The Fermi Paradox is Back

nettxzl writes ""Sentient Developments revisits the Fermi Paradox which is "the contradictory and counter-intuitive observation that we have yet to see any evidence for the existence of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI) although the size and age of the Universe suggests that many technologically advanced ETI's ought to exist." Sentient Development's blog post on the Fermi Paradox states that "a number of inter-disciplinary breakthroughs and insights have contributed to the Fermi Paradox gaining credence as an unsolved scientific problem" Amongst these are "(1)Improved quantification and conceptualization of our cosmological environment, (2) Improved understanding of planet formation, composition and the presence of habitable zones, (3) The discovery of extrasolar planets, (4) Confirmation of the rapid origination of life on Earth (5) Growing legitimacy of panspermia theories" and more ... So, where is everyone?"

Comments

Re:Time to give up...

[h4rm0ny]

Maybe it's been broadcast in a way that we just don't recognize yet. A mere few centuries ago, no-one would have thought to look for alien life (if they thought to at all), by looking at radio waves. Radio what? It's easily possible that there is another great leap just around the corner that is pretty obvious once you reach a certain level of technological or scientific know-how. Maybe someone will discover a sub-ether-o-matic and the whole sky will light up. It's also possible that life forms frequently move toward a smaller population base and thus give off less indicators of their presence.

Considering the current state of affairs...

[Jasin Natael]

I'm reminded of an argument put forth in Robert J. Sawyer's Calculating God: If, once we reach a certain level of technological sophistication, it takes only hundreds or thousands of years to either annihilate ourselves or transfer our consciousness into a virtual world, what are the chances that any two types of intelligent life could exist contemporaneously anywhere in the universe, provided that a sufficiently intelligent species develops science and technology only after developing for several billion years?

We're not even confident that our social experiment will last right now. We've had 120 years or so of real technology -- and there's no guarantee that resource constraints, political strife, or any number of environmental factors won't return us to subsistence farming within a few more generations. The real question is, given not only the incredibly large size of the universe, but also the almost incomprehensibly-long timelines, what are the chances that two intelligent species will be concurrently intelligent, civilized, and looking for each other ... and furthermore, what is the chance that we are one of them (and at this very moment)?

Please check out the Disclosure Project

[Hej]

I found a video from these guys to be rather interesting, if not somewhat convincing: http://http//www.disclosureproject.org/ Video can be found here. Please, anybody with some web space, put up a mirror so that this nice little not for profit group doesn't get slashdotted off the web: http://www.netro.ca/disclosure/npccmenu.htm

Re:The paradox

[thegnu]

The paradox is that if they have a few thousand or hundred of thousand year ahead of us, then they should have at least by probe or similarly conquered or explored this galaxy, or send a lot of radio signal.
My girlfriend pointed out that we've been analyzing for hydrogen based signals, because it's the easiest to produce, and we've found nothing. And then it came out in the conversation that WE'RE not sending out signals because we don't want to be found because we're not advanced enough to protect ourselves from someone who could find us.

Ahem. So in 10k years, we'll be advanced enough to defend ourselves from these theoretical people who are 10k years ahead of us? Will their civilization stop advancing, and we'll catch up? How about maybe aliens aren't sending out signals either?

How about maybe, just maybe, the way we developed science is not very efficient afterall in the grand scheme of things?

I love it when people argue the existence or non-existence of super-advanced beings based on our assumptions about how right we are about everything.

"something wrong with our thinking"

[Mr. Slippery]

Indeed, as TFA notes, there is "something wrong with our thinking", or at least with that of the author.

First, interstellar colonization? Unlikely. It makes nice SF, but there's no good economic basis for it. A civilization that survives long enough to reach the technological level necessary for interstellar spaceflight will have stabilized its population and learned how to use local resources to make their home world a paradise. Why go anywhere else? The expense is enormous, the payoff non-existent. (They're working on stellar engineering, of course, so there's no worry about their sun going nova.) Childish species who still imagine faster-than-light loopholes might dream of going swashbuckling across the galaxy, but grown-up races are content to follow more mature pursuits. TFA's claims about "intelligent life's ability to overcome scarcity, and its tendency to colonize new habitats" are simply handwaving, generalizing from one species of half-bright monkeys into sweeping statements about all intelligent life.

Second, there's the question of signal detection. Contrary to popular belief, radio and TV transmissions probably couldn't be detected at interstellar ranges. We've only sent a handful of signals into space that are detectable at long ranges - and mostly that's content-free radar signals. Why do we assume others are more chatty than we are? I imagine a galaxy full of listeners, each waiting for someone else to start talking. Additionally, compression and encryption make signal indistinguishable from noise.

Third, recognition of "mega-engineering". TFA claims "we see no signs of their activities in space". How would we know? We assume a "natural" explanation for phenomena - as we should - but if we assume the existence of greatly advanced tech, who knows what we think of as "natural" and take for granted out there that's actually engineered?

Re:So, where is everyone?

[smallfries]

Nice. I think you've stitched up all the major avenues of discussion with the first post. Another alternative that made slashdot last year some time was the theory that our galaxy was not conducive to intelligent until recently. The idea is that gamma-ray bursts from pulsars would kill off all life near by. Over time the rate of these events has dropped until the time between them is roughly the length of time for an intelligent species to evolve. At the moment our galaxy is undergoing a phase-transition from an environment that is hostile to life surviving long enough to evolve intelligence, to one that would allow it. So in some sense, all of the intelligent species are "recent" innovations in the galaxy.

It's an interesting theory, but it is just one possible explanation. James Annis' paper describes it well.

We're under protection

[Mystery00]

It's quite possible that they're just waiting for us to stop shooting each other, and act like a single species for once. Which is when we'll be allowed to make contact.

Out of all the different possibilities of why we haven't made contact, I tend to think it's not that intelligent life doesn't exist, or that they don't care about us, I think it's that they do care, and that's why they're leaving us alone. It's akin to us protecting the animals of this planet, so they can continue to exist and spread. It's quite possible we're under protection also, until we can fend for ourselves.

Old? Can we truly define old for the universe?

[casca69]

It behooves us to consider Fermi. The idea is indeed seductive.
On the other hand, just because WE don't usually quite make one hundred years of consciousness, we assume all things told, that six BILLION is old, and Thirteen Billion is even older.

One thing no one has pointed out yet. What if that is YOUNG? Vaunted as he was, Fermi didn't include that as a possibility. He either didn't see it, or discounted it. What if we're the FIRST major civilization to grow? Or, let's use our own development as a yardstick. It took us, what seventy five years? to begin putting the broadcast entertainment onto cable, and stop actually advertising our existence. It won't be much longer, and our planet will be nearly invisible.
Now, if technology develops the same, no matter WHEN, but THAT, it would have taken a hundred years, roughly, for the civ to develop broadcasting, use it, and then, as we are doing, turn it inwards, and not waste power in exo-broadcasting.
So, any star roughly a hundred light years out would be able to pick up our signals, but if their civ had gotten a start a thousand years before ours, well, then, we missed their shows by a millennium. Talk about the need for TIVO.

My point is simple. We assume any civ out there is attempting to get our attention. If they developed like ours, even starting the same day, we won't see them at all, UNLESS they are at the right distance. Otherwise, we won't see their signals, as it already passed us by, or the leading edge hasn't hit us yet.

We won't even go into the many different and varied methods we ourselves use to communicate that never beak the atmosphere, thus making them exo-undetectable. Fermi's assumption is a classic illustration of of assuming... You know, making an @ss out of you and me?

We're right here

[symbolset]

An important idea in the panspermia theory is that when a star goes nova, the biomass is not totally eliminated. Some fragments remain. When new stars and planets coalesce around the remnant masses those become the seeds for a new generation of life.

So according to that theory, we are the alien life forms we're looking for, in a certain sense.

If mankind is to persist another thousand years we'll have to solve a number of important puzzles. To survive a hundred thousand we'll have to solve many more. By then the pointlessness of immortality as a species may be self evident.

Any civilization sufficiently advanced to come here in force from another star has solved the energy, food and mortality puzzles, which leaves conquest unlikely as a goal I should think. Why take the trouble to scrap it up with a pestilent life form at the bottom of a steep gravity well when mass and energy are abundant in the oort cloud and asteroid belt free for the taking? Why travel all the way to another star just for that since those things are doubtless abundant where you came from?

I think what's left is tourism. Intelligence and curiosity are sufficiently linked that a life form evolved enough to solve the necessary problems would want to watch us develop if they could. Perhaps they're here now, secretly recording our ridiculous antics for their own version of reality tv.

Re:We're right here

[Stephen Ma]

Any civilization sufficiently advanced to come here in force from another star has solved the energy, food and mortality puzzles, which leaves conquest unlikely as a goal I should think.

I agree that conquest is unlikely. But how about backup?

Even stars have a limited life, and stability is not guaranteed within that lifespan. A major stellar flare would be a very bad day for even a strong civilization. And supernovas -- and the resulting sterilization of entire stellar neighborhoods -- are rather common on the cosmological timescale. In other words, huddling forever around one star is a bad idea.

Therefore, civilizations that really want to endure would want to back themsevles up, preferably thousands of light years away, beyond the sterilization radius of any local supernova. Of course, the backup is a huge civilization in its own right and would want its own backup, and so on.

So again we have exponential expansion into space, and we are back to Fermi's question: where are they?

Re:We're right here

[Blakey Rat]

The Vikings actually kept decently detailed records, you know. In Jared Diamond's "Collapse" he cites the Viking record that explains why Eric the Red "discovered" Greenland after being kicked out of virtually every other Viking land for killing dozens of people in bar brawls. And that's one of their national heroes.

Re:The paradox

[TheRaven64]

And then it came out in the conversation that WE'RE not sending out signals because we don't want to be found because we're not advanced enough to protect ourselves from someone who could find us It's not a new idea. I read something by Arthur C. Clarke published in the late '60s discussing the idea (and he cited earlier sources) that everyone might be sitting out there behind large radio telescopes waiting for broadcasts. It also argued that leaking EM is something that races are likely to only do for a short period. As technology improves, you move to shorter wavelengths, since these have a greater information carrying capacity. Unfortunately, they also have a shorter range before they are lost in noise, so there's likely to be a very small (in galactic terms) window where a species is using technology inefficient, yet powerful, enough to be picked up at stellar distances. This means that you are only likely to intercept intentional broadcasts, not accidental ones.

Of course, the problem with the 'everyone's listening' argument is that it requires everyone to be listening. Even if only 1% were actively transmitting, we'd expect a lot more signals than we've found.

Andromeda Galaxy Collision Imminent

[Sigfried]

Assuming a civilization was advanced enough to be able to travel and communicate galactic distances, they would also have long ago realized what we only recently learned, which is that the Andromeda galaxy is due to collide with our own in about two billion years. Probably not much they could do about that, so they charted out another more hospitable galaxy and took off. So long and thanks for all the fish.

Re:Andromeda Galaxy Collision Imminent

[Lengyel]

Osame Kinouchi in Persistence solves Fermi Paradox but challenges SETI projects has proposed a model of colonization that does not assume that colonization follows a uniform diffusion process. A uniform diffusion process is often tacitly assumed in back-of-the-envelope, extra-terrestrial-free solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Instead of a uniform diffusion process, Kinouchi proposes a model for intergalactic colonization closer to the distribution of cities on the Earth. This is not a simple uniform diffusion process, as shown by the non-uniform distribution of cities, and by the presence of exotic "lost" tribes, whose provincial worldview might prompt them to conclude that there is no global civilization.

Kinouchi points out that for a wide class of diffusion processes, including simple processes other than uniform diffusion (in which colonization would occur uniformly in every direction), the number of non-visited sites need not decay exponentially with time. Instead, the probability that some site remains uncolonized might follow a power law.

(He gives the probability that a site might not be visited by time t as P(t) = P_\infty + Ct^{-\theta}.)

I'll jump to the conclusion: if the colonization of space follows something like a non-uniform, persistent diffusion process, then there will be large regions of space that won't be colonized, away from the colonized areas. Since we haven't heard from extraterrestrials, we can assume we are in one of the large, unvisited regions, and so the nearby candidates for SETI searches are also unlikely to have been visited. (Kinouchi asserts that the Fermi Paradox is "locally" true.) So SETI has to look further than the immediate stellar neighborhood for likely candidates.

Re:So, where is everyone?

[1u3hr]

The idea is that gamma-ray bursts from pulsars would kill off all life near by.

Stephen Baxter's novel Space uses this idea.

PS, your link is malformed. Should be An Astrophysical Explanation for the Great Silence, very interesting despite being a PS file with the ugly bitmapped TeX font.

Re:So, where is everyone?

[Saikik]

Wait so what this theory is suggesting is that we maybe among the first sets of intelligent life.

So does that mean that we may end up being the advanced civilizations that other aliens dream of discovering?

First Contact reversal we land on their planet after they finally discover warp drive.

Wow, another /. philosophical win!

[Simon Carr]

Glad to see everyone has solved the Fermi Paradox just by reminding us that space is big and by quoting Douglas Adams ad nauseum. Guess we can close the book on that one. No Python references for us? I think that would sew it up tight.

Sarcasm aside this thread has so much supposition about the intelect, ability, advancement, logic and morality of any possible alien life it's mind blowing, and not in a good way. I don't think we can presume to understand an alien intelligence even if it did show up.

I've read some comments that proposed that if an alien life form advanced enough to actually mobilize the technology to reach us that they would be so intellectually superior that they would have no interest in us, or at least no malevolence towards us because they would be so enlightened. That's a massive guess that puts a lot of faith in the development path of "intelligent" life. If you think of Humanity as a possible median point for cruelty and benevolence (as we often paint ourselves in Sci-Fi), that still leaves a lot of terrifying room for a bad encounter.

Anyway tl;dr it's a paradox. It's genuinely weird. There's no simple explanation. Space is big, but life should be plentiful if the explanation of abiogenesis holds (local chemicals spontaneously live). It should be plentiful if the explanation of exogenisis holds (space junk has space mold)? Dammit it's just weird!