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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?"
o Far away in space
o Far away in time
o Far away in space and time
o Hollywood
In the immortal words of Douglas Adams, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-boggingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
The problem isn't that there isn't anyone else out there. With so many billions of stars and planets, the odds that there are other intelligent beings out there are astronomically large. (Pun slightly intended.) The problem is that the distances required to travel to reach them and also astronomically large, and the odds that there is life on any given planet are infinitesimally small.
I always put this thought experiment before people: If you had a spaceship that could instantly take you to anywhere in the universe, where would you go?
Sure, you'd probably drop by a few nebulae and stars and even planets, but after you've seen a few, where to then? You could travel to other planets for lifetimes and still not run across intelligent life on other planets. It's not that truly interesting things aren't out there, it's just that the universe isn't very conducive to producing life-bearing planets. Sure, with so vastly many planets, it will happen (and obviously has), but finding life out there is like finding a needle in a haystack, and we're just now starting to be able to see the haystack.
Further complicating matters is that we don't have spaceships that can instantly take us anywhere in the universe, and according to the laws of physics as we know them, it's likely that other intelligent beings don't either. Maybe they have travelled lifetimes and they just haven't run across us yet.
So be patient, my fellow humans, it may take a few million (or even billion) more years. After all, it's more than just a trip down the road to the chemist, and something that cool will probably be worth the wait.
This is it folks, this planet is all there is. God only created life here on earth.
So we've used a few hundred years of technology for almost a hundred years to look for signs of life in a (nearly?) infinite universe and not found anything. Must mean its not there.
Considering the state of terrestrial intelligence, maybe any ETIs have realized that broadcasting attack coordinates into space may not be such a great idea?
lol: You see no door there!
and the Extra Terrestrial Intelligence that we know about has been covered up.
Steven Hawking's comment (about how the history of advanced civilizations on Earth meeting less-developed civilizations has generally not gone well for the less-developed ones) would seem to apply here. Hopefully, any civilization advanced enough to not blow itself to pieces before developing interstellar transport capability would be reasonably benign -- but can we afford the risk? If a civilization has the wherewithal to visit other star systems, they are at the very least many years beyond where we are, both technologically and economically.
Maybe we should be glad if we're too insignificant to be noticed just yet. (We certainly don't have our act together, at any rate.)
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Anyone remember who first noted that the best evidence for intelligent life in the universe is that they haven't contacted us?
...but they are way too smart to talk to strangers!
A fungus doesn't need to travel fast to eat your bread. Actually it doesn't travel at all and gets the job done after a few weeks. Space colonization is the same process on a larger scale.
We've been unable to make our presence known by radio until less than 100 years ago.
We can get humans to the moon, but not to the next planet.
The universe is vast even compared to our oceans and we lose people in our oceans all the time. Why would we think a space probe would be noticed by someone?
Now, our technology will improve and some of the above statements may change rapidly. But, the chances of our using some of those technologies to destroy ourselves seem to be accelerating as well. Perhaps the missing part of the model is that other civilizations always blow themselves up within a few hundred years of their first communication attempts or steps off their planets.
We probably will.
reminds me of a quote Grissom had on CSI about aliens: "I am sure if there is something out there looking down on us from somewhere else in the universe, they're wise enough to stay away from us."
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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)?
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
Assuming they're smart enough to create signals that we can detect, they can most likely detect ours too.
Complex life on this planet has been going on for hundreds of millions of years and yet it's only in the last hundred or so that we've been able to look out with anything more than enhancements of our natural senses. This implies that the odds of a second species being at exactly the same point tiny. Most likely, if they're sending things we can read, they got there a long way before us and are quite a bit smarter.
Assuming they're quite a bit smarter, one look at the crap our radiowaves are sharing with the universe - infomercials, reality TV and our politics/wars - and I'd imagine pretty much any higher civilization would be embarrassed enough about us to screen their signature and make damn sure those idiotic hairless apes don't go and screw their part of the galaxy up too.
So, the answer to the paradox: There's most likely higher intelligence out there. And, because it's higher, it's most likely embarrassed to hell and back by us and screening itself from us. Problem solved.
Any space-faring race that makes it here will be technologically advanced by far.
We're technologically advanced over all the other creatures here on Earth. We eat them.
--
BMO
Maybe they are out there, trying to communicate with us, but they're using MSN Messenger and have the same bad grammar as half of the other people who use it?
"hello earthling.we want to know you know about us.info is important!!!!!"
I always found it puzzling that the brightest minds seem to feel there's a fair percentage chance we'll find sign of extraterrestrial intelligence from radio waves. Granted, they're a lot more clever than me, so hopefully they have good reasons.
My view though...
Our civilization is in its technological infancy, and even we find radio rather slow and limiting. I can't imagine us leaving much of a radio footprint in another hundred years, especially not leaking it with omnidirectional broadcasting.
Imagining the same being the case of another civilization, we're trying to listen in on broadcasts from a time window of two hundred years or so, and we've been listening for a couple of decades. In a context where being off by a million years wouldn't be too bad, the odds strike me as fairly infinitesimal even if assuming thousands of civilizations located cosmically nearby.
Doesn't hurt to try, mind. It's not like we have a lot of other options open to us currently.
Now, think of it in a new way. Suppose you were a civilization that just developed space travel, much like where we are now. You have a galaxy around you with 400 billion stars, and that's a lot. It takes you 100,000 years at light speed to cross the galaxy, and that's a long time. However, you have 2 billion years to explore. I have no good grasp on where humans will be 2 billion years from now, but I am sure we will be pretty advanced. Now add to the mix that there are maybe 1000 or 10,000 or 100,000 other advanced civilizations alongside with you, and you can see why we are wondering where everyone is. Oh, and there are a trillion or so other galaxies out there, so if you start to consider the possibility of intergalactice travel, you can even go futher with this.
Really the best answer to the Fermi paradox is that Earth-like conditions are rare. However, I think we just discovered a planet 20 light years away that has 0-40 degreee celsius temperature, water, and is a rocky planet, so maybe that is not the answer either.
Our radio emissions are a powerful repellent to intelligent life. Come on, if you tuned in to earth and heard all about Paris Hilton, Disco, or one of FDR's "fireside chats", wouldn't you just keep on going by?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
With so many billions of stars and planets, the odds that there are other intelligent beings out there are astronomically large. (Pun slightly intended.)
That's the Sagan argument. Unfortunately, the fact that we exist tells us absolutely nothing about how probably intelligent life is or isn't (see: anthropic principle). Sagan's argument doesn't address the fundamental Fermi problem.
The problem is that the distances required to travel to reach them and also astronomically large, and the odds that there is life on any given planet are infinitesimally small.
True, but the amount of time that's passed until us showing up is also astronomically large. It only takes one race with an expansion desire to fill up the galaxy at sublight speeds around 1 to 10 million years (via geometric expansion). Even if it took 100 million years, that's still a blip in the life of the galaxy. At the very least, someone should have sent out self replicating probes by now. By we've seen absolutely nothing.
I'm pretty much convinced that intelligent life is extremely improbable, and that we're alone in the galaxy.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
>A fungus doesn't need to travel fast to eat your bread. Actually it doesn't travel at all and gets the job done after a few weeks. Space colonization is the same process on a larger scale.
I'm not sure how sending fungi into space to find alien bread to consume is going to be useful to anyone besides the fungi.
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
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.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
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?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Even if there was proof of ETI our governments would cover it up. Is it really a paradox if we have no chance of obtaining proof?
One piece of wild speculation on why we haven't accidentally picked up any TV or radio broadcasts from ET...
At this point in time TV and radio is rapidly being usurped by interactive media, most of which currently travels along cables and would of course be undetectable from other planets. As for wireless internet, the power of a wireless LAN router is obviously far less strong than say a TV signal broadcast from a TV tower. And future wireless broadband signals would presumably also be local and low-powered, because it's more efficient that way. (Guesswork, of course).
Of course traditional high-powered TV and radio broadcasts aren't dead yet, but in say 100 years it's pretty easy to imagine that they they might be. (Or not -- I know this is all speculation)
So, IF (huge if) other civilisations follwed this path, this might be a possible reason why we don't see or hear their broadcasts -- because like us their high-powered broadcast media only existed for a short time, and were soon replaced by more efficient low-powered interactive media
All wildly speculative I know.
Hopefully, any civilization advanced enough to not blow itself to pieces before developing interstellar transport capability would be reasonably benign ...
Why would showing restraint with respect to interactions with your own species mean you would show similar restraint when interacting with other species? Wolves can show much restraint to other wolves, but little to other species.
Evolution favors a combination of aggressiveness and intelligence. Losing either quality will make you vulnerable to those who have not lost either. Consider pacifism. Pacifism only works when isolated or when there are non-pacifists who protect the pacifists. Humans are probably either unique or one of many intelligent species. Given many intelligent species, some may have become pacifist in isolation, but all will not. Those who retain some aggression will dominate in the long term. The more civilizations that have made contact, the less likely we are to meet pacifists. Given that our first contact is also likely to be one of many I'd so the odds of your optimistic scenario are not good.
The Universe Song
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
and things seem hard or tough.
and people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
and you feel that you've had quite enough...
Just remember that your standing on a planet that's evolving,
and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour.
That's orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it's reckoned,
the sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
are moving at a million miles a day.
in an outer spiral-arm at forty thousand miles an hour
of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars,
it's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
but out by us it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point,
we go 'round every two hundred million years.
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions,
in this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
in all of the directions it can whiz.
As fast as it can go, that's the speed of light you know;
twelve million miles a minute, that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when your feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'cause there's bugger-all down here on earth!
Your GP does not understand how small the possibility of something like this happening is, even in a vast universe. The living cell is a structure, and the first one is not built by incremental trial&error as in evolution..you have to have a functional formation who's constituents (DNA or similar) happen to represent the very structure that was arbitrarily formed itself, and are able to replicate themselves into another clone of the original (mitosis or similar).
We are the ultimate result of a very low probability event, and we are alone.
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.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
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?
I was talking about this with a coworker a few weeks back and realized something. Back when radio was first discovered they used *huge* transmitters to transmit a small amount of data a short distance because their receivers were so crude. Later receivers were vastly improved and you could use much lower power to send much more data. Soon we had over the air TV that had a phenomenal amount of data flowing through the air, but, to not encroach on competing channels in adjacent areas, the signal strength was reduced again.
Skip forward to today and we are using cable (very little "signal" escapes) and fiber-optics (no signal escapes) to send even more data back and forth. So, in a few years time we've gone from a very noisy planet with out much to say, to a much less noisy planet with much more to say.
I think it is inevitable, simply from an efficiency perspective, that we will be using more and more "tight-band" communication methods in the future (quantum entanglement?). It seems intuitive that the more advanced a civilization gets the more efficient it will strive to be. The more efficient it is, the less noise will be wasted into space (especially compared to the natural noises of the planet, like lightning, aurora, etc.)
Look how much more efficient we've become in just a hundred years. If this is indicative of other civilizations, then the window of opportunity for eavesdropping on them is extremely small. And that's assuming that they are remotely like us and not building their civilization at the bottom of their ocean or are just so different from us that we wouldn't even recognize them as life.
As far as colonizing the stars goes, barring some way of FTL (or instant) travel and communication, I think we will never move beyond our own solar system in our current physical form. I think we will have figured out how to lose our bodies and move our consciousness into "the machine" before then. Once that happens, there will be no need for maintaining the human race in a biological form at all since "reproduction" can occur in solid-state. Once we've reached that stage, being effectively immortal, we might be willing to entertain the thought of physically traveling to other stars, but there will be no need to colonize them, they can be virtualized. But then again, we could virtualize the whole trip anyway.
Either way, that step in technology would almost guarantee a very efficient system that would need to produce almost no waste products. With no need for maintaining and supporting physical bodies, all of the energy required to sustain physical life will not be needed. No more growing and shipping crops. No more energy wasted in physical travel. In fact, very little need for ever physically moving anything, from then on. This would make most of our civilization a "static" construct. At that point, unless we were purposely broadcasting for neighbors, who'd ever hear us?
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
Why go anywhere else?
Why *not* go anywhere else?
First, there's a danger in keeping all your genetic eggs in one basket. Secondly, I don't know about you, but I have a strong yen to stride among the stars. I do know there are many like me. Why climb everest? Why colonize the moon? Or Mars? Why *not* travel to the far reaches of the universe?
Humans are, by and large, creatures with a great curiosity. In the face of a utopia, I'd hope that at least some would wish to explore, and perhaps settle, the great unknown.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm pretty much convinced that intelligent life is extremely improbable, and that we're alone in the galaxy.
What an extremely narrow and self-centered view of the universe.
First of all "extremely improbable" when talking about something the size of the universe means that even if life in a given star system had a 1 in 1 million chance of ever developing (I'd call that "extremely improbable"), that's still 5,000 systems in our galaxy alone that will develop life someday, or already have. For a 1 in 1 billion chance, that's still 500 star systems. And there are up to 500 billion galaxies in the universe. Even if only 1 out of every billion star systems will support life - or perhaps 1 out of every 5 billion planets - that would still mean there could be trillions of life-supporting star systems in the universe. Given that there are not one, but two planets in our system that are capable of supporting life (Earth and Mars), both of which may have actually supported life, it's certainly no stretch to think there are at least this many planets out there that could support life and that at least some of them are actually doing so.
It's all too easy to draw conclusions for the entire universe based on observations of your local area. People do it not just when thinking of extra terrestrials but even when thinking of other people and cultures on our own planet. There's a tendency to think that the way we do things is just the way that things should be done. But there are many ways life can develop, many ways life can be supported, and many, many planets that are much too far away for us to observe or for them to observe us. It's foolish to think that we are alone simply because we have not observed any other intelligent life in the few hundred years we've been looking.
Maybe other life forms have sent out self replicating probes. Why would we have necessarily noticed?
To me, the Fermi Paradox doesn't necessarily speak to the non-existence of intelligent life. Maybe it says something about the ability of intelligent life to colonize the galaxy. Perhaps it's an energy issue -- were is all the power to travel and colonize the galaxy going to come from and is it worth harvesting it for space travel? Perhaps it's a time issue --even with light speed travel is it worth it to send their people that far? Perhaps it's a socio-political issue -- can a civilization be stable enough long enough to get such huge projects underway and complete them? Perhaps it's an environmental issue -- even the hospitable earth has mass extinctions every 62 million years; perhaps there's no place that's hospitable enough long enough for civilizations to get much further than we have.
We're an "intelligent" species by some loose definition. We also know that our one intelligent species hasn't achieved meaningful space travel or communication. And I'm not convinced by looking at our collective milieu that we'll be colonizing the galaxy in the next billion years either.
It's all conjecture; I personally think there's life out there, even intelligent life. But we'll probably never meet -- it's just too much effort. And I don't think the Fermi Paradox (which is based on the assumption that galactic colonization is viable) says much about it.
Cheers.
This is one of the most likely reasons we've not "seen" anything as yet. As far as we know, interstellar travel is annoyingly slow and energy intensive; that alone could account for no visitors, no matter how well populated the universe is with intelligent beings. That leaves communications; but our experience here indicates that catching the communications of others is very unlikely. Why? Well, we've been hanging about for 50,000 years or so in the form we like to consider actually "us." Of that 50,000 years, we've been using radio and television for about 100 years now. But in the last 25 years, more and more of our radio and television signals have been finding their way into satellite to ground signals, which do not radiate away from the planet and are very, very low power; other signals are now traveling inside cables instead of the through the air; and finally, newer communications are moving to optical methods, and we're talking optical in cables for the most part, meaning again, less and less high powered "accidental" signal radiation (effectively zero in terms of interstellar distances.) The reasons are higher bandwidth, vastly more communications channels, more energy efficient, better control over where the signal goes - and doesn't go. These are reasons that transcend our civilization; there is every reason to think that other beings would find the same benefits.
Next, look at our development: We're paranoid. We have been prey for a lot of living things ranging from other people to lions to snakes to spiders to bacteria, consequently we're not of the mind that the universe is likely to be a friendly playground. You can find reactions to that notion everywhere from science fiction to the unwillingness of today's moms to let their kids play outdoors unsupervised. Looking at our SETI program, the first thing you probably notice is that we're listening (poorly), which seems prudent; but we are not intentionally transmitting a signal to the stars, which has been a political decision. That leaves the accidental radiation, the strongest of which has been radar transmissions, which are mostly information free... but even if they're enough to get us noticed, we've only been at this for a 100 years, so our signals are only 100 light-years out so far. That severely reduces the number of potential listeners, and of course it presumes they, like us, are listening for anything, not just signals modulated with complex information.
Also, as an earlier poster observed with a quote from Douglas Adams, the universe is gi-flipping-normous.
All of this contributes to why Fermi's Paradox should be considered Fermi's Blunder by anyone who really thinks this through.
I see no reason to doubt there are plenty of other life-bearing planets out there, and that a fairly significant number of those in turn have intelligent life of one form or another. The fact that we've not "heard" any of them doesn't surprise me one little bit, Fermi's naive reasoning aside. In another 100 years, the odds of us radiating anything at all from our little corner of the universe are probably very low indeed. If that's typical (and it may be longer than typical), then in order to "catch" someone else transmitting by accident, we'll have to be listening at the same time + distance in light years that they go through the RF development process, and we'll have to have sensitive enough equipment to hear them. That last point is interesting, because although technically speaking, we are listening for "them", we're presuming they're sending at the low-noise point of the spectrum with the intent of us hearing them. If it was accidental radiation like radio and TV we were looking for, we couldn't hear that with our current gear at all. In order to get to that level of sensitivity, we'll need outer space "ears", and pretty big ones. Nothing like that is even on the drawing boards. So again, the odds of us hearing anyo
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That is not true. It's not that the conditions and chemical constitution of the environment need to be the same, it's the fact that their needs to be a very low probability event (or set of events) occur for the first "living" cell to result from some arbitrary water-based reaction somewhere in the planet, giving us a cell that has at least basic reproduction and respiratory (energy converting) capabilities. Evolution cannot aid this first cell: there are none before it. It has to come as a result of a single "miracle moment" where the necessary compounds for a connected cell wall, nucleus, DNA..etc all form at the same time AND at the same small point in space, albeit at a much smaller degree of complexity compared to living cells today.
Wow. No serious scientist has proposed life starting by a cell miraculously springing into existence with no prior evolution involved.
Most of the pre-biotic soup theories involve dilute mixtures of animo aids, peptides, sugars, polymers, etc, that replicate as a group. No DNA or similar is involved, there are no cell walls, little or no respiratory capabilities. These features all evolve incrementally and independantly over time. As Darwin noted, the "first life" might have been a salty, slightly greasy, tidal pool.
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.
Great. Now you want me to worry about alien races leeching off my wifi? When I can't even connect from 200 feet away?
If by "intelligent life" you mean human-like civilization with very complic... er, "rich material culture" way of life, I completely agree.
However, it is very much possible that Cosmos is full of various intelligent beings of different kinds, covering spectrum from dolphin-like intelligent, playful, social and friendly creatures, all the way to almost "Alien"-like super tough, hive-building predator killer monsters. However, what we probably won't find in high supply is any kind of beings capable or wanting to travel out of their home worlds.
Because, you see, the story of humans on Earth is story of a nerd beating all the jocks and becoming the top dog in his school, all that without giving up his nerdness and growing muscles, of course (e.g. by going to the gym and working out). While such story has certain appeal and makes a nice comedy plot, it is very unlikely to happen out of the realm of fiction, and even less likely to happen twice (or at least not very often).
We as a species broke out of the beaten path of survival because of peculiar pattern of our ancestors' position in food chain and our planet's climate history.
It is not some inevitable fate that will happen anywhere if you give it enough time, like Karl Sagan believed. It is more of a deviation from usual cycles of evolution. Besides, we still may fall back to self-indulgence (and we actually regularly do, according to history of most successful and organized societies from the past). Once we make it the way we want it and solve all our problems that worry us on this planet, we won't even wish to go out and search for some alien intelligent life, just like those hypothetic intelligent top-of-the-food-chain superbeasts I mentioned before. Absolute success is as much a showkiller as catastrophic failure.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22hydrogen-based+s ignal%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en -US:official&client=firefox-a
One hit.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
How about: we don't hear giant drums in the forest, so there's no one there? or: none of the smoke clouds we see are arranged into signals, so they are only forest fires?
One of the things that irks me about so many wannabe futurists, xenophiles, and run-of-the-mill SF is a failure of technological vision. Why would one assume that sending radio signals between the stars makes any sense whatsoever for an advanced civilization, unless we assume that our science has reached a galactic pinnacle?
Fermi's paradox, to me, ignores:
Damn those pesky terrorists
What if we're the first? I mean, someone's gotta be the first. What if that's us? It would certainly explain why we haven't seen anyone else out there yet.
Is intelligent life just a brief transition to a very different form of being? Extrapolating from the history of life on Earth, non-intelligent life seems to exist in a somewhat stable state. Perhaps bacteria-like life is everywhere in the galaxy, and dinosaur-like things are pretty common which gradually evolve for many millions of years without producing human-like intelligence.
But once human-like intelligence evolves, how long does it take until there is a Technological Singularity that causes human-like life to be superseded by some sort of ultra-intelligent artificial beings (that is beings that are designed by intelligent brains, not by evolution)? Humans have only existed in modern intelligent form for about 50,000 years. And now we seem more close than far from truly understanding how our own brains work and building machines with superior intelligence which replicate the key features such as consciousness. As a sort of estimate, comparing our knowledge of neuroscience to our knowledge of physics, perhaps neuroscience is now at about the level of Newtonian mechanics. We know some key principles of how the brain works and can apply them. We know how neurons work, we know major functional areas of the brain, and we have had some success developing pharmaceuticals that tweak the operation of the brain. However there is a lot we don't know (like what is "consciousness", really?). What we need are some major revolutions in neuroscience comparable to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics (with perhaps subsequent revolutions of the superstring or grand unified theory variety). It took about 200 years to get from Newton to Einstein, which is a trivial amount of time in the big scheme of things.
So could it be that human-like life usually only lasts about 50,000 years before it replaces itself with something vastly superior? If so, then we should not expect to find extraterrestrial human-like life because the window that it exists is so short. So where then are all the artificial super-beings created by extrateresstrials? Perhaps improbable though it may be, a Singularity just hasn't happened in our galaxy yet, because if it had happened then the super-beings would have rapidly converted everything into matrioshka brains or something, precluding the existence of humans. Or perhaps the super-beings quickly figured out how to slip away into some dimension of space unknown to us, and they are all having a great party there right now. Or perhaps the super-beings really are out there, but we just haven't figured out how to contact them yet.
No-one thinks that the earliest form of life involved DNA (or anything like it). The simplest form of cellular metabolism would basically have been a self-replicating chemical soup that "consumed" chemicals in the environment in order to create more of it's own chemical constituents. This type of self-sustaining chemical microenvironments likely occured all over the place - before they ever became separated from the rest of the environment by any cell-like container.
The earliest cell-like containers may well have been simply lipid (fatty) bubbles that presented a semi-permiable membrane that let certain chemicals thru. These types of lipid bubble could easily have formed naturally (think froth at the edge of the ocean), maybe even based on products of these chemical reactions. There's no need for the earliest "cells" to have been created/encoded by the chemicals they contained as they are today (DNA).
The earliest forms of replication also need not have been self-encoded - they would almost certainly have been due to physical processes - e.g. if you whipped up (sea-shore wave action) a bunch of large fatty bubbles, you'd get a lot of smaller fatty bubbles which would then "grow" via their semi-permiable enclosure letting in the external chemical components that "fed" the chemical reactions. Similar to how an amoeba )modern single cellular organism) "reproduces" by splitting into two.
Highly complex chemicals like DNA or RNA may have have originated as simple chemical catalysts that sped up the reaction process - i.e. guided it rather than being part of it per se.
These types of extremely simple pre-cellular origins are far from being low probabiliy events - they are alomost inevitably going to occur given a rich enouch chemical environment and suitable phyiscal conditions (water, wave action = stirring, lightening, sunlight, etc). If you're interested in the beginning of life at this extrememly early stage, try reading Stuart Kauffman's "At Home in the Universe".
Even at this early stage, evolution would necessarily have occured. Among multiple such self-sustaining reactions, those that were best adapted to the environment (those parts of it they relied upon, e.g. available chemicals) would necessarily have left more "descendents" than others that were competing for the same raw ingredients (food supply). With these types of lipid membrance cell, new chemicals in the environemnt that were not part of the chain reactions occuring in the "population" would often have been introduced, and occasionally would have modified those reactions and their products. This source of variation would then have been fodder for natural selection (the winners swamping the losers out of the environment), and so it goes...
The "increasing complexity" argument seems contradicted by the facts (and the reference is to a 10-year-old paper, which is described as "recent").
We like to think that intelligence produces a general sort of fitness, but the all of the primates are extremely intelligent, probably the most intelligent creatures on the planet, and with one exception they all live in highly specialized niches, and they're all likely to become extinct within a hundred years or so.
In spite of what that paper says, increasing complexity does not mean increasing fitness - orchids are among the most complex of flowering plants, but they are also highly specialized and are vulnerable to changes in their habitats.
The one data point we have is that, although life arose probably as soon as the earth cooled off enough to allow it, for most of earth's history, the highest form of life consisted of algae mats. It may be very, very hard to develop even eukaryotic life, and intelligence may require an outlandishly improbable set of events. Hard to extrapolate from one data point, of course.
Sure. Like impoverished, backwards Rome attacking the advanced Gauls. Or the ignorant Persians versus their enlightened neighbors. Or the weak, agrarian English building the British Empire from the corpses of more industrially developed...everyone else they could find.
See the history of Earth nations to find that some cultures are scrapping for a fight.
The Fermi Paradox is very interesting. However it's not the only one. No one ever discusses the other one.
The earth is the one place we know is habitable for intelligent life. Life has existed for over 2 billion years. Why is there no evidence of previous intelligent civilizations on our planet?
Call it Allen's Paradox.
There's another possibility -- which I'm sure is not popular around here, but which is in fact the most likely explanation: Our theories of how alien life might communicate over long distances is very likely wrong. We already know that radio communications are inappropriate. Takes far too long. What certainty can we in fact assign to the idea that we fully understand all of the possible communications mechanisms when in fact astrophysicists continue to be surprised on a weekly basis by space observations? Take an honest look at the predictive track record that mainstream astrophysicists have. Subtract out all of the theories that were created after the observations were made. Look just at the mainstream theories' predictive capabilities, and ask yourself: why are we still being surprised by enigmatic observations? Predictive ability is really the only honest assessment of the theories we have. If we aren't exhibiting great accuracy with our astrophysical predictions, then we should not consider our theories about alien communications to be even more accurate.
The real problem is that people here, and within the field of astrophysics, would generally prefer to not consider something like that. There is a general aversion to thinking that we might have made mistakes in our own mathematical modeling of the universe -- so much so that we would prefer to postulate invisible matters and forces are causing the things we see with our telescopes.
Furthermore, pseudoskepticism is taking an increasingly prominent role in science these days. It's becoming instrumental in deflecting attention away from anomalous data. The existence of a possible answer that conforms to mainstream views is now sufficient to ignore the fact that many of these anomalies in fact formulate a cohesive story. If you dismiss each of the individual anomalies on a case-by-case basis, then you can easily miss any fabric that might connect them together. Pseudoskeptics have taken over wikipedia and have long ruled this forum here. Finding a place where evidence that clearly contradicts mainstream beliefs can actually be discussed in a rational manner is becoming increasingly difficult. Evidence and prediction are losing value relative to consensus. If we allow this transition to continue on its current course, we will convince ourselves that we've figured everything out before we actually have a theory of everything. We can quite easily cause ourselves to ask the wrong questions under these circumstances, and a theory of everything -- as well as alien communications -- will seem forever elusive. Make no doubt about it: our own perception of our own accomplishments plays a very prominent role in our ability to solve these sorts of problems.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
DNA is a late comer. Before that, we think primitive organisms used RNA as a code instead of DNA. We think this is true because the oldest DNA based fossils are the Stromatolites, mats of cyanobacteria which date to about 3 Billion years. From there back to about 3.5 Billion back, the various trace fossils remaining are thought to be mostly RNA based life.
DNA is an advanced replicator. The sort of DNA found in eubacteria is more advanced (in that it has some additional error correction mechanisms, meaning it does a more reliable job of copying itself. DNA in multicelular organisms is more advanced still - in fact it can be argued that sexual reproduction, putting the reproductive organs deep inside a parent so they are protected from some chemicals and radiation, and many other evolutionary advanced are all about improving copying fidelity.
Lower mutation probability seems to be something nature is heavily selecting for (which makes sense). Lower mutation probability actually increase the evolution rate (which seems counter-intuitive, but which is just what modern Biologists such as Dawkins will claim, that is lower mutation rate = increased selection rate is the orthodox version of the theory I'm presenting, not some crackpottery. I can go into why this is, but I'd rather people read Gould, Dawkins, and others for themselves and get it from the horse's mouth).
So if modern DNA evolved from more primitive DNA about 1 Billion years ago and Earliest DNA about 3 Billion years back, what happened before? RNA seems to takes us back to about 3.5 Billion years, so given the age of the earth, we have to squeeze probably at least 5 sequentially more primitive replicators, maybe many more than that, into that first 1/2 billion years that are left. Plus, each step back means sloppier copying and a slower overall evolution rate, so each step is more 'miraculous' than the next. (I'm not claiming an automatically supernatural explanation here, just saying that the probabilities seem to be getting really incredibly unlikely, reaching odds of billions to one and then zooming up into really improbable odds, on a par with all the air molecules in the room just happening to all jump to one side type events, when we talk about the first few steps from inorganic clays with various crystaline microstructures to something a little more like a true self replicating molecule).
Now this talk about the 'soup' behaving like it's gonna evolve automagically is another thing. When people run experiments with glass globes full of Methane and Ammonia and electrical arcs and UV for energy sources they very quickly get Amino Acids, usually within a few hours, which is where these 'soup' claims start. But when they first did these same experiments the researchers assumed that they would see Proteins within a few weeks or months, and that part just didn't happen. Getting from Amino Acids to self replication turns out to be Quintillions of times or more harder than these early experiments suggested. Saying that self replication might be a mysterious property distributed throughout the 'soup' as a whole is just another way of ignoring how long the actual hard data tells us those odds are.
Something is fishy as hell with the whole origin of life question, and not just with the Fermi Paradox. Darwin himself knew it - that's why he carefully titled his first book "The Origin of Species" and not "The Origin of Life". By his own writing, he thought he had explained why life, once started, divides up into species and why the fossil record shows species have changed, died out, or been replaced by new one species, but he didn't think he had solved the more ultimate origin problem as well, and in fact thought his theory might pose whole new difficulties in solving it.
Huxley's related book "On the Origin of Species, Or, The Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature", is mostly where people get the idea tha
Who is John Cabal?
Creationism is an important aspect of this discussion and shoud not be modded off topic.
For myself though, I try to see the world as closely as it appears to be, rather than through the interpretations of men. We discuss here things on a cosmic scale perhaps beyond human imagining and I am comfortable with that. I am not comfortable with speculating on the whims and motives of beings divine as I am certain that is beyond my ken.
Of this I am comfortable though: to describe a thing as being something other than what it clearly is can almost always be considered a slight to its creator. It is beyond me to speculate about why a creator would make the world appear to be one thing and then require his adherents to insist it was another. That sounds to me like a cruel game and even less likely than intelligence as random happenstance.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Read through the list of nations that are part of the U.N. Some of them count as bad neighborhoods, and they still have a presence on the global scene. You started with an image of a Utopian galactic society, and I can't figure out why. Why would you assume that the rest of the universe is so much better than us? Why would you assume that drugs aren't widespread to help lower the effects of culture shock? Why couldn't a military ruler exist in such a system? Even nonsentient species on this planet understand self-defense. Build up enough military power that whoever or whatever is out there can't impose their will on us seems like a valid argument for a leader on any stage.
And how can you make sweeping statements about as of yet imagined beings and their society, and be condescending to everyone who isn't partaking of the same fiction?
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
There is a scary possibility, look at our own inability to get fusion to work, oil/chemical energy is ok to just get a civilization started but to go from star to star you at least need fusion. In fact each planet might only get one chance because the first civilization could easily use up all the easy to reach oil and coal. If the first civilization dies off, the next one to come up has no easy to use starter energy to run their technology long enough to even get a shot at researching fusion. For example the hot, jungle like conditions that created our oil and coal might never come again. It's possible that there's is no way to get fusion to work. So everywhere in the universe are lots of civilizations that then have energy crises and either learn to live efficiently (using piddling fission power, wind, and other renewables) or just die off. This makes them much harder to detect. Even without fusion, it might be possible to go from one star to another very slowly via advanced fission propulsion (taking centuries in slow boats to go from one star to the nearest star with robots growing the crew as the ship approaches the target star out of frozen ova or some other even farther out nanotech method) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rock et
but doing that just clones your power starved civilization on another
star and doesn't solve the energy problem. The only thing it really
does is reduce the chance that one disaster will wipe out your only
planet.
Mark
This is one angle I hadn't considered in my post. I'll concede this point. Although farming creatures to kill are a renewable resource, new and different wild game is a sport some individuals in an advanced civilization might enjoy. Extensions of this concept apply, and alien angles beyond what I imagined. Another poster mentioned backups, but I doubt the occupied -> vacant ratio of livable planets is so high that eradication of us as pests is an efficient solution to this problem.
Not to be pedantic, but mass is energy. That the Oort cloud is rich in hydrogen for fusion and known to have scattered mountain sized collections of frozen hydrocarbons is just bonus. To get manned craft beyond Saturn we would need fusion power at least, or some other as-yet undiscovered fount of energy. Even for unmanned craft that we send that far we use fission.
As another poster pointed out, yes, this brings us back to the question of where are they? Perhaps in the coming decades we will come to see that we've already seen them, we just didn't know how to read the signs. Perhaps the noisy phase of social development is brief enough that no culture passed through it close enough for us to see it, in the brief span we've been looking. Perhaps we are alone for now. If we take the obvious step and expand our sphere everywhere we can, we won't always be. Eventually the lines will diverge enough that "we" will be "them". Space is vast, and after Saturn the landmarks are far apart.
It bothers me that we can't see ion drives in the distance. That must mean the technology is short lived, soon to be surpassed by more efficient means. Otherwise potential alien intelligences would be shifting lunar sized masses with it, and we could see that from a galaxy away.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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!
-- The unsig...
Provided that one model of the inevitable course which all civilizations must absolutely follow is true.
You made one crucial mistake in the above... it doesn't take "all" civilizations, it takes only one. Only one civilization has to either want to expand throughout the galaxy, or wants to create self-replicating probes to explore the entire galaxy. Assuming intelligent life is relatively common, do you think it's reasonable that not one over the last few billion years would do it?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Even more irksome is when people make sweeping statements about things supposedly missing from science fiction that has in fact been extremelyv thoroughly explored over the decades.
(And trying to be slippery by qualifying with "run-of-the-mill" doesn't help, since that amounts to a circular reference -- if a story does address non-radio-signal communication, then it doesn't count???)
Even in the earliest "space opera" stories (e.g. E. E. "Doc" Smith and his cohorts) in the 1930's outright assumed that advanced civilizations would use telepathy, tachyonic communication, etc., and it was not rare even then to suggest that they had more or less forgotten about ordinary radio waves as hopelessly antiquated.
Decades ago there was one particularly amusing story (author and title forgotten, alas) with a series of vignettes, each suggesting a different and clever explanation for the Fermi Paradox e.g. one civilization was trying hard to communicate with Earth in particular, but they kept assuming that their data rate of e.g. one bit per year was too fast, so they kept slowing the rate down.
A very funny story (which I think is actually available online, these days) talks about the incomprehensibility, to members of a far-flung multi-species galactic civilization, of Earth having beings that "thought with meat", as opposed to every other galactically-known species that had brains of plasma or electronic etc. nature than were otherwise known. (This was not directly about SETI issues, but such are strongly implied.)
The ultimate problem is not a lack of imagination -- many, many exotic notions of ET communication have been considered -- but rather that the exotic modes are not pragmatic. If ET's communicate with tachyons, well, alas, we don't even know for sure whether tachyons exist or not, let alone how to try to receive them from ET's.
Interesting recent example: in quite recent years, it turns out that there is a previously-unnoticed theoretical prediction from quite orthodox physics, that photons can carry, not just their intrinsic spin of 1, but also an arbitrary number of additional units of angular momentum. This seems to be little-known, so far, and no one knows how to either produce or to detect that additional angular momentum in photons.
Nonetheless, many people immediately speculated about 2 things: whether cosmological events may produce such photons, and whether ET's might produce such photons.
Failure of imagination is not the problem. The problem is the pragmatics of turning imagination into a realizable experiment.
You complain about the failure of the imagination of SF writers, futurists, etc, but what that says to me is that you are unaware of the rich imagination long ago represented by such people.
Perhaps the problem is merely that you read only "run of the mill" or mediocre fiction and futurism, hmm?
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
But it is rather difficult to "see the world as closely as it appears to be", with disregard for "the interpretations of men", without coming to the conclusion that it, and in fact the whole universe, revolves around you (the observer).
A good point, but consider going two steps further: how can anyone truly "clearly" see, never mind accurately describe, a creation, if that individual is not the creator — who could be said to have "described" it via his creation?; and, how can the thing created truly "clearly" see (and thus accurately describe) itself, never mind the entirety of the creation of which it is part?
(There are Biblical, and presumably other religious, statements that raise these same points; they are thousands of years old!)
Start with a safer assumption, which I touched on above: nobody in this world can really "grok" the entirety of the world, never mind the universe. They really can't even understand, or clearly see, themselves. (We still don't really "get" how a dog, a gecko, an ant, or even a paramecium, actually works, never mind why any of them exist.)
Given that, we really can't reason from how the world/universe "appears" to us, because we don't understand us, and the vast majority of what constitutes said "appearance" consists, for any particular individual, of information obtained "through the interpretations of men".
That suggests our biggest challenges will involve our "fights" with ourselves and our interactions with others. This shouldn't be surprising, considering that, even in the comparatively-simple world of Newtonian physics, the "N-body problem" is considered very difficult to solve — yet each "body" is obeying very simple and well-known rules, when compared to how any living organism (from a virus on up the so-called evolutionary, and complexity, ladder) behaves.
Next, is there any truly persuasive evidence that our Creator requires us to insist the world is something other than it appears to be? I'm unaware, offhand, of any evidence that Jesus Christ, or certain other well-known "Men of God", insisted on any such thing, or required their adherents to do so to others.
That leaves us with a somewhat-less-controversial, but perhaps-even-more-interesting, question: why does religious teaching generally dissuade us from probing, contemplating, and even worshipping the fullness of our physical universe, and instead focus on teaching us how to treat other people, animals, and our environment?
There's a reasonably scientific answer to this, one that I think becomes more rational the more we learn about our physical universe: the universe may be vast, but it is not, from the point of view of any individual who is subject to religion teachings, consistently important across all of its "components". (I.e. there's insufficient "spooky action at a distance" such that we really need to know what's going on in Andromeda.)
Simply put, whether
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
Ben Bova, a major science fiction writer, has a proposed answer to the Fermi Paradox that startw with one of the side-effects of general technological advancement: The average person (of any intelligent species) acquires more and more power to do things. Well, on Earth it is well known that not all persons are emotionally stable, even as adults. Why should an assumption of stability be made for other worlds? Remember that if there is a technological cure for insanity, it is beyond our current technology, and it is reasonable to assume that another species at our technological level will also lack that technological solution. Which means plenty of wackos running around out there with power to do stuff, just like here. And what can one empowered insane person do? How about write a software virus that destructively disables a key technological infrastructure? How about recruit others into a terrorist organization that acquires nuclear weapons and starts a world war? How about create a biological virus that results in a deadly worldwide plague? Bova basically says that after a certain technological level is reached, every global civilization gets murdered from within by some insane individual or group. So nobody ever reaches the stars. Even if some social "cure" is tried, like totalitarian testing/execution of people arbitrarily defined as "insane", likely as not either of three things will happen. (1) They don't catch everyone who wants to destroy civilization. (2) They encourage ordinary folk to resist being part of such a culture, leading to destruction of the civilization. (3) They succeed, but as a result of having clamped down, become a "water empire", and end up not wanting to go to the stars.
We think we can't see God, so we decide there is none. But we wonder why we can't see ETIs, so we invent reasons.
All very ironic, especially when the answer to both questions is basically that we can't see the forest for the trees.
joudanzuki
True. Our EM leakage is not decipherable beyond Pluto. For an outsider far away, we're just some star with a tiny tiny tiny amount of added noise in the radio spectrum. See http://sciastro.astronomy.net/sci.astro.6.FAQ
> Evolution favors a combination of aggressiveness and intelligence.
:)
Then how do you explain cockroaches, phytoplankton and sponges? What, you think they're "less evolved" than we are? That's nonsense! They've been evolving for just as long (longer, depending on how you measure)--they are extremely evolved! The most populous multicellular creatures on this planet (by sheer volume, not just numerically) are ants and termites. And while some of their behavior may resemble what we call "intelligence", it is clearly hard-wired, not learned. And while ants are usually fairly aggressive, termites are not so much. For a more obvious example, a little closer to home, consider the field mouse, an immensely successful species, but neither intelligent (at least for a mammal) nor aggressive. In fact, aggression is most strongly associated with apex predators like that wolf you mentioned. And while apex predators are really cool animals in general, they also tend to be extremely fragile as species.
I might go so far as to say that the available evidence shows that Evolution (that famous anthropomorphic personification who lives in a house made of giant tortoise shells, decorated with finch feathers) disfavors aggressiveness, and seems to be fairly neutral about the whole notion of intelligence.
Of course, when it comes to intelligent, technological species, well....we're speculating based on a sample-size of one, which is not enough to form any sort of meaningful conclusions. I think it's fairly safe to say that evolution will favor intelligence when designing intelligent, technological species, but beyond that I hesitate to guess. I also think it will tend to favor hair when designing hairy species.
I like Charlie Stross's solution to the Fermi paradox, as proposed in "Accelerando" - basically that as a civilization becomes more advanced and reliant on technology and bandwidth, they're less willing to leave to go out exploring. Sort of the why-leave-home-all-my-stuff-is-there theory. So we haven't encountered intelligent life because everybody out there decided they were going to stay close to home.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
The Great Filter (Drake's equation) teaches us that the number of other intelligent civilizations in our Galaxy alone is expected to be anything from several to tens of thousands at any given time.
The Drake Equation starts a discussion. It wasn't meant to really calculate anything. It's simply a way of describing the probability factors, but we have absolutely zero clue what the probability factors really are, especially the probability of intelligent life arising from base life.
In any case, that was Sagan's argument, and the Fermi Paradox firmly asks, if there are so many, why the hell don't we see ANY evidence, when logically they should have spread everywhere in the vast amount of time of the galaxy?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Suitable stars with suitable planets for the development of intelligent life maybe very very rare.
If extra-terrestrials do exist out there (which they probably do), the question is more likely "Why would they even bother with us?" Honestly, if they have solved mortality, interstellar travel, and a slew of other issues that it takes to become a space-faring race, why would they be interested in us? Even mild scientific curiosity can be satisfied by scooping up a few of us and dissecting us.
Reasons to Visit Earth:
- Humans make fun pets. ("Look, dear! Talking monkeys!")
- Curious as to what humans taste like.
- Anal probes are the equivalent of interstellar cow tipping.
- Human horn is an aphodesiac.
Reasons Not to Visit Earth:
- Same reason a level 70 in World of Warcraft avoids starter areas. There's no point.
- Stupid humans keep wanting the ET's to just solve their problems for them.
- The last guy that got stranded in Roswell was carved up like a turkey.
- Same reason why humans don't bother to explain how microwaves work to dolphins. Sure they can talk, but they don't understand a damn word we say.
You assume aliens would be no more advanced than we are. However, even a thousand years (trivial on the cosmic scale) makes a huge difference in the technological scale. Consider that 1,000 years ago the deadliest fighting force was a man in armor on horseback. A single infantryman today, armed only with basic gear, could take out a hundred knights. A well-equipped squad of 10 could take out a hundred thousand or more- certainly more than enough to break any 10th-century army they fought against. And that's without giving them tanks, ships, or aircraft. That is the difference 1,000 years makes. Our world appears to be billions of years old, and our star one of trillions. Even if there are only 10 other civilizations in our ~10-billion year old galaxy, we would expect at least one of them to be at least a billion years more advanced than us. Saying that we are the most advanced civilization out there is saying we are probably the only civilization out there.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Funny how God is the last explanation anyone is willing to entertain regardless of how much a stretch the alternative is.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?