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Why Life On Mars May Foretell Our Doom
Hugh Pickens writes "Nick Bostrom has an interesting interpretation on why the failure of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) for the past half-century is good news and why the discovery of life on Mars could foretell our doom. Bostrom postulates a 'Great Filter,' which can be thought of as a probability barrier and consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems."
That would be a major headline. Even when hints of life on Mars are announced there is a story.
don't they have a mountain on mars shaped like that? heh
from earth?
The guy dismisses the possibility that most civilizations evolve in some direction other than midlessly colonizing every star they can reach.
After all our own civilization has pretty much lost interest in anything beyond putting up more geostationary TV transmitters.
What if most evolve beyond physical forms? What if most lose themselves in virtual realities. What if many simply don't bother leaving their own solar system because the speed of light proves to be unbreakable and they aren't interested in planting colonies that will have little or no contact or impact on their own civilization?
Or what if we just got lucky and got a galaxy to ourselves?
Democrat delenda est
For those of you who didn't want to read through six pages of thick words: the author is basically expanding the Drake equation to possibly include something past our current tech level. The idea is, if the really unlikely thing for life to survive is something we already passed (such as, life instantiating in the first place) then we have nothing to fear. But if it's something that happens once life already exists on a planet (very likely if another planet in our very solar system once held life) then we may soon be in for a world of hurt.
So, interesting speculation, even if people have been batting it around for years now.
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
Advanced Aliens, having evolved separately from us have a different means of perceiving the Universe. Their senses are not our senses. SETI is searching a very narrow range of frequencies, so it could be that the Aliens are simply broadcasting on one we aren't even aware of. That plus everyone knows that the first step towards extrasolar excursions is manifest psychic abilities;-)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
An English Professor, talking to a Mathematics Professor, at length, describes with lofty words and colorful adjectives why God does not exist. In response, the Mathematician writes a complex formula on a chalk board and proclaims: Therefore, God exists. The English Professor could not retort. Moral of the story: I donno. Somehow I thought it fit, and now have forgotten why.
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
How the hell does this guy keep getting first?
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
More speculation based on one data point of life evolving (Earth), and the fact that we haven't detected any signals from life. Leading to some dubious speculation that there must be some single catastrophic thing ("the Great Filter") that prevents intelligent life from populating the galaxy, and how somehow if life evolved and died out on Mars, it means the Great Filter is more likely to be ahead of us. As opposed to behind, say, near where whatever caused the hypothetical Martian life to die.
Of course, this all assumes there is some Great Filter, and not a series of probabilities that add up to make planet-colonizing life unlikely. And a bunch of other typical assumptions about life being similar to us, etc.
In a way, he is just restating the Fermi Paradox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations.
I can't access it.
It was a good place to avoid environmental laws while the try to do multidimensional work.
Real shame about the 'flaming skulls' incident..real shame.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Because he's afraid of the egg-istential risks!
Read my Very Short "Stories"
Maybe the so-called "great filter" is just time? We're viewing the universe as it was millions of years ago, for the most part, and maybe the rest of the universe is just like us in terms of the scale of time required to achieve complex space travel.
So if we find trilobites on Mars ... Mankind is doomed.
... beyond stupid.
Because the trilobites couldn't find a way to get to the sweet Earth oceans before Mars dried up on them. And, therefore, there is a "Great Filter" that prevents us from colonizing the galaxy.
WTF ?!?
The "Great Filter" is DISTANCE. It takes a LONG TIME and a LOT OF ENERGY to travel from one solar system to the next. Extrapolating our demise from the failure of a bunch of imaginary trilobites' space program is
The galaxy is HUGE. Even if there are 100 billion stars in it, we'd have to cross HALF A GALAXY to get to 50 billion of them.
Just do it.
The other civilizations played with artifacts of the Great Old Ones, who ate their brains.
(c.f. "A Colder War")
Maybe there is a secret society of advanced civilizations that know about us but have decided not to contact us until we're mature enough to be admitted into their club. Perhaps they're observing us as if we were animals in a zoo. I don't see how we can conclusively rule out this possibility. But I will set it aside in order to concentrate on what to me appear more plausible answers to Fermi's question.
Set it aside?! Wait just one minute! That happens to be my favorite theory!
Don't know. Thjey banned my addy for my first posts.
Obviously,
He's a Martian, thats why he is so interested in Anal Probes.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ogXJ7YBb3NE
Kids In The Hall Sketch
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
...are doing their job reasonably well - trimming life down as it emerges to prevent another galactic dawn war among any space-faring organisms.
In an article in SEED magazine, Geoffrey Miller suggests that technological civilizations lose ambition toward real achievement once they start playing computer games.
Cripes, I known fellers like that.
Better get the shotgun and health kits ready.
The Earth isn't going to be habitable for much longer. Solar output increases with the age of the Sun, which will eventually tip the Earth into thermal runaway.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Suppose we find trilobite skeletons on Mars ... and the next day an alien ship enters our system. In his work, those two are contradictory events. They cannot happen in the same universe. But there are all kinds of ways they COULD happen.
...
... develop that area ... and then move out from that fringe in X years. So you would have a new fringe area every X years. And X would (given human life spans) be a few thousand years. Just long enough to get the colony's population up to where it could build a space program of its own.
So his theory is flawed.
Now, whether a million years is significant or not
It is not in the entire history of Life.
It is VERY significant in the history of any single species.
You assume that such civilization would instantly launch a ship to each and every star and that none of those ships would have problems in the million year long flight. Although many ships would have to cross our galactic core.
Rather, a civilization would colonize the area around it
... is that they're alien. Such is the phrase often mentioned by Benford, Niven and others. They're more acutely aware, as those who by trade imagine what aliens might be like, than are those such a SETI scientists. The latter keep themselves boxed in with the idea that what they're looking for will look enough like what they're used to, and so engage in scientific human-chauvinism. The error here is that there are so many others forms that life, and even intelligent life, may take that we wouldn't be able to recognize it with our present understanding. As an example, we take discovery of gas giant planets in other systems as a matter of course, and get excited about "Earth-like" discoveries, even though what's presented is hardly Earth-like. Yet we're finding that there is life in some unlikely places here on Earth, the so-called 'extremophiles', a fact that could be taken as suggesting that life could exist in the environments found on some of the 200 odd exoplanets already known. This applies to not just life in general, but also to that which would be considered "technological" or "advanced" if we could be conceive of these things in the myriad ways they might occur besides what we know from experience.
Consider: How much for how long of SETI has listened for interstellar communication on the "neutral hydrogen" frequency, when any portion or amount of the electromagnetic spectrum could be used along with various planar and circular polarizations, and amplitude and frequency modulations to multiplex vast amounts of information in a shorter burst? Signal analysis people consider these well, but SETI researchers restrict themselves to that which they imagine we would do. They end up not looking for alien life or civilizations, but rather other humans in the universe, something exceedingly unlikely.
Unless and until we lose this Earth-centric provincialism, we might detect life and even high technology out there, and never recognize it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
In other words, even if the universe is infinite, it is finite to us! And, it must always be finite. Period. End of story. I'd never heard that expressed before. It makes our place in the general scheme of things seem smaller.
This is Nick Bostrom, the fellow who last tickled our fancy (ahem) with the notion that it is far more likely that we are currently living in a computer simulation of the present than actually living in the time being simulated.
He seems here to be pulling the same kind of statistical trick as he did in the simulation argument: estimating the probability of what is in our experience a necessarily singular event by considering many thousands or millions of like events. This is anti-scientific in the highest degree.
My hope is that this is another in a series of large-scale pranks intended to demonstrate how even quite educated people fail to understand basic statistical concepts.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I think he glosses over the possibility that the great filter lies between the origin of life and our current state. Thus the closer any life we find on Mars to our own, the worse for us. But I have my own doomsday power hypothesis.
I think there is a final great filter, and that it is ahead of us. Technology increases power, and people use power. Ultimately it is likely that the power to destroy all life on earth, or at least all intelligent life, will exist, and someone will use that power. Will we leave earth before doomsday power exists, or is used? That seems vanishingly unlikely, since doomsday power looks a lot closer than meaningful space travel.
Perhaps I am wrong, and no madman could acquire such power.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Given that intelligence makes one a useful slave to others more powerful, it is arguably a good idea to hide one's species' intelligence from the attention of unknown aliens with unknown quantities of firepower.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Rubbish! It's The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief that will prevent further space exploration.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Consider, for example that in our present physics the low edge of space-time scale is at 1E-33 meters, the Planckian scale, while our "elementary" particles or any experiments are at the scale 1E-16 m or greater. The region between 10E-16m and 1E-33m is a "desert" as far as anyone knows. Yet this "desert" contains as large span of scales as the range between our elementary particles and any lifeform or any of our technological creations.
For all anyone knows there could be the entire hierarchy of complexity, far greater than our own, built between the Planckian scale objects and our present "elementary" particles. While the number of orders of magnitude is the same between the two regions, recall that the "clock" of that underlying hierarchy would be ~1E16 times faster than the clocks of our elementary particles (since signals there travel much shorter distance) and that the density of components making up complexity at that scale would be a cube of that ratio, i.e. this underlying hierarchy of complexity would be 1E50 times more dense, with clocks running 1E16 times faster, than anything we can build with our "elementary" particles. Within such picture, our elementary particles and anything built upon them, would be a galactic scale engineering projects of such super-civilization (which to us would be for all practical purposes god-like). Yet, within our present scientific framework, we wouldn't have a clue that it exists.
Hence, "they" may well be here, and we may be even "their" little project or an experiment, but we are too primitive to recognize any of it. The author starts with a premise of near omniscience of our present science and thus leaps from 'absence of observation' to 'observation of absence' and from there weaves his story. That premise will seem ridiculously arrogant even to our grand-grandchildren hundred years from now, let alone to a civilization few hundred million years more advanced than ours. We may have no more understanding of "them" than one-bit cells in Conway's game of Life have about us.
THE UNIVERSE:
4. Population
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
Mars is too close to us to say much about exobiology IMHO. The Earth and Mars have been exchanging tons of biologically active material for their entire existence (large meteor strikes cause material to be ejected to escape velocity, and some small fraction of that will be treated gently enough not to kill any bacteria).
So, there is is likely to be life on Mars, and it is likely to be pretty similar to some life on Earth, proving nothing on the big question of where is everybody.
Yes, technology moves forward, but it can only do so at a rate upon which we can understand it. Unfortunately for the quasi-religious nutters who worship at the church of the "singularity", our ability to reach new levels of technological sophistication moves at approximately the same rate over time. New generations of humans can absorb and build upon developments in technology only so fast, and even in the unlikely event that we magically come up with an AI smarter than us to accelerate the process, why would we expect it to bother with us after it achieves "enlightenment"? Sorry folks, but "singularity" theory is just another expression of end times religious nuttery in the grand old tradition of the many religious philosophies that came before it.
You must be the life of the party.
ascended Ancients have rules that say they can't contact the rest of us.
The basic premise of his argument is this: There is one great filter. If we cannot find one in our past, then it must be in our future.
First of all, there doesn't need to be a single highly improbable event. The improbability of a single event is indistinguishable from several somewhat more probable, but still unlikely events that must all occur to satisfy the conditions for life. The odds of me winning $10m in the state lottery might be about as good or even better than me winning $10m in 100 or more $100,000 slot machine jackpots.
There are so many improbable events that occurred between the first microbial life to human life today. We can begin to list the various improbable events that have directly or indirectly led to intelligent life on earth. Eventually, we will have a list so long that it will make it clear that a SINGLE great filter is extremely improbable.
There does not have to be a single great filter. It can be many events, both in our past and in our future that prevent a similar civilization from making contact. To an advanced race building Dyson spheres, we would be about as advanced as the microbes we may or may not find on the Mars polar cap. Maybe they are in the great void of the Bootes sector, capturing all of the stars' energy from that part of the universe. It could be that in our future we DO find microbial life on Mars and just decide that it's not that different from life on Earth and thus not that interesting to study or preserve. Most likely, we simply colonize over any microbial life we happen to find because it will be common.
In any case, here is a few improbable events, out of the top of my head, which may allow intelligent life on Earth to evolve, but make it unlikely elsewhere, including Mars.
- The human race at one point was reduced to 5000 individuals. Perhaps lack of genetic diversity in an advanced species was a precondition for intelligence.
- We have H20, but not enough to cover the entire surface of the planet. Sharks are the most evolutionarily advanced species because they are perfectly fit for their environment and have not changed significantly in millions of years. Perhaps intelligent life cannot develop without a geologically young planet that has mountains and shifting land masses because in a mono-ocean world, a single predatory non-intelligent species would dominate.
- A carbon-dioxide rich environment is slowly transformed by plantlife to an oxygen rich environment that allows oxygen respiratory systems to develop. Perhaps having all of our carbon trapped in crude oil for millions of years allowed us to breathe the air.
- Dinosaurs were wiped out, paving the way for mammals. Who knows what the implications are here? Just recognize that mass extinctions in which some life still survives and thrives is rare.
- Rapid reproduction and rapid metabolism. Let's face it. As creatures we are very fast compared to geological or cosmological time. This lets us get this far in the wink of a cosmological eye--- before any of the common cosmological events have a chance to hit us.
Wait, so the headline isn't a crafty way of referring to a new DOOM game? Color me disappointed.
Perhaps WE are the von Neumann probe of which you speak. We seem to fit the criteria. Also, it is very difficult to have a perfect filter or perhaps a perfect probe. If there is a series of less than perfect filters and less than perfect probes then perhaps less "developed" life forms have evolved on other planets. In that case it may be the case that there is no future GREAT FILTER, but only a continuous series of minor ones that act together to prevent the malignant spread of one space faring specie throughout the galaxy -- much as we have done to our home planet.
"No instance of abiogenesis (the spontaneous emergence of life from nonlife) has ever been observed."
Uh, what about all life on Earth?
Thanks a million. Push Start to replay.
doomed. Doomed! DOOOOOOMED!
Sig this!
I don't think its unexpected, but I think its an unsafe assumption we tend to make when talking about life elsewhere in the universe that the development of social intelligence is really an evolutionary advantage. To the best of our knowledge its only happened a few times on Earth. It didn't help species like the Neanderthal, and our genes tell us we almost went extint at least once. There's substantial evidence that the sequence of events that lead to us becoming socially intelligent is uncommon -- us and our ancestors, perhaps elephants and some of the marine mammals.
But to be intelligent AND able to communicate between the stars means also developing technology, and there's possibly even LESS evolutionary pressure for that. For it to be beneficial you need to have some sort of external pressure that keeps a species from occupying once niche in the environment. You need that pressure to happen to a socially intelligent species (because you need to be able to share and communicate accumulated knowledge). You also need to presumably have fairly fine motor control -- elephants may be intelligent but they're never going to be building electronic devices, or mining, constructing habitats, etc.
You need to develop technology to a fairly advanced level without killing off your planet. You need to develop energy sources capable of powering long distance travel and communication... and you need to have something that drives you to that. Remember our brains have evolved to make us curious, to want to travel, to want to expand and we still don't have the motivation as a species to take the next step yet.
Thats a LOT of ifs. The universe could be teeming with life and most of it is likely not intelligent. And the universe could be teeming with intelligent life that never became technical.
Remember, success is survival of the species, not inventing TV or space flight. If it takes eight billion years between the development of life and the death of a star to weed out life that didn't evolve to travel between stars, there hasn't been much time to weed out the ones that didn't. Think planetary evolution on the scale of billions of years. We just haven't had that many billions yet.
(This ended up both longer and somewhat more rambling than I intended...)
Because he's really CmdrTaco :)
There's another reason we don't see extra-terrestrial civilizations: time and distance.
As the article notes, we can't actually see extra-terrestrial planets. All our looking for ET civilizations is done by watching for indirect signs of them passing Earth, primarily radio waves. Here on Earth, though, it's only been in the last 2 centuries that we've been putting out any radio signature at all, and we're rapidly moving towards putting out less and less of a signature. Communications systems that broadcast indiscriminately in all directions are less efficient than ones that focus their broadcast, and non-broadcast systems are more efficient yet. There might only be a 500-year-wide band in which we're detectable by radio emissions at any given point in the galaxy. And if it's true for us, it's probably true for other civilizations as well.
So, take any star out there. It's going to be a fixed distance away from Earth, so we can ignore the distance factor. If it's say 700 light-years away, then for us to be able to see any civilization on it's planets they would've had to have reached the point where they began using radio between 700 and 1200 years ago. If they discovered it more recently than 700 years ago, their very first broadcasts haven't had time to arrive here yet. If they discovered radio more than 1200 years ago, 700 years ago they'd've reached the point where they stopped broadcasting detectable radio signals. The trailing edge of their bubble has already passed us, and we won't see detectable traces of them again.
So there could be hundreds of civilizations out there. If they didn't pass through the radio-emitting stage at the right time for their distance away from us, they'd be invisible to us. And that "right time" is a fairly tight window as such things go.
There are so many holes in this guy's argument, I'm not really sure where to begin....
Let's start here: "The oldest confirmed microfossils date from approximately 3.5 billion years ago, and there is tentative evidence that life might have existed a few hundred million years before that; but there is no evidence of life before 3.8 billion years ago."
Life began on Earth not too long (in geological terms) after the conditions for supporting life as we know it were available. The Earth is thought to be roughly 4.6 billion years old. It took roughly a billion years before life began (as far as we can tell, since we don't have fossils any older). A billion years is a long time, but the Earth wasn't a very pleasant place during those first billion years. The first 500 million years or so the hot atmosphere was largely composed of water vapor, hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, methane, iodine, bromine, chlorine, and argon. The halogens (bromine, iodine, and chlorine) would be pretty hostile to life as they tend to be very reactive (especially chlorine and bromine), especially with all the UV the Earth was getting without any ozone layer to protect it, which would tend to create even more reactive radicals of these elements.
Over the next 500 million or so years, the Earth started to cool a bit. Water started to precipitate into lakes and oceans, CO2 and N2 became predominate, and suddenly life started to showed up and with it came some oxygen (as a result of the metabolism of the forming life).
Now, from that perspective, life pretty much popped up as soon as it could, which says to me, life is almost inevitable, if the conditions are right for it.
The first Eukaryotes (complex life) didn't show up until about 2 billion years ago and multicellular life about a billion years after that. So multicellular life may not be a given. It could have been a seriously improbably fluke. But of billions of planets and billions of galaxies, it's probably bound to happen sometimes.
The author goes on to say, "Attempts to create life in the laboratory by mixing water with gases believed to have been present in the Earth's early atmosphere have failed to get much beyond the synthesis of a few simple amino acids. No instance of abiogenesis (the spontaneous emergence of life from nonlife) has ever been observed."
And he's correct. But maybe if we used a lab the size of a planet and allowed a few hundred million years, we might get the results of abiogenesis. I mean, it happened quickly in geological terms on Earth. That doesn't mean you throw it in a pot, cook it up and you're going to have it the next day.
I could go on and on, but I think it's pretty clear the author has no real concept of what a billion years really is. It's a REALLY, REALLY, REALLY long time. It's plenty of time for a lot of really, really improbable events to take place over and over.
The author glosses over the following point: We have no way to prove or disprove the idea that an intelligent non-human species would think in terms that would make technology or communication possible in the first place.
Just as we only have one example of a life-supporting planet, we only have one example of an intelligent species. There is a tacit assumption in science fiction that other species would stumble onto language, mathematics, and advanced technology, even if their brains were organized in a manner totally different from ours. And this assumption in turn seems to taint the scientific discourse on this subject.
Overall I liked the article, but I still think there's too much that we just don't know. I really liked "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem because this is the exact thing he was on about, that as we search for "intelligent life in the universe" what we are really looking for are mirrors of ourselves, and we just need to get past that, and be more willing to stare into the unknown and admit that we don't know what we don't know.
What if most evolve beyond physical forms?
There is no such thing as "beyond physical." Everything we know of has a basis in physical reality. Even ideas. Unless you're positing some kind of transcendental disembodied magic, everything has a physical existence.
blog
If cmdrtaco wants to goatse everyone he just lets kdawson post a story.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Site was starting to puke on me. Full text.
Technology Review - Published by MITMay/June 2008
Where Are They?
Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.
By Nick Bostrom
People got very excited in 2004 when NASA's rover Opportunity discovered evidence that Mars had once been wet. Where there is water, there may be life. After more than 40 years of human exploration, culminating in the ongoing Mars Exploration Rover mission, scientists are planning still more missions to study the planet. The ÂPhoenix, an interagency scientific probe led by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, is scheduled to land in late May on Mars's frigid northern arctic, where it will search for soils and ice that might be suitable for microbial life (see "Mission to Mars," November/December 2007).
The next decade might see a Mars Sample Return mission, which would use robotic systems to collect samples of Martian rocks, soils, and atmosphere and return them to Earth. We could then analyze the samples to see if they contain any traces of life, whether extinct or still active.
Such a discovery would be of tremendous scientific significance. What could be more fascinating than discovering life that had evolved entirely independently of life here on Earth? Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we are not entirely alone in this vast, cold cosmos. But I hope that our Mars probes discover nothing. It would be good news if we find Mars to be sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit. Conversely, if we discovered traces of some simple, extinct life-form--some bacteria, some algae--it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something more advanced, perhaps something that looked like the remnants of a trilobite or even the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be very bad news. The more complex the life-form we found, the more depressing the news would be. I would find it interesting, certainly--but a bad omen for the future of the human race.
How do I arrive at this conclusion? I begin by reflecting on a well-known fact. UFO spotters, RaÃlian cultists, and self-Âcertified alien abductees notwithstanding, humans have, to date, seen no sign of any extraterrestrial civilization. We have not received any visitors from space, nor have our radio telescopes detected any signals transmitted by any extraterrestrial civilization. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been going for nearly half a century, employing increasingly powerful telescopes and data-Âmining techniques; so far, it has consistently corroborated the null hypothesis. As best we have been able to determine, the night sky is empty and silent. The question "Where are they?" is thus at least as pertinent today as it was when the physicist Enrico Fermi first posed it during a lunch discussion with some of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory back in 1950. Here is another fact: the observable universe contains on the order of 100 billion galaxies, and there are on the order of 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. In the last couple of decades, we have learned that many of these stars have planets circling them; several hundred such "exoplanets" have been discovered to date. Most of these are gigantic, since it is very difficult to detect smaller exoplanets using current methods. (In most cases, the planets cannot be directly observed. Their existence is inferred from their gravitational influence on their parent suns, which wobble slightly when pulled toward large orbiting planets, or from slight fluctuations in luminosity when the planets partially eclipse their suns.) We have every reason to believe that the observable universe contains vast numbers of solar systems, including many with planets that are Earth-like, at least in the sense of having masses and temperatures similar to those of our own orb. We also know that many of these solar systems are older than ours.
From these two facts it follows that
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
hey kid, don't tell me the odds
There is no reason to believe that we would even recognize extraterrestrial colonization. Right now, we probably expect an intelligently colonized region of space to be filled with large metal constructions and the congested traffic of a billion large space ships flying to/from various colonized places. Or we expect astronomical scale artificial constructions, like Dyson spheres.
There is NO reason to believe that civilization will look like that after having advanced sufficiently. This is just how WE scale our CURRENT concepts of "building/living structure," "vehicle," or "power plant" into future tech. In the same way, a man from the year 0 may imagine 2000-years-in-the-future tech to include super-chariots that are attached to 1,000 horses and triremes that can fly. It's impossible to see even a few THOUSAND(or hundred) years into the future with any accuracy.. all of our concepts will be completely obsolete and irrelevant. What makes us think that we will have ANY idea what progress/expansion/colonization will look like in a MILLION years?
Maybe a thousand other races have already passed our level of advancement and continue to exist, but in a way that is beyond our comprehension.
New webcomic updated on Sundays: HERE
Now that was a fun read and I agree with the author: if we find any evidence of advanced life on other planets it may be very bad news indeed. The key here IMHO is the term "observable universe". Nick is not suggesting that there will not be life in parts of the universe we will never reach, and in fact Nick admits that probability is in favor of this being the case. Rather, Nick is talking more practically about what we humans can expect to find within our own little pocket of the universe that we could conceivably observe and perhaps one day travel to. The idea is very simple: The more advanced life gets, the less likely it is to be held back by random chance. Consider: A) The creation of self replicating single celled organisms from *nothing*, that is, the creation of basic life from the primordial soup, looks to be extremely improbable, so much so that it may be entirely reasonable to assume we will never see another instance of life in our "observable universe". B) On Earth, Nick says it took 1.8 billion years for life to evolve from single cell to multi cell organisms. This suggests that this step also has a great deal of chance about it, and again, we may not see life more advanced than this in our "observable universe". C) If however we begin to see multi celled organisms, or worse, vertebrates, then the chances of evolution being held back by random chance becomes far less likely, especially in the context of billions of years. It's like a ball that, once it gets rolling, can't be stopped. D) Our study of evolution here on Earth suggests that life is aggressive fundamentally and will spread to every nook and cranny (land, oceans, sky, hot, cold, deserts, etc) given the chance. If we agree with this, it is not unreasonable to assume that a civilization will spread to other planets as soon as as it has the technology and the means to do so. It is the intrinsic nature of life to explore and spread. E) As time goes by, it would appear that civilizations develop better and better ways of completely destroying themselves. So far we have nukes, chemical and biological weapons, but we are already starting to see a new wave of possibilities from the worlds of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and physics. What kind of evils will be have 100 years from now, 1000 years from now, a million years from now? The mind boggles. F) If we concede that life destroying technologies are likely to be developed, and we concede that there will always be rogue individuals or nations willing to use them in the name of justice, freedom or God, then the conclusion is that it's just a matter of time. Nick is suggesting that, if life does happen with reasonable frequency, and if life does tend to evolve into advanced civilizations, that is, the Great Filter is not in out past, then there's a very strong possibility that inevitably, our own species will end in the same way they all do. I think it's interesting anyway.
Judging by how hard it was to load the article, I believe this guy's web server barely managed to get through its own "great filter."
Link doesn't seem to be working, I get a 404 error.
If the Big Bad Filter Event is waiting for us, wouldn't there be some wreckage from the previous civilizations on Earth that didn't make it? If you take his supposition that Earth is likely to pop off complex life forms, but some event Filters em off later, wouldn't we be seeing some of them underfoot? Or did we just happen to get a virgin planet?
That wasn't Life on Mars. That was the season 3 finale of Doctor Who. I see how you could get confused since John Simm was in both but that was definitely Doctor Who. And if you bothered to watch the whole thing you'd see that the doom was averted and even retconned.
Bostrom's argument starts from essentially the same version but in space, not in time. He takes our civilization, not a persons life, as one data point in the set of all existing civilizatons. He takes the Fermi paradox to say that it means that the set of interstellar civilizations is very small or even nonexistent (otherwise aliens or their machines would already be here), hence the probability barrier (thinking about it there may be more than one barrier, which he doesn't discuss). Then we have to find if our civilization will evolve to become interstellar travelling or not, which means finding if at least one probability barrier exists in our future all barriers are in our past (and we were lucky enough to pass them). If we were lucky then civilizations in our lever are as rare as interstellar ones and therefore going from here to there is likely. If reaching our level is easy, then going from us to interstellar must be hard, so we are doomed.
At least in this version there is some hope, assuming that we don't find life on Mars or elsewhere near here. Well, there is a loophole if we find life there but it turns out to be originally from Earth (if it is possible for earth life to survive space and take root in another world). In the Carter catastrophe version there seems to be no hope.
As we have seen through our own history and present, when civilizations interact, it is often hostile and violent. It would only take one aggressive, space-faring, xenophobic race to send the rest into hiding.
With two such crazies, even the aggressors would hide lest they meet their doom in a kinetic fireball. Planets and space habitats are just too easy a target.
This fits with UFO observations too. We see their ships, but not their home worlds. Ships are mobile and hyperspace travel may be untraceable. Additionally, why would they communicate with us when we're broadcasting everything into space? That's crazy talk. It's only a matter of time before the Zurgs find us, drop some comets in our oceans and turn Earth into an algae farm or just bust it up and leave us for dead.
Hell, it may have happened before. We have an asteroid belt that some propose was formerly a planet. Our Moon was supposedly formed through some sort of cataclysmic collision between Earth and some other large planetoid.
We need ships. Lots of them. We're sitting ducks out here.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
As Rob Malda once put it, in our world the extremes of whatever prediction (be it in Microsoft's or Apple's PR output or a Humanities Professor having a go with statitics) is seldom the true outcome. Much more often, as Rob would put it, "it's somewhere in between".
Translated to the possibility of intelligent civilisations in our universe (or galaxy) the most probable likleyhood is that there is neither an all encompassing galactic civilisation nor is there an utter dearth of intelligent civilisations. There are probably very few intelligent civilisations, most of whom are faced with the same laws of physics and daily trivia as we are, in some or other form.
In concrete terms, I would think that any civilisation would have to put an enormous amount of effort into exploring interstellar space, probably beyond the means (or the will, considering how many humans consider space exploration a waste of money and time) of all but a tiny few, and given the laws of physics, it would mean that maybe there are in fact a tiny number of interstellar civilisations, but that they are confined to small corners of whichever part of the universe/galaxy they come from.
So, if I've got it right, this article is about Demons?
So, six and a half pages to explain tis filter concept, and a single paragraph to point out it doesn't matter anyway.
To Technology Review: Cancel My Subscription.
For a measly 5 bucks Mr. Troll can get a preview of at least 1000 pages. Seems like a cheap form of advertisement...maybe he's the Goatse webmaster? Or maybe he's just a /. editor?
This is the kind of article I'd like read on the toilet.
One of the real flaws in his reasoning is an apparent assumption that there's only one "Great Filter". I would argue that there's no reason to assume this -- in fact, his own discussion points to the fact that there are quite a few improbable events that would have to happen for life to have evolved to the intelligence stage.
A number of these factors are actually common between Earth and Mars, so I certainly wouldn't assume disaster is in our future if real evidence of life (even relatively advanced life) is found on Mars.
Still, a takeaway lesson from his piece is that intelligent life seems, to all observation, to be a pretty rare thing, and there is good reason to think our civilization (even species) could one day destroy itself. Perhaps that self-knowledge could serve us in good stead.
Kythe
We will BE KILL BY DEMONS!
As others have pointed out, his logic is very seriously flawed.
Among many other things, he ASSUMES that because we have not detected alien life, it is not there. Or that it is not capable of sending sufficient signals. Or... something. But it appears that in all his scenarios, it is assumed as a given that if there were aliens we would have found them by now.
Hogwash.
For just one simple example, what about the signal to noise ratio? Seti@home was recently just starting to catch up on the backlog of signals captured by the Seti program, when they tremendously expanded the bandwidth they are testing. Now we are back in the same place we were before: a massive backlog of mostly noise, looking for one little signal. It may be there... but finding it is another matter, which is an inescapable matter of physics. The "needle in a haystack" problem will not go away.
There are an enormous number of other reasons that an alien race, even an intelligent one, would not be eager to send us signals or otherwise make themselves known. Or not send us signals that we recognized as such.
And there is more. Vastly more.
His point of view is interesting, but no more. As a logical argument, it holds about as much water as a chain-link fence.
Why do we always assume the aliens are friendly?
... whether or not "Intelligent Design" is part of our past doesn't matter because it IS our future. A very good point that I hadn't thought of before.I think humans are the Zerg.
We largely canceled our space program back in 1967, when budgets started being scaled down. What we do nowadays is a pale shadow of what was once dreamed about by space enthusiasts, myself included.
If a space program had been kept up at Apollo levels of funding, we would have landed on Mars in the eighties. We would already have a permanently manned moon base and we would right now be mining asteroids, building solar power satellites with extra-terrestrial resources and likely too, building O'Neil colonies.
Once you've got an O'Neil colony, it is not overly difficult to give it some locomotion. It doesn't have to be a lot, a solar sail would be sufficient to, over the course of years, put it into an orbit that doesn't interact too closely with other earth business. Indeed, it makes some sense to perhaps build one's O'Neil colony affixed to a comet and hitch a ride out into the Oort cloud. From there, it is a short hop to building another O'Neil colony on another comet, perhaps one belonging to the Oort cloud of another star, and so the diaspora begins.
My point is simply this. We have had the wherewithal to escape most currently envisioned existential risks for thirty years. We have chosen not to because the 'ignorant masses' have not had the vision to give their politicians the political will to spend ten percent of what they spend now on the military on securing the future through space expansion. However the mere fact that the potential has existed for that long would increase the likelihood that any technological civilization has at least a decent chance at making that crucial leap.
Peter
That doesn't mean we should despair, that's the whole thing about consciousness, we can make decisions, we can work towards not blowing ourselves up, not creating a super plague, and even if for some reason we can't not do those things, we can still simply hope to survive, as we always have and always will.
The reason life thrives everywhere on the planet is not because of some mystical principle, it's because life continues to try. Presuming that life in volcanic vents didn't evolve independently of other life then billions or trillions or more of living things probably died to either get into that environment or to get out of it(if that's where life began), but some of them made it. And those things gained resources that weren't available to others. That's the whole beautiful and terrible thing about life.
If we don't destroy ourselves and it's physically possible, human beings or something like us will colonize outer space.
Maybe we will destroy ourselves, maybe getting anywhere substantially far away is impossible, but that's not going to stop us trying, and the whole "billions of others couldn't do it so why should we be more lucky" is just pathetic.
If there is nobody out there talking to us on interstellar radio (which SETI seems to show) yet we are close to being able to send interstellar messages of our own (which we are) then EITHER:
1) The probability of life forming in the first place is so low that we are pretty much unique in the universe.
OR:
2) The probability of life forming in the first place is quite high - but the probability of it surviving past the age at which it can send radio signals is so low that there is nobody out there.
ERGO: If we find primitive, non-Earthlike life on Mars or anywhere else then we know that (1) is definitely not true. It would follow then that the reason SETI hears nothing is (2). That's bad news because it means that humanity is almost certainly doomed to die out very soon.
Of course there are other possibilities:
3) SETI is flawed in some way.
4) The Galactic Federation doesn't permit you to talk to primitive societies such as ours.
5) There is some reason that we don't yet understand why transmitting interstellar radio is impossible.
6) While it's very, very unlikely for an advanced civilisation to survive (say) the invention of gunpowder, we've been amazingly lucky and have gotten past that point.
I don't know why it took 6 pages to say this.
Our previous colonies could look forward to resupplies within a couple of years (at the most). A colony in another solar system
And THAT is even considering that you're on an Earth-clone planet. If you're on a space station (the way I believe it would work) then you're in even greater danger of dying out before help gets there.No, it is very easy to understand when you understand the DISTANCES involved.Why? You are stating their starting time as if it were a fact.
IF species X started at location Y, Z years ago.
And IF species X traveled A lightyears every B years.
THEN species X would be at location C by date D.
Assuming no problems were encountered.
That species X is NOT at location C
And his theory is SO flawed that if we don't expand, that means that there IS a "Great Filter".
And if we die out and are replaced by intelligent dolphins, they they won't expand because of the "Great Filter" except that THEIR "Great Filter" will be completely different than ours. And so on and so forth.
Which kind of negates the "Great" aspect of the "Great Filter". Because there is not a SINGLE "filter" that would apply to both cases.
Surprise! I'm an alien!
The nuclear bomb is pretty much the first application that becomes obvious when you learn about fission, because the whole explosion thing just pops right out of the equations (and fission itself is pretty much impossible to miss if you're advanced enough to figure out things like space travel and semiconductors).
Considering the extremely competitive world that any imaginable life would have to evolve in (which is itself necessary in order to become complex in the first place), it's really hard to imagine the result being something that never has wars.
My guess is that anything that gets close to being able to spread through space ends up nuking itself right back out of existence (or at least back to the stone age).
One more time, there is only one solar systems! We live in it. It is called Solar System because the Star in the center is name Sol. The other are Star Systems, not Solar Systems. The only exception I know of is when you are talking about parallel universes. Tim S
>>Yet we're finding that there is life in some unlikely places here on Earth, the so-called 'extremophiles'
There is a world of difference between instantaneous life arising in thermal vents on the sea bottom and life evolving to survive there. I think the fact that 'advanced' life lives in temperate conditions while bacteria live in extreme conditions indicates that (at least on Earth) intelligent life is tied to temperate conditions. Unfortunately for science fiction, physics and chemistry are real and immutable. Some things don't happen at 100 degrees Celsius, while some things ONLY happen at STP. That's life (hee hee).
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
If you read the article, then read the responses, then wonder why we have not been contacted ... and your surprised?
How does the ASCII art fail the lameness filter?
The article is pretty silly, but the most silly aspect is the assumption spacefaring means starfaring. If there exists no practical way to exceed the speed of light, we may never have seen other civilizations because they're just too damn far away. There may be billions of stars in the universe, but what are the odds there is a human-habitable planet within, say, 100 light years? Is it really worth the effort to colonize a planet so far away? Your colony ship takes, say, 10,000 years to arrive at it's destination (and that's a smokin' fast colony ship!), and the inhabitants spend the next 10,000 years terraforming the target. Hell, by the time you come in physical contact with your colony it will be populated by a species distinct from the colonizers.
A light year is a long, long way. While it may make sense for us to leave our home planet, I have yet to see a reasonable scenario where we would leave our home star system.
And why does the author assume we'll be able to observe evidence of an advanced civilization? The engineer in me thinks part of technical sophistication is only sending radio waves to the intended target, not slinging them all over the universe. When the world is covered by a fiber grid, and all RF communications is low power spread spectrum, will our civilization be observable via a radio telescope? I doubt it - won't be enough there to pick out of the background.
And let's say the universe is teaming with technological species. When we look up at a star a billion light years away, we're seeing what occurred there a billion years ago. There might be a whole galaxy filled with easily detectable life forms, but if it's a billion light years away we won't know for another billion years.
I find Nick's thoughts to be very insightful and logical. Here are some additional ideas:
The Great Filter is The Great Filter. At some point, every technologically advanced civilization of intelligent beings would ponder The Great Filter just as Nick has done. As evidence mounts that the Great Filter is ahead of them and most likely derived from some technological advancement, that civilization loses its push for technological advancement. They realize and accept their limitations because they don't want to become extinct. They realize that their species has a greater chance of survival if they live in harmony with nature. Ponderance of The Great Filter could lead many advanced civilizations to confine themselves to home. Perhaps this is a wise course of action or non-action.
However, I believe we are facing The Great Filter right now. Global Warming, climate change, energy crisis...whatever you want to call it. The Great Filter is finding an efficient means of producing vast amounts of energy with no negative impact on the home environment.
SETI failed because the Intergalactic Council put out a memo to all members instructing them not to waste time attempting contact with minor systems. Minor systems are those systems failing to register at least 9 planets.
Have gnu, will travel.
Okay, so British dramas might not necessarily be everyone's cup of tea, but let's not resort to hyperbole.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Stuck on a big rock with another chunk of rock hurtling in our direction, trying to find ways to get off and survive.
Great Filter = Copyright, Patents & Trademarks
Seriously the great filter is very nebulous concept and nothing that you could point to among all the different ways a civilisation could be destroyed or made extinct, so a lot of the assumptions about this filter are probably a bit silly. That's certainly not to say there may be an reason or type of cause that's more likely than others to cause the possibility of survival to plummet.
It seems to me trying to save the world from destruction like oooh, environmental destruction or massive industries fighting to extinguish technologies that might save people from burning fossil fuels seems like the problem we need to be thinking about. There is so much waste and self-interest imo that it's really impossible to advance technology in a big way without putting the whole world in danger. The atom and genetics have shown us that, easily.
With so many people complaining and commenting on fuel prices you would like to think that people would understand the problem.
Yeah right. We've NEVER made contact. There IS NO AREA 51. Go back to sleep.
I need to stop reading the post before the subject.
I remember my first beer too
In fact, it does nothing of the sort.
Nothing is inevitable. If an energy source were found that was so cheap and abundant that it was essentially "free", for example, then the possibilities are magnified by many orders of magnitude. Abundant energy can take the place of an awful lot of material resources.
There is no reason to believe that some random "AI" we manufacture would experience anything like human emotion. While most animals in nature behave in ways that we associate with "emotion" (even bees, for example), there is no convincing evidence that emotion is necessary for intelligence. And, since the "evolution" of such an intelligence would be artificial, not not even remotely resemble the natural evolution that has taken place here on Earth, we have NO reason to believe, at all, that such an intelligence would possess or display emotion, unless it were merely mimicking us. And mimicking is not enough.
Electrical patterns in his brain. If those patterns weren't there, there would be no feeling of friendship. So "friendship" has a basis in physical reality. (I'm sure you can even find people with some specific form of brain damage which are completely incapable of feeling "friendship".)
(Not the original poster).
Vernor Vinge spoke at my company once and talked about ways the Singularity might not happen. For example, what if we never figure out how to create massive software that actually works?
The most interesting scenario he pointed out is one in which exponential technological progress is a temporary phase, like a 13-year-old's growth spurt, and the curve of development goes S-shaped and reaches a high but stationary plateau.
Vinge pointed out a book called "The Coming of the Golden Age -- a View of the End of Progress" which suggested that after the leveling off we'd be living in a pretty comfortable world, close to some visions of Utopia. If the natural limits of technology fall short of self-replicating interstellar probes, then the answer to "Where are they?" is "They're enjoying themselves on their garden planet".
The book is even more provocative in arguing that this is already happening. It's kind of plausible at first glance: how much development is simply more of the same only cheaper and faster, how much is outright pointless, and how much progress has really happened on groundbreakers like true AI?
The punch line is that the book was written in 1968.
By a molecular biologist.
So the real questions are: what is the age distribution of advanced civilizations and how old are they when they colonize other stars? When you see that life began almost immediately on Earth, it doesn't seem likely that there are many civilizations much older than us. There may be many total, but they would probably make up a low percentage of planets that formed intelligent life, so they may be very far away. The older a civilization, the larger it's sphere of influence may be, but the rarer it is.
We have no idea how to detect aliens in distant solar systems. The only thing we can say about the lack of aliens is that it appears none have been to our solar system yet. All we can realistically say is that there is probably a significant number of solar systems not visited by extrasolar aliens. We really just got here. We are like guests that show up early to a party and wonder where everyone is.
Maybe it's inevitable that intelligent civilizations produce self replicating robots, but I don't think it's inevitable that many choose to.
No mention of Bruce Stirling's "Swarm"?
I'm an optimist. I believe changes average out for the better. However, the oscillations are dangerous, and we could well exterminate ourselves with one good oscillation that goes below zero. We've already passed the point where any significant nation could create a biotoxin that would exterminate all of us--and we're reaching the point where insane individuals could do it. Ergo, either we damp our negative oscillations or we go away.
As an optimist, I guess that some civilizations do make it past that point. Therefore they must be watching us to see whether or not we reach that level. If we're not going to make it, then no sense in worrying about us, eh?
Anyone want the pessimistic version?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
That means, that there is a strong possibility that single celled life can travel from earth to mars, or (and due to the size of the planets gravity wells, this is much easier) the other way round.
So its quite possible that there was once life on Mars, and it wasn't independent to earth life. Rather it was a distant cousin. Given the ease of travel, its quite likely that were are all Martians.
In the trans-Martian Pansperma theory we'd except to find pockets of life all over the solar system, anywhere that earth-like cells could populate given enough mutations ought to have single celled life at least. And all these life-forms ought to be distant relatives, all using some DNA variant, with some similar genetic coding system.
So life or relics of life on Mars.
Life or relics of life in Europa's oceans.
And even, maybe life on titan, or in the upper clouds of the gas giant planets.
But this wouldn't mean life was likely on other planets in the galaxy. So life on Mars wouldn't change the Nick Bostrom's Great filters, wouldn't change the chance of there being other civilizations out there.
Actually that fact there Mars looks dead, despite being seeded from Earth, adds one more Great filter to life. The Gaia hypothesis, due to James Lovelock, that once life forms, it creates ecosystems that self stabilize the environment, it seems can't be powerful enough to keep planets fertile over billions of years. Losing water (by photo-disintegration from UV light), was enough to sterilize most of Mars. And this will happen for any planet to small.
Another great filter comes from asteroid collisions, and this will happen more ofter for bigger planets and planets not shields by have gas giants in the outer solar systems.
It also seem that planets formed to early, won't have enough heavy elements to be rocky like earth. And the planets to near the galactic center would be hit by supernova explosions too often. So there is a Goldilocks zone in the galaxy (expanding with time) as well in the distance of a planet from a star.
Nick Bostom, makes a very interesting argument, that needs to be added to the Fermi Paradox. But, due to the likelihood of Trans-Martians Pansperma, finding life on Mars, wouldn't make me worry about the future of the Earth.
The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one.
The Great Filter is the only legitimate framework for speculation he offers, unfortunately he doesn't limit himself to the reasonable
... doesn't work so great.
As far as his examination of what the Great Filter could be, he overlooks a ridiculously huge problem, SAMPLE SIZE!
If after the emergence of fertile conditions a certain feature takes a long time to evolve, it is probably a fairly unlikely event.
If after the emergence of fertile conditions a certain feature evolves immediately this does NOT infer that it was likely. Since the event(s) composing the Great Filter are supposed to be statistically unlikely at a galactic scale they shouldn't have happened here at all. Using inductive reasoning to look for extremely unlikely events by examining their appearance on a time scale where they shouldn't exist in the first place
His box has worms in it. His methodology only works if we assume that life is (relatively) common and Earth is a representative sample. Kind of a contradiction
I strongly suspect that the first space faring life forms were not remotely intelligent.
and the time scale that really matters:hours, and how many PS3s are working on the GreatFilter@home project. Virtual sample size
I love you Sarge...
The author doesn't consider the possibility that interstellar travel is prohibitively difficult.
It may be, for example, that a minimal interstellar expedition costs 20 years production of the entire civilization.
That's a lot of effort to put into finding out that the neighboring star system consists of dead rocks, and even if we're lucky and find a habitable planet, it's our great-to-the-nth grandchildren who will reap the benefit.
Can you really see any human civilization taking such an enormous gamble? What politician is going to tell the people "You'll have to pay 20% more tax for the next 100 years, because I want to send a probe to Alpha Centauri, which is probably a dead rock, but our great-great-great-great grandchildren will be very interested in the result" ?
If a lunatic dictator did embark on such a folly, would his successor, and his successor, share his monomania?
It only takes one politician in a century tp see some advantage in offering the people a huge tax cut, and the project would lapse.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Life on Mars will be at best microbial. What if 90% of all life that started in the Galaxy got stuck/snuffed out at that stage?
What if both Mars and Earth were beginning life from a failed alien terraforming attempt?
If WE ever try terraforming, not all of our attempts will be successful. We might even 'successfully' die out before actually colonising a given planet.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Let me try to break it to you:
// == great_filter !~ 0 // !complex_life_forms // == great_filter ~ 0
INPUTS:
1. There are many stars, many other planetary systems besides ours, many many planets, a small proportion of which are bound to be similar to Earth. Although that proportion is small, there are probably a large number of Earth-like planets due to the shear vastness of the galaxy. Let's call this input "the Drake equation".
2. In 50 years of SETI we have not found evidence of any interstelar travel-capable civilizations. Let's call this "the Fermi paradox".
BEGIN
Therefore, there must be at least one step in the progression from "Earth-like planet" (ELP) to "interstelar civilization" (ISC) which is very difficult (i.e., highly improbable). Let's call this very difficult step "the Great Filter":
if (drake_equation && great_filter)
{
assert(fermi_paradox);
}
If the filter is "close to the beginning" of the progression from ELP to ISC, then most of the galaxy is either devoid of life or, at most, inhabited by very simple life forms.
If the filter is "close to the end" of said progression, then most of the galaxy might be inhabited by complex life forms. In pseudocode form,
if (great_filter ~ 0)
{
assert(!complex_life_forms);
}
else
{
assert(complex_life_forms);
}
or, more concisely,
assert((great_filter ~ 0) == !complex_life_forms);
Life on Mars provides the only data point other than Earth that we can acquire in the short term. If we were to find, say, a martian mouse, then our data point would mean
assert(complex_life_forms);
and therefore
assert(great_filter !~ 0);
On the other hand, if the best we can find is very primitive martian life, or even no life at all, then
assert(!complex_life_forms);
and therefore
assert(great_filter ~ 0);
Finally, if the Great Filter is close to the beginning, then we humans already went through it and from here on it's the easy part:
if (great_filter ~ 0)
{
assert(humans_kick_butt);
}
But if the Great Filter is close to the end, then we might still have a high probability of failure:
if (great_filter !~ 0)
{
assert(!humans_kick_butt);
}
Now put the chain together and you get:
if (complex_life_forms)
{
assert(!humans_kick_butt);
}
else
{
assert(humans_kick_butt);
}
Hence:
OUTPUT:
Life on Mars might foretell our doom. The more complex the life on Mars, the more doomed we are.
Please notice that this argument does not try to prove:
a. That there is/there is not life on Mars. This is a data point (input) to the argument, not an output.
b. That there are/there are not many civilizations out there. This is also an input (Fermi's paradox).
c. That a billion years is/is not enought time to evolve life on Earth/Mars/somewhere else (irrelevant, i.e., that code is totally decoupled from this module).
d. That we are doomed (on the contrary, given that Mars could be lifeless or at most have bacteria-type life, the conclusion is rather optimistic).
The argument does ask you to accept, for sake of discussion:
a. That Fermi's paradox is a fact, i.e., that there are not many civilizations out there hiding from us for some reason.
b. That the timescale involved is soooooooo huge that it even dwarfs the astronomical distances.
It also assumes that there is onl
wow nothing but insecure, defeatist and deluded humans in here!
Pitiful Earth creatures!
He says something on the order of "...since we haven't been visited by aliens...".
O Rly?
Bear with me, I'm not one of the Project Bluebook fanbois or a UFOlogist. Here's my logic:
- presupposing there is no "Great Filter" as posited in the article
- the universe, being something like 15 billion years old
- humans went from essentially animals to homo sapiens sapiens in what, about 3 million years? (Assuming that we're average in that respect.)
- earth itself being only about 5 billion years
- assuming that the universe needed at least 5 billion years to 'get going', that still leaves a 10-billion year window in which another earth could have developed completely, and easily within that span one or more sapient life forms could develop.
Given all of the above, it's exceedingly likely that any sapient race which has existed before us has hundreds of thousands if not MILLIONS of years of development ahead of us.
And, presuming that they'd bother to visit a yellow, main sequence star out on the Milky Way rim, would we have *ANY* chance of observing them, observing us? Do amoeba's recognize that we are looking at them in the microscope?
Using that logic, I believe that we're quite unlikely to run into any sapient race, as they are either millions of years ahead or behind us, and if they're ahead, I only hope they're friendly because we'd have no chance if not. None. (Then again, we'd probably have little they're interested in...I hope.)
-Styopa
With all these theories you're all assuming that the other life would need to travel to us and maybe communicate. Space is empty but there is still a ton of stuff to do. Our own solar system we have tons of research, metors and resources to mine, a planet or two that could be useable, heck even building up in orbit to make goods in a zero-g enviroment. We still have resources here on earth to rape before we can even bother moving outwards to do the rest of the planets.
He also keeps using a sample of one (life on Earth, the only life we currently know of) to extrapolate.
This article has very little to do with science. It's an opinion piece, almost like an Op-Ed. The author makes a lot of false assumptions based on scant evidence.
He's talking about von Neumann probes as if they're a means of colonisation. They're not. They're a means of exploration. He dismisses the possibility that advanced civilisations don't care about spreading out on the grounds that life on Earth shows a strong tendency to colonise. It doesn't show a strong tendency to explore (there is one, but not very strong). So yeah, it's possible for an advanced civilisation to have explored the whole galaxy by now, but it may well not to possible for them to have colonised it, so they might not have bothered.
> We need ships. Lots of them. We're sitting ducks out here.
You got modded funny by the other sitting ducks.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space."
You forgot:
D) They have a baby monitor somewhere in our solar system, which only went off a hundred years ago. They are currently on their way, or are waiting for us to grow up and prove ourselves worthy of contact. Maybe they want us to show that we can actually get along with each other, let alone with an alien race.
There are so many presuppositions, there's no way to make a prediction with any probability of correctness. We have exactly one point of data: ourselves. We don't even know if there's other life in our own solar system.
Any conclusions at all are just SWAGs (scientific wild-assed guesses) at this point.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
It just so happens I'm large-earred sales rep for a pre-owned starship firm. We have spiffy, cutting-edge starships for war and profit at bargain basement prices!
Why does everyone make the assumption that we should expect visitors from another civilization (and subsequently a more advanced one). How many interstellar manned vehicles do we have going out looking for other civilizations?
Isn't more likely that if there are any intelligent civilizations out there, they're probably at the same technology level as we are?
I'm just frightened the "Great Filter" is going to destroy us all. Is it a spaceship?
As a kid, it was one of my favorite books, and I still re-read it occasionally. Tell him that just as the square was astounded by the sphere and unable to grasp the concept of "height", he'd be unable to grasp the 5th (assuming he agrees that time is the 4th)
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I know why we haven't been contacted by intelligent, technologically advanced aliens yet.
It's because I pooped in a sock once.
This whole search for "alien" life is yet another typical Western, dualistic, "us vs. them" stupid rush down a blind alley of flawed logic.
... [repeat ad infinitum] parsimonoius and solipsist in the way it organizes itself.
Listen up people - there are no aliens "other than us" because the ENTIRE universe is a unitary life form. Period. And the Universe is VERY VERY VERY
Given this, "We" are nothing but just the right amount of "self-aware" components the Universe needs in this epoch of Its existence. period.
Whenever a civilization gets advanced enough to attempt to simulate the near Big-Bang conditions, an actual Big Bang occurs and the Universe is reset.
This was an interesting article, but it neglected to address the idea that life on earth may have been seeded from outside the planet. It is possible that life on our planet is the result of panspermia. This throws into doubt any conclusions about a Great Filter, and may also invalidate the idea that life appearing on Mars is bad news for us (humans), since if life here may have been the result of panspermia, then so too would life on Mars likely have occurred for the same reasons. An even more far-out hypothesis is that life on our planet is itself the result of alien efforts to seed life on other worlds (a sort of biological von Neumann probe).
There's always the tiny, miniscule chance that God created the universe in one enormous explosion, followed by the creation of our little planet, which then began to rotate to give it 'day' and 'night,' and accumulate water from the nearby 'hood to form oceans. Then God might have created life and sent it to His new planet where it grew and developed, filled the oceans with fishes of every kind...and then...people!
Under this ridiculously improbable scenario, discovering life on Mars wouldn't make any difference either way to our future, which would lie only with God, our creator.
C. S. Lewis had a fairly defensible aversion to argument from improbability, or The Utter Size Of It All, and events tend to bear him out. First, SETI throws in the towel on electromagnetic spectra as vectors of longrange communication (information entropy clouds the transmission, as signals attenuate to the point where they merge into background noise.) Second, no one has yet found any other plausible string ("string," get it? heheheh) to connect the twin tin cans of Earth and the next most proximate civilization in the infosphere. So light is not the answer, whatever its wavelength. What IS? We'll assume "rhodomagnetic waves" are 1940's SciFi bunkum, while "dark matter" probably will turn out to be the WD-40 that unlocks the doors of our rusty perception. Third, the human race has so far been incapable of recognizing intelligent behavior in non-human species, for the sane reason that one does not allow oneself empathy toward food, fuel, transportation or even entertainment as scintillating as monkeys on a rock. We are intellectual yakuza toward competitors, and blaze into open hostility at the slightest affront. We are, in short, either the pariahs of the civilized Universe, or there's something out there worse than us. (That's your cue, Q.) And fourth, with rare exceptions the human race can't even think about reality without getting tangled up in paradox: To wit, back at the Beginning of Time (sirens, cop car in your rearview mirror!) there was a Big Bang (just breathe into this thing, sir...) In short, there's no need for a "Great Filter" to flatline our ambitions. Ordinary stupidity does fine.
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Note that the Earth's sun is a Population One star, and more primitive stars that formed earlier in the life of the universe than our sun did have a much lower concentration of metals and other heavier elements - arguably those elements needed for life to form.
I think, given the science we have researched, it is very likely that our sun may be amongst the first stars formed even capable of supporting life. Given that, there is no reason to suspect that other civilizations haven't already started, and are on par or ahead of us - especially given that if there is no proximal solution to faster-than-light travel (ie, a solution discoverable in the first 50,000 years of recorded history). In such a case, civilizations, no matter how advanced, would still be limited by their observational capabilities. Only once we as an aware civilization were old enough to be observing the universe for a period of time it took for light from the majority of the galaxy to reach us could we reasonably say that we were unique.
On point; if your rough estimate of 'half' the age of the galaxy is off, your conclusions could be way off. Note that the oldest Population I stars (10 Billion years old, compared to the Sun's 4.5 Billion) have only a tenth of the metallic contact of our system. The youngest stars, only a hundred million years old, have up to 2.5 times the metallic content of our system. It's reasonable to think that we are the forefront of stars capable of supporting life. Certainly, the niche-filling capacity of biologics suggests that it doesn't wait around much.
Given that, there could be a great deal of civilized life out there. The questions we should be looking at are less about what are the probabilities of life existing elsewhere at what frequency, assuming some large number of unknowns, but what is the maximum theoretical visibility of our own civilization? How far out, with our theoretical knowledge, would we be able to detect ourselves? With that bit of data we can tell the upper bound of the frequency of civilizations, and as time goes on we will push it down until we find the actual frequency.
As it stands, though, I don't think our ability to see other civilizations is very advanced; and on that basis, we should not be too surprised if we can't see anyone else.
[Ego]out
http://curezone.com/blogs/fm.asp?i=985423
Anyone have any input? Is there a chance that we've not encountered any other aliens yet because we haven't been part of the milkyway galaxy cluster of stars yet? Maybe that somehow limits travel between systems?
Vernor Vinge...suggested that after the leveling off, we'd be living in a pretty comfortable world, close to some visions of Utopia. If the natural limits of technology fall short of self-replicating interstellar probes, then the answer to "Where are they?" is "They're enjoying themselves on their garden planet".
Your example is plausible, but that would have to be the case for EVERY SINGLE ONE of the millions of civilizations that some logic says must have existed over the last billions of years.
As the article mentions, it all comes down statistics: small probabilities multiplied by millions of opportunities = improbability that it hasn't happened.
I'll quote from another comment:
"Sure, that might explain why a PARTICULAR spacefaring civilization hasn't shown up in our neighborhood."
"But the question we have to ask isn't "Why hasn't spacefaring civilization X set up shop in our neighborhood?"
"The question is "Why is it that, out of the hundreds of billions of solar systems that exist or have existed since the beginning of the Milky Way, not a SINGLE ONE has produced a spacefaring civilization with a detectable presence in our corner of the galaxy?" "
Even if most civilizations never develop an interest in space travel, it only takes ONE civilization to decided to not stay on their their home planet, in order for a civilization to colonize the galaxies over billions of years.
If, to Vinge's point, there is some technological restriction that keeps ANY civilization from developing interstellar probes, then that is the Great Filter that the author is discussing. If that is true, that would explain why we don't have contact from interstellar civilizations, but it would also imply that the human race is bound to the solar system forever, which is a sad thought to the author.
Humankind might be the first intelligent civilization to emerge.
Well, I for one hope that f we do end up dealing with one of numerous similar scenarios, we at least try not to make the same mistakes (and I hope we have a "happy" ending and continue as a species even though if I've learned anything from these stories, we're probably screwed three ways from Sunday as individuals).
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One of the conclusions of this article is that he hopes that we don't find life on Mars, or anywhere else in the galaxy, as it would mean that the Great Filter would then supposedly be ahead of us on our path.
This seems to be logically incorrect. Obviously, if we find signs of life on other planets where life no longer exists then their own particular Great Filter event already happened. So if we do find trilobites on Mars we can conclude, based on the observable evidence, that a Great Filter Event is more than 50% probable to be in the past (given the initial probabilities with no data as 50% past, 50% future).
The more and more planets we find that had life on them (without advanced civilizations) and no longer do the higher the probability that Great Filter Events are in the past.
Also, I am of the mind that there are numerous small filter events of varying probabilities in a semi continuous stream, and of which could cause a single instance to become inviable, none of which present a massively improbable barrier individually. This rather negates the argument I used above as it dismisses the theory of a Great Filter Event completely but it does not negate the poor understanding the author showes of what life on Mars would mean given that the GFE theory is correct.
We're sitting ducks for the Berserker (Saberhagen) doomsday devices that are roaming the galaxy and have already wiped out other life. They just haven't gotten here yet! Buwahahahaa...
I suppose the most important filter is simply time - it took more than 3 billion years for primitive life to turn into something intelligent enough to travel for short times to the nearest body in space.
All those billions of years, a single large catastrophe could have wiped out all life. The most endurable bacteria can only handle temperature changes of a few hundred degrees Celsius. A large impact, an intense bombardment with radiation, a flooding of the whole planet with lava, and similar events easily top those limits. While any of those may be extremely unlikely in large parts of our galaxy in a billion years, one of them happening in 3 billion years appears to be *very* likely.
Just look at our solar system: A planet with no traces of asteroids from more than 500 million years ago, i. e. completely lava flooded surface (Venus). A few moons that were nearly obliterated by impacts. Planets that moved from hot to cold areas of the solar system or the other way around. One asteroid ring around the sun and one around a planet, maybe from devastating impacts. Two moons which will collide with their planets within a few hundred million years. A planet of which half it's surface has been wiped out by lava floods, probably after an impact heating (Mars). A recent asteroid impact into a planet leaving a cloud larger than earth. And probably many more potentially life eliminating catastrophes which could have hit our planet too, but which we don't know much about yet.
If we assume that about a quarter of all stars and brown dwarfs are stable enough to support 4 billion years of development, that half of them have 1 or 2 suitable planets, that only 1/1000th of them don't go through major catastrophes, that only 1/1000th of those actually get the "spark of life", that only 1/10 out of those "sparks" don't develop into a "stable lifeform" able to keep all higher development from happening, and so on, we get a pretty dead universe.
And this is exactly the reason why we should expand into the deep oceans, the frozen regions of the planet, into the solar system, and beyond - as it is now, we could be wiped out any day. Just imagine an iron asteroid of a few dozen miles and with a speed in the lower percentages of the speed of light - impossible? Not if you look at expansion rates of the debris of super novae or the speeds of heavy stars close to each other. The warning time would probably be only a few days if it came from outside the plane of our system or was hurled towards us from the sun. Or a supernovae exploding close to our solar system. Or one of those speculated-about mini black holes (or a similar renegade neutron star) coming close to the solar system. And so on.
If we had a large permanent moon base with sufficient autonomy, no bacteria, virus, single impact, climate change, weapons/particle experiment gone wrong, or similar event could wipe out all of humanity. A further base on Mars and/or in the asteroid belt would reduce the danger even more. It would also give humanity time to react in case of robots/ai taking over or other such events. A colony in a nearby star system and a likely fleet of generation ships on the way at about such a time would eliminate most dangers which can hit a whole star system - like a nearby super nova, being hit by radiation from a badly aligned quasar, a large or heavy planetary body entering the solar system and throwing it into turmoil, and so on.
So yes, I do advocate wasting billions into expanding into space, with none of that ever paying off - except in the unlikely event of a major catastrophe. I do advocate building large and ridiculously expensive generation ships that will probably take hundreds of years just to reach the nearest star systems. I don't believe there will ever be ftl travel, anyways, as our universe would be filled to the brim with intelligent life if that was possible.
Any race which can figure out how to get here even when our most advanced technology can't even find a trace of them is likely to be able to descend upon us and eat our faces straight off our heads in slow motion, over and over again. Noone will hear us scream, and no weapon we have will stop it. Our new infinity will be that of a looped, slo-mo nightmare that consists of having our faces chewed off by beings we should have never beckoned.
Could a civilization at Alpha Centuri figure out the difference between radar and a minor burst from our sun?
Unless there is a detectable carrier wave, you won't figure out that communication is taking place.
Even something simple like FM radio is barely recognizable as a form of communication when you are looking at it through an oscilliscope. More advanced communication such as encrypted digital signals would be difficult to find unless you know you are looking for them, and even then that doesn't mean you will be able to decrypt them.
Ultimately we have no idea what frequency a civilization would use for communication, what modulation system, what encoding (as in ascii codes not encryption, what encryption, and finally what the language is. Welcome to the problem of SETI.
In the seven ages of man (The ~10,000 year cycles, not the poem from Shakespeare referring to the Stone/Bronze/Iron ages, but the times in which one age is all but forgotten by the next age.), each time mankind has attained the technology plateau to establish civilization on Mars it has been short-lived. The societal stresses from multiple worlds is something our race has yet still not learned to appreciate. Man still seems to need to control and destroy.
Very few relics of the previous age persist. Even the garbage of the previous age has been lost to time. Very occasionally, we will find a curious relic, such as a spark plug inside of a rock.
Curiously the longest-lasting civilization was during the 3rd Age. Nearly 500 years before collapsing. But then it collapsed with the worst destruction so far. Even the moon shows the scars from that horrible conflict - all the largest patches on the moon are from fusion weapons, not naturally-occurring craters as they would have us believe. Fusion weapons to wipe all trace of there ever being cities on the moon. To return the world to a simplistic agrarian existence until the rise of the next golden age.
Mars is the filter, the filter to see if we have yet reached the evolutionary level to not bicker as small children when in this situation.
Why do you think the named the planet after the god of war anyway? Racial memory.
What else explains Bush wanting to send people to Mars - he's not just betting on a single apocalyptic prediction, the Armageddon legend isn't failsafe. [Just kidding about that one - I hope!!]
".........All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."
Also, don't forget about SETI. It's been going on for about 40 years with zero results (not including the WOW! signal).
It's not the norm, but we (humans) are capable of carrying out projects that take longer than our own lifetime.
They haven't noticed us...yet
I would also like to point out another logical fallacy in TFA: it presumes that there is "A Great Filter" (working his).
There is absolutely no reason to make this astounding presumption. But in fact it is critical to his argument: he professes that "THE Great Filter" must come either before or after our current state of "evolution". This is a HUGE assumption and he should not be allowed to get away with it.
It is VASTLY more likely that the kind of evolution he envisions is tested more-or-less continuously, with occasional "bumps" in the path. And, in fact, our strongest evidence today points to evolution happening in a manner known as "punctuated equilibrium", in which species are under more-or-less constant competitive stress, with the occasional major happening (volcano, earthquake, comet collision, biological outbreak) to shake things up.
There is NO reason to believe it would be different anywhere else.
And that breaks the entire basis of his argument: that there is *A* "great filter" that occurs at some point. Although the Puncutated Equilibrium explanation still leaves some mysteries in regard to the Drake issue, it totally destroys the author's major thesis.