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."

Comments

Ignores possibility of the Singularity

[jmorris42]

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?

Re:Ignores possibility of the Singularity

[LurkerXXX]

You are still making a lot of assumptions in your theory.

1) What if they already mapped our solar system a billion years ago, and it just wasn't to their taste. You assume there is something great about our solar system that they'd want to hang around. What if they like 7G's of gravity with a methane atmosphere and liquid water surface? We don't might not have any planets that are to their particular taste, so they moved on from this wasteland of a solar system.

2) What if they mapped it out, but it wasn't quite right then? Maybe they dropped off seeds to kick off life on earth. Maybe they started some 'terraforming' on some planet, say Mars, that has changed it's atmosphere, but they just haven't come back yet to move in to the changed digs?

3) Maybe it takes a hell of a lot of resources to make a generation ship needed for travel, and they take much longer to produce than you think, or aren't made at a lot of the 'destination' planets because it would use too much resources. In any case, exploration may take a lot longer than you think it should for them.

4) We've likely only been 'advanced' enough to be interesting to talk to (if we actually are yet) for maybe a few thousand years. That's a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of time on the galactic scale. If their nearest inhabited planet is a few hundred light years away, why would they waste resources sending a ship to say hi to some funny looking monkeys?

Re:R'd T F A

[defile39]

But he doesn't really address the possibility that there will be sufficient advanced life to "deal with" the advanced life trying to bring havoc to innocent blue-green balls. If you do expand the Drake equation thusly, you must also account for advanced civilizations interacting with advanced civilizations. What is the probability of an intergalactic ethic forming versus an intergalactic ethic not forming? Frankly, based on the fact that developing technology to the point of intergalactic travel requires social stability on your home world, I would think the balance favors HAVING an intergalactic ethic.

I can explain the flaw easier.

[khasim]

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.

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 ... 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.