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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."
He presupposes a lot of things that aren't necessarily true, or are pretty improbable.
For example, the whole article (what I read of it before my eyes glazed over and I passed out) seems to revolve around this whole idea of the existence of a "Great Filter" event that makes technologically advanced species highly unlikely. He bases this on the statistical probabilities of such a species existing but not contacting us, but offers no really convincing arguments that such a filter event must exist.
However, I would argue that with the number of planets out there (many millions probably, since we've managed to find some around lots of stars, and we can't even detect the Earth-sized ones yet) and the vast distances involved, the chances of some interstellar-traveling species coming upon our particular little planet is pretty slim, no matter what sci-fi would have you believe. If the civilization lives, say, 200 million light years away, it could have been making a beeline for us since the beginning of mankind and still not be anywhere near reaching us.
Much of our fantasizing about extraterrestrial life has assumed that there is some way to travel faster than light and we just haven't discovered it yet. However, what if there really isn't? What if physics simply won't allow faster than light travel? In that case, unless the advanced civilization was extraordinarily close to us, it's virtually impossible for them to have encountered us by now, even if they had been out landing on other planets for thousands or millions of years.
My theory (hypothesis really, since it's not particularly testable) is that it's impossible to know or even meaningfully speculate on the existence of extraterrestrial life given the limits of our current knowledge of the Universe. We are a flea on an elephant's back trying to understand the entirety of the elephant using nothing but a magnifying glass. It's probably impossible to really get the whole picture, and even if it isn't it will take a really long time.
There is a third possible answer - that the ecological niches in the galaxy tend to be already filled with entities that are hostile to such exponential growth. (As, indeed, are the ecological niches on Earth.) That suggests that the Great Silence may be a defensive mechanism, which would have very worrying implications for us, as we sit here broadcasting away the fact of our existence.
And don't forget that our Sun is a second-generation star. The lack of heavy elements makes developing technology on a planet orbiting a first-generation star, but a civilisation evolving around one that didn't kill itself off by now would have had a few billion years head start on us by now. If our rate of technological progress continues linearly (which would involve quite a slow-down) then a million years is enough time for us to colonise the entire galaxy, decide it was a bad idea, clean up all evidence of our existence and go off somewhere else.
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For example, the whole article (what I read of it before my eyes glazed over and I passed out) seems to revolve around this whole idea of the existence of a "Great Filter" event that makes technologically advanced species highly unlikely. He bases this on the statistical probabilities of such a species existing but not contacting us, but offers no really convincing arguments that such a filter event must exist.
The reason for the assumption of a Great Filter comes out of the Fermi Paradox. If you start by looking at the Drake Equation and the assumption that Earth like planets with intelligent civilizations are not that uncommon, you very quickly come to the conclusion that there should be a whole lot of intelligent species in just our own galaxy. Further, since there are billions of stars which existed well before our own (talking billions of years before) one would expect that there should be at least a few advanced civilizations which have had time to colonize our galaxy. Even with slow generation ships this should only take on the order of a couple hundred million years. If they only started out while our planet was cooling, they should have found us by now, known that this planet was going to be Earth-like and setup shop back when they could go hunting Dinosaurs.
So, where the hell are they?
However, I would argue that with the number of planets out there (many millions probably, since we've managed to find some around lots of stars, and we can't even detect the Earth-sized ones yet) and the vast distances involved, the chances of some interstellar-traveling species coming upon our particular little planet is pretty slim, no matter what sci-fi would have you believe.
Much of our fantasizing about extraterrestrial life has assumed that there is some way to travel faster than light and we just haven't discovered it yet. However, what if there really isn't? What if physics simply won't allow faster than light travel? In that case, unless the advanced civilization was extraordinarily close to us, it's virtually impossible for them to have encountered us by now, even if they had been out landing on other planets for thousands or millions of years.
Yes, but in the amount of time in which the Milky Way is known to have existed; and assuming that space faring civilizations are not ridiculously uncommon; they've had plenty of time to map this galaxy.
The oldest known star in our galaxy is about 13 billion years old, so the galaxy is at least that old, if not close to the actual age of the Universe itself (current estimates put it around 13.7 billion years). So, let's try to make some reasonable assumptions. For example, let us assume that it took our galaxy half of it's life to produce the first space faring civilization which felt the need to expand. If we call the formation of the galaxy year 0 and go forward, this civilization would have set out to colonize the universe at year 6.5 billion. Our very own solar system was still about 1.96 billion years from forming. At about 250 billion stars in our galaxy, it means that they would have needed to map an average of 128 stars a year to know about the Earth when it was forming. And then they had another 4 billion plus years before humans decided to show up, reducing the mapping load to 42 stars a year on average. And they probably wouldn't need to visit every star. Even with the technology we have now, we can get a good idea of what a star is like and know where it is. Our ability to detect exoplanets is getting better and better; it is quite possible that we will reach a point where we can detect Earth-like planets without the need to go there. So the mapping need would really amount to only visiting stars with likely planets. The problem is that, they should have had billions of years to be finding planets, not just the paltry millions you are giving them.
So again, where the hell are they?
There are only a few possible logical conclusions:
A) They're hiding - For whatev
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
From my days as a physics major (before I hit the brick wall of Quantum Mechanics), I remember that the problem isn't going faster than the speed of light. You can do that. You just can't speed up from sub-light speeds, pass the speed of light, and then go faster than light. You could start out faster than light, but then you would be unable to slow down to sub-light speeds again.
As far as the chances of there being intelligent life out there versus our not detecting any, remember that the Universe is an extremely large place. We've only been listening in for a very short time at very small slices of the sky. The chances of us stumbling upon an alien signal and recognizing it as coming from an intelligent source (they won't exactly be speaking English) is minuscule.
In addition, it's likely that the time that an intelligent civilization spends tossing radio waves about is relatively short. If they want to advance to be a true space-faring race (as opposed to our civilization which is in the toddler stage), they would need to develop some other means of communication. Imagine trying to communicate with a space station orbiting Jupiter and having to wait for a 35 to 52 minute delay with each question. (Depending on which side of the sun Jupiter was on and, yes, that is how long it takes.)
So SETI and similar efforts have been searching a tiny fragment of the sky for a very short time for signals that might only be "visible" to us for a short period of time. It's no wonder we haven't detected any other intelligent life.
we have only been listening for a very short time to a very small portion of the sky, in a narrow range of frequencies.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Actually, while I suspect that there are a number of significant filters to the evolution of a star faring civilization rendering it fairly rare (with the development of sufficient cerebral complexity for self-aware intelligence being a big one), I think we've been playing footsies with another for the last 50 years.
Once you get to the technological development where we are now, the destructive capability available to an individual increases exponentially. There comes a point where a few individuals obtain the power to destroy all life on Earth (i.e. the US President's football). Eventually more and more individuals obtain that power through biotechnology, nanotechnology, etc. At some point in the next few hundred years, that capability will probably be about as common or as easy to obtain as an automatic pistol is now. If a civilization gets to that point and hasn't figured out how to deal with excessive economic inequalities, tribal or national rivalries, mental illness, even bullying, then the result of a Columbine-style freak-out (let alone the stuff going on in Africa and the Middle-East) can be the end of the human race.
Now if you're a galactic civilization, the last thing you're going to do is be stupid enough to get yourself mixed up in that kind of a mess. All intelligent species would evolve with very strong competitive instincts. Humans wouldn't be very happy with an external civilization imposing their values on us and tinkering with our genes and institutions to "help" us through this transition. Right now, there would almost certainly be groups with libertarian leanings that would lead a strong xenophobic backlash (I mean, just look at how we're dealing with the implications of Climate Change). A few unsuccessful attempts that led to massive death tolls among galactics and required the genocide of species that lashed out in xenophobic paranoia would provide a strong warning against further meddling and ample motivation to avoid detection.
It's probably going to take us some close calls and brushes with extinction before we get enough motivation to develop protocols and institutions to help identify high risk individuals and dangerous memetic systems. Note that a dictatorial police state would not be a stable long term solution to this problem; my gut feel is there's a good chance it will require genetic tinkering.
So in my mind, the filter we have to go through is a race between the democratization of the power of extinction with the development of non-tyrannical institutions to prevent that. In that sense, the humbling of the USA "superpower" in its attempt to establish imperialist control of oil resources in Iraq is a useful lesson that takes us part of the way down that path. But it's one that will probably need to be reiterated quite a few more times over the next centuries before it sticks. Until it does, any galactic civilisations will be wise to extensively record the results for any young races that might be stupid enough to think intervention is possible. They'll bring out the popcorn, sit it out, and just watch until we can show we've matured as a species to the point where ALL of us are safe enough to contact (either as self-controlled individuals or as self-inflicted piles of bones).
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
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?" Are all spacefaring civilizations interested exclusively in planets with 7Gs of gravity and methane atmospheres? If so, that demands some kind of explanation.
As to your other points of the form "It takes resources to...", keep in mind that we're talking about civilizations that are billions of years more advanced than we are. As far as they're concerned, the kind of resource requirements you're talking about are, for all intents and purposes, zero.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
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).