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

[eln]

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.

Re:Ignores possibility of the Singularity

[cplusplus]

After all our own civilization has pretty much lost interest in anything beyond putting up more geostationary TV transmitters. Only because it's outrageously expensive and really really hard to keep people alive in space. If space travel were as cheap and easy as a walk in the park, we'd be EVERYWHERE.

Re:Ignores possibility of the Singularity

[Sylver Dragon]

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

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:Ignores possibility of the Singularity

[ppanon]

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).

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.

Fermi Paradox

[__aanonl8035]

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 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.

Re:He ignores DISTANCE.

[TheRaven64]

Humans are a very young species. In fact, mammals as a whole are quite new on this planet. The first mammals appeared around 164 million years ago while the earliest fossil records of multicellular animals are around 610 million years old. If a species on the edge of the galaxy had begun sending out ships at 1% of the speed of light when they appeared, then by now they would have gone the length of the galaxy 61 times - enough time to spend a little while colonising each planet before starting for the next one. If they can go at 10% of the speed of light, then the galaxy is quite a small place for a species which thinks in terms of evolutionary timescales.

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.