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New Paper Offers Additional Reasoning for Fermi's Paradox
KentuckyFC writes "If the universe is teeming with advanced civilizations capable of communicating over interstellar distances, then surely we ought to have seen them by now. That's the gist of a paradoxical line of reasoning put forward by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. The so-called Fermi Paradox has haunted SETI researchers ever since. Not least because if the number of intelligent civilizations capable of communication in our galaxy is greater than 1, then we should eventually hear from them. Now one astrophysicist says this thinking fails to take into account the limit to how far a signal from ET can travel before it becomes too faint to hear. Factor that in and everything changes. Assuming the average communicating civilization has a lifetime of 1,000 years, ten times longer than Earth has been broadcasting, and has a signal horizon of 1,000 light-years, you need a minimum of over 300 communicating civilizations in the Milky Way to ensure that you'll see one of them. Any less than that and the chances are that they'll live out their days entirely ignorant of each other's existence. Paradox solved, right?"
We humans are God's only children. That's why there's no one else in the universe. And the universe was created 6k years ago. Duh! Scientists... what useful things have they ever done other than bring up heresy?
we've gone from
a) it's impossible to find other intelligent life
to
b) it's statistically impossible to find other intelligent life
I still have hope, as illogical as that is.
Assuming the average communicating civilization has a lifetime of 1,000 years...
Damn - We've got less time than I thought. Here I've been rooting for heat death. =(
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
No link to anything but Wikipedia and a blog?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
"Paradox solved, right?"
No. Some planets suitable for life have almost certainly existed in this galaxy for billions of years longer than the Earth. By now, one would expect there to have been civilisations that spread throughout the galaxy and therefore brought Earth within detection range of their signals...
Grr! Arg!
One of the thoughts that's crossed my mind as we further explore and understand utilization of quantum information is that if there is sentient beings "Out There" with some level of capability for space exploration is that it would seem that this would be a very likely way for them to maintain communication. Efforts such as SETI would then be attempting to discover background noise (I use the term "noise" here more as commentary on what most of what we communicate tends to be) of civilizations no more advanced than ourselves attempting only very nearby levels of communication.
Civilizations capable of greater levels of exploration would likely have developed means of utilizing communication along the lines of quantum information than our radio waves.
Only if we're not the first, or amongst the first to get to a level of technological advancement. A good question would be 'how long should it take to start broadcasting?'
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
If the universe is teeming with life then there would be a whole lot more than 300 civilizations out there who can transmit on this level. I think the paradox still stands.
I thought it was because as they reach our level of civilisation, they built giant particle accelerators for research and turned their planets into black holes.
Maybe we are the first to achieve this capability. If life did create itself from a universe that created itself, ONE of the life forms which achieved this interstellar communication would have to be first. Why not us?
Easy solution: This is not a paradox to begin with.
...it means that civilizations that spread out and last longer than 1K years are exceedingly rare. Which would mean that our odds of achieving any meaningful interstellar travel are quite low. (We might make a space probe or two, but like how we got to the moon but haven't done anything with it, apparently nobody puts out space colonies.) There are other posible theories, though.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
This is hardly a new idea. It's so not new that I think I remember saying something similar about two years ago, and I'm not exactly an expert.
Analog signals degrade quickly, and digital signals are worse, in their way, because they don't tolerate degrading as well. Couple that with broadcast limitations imposed by local governments to keep signal strength down, and I can't see how our signal could be reliably detected more than a few light years away without a HUGE radio antenna array.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Is there stuff in space that acts like rain fade that can block / make signals to weak to pick up?
...scenarios like this. But it takes a science fiction writer of special talent to be able to get their fiction to be considered a 'paper'.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The scope of the Fermi Paradox deals with the length of time it would take an intelligent civilization to explore and colonize the galaxy, and given Fermi's estimates we should have observed spacecraft and/or probes. SETI's signal hunting doesn't even scratch the surface of the paradox.
The real answer is that they've been trying to communicate with us for years but RIAA, fearing they might play music for us has already had their ISPs throttle their messages into oblivion.
evil race killed the mall?
We humans are still a bunch of young, angsty teenagers. We desperately want to make the "first contact", crying and yelling and suffering from the depressive thought of loneliness.
Other galactic civilizations simply matured and stopped worrying about such pointless things. They make themselves busy with real business.
Grow up, humans.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
What about new type of commutations that we have not invented yet? Its possible they are communicating all over the place but we can't hear them yet because we don't have the technology to hear them yet.
Summary says: "300 communicating civilizations in the Milky Way". The quote is: "300 communicating civilization in the galactic neighborhood". I interpret the latter to mean all solar systems within 1,000 light years. The former quote leads to the entire milky way, which has a diameter of 100,000 light years.
Just how do we know the odds of life evolving? And of intelligence developing?
"Oh, the universe is so big! Life must be everywhere" isn't an argument.
Suppose intelligent life was a super freakish accident, not a forgone conclusion. It took 4-billion years for it to develop on earth. I'll bet it might easily have never happened. And then, there was no reason why we had to develop a technology based culture. That, in itself, might have been a freakish cultural event.
So, maybe, we are pretty special after all.
What if the signal's been there all along, and we've just taken it for granted as a physical phenomenon?
Maybe there are advanced aliens looking for intelligent life.
If they found earth they'd keep right on looking.
As a species we're violent, irrational, deluded, greedy and self interested.
The occasional deviations from this norm in no way redeem us.
If I had a choice not to be involved with this disgusting species then I wouldn't either.
To my thinking the key is that we have such a narrow definition of life, since we are only aware of one kind - life on Earth. Perhaps there exist intelligent entities out there that are undetectable to us. Perhaps, they are so different that they are also looking for life but with an entirely different definition. So it's like ships passing in the night.
1. They might not communicate with radio waves. Maybe they've developed other ways to communicate among themselves, and we can't detect that.
2. Why would they talk to us? Presumably they're interested in intelligent life, and we're questionable there. Maybe when we develop the means to travel beyond our solar system, they'll take notice. Whether that's good or not is debatable.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Unless it's been vastly misrepresented in mainstream presentation (like TFS), Fermi's Paradox sounds pretty ridiculously simplistic.
Other bad assumptions it makes, just off the top of my head:
1. Other intelligent civilizations want to engage communications with aliens who, for all they know, might try to blow them up or eat them.
2. Those civilizations are willing to spend resources to beam electromagnetic radiation out into space in the vague hope of someone noticing.
3. Other intelligent civilizations "capable" of "communication" will follow the same technological arc as us and develop electromagnetic communications rather than, say, quantum communications or something we haven't even thought of yet.
4. Those aliens will assume that WE (or some unknown aliens) will be listening carefully for extrasolar broadcasts.
5. Those aliens even have a concept of "communication" and aren't just some hive-mind that never needed to evolve social skills.
6. They didn't cut their Alien-SETI funding to pay for medical research or an Alien-Wall-Street bailout package or something. (I mean, what do you think the chances are that WE will broadcast for a thousand years?)
And so on.
Really, Fermi's Paradox sounds like me saying that if I sit on a lonely beach for a week and don't find a bottle with a message in it in proper English, there are no other intelligent beings in the world.
Maybe there is just a spam filter and it's all in a junk folder somewhere?
Either that or it's on it's way via an AOL CD (hell there is enough of them for any number of civilisations! :)
It's not like we're located close to Downtown Galaxy. We live out on the edge. There's probably some galactic equivalent of AT&T or Comcast that is telling everyone else "We'll be providing them with service 'soon'. So our monopoly is justified."
Either that or the installer showed up and we were too busy/unaware to answer the door. So they said they'd be back later.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is that our galaxy is full of advanced civilizations and most of them are beyond our level of technology, and more than likely use FTL communication technology. And as a result of this we don't have the technological means to detect such signals which leads some scientists to ignorantly conclude that no one else is out there.
Furthermore, the scientists that are acting as if the Fermi Paradox is still valid refuse to accept the obvious truth that was uncovered years ago by The Disclosure Project, namely that we are surrounded by more advanced civilizations, and we have been for quite some time.
I should have thought that the limitations of communication would have been obvious to anyone seriously considering the situation. I have a hard time imagining anyone contemplating this "problem" for any length of time without running across that little "detail"!
Even further, one has to consider limitations of technology. We have just recently shown the ability to "communicate" faster than light, at a distance of 1 meter. Whether that will ever become a practical technology, in the sense of communication, remains to be seen. But it should be obvious that if radio is inadequate to the job, something like faster-than-light communication would be the only way to make oneself known. And a minimum level of technology is needed to detect that... if in fact we ever do.
I always wondered why this was called a "paradox", when some of the reasons we have not so far detected ET life are so glaringly obvious.
I prefer to think that the aliens just forgot to pay their long distance bill last millennium.
... are so much more efficient than simple broadcasting that any advanced civilization would use them. If they are out there, we can't detect their communications directly.
Assuming the average communicating civilization has a lifetime of 1,000 years
I would think that once a civilization reaches the point where it's sending EMF radiation, its chances of survival become greater. Look at us - if an asteroid were coming toward Earth in 1886, Earth would have been doomed. If one comes at us now it MAY be doomed, but again we may be able to deflect it.
Once a civilization gets a handhold on any planet but its own, it stands a far, far greater chance of surviving.
Once it gets a toehold on a different stellar system it seems nothing will stop it but entropy.
We are far too vain. A thousand years is NOTHING. The dinasaurs ruled for millions of years, we've only been here as Homo Sapiens for perhaps a few hundred thousand at most.
In ten million years there will likely be no himans, but our inhuman/superhuman decendants will likely be alive, and communicating (somehow) at faster then lightspeed. I have little doubt that we'll (or our superintelligent decendants will) find a way around the speed of light. We're just not smart enough - yet.
Free Martian Whores!
Here on Earth we have what most people would consider intelligent life and we can't communicate with it on any meaningful level. We can't talk to Dolphins and we've had years of trying. Communication is complicated enough with beings that are based on the same system (DNA). I can't for the life of me understand what makes people think that we will be able to understand alien life or vice versa.
If anything we will be a curiosity to be examined and fed fish.
The broadcasts catch the attention of entities it would be best to avoid.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
That's a big assumption, and why would one assume that?
or they could be using a line of sight communications technology that we can't intercept. Or the universe is very big... or or or..
Now factor in nukes to turn that figure into a fraction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi#The_Manhattan_Project
He was a Nobel laureate for physics, not for peace...
Assuming the average communicating civilization has a lifetime of 1,000 years
From what orifice was this number pulled?
They have a sample size of 1 civilization with an unknown end-date of communication capability. Where does 1000 years come from?
Read it. Also reference a TED talk my Susan Blackmore on the danger at the birth of new replication mechanisms. It may be harder to survive to the space-faring stage than we think.
Imagine holding up a lit LED on top of Mt Everest. How far away do you think you'd be able to see that, even assuming clear viewing conditions.
Now back off and imagine how far away our sun would be easily distinguishable from every other star in the milky way. The closest neighboring star to us isn't even the brightest star in our sky.
Compared to our sun, all of our communications are on the level of that LED on Everest. That will give you an idea of the likelihood of spotting a signal from any distance, even without the background noise.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I still any civ out there will be thousands if not millions of years old, given the scale of time in the universe. Personally I think they achieved technological singularity. They wouldn't have anything to say any more than our having a meaningful conversation with bacteria - provided practical interstellar communication is possible anyway.
Beware the white man, he comes to take your land/planet!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I think the people that study these things have their head in the clouds.
There are two very obvious technological trends that fully explain the Fermi "paradox"
1. The better our radios have gotten, the more the output becomes indistinguisable from noise. A signal processing engineer can explain more, but ultimately the maximum bandwidth for a radio is obtained for a signal that has the maximum entropy content possible. So the output of more and more advanced radios look more and more like random noise.
2. Technology begets technology. It seems obvious that tech change will accelerate faster and faster, until we develop machines that have trillions of times our own intelligence and cognitive capacity, and can rearrange matter on the molecular level at an exponentially expanding rate. A civilization that develops radios will likely continue to develop until they have gathered all the available resources in their starting star system. They will then expand outward from their starting point at close to the speed of light, exploiting the resources of every star system they enter.
So the first sign of extraterrestrial intelligence will be when they roar into our star system and set up shop. Hopefully, they'll be kind enough to not consume our planet if we don't yet have the technology to defend ourselves...
http://www.setileague.org/articles/meat.htm
Hello (hello, hello)
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anyone home?
At this point I'd settle for some evidence that the number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy is at least EQUAL to one.
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
Maybe other intelligent species are just ignoring our communications at this point...
Somewhere in a galaxy far far away, they HAVE the technology to hear and see our communications, but have put us on a permanent blacklist for all of our Viagra and Enzyte ads....
Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody... - Dick Armey
We can hope, anyway, that we're past the filter. Finding life elsewhere in the solar system would be undeniably cool... but for the above reason, it would also be unsettling.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
before it becomes too faint to hear.
I (along with many satcom engineers I know) have been saying this for 30 years! There was even a PBS show 20 years ago about life in the universe that pondered Earth's own signals as seen from other worlds. They talked about how our signals would eventually be lost in the muck. Why is this suddenly some new idea?
Yeah, yeah, enough of the amateur poetry.
From our point of view, it seems far more logical than first contact will be made through AI, which probably isn't even in contact with its home planet anymore. Assuming aliens are like us may seem arrogant, but it's still the best assumption, though other ways are possible of course.
I don't buy into the argument that we can't communicate with higher life forms, just because we can't communicate with lower lifeforms, which isn't even 100% true. We are blessed with Socratean humility, and high life forms will too. But I suppose you can cast doubt on any assumption, even these.
Yeah. Vast, Incomprehensible Distances. Double the distance, 1/8th the signal strength.
People also forget the time aspect when it comes to this paradox. A probe could come by every 100 years, and we would have missed it. We probably would miss it if one swung by tomorrow if they didn't want to announce themselves. For all we know planets with life on them are just not interesting to other life forms because of the vast number of alien bacteria and microbes, it just isn't worth the hassle. Far easier to wait for terraforming to complete on a barren planet in a barren system, and make it to your own needs. Or they have a Star Trek "First Contact" type rule (but I'm sure this would be broken by renegades, unless interstellar travel was so expensive and difficult that sending out a ship to travel between systems is a major event, and it getting there intact after 100 years of travel and on-board societal development a miracle).
The theory is lacking because it doesn't take Galactus into account. Obviously, there are fewer ET civilizations around than expected, because Galactus has been devouring them.
It's possible that our technological advances will sufficiently alter our thinking to the point that the question of ET's will fade away to the point of being boring and moot. It sounds silly, but what if, for example, we discover that there is a God, and we get his telephone number the next morning? Speculative, but perhaps other civilizations simply transcend their curiosity at some point well before they travel beyond that horizon.
In the same way that humans are the only technological civilization on the earth, we're likely the only technological civilization in the universe as well. The time scale of evolution pales versus the time scale of intelligently-directed technology, so as soon as one group develops technology it will near-instantly spread and conquer ever-larger areas of space. In the same way that we've come across other intelligent but non-technological species (primates, whales/dolphins, birds), we'll likely come across other intelligent and non-intelligent species as we conquer the universe in the relatively near future. Maybe even technological civilizations inferior to ours (there's still a small window of opportunity for another civilization to beat us to the punch and take over earth), but we can predict the general shape of those encounters by looking at the history of such encounters on earth (the first being the destruction of neanderthals)
What's funny is this is practically just a restatement of a fermi paradox, except instead of asking "why aren't they here", it takes into account what would likely happen if they were here - we'd be gone
We just don't have the information to answer the question.
About the only thing I can state with any certainty is that the question isn't going to be answered by a bunch of academics sitting on their duffs making up all-variable equations into which they plug wild assumptions.
Either they're going to come here (or have), or we're going to go there. I love good speculation, but this one's tiresome. It's just grinding gears. I mean, Schodinger's Cat is an interesting thought-experiment, but if thousands or millions of people spent decades going over and over the details I'd consider it a sign of mass insanity.
Maybe SETI isn't a question of good or bad science, maybe it's a question of OCD.
I think you mean to say "Poems? The lad fancies himself a poet!"
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
>Maybe there really is no FTL, and other alien races are as leery of sending out giant
>seedships that they themselves can't ride in as we are, and are thus still hanging out in their home starsystem.
I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but I just had to say. If there really is no FTL, it is probably one of the most depressing aspects of existence.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
...should offer additional proofreading before posting
How much longer will we be sending out signals into the ether? In 20 years time, everything except the last few yards will be through optical fiber. Furthermore, we have no reason to be sending huge amounts of radiation into space, and would we want to? Vis a vis Zebrowski' The Killing Star.
"Detection of broadband signals from Earth such as AM radio, FM radio, and television picture and sound would be extremely difficult even at a fraction of a light-year distant from the Sun. For example, a TV picture having 5 MHz of bandwidth and 5 MWatts of power could not be detected beyond the solar system even with a radio telescope with 100 times the sensitivity of the 305 meter diameter Arecibo telescope." SETI@home FAQ
Crap - I expect better from slashdot.
The gist of the Fermi paradox is that even if other civilizations are super rare - we should be up to our asses in aliens. Even if they are in other galaxies. Even if they don't want to communicate. The mathematics of Fermi cannot be refuted by some clown publishing a paper.
There is no-one out there and I don't understand why. Some of the implications of Fermi's very simple calculations will keep you up nights.
went through a brief period of wideband, and then switched to
I would also assume that broadcasting any signal that can be picked up a few light years away, and broadcasts in anything but very short bursts, is so overpowered and wasteful that use for more than a very brief development window in history is unlikely.
First of all, what makes us so sure that even if some alien civilization wanted to communicate with us, they could?
I have no desire to talk to the ants living in my backyard or the fungus growing under my sink. And even if I did, I wouldn't be able to. Forget subspace signals, what about levels of intelligence so exponentially beyond ours that there's not even any remote chance for mutual communication.
For all we know, some alien kid out there has already fried some insignificant humans with his alien magnifying glass.
That we are on the verge of creating nanorobotics and AI, and so any civilization more advanced than us almost certainly have these technologies, and with them they could remain hidden from anyone who does not have equivalent technology. They would also be likely to WANT to remain hidden because if they pollute our civilization. If the aliens developed their civilization until they reached nanotech and AI without outside inteference, they probably would see this as the most natural course of a civilization's history, and therefore would impose it on us. If aliens introduced themselves to us, there would be mass chaos on this planet, and a lot of hatred going both ways, they are almost certainly not going to be 'pretty' to our eyes, and vice versa. People would attack the aliens if they tried to walk amongst our population just as they do people of different races, and even people of the same race. Although the aliens could defend themselves easily if they had the technology to get here, it would still be ugly. Just look at orginizations like Hamas, how would they react to the 'infedels?' Although I think seeing an alien would be neat, and we could learn a lot, there are a lot of good reasons for them to just stay away from us and hidden, and with advanced technology that would be easily possible. Or maybe life is just so improbable, we're the only ones around.
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
You're making the assumption that such a civilization would inevitably overcome the vast distances between the stars. Just to reach Alpha Centauri from here with a solar sail performing at its theoretical limits would likely take over 100 years, and Alpha Centauri doesn't appear to be habitable.
Of course, the scifi authors and physicists with time to speculate have proposed a lot of various ways to overcome the distance and speed-of-light limitations to explore the galaxy, but none of these are anywhere near proven feasible. Hibernation, time dilation, wormholes, FTL, and multi-generation crews look good in books or movies, but the realities are non-trivial and in some cases possibly contrary to the physical reality of the universe.
So I would argue that galactic propagation is a currently unverifiable argument to support the Fermi paradox.
As a species we're violent, irrational, deluded, greedy and self interested.
The occasional deviations from this norm in no way redeem us.
If I had a choice not to be involved with this disgusting species then I wouldn't either.
We are the product of evolutionary forces, while we may be violent, irrational, deluded, greedy and self interested we are also social, curious and empathetic.
I would suspect that any other life form that is a product of the same evolutionary forces would share a similar mix of these attributes.
Ultimately, the problem I have with the SETI project is that they're looking for signals that by nature will have to suffer lightyears of Free-Space Path Loss (In short: it's proportional to the square of the distance). Worse, since we assume such alien civilizations will be hanging out near a star for the most part (deep space is cold and lacking in resources), you have a gigantic open fusion reaction happening right behind your signal, raising the noise floor tremendously.
From a layman's perspective, I don't see how they could reasonably hope to see anything, especially if the aliens are like us and tend to direct their transmitted energy rather tightly to avoid wasting too much of it.
Lets say for instance that we can pick up a signal from Geosync Earth orbit using little more than a crappy whip antenna (See: Satellite radio) for a system with maybe 200dB gain in total. Now lets say we're looking for ET with a magical system that has a million dB worth of gain. The distance from the Earth to a Geo satellite is 26,200 miles. The distance from the Earth to Alpha Centauri is 2.57 Ã-- 10^13 miles. Just comparing the square of the distances (6.86 x 10^6 to 6.5536 Ã-- 10^26), you can see that a gain of 10^9 is just not going to cut it, not by a long shot.
It seems to me that the only way SETI could possibly work is if ET was narrow beaming an extremely powerful signal directly at Earth 24/7 for centuries, or if they were hanging out in orbit chatting away over CB radios in stealth spaceships. The most plausible reason why SETI has not found anything is that any signals that are out there are well below are detection threshold, and this is even before we begin to think about a civilization that moves beyond RF transmissions in favor of something more exotic (entangled photon radios?).
I read the internet for the articles.
Still holding...
Seriously, I do. I also play the lottery.
People keep telling me it's a tax on people who are bad at math. But I have a different opinion. By playing, my odds increase dramatically. It was zero and now it's not. And someone does win the thing every so often. Why not me?
So it's near impossible. So what? Let's keep looking. People get lucky all the time. Parachutes fail and people live through it. Separated adopted twins wind up living next door to each other. You hear about unlikely odds all the time.
If this universe can teach you anything, it's that you never play the odds.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
We're not broadcasting to the galaxy either. We're only leaking. Parts of our planet have radio transmitters, but they're all oriented to the local horizon, and many of the radio signals bend around the horizon. Some of these horizontal beams' signals leak off into space, but they're rotating with the planet so they form 3-D spirals of weak signal and silence.
A distant radio receiver tuned to one frequency would hear a fraction of a second of sound before the beam moved on... and another bit of that station might show up 12 or 24 hours later (plus or minus 3 minutes). At little burst of sound would be just another bit of noise on the loudspeaker.
If we were broadcasting, we'd have omnidirectional antennas at a pole or many directional antennas transmitting the same signal outward. And we'd be using a lot more powerful transmitters on appropriate frequencies (radio or light).
And then the interstellar pirates would find us and we'd be incapable of showing ourselves. It only takes a few xenophobic idiots to spoil the Commons.
Note the following:
1) Author is an MBA. The "Bouchet-Franklin Institute" is his private lab.
2) The place of publication, arXiv, while very useful in certain fields of physics, is not peer-reviewed. It's basically the same as posting this paper on your blog.
3) The arXivblog, not run by any people actually associated with arXiv (as far as I can tell) regularly posts completely inaccurate summaries.
4) The published paper is laughably simplistic. As others have pointed out, these are obvious considerations, and the paper is mostly argument and simple geometry. While it's nice to see some back-of-the-envelope calculations on a minimum civilization density for a given detection cutoff, that's exactly what this is -- back-of-the-envelope calculations.
"Space is big. Really 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 chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Adams
I'll include some explanation. We've been dealing with science fantasy (I'll define that here as fiction that uses scientific sounding explanations of things for purposes of adding credibility to fantasy stories but which isn't exploring actual science) for years. The best of it points out somehow that it has some cheat (like the spice Melange or the Heart of Gold) that changes the rules of interstellar travel.
Because currently, without finding a way to cheat, those rules are ironclad and depressing, and basically mean that the nearest star is out of reach as far as we know, let alone zipping around the entire universe at will. How would you even navigate in something that vast let alone actually travel it?
It makes the question of extra terrestrial intelligence a question along the lines of a Medieval Churchman speculating on the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. A sort of interesting philisophical discussion but not much more than that.
For the record, I believe with metaphysical certainty that both extra terrestrial life and extra-terrestrial intelligence exist. I also believe with the same certainty that I'll never have any proof of that either way.
Fermi's paradox which boils down to "Where are they?" is living in fantasy-land. You want to know where they are? I'll tell you, "You can't get there from here."
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
you know, if you're going to quote song lyrics, you might as well get them right
Maybe the computer running our particular universe simulation was configured to have only one civilization.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
Is there anybody out there?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The calculation of 1000 years seems a bit too long. We can't figure out how to shorten it because we don't know how long we're going to be using broadcast signal based communication as opposed to some other more direct means.
My own contribution to the debate:
As technology advances the limited amount of available bandwidth becomes more valuable, while costs of utilizing it drop. The civilization migrates its bandwidth use from simple, extremely redundant, coding schemes (like AM and FM) to subtle, highly-efficient schemes that are virtually indistinguishable from thermal noise (like OFDM). They also use spacial multiplexing to re-use the same bandwidth over and over at various locations. This buries the few redundant parts of the signal (like the pilot subchannels used for synchronizing the receiver) in interfering noise.
The result is that, after a fairly short time, at a distance they are virtually indistinguishable from a hot black body - and lost in the sagans of other hot things in the galaxy.
Our first AM voice radio broadcast was at the end of 1906. 102 years later we're taking a big step in the transition to OFDM-or-CDMA-everywhere by shutting down "analog TV" and replacing it with OFDM-based digital. AM and FM are already using digital variants to squeeze more out of their spectrum. Any bets on how long until they switch, too?
Once the simple-modulation blowtorches are switched over the few remaining detectably-patterned signals will be soft voices crying in a wilderness of high-noise-floor. If we don't DELIBERATELY send some intended-to-be-noticed beacons we'll again be lost in the background - our own and the galaxy's.
A thousand years? In our case the detectability sphere looks to be only a tad over 100 years deep.
Don't blink!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I thought it was because as they reach our level of civilisation, they built giant particle accelerators for research and turned their planets into black holes.
I think it would be hilarious if an alien civilization flew into our solar system only to find a black hole -- complete with moon -- orbiting the sun between Venus and Mars! No doubt they'll know exactly what happened...
There's a civilization-destroying race out there that listens for signals, then goes off and incinerates entire solar systems in a zealous attempt to keep the universe quiet.
Intelligent beings that happen to live know that they have to shut... the... hell... up.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
What makes people think that we even have anywhere near the technology to receive a signal that can travel across an entire galaxy and be received by another entity.
Would you expect some tribe in the Amazon to be able to receive radio signals?
"Hello? Hello?... I don't understand. I keep transmitting but there's no reply!??"
Now, maybe if we were transmitting in drumbeats or some such we'd get better results. Granted this example is the inverse of what tfa is written about, but the point is the same.
We've already observed lots of spacecraft. What do you think landed in Roswell?
More seriously, Fermi's Paradox doesn't take into account the Prime Directive. What if there are advanced ETs out there, but they refuse to communicate directly with us (besides abducting a few samples...) because they have a Prime Directive that forbids that? After all, here on Earth just among genetically-nearly-identical humans, contact between more-advanced technological and less-advanced cultures has always been disastrous. Perhaps the ETs have reasoned that initiating contact with us would cause all kinds of problems. After all, look what happened when Orson Welles broadcast War of the Worlds. People thought it was real (despite repeated messages to the contrary, for people just tuning in) and went into a state of panic. The aliens probably saw that with one of their covert probes and reasoned that we're simply not ready for contact, and won't be until we figure out how to achieve FTL travel.
Why are we soooo certain that we *want* to be found? I personally would prefer not to be a slave or a menu item to another race of beings. Honestly, what makes you think they will be peaceful or even tolerant of our existence if do find another civilization?
2 cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
Modern cockroaches have been around for 140 million years.
They are so well adapted that they live in practically every corner of this planet.
Yet... they have never formed a civilization, culture, or means of communication with other species.
The paper talks about communicative civilizations, capable of interstellar communication or at least capable of sending an interstellar of sufficient power and duration for another communicative civilization with similar capabilities to hear it.
Signals DO get lost in the noise over time. Civilizations CAN go extinct.
Hell... we had excellent chances to wipe ourselves out through a nuclear apocalypse dozens of times already.
It is a god damn miracle we are still around when you look at that list. And we came up with that one 64 years ago.
At the same time, we have been actively listening for extraterrestrial signals for only 49 years.
For a signal coming over a single form of communication.
We had entire 15 years to simply stop existing without even trying to listen if there is someone out there.
Signals deteriorate. Civilizations go extinct.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Hell, man! Is there any intelligence down HERE!!
Jeesh! These scientist with all their assumptions and preconceptions. Last week, we were supposed to believe that because we're able to capture a few pixels of UV radiation from a distant star system, and it can be spun into a computer model of the planet's atmosphere. The whole thing is a bunch of naval gazing to keep a bunch of nerds a colleges employed. Get a job, guys.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Surely a 1000 year old advanced civilization (they have been broadcasting for 1000 years), could solve the problem of weak signals OR amplification ? Considering what we can 'see' with Hubble, imagine what instruments we could use for detection in a few centuries.
He did.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Perhaps civilizations destroy themselves within a few decades of discovering broadcasting, or perhaps they quickly discover a more efficient way to communicate. In either case, their transmissions would be like a short lived ripple in a very large pond.
Am I the only one who felt that "they might be too far away" was obvious before?
And if they take 1/2 light speed, in 65,000 years they will have travelled in a straight line a quarter of the galaxy.
Now why did they JUST HAPPEN to stop right at us, rather than one of the other systems littering the galaxy? If they went from one star to another, how long would it take 70 million craft to reach them all?
But I think the whole point of the Fermi paradox isn't about aliens trying to communicate with us. The point is, if they exist why haven't they come here?
There are many stars billion years older than Earth. Unless we assume that conditions on Earth are extremely unusual, there should be a very high probability that a human-like race had developed a space-faring civilization tens of millions of years before us. In that case, several of those races should have reached Earth by now.
Maybe some of them have a highly evolved ethical sense and would try to preserve Earth, letting humans develop their own civilization, but how likely is it that all of those space-faring civilization have the same ethical principles? That would be like expecting us to preserve some area in Africa or Borneo to let chimpanzees or orangutans alone so they could develop their own intelligence and create a civilization.
As far as we know, intelligence is highly linked to curiosity, which leads to exploration. One must assume that if many intelligent species exist, at least one of them is curious enough to travel and explore the galaxy as soon as its technological development allows. Therefore, either the development of intelligent life is extremely rare, or our own development went through an extremely unlikely path.
If we don't DELIBERATELY send some intended-to-be-noticed beacons we'll again be lost in the background - our own and the galaxy's.
Except for RADAR. Maybe RADAR will be replaced too, but for now it's quite noticeable.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
that it isn't that a civilisation lasts 1000 years, but that a civilisation that will automatically be using broadcast that can be picked up by us is no more than maybe 1000 years.
After all, we're beginning to change our energy requirements for standard broadcast, reducing the visibility of earth in the radio spectrum. We now use narrow beam radio waves. But we have to be pointing it IN THE RIGHT PLACE. And after 500 years of Arecibo and nothing back, will we continue to pay for it?
Doesn't look likely, does it.
You know how in every Sci Fi there's at least one super advanced, even handed, beautiful, wise and ancient species that every other species looks to for guidance and arse-kissing?
/drools about wearing a space-toga and arguing philosophy with space-adventurers
If this paper is wrong and there's no other life as capable as us in this galaxy... then we're that species. Well, we will be, in thousands/millions of years time, when everybody else has caught up to the space faring stage. So the next time you watch StarGate and see some awesome new so-ridiculously-advanced-and-mysterious race, you can nudge your friend and nod knowingly at the TV; "See those guys? Yup. That's us in a million years."
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
It might be "noise", but it's still a distinct power band - not a black body distribution at all.
The aliens had their own Peak Oil apocalypses and never found a magic bullet, so they ran out of energy to transmit their interstellar "Helloooo!" They had their 15 minutes of fame and then faded away.
... No, really. The change in technology from broadcast to cable and and the internets solves the paradox.
Omnidirectional high-energy broadcast is a profligate waste of energy. We are increasingly switching to cable, fiber optic, directional transmission, and low-power networks of short-range transmitters like Wi-Fi and cell networks. As a result, within 100 years, you won't be able to detect earth's radio signature from more than a couple light years out for this reason. The same will be true of other advanced civilizations.
In the 1950s when the "Fermi Paradox" was coined, broadcasting was still growing, and extrapolations of that growth led to the belief that "advanced civilizations" would be spewing out significant fractions of a star's output as radio waves. Those extrapolations were simply wrong - technology took a sharp left.
Advanced civilizations will likely be maximally efficient with their energy, and thus silent from a passive-detection point of view.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Religious discussion of extraterrestial life is a very old idea. In the 19th century many writers from many different Christian denominations were fine with the notion of extraterrestial life. Others had issues since it brings up theological quandaries like whether aliens have orignal sin and how could Jesus be the only begotten son of God if other species fell as well. Michael Crowe's "The Extraterrestial Life Debate:1750-1900" discusses this and related issues in detail.
The earth's been around for 4 billion years or so.
Of that four billion, we've been around for less than a million of them.
Of that million years, known civilisation has been around for around 10,000.
Of those 10,000 years, half of our technological advancement has been in the last 100~.
What if we evolved a million years earlier? That's a drop in the bucket in terms of the earth's age and we could easily see it happening. But what we couldn't see is, if we did evolve a million years earlier, what technological state we'd be in today. We can't accurately forsee 100 years in the future let alone 1000 years, or 10,000 years, or 100,000 years... and a full million years' worth of technological advancement at ridiculously fast rates -- the technological singularity would have been reached if it does exist -- and most probably self-guided evolution/special modification. Would we even use radio waves on any level at all, let alone for communication?
And that's just us. Our sun is one of the younger ones in the galaxy -- the universe. If we can't fathom were we'd be in a million years, imagine an alien race that achieved sentience a billion years ago. Unfathomable. Maybe they do have contact with us -- and view us as kin to fungus growing on rocks.
My point is, assuming the number of sentient species in the galaxy being in the hundreds of thousands, the chance of any two of these species being anywhere near each other on the technological scale -- and I'm using the term "near" very loosely -- would be damn near infinitely small. If we do stumble across life elsewhere in the galaxy, they'll probably either so advanced as to be beyond our comprehension, or so primitive as to be not worth much more than a footnote in a wiki... "Planetoid X263369 shows promising chances of forming cell-like life in the next million years."
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
Our emerging knowledge of genetics implies that our self-engineered descendants a few centuries from now will be very much more capable (if our lineage makes it that far). This will be especially true of the subset who leave high-gravity planetary surfaces and the dangerous neighborhoods of stars for better real estate in deep space. Their descendants, perhaps based on superconducting neurological systems (cold is a feature not a bug for quantum effects) and with the size that microgravity enables, are unlikely to have much to say to entities on our current level.
Perfect compression is indistinguishable from random noise. (the same is true for perfect encryption). The more advanced the civilization the more precious bandwidth will become to them and the closer their compression will become to being perfect. SETI will only succeed if the civilization wants to send us a signal.
For a civilization to be able to keep up that level of commitment for as long as it would take would be inconceivable. This isn't to say that it couldn't happen, but . . . .
That word -- I think it means what you do not think it means.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
Not anymore, they got comfortably numb, someone set the controls for the heart of the sun and now they've all gone to join the great gig in the sky.
It might be "noise", but it's still a distinct power band - not a black body distribution at all.
But it's a very broad band - and there are many of them. The amount of power needed depends on how far you want to go and what the background is that you need to surpass - and a major component of the background is thermal noise, pushing toward a thermal distribution of signals as well.
Yes the distribution is distinguishable - at least so far. But remember that you have to observe the signal in the presence of other backgrounds as well. (A narrow band filter like you can use to find an AM or FM signal just won't cut it.) How far away from the Earth can you make that distinction? And if scientists DO, would they attribute it to intelligent signal transmissions or look for some oddball physical process - in the emitter or the medium?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Can't we just send all the middle managers, hairdressers & telephone sanitizers out to find the ETs?
"Assuming" means an assumption is being made. And an assumption is a proposition that is taken for granted, as if it were known to be true. (source). Don't demean it: it is classic tool in science, logic, philosophy, mathematics, etc. So all this fuss about where the assumption is coming from is pointless -- we all know where it comes from.
Why don't you just go ahead and give us *your* assumptions, together with some derived conclusions from it, along the lines of TFA. Using *your* assumptions, what would you say about the Fermi paradox, exactly?
That would certainly be more interesting than pointing the obvious meaning of the word assumption.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Watch the Outer Limits episode, "Final Exam."
I must say it is a pleasure to work with you instead of these crazy nutjobs.
Now, please take off your pants and put your underwear on your head to signal our next meeting.
-- Zwrxgz 67A8U9
Except for RADAR. Maybe RADAR will be replaced too, but for now it's quite noticeable.
It's also highly directional and mostly in frequency bands that don't make it through the ionosphere all that well.
RADAR is already migrating from simple continuous streams of short high-energy pulses to broad chrips and other, more complex signals that give more information about the target (and have less power demand on the transmitter).
Aircraft location for air traffic control is migrating from RADAR to aircraft-mounted GPS beacons. (The RADAR will still be around for a while. But don't be surprised if it migrates to more subtle technology.)
Military RADAR has a big advantage if it looks like background noise to a target.
(Marine radar does NOT - it's really good if your little sailing yacht makes a big spot on the screen of the supertanker that could run you down - a spot indistinguishable from that of another supertanker. B-) But marine radar is low power.)
Short high-energy pulses chew up a lot of valuable communication spectrum. Moving to a lower-energy signal could make it more available for other uses, creating an incentive to migrate.
So don't be surprised if even RADAR eventually fades into the background.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That they are there but that they're avoiding us
Since the limiting resource for advanced civilisations is likely to be matter/energy you'd expect competing factions to either consume it extremely quickly or to hoard and hide it. Even if some civilisations chose not to take the expansive route it seems unlikely that civilisations are common but that they all remain inexpansive. It doesn't appear that the galaxy is either being consumed or hidden which suggests either that we are alone, almost alone, or that matter/energy is not a limiting resource for advanced civilisations.
Doesn't that "magical" 300 number assume that all those civilizations are evenly spaced?
I'd also have to wonder if perhaps we live in the "shadier" side of the galaxy and all 299 of the 300 intelligences have already moved out to the suburbs on the other side of the galaxy.
I think the time factor is much more important - even if our civilization lasts eons (dinosaurs hang around for 100 Million years), the odds that some one else is at a point of technological development to understand us or we noticing them is extremely low. Dozens of "advanced" civilizations could have happened in our own galaxy, and we'd missed them completely. Hundreds could exist in the universe right now, and have no way of knowing of us.
But then, supernova explosions could just be an elaborate long distance communication system, and gammy burst are really intergalactic warfare. And we completely misunderstood the contact attempts of the guys talking trough burning bushes.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
Hey, guys, You all need seriously to go out a lot more. Those lines are from "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd from the album "The "Wall"
He's just acknowledging the Gelgamek christians.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
My definition of "Intelligent civilization" includes being smart enough to NOT broadcast their whereabouts to unknown other beings in the vicinity that might have hostile intentions towards them. Humans used to methodically kill wolves, bear, shark, and other species because they felt they were competing with them for resources. It's not too big a stretch to imagine that some other species might feel the same way about humans.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
And "New car, caviar, four star daydream, think I'll buy me a football team" is absolute rubbish, laddie! Get on with your commenting!
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Earth consists of supernova remnants. That gives us a technological advantage over any life that develops in a non-supernova area.
If you look at a Periodic Table, consider what kind of technology you could achieve with only elements lighter than Fe (inclusive). You wouldn't have lead solder to connect your steel wires. Copper doesn't exist, silver, gold. Alloys of steel lack the Co, Ni, Mo. NO titanium.
Maybe they were hampered in technology by materials and developed an organic Bluetooth equivalent, short range. We'd call that "telepathy."
Building a generation ship will easily be one of the most expensive and large-scale projects that our species has ever undertaken. A couple of willing colonists can't afford this alone. They need the entire population behind them.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
For fun I completely dispute this. There is a strong human impulse to dream of Armageddon -- all major religions have it as a core precept -- and why should we not fear mass death as all of us shall surely perish. But the belief that we will surely wipe ourselves out -- irrevocably utterly die from 1) The Bomb 2) a plague 3) a hot planet 4) financial catastrophe 5) war 6) science gone bad etc... is to say the least overstated. Though the Romans fell, the Manchus fell, the Hebrews fell, the Nazis fell, the English Empire fell, the Turks fell, the Egyptians fell etc...the truth of it is that people actually kept puttering along quite well -- in the long term. Let's imagine tomorrow the USA and Russia decide to play toe to toe no holds barred nuclear combat. Say 300 million of us were made ash -- and the Russians 270 million or so dead...lets say atomic fallout made things bad for a while. Out of 7 billion of us 6 billion killed -- really? Do we have any doubt that those that survived -- and don't give me that sci fi crap about mutants blah blah blah -- those that survived would be perfectly able to continue on, just as good at math just as good at movies computers etc. Humans would continue maybe more wise just as the Hutus and the Tutsies are somehow still here. Imperfect but human. So if and ever we make it into the stars I predict the opposite, long term fitful expansion. Now where are the aliens? I don't know, it could well be that space is really hard to conquer...even for robots. But I give our species greater than a couple of million years to get UP even if we make the planet a desert beforehand. 537
The paradox assumes radio (and variations) would continue to be used for the entire period. What if something better is just waiting for us to discover and most advanced civilizations switch to it. The universe could be filled with thousands of advanced civilizations jabbering away at each other and we simply don't have a clue because we're listening to that quaint old fashioned radio stuff.
-- Will program for bandwidth
(Paraphrased from George Carlin)
When did that word mean "reducing by 10%" to "reducing *down to* 10%"?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If we can't fathom were we'd be in a million years, imagine an alien race that achieved sentience a billion years ago. Unfathomable.
That assumes unlimited progress. On the contrary, evidence suggests we are very close to the limits of progress now.
First of all, the entire reasoning is flawed.
It simply makes no sense, what so ever.
My case and point: Radio technology.
Now, I have used radio technology quite a bit. I have to say, I am not impressed so far.
Seems slow (Its a dog for wireless G, and well...can't get decent wireless N drivers for Linux because of greed, and patent problems in the US...etc, probably still is dog slow.)
Now, why would, a intergalactic civilization, use electro magnetic waves, to communicate, over a distance of hundreds of light years?
Sort of seems, well, impractical doesn't it? Yet, all of these learned people insist that is the ONLY POSSIBLY WAY TO DO IT. Sort of seems oxymoronic too. Somehow the intergalactic civilization can conquor huge distances, but can't even say hello to each other from one end of the empire to the other end?
It is just stupid no matter how you argue this point. Not only that, but I am going to rightly assume I think, that any civilization that comes into being, has to operate on at least some of the same principles as our civilization. You cannot coordinate advances in a galactic empire with such a system as using radio, it is too slow for the distances.
Remember the horse and buggy? That is what I compare radio too. Is there something better? Well, people during that day didn't think so. It was simply impossible to better than the horse and buggy.
Why? Well, because the leading scientists of the day said so.
Luckily the idiots all died out, eventually clearing the way for well, people who had a little bit more imagination. (That and their tenure was now up for grabs and people could now introduce new rigid ways of thinking.)
It just so happens some of those rigid, unoriginal ideas included the steam engine and well...greed.
What is the only way to send signals instantaneously without distance becoming a limiting factor in todays world?
Do we know of any such system today?
Well, yes we do. But, I won't mention it here, because it is at the very leading edges of computing and you will just have to look for yourselves. But it involves tapping unseen states of matter which exist outside time and space.
But, as I point out. Radio waves would be a totally useless system to use. Nobody seems to point that out, UNLESS of course we consider the other side of the Fermi Paradox.
Which basically is, since using electromagnetic signals is really stupid, and since a civilization of vast galactic means would not use them, and they are not here.
It is entirely possible they simply do not exist.
That is a scary thought.
I prefer the alternate view though. Why? Well, Earth cannot be that unique. I mean, I am willing to at least entertain the idea that in the entire galaxy, let alone the UNIVERSE, there was another planet, that came to pass with similair traits and that:
1) A very advanced civilization really does exist.
2) Like the horse and buggy, they over came all obstacles to thinking and discovered the secret of travel, outside space time, to any point and any place in the Universe.
Given the SIZE of the universe, here is where I believe the Fermi Paradox falls flat on its face:
If you could go anywhere in the Universe, why in the hell would you come to a planet like earth with retards on it?
I am serious. If you could travel the entire universe and utilize communications that had no problem with distance, in fact, distance and time was entirely NOT PART of the transportation system, how long would it take you to eventually come around to the earth?
I ask this because it would seem to me, once you discover such a system, keeping yourself confined to a single galaxy is dumb. (i.e. The Drake equation should really be recalibrated to the entire Universe, not just the galaxy.)
I mean, it is sort of like this: Once you invent the airplane. Would you SERIOUSLY restrict yourself to your little country? No, of course not, you would get in the pl
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
First, I realize that I am most certainly outnumbered here on Slashdot.
I personally have no problem with the concept of God having created life elsewhere in the universe. The thing is that the three most fundamental reasons why I believe that something isn't in the Bible is that it's either not important enough, there's different terminology, or there are underlying principles. If there's an alien civilization on the far side of Andromeda, our radio signals will take thousands of years to reach it, and it will be thousands of years before they respond. Unless both sides develop subspace communications, or we develop transwarp technology, it really won't matter all that much if they exist or not. Either way, I don't think that extraterrestrial intelligence is contrary to the Bible. I just don't think that it matters.
Fermi's Paradox doesn't take into account the Prime Directive.
The problem with the PD is that it assumes the possibility of some sort of "conspiracy", where a number of civilizations agree that one should leave the "underdeveloped" ones alone. Where a set of explanations would fit, conspiracy is never the correct one.
The Fermi Paradox has a rather simple solution, and I don't see how that is such a mystery given the information we have about our galaxy today. The problem is that the universe is amazingly hostile to life. It seems likely that there is microbial life everywhere, and that there is many places that develop advanced multi-celled life. The chances of maintaining a life-friendly environment for the millions of years it takes to produce moderately intelligent species and for them to develop technologies advanced enough for interstellar colonization is simply vanishingly small.
Our solar system may not be that common. We have three very important things that have helped life on earth. We have two gas giants protecting us. It seems likely most solar systems have some gas giants. We also have a huge moon, by any measurement, offering a significant amount of protection plus a very friendly environment (without the moon earth would be significantly less life-friendly). That is probably not that common.
Life is abundant. Advanced life is rare. Intelligent life is exceedingly rare, we might be the only ones or one of only a handful. All because the universe isn't a very friendly place.
I for one welcome our unknowing overlords
Watch those corners
The comment wasn't ventured as a specific theory, just a possibility that could be plausible based on what we know about human nature. The question, "are we alone" may sound profound, but only in context of the current human condition. Change the human condition, and the importance of that question might change. Additionally, the more we learn about the universe, the more obvious the actual answer will become. We're not very interested in whether extraterrestrial planets are round. We don't really care - in fact we'd be shocked if they weren't. That's because we understand the nature of matter and gravity, and while we can't prove that they are round, it's not a question we're particularly concerned with. Life on other planets may turn out to be just such a situation should human knowledge and intelligence reach that relative point.
Another theory is that they haven't contacted us because they're just not that into us.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Might be better if we don't hear anyone else, given how much noise we are making. Any response could easily be relativistic!
Seems that if we are not the only ones (or the first) out there then they have already thought through the same things we are now doing. Hence even if they are only 1000years ahead of us technologically we would likely be hearing from them if they wanted to be heard, in a means hearable by our level of civilization.
If a line of reasoning leads to a paradox, then it means that one of the assumptions behind it is false. The question is, which one?
There are a number of huge, hard-to-prove assumptions behind Fermi's paradox, so why does everybody assume that just one of them - "intelligent aliens exist" - is the culprit?
Now, if they don't, that means that, as the only intelligent civilization to evolve, we're way, way out on a probabilistic limb: tricky to disprove but enough to have Occam sharpening his razor when faced with the other assumptions:
Practical interstellar space travel is possible: I'm not talking FTL here, just getting to the nearest star in less-than-geological time. We certainly haven't cracked it yet. Even SF authors who eschew hyperspace seem to resort to antimatter drives (or other unobtanium-fuelled solutions) for this now. Nor have we successfully frozen and thawed out a sentient being, yet (unless you just had a dose of salmonella from an inadequately-microwaved readymeal: see final paragraph).
Aliens would want to colonise the galaxy: A character in Diaspora by Greg Egan put it nicely: "that's what bacteria with spaceships would do". If you're running out of space on your planet, you don't just need interstellar travel, you need interstellar bulk carriers to make a difference. Condoms are cheaper.
So, if you don't have FTL and your species is not suitable for home freezing, you could build big slow generation ships, that take hundreds of years to reach the stars. Still tricky, and since such is ship is always going have strictly limited resources you still better pack those condoms.
Now, come to think about it, if you can build vast numbers of these wonderful self-sustaining colonies that can survive for centuries in the wasteland of interstellar space, and your people are prepared to spend their lives in them while practicing responsible family planning, what exactly was it you needed planets for? Raw materials? There's gigatonnes of those floating around your own solar system, and you had to learn everything there is to know about sustainability in order to build those generation ships. Perhaps its time for a staycation? Even if your star is beginning to look a bit iffy, the Oort cloud is probably safely out of range of anything short of a supernova.
Self-replicating robots: We can only hope that intelligences vast and cool and immesurably superior to ours have learned the Earth phrase "What could possibly go wrong?"
Hey Burt, I'm about to fit the interstellar space drive: have you tested the replication limiter yet? Burt? Burt! You're turning into grey goo, stop it!
We haven't met them: Well, ruling out the mice, dolphins, Atlanteans and the guys that live inside the hollow earth (look at the poles on Google Earth, guys - the holes are there!) there are other options.
I mean, the tentacle-room on economy class FTL is appalling, and by the time a generation ship eventually reaches its destination, odds are that your ungrateful great-great-grandchildren will either have regressed to savages who worship the engine, uploaded themselves to the ships computer or turned the ship's storeroom into an interdimensional corridor and emigrated to a parallel universe.
No, if despite all the hurdles, you want to send your DNA to the stars then the best thing is to do just that: send your DNA. Its light, it freezes well and the postage is cheaper. Pack it up in viruses and send it out there to influence the evolution of a million species. Next time you have the flu and sneeze, don't say "bless you", say "welcome to Earth".
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
In 1996 I was a geology major living in a house with a bunch of geo and other science majors. Needless to say we threw a pretty big party on the night of October 23, 1996. I mean, c'mon, how often does the Earth turn 6,000??
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
>It isn't lack of FTL that is holding us back, it's lack of energy.
Either way, we're fucked in practice, eh?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
why is there such a big assumption that aliens will necessarily use the electromagnetic spectrum to communicate? Has anyone even tried looking for alternaitves?
Perhaps there is at least one other mechanism/medium which many other alien species out there have discovered and use exclusively, possibly because they didn't ever discover radio or even if they did, they only use the alternative because it has less limitations. Perhaps we dumb earthlings are actually quite unusual in not having discovered the alternative yet, because we haven't even looked because we're so invested in 'good enough' radio technology. Given such a scenario is even possible, it would seem incredibly naieve of us to presume "no radio emissions == no aliens".
And I have become comfortably numb.
ROI for who?
For the people sending the ship, the ROI may be low. . . For the people riding on it, the ROI is incredibly high. They get a whole new star system of their very own, to do whatever they wish with it.
Philosophically speaking: Why do we know that there are things we don't know? It's because we can imagine. In considering aliens we can only imagine because we don't yet have the knowledge to know. We don't have the knowledge to know because we have yet to discover the tools to enable such knowledge. There is a whole new understanding ahead of us after we discover these new tools. Till then we can only tolerate the intellectual insult posed by such things as Fermi's Paradox
But that doesn't mean it isn't solved, or more like it isn't really a paradox.
What law of nature says that life bearing planets have to be common? Depending on what parameters you plug into the Drake Equation you may or may not have a problem.
It is perfectly easy for me to imagine that life, or at least intelligent technological life that wants to communicate with someone else, has arisen exactly ONE time in our galaxy. Or at least few enough times that we are unlikely to ever overlap with it.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Yep right here on /. I thought this was the best place to start contact because it seems to be the place most inhabited by super intelligences on planet Earth.What you don't believe me? Well what hope have we got of making contact then?
There are many worlds out there however none of them have had to foresight to actually send a signal and instead continue to listen for signs of life.
"Assuming" means an assumption is being made. And an assumption is a proposition that is taken for granted, as if it were known to be true. Don't demean it (blah, blah, blah, etc.)
Gee, thanks sensei.
So I'm not allowed to ask where they came up with the number 1000? If I ask such a question, I am somehow 'demeaning a classic tool in science'? I should just take it on faith that its a well founded assumption because you directed me to a Wikipedia page that has nothing to do with the original article?
Get over yourself.
See that's where I think Fermi's Paradox still stands.
We're terribly interested in finding other species. I think any space faring species would be.
As soon as we have interstellar capabilities I would say we should send a powerful, self repairing transmitter to the nearest pulsar or notable object. And have it just start blasting ascending prime number pulses across the broadest spectrum possible.
If you want to get noticed... wait by a street corner not an alley. Go to a bus stop.
We should be looking at interesting places for broadcasts not scanning blindly.
Right after you post a list of your other winners.
And you might want to adjust your odds. You're not competitive with Mega Millions. The odds of winning your lottery are one in ten^14, or 100,000,000,000,000, for a cost of 1000 dollars.
Mega Millions pays out fifty times your million (currently, the number changes) dollars, costs one dollar to join, and has odds of one in 175,711,536.
Oh, another thing. What you're describing is a variation on a numbers racket. It's illegal for private citizens to do. Unless you're the Prime Minister of Norway or something, of course.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
SETI is probably a waste of time and resources. We (the human race) don't even generate the sort of signals that SETI looks for. Our communication technologies are verging on being indistinguishable from background noise, or even completely undetectable (photon entanglement).
If detecting an alien civilization from their signals is not going to happen, then the only way you're going to meet them is by close encounter. Since current theory says that FTL is impossible then you have to do some sub light speed generational ship type of thing. The human race tends to only do things that are profitable (you could argue that there's that whole survival trait thing kicking in), we're never likely to build one. Why would anyone else?
I'm thinking that even if there is some trick to achieving FTL travel, then number of races that live long enough and care enough to find it are probably pretty small. Let's say you do find it. Let's say you work out how to travel 100 times the speed of light. It's still a two week trip to our closest neighbor, and all shipwrecks are terminal. If there are other intelligent races in the universe, maybe interstellar travel is so hideously expensive and risky that those civilizations expand very very slowly, far slower than Fermi's paradox predicts.
Fermi's Paradox is usually represented by the Drake Equation: One made up number multiplied by another made up number multipled by a third made up number multiplied by one more made up number, and so on up to seven made up numbers, winds up being equal to one last made up number.
It's a nice basis for conversation, but mathematically it's still one equation with eight unknowns and that can't prove much of anything. What's to resolve?
Unfortunately we don't have interstellar capability yet or any sign that there is a way around the speed of light. We're stuck in this solar system for the time being. Our radio signals will propagate no faster than c and our probes, once we make them, will be slower (at least for the foreseeable future.)
Round-trip talk time is two years per light-year.
Listening where we are can be done now. No wait for our signal to propagate to them, and their signal (if present) has already propagated to us.
Unfortunately, if they were also essentially spread-spectrum-only emitters by the time the stuff going by us now was sent, we're hosed. B-( Or at least we'll have to modify our filters to look for efficient-modulation signatures.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
We haven't met them?
Some might say "We are them".
The Fermi paradox doesn't have much to do with radio waves.
In less than 100 years (probably much less), we will be capable one way (mature molecular manufacturing) or another (bioengineering + advanced technologies based on biological byproducts) of building tiny autonomous systems that can reproduce themselves given sufficient raw materials of the right basic sorts (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and trace amounts of other materials). This would allow exponential expansion, using tiny ramjets or laser driven lightsail seeds.
If *just one* civilization developed that capability, and *just one* member of that civilization got the inclination to cover the galaxy/universe once the technology is trivially cheap, then a sphere expanding at near light speed would be consumed. In a mere 150,000 years, the galaxy would be consumed by "smart matter" which could be programmed to do the will of the originator. In less than 3 million years, a seed starting in the Andromeda Galaxy would consume all suitable matter in the Milky Way.
(By the way, it gets trivially cheap pretty damn quickly for technology that can reproduce itself autonomously - one prototype means an indefinite, dirt-cheap supply.)
Radio waves aren't the issue. The question is why there's a solar system here instead of a Dyson sphere supporting a quadrillion copies of Joe the Plumber in his own personal heaven.
The Fermi paradox is a pet hate of mine, it really establishes nothing, they would be here is an assumption, it's not even a falsifiable one.
There are far too many approaches to the paradox other than the They Are Not Here.
If 'they' had the capability to cross interstellar space they would more than have the ability to stay hidden for one.
If they were here, would we be able to identify them? We've probably been scanned to a molecular level and been unware of it.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I just blew off mod points on this topic to make a rather inane point and you come along with something actually insightful. Damn you!
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
There are only two possibilities of how humans will like in 1,000 and in 10,000 years.
(1) They will be extinct
(2) They will have learned to live in a steady, non-growth state and in a sustainable manner where resources are never added to nor removed from the natural environment.
The Earth was in state #2 up until only a few thousand years ago and will be back in that state within a thousand years by either of the two numbered paragraphs above.
Oh wait. Not First Post. That blip in time came and went and I missed it. I guess I don't exist.
A few points. The first one is that I remember reading a story last week about Quantum Entanglement effects which had been successfully observed acting over a whole meter. Now that's pretty cool. If our species gets that kind of technology up and running correctly, we could probably do away with the silly EM spectrum as a means of broadcast communications altogether in a decade or two. Which would mean that our race will have been broadcasting EM noise into space for less than two centuries or so. Just a blip, really. Our inane first post sent and gone as we move on to making more intelligent comments.
Also, as I'm fond of pointing out, we've been in communications with 'aliens' for quite some time now, but since it doesn't conform to the limited concept of what such a contact is supposed to be like, (according to our best minds in Sci-Fi, bless them), the whole subject is ignored.
There was something else. . .
Right!
They're already here and they've been manipulating humanity for eons. And we're food. And we all know the rule; Don't talk to your food! (Or was it, don't eat with your mouth full?) Whatever. We don't hold communion with cows. --We just breed them from the mighty horned beasts of the plains into dumbed down, obedient, drugged-up tasty bovine snacks who simply don't get that they're food. They live in cubicles, (well the pigs and chickens do, anyway), and they are fed on toxic crap and they don't think for a moment that they're going to be killed and eaten. Heck, if they had the brain tissue required, we'd probably distract them by introducing a bunch of silly stories about cows on crosses or something. --To keep them from open revolt by assuring them that all their woes and daily misery shall be rewarded when the Burger King comes down to 'save' the most righteous of the herd. And blast the rest into oblivion. It doesn't have to make sense. Cows aren't very smart. --Just so long as they don't think too hard or question anything. And believe that flaming bushes are really god and not not some manipulative rancher cattle-prodding them toward the promised land from his hyper-dimensional realm of alien sneakiness.
"As above, so below."
I find it remarkable that people really think that intelligent life would want to reach out and make friends.
Except. . , what is UP with those crop circles? You know; the ones with the magnetic seeds and EM damage which drunk engineering students make without ever being seen in the dead of night with their rope and planks. And, apparently, some means of re-writing genetic plant code so that seeds grow all funny afterward. And making sure the plants don't break, but rather bend at the stalk joint. And that the black helicopters buzz the fields, because the military are just SO fascinated by the doings of drunk pranksters.
But hold on. . , I thought there was no communication. Well, according to the various voices tumbling around space, there's more than one race, more than one state of existence, more than one agenda. And some of them make circles.
But with our tunnel vision so firmly fixed on SETI and a needle-narrow set of galactic possibilities, somehow people are prevented from seeing the messages which are practically shouted at us.
Why? How can it be that many of the same people who argue in defense of Fermi refuse to acknowledge the blatantly obvious? Isn't that a little discordant? Yes! It is. It is discordant, and this is because we're dumb cattle and we believe as we are instructed. --That aliens fly in space ships, are slaves to time, actually want to talk to us and that they'll use walkie talkies to do it. Just Like Us!
Thankfully, not everybody is really that asleep.
-FL
Currently it's not possible to send information ftl (faster than light), but what if there are other technologies that can send information by sending a signal through warped space?
What evidence is this, exactly? All I know of is theories, hypothesis, evidence and common sense that the opposite is true.
... need I go on?
... it's just suddenly dawned to me that you may be trolling :(. In which case, well done. But I'll post this anyway with the assumption that you're not.
Further more, consider this. Imagine tomorrow, science stopped. We just suddenly find out we've learned everything there is to know and our technological achievements plataeu. Give us a million years and we'll still have found a way to colonise or tap resources across the entire solar system. Hell, give us enough time and inclination and we'll eventually make it to other solar systems using current technology and theory and find a massive amount of different ways to employ said technology in ever increasing complexity... for example, massive engineering projects like space elevators (a short term example) or even ridiculously complex things like an interplanetary network of "roads".
Of course that's all moot as some of the most insane scientific discoveries are so far off as to be deemed near impossible; ie. looking beyond the event horizon of black holes, intergalactic travel, faster-than-light travel, a true understanding of quantum physics and its merging with general relativity, techniques for "editing"/forced evolving of the human genome, perfect AI, clinical immortality, transferred or shared consciousness,
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
...as do most of the replies here. The point is one of population dynamics: any technological civilization is inevitably going to spread from star to star. It takes only a few hundred million years for the very first civilization to colonize the whole galaxy in this manner, even without faster-than-light travel. That's a blink of an eye on geological timescales -- our own planet is 4.5 billion years old, and the galaxy as a whole is older than that. The odds of the first two civilizations in the galaxy arising within a few hundred years of each other (such that the second one wouldn't find the galaxy already fully settled) are extremely small, like finding that the two shortest people in the world are the same height within a fraction of a millimeter. So: it doesn't matter how many hundreds of light-years their "signals" can travel -- if we're not the first civilization, then whoever was first should have settled the ENTIRE GALAXY (including the stars right next door) millions or billions of years ago.
The only reasonable conclusions are that either WE are the first, and we'll find the galaxy completely empty of other civilizations; or we are not, and we're living in a nature preserve, as the ancient ETs that settled the galaxy ages ago intentionally hide from us.
What is the shortest possible signal that would almost have to be from a sentient being? I mean, speaking from the perspective of information, what would it take? Something like sending a sequence of repeating primes?
Well, whatever it is.. we need to send it now, not tomorrow.
We need the opposite of SETI. Instead of looking for them, we need to send out the strongest signal we ever have. So strong that it will need to originate from the other side of the moon just to protect people on Earth from the source.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
I wish that I could defend christianity in the same way that I occasionally defend communism, i.e., what is being complained about is a perversion of the intended meaning.
Unfortunately the history of christianity has been so perverted by the official representatives of the same that we have no real knowledge as to what happened historically. In fact even the evidence of Jesus son of Mary's actual existence is a bit dubious. Tax records that should exist, e.g., mysteriously aren't present, etc. Possibly there was an actual person filling the role, and we have merely misplaced his century. Another possibility is that JC was merely a notional person, similar to Nicolas Bourbaki the notional mathematician. Or possibly just lots of records got lost in unexplained ways from unexpected causes. Or possibly he had enemies in office who desired to remove all records of his existence. Secretly. Some of these sound a bit far fetched, but 1000 years is a long time, and something must have happened.
FWIW, it's worth noting that none of the Gospels were written by first hand witnesses. They are at most retellings of stories of first hand witnesses. (50 years isn't that long, so it could have been possible for a genuine witness to write a Gospel, but that isn't what happened.) And these stories that were told were a mixture of religious creed and political propaganda. (The two categories were mixed in Judea at that time.)
So try to guess how much you would believe the Bible if you first encountered it in the context of "Fantasy literature". Then ask yourself why it shouldn't be shelved there. (There ARE reasons...mainly having to do with the mixed nature of what it recounts. PARTS of it are historical. And parts of it should go in erotica. [Not very good porn, but porn nonetheless. Consider the tale of Lot and his daughters. A bit of work could have made that quite spicy.])
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Einstein said that he did not believe in "spooky action at a distance". He never said anything about it being an argument based on relativity.
Yet this stuff has been proven time and time again. It is simply observed fact that no information is ever exchanged via quantum entanglement. It is not a matter of there being 500 possible ways it could happen and we've only eliminated 10. It is DEMONSTRATED not to happen at all.
You can start your research on that topic with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem
âoeNo physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics."
This theorem has been demonstrated by experiment to hold, thus no transmission of information by QM AT ALL, ever.
Hope may spring eternal, but it is as futile a hope as that of the perpetual motion machine proponents. This also reinforces Relativity's ban on superluminal information/matter/energy but the two stand independent of one another. Thus you would have to overthrow BOTH theories at once, and thus ALL of the well attested standard model to get out of that jam.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Travel times for a large ship would HAVE to be immense, not just large, but stupendous large. A massive ship that could sustain 100's of passengers for 10's of thousands of years in the hard radiation environment of interstellar space? Maybe it just can't be done. Maybe no kind of self replicating repair systems and AIs and whatever else would be needed is just possible to build in such a way as to give even a 1 in 1000 chance of success.
The amount of power that would be required to propel this massive ship would simply be truly astounding and nobody yet has demonstrated that it will ever be possible for humans to generate those sorts of power levels.
Maybe by the time you add up all the massive complex of equipment you need on top of the engine and the fuel required for the biggest thing we can launch there simply isn't enough room left for crew?
Maybe our new robotic overlords will be smarter than us and I salute our star drivin' overlords!
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
The result is that, after a fairly short time, at a distance they are virtually indistinguishable from a hot black body
I am a geek, but I'm not even close to that much of a geek that I could ever confuse radio waves with a hoochie momma no matter what color her skin is.
This is basically the same question as Olber's paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olber's_Paradox). In an infinite universe, all lines of sight intersect the surface of a star. The brightness of a stellar photosphere is independent of distance. (It is flux that varies with the inverse square of the distance, not brightness.) The paradox is why the night sky is dark.
Similarly, an infinite universe with any finite fraction of star systems populated by sufficiently long-lived technological civilizations would result in radio waves reaching Earth from every direction. (Of course, unlike starlight, the plethora of signals would have to be disentangled.)
Just as Ted Harrison's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Robert_Harrison) explanation of Olber's Paradox relies on the finite lifetime of stars (originally a notion from Edgar Allan Poe!), so the explanation of Fermi's Paradox keys on the finite lifetime of civilizations. This is, after all, one factor in the Drake equation. The new part here is the recasting of this into a clustering analysis of overlapping light travel time spheres of influence.
Perhaps they are avoiding us.
It's not like we are located in galactic central. More like a cross roads with a family store.
Blogging because I can...
Not least because if the number of intelligent civilizations capable of communication in our galaxy is greater than 1, then we should eventually hear from them.
The keyword is eventually. Eventually can be a really really long time. How long have we been listening for? Radios have only been around for how long? 100 years? That's like a nanosecond in the galactic timescale.
The "zoo theory" is that we are being protected by another civilization(s) from outside interference. That may explain some of the odder UFO sightings. (Maybe they purposely broke the LHC also.)
Table-ized A.I.
Every one who does not believe this will be accepted by God only if they have never sinned, even only once.
That's not the claim of the Christian Bible.
Romans 2:
14 For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves:
15 Which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another
John 12:
47 And if any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.
These passages clearly acknowledge the existance of human morality without the need to encounter it in a Christian Bible. Morality predates Christianity and is the very thing that allows us to examine claims made by a religion (or by anyone) and determine for ourselves their morality. Modern Christianity conveniently ignores the putative demands set forth by the putative creator of everything that we must beat or kill unruly children, enslave and rape and pillage our enemies if they are "heathen", and so on. It is our own innate morality that allows us to understand which religions and parts thereof are Wrong and Evil.
Christianity is just another religion claiming "we're right and everyone else is wrong!". They all make the same, tired, contradictory claim at some level. That's why apologists strain so hard to back up their position by trying to find evidence for it, tacitly admitting that the historical, ethical and ontological claims of their religions are nothing more than bald (and baseless) assertions in so doing.
That's why you trot out your claims that "the claims of Christianity are unique" and "the factual claims of the Bible have never been disproved, if one allows desperately contorted denials of the antiquity of the earth and universe, evolution and the origin of life" and similar here on slashdot and perhaps elsewhere.
Those tiny specks of light are specks for a reason. Intelligence on earth is due to its proximity to the center of the universe. It falls off from there.
Relax (relax, relax)
It's just a little martian
There'll be no more AAAHHHHH!
They've got a tractor beam!
Time to be brutally honest with ourselves. Maybe there are other forms of life, but like the hot chick in Marketing, "they just aren't that into us..."
Maybe societies don't have a very long lifespan. The are a lot of signs that our own will collapse because of our environmentally unfriendly nature. Maybe all species in the galaxy go for the short term pleasures. We might enter the last phase of our own life cycle.. Maybe that's only 150 years... That's about.. 6000 weeks. A big chance there's a lot of life in the universe.. societies in a technological phase might not be sustainable... So they are hard to spot...
They just love to taunt christian with the idea, knowing very well that the bible , made by herd folk culture of 6K years ago, and another part made by paysant culture of 2K years ago, would not take into account something as life on another planet, because it would never come to their mind. I certainly like to taunt a few I know with that.
As for religion and science being compatible, they are not. Science is based on a moving knowledge base, hopefully increasing based on evidence taken from the environment. Religion is based on a relatively frozen assumption taken from the mind of a few. If there is ANY incidental compatibility, it would be a temporary state, it would quickly soon thrown out as soon as science move on. Indeed what we observe today is religion , and mostly the bible, being utterly abandoned as an explanation from natural things, except by a few fanatic. You can certainly be religious and apply science, but as soon as you let your religiousness skew the scientific method, you have lost your way.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Some might say "We are them".
Yeah, but I was kinda trying to support the notion that there might be intelligent life in the galaxy... :-)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It's also highly directional and mostly in frequency bands that don't make it through the ionosphere all that well.
Directional is an advantage. Omnidirectional is hopeless if you want to detect it from light-years away. Your only chance is a directional signal which happens to point your way. (Of course if you get just a few moments of signal, then it's hard to tell if it was a measurement error. You can hope to get lucky twice.)
The ionosphere is a problem.
So don't be surprised if even RADAR eventually fades into the background.
I won't be surprised, but for now I still believe RADAR is the best bet.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
and maybe they have landed talked and made bases, but request the govt to keep them secret until the world economy is utterly broken and made worthless.
Then the govts will say this;
"Today, we have lost all money, have no funds, your investments are worth zero, but we have a secret to let you on, we have been friends with these aliens for decades, but now can let the truth be told because now theres no chance of the sharemarket crashing below zero.
They also come with gifts, plans, alien spaceships to give us, and a way to enter interstella trade with other worlds. GM will now make 12000 space ships a year selling them to other aliens for 2 tonnes of golds each.
We also can tap into limitless fusion power and all coal powered plants/wind/solar/nuke are obselete, welcome to the real 21st century."
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Some say the ancient humans ate cactus or mushrooms similar to LSD that made em so high and saw so many things and gave them wicked imaginations of spiritual god like visions.
If you have never tried LSD, then you have no concept of how 'normal reality' can suddenly look spaced out and 100x more interesting, kind of like comparing 1970s pong game to full HD ps3 games.
Old indians have rituals that do involve psycoactive substances
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Surely building robots that can walk and build things in moon gravity with no air would be awesome.
All solar/nuke powered, they can build our giant spaceships and everything for free.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The question is that all these are assumptions. Don't lecture me that you are 100% certain that we can build microprobes or biotech that can stand travelling through space. I am not saying we can't either. But perhaps it is not possible to microprobes withstand interstellar radiation, biotech might loose their genetic programming after a few millenia or even centuries (they evolve don't they?) and so on.
All these are theoretical possibilities. Until either a probe from a foreign civilization come to us or we build our own, they will stand this way. I may be as thrilled as you by sci-fi, but we have to recognize it's still firmly in the fi camp.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
I mean,
- the universe is about 13 billions years old if i'm not mistaken
- we've been able to make enough "noise" to be detected by our closest potential "neighboors" for only a few hundred years at best. So that's a tiny tiny fraction of time compared to the age of the universe. A small little blip.
- it is likely that in 1'000 years from now, or even make it 10'000 years, that if we pick up some noise coming from a distant star system we will be so advanced compared to whatever they might try to tell us that i would compare that to ants for us today: do you really care about the ants communication when you walk in the forest today ? no.
- so my conclusion: the time elapsed between the moment we started to make outgoing noise and the moment we could not care less anymore about such incoming noise is so so so small compared to the age of the universe that the probability to "communicate" with anyone today is extremely low, almost zero.
- we would have to be communicatign with a civilisation which is at par with us in terms of technology and intelligence level, and the time window for this to happen is so bloody small, even if this window is 10'000 years long.
maybe someone can try to help me explaining this better...
Yes, you can resolve the Fermi paradox if you assume that civilizations consistently destroy themselves after a short time (1000 years); you don't need to invoke communications range limits.
The question is: how and why are they destroying themselves? We are not talking about some or most civilizations offing themselves after 1000 years, we are talking about every single one of them, because if even a single civilization made it to an age of several million years, we should be seeing them.
Can the God Almighty create a stone so big that he himself can't lift it ?
The common reviewer of Fermi's Paradox thinks advanced alien civilizations are like our own (leaking radiowaves into space or broadcasting directly to unknown species). That is an assumption that fails upon examination. We are slowly confining our transmissions to either cable or fiber which will eliminate wasteful transmissions to the universe. An advanced reviewer will also recognize that if you want to communicate with an "advanced civilization" you will want to communicate with a civilization that has "taken its star dark", e.g. stars that can no longer be seen in the visible spectrum (but can be seen in the IR spectrum). So communications would be directed and site specific.
Finally, with regard to communication and advanced civilizations, I would say "We don't talk to nematodes and they don't talk to us." It is pointless for civilizations which are too far apart on the evolutionary scale to attempt effective communication. We don't attempt to teach nematodes to read!
Orion's actual PAYLOAD was very small. Even a one man expedition would require orders of magnitude more energy to reach even 0.12 C. Now multiply that by 1000 for 1000 people, multiply it again by some factor for all the life support they need and equipment they would need. Now you have what may well be an infeasibly large and expensive craft.
Also, Orion and the various other studies are nothing like being actual feasible starship designs any more than Jules Verne's space gun was a feasible design for a moon rocket. The space gun would WORK in a sense, it doesn't outright violate the laws of physics and probably could be built, it just couldn't put a man on the moon in one piece.
Likewise Orion, Daedalus, etc only consider a few basic aspects of the problem of star flight. There are vast areas which they either simply didn't address or just papered over. Things like how does your craft actually survive plowing through the interstellar medium at .12 C? How does it avoid being destroyed by the first grain of dust it encounters? (there aren't many things in interstellar space, but there are about 5 hydrogen atoms per m3). How are the electronics (or whatever) protected against the flux of galactic cosmic rays?
These probes were also only designed as FLYBY missions. If you want to stop at the other end then you have to either carry a whole second fuel supply (multiplying the total fuel requirements of the initial craft by a factor of 1000 or so) or come up with some other way of braking, which again requires a bunch of equipment that has to be carried for that purpose and again increasing your fuel requirements by a large amount.
So once you start adding in all the things that would be required to make an ACTUAL working manned starship that would have a range of a few light years you have one heck of a ginormous thing you have to build which would require ridiculous amounts of energy, like on the scale of all the energy produced by a type II civilization for several years.
Now, finally, add the factor of RISK onto all your calculations. What is the probability of the success of an individual mission? This huge investment isn't guaranteed to have ANY payoff, and certainly if you were doing it for the first time you would have to consider the probability of failure to be reasonably large.
And then of course it is pretty hard to imagine WHAT the payoff for the people sending the craft out would even be. "Several generations from now there will be some scientific data returned by this mission". OK, yeah. That might get us to send a probe. I fail to see why anyone would be so motivated to send a colony ship that they would pay the huge cost.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I'm not sure that generational star travel is that...relevant? I'm not sure that's the right word.
While it would be interesting and perhaps comforting to know that humans have traveled to other stars, what good is it going to be and what meaning will it have for us if no one can speak to them or ever see them again except as a matter of historical record?
Our star colonies will be as exciting and meaningful to people today as we find reading about Columbus.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
... the last thing I would want to do is to obliterate the local population of living creatures.
Knowing how scarce life seems to be, it would be utterly pointless.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Humans have sex with camels, goats, dead whales, and eat Baloot's. Why would any sentient creature want anything to do with us?
Assuming the average communicating civilization has a lifetime of 1,000 years, ten times longer than Earth has been broadcasting, and has a signal horizon of 1,000 light-years, you need a minimum of over 300 communicating civilizations in the Milky Way to ensure that you'll see one of them
Probability dictates that some galaxies will be more dense with civilizations then other galaxies. Furthermore, our existence is such a tiny blip in time that a society could exist slightly before or after us, yet we'd never get in contact.
What I really wonder is how likely we are to find a "space fossil," IE, evidence of life that is now extinct.
No, I will not work for your startup
....what I've never understood about the SETI ...
approach is that
you'd think that the Heliosheath would at least
attenuate (if not totally mask) any incoming EM waves
If it protects us against interstellar radiation, ....and what if the modulation isn't even based on a base10 or base2 system :shudder: ...base8! run for your lives!
I don't see how even a few MW's of radio would look like anything artificial
or
What were the odds!
>But like you said, everyone you knew on the planet you left would be dead.
This is only slightly less depressing than the possibility of no interstellar travel at all.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I am not trying to single out this post, but half the thread seems to be assuming Fermi's paradox is about alien civilisations communicating with us over radio. This is 100% wrong. We are all actually talking about a paradox that was never postulated.
First, it has to be pointed out that the radio-wave idea has been discounted many times for a much more obvious reason. The period of time that any civilisation engages in communication by radio waves is likely to be a tiny fraction of a percentage of the total life of said civilisation. The idea of finding our alien friends through listening to radio waves was ridiculous when Carl Sagan was promoting it and remains so today.
Secondly, The Fermi Paradox is about alien civilisations *colonising* the Galaxy or "arriving here." It was originally phrased as the question "where are they?" (i.e. - they should be here by now given a finite universe and a certain amount of time.) As flawed as *that* idea also is, it's a completely different flawed idea than what most folks her are arguing about, which is the incredibly super-duper flawed idea of radio communication between advanced civilisations.
Every form of life self-replicates, so the theory is obviously sound. We just need to figure out how to create a life form that also operates as an interstellar probe.
Again, what about the part where we have to recognize this 'alien communication' as actual communication? Where is it written that all life in the universe (here uni- meaning 'one', so 'the' uni-verse sounds somewhat wrong, should be 'our' universe or 'a' universe)is carbonbased, i mean even captain james t kirk had to fend of siliconbased creatures in his days ... where does this so-called paradox take into account that we can only hope to understand things that are recognizable in 'our' universe and that something alien might be so ... alien that we don't even notice it...then again, the universe is known to pull some sick jokes so it might really be possible that we are the only sentient life in it ????? Naaaaah, don't think so
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)