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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?"
"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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've never understood why Christians are so afraid of finding life on other planets or why atheists are so adamant that it will prove the Christians wrong. The Bible doesn't say anywhere that there is only life on Earth. If you take the creation story in Genesis metaphorically (lots of Christians do), then life evolving on other planets doesn't clash with theology at all; unless of course I'm totally missing something, in which case please point it out because I'm curious. From what I see, religion and science aren't necessarily incompatible.
Oh, it's terribly fascinating!
If other civilizations do show up, then it's because God wants us to preach salvation to them.
However, the article is pretty bad. From TFA
> Assuming the average communicating civilization has a lifetime of 1,000 years...
Well, there they decimate the entire strength of the argument. It's about longevity of civilizations (and a probable galactic or universal one)and sheer numbers.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
He uses philosophy throughout and though short, it has some pretty dense ideas.
I've found that most Christian writing, both Protestant and Catholic, is largely dependent on some pretty dense ideas.
>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.
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.
Ahh wikipedia. Nothing like seeing an article refute itself mid-paragraph.
Question everything
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.
Um, how about this? 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29. That's 7 days, inclusive, and given the GP's statement, the 23rd would be the first day. So you failed twice. First, 23 + 7 is 30, not 31. Second, you forgot the inclusion note.
Don't worry, you're not the first person I've met who fancied himself a nerd and couldn't do date math properly.
...
I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere about nerds not getting dates...now it all makes sense.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Even if you take the creation story 100% literally, nothing would preclude the existence of life elsewhere. (Although the Fermi paradox would not work at all, as it's easily to imagine that any aliens are roughly the same, or lower, level of tech we are, with a 6000 year old universe.)
I mean, the Bible doesn't document everything God has done, and even the most literal reading of it wouldn't support that.
Not to mention the small problem of where all the other people besides Adam and Eve came from. Obviously, if that story is literally true, God made a bunch of other people he (or, rather, his documenter) didn't bother to mention making, so it's hard to see why he'd mention making life hundreds of lightyears away.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It might be "noise", but it's still a distinct power band - not a black body distribution at all.
Fermi's paradox is paradoxically absent any real facts. We know not nearly enough to know if it's even relevant.
For example, one prime assumption is that alien life would communicate on the EM spectrum someplace using technology similar enough to ours to be in a form that we would understand or recognize. Yet dolphins are quite intelligent, and we have no idea what they are saying. If we can't decipher communication in a biological form that's based on the same exact biology as ourselves, that is 99% identical at the cellular level, how can we justify our arrogance in believing that we'd know truly alien communication if we saw it?
Obviously, if we did come across some communication on the EM spectrum that we were to show wasn't some mere physical process, we'd have proof of alien communication or related phenomena. But there's no evidence at all that they would. In fact, it's rather unlikely that we will ourselves, in just a few years: take a look at spread spectrum transmission for a method that we already use today in many uses that would be virtually undetectable by SETI.
Fermi's paradox is based on a large number of assumptions of scale that are, quite frankly pulled from Fermi's backside, and aren't even well supported by technological developments since its inception. They are the best assumptions available, but they demonstrate nothing other than a weak foundation for conjecture.
And if some of those assumptions are already demonstrated irrelevant with applicable technology HERE, TODAY, how can we give Fermi's paradox any more than the time of day?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Odd how Catholicism is the largest Christian denomination in the states: http://www.adherents.com/rel_USA.html#families
I eat Karma for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's why I don't have any.
The real problem is that logic and reason have very little to due with fundamentalist beliefs for any religion.
(Emphasis here on fundamentalist beliefs.)
Send me $1,000. I guarantee you there is a 0.000000000001% chance that I will send you back $1,000,000. Of course, if you don't send me the money, the odds of me paying you are zero. So you should definitely send me the money.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
(In case anyone was wondering, Earth is a Libra.)
Not to nitpick or anything, but the Earth cannot have a zodiac sign, since the latter is usually defined as the constellation in the ecliptic that the Sun was present in. Which presumes that the observer was located on the Earth. Ergo ...
For most believers, God himself could come down from on high and bitchslap them with the truth about the universe and what he/she/it really intended for them, and the'd _still_ keep believing what they are told to believe on Sunday.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
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.
A planet that's right in the mid-range of liquid water. Venus is too hot for liquid water, Mars is too cold.
Then why water, why not another solvent? Because water and carbon compounds allow a much larger number of complex molecules than any other combination. All the experiments performed in laboratories, all the measurements done in astronomic observations have failed to reveal any sort of chemistry even remotely resembling water+carbon chemistry in complexity.
Nature holds no distinction between "can" and "should". Morality is a product of idealism and virtue, both properties primarily ascribed to sentient beings: we have chosen a way to live that we consider "right" (whatever that is) and we are willing to restrict our behavior to accommodate this ideal.
It's one of the noblest things about us, and I hope that sentient extraterrestrial life would also possess a sense of morality. But don't think for a second that nature itself is moral. Nature is completely impartial and completely absolute. How good or evil someone is does not factor into how quickly he falls if he walks off of a cliff.
If that sentient life poses a threat to us, we can attempt to resist to the limits of our power. Should our capacity prove inadequate, we will be destroyed no matter how much morality we possess or how much morality that alien civilization lacks. Is it "ok"? No, it's awful! But that is how reality works. Species go extinct, volcanoes erupt, and people starve despite our best efforts. We can't shape reality by our whims alone; we can only try to change things by working within its rules.
This is true irrespective of religion. Unless you believe God is going to save us from the aliens... in which case maybe He already is, by keeping them from contacting us. Now there's an interesting solution to the Fermi paradox.
Religion and science are fundamentally opposed on the issue of epistemology. In science, everything has to be compatible with observations or it can't be properly claimed to be true. In religion, truth is established by authority: the preacher or the bible or (fill in the blank) says it's true, therefor it's true.
This explains why some people are so enthusiastic about finding errors in religion. Logically, once the flaw is found, the authority is dethroned, and the whole religion should collapse. Alas, religious people can be remarkably immune to logic. So although it is worthwhile to point out religion's inconsistencies (both internal and external), it won't change the mind of most people who want to believe.
As an illustration of the division between religion and reality-based belief systems, consider what happens when something in religion is found to be in incontrovertible agreement with observations. If it's an old event, then the item ceases to be religion and becomes history. If it's some principle of behavior, then it ceases to be religion and becomes part of the soft sciences like psychology or political science, or (worst case) part of the humanities such as ethics. When something is proven, it's no longer religion.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
...Why are we soooo certain that we *want* to be found?...
Anybody intelligent enough to be able to travel throughout this galaxy or beyond, or even just communicate, would certainly study us for awhile. They would have learned by now that we humans are a warlike race that cannot get along with one another even on our own world. Even in our fictionalized scenarios, with imagined technology, such as Star Trek or Star Wars, there is nothing but war and death, such as the destruction of entire planets by some of our imagined technology. Human history provides an absolute guarantee, that if we would meet such an advanced civilization, we would use their technology against them and one another.
All theory is gray
Most Christians? I take issue with that, so here is the obligatory [Citation Needed].
As long as we're talking bullshit, I'd say that most Christians do not take the creation story literally.
Again, either you're not an American, have never been to America, or if you are American, you've spent your entire life in San Francisco. How exactly do you think GW Bush was elected twice? Have you never heard of the "evangelicals", a huge and fast-growing religious/political group? They're not quite big enough to win national elections all by themselves (that's why Obama won this time, since Bush did such a horrible job and the economy's in the toilet), but they're a very large and powerful force. And if you didn't realize it before, "evangelical" equals "fundamentalist".
If you want citations, just google for "evangelical christians in America".
The flip side of this argument is that a species comes to dominance over its own planet through competitive behavior, i.e. aggression. Just because they have superior technology doesn't make them morally superior.
As for what we have to offer? There are a plethora of movies that spell this out: natural resources, a habitable planet, an enslavable population. What do you think our own warlike, inferior race would do if, say, Mars were humanly inhabitable tomorrow? Crossing the ocean in the 1500s to settle the New World was a scary proposition, and yet the Europeans didn't let that stop them. It was precisely their ambition, competition with their neighbors, and their desire to claim the wealth of those new lands that drove them to do it, even with primitive technology.
Peaceful races may fail to contact us not because of their moral superiority, but because they lack the incentive to bother.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Wrong.
Faith can be falsified quite easily. I once had faith that creationism was the truth. I read plenty of books and pamphlets to back up that idea. But then one day, it occurred to me that in order for creationism to be the truth, there had to be a vast scientific conspiracy out there, ranging from paleontologists to biologists.
So I started paying attention to science.
I now know that I was incorrect. My faith was wrong. I was blind and now I see.
Anybody intelligent enough to be able to travel throughout this galaxy or beyond, or even just communicate, would certainly study us for awhile. They would have learned by now that we humans are a warlike race that cannot get along with one another even on our own world. Even in our fictionalized scenarios, with imagined technology, such as Star Trek or Star Wars, there is nothing but war and death, such as the destruction of entire planets by some of our imagined technology. Human history provides an absolute guarantee, that if we would meet such an advanced civilization, we would use their technology against them and one another.
Typical that some guilt ridden touchy feely sentiment gets modded insightful here.
The entire premise that some advanced civilization would evaluate humanity on it's ability to get along is ludicrous. Wasn't that the whole storyline of the Q in TNG?
If we are going to start asserting crap like this, then it would be equally valid to suggest that we are the equivalent of the 98 lb. freshman nerd of the universe and that we've been stuffed in our own locker. How about that instead of our galactic neighbors being worried about our 'warlike' nature we have been shunned for being a bunch of weak ass little pussies? Maybe they are just waiting for us to sort out our little squabbles so they can deal with the one with big enough balls to kick the crap out of everyone else. There is NO basis to suggest that either of these scenarios are more or less likely.
I'll buy just about ANY technological explanation before you'll convince me that we are being left alone because some advanced civilization who can hear our signal is essentially scared of dealing with us. Honestly, the suggestion itself is the height of conceit.
Politicians are like diapers - they should be changed frequently and for the same reasons.