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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?"
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?
...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.
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.
"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...
But they would have to be within earth's range in the last 100 years or so for them to detect us. "Billions of years" means they could have existed on Venus before humanity ever showed up, for all we know. If they were that close, the signals would have long since passed us by at the point we were discovering fire.
Or they could have been reasonably nearby, but too far for the signal to reach us without fading out completely.
Or they could be using a different form of communication than we are able to perceive.
So, honestly, "expecting" anything is a little silly and assumes far too much.
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.
The point is you don't need to have a population that is astoundingly wedded to the idea of spreading out across the stars. You need a tiny, tiny fraction of the population to be wedded to the idea - just a handful of pioneering types who are okay with being placed in stasis for a few centuries, or raising their children and grandchildren inside a giant hollow cylinder. If you can find 500 people every few years who are willing to do something like the above, you will eventually become a pan-galactic civilization.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
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.
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.
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.
The 1,000 year thing seems like the weak point of this theory.
Actually, the estimate of the probability of the kind of intelligence that makes complex machines is a bigger problem, and a plausible solution to the paradox.
We have ample evidence that if a thing is possible at all, evolution will reproduce it many times. Wings, fins, eyes... all of these optima have been found many times, across genera and families and whatnot. By one estimate the eye has evolved independently a couple of dozen times, based on the proteins used in the retinal structure.
There was an article here on /. a while back pointing out that two birds previously believed to be related were the result of convergent evolution. Evolution finds the same optima over and over again.
The kind of intelligence that makes complex machines has evolved on Earth exactly once, and that is the only kind that is of interest in Fermi's Paradox.
Furthermore, the current best guess at the evolutionary driver of kind of intelligence that makes complex machines is that it's a peacock's tail, and extravagant sexual display that had relatively little utility outside of attracting a mate or two. Therefore the whole "making complex machines" aspect of our intelligence is more-or-less an accident, not the result of direct selective pressure at all.
Men are very slightly better at some spacial reasoning than women because we hunted more, maybe, but that very slight difference is a measure of how little practical, non-sexual, selective pressure their actually was.
So based on what we know at the moment about the kind of intelligence that makes complex machines it seems likely that the resolution to Fermi's Paradox is that it is unbelievably rare. We may well be the only species to have such an intelligence in our galaxy, although even I have a hard time believing we're the only one in the universe. It could be, though.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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
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.