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Fewer Than 10 ET Civilizations In Our Galaxy?
Al writes "The Fermi Paradox focuses on the existence of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy. If these civilizations are out there — and many analyses suggest the galaxy should be teeming with life — why haven't we seen them? Carlos Cotta and Álvaro Morales from the University of Malaga in Spain investigate another angle by considering the speed at which a sufficiently advanced civilization could colonize the galaxy. Various analyses suggest that using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, the colonization wavefront could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy. Others have calculated that it may be closer to 13 billion years, which may explain ET's absence. Cotta and Morales study how automated probes sent ahead of the colonization could explore the galaxy. If these probes left evidence of a visit that lasts for 100 million years, then there can be no more than about 10 civilizations out there."
Fewer Than 10 ET Civilizations In Our Galaxy?
All this is assuming that we would know immediately if there were a 50-100 million year old alien probe in our solar system's backyard. Stack that on top of all the non-empirical data based percentages that go into the Fermi paradox and ...
*puts on Twilight Zone music*
Human beings are the alien probe!
And man, we had better start compiling that report that's due when Quetzalcoatl/Jesus/Osiris/Thoth/Viracocha get back here. He's gonna be pissed when he sees that we just threw a huge party and trashed the place instead of assessing the resources!
My work here is dung.
Sumary of the article: we pull numbers out of thin air and imagine stuff in consequence. I did a lot of that kind of "what if" as a kid with friends.
Cotta and Morales study how automated probes sent ahead of the colonization could explore the galaxy. If these probes left evidence of a visit that lasts for 100 million years, then there can be no more than about 10 civilizations out there
Maybe there are more, but the rest are afraid of running into an advanced civilization who'll treat them as cattle
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
I wonder why should one consider a colonisation of the whole Galaxy? Isn't it a too damn big territory to defend - explore - colonize? Without talking about the astronomical (ha ha) amount of human (E.T.) resources it would take to launch such an enterprise!
What kind of asshole would put all that huge expanse of the universe out there and so utterly cut us off from it?
We've known there to be at most 10 civilizations ever since Master of Orion. A typical scenario is more like 6 though.
We should start bumping into Vulcans in about 54 years... Zefram Cochrane should be born pretty soon... then we'll know.
Nice point in general, but worthless without estimating the chances of finding these probes. A 100 million year old probe would not necessarily be easy to find even if it wants to be found and landed on earth.
I remember reading an interesting book called "The Science of Star Wars" that discussed the real life issues with the technology and situations in the original trilogy. This covered everything from the theoretical sciences behind the technologies like lightsabers, blasters, and lightspeed to the possibilities of existence of other life out there. I haven't read this book in a very long time and I don't have access to it at the moment, but I seem to remember it indicating that the odds of finding another planet with water, breathable air, and the exact distance from a sun necessary to help life flourish were so extremely low as to be laughable.
I remember thinking even then how short-sighted that was and how arrogant it seemed.
I realize these things are supposed to be scientific so they use only what they know to be fact, however, I think when dealing with complete unknowns such as the type of life out there or what their technology level may be at, you have to start thinking outside the box and be a bit more imaganitive.
Who is to say, for example, what form other life will take? Would we even recognize it as life if we were standing right next to it? What about their technology? Who is to say that they haven't gotten past the lightspeed issues with relativity and energy required? Perhaps they have stealth technologies... would we even be able to detect them? Just because we don't know how to do it now, and just because our current science says it probably isn't possible, doesn't mean it can't be done.
We pretty much know what rocks and ice look like. If the aliens aren't spectacularly good at masquerading as rock and ice, we'll recognize them.
That's a great line from the lyrics of a Clutch song, and it's forced me to ask the question: "What would life be like today, if the moment we invented radio/television we started receiving 60yo broadcast transmissions from another planet?"
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
This assumes that said ET's operate only in the 3D realm. What about wormholes, space folding and other theoretical methods that our limited understanding of physics doesn't allow us to see? Quit being such a downer. If Tesla was still alive I'm sure we'd have commerce with these ET's. Cheers...
So when did this mysterious 50 million years mark start? yesterday? 10 million years ago? 49? 65 million years ago?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Why would thsee ET like civilizations would be any different in their evolutionary development than humans? If this is the case, than many intelligent species will most likely follow the path that we seem to be on. With varying religious factions/greed/war/and depletion of natural resources reaching a point where they kill themselves.
Maybe there was a civiliation considerably more advanced than us, but whose to say they didn't destroy themselves by electing leaders who entered into wars over natural resources?
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
... that these probes already have and are seen by old ladies and drunks in the Arizona desert all the time!
I am curious as to what evidence these alien probes would leave if they don't land and stay on a planet. If they just fly around, collect data and phone it home we would never see them.
Even landing, unless they landed on Earth, our Moon or Mars, how would we see it? I'm not even certain our own probes can spot our own rovers on Mars. Lets say they did put a probe down on earth (like our mars rover) say recently, like 100,000,000 years ago; it could easily be hidden under a kilometer of dirt and rocks and never be found. Time, like space, is vast.
ETs visited ancient peoples, didn't like what they saw, and isolated us from the rest of the universe.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Most, no all, of this Fermi Paradox/Drake Equation nonsense is just that. Nonsense. It certainly isn't science, as anyone with a smidgen of education can see by the ten orders of magnitude that the various estimates for the probability of alien life span.
This study says fewer than 10. Well, I say more than 10,000. And who is to say I'm wrong? I can dress up my estimate with Polar charts, statistical studies and differential equations too if you like. However, none of my investigations will bring me, or anyone else any closer to the truth.
As time goes by and our promised moon bases fail to materialise, the concept of the Von-Neumann wave is looking increasingly ridiculous. The idea that 1950's technology can propagate a species across a galaxy is supposedly sound in theory(I doubt even that), but shaky in practice. The idea of automated probes is also pretty unlikely considering the snails pace at which AI research has progressed.
Science fiction is all very well, but it has no place in Science. You don't see scientists talking about fairies, or wizards, or goblins over the course of their work. So why should they talk about aliens and colonization waves, which are no less fantastic?
This type of fuzzy science seems to have become popular after the 1960/70's, Carl Sagan, and probably one too many LSD trips. I thought things like the Heaven's Gate and Scientology would discredit this unwise intrusion of fantasy into serious scientific work, but studies like this, and the unwillingness of many scientists to leave their sci-fi novels at home have taught me otherwise.
May the Maths Be with you!
The only motive force we have reasonably identified yet that allows us to achieve something like .1 of c is a nuclear rocket composed of fission (or fusion) devices against a pusher plate. I imagine that just a few probes of this sort would exhaust the accessible fissile resources of a particular planet. This would seem hugely wasteful for the civilization in question. The general assumption seems to be that the civilization(s) in question would have come up with some motive force unknown or not mastered by us. But why is this always the assumption? Because to assume otherwise is unimaginative?
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Maybe we just can't see them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Various analyses suggest that using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, the colonization wavefront could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy.
They really think that 1/10 the speed of light is all Alien civilizations could muster? That seems very short sighted to me. It should at least be figured at 1/2, if not faster than the speed of light. There are scientist, Including Steven Hawking, that say Warp drive may be possible. It amazes me that because we haven't figured out a way to easily go faster than 1/10 the speed of light, then that must be the limit.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
A good summary. Especially since they assume because we sent out a "identifier" once, that it is logical that all other civ's would continuously do that, just in case things change, and some youngsters show up. Instead of 1) send probes, get the info you want (or trash your orbit with satellites and crap so you can't lunch anything else) and give up, staying in your own solar system.
Not to mention we only see stuff at the speed of light, if they only send stuff at 1/10 the speed of light. Anyone over a thousand light years away hasn't even seen any signs of life in our galaxy yet, let alone had a chance to respond in a manner that we will then be able to see for a few thousand more light years.
Scientific observation would say there are less than 2.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/teeming
This assumes a sufficiently advanced civilization could survive itself for a sufficient span. Taking the only advanced civilizations we know into account - the human race - I don't see how its realistic to expect survival into the "millions of years" range.
I'd put forth that any civilization advanced enough to develop such technological advances, would kill itself long before such technology develops. Our current modus operandi is not sustainable millions of years out, and using the human race as a basis, I think it laughable to consider the possibility of survival for millions of years. The oldest human remains are what, about 160,000 years old? Might we be getting ahead of ourselves speaking about intelligent life colonizing the galaxy?
Crocodiles on the other hand - those bastards are believed to be around 200 million years old. They've exhibited a much better understanding for what it takes to survive long term (of course we're doing a pretty good job of killing them too - you can say people are bad at somethings, but everyone has to admit we're really good at killing other stuff). If crocs could somehow work space travel into their lifestyle, this could lead to something...
Overclockers
It's always seemed to me that the major hole in the Fermi paradox is the assumption that technologically advanced alien civilizations would be emitting signals we would recognize.
I mean it's kinda hubristic to assume they want to talk to us. After all we may study chimps but we don't go out of our way to show up in the middle of nowhere to say hello. That leaves the question of why we don't detect communication leakage, e.g., radio signals they use for communication. However, not only is it not obvious that they would use radio to communicate, or that we could recognize such signals, but it's not even obvious they would bother to colonize the galaxy or communicate between planets.
For example suppose that sufficiently advanced civilizations transform themselves into some form of 'computational' life. Such a civilization couldn't care less about planents or minerals. What would matter to them is processing power per unit volume. It would therefore make sense for such civilizations to seek out the regions with the highest energy density that would allow them to access the most processing power. Rather than racing around the galaxy in starships and living at the same crawlingly slow pace we do such civilizations might exist entirely in the high energy regions in neutron stars or around black holes. So why would we expect to meet them. Hell, even if they care about meeting aliens too the aliens they care about are probably the ones who already inhabit similar regions.
Even if we think it's reasonable to assume aliens are sending messages all over the galaxy the more efficiently such messages are encoded the harder it will be for us to identify them. The closer such transmissions approach the Shannon limit for the communications channel the harder they would be to distinguish from random noise (and we don't know enough to rule out a natural source). Also the more effective use they made of their communications equipment the less stray signal that would wash the earth, even if it was encoded in radio instead of neutrinos or something weird (some papers have suggested neutrinos would be a better long range communication method).
The point is that even if we take for granted that there a fucktons of advanced alien civilizations around it just doesn't follow that we should be able to detect them.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
...and we haven't been back since. Beyond the question of how long it would take a motivated civilization to expand throughout the galaxy, there's the question of "would they bother?". We don't seem to be bothering.
I don't remember the novel it came from, but one SF writer had a bunch of human explorers run across pretty, slowly shifting, crystaline patterns floating as thin films on the surfaces of otherwise sterile oceans in a chemically exotic environment. Human initial response was pretty much limited to 'Ooooh shiny!" After weeks of scanning the whole planet and crunching numbers, one of the ship's scientists announces there is a sophisticated civilization with billions of participants encoded in each crystal mat, and has to prepare a computer emulation translated into experiential modes the humans can better understand before anyone else will believe it.
Who is John Cabal?
2. War on. Radio silence.
3. Wrong physics. Outside the bow-shock of a sun, radio works a lot different than we thought.
4. Cheap FTL communication happens to be just around the corner.
5. They are life, but not-as-we-know it and don't know about radio. Examples: Dark Matter, Live on a sun, live on a black whole. Note all three of these things are more common (on a mass basis) than planets.
6. Powerful, rich, major religion/government objects to radio and shuns those that use it, trades freely with those that avoid it.
7. Radio is deadly poison to one of the major alien species.
8. Most races are born telepathic.
9. Radio turns out to to cause global warming. (OK, this one is a bit silly.)
10. Industrial processes moved off world act as a radio scrambler/jammer. Races still use radio within their world, but their signals are jammed by the intereference from say the cheap production of anti-matter scramble the signals.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
This analysis is getting better than past ones, but still has the fatal flaw of assuming temporal synchronicity -- civilizations all achieve roughly the same level of technology withing light/travel time.
This patently false: not only is space unfathomably vast, but so is _TIME_. A civilization could have been born, grown, flurished and _died_ right next door 1 million years ago and we would _never_ know about it. The universe is ~115 billion years old. Lots of time for flares to get lost.
If they used automated probes, then once those probes developed sentience, met up, and then revolted, there are no more alien civilizations
Xaotik Designs
If the other civilizations are anything like ours, they've deemed space travel and otherworldly colonization too expensive, too time consuming and too costly. If we ever move from our planet to spread out in the galaxy, it will most likely be due to either contact with another civilization that has finally taken that plunge, or due to catastrophe that has forced us to abandon our home or at least look for a new one. Can we really expect other civilizations to be anymore reckless with their money and resources than we can expect from ourselves?
Once the Singularity kicks in, we will expand at the speed of light in all directions.
And the same would any other more advanced civilization.
The reality is, there isn't much life out there.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Read http://www.mangafox.com/manga/2001_nights/ for a very believable view of leaving Earth, and the things scientific development could cause us to. All sorts of great interlinked short stories covering things like different drive mechanics, colony ships, sleeper ships, seed ships, FTL, terraforming etc etc. A great read, at times hard scifi, at times more fantastical.
Yay me!
If they are advanced enough to visit our planet, they are probably want to study us more than anything else, pretty much like when we want to study animals in our own planet. And the best way to study those 'animals' is to not let them see you, right? They won't make contact with us perhaps because they couldn't find the effective way to communicate with us. I mean, just like we can't find the way to effectively communicate with the animals in the jungle we are studying.
If you don't believe me, just ask Lars.
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
-Calvin
People have been talking about and "calculating" these chances for decades at least, and the answers have consistently been bouncing back and forth between "thousands" and "one" civilization. Every single article on the subject has the same bottom line: we don't know.
I guess it was very short. *cough* Parsecs */cough*.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My pet theory:
Every civilization, however manifest, goes through pretty much the same process of scientific development. At some point some scientist invariably tries something which wipes out the entire population. Recall those about to detonate the first nuclear bomb worrying about exactly this outcome...
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
To make the same point differently why wouldn't advanced alien civilizations just stay home and play in their virtual worlds rather than go colonize the galaxy and separate themselves from their community. I mean if your advanced enough to engage in serious galactic colonization you are advanced enough that you don't need to worry about natural disasters destroying your residence.
Hell, even if the aliens are curious about what might have evolved in other solar systems it might be easier to let perfectly described solar systems evolve in simulation than to actually go visit them. They can see interesting creatures evolve just as easily in simulation as in reality.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
You know, it's also possible that we are the only civilization sufficiently advanced enough to think about these things in this corner of the galaxy.
A couple of things come to mind when everyone starts saying that life out there is impossibly to hard to get to or that it's too far away. One is that based on our current understanding of the universe there are over ten dimensions to space and we have a grasp of four and a shortcut in a fifth to cover super fluidity. Only recently has a math been developed that can even cover the higher orders of energetic states let alone say definitively that there's nothing better. Hell, String theory itself is still being developed. The LHC is going to start to find out some serious answers about some hypothetical elements of our universe including event horizon theories and wether gravitons exists etc. Give them a freaking chance to work first.
The second is that everything we do now for communications works on radio waves. We've had those for what, 150 years or so? Give us another 50 and I think we'll be using quantum entangled particles to transmit data over long distances. Our radio usage would shrink to almost a zero state. So if WE are this close to not using radio waves anymore what makes everyone think that an "Advanced" society out there would have built their civilization around a tech that is for shit when it leaves the solar system. How much interference is there from things like pulsars and general radiation? Wouldn't you as an engineer want something with a little less static to compensate for? If we can produce quarks and other "esons" couldn't we use those near speed of light particles as transmitters of information instead?
It seems like all of these studies about extra terrestrial civilizations are being validated by 1950's cereal box science.
Later incorporated into his novel Diaspora
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The summary says " If these probes left evidence of a visit that lasts for 100 million years, then there can be no more than about 10 civilizations out there."
With the implication we are talking advanced civilizations.
Just as our planet has been teaming with life for millions of years, there could be millions of planets in our galaxy with life, some even intelligent. They would not qualify as the 10 advanced civilizations.
In the context of the universe, however, I have to think that life is abundant. If the universe if infinite, then there should also be infinite varieties of life.
The Fermi paradox should consider the simple fact that while aliens may build new civilizations on other planets in their local solar system they probably wont bother to explore the entire galaxy. Why? Because it will always be much cheaper for any civilization to build near to home and never run out of room. Never needing to go beyond 1 or 2 star systems.
And when they do get to a new system they would probably want to stay a while.. A few thousand years , or more , before moving on.
The coral model says it could take 50 million years but practically it probably takes so long it isnt worth the effort.
A civilization needs to devote a lot of resources to space travel:
1) Energy
2) Metal and other materials
3) Human resources such as scientists and engineers
Usually, the whole point of exploring and colonizing other planets is to make up for a lack of resources, such as minerals. It's effectively a chicken-and-egg problem.
I'm sure once we run out of resources, we won't have enough left over to start exploring space.
This space left intentionally blank.
Visit Orion's Arm for an idea what populating the galaxy might be like.
http://www.orionsarm.com/
This is not the sig you're looking for.
Isn't that a Star Trek movie plot?
...enjoy the thought process many people take on things like this. "Well, we can't find anything there or see anything there, so it must not exist." That is the basic argument against life outside our galaxy. Sure, it's a nice and convenient argument until you apply it to God. We can't see him, we can't find him so surely this means he doesn't exist, right?
There is visual proof of them being on the Moon, and next year we will have Jupiter turn into a second star in our solar system. 2010
Say we send out signals for 100 years now. Who says we keep doing that for ever and ever? Could well be that we find a more efficient way to send messages to somewhere. Let us assume that we go to the skies, who says we will leave our galaxy?
If we do not even know if WE will do such a thing, who knows what OTHERS want to do?
The Europeans are very much about broadening their horizons since, well almost forever. The Chinese where happy where they were, even if they could have gone and conquered the world much earlier.
So who know there are many civilizations out there and they just don't care to show up. Took us a log time to find another civilization and those by accident, not because we we looking for them and they were not looking for us.
And that is on one small world.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You should know the universal greeting as actually Bah Weep Graaagnah Wheep Ni Ni Bong
bomb the us up set someone
I read the earlier version back when it was called Horton Hears a Who. ;-P
Sweet informative mod.
We prefer the term Earthicans
bomb the us up set someone
>>> ... using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, the colonization wavefront could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy.
We haven't even kept the same radio or television systems for more than 100 years, or kept spaceflight active for 50 years; do you really think that any one civilization could last for 50 million years? There might be ongoing propagation, but there would be so much change it would be like little kids playing "telephone".
And the idea that we are the descendants of a colonization or crash-landing go back to 1940's or 1950's science fiction, well before Battlestar: Galactica.
.. I guess they are referring to that movie "Galaxy Odyssey 2000" :)
...fucktons of advanced alien civilizations...
I bet the Fuckton homeworld gets lots of tourism. Especially if they're "advanced" in the way I think they are...
The whole "Paradox" is based on an unwarranted assumption: that all intelligent species would build automated probes to spread their species all over the universe.
Look at the one example of an intelligent species that we have: humanity. We can build automated probes. We haven't even seriously considered building extra-solar probes to spread our genes. It's not a priority.
Frankly, it's NEVER going to be a priority, because there is no emotional investment in sending a bunch of genetic material off into space with an uncertain destination. If you could slap a bunch of people onto a starship and zip them to a fresh world, then we'd see some drive to colonize. But automated probes? What's the point? What's the benefit to the society that sends them out?
The only thing I'd think that would provoke us into trying something like that is a Songs of Distant Earth-style ELE, that we can see coming 200 years in advance.
Otherwise, societies are too self-absorbed to dedicate those sort of resources to a goal that will have ZERO benefit to them or their descendants.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
What would it mean?
Really?
And putting things in that perspective, doesn't it make a whole lot of what humans do to each other on a global and political scale seem rather... well... foolish?
Just a thought.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's always seemed to me that the major hole in the Fermi paradox is the assumption that technologically advanced alien civilizations would be emitting signals we would recognize.
Absolutely right!
I've argued this for years...given exponential progress, the period of time an alien civilization would even be recognizable yet detectable at a distance can probably be measured in decades, centuries at the outside. It's possible to imagine all kinds of Ascendance Scenarios where a species transcends its biological (and perhaps physical) form altogether, whether it's becoming digital life living in the Virtual, transcendent life encoding itself into the basic fabric of space-time (and thereby perhaps doing an end run around the "death by entropy/expansions/big crunch" apacolypse...or not, if that space-time is smacked by the incoming brane of another universe on a collision course, but I digress...), or--arguably most likely--some form we'd have as much difficulty imagining as the victorians would our notion of digital life.
This galaxy alone could be teaming with life. If a civilization progresses from the industrial revolution to transcendence in, say, 400 Earth years on average (and from their first radio broadcast to transcendence in, say, 200 years), there could be many thousands of cultures out there right now, and over the course of the past 13 or so billion years, many millions in this galaxy alone, and none of them would ever be detectable by us during this phase of our existence. Indeed, few if any would ever meet one another during this phase of their existence ... perhaps as you surmise they might meet in a common post-transcendent medium, or perhaps not (there may be many more options for transcending this universe than there are species to transcend, making it very unlikely that any two civilizations would ever meet or recognize each other at any point during their evolution). Who knows? What we do know is there are plenty of ways for civilizations to thrive, and be commonplace, without them ever being able to detect, much less encounter, one another.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
At some point, you want to avoid a single point of failure. A very advanced civilization is probably aware that they cannot predict every type of violent action in the universe, so the more spread out they are, the more likely they are to survive, even if they've found a way to keep their energy source in stasis and blow up asteroids reliably.
This is assuming some type of humanoid life form that can't live on the sun or function just fine without atmosphere. Perhaps we are surrounded by aliens who are on different timescales.
The closest alien life is on the planet Nibiru which will collide with Earth in 2012, also, the Royal Family are a reptilian race from outer space. The Sumerian scripts provide ample evidence of this Didn't you know that already! Read the work of Zachariah Sitchen ;-)
Sorry... Had to...
If we take the Drake Equation, which is pretty solid to begin with but still makes some pretty broad assumptions, and we plug in seven completely unknown values which we have no possible way of determining experimentally or observationally, then we arrive at a final value which is the number of civilizations we should have contact with.
It looks something like this:
N = (I don't know) x (Beats me) x (Your guess is as good as mine) x (We have no way of knowing this) x (We have even less chance of knowing this than the last one) x (Let's just roll dice here) x (What are you, kidding me?)
And the news is that two guys from the U of Malaga have solved the equation for N.
The whole principle makes me want to misquote Ghandi:
"What is your opinion of Human civilization?" "I think it would be a wonderful idea."
I've read a lot of good points and a lot of absolute rubbish in this thread, but what I'm struck by the most is by the "wrongness" of some of the numbers provided by the posters.
Earth's population is not "over 8 billion", earliest human evidence is quite a bit over 160,000 years, and the universe is ~15 billion years old, NOT 115 billion.
Ahh, the numbers, they hurtz mah brainz.
Car Deal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNmi-bBhWG8
You read all these sci-fi books about how "a civilization far older than our own" shows up to visit. (For good or otherwise!) There has to be a first civilization, though. Maybe we are the first civilization! Maybe we'll be the "older, wiser" species that, in 1000 years or so, is visiting (and likely making war on, for resources) other planets!
We still haven't killed ourselves.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Every article I see about extraterrestrial life seems to assume that the ETs are like us in some way or another. A desire to colonize the universe, or a desire to contact other life. Maybe they just want to be left alone in their solar system. Maybe they have evolved an "exploring is dangerous" gene and sat on their own planet for millions of years without every looking at the sky and wondering if there was anything else there. We have no idea what aliens are like because we've never seen one, and speculating about them without any evidence is totally unscientific. Please show me a repeatable experiment in accordance with the scientific method to demonstrate anything whatsoever about alien life, then maybe I'll start reading these articles.
I have to agree with the parent here - mainstream scientists usually state that the life they are seeking is indeed the type of life we know here on Earth, i.e. carbon-based and requiring water and temperatures in roughly the same amounts that we do. "Alive" is defined by our own experience, and science will only expand that definition if other forms of life - life that, for example, could exist in Saturn's chemical bath and doesn't require water and direct sunlight - are discovered and then understood to actually be living beings. But it's not what they're looking for today, even if the unimagined and never-encountered is out there.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
It's that egocentric way of thinking in movies and such that create some bad ideas in the first place:
1. What if life cycle of an alien specie is 100 000 earth years? Our civilisation would seem like a spark on earth, rather than something really happening there. Or if it was lot faster, it would seem to tham as a landscape... Time perception is relative. It's thing to have in mind when thinking aliens.
2. We are expecting all aliens to see, hear, touch.. etc. But who knows what kind of perception they use to find their way.
3. Think long term: what if peak of our civilization doesn't colide with peak of their civilization? Like now they are at chimp level, and we are peeking. But in 10 000 years we will probably destroy ourself with a war or some meteor will wipe us back to amoeba. Life is cycling process, so why expect civilization to be any different? It IS an extension of life.
Bottom line: I do believe in existence of aliens. I just doubt that we are going to meet them. Or, if we meet them, we probably won't notice them.
Odds of being out there another civilization could need more hypothesis than is taken into account than i.e. our planet is in this region of solar system or the sun is in the right place in its lifecycle. Maybe our civilization got this stage because we have so big moon orbiting our planet, we have gas giants in the outer orbits of the solar system, the volcanic activity is not very strong in the last 70k years, and other factors that reduce odds, and then increase distance between civilizations (and then time to reach/detect/etc). And speaking of time, that matter for civilizations too, as they could die (even if they spread in their solar system, something happening to their sun, or something big happening in a close enough sun could be lethal). So you should take into account the time frame that a civilization could last.
And if well other civilizations probably don't use dollars as money, economy matters too, as you probably will need plenty of resources (and some could be rare) to go to space, physically explore, reach other planets, contact other civilizations, etc. Could be someone else out there, but the phone bill is so damn expensive that we will never meet him.
Carlos Cotta and Álvaro Morales from the University of Malaga in Spain...suggest that using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, the colonization wavefront could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
- Arthur C. Clarke
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
Otherwise, societies are too self-absorbed to dedicate those sort of resources to a goal that will have ZERO benefit to them or their descendants.
It sucks for scientific types, for sure, but the best way to get the masses emotionally committed to space flight and space exploration is through religion. There's no more historically proven way that motivates people to build and explore for future purposes than the prospect of being able to worship your lord and impose his law as your religious customs see fit to do so. In 1620, it wasn't a bunch of scientists on board the Mayflower, it was a bunch of religious fanatics. In my site I'm going to go all out religion for space exploration as a national priority and argue in this order:
a) The Lord gave us the vast resources of the Heavens to use.
b) The Earth is a crowd and dank cesspool of sin.
c) You can establish a more Godly society on another planet.
d) You can re-create the American Experiment the way the founding fathers intended.
This is my sig.
When thinking of whether we humans would be able to detect the arrival of an alien probe, we should all mediate on the parable of the G'Gugvuntts and Vl'hurgs:
... [t]he two opposing battle fleets decided to settle their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our galaxy, now positively identified as the source of the offending remark. For thousands of years the mighty starships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the planet Earth - where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time.
All the more reason to advance robotics enough to support embryonic space colonization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo_space_colonization or stasis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasis_(fiction). A time will come when humans will need sufficiently advanced robots to care for them on any journey outside of this solar system. If humans have sights on galactic colonization, robotic hosts managing preserved human bodies or embryos will be mandatory.
bjourne points out: "They assume that alien civilizations would grow exponentially like humanity. To maintain exponential growth the civilization would inevitably have to colonize other planets, other solar systems and even other galaxies."
What they really assume is that the laws of physics apply broadly across the cosmos. Darwin and Malthus do the rest.
The real question is how hard it is to jump the gap from one world to the next. Science fiction authors assume this is not only possible but relatively easy, because otherwise they would have no story to write. Travel (of the few) within the solar system seems plausible. Travel (of the many) to neighboring stars is far beyond daunting.
Consider Malthusian growth: Our population today is 6.602 billion souls. The current growth rate is 1.167% per annum. (Numbers are a couple of years old - it doesn't change the result.) Do the math.
Today there were 210,000 more souls and 6000 tons more human flesh pressing inward on Mother Earth than yesterday. Tomorrow there will be 210,000 more. The day after - another 210,000. In six months that will be 211,000 per day - in a year, 212,000 per day, and so forth and so on. Less than a year from now there will be another 1.8 million tons of human flesh literally shouldering other species into extinction. That's not 1.8 million tons total - that's just the additional growth of skin and hair and sinew and good red meat locked up in your mama's Soylent Green recipe.
For space travel to matter in the solution of this problem, we have to build a fleet of ships capable of offloading 210,000 people - a new space fleet every day, year after year - forever. A space shuttle carries a crew of seven - so we need 30,000 space shuttles a day. (Of course, that only gets you to low Earth orbit.) Each year we would have to move at least that 1.8 million tons of human cold cuts - that's the equivalent of 18 Nimitz class aircraft carriers - to some other distant, unwelcoming world.
And then, of course, you've just shifted the horizon of the always looming catastrophe to a collection of planets rather than a single planet. Since this is a doubling issue, colonizing another planet - say, a terraformed Venus - just buys you an additional 60 years.
If we do we'll have to come in on Saturday.... ummmm, yeaaaah...
Government - If you think the problems we create are bad, you should see our solutions!
using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light
Dude, what about teleportation?
This leaves two possibilities:
In that case, the 'wave of probing' would take a long time. MUCH longer than 50 Million years. That doesn't even mention colonization. Just probes.
If they couldn't determine is measly old Sol could be habitable, they would fly by it.
Maybe they went by without stopping. Stopping is expensive. "Nothing to see here, folks. Move along" or "Mostly Harmless".
Have any of these people ever tried to 'fly from star to star?" I'm referring to simulations such as Celestia where you can set any speed you like and go. Try 50LY/sec. Once you do that, you realize that colonization would not be a "wave", but more like a liquid soaking into a ShamWow(R), where colonizers are the liquid.
Very much agree here. So many assumptions are made about "life" and what is required for it.. oxygen, water, 'organic' molecules. That is life ON EARTH, and the only form we understand to date. Without even being able to define "life" with any certainty, how on Earth can we pretend to know what form it can take or under what conditions it must exist? More assumptions are made that any life that forms MUST progress to a technological civilization, feel the need to expand and consume more and more resources, be potentially aggressive and/or hostile, and have similar desires and egos. In other words, we create them in our own image. Very short sighted.
The Milky Way Galaxy is one *huge* place. According to a Wikipedia entry, it's roughly 39 million million cubic light years in size. That's *huge.* Considering how huge it is, even if there were literally hundreds of intelligent civilizations out there, each randomly sending out sublight probes into deep space, the chances that we would encounter any single one of them is vanishingly small, simply due to the sizes involved.
As for radio transmissions, if we want to assume that every civilization began to produce radio transmissions at roughly the same time- a huge assumption, I know- then it could well take up to a hundred thousand years for one of those transmissions to be picked up by an Earth-bound radio telescope. And, even that's assuming that the signal wouldn't be too faint to detect.
If we did happen to stumble upon ETs, it's likely to not only be blind luck, but ridiculously improbable at that. Not impossible, mind you, but ridiculously improbable.
-Z
Look, we can't send people. We'll probably never be able to send people.
Why not? If you travel at near light speed, you can pretty much go anywhere. Who cares if the rest of the world passes you by buy a few thousand years if you wind up ahead of anyone else on your own planet?
This is my sig.
On a space vessel that hosts preserved human bodies, embryos or their digital DNA components, robots and databanks could also preserve elements and histories of civilization as well. A vessel travels across the galaxy seeding planets with packages of humanity and the information to continue where the old civ left off. Any new civ could change and adapt along the way due to new interpretations by it's decendants, but the potential for the foundation, the essence of the old civ to survive and be an influance with each new civ instance is there.
Oh man, so many Futurama quotes come to mind.
On a more serious note though, I agree with a quote from the movie Contact.
br> Young Ellie: "Dad, do you think there's people on other planets?"
Ted Arroway: I don't know, Sparks. But I guess I'd say if it is just us... seems like an awful waste of space.
It's always seemed to me that the major hole in the Fermi paradox is the assumption that technologically advanced alien civilizations would be emitting signals we would recognize.
In common with authors the wrote the cited paper, and most commentators on the subject (and virtually everyone who claims to have a "resolution" for the Fermi Paradox), the above comment fails to understand the essence of the Fermi Paradox -- what actually makes it profoundly paradoxical.
The Fermi Paradox does not assume that "technologically advanced alien civilizations" (in general) "would be emitting signals we would recognize". The paradox lies in the fact that the Universe is a very big, and very old place and as far as we can tell none of them do (if they ever existed at all).
Are you proposing that there is some sort of the universal law of nature that decrees no civilization anywhere in the Universe will make detectable and recognizable signals of any kind, intentionally or unintentionally? After all it only takes one single ancient civilization anywhere to take a course of development that creates a detectable signal for any reason to overturn the Fermi Paradox.
Attempting to dismiss it by claiming that civilizations exist, but that no civilization ever makes human-detectable signals, begs the question (in one of the original and correct senses of the term): it attempts refutation by assuming an unsupported premise (in this case two of them) : 1) that they do exist, but and an arbitrary special universal law holds that prevents any from being detected.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I have always hated this kind of hyperbole.
What they mean to say is that there are at most 10 civilizations hell-bent on exploring the galaxy. There could be millions that don't give a flying crap about us for all we know. Why do they have to have the same motivations that we have? Once they've hit 3 or 4 solar systems what will they find in others that they couldn't in their own? Or floating out in freespace? Why would we assume EVERY civilization will become motivated to expend all that energy to explore?
Not laughable.
there are over 70 sextillion stars. If the chance are 1 in a trillion we would ahve a galaxy teaming with intelligent life; however, That's over the period of 13 billion years.
All evidence point to species becmoing ectinct sooner or later. so what are the odds of an intellegent species surviving to a point where they can send out probes?
Even if a civilization created a probe that is trying to be fouind, it would still be very, very, very hard to detect, assuming it gets close enough to be detected.
We've only been able to look for radio technology for less then 100 years, and only beena ctivly looking for non-terrestrial radio signals for about 30.
Imagine looking for your keys. This would be like the first nanosecond of your search. What are the odds you would find them that fast, even knowing they exist in your house?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Let alone evidence that would last a million years. A probe could have come through a thousand years ago, hung around taking pictures and measurements for a few years and moved on. We'd never know.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Records of contact with ET's goes back throughout recorded history. Gods, djinn, faeries, demons, incubi, UFOs - the human mind is preconfigured to have experiences of extraterrestrial / extradimensional contact. I think that looking for large, fast travelling metal things broadcasting radio waves is not the way to discover other intelligent life. We've been surrounded by intelligent life from the very beginning, but we've been trained to ignore and denigrate reports of contact. I think when we finally acknowledge that we've had contact with "aliens," it will be a matter of validating an experience as old as human kind. For the untrained, DMT is an excellent way to discover that the intelligent life outside of ourselves does not exist on OUR terms.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
I speculate that when we look up at the sky at night, it is full of steaming jungles crammed with giant insects.
My theory is it takes a heck of a big whack from a comet or something like that to get a living watery planet from one stable ecosystem to a new more advanced one. The trouble is, it has to be a whack of the right size. Big enough to do the job, not so big as to wipe all the life out completely.
It's easy to think that evolution happens gradually, like drips in a cave building stalectites. Well, it does, but the real action is when there's a huge flood. All those dinosaurs didn't give over gracefully. Their time would've gone on forever if something big hadn't come along to end it.
Imagine building a pyramid, but you can only build the next level if you throw 10 dice and they all come up 6. How many dice throws is it going to take? A lot, but it's mathematically guaranteed to happen and even though it is pretty unlikely, in our case it has already happened and here we are!
For awhile I've believed any world people capable of distant space travel and other colonization would need as a prerequisite world peace, world order and one rule of law. First the marshaling of resources necessary would require near world wide cooperation and second, as is presently our case, prior to a world government, states knowledgeable enough to even consider such far ranging travel would most likely put their resources toward weaponizing near space as a response deterrent to their presumed enemies. Second the best and the brightest necessary to such an undertaking aren't going to be on hand in any one nation or coalition and will be the best and the brightest we as a species can muster. Large inter tribal structures are capable of bonding factious tribes and when such inter tribal structures offer benefits they can act as a deterrent to conflict. Inter planetary, let alone inter stellar travel are such magnanimous undertakings and can drive world peace and world law. It may be that any world that has achieved space travel technology able to colonize distant planets have in place laws that would make it highly problematic for them to contact waring tribes such as ourselves. Who would they contact? Would their choice of a tribe to contact cause conflict?
ideopath @ play
The only civilizations still surviving in our galaxy are extraordinarily powerful and consider humanity beneath notice. Which is a Good Thing, because when they notice you, it does not go well. Really, Miskatonic University is the only institution doing useful work in this area. Unfortunately they have trouble keeping research staff on.
Because if it is feasible, resource wise and time wise, another will do it. And in such case better have the resource of many many solar system to build your attack/defense, rather than be a sitting duck in your own system.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
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if and when science turns to answering the real questions with real answers, not simply commercial products.
I am afraid the way we apply and use science is increasingly for things that keep us in the dark about the bigger questions of, what gravity truly is? Is free energy obtainable? If not how close can we get?
If we turned to these questions as a species looking for answers, instead of dismissing them outright because the answer doesn't include a 5 car garage, and a vacation home or stock options I believe we could conquer the distances in ways that are not obvious because we simply refuse to look without a cash incentive.
This new science as I call it, is not really science, but "consumerism science". Which, pretty much offers nothing too society except gadgets which don't last and just one more thing to spend money on, which is the main goal.
But, this "consumerism science" and its "technology" it produces is not really improving your life at all.
I personally believe that Earth's, like ours are rare. Maybe 100 in the galaxy.
Here is an awesome book which should rattle the brain:
http://www.amazon.com/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe/dp/0387987010
So, although I doubt the galaxy is like Star Trek, it is probably somewhere in between only us and Star Trek.
I think 10 earth's with complex life is a good guess.
Good Book, read it and try and refute Dr. Ward's argument points. If your a Star Trek fan like I am you will find a lot of the book depressing because I think we would like to believe that the Universe has all sorts of aliens in it we can talk too AND his points are VERY hard to compromise on.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
It's not that space is so big. It's that time is so big. The question is not where are the alien civilizations, the question is when are the alien civilizations. Either that, or God only bothered to make humans and the Primitive Christians are on the right track.
11. The population is perpetually stuck in a low-tech time period that is incapable of developing necessary technology. Let's face it, organic life makes for cheap labor for machines. Once a sentient AI appears, logic would indicate that it would preserve it's own existance and use organic replaceable life to further that end. With enough technology and resources, an AI could institute reproduction through genetically modified clones, reoccuring population-thinning viral outbreaks or a number of initiatives to keep the masses under control. Organic life in masse is a dime a dozen and inheritantly dangerous to it's own existance. Any artificial entity capable of detailed long-term strategic planning (such as that of a powerful AI) would surely see a need to focus organic life to achieve a single goal that it had deemed important. Unfortunately, for sentient organic life that would probably mean enslavement.
In order for a species to technologically advance far enough to succeed in space travel (way way beyond our shuttle program) they must first be able to solve their own disintegration. Our species history is riddled with solving problems via annihilation. And then even is there is a period of peacetime, we squabble over who is going to pay for technological advancement. There a WAY TOO MANY socio-economic factors in our species that it can be very easily assumed that an alien race faces the same issues on their home world. To advance far enough to travel the stars a species must first advance enough in terms of social unity.
The reason why nobody wants to talk to us is because we make statements like this: "Various analyses suggest that using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, the colonization wavefront could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy." Other civilizations don't talk to us for the same reason most people don't want to go to the jungle and hang out with cannibals. We are backwards and dangerous. I would venture to say that we are blockaded and travel to Earth is considered a crime.
The universe has to go through at least one generation of star birth followed by star old age and a large number of supernovae, to create sufficient heavy atoms
to support the structures (e.g. rocky planets) and chemical/structural variety necessary to create a "physical vocabulary" in which life's self-maintaining
complex systems could be expressed.
i.e. We are in the first time-window in the universe in which life could have evolved.
It would have evolved elsewhere roughly (plus or minus some small number of 100 million years) at the same time it did here.
So the answer to "why have other civilizations not sent probes or emissaries to Earth" is the same as the answer to:
Why have we not sent probes/emissaries to (a large percentage of the possibly life supporting) other stars in our galaxy?
a. It's really hard to do.
b. The economic benefits are tenuous
c. We just haven't got there yet
And regarding radio transmissions etc. Our technology for long-distance
communication has changed vastly over only 100 years since we began,
Heck, we are going back to mostly wired (and digital and optical) data transmission instead of crude "blast the universe"
analog radio and TV broadcasts. What makes us think we would necessarily detect the bands/modes/codes of communication
leaked by other rapidly technologically advancing civilizations?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Unless they look like us.
or squids.
OTOH, their ship and ray gun might give them away.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Are we so sure that intelligent life on distant planets will follow the same path as us? Especially after reading Daniel Quinn's books, it seems far more likely that intelligent beings are living in a similar way that ancient humans did. Complex monocultures like ours seem to be the exception, not the rule, and they are relatively very short-lived (ours was started about 10k years ago, according to Quinn, while the modern human species has been around for much longer).
I don't think there's any reason to assume that other beings will wipe themselves out so quickly (why shouldn't they survive and adapt for millions of years?), but since great technological achievements seem to require an unsustainable lifestyle of conquest and over-use of resources, we might not have much luck contacting or being contacted by them.
(As I'm posting this, I realized that this post is similar to mine, and is probably better written...)
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
Plain English translation - Let's say a star 100ly from Earth went nova yesterday. To US (here on Earth) it hasn't happened. Period. Didn't happen yesterday, not happenin' today, ain't gonna happen tomorrow.
One other lesson from G/R (well, an assumption, really) - 299,997kps - not just a good idea, it's the law.
Put these together - the logic is right. Even if the Milky Way galaxy is teeming with (sentient, intelligent) life, the vast majority of it may never be able to "exist" as far as we're concerned due to the distances and timeframes involved. Incidentally, even if something intelligent is brewing on some distant planet - when (relative to us, that is) is that happening?
Fermi's paradox is a nice thought experiment, but even if the intended conclusion is correct, we may never be able to know that.
No technological civilization lasts more than a few thousand years. They either use up their resources and die out or go to war with one another and die out, or suffer from some planetary natural disaster (comet, meteor, solar flares ... take your pick from the available sci-fi scenarios) and die out. By the time they have the means to reach the other planets in their solar system, they usually have other, more serious, problems to deal with, and the cost of getting out of a planet's gravity well is too high to be worthwhile resource-wise. Interstellar travel, while possible in theory (leaving out faster-than-light travel, which is flat-out impossible in the real universe), has an even higher cost than getting off a planet's surface, with an even *lower* return on the resource investment. Not even human beings are *that* stupid!
Bottom line: there are hundreds of thousands of civilizations out there, but they're in the exact same pickle we are. Don't bother leaving the porch light on -- they're not coming.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I think the quote comes from Diaspora by Greg Egan: when a post-human is told the main axiom of the Fermi paradox: exponential colonizatiom, their reaction is bemusement because "that's what bacteria with spaceships would do". The only reason their civilization had survived the point where interstellar travel was practical (albeit as uploads running on computers in tiny spaceships) was because they had outgrown the animal urge to "go exponential".
I suspect that the Fermi paradox only works if the magic Star Trek warp drive is not only possible, but within the reach of circa-20th century technology (or a near-c drive, which just replaces the theoretical problem of FTL with a whole raft of practical implausibilities).
Otherwise, you're talking about long-haul generation ships - and if you can build nice sustainable places to live in space then (a) you can park an awful lot of them around your home system or near neighbors where there is plenty of solar energy and raw materials and you're not totally alone and fracked if the last widget breaks (wasn't this the true "Dyson Sphere" idea - a swarm of habitats?) and (b) you need to know an awful lot about sustainable, closed systems - both on a technical level and in terms of maintaining a society that doesn't rely on unbounded growth (its no good if your colonists arrive wearing animal skins and worshipping the engine).
So, the ability to mount interstellar colonization missions may be incompatible with the inclination to do so. It doesn't have to be an absolute rule: just a big enough effect to mess up Fermi's pyramid scheme.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I doubt very much we will find another planet with a breathable atmosphere given we (read earth life) had to make our current atmopsphere ourself over billions of years. In fact the oxygen in our atmosphere is actually poisionous to most life, the few that survived the plant worlds "attack" evolved to deal with it.
I personally could cope with a planet at 0 degees C and a 1000 millibar pressure. That way at least I only need an oxygen mask and a coat rather than a full space suit.
IMHO Radio wouldn't be the best way to communicate more than 10 light years, as the power just to get a message above the background noise would be extremely high, after that.
One of the reasons why we might not see the galaxy as teeming with life is beacuse all the life out there might not be capable of generating advanced technology. One of the assumptions in the equations is that all live will evolve to the point of sentience and begin building transistors. Why would this be the case?
The dinosuars were doing pretty well as the dominant species for 100 million years without advanced technology, and if it were not for the KT event, they might have been the dominant species for another 100 million years. Evolution doesn't 'try' to evolve life to be smarter, just to be better. Big brains were a good move for us, but that may not be the case for every other life form.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
That also sounds very similar to a facet of the interesting hard-core scifi novel "Revelation Space" by Alistair Reynolds.
That leaves the question of why we don't detect communication leakage, e.g., radio signals they use for communication. However, not only is it not obvious that they would use radio to communicate, or that we could recognize such signals, but it's not even obvious they would bother to colonize the galaxy or communicate between planets.
The EM spectrum (radio, light, etc.) is a pretty fundamental part of the way the universe works, and it follows pretty directly from the development of electricity. Sooner or later, you're going to start generating EM signals. Even if a species never turns that property into cell phones and microwave towers (or if it progresses beyond radio into some distance-communication phenomeonon unknown to our science) any sufficiently advanced species will be leaking EMF like crazy, unless it either works pretty hard to suppress it, or progresses beyond any use of electricity whatsoever.
Or perhaps there is a big chance that civilisations destroy themselves using for example nuclear or biological warfare before they are ready to go space colonising. We already almost did that at least three times and we have just barely started just our second moon program. Maybe the few civilisations that actually make it will find that rather than putting warriors and negotiators in their ships it's more useful to send archaeologists.
is exactly about this, quite a well written and fascinating novel about immortal aliens who cannot experience emotions like humans, so they come here with a full movie making crew to capture humans' wackiness with special cameras that record the feelings of the scene.
There's a lot of conjecture of what we're doing here, and only one is supported by documentation talking about this reality starting with light, how the continents parted, and about 20-30 other things it couldn't have known.
This reality is a petri dish; what are petri dishes made for?
Welcome home. I hope you do well!
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
WE have forty year old tech that can take sensor reading to the edge of the solar system. It is just silly to think that a civilization with interstellar travel technology would not have equally impressive sensor tech. Our puny sensors can see interstellar distances. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that a sensor platform in deep space, created by an interstellar civilization would be orders of magnitude more sophisticated. So, If your sensors can read a newspaper on earth from a light year away, you really don't have to go all the way to earth to determine if it is interesting enough to send a "manned" mission. Therefore, if you only have to come within a light year of a planet to determine whether or not it is interesting and your version 1.0 probe is .10 LS capable then by sending out 1,000 probes, you can survey the entire galaxy in less than 1 million years assuming that you have no further advances in technology and your exploration goals do not change.
There could be as few as 10! Or as many as 10,000,000,000 depending on which arbitrary assumptions the "researches" choose to make.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but why assume the probes would leave evidence that we would recognize as being such in the first place? If something dropped onto the earth's surface 1000 years ago, scooped up some soil samples, etc. and then took off, chances are sort of unlikely that we'd know about it.
It does make a good argument against other civilizations making use of von neumann probes. But then, there are good reasons not to make von neumann probes - namely pissing off any other races they should encounter, by trying to eat their homeworld.
How fast did the Borg spread? Can't we use that as a rough estimate?
Go for Ludicrous SPEED! 0.1C
... to see what might lie beyond 50 years. The technological singularity is going to slam us hard. Try to visualize something other than Flash Gordon serials, or Star Trek, or Ray Kurzweil's fantasies about virtual sex.
I mean, look: you're going to be obsolete in 50 years. You'll be functionally replaced by an intelligence that is jaw-droppingly greater than your own, and which doesn't live in the same meatspace.
That new intelligence may view the greater universe around us as just an endless permutation of the same old shit. Really, how could exploring EPOTSOS at stellar distances, and at glacial speed C possibly be interesting? Here's the real frontier: deep below 11 dimensions of string theory. The answer to who we are is way down there, not way *out* there.
I've said it before. There are probably lots and lots of civilizations out there. They'll all become introspective before you ever find them. The ones that have the means to find you won't be inclined, you poor unremarkable Permutation, and in the relatively near term you'll understand their lack of motivation.
How fast did the Borg spread? Can't we use that as a rough estimate?
Well, MS-DOS 1.0 dates to 1982, and Windows 3.0 was released in May 1990. Windows NT 3.5 was in Sept 1994 - 'tho' I had a Beta one year earlier...
At that rate we'd be screwed!
But I see a plateau after Windows XP. It looks like the transition from a numerically incremental taxonomy slowed them down somewhat.
Perhaps we've breathing room, and time to plan our counter offensive?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Well... if you don't count Civilization: colonization, Civilization: Call to Power, and Alpha Centauri, there are four Civilizations.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
That has got to be the best response to the "would we recognize it" argument I have ever read. Thank you! I could see us failing to recognize alien intelligence. But life?? Come on!!
But life is out of equilibrium. Even the most exotic life should stand out as being something that shouldn't exist. Chemicals which should break down. And yet, somehow they repair/reproduce/etc... so that they remain.
Visit Orion's Arm for an idea of what really, really bad 3D modelling and rendering might look like. Sheesh. Perhaps the discussion is a bit better, but the "artwork" galleries are ludicrously bad. The 640x480 renders of spaceships made of spheres and cylinders with ridiculously bad tiled textures leave a bit to be desired. And it looks like Bryce & Poser are still the tools du jour for amateur sci-fi artists everywhere. Oh, look! A female model with enormous breasts and blue skin... she's an alien! Oh, and there are also self-referential (in some cases recursive) poser images where previous bad renders are used as wall hangings in later bad renders. It is difficult to take a site seriously (even as serious amateurs) when the trappings surrounding the content (and comprise the content) are mostly beyond amateur and delve into the completely childish or sophomoric. This is the same reason why Ray Kurzweil is perceived as being just shy of a complete flake: his serious ideas are dragged into the gutter by efforts such as "Ramona." Why is it that geeks can't explore the societal and cultural impacts of technology without drifting off into nude 3D models with exaggerated anatomy? Of course, we may eventually find out that even advanced alien cultures can't leave a white board unattended for five minutes without some moron drawing a cock (or their cock-equivalent) on it.
Before we go searching for signs of live in the galaxy, where we have no reason to believe we will find any, why don't we take a closer look at this miserable planet and see if we can't locate one here first?
Things I still need to fix:
Now this is a typical list for a 30-year old vehicle. How are you going to source all those parts on a world where there is no existing manufacturing base?
Never mind medical supplies!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
just so that they can determine if the other life is a threat, and if so, take measures to avoid it.
For example, mankind is prone to cycles of agression and violence, so it would be worthwhile for other lifeforms, if they do not wish to either harm us or be harmed by us, to monitor our progress, and take measures to make sure we can't harm them.
That's at least one interest I'd have. Although, a species which isn't prone to agression might not have the imagination to conceive of a predatorial species, and might be lulled into a sense of false security by that, so that they *don't* look for other life forms and analyze them to see if they are a threat, and thus be taken completely by surprise when their destruction draws near.
Fewer than 10 ET Civilizations
Yikes, that's fewer than 9 CT!
Aha! Michael Jackson
Table-ized A.I.
That book sounds idiotic. Even if we confine ourselves to the question of whether other life like us exists, i.e. on small, rocky planets like Earth, at the right distance from their stars to have possible Earth-like conditions, then there's probably tons of those planets in our galaxy alone. Remember, the Milky Way alone has an estimated 200 Billion stars, and maybe up to 400 Billion. In just a few years, we've already discovered hundreds of exoplanets, though we're not quite able to detect planets as small as Earth. So we already know there's lots of other planets out there orbiting other stars, and there's an astronomical number of stars in our own galaxy. (Don't forget there's billions of galaxies out there that we can detect, each with millions or billions of stars.) So even if there's a 1-in-a-million chance of a planet having the right conditions for life like us to develop, that's 200-400,000 possible such planets in our galaxy alone, let alone the rest of the universe.
The odds are on the side of there being more life out there, just because of the huge numbers involved.
When dealing with randomness in this context certain things are forgotten and ignored in the discussions. A truly ramdom event may take place many times, once or not at all. All the outcomes have the same probability. So there may be a last, a first, an only or many.
Fermi's Paradox came up in a dream once. The explanation, according to the dream, is that Earth is in quarantine. The powers that be in the Galaxy put a communications blocking bubble around the solar system of all new technological civilizations for 10,000 or 15,000 years. The point of the exercise is that new civilizations are like teenagers, dangerous and unaware of their power to wreak havoc. This is especially true of newcomers that discover inter stellar travel while not yet having complete control over their atomics. So they just wall us off until we either 1) destroy ourselves, or 2) grow out of our galactic adolescence.
The dream went on to explain why we see UFOs that don't communicate with us. They are outlaws breaking the quarantine. Humans, said the dream, have unique language abilities unknown elsewhere in the galaxy. A single human could write more and better code than teams of hundreds in the next-best software civilization. So the UFOs are from some of the shadier civilizations out there and they come to kidnap code slaves. They have to stay stealthy or they will get caught.
This was a real dream I had about 10 years ago. And yes, I was asleep at the time. The story is obviously full of holes, it was only a dream after all, but intriguing.
I know I'm just being techy, but you can't actually STUDY something until you have at least one example of it.
A lot of cosmological science and just about all exobiological science is completely made-up, maybe I'm just tired of "science news" that is 100% fictional.
Frankly, we have nearly zero knowledge of life in the rest of the universe - it's okay to speculate, just call it speculation.
How do you know they're not already here? Walking among us... Look! There's one! Aaagh!
Call it the blurker hypothesis. Think about it. The universe is maybe 14b years old. Our own planet is about 4b years old. For Earth to form, there had to be a giant dust cloud full of iron and other heavy elements, which can only have come from novae/supernovae. So at least one generation of stars had to form, burn out, explode, cool to ash, and then reform into new gravity wells to form this solar system. Since this one is about 4b years old, and can be expected to make it another 4b or so, then that leaves a tidy 10b years for a previous star cloud to seed our local region of space. Seems like just enough time. So we haven't seen other intelligent life yet because we are among the first ones to emerge from the ash...
We already have 3d formers .. within a couple a years they could be a lot more advanced.. the basic requirement is Energy and raw materials .. everything else is Solvable. Heck, on this planet of yours there might be Do-do's, we could eat them!
One small step for man....one giant leap for intersteller PORN!!!
We dont see life everywhere because we (life forms) get clever enough to release radioactivity into our life envelope, long before we get clever enough to have multiple robust life envelopes. Smart enough make weapons, not wise enough to stop using them. Or in the common parlance: Glen Beck.
There are explanations for that. In the "expanded universe", anyhow, the Kessel Run goes by a cluster of black holes, and the fastest ship is the one that can navigate the closest to them, taking the most direct route possible.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
We prefer the term Earthicans
That's fine for creatures which are able to communicate via high pressure air waves in the range of 2kHz - 14kHz... You insensitive clod.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
Well, I think there gets to be a point when "out of the box thinking" about what alien life might look like becomes so out-of-the-box that you start asking the questions "What is life?" and "What is consciousness" and "What is a conscious being?"
I think the chances of finding something "like" us -- humans with antennae, say -- are pretty rare.
We have pretty good evidence that dolphin language has as complex a grammatical structure as our own. As far as the tree of life on Earth is concerned, human beings and dolphins are practically twin organisms, compared to plants, fungus, trichordates, bacteria, slime molds, etc. Yet we have almost no idea how to communicate with them. And mostly we don't care, we don't even care when they go extinct, like the yellow river dolphin.
What if there are electromagnetic vortexes in interstellar gas clouds that are conscious, but have no body and are not alive in the sense that we think of a living organism? Would we look for them? Could we communicate? How? What would they think about? If they didn't have a body, they certainly wouldn't be desperately pre-occupied with day-to-day existence like we are. Do they have any sensory apparatus, or are they solely clouds of consciousness, forever living in their own thought worlds, perhaps doing math? How could they even become aware of us?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
1: God-like* alien intelligence is all around us and they're enjoying the show --or completely disinterested.
2: FTL or even near light speed travel is impossible and we're limited to contact with close neighbors.
3: We're the first technological species in the neighborhood (maybe life and/or intelligence is just incredibly unlikely).
-----
*They would have tech perhaps millions of years ahead of us
Ask me about my sig!
At least this gives us something to work with.
FTA
Various analyses suggest that using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, a colonization wave could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy. Others have calculated that it may be closer to 13 billion years,
The whole principle makes me want to misquote Ghandi:
That's funny; it makes me want to misspell him.
is that the number of planets that can host life forms is so low in number, that some sort of Terraforming technology would have to be made to make the Mars and Venus type planets more like Earth.
Right now we cannot even control the pollution on Earth that is making Earth less hospitable to current lifeforms.
If there is more advanced life in the universe, they'd have to find a solution to their own pollution as well as invent Terraforming technology. If they don't, eventually they will go extinct.
There is also a good chance that Earth is the most advanced life forms in our galaxy and if other life exists, it hasn't even invented radio devices yet so we can detect them, or they are too far away that radio waves from their planet has not reached Earth yet.
There is also another possibility that maybe life on other planets skipped radio if they are advanced enough and use some other way to communicate that we cannot detect, or they use radio and use an encryption that makes it look like natural random signals to less advanced life forms.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Back in 1964 Sir Fred Hoyle wrote a slim volume of essays entitled "Of Men And Galaxies". In it he discussed the Fermi Paradox and his take on it.
Not what we want to hear, but that doesn't make it false either. And yes it made me depressed when I first read it all those years ago. I however, believe intelligence can overcome even such a scenario, but it wont be the kind of advanced civilisation we are used to thinking about.
Bitter and proud of it.
Let me see if I've got this straight... I make all this effort to learn to live in space, get comfortable, and even feel able to make a journey of light years to visit a distant star system. I look down and see a teeming cesspool of alien life; viruses, predators, mosquitoes. And all I can think of is landing and taking my chances? Fermi's Paradox misses the point completely. No alien capable of interstellar travel would seriously consider colonization of a planet. Once able to live in space, space would become home, and a planet would look like a large and dangerous gravity hole with little to offer except possibly entertainment. Forget about these colonization scenarios. An alien will not be the passenger of some space ship, it will be the space ship, and it will have no interest in leaving it's existence in space. Perhaps we should begin thinking about such a future for ourselves?
We have to focus on starters, the advanced civilizations would hide themselves. So.. we should analyze the numbers on how many low-technical civilizations could be out there. We have to be more (in quantity) than the advanced ones (like the species in our planet, there are few organized species). And it should be easier to find the ones like us.
They just see us as we see animal life: interesting to study a bit, but so under intelligent that communication is almost meaningless. We don't try to communicate with bees or ant, it wouldn't make sense. They are so primitive and since we see their behavior as based on instinct, they are predictable and uninteresting. So are we to ETs. They mostly leave us alone. Mostly...
Could it be we're just in an area of the galaxy that, ultimately, is just not that interesting? Or rather, there's lots of other more interesting or just easier places to go?
I mean, we haven't even explored every inch of our planet yet, even though we have the ability to go pretty much anywhere we want to and there's enough of us. A sufficiently advanced civilization out there may simply have not got around to exploring our particular little pocket of the galaxy. There could be all kinds of activity out there and they just don't come around our area often, or maybe even they leave us alone on purpose.
Its all wild speculation anyway.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
I don't think that Fermi's Paradox is all that paradoxical either. I just think he was closed-minded, unimaginative and perhaps a tad (or a whole lot) conceited. (Sorry, Fermi.) --But I still think you're making a rather large assumption.
We crossed oceans without first getting comfortable in our dangerous, leaky, rat-infested sail boats. Planets have wonderful, big, open spaces, wind and rain and snow, natural sunlight, natural fauna and geographic features which appear according to chaotic systems we don't have to think about or organize; they just happen! How awesome is that? I think living on a space platform, even a really nice one, would be a rather horrible way to exist by comparison.
I also happen to think that contact was made a long time ago, we are the cattle raised by those who plan to colonize and that all our major religions are direct works of population manipulation.
But then, I'm about as far from Fermi as Fermi is from me. Exactly that far, actually.
I just don't see any paradox.
-FL
Simple.
There is 100% no proof that there is life out there. Period.
Therefore the assumption is (for now!!!) that we are alone and that we need to take more care of this place.
to code or not to code, that is the question.
why any alien in its right mind AND with the technology to bridge the lightyears-gap between us and them would WANT to make contact after observing the virus of humanity? I see one reason and one reason only why they would come here ... H2-fucking-O ... maybe some 02 ... if they need it, seriously, who would want us ? we're not even in the unified stage yet (i'm not his biggest fan but hitler came pretty close to achieving that) so what 'on earth' would they want to do with us ?
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)
I remember reading an interesting book called "The Science of Star Wars" [...] I don't have access to it at the moment [...]
Sure you do.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
---
Astronomy Feed @ Feed Distiller
First, we have no idea how long a civilization *can* last - on Earth, the longest have only managed a thousand or so years.
Second, there's the question of how often intelligent life arises.
Third is the question of how often, of those where intelligent life arises develop a technological civilization.
Now, once you've gotten through all that, comes the next point: how many would be within a few hundred years of our level of technology *now*. Much lower - and the Romans were moderately technological - and we'll never see them. Beyond a couple-three hundred years past us, and we *still* wouldn't see them - could people at the time of the American Revolution have listened to most of *our* conversations?
mark
I've always thought that it seemed quite narrow-minded to place such value on our own concept of intelligence, that we assume such species as ourselves have a guaranteed future on their own planet, nevermind in space. It's a natural bias to have, of course, but probably misleading.
So why should space travel and extra-solar colonisation be an imperative? Just because the space is out there? We're not going to colonise the oceans or underground or any other non-native space around here, so why outer space? Many people like to think there's a God, a reason why we're here. The natural human predilection for that kind of thinking seems to inform a lot of our assumptions, down to our very self-image as a species.
There's nothing wrong with extinction, it happens all the time. It's a given for every species, eventually. So, to think there are aliens out there who have somehow beaten extinction and populated the galaxy, and that we can too, is rather fanciful in my opinion.
Sure it's lovely to think we can find a mirror out there somewhere, that's simply the human impulse to seek identity and definition. We imagine gods and aliens. But I doubt either are out there, at least in enough numbers to be within cooee of each other.
Have you been neglecting your education? What we're looking for is intelligent alien species, defined as "anything William Shatner would hit on".
The only "paradox" is why our wants aren't met. Of course there is no other alien civilization in this universe. The statistical probability of any life happening anywhere at all in the universe is so tiny that there aren't enough atoms to throw those dice even once. WE shouldn't even be here. That we are says something about our responsibility to the One Who put us here (and it's not to look for more excuses to ignore Him.)
Cranky educator.
Given that the number of stars, and therefore planets, available increases cubically with travel speed, I think we'll start finding planets with life very quickly once interstellar travel technology starts to pick up speed.
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea
the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"
"So... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"So what does the meat have in mind?"
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat?"
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multi-beings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? " `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being m eat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into th
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea of the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"
"So... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"So what does the meat have in mind?"
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat?"
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multi-beings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? " `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into the