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Maybe the Aliens Are Addicted To Computer Games
Hugh Pickens writes "Geoffrey Miller has an interesting hypothesis in Seed Magazine that explains Fermi's Paradox — why 40 years of intensive searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing: no radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind. All the aliens are busy playing computer games. The aliens 'forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism,' writes Miller. He says the fundamental problem is that an evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself, and that although evolution favors brains that tend to maximize fitness (as measured by numbers of great-grandkids), no brain has capacity enough to do so under every possible circumstance. 'The result is that we don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography,' writes Miller. 'Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot.' Miller adds that most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children, until they eventually die out."
Who here doesn't think a TNG-style Holodeck would lead to the downfall of our civilization?
The bastards keep hacking into our WiFi and pirating Starcraft! Now our ISP is sending us cease and desist notices! We tried to tell them it was the aliens but they just referred us to a local psychiatrist!
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
...did-just-one-too-many-dailies dept.
This-one-just-sucks-alot. Give-it-up-you-morons-please....
Geoffrey Miller is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at University of New Mexico.
I'm sure the guy is looking for a government grant, to study this intriguing possibility. Great job, if you can get it: spend government money to study if aliens are busy playing videogames
Why do we believe that aliens will be preoccupied with themselves and ignore the cosmic plot, just like we humans do? perhaps aliens evolved from a kind of ants, for example, where the 'we' is above the 'I'.
40 years of search is nothing. We may search for another 10,000 years and find nothing...in cosmic terms, even 10,000 years is a drop in the bucket.
Do you think this guy saw the movie Idiocracy?
All it takes is one individual who is not busy playing games otherwise.
Also, the article is dated May 1st, 2006. Is seed magazine run by the same guys running /.?
Is Miller talking about Aliens, or is he talking about us? Becuase if he's right, the prognosis for humanity isn't that bright!
L8r.
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
...because it seems to me he's completely lost touch with reality. Either that or he's still a teenager since he doesn't seem to understand the concepts of love and companionship in a relationship, especially one that gives rise to kids. There's more to producing children than just having sex. Also anyone who thinks pornography is a substitute for the real thing needs to get out more. Literally.
While those individuals at the higher end of the intellectual spectrum are not breeding, those at the other end of the bell curve are breeding prodigiously.
If the author is willing to say that any species will diverge into a higher-order brain function group and lower-order brain function group, I think he will have a hard time espousing such racist theories. However, his theory that advanced races will face extinction due to lack of reproduction is doomed from the outset given that lack of childbearing is only a problem among certain groups.
((1 MW) / ((4 light year)^2)) * (100 (m^2)) = 6.98311557 × 10^-26 watts
So even if there are aliens in the closest star broadcasting using a 1 MW transmitter, the output here is way to low to measure.
They're probably sitting there wondering why they don't receive anything either.
This theory is ignorant, and wrong. Think about it for a second. Suppose you have a large population of sentients : not just individual beings, but competing societies and civilizations. Now, some of these populations succumb to the lures of computer games and fast food and porn more than others do. What does this cause? DIFFERENTIAL REPRODUCTIVE SUCCESS. The invisible hand of evolution correcting the problem, again. This may ultimately mean that the eventually 'victors' in the recent rat race (USians) lose to other societies that are better at breeding. (such as India)
No, the reason we don't see SETI signals is obvious. IF alien species are within our light cone, they are using communication systems that are indistinguishable from noise, since maximizing entropy in a radio signal allows you to pack the most data into an available slice of spectrum.
But, more likely, there are no alien sentients who have developed radio and the light has traveled to us already. (remember, anything we see now from earth is thousands to millions of years out of date) It took 3.5 billion years for life on earth to go from self replicating molecules to us, which is about 25% of the total age of the entire universe. In earlier eras, the Universe was much, much hotter and less hospitable to developing self replicating molecules (too much reactivity for stable self replication)
I am a highly evolved alien living among the humans. While I will admit to a mild addiction to Slashdot and Drudgereport (some days these are very similar), I don't play computer games or watch television. I literally have no time for either as I am so busy watching the humans and pondering all the different recipes that would make them tasty. Not to mention that as an alien, I haven't figured out how to make much money and can't afford cable or satellite TV. I tried "bunny ears" for a while, but they quit working last Spring and I haven't missed the TV much. When I did watch it, I just kept seeing fellow aliens (Nadya Suleman, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga, Sheyla Hershey, et al.) entertaining the humans.
This theory that aliens are highly evolved and addicted to electronic entertainment is backwards because we know better than to end up sitting in Plato's Cave staring at flickering images when there is a marvelous world waiting to be viewed and humans, fattened in caves while watching flickering images, waiting to be devoured.
In principio erat Verbum.
And live a life of amusement. Maybe they have better things to do than to speculate uselessly.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
why 40 years of intensive searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing: no radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind
Because there are no aliens. Duh!
I'd think all these intelligent races would end up with a technological singularity. And maybe the super-intelligent artificial entities that result out of that, have reasons to cloak themselves...
change is in the air, everywhere, see you there?
never a better time to consult with/trust in your creators, who, among (billions of) other things, can change EVERY THING in the proverbial wink of an eye.
i'm telling you they area among us. watching, waiting... and when time is ripe, when humanity is at peace, when our technology reaches a certain treshold, we'll be confronted and conformized to the intergalactic community.
Maybe so. It might seem unlikely an advanced race would be so dumb.
Perhaps industrial infrastructure will be focused on digitized minds in a virtual landscape, and will not be "wasted" on supporting organic bodies and fixing them over the centuries. Maybe digital life is going to be much richer and more expanded than what can fit inside an organic brain.
On the other hand, we've had the public Internet for 15 years, say they've had it for 15,000 years.
It's hard to understand what their issues will be.
However one possible link is that there may be a point of decision near the beginning of Internet development for all societies, which characterizes all history after that.
Not to be tongue in cheek, but it could be summarized as DRM/MAFIAA/ACTA/ANTI-TERROR/WTF vs. OpenSource/Level Playing Field/Honesty&Balance. As time progresses, the DRM..WTF government-industrial players control the lifeblood of the society, whether it is controlling software/entertainment or perhaps with more advanced technology, controlling a person's biological makeup, or perhaps your life as a simulated person in a planet-wide computer.
The organics will (as some recent novels have suggested) be on the outside of mainstream society and will have only the OpenSource technologies and resources available to them. They probably do not have extra resources lying around enough to waste on contacting other civilizations, especially if their communications are considered equivalent to caveman grunts by most all of the listeners.
Another philosopher^H^H^H^H scientist has theorised another possible reason for mankind not perceiving an alien intelligent species. Next up, another possible reason that God may or may not exist. After that, discussion about the (un)certainty of the big bang.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
Sign me up for the Imperial Guard.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Fermi wasn't just talking about radio signals. Colonizing an entire galaxy doesn't take a whole lot of time, on geological timescales. When Fermi posed the question, where are they, he was wondering where the obvious mega-engineering is. How come we don't see any dismantled planets? Where's the stars blotted out by solar collectors?
I think all these questions have one simple answer: you're asking the wrong question.
Radio is primitive and totally unsuitable for an interstellar civilization to be using. They'd have something better. We've only had it for 100 years and we're already going dark.. that's just too short a time to expect an alien civilization to detect us, that way. It seems fair to imagine we'll never detect each other that way.
Although I suppose technological alien civilizations, and us eventually too, will build large colonies in free space, I doubt we'd be able to detect them. Not now and not back when Fermi was asking where they are. In about 25 years we might build some interesting gravitational lensing telescopes out at 500 au, and that may let us image the surface of planets around other stars.
The last one, Dyson spheres, they're a great idea but they make little sense for a civilization that has mastered interstellar flight. Just like radio, they're more likely to have something better.
How we know is more important than what we know.
.. add aliens as friends? Which social networking site is that?
So we can get a sense of their ideal life they try to portray through pictures.. Or maybe mental projections..
The idea seems like bullshit though. In a overpopulated world, there is excess and no real reason to reproduce as there are alot of people already occupied with that. The globalization, and more independant thinking, disposable "friends" in very densely populated regions (you can walk off and meet other strangers, and keep on doing that for a very long time without exhausting the "pool of people".). Hence people will tend to "seek out pleasures" more in such dynamics.
In more rural area's, there are different values and different aspects are more important. You'll see more closely tied together communities and families and more the "traditional lifestyle", because it's more needed to rely on eachother. (instead of popping into a 7/11 quickly and be able to live very detached from everything.)
So, in my view, there is "no need" right now to reproduce or maintain bounds like you would if your race is declining and there is more reason to seek out support with eachother for being able to maintain in your living state. We have excess and excess of humans.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
TFS: He says the fundamental problem is that an evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself, and that although evolution favors brains that tend to maximize fitness (as measured by numbers of great-grandkids), no brain has capacity enough to do so under every possible circumstance.
Extinction just means insufficient evolution.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Or maybe, on the contrary, let's really project human motives upon them. But the real ones, instead of idiotic bullshit designed just to make headlines.
Do humans get so busy with computer games that the whole species, all 6 billions of us, forget to even mine the resources we need or trade or plough the fields? Did any country yet starve because they were too busy playing to go to the supermarket, or go open the supermarket for that reason? No? Then why should we assume that any aliens would?
Because colonization was usually driven by wanting some resources which are abbundant over there, and are in short supply over here. Even if sometimes that meant "living space". That's what drove people to put a lot of money into building a big ship and risk their own lives on the high seas. Or by extension in the void of space. If you're going to invest billions in a space freighter and risk perishing to a micrometeor impact between here and there, you'll expect some suitable ROI. That ROI is what would drive people to do that.
So if there actually was that ROI to be made in space travel and colonization... am I the only one who thinks it's idiotic to imagine that a whole civilization, down to the last member, from CEOs and presidents to the last bum on the street, would go "nah, we'll just sit and grind the epic gear, thank you very much?" How do they survive at all, if nobody is even interested in working or making some form of income?
And if they are, how come they'd reject _only_ space colonization in favour of sitting and playing games, but not the other forms of work, including making those games?
Or maybe the more mundane reality is that that ROI just isn't there. Maybe the energy to haul stuff between stars really doesn't make it economical to mine the dilithium some 20 light years away.
And if c really is the speed limit, and space being that big, maybe nobody is interested in investing now in a ship which would return with the goods in 1000 years. Just because they don't even know which resources will actually sell that far in the future. Less than 200 years ago, aluminium was more expensive than silver or even gold, so I guess if we sent a ship to establish a colony and mine the most expensive stuff we can get there, it would have been aluminium. Then almost over night a new process was invented for producing it, and price fell like a rock. Or as little as 100 years away, coal was the fuel of superpower navies, and wars and willy-waving games were waged over access to it and to coaling stations. Then it all moved to oil, and now to nuclear reactors.
Or maybe they just don't need the extra space, and hence the colonies. Everywhere on Earth where we got sanitation, antibiotics, etc, population stopped growing and in fact started to decline. People used to make a lot of kids to beat the odds, but if their survival is all but guaranteed, they stop after 1-2 kids. We already simply don't need to offload some population somewhere else. In a million years (if we don't nuke ourselves first) the whole Earth population might be in a couple of quaint villages surrounded by thousands of miles of woods. And need colonies like a fish needs a bicycle.
But, of course, those are rational reasons. Nah, let's go with a sensationalist idiocy instead, like "maybe they're playing video games." Geesh.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
On Soviet Xen, Gordon Freeman kills YOU!
Compare to the size and the age of universe, the likely length of an alien civlization, 40 years is not a long time to search for anything, let alone being in the right time peroid to detect a alien civlization.
... explains our future even better than the best scientists. Mike Judge is a prophet!
"Who here doesn't think a TNG-style Holodeck would lead to the downfall of our civilization?" Don't forget: Lt. Barclay (the one who was always in some sorry circumstance -- turned into a giant spider, or whatever) eventually managed to pull himself out of that trap. If he can do it, so can Humanity!
If they are nothing like us, that will be a bigger problem.
This particular idea almost collides with the idea that aliens will make our life better in some way when we encounter them. They might treat us just like the old world treated the new world and its inhabitants. If simple cultural differences can cause such trouble, imagine whole species encountering each other.
I sure hope for aliens who have evolved into societies like ours, completely independently. I (and in extrapolation, the rest of humanity) will not be able to deal with something like a hive mind of consciousness in an incoming attacker. But I'm sure with the regular kind of invaders, I shall be able to achieve some sort of truce
Because you see, I for one welcome ... (bah, that was too easy).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
This might be a off-topic rant, but..
I don't think people of our current society really understand how good we have it..
Every single living species on this earth have had to constantly forage for food, shelter, or mates.. constantly. And we had to do the same for a very, very long time. I'm not talking about going hunting once a week, I'm talking before that, when we had to spend most of our time foraging for food, that means from 6 in the morning, until 8 in the night, going from place to place for shelter, or for food.
This is what wild animals have to do, and this is what we had to do.
Our current situation, where we have specialized and been able to organize our efforts so much that you only need to work 8 hours a day to feed, clothe and even pamper yourself without any real worry is what has given us the chance to specialize into other areas which are of no real concern to our immediate needs.
Our efforts throughout the ages have given us more spare time to do with as we please, and we've reached a certain equilibrium where we can both fend for our needs, and enjoy things in our spare time.
Would we really be even interested in things in outer space, if we had to worry about us and our kids being ill and hungry for weeks on end?
We are very Naive about our own efforts because we aren't the people who had to work out all the details, all the systems, all the inventions which puts us where we are today, it's our forefathers and mothers which gave us their legacy in hopes of a better future and good people of our day which are carrying the torch.
It's a miracle that we've come this far, and our success might just be the first chance life in the universe is able to be this stable and this prosperous to be able to even think outside our basic needs.
Never forget how lucky we are that we can work together for a better world. I just hope we can do it even better in the future.
This, too, may be happening already. [...] fundamentalists [...] already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to avoid it.
I just can't take someone seriously, who pretends that fundamentalists have a viable answer to problems of society.
Are you saying we're doomed to fail in the future; or, is the future now?
Sounds like the plot of that movie... and like any great satire has a faint of reality lurking behind.
If you believe that evolution has some kind of goal, then you might just be more of an "intelligent design"-er than you think.
BTW you can turn any agenda into a theory on why there's no aliens.
Maybe they all succumbed to global warming.
Maybe they all elected leaders who were born in Kenya.
See how easy that is?
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
So are we assuming that aliens don't have mothers? Because if I played too many computer games I got thrown out.
They are probably out there in there puny spaceships because they were send out and - if we are lucky - they are wondering what to do after playing space-ball.
This is the most rediculous theory I've heard in a long time. Why does he assume that alien beings not only evolve like Earth-like beings, but also have the same, identical characteristics of humans? If we send alien signals to cats, would they respond back? i think not. Do they sit on their kitty-asses playing Wii? not a chance. and yet they exist.
There are way too many variables and unknowns for us to simply conclude that "aliens are playing video games" or "engaging in excessive consumerism" as the reasons for no contact. Come to think of it, this theory is stinking of we-must-take-care-of-ourselves-if-we-want-to-survive propaganda.
Whatever. this article is too retarded for me to further waste my time on.
DONT DATE ROBOTS
There are several SF stories around Utopias/Distopias where most humans spend all their time immersed in some kind of ultra realistic VR environment, typically linked via some kind of direct brain feed. Basically a realistic enough VR environment, thanks to our ability do immerse in it and forget that it's not real, can fulfill all the psychological needs of an individual, more so even than reality since it has fewer barriers and does not suffer from the limitations of normal societal structures (in human society there are only a limited number of positions of a given type, for example Village Chief, but in a VR environment you can use NPCs to create as many virtual societies as you want and as such as many slots of a given type as you want).
There are quite a number of natural limitations to a scenario where all mankind lives in VR:
- Natural selection would remove from the genetic pool those that spent all their time in VR, since they wouldn't reproduce.
- Physical needs would still have to be catered for. This means that things still have to be produced (like food). The VR environments, being targetted at satisfying the individual would be highly unproductive, so full automated means of production would have to exist, and they would need to be fully fed from some for of free energy.
- As long as there are multiple nations, unless ALL of them "went into VR" at the same time, the ones that didn't would simply march their armies into the land of ones that did and take over.
That said, for exploration of the unknow to stop or slow significantly, all that it takes is for the Explorer types amongst us - the same kind of people that 3 or 4 centuries ago would be jumping into boats and travelling to unexplored lands, and the same kind that nowadays would drive us to explorer space - to fulfill their drive to explore in VR environments which one miht argue already happens in part. It's thus quite possible that this will keep Human Society in the period of stagnation with regards to expanding our physical borders of knowledge in which it currently is. In the extreme, having lost all our drive to physically go out and explore, humans could turn their backs to space forever.
That such a scenario could occur in alien societies is not beyond the realm of possibility. However, there are other drivers for exploration (conquest, material wealth, overcrowding, maybe even religious reasons) and the idea that all alien societies will sooner or later fall to the trap of "satiation of the need to explore by VR environments" is far fetched.
Then again one might also argue that the causal relation is actually the reverse:
- Human Society being in a period of stagnation with regards to expanding our physical borders of knowledge is not caused by Explorer types finding saciety in VR environments but instead said Explorer types are driven to "find their fix" in VR environments because we are currently not expanding our physical borders of knowledge.
My favourite line from an excellent old physics book called "From the Black Hole to the Infinite Universe".
"Yes, there are aliens but they don't want to talk to us. Have you tried communicating with ants lately?"
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Hole-Infinite-Universe/dp/0816233233
> They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.
Damned brilliant article. Scary when you laugh at the funny man in the picture and then you realize it's you.
(LOL. I can't wait to update my Facebook about this!)
There is a reason why we haven't yet had wide scope verification of so called alien existence, but it will happen. And when it does, everyone will understand why up until it happens why it didn't happen sooner.
Solar flares, polar shift, galactic alignment & more happening in the cosmos does fall into the scope of real science. Mayan Calendar dates it too, as does many other religions and beliefs, ie, I Ching, bible revelation (a revolution), etc..
We are experiencing our own polar shift as the north pole continues to shift southward. This effect the magnetic field of the earth breaking it up to some degree. This magnetic field is part of what gives us protection from such things as solar flares.
The solar flares, if a large one hits earth directly it will be like a big EMP blast knocking out electronic equipment, including Slashdot oh my, notably communication. A strong enough one and it can burn the surface a bit too. And we do have weakened atmosphere issues we created.
These events of course produce radiated energy summed, but to what sum effect it will have on us is not yet known.
And if the sum total effect is that it pushes us to our next transition in evolution, such a transition would not be the first time. Julian Jaynes identified the transition from the bicameral mind to the unicameral mind where consciousness came about as well as our ability to develop higher levels of abstraction and deception. We also had a transition in language of mathematics when we moved from the roman numeral system to the zero inclusive decimal system and furthermore other numbering systems such as binary. Major advances became possible, including the development of computers as we have today.
The next transition of course requires a need to do so, a motove for us to make such a move. And we may very well have real physical things happening to cause such. But to what state of our evolution?
A new level of awareness and communication on a regular basis. The opening up of our subconscious into our consciousness. Telepathy and to some extent Psychokinesis.
We would be like children needing guidance, and we would get it from those who already exist in such a awareness state. We are going to find out we are not alone and on a wide public scale, undeniable. But they won't be responsible for the events that cause our consciousness to expand as that will be due natural events.
The closer this turning point gets the more who will start experiencing their thoughts converting to reality.
And what sort of games will we play then, Global Thermal Nuclear War?
Careful what you think, it might just manifest.
But for my money, Geoffrey Miller has it. Try reading his book "The Mating Mind". I just quickly scanned "Why We Haven't Met Many Aliens", and it looks like one of those astonishingly simple perceptions that is absolutely right and immensely important.
For the past 25 years, give or take, I have been studying the software industry and, to a lesser extent, IT in general and its effects on human society as a whole. Pretty much my number one conclusion has been that we have accomplished far less than we might have done, because of the overwhelming tendency to treat everything as entertainment. As Larry Ellison said a while back, software is one of the very few areas of technology that are more fashion-conscious than women's clothes. Why is that? An important sub-question, under that general heading, is how did Microsoft become the world's most influential IT company?
Miller has grasped a very important truth, and we need to take him seriously. (Of course, it might be more fun and more profitable - as well as amusingly self-referential - to make a computer game out of his scenario).
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
It's funny. Learn to laugh a little. Looking at our own society, and our additction to games, TV, and other electronic diversions, it's easy to attribute this to aliens. Personally, I see it as a commentary as to why WE won't ever be the ones to make contact. I mean, seriously, who doesn't think for a moment that if we could create ST:TNG Holodeck technology that it woudln't become the new "internet is for porn". Just don't ask me to clean up after you.
It might be the single most humane way to reduce the human population down to manageable numbers and get rid of the pleasure-seeking mouth breathers.
We'd finally be left with a population for whom the pursuit of meaningless virtual pleasure isn't the be-all and end-all of their existence.
We'd be left with some artists, some engineers, probably all the mathematicians, and people who like other people...
I really don't see a problem with it.
Huh? I don't play computer games. I consider them childish and a waste of time - I've simply outgrown them. Once in a while I'll pull out the oldwarez and indulge in nostalgia, but otherwise no. Maybe this guy has his head so far up his ass, he has no idea that other people aren't like him and his friends?
Seriously, fuck computer games. I'm talking about sitting in a Matrix-like pod with IV food supply, automatic waste elimination, and a brain probe that continuously stimulates the pleasure center.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
...they are simply ignoring us? You see the problem is our egos are so frickin big that we consider ourselves to a species worthy of connecting with. Take a look around..Take a look at how we treat each other, other species, the planet around us. What makes us think we are such a great species to connect with? If 'they' exist they probably think we are scum. Possibly even in the same way we consider ourselves so much superior than other creatures on this planet. The problem being that we consider our superiority only in terms of ourselves not the universe at large.
Assume there is intelligent life in many places in the galaxy; thousands of civilizations exist:
Given that life can have started on countless other planets at least a billion years earlier than on earth, it is logical to assume that many of them are way ahead of us at least in technology. The computer revolution has only been going for 60 years now, image what tech looks like in 1000 years, or a million.
Civilizations that predate us with millions of years are garanteed to have met each other long ago. Any wars, or cultural or technological exchanges must have happened also very long ago already (millions of years or more), and what most likely exists now is some form of status quo, a stable peaceful situation. They will not come here for our resources, because there are way more resources in the astroid belt, the Oort cloud or the gas giants (water, ores, hydrogen/helium).
If they do come to Earth, they are likely interested in the life on earth, maybe humans, or possible our plants, animals, sea creatures.
Direct contact can easily destroy the lesser evolved culture, see the many historical examples of this (indians). Also bringing humans in large numbers into their culture might upset things for them.
Of course it is possible that people, or whole tribes, have been taken by aliens long ago to somewhere else. For this reason it could be that humans are living in large numbers elsewhere in the galaxy. It could be that we are being visited by extraterrestrial humans, or some evolved posthuman species.
In any case it seems to me that ET will keep their distance, studies us at leasure. It may very well be a universal law: don't interfere with the natives. It may be that they interfere with Americans a little more, abduct one once in a while because who is going to believe an American? ;-)
In other words: we are likely in a zoo.
My theory is we are quarantined until such time that we are ready, matured.
We still have brutal wars amongst ourselves. We have no serious form of global government. Therefore if ET suddenly landed on our major airports, all governments would scramble to gain access to alien tech to gain advantage. A new weapons race would be sure to follow. A new global war could very well result from that. If life in the universe and ET in our galaxy is ubiquitous, they probably know this. They likely have a whole science devoted to what happens after contact. Unless they want to destroy us, they likely take things really slowly.
We do not share resources in a fair or rational way, and we are destroying our natural environment rapidly. I sometimes wonder if they would come to intervene, save us from ourselves, but I think not. Maybe if there are other _humans_ out there (descendants from humans taken away many generations ago), that they would care. I think ET has seen it thousands of times ago, and any species not willing to save itself is likely not worth saving, or cannot be saved anyway (it always fails, for instance).
I have always found the Fermi paradox argument stupid and short sighted. It completely disregards the possible interactions between multiple ET civilizations and the formation of a stable situation, and the existence of protocols for dealing with upcoming species like humans.
So, in short they are not showing themselves (much) because doing so would be very unwise.
Fermi's Paradox isn't so much a paradox as what one would expect.
Space travel is hard and takes a LONG time. Galaxy spanning empires are unlikely to exist without unknown physics being used. Any interstellar civilization bound to physics we know would be unable to spread very far, or very fast, as the time needed for travel and communication are enormous. A civilization able to harness any sort of practical near-light or faster than light space travel, radio waves would likely also have totally unknown communication methods.
A civilization bound to physics we understand would have no use with radio waves for interstellar communication. It requires a tremendous amount of power, virtually all of which is wasted. Not to mention the noise and interference with shorter range communication that radio is good for. The only use an interstellar civilization would have for sending radio waves over interstellar distances would be specifically for the purpose of communication with unknown civilizations.
Given our current level of technology, we do have a device which is fairly close to ideal for interstellar communication. Lasers. Far more of the energy you pump into the beam will arrive at the destination, requiring far less power than a radio transmitter. One obvious side effect of this is that any interstellar communication going on out there would be invisible unless directed at us.
The more important question is, in these "video games" are humans NPCs, quest givers, or killable mobs?
And if we are, what kind of loot do we drop?
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
In the "Don't that Robots" propaganda video !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
It takes a very long time to develop faster-than-light (or better) technology but in every case before a civilization can do so, they are wiped out by a gamma-ray burst.
Even colonizing the outer planets won't be enough, they (we) would have to spread across the galaxy and outside the home galaxy to survive gamma-ray bursts.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I find this theory preposterous and a piss poor attempt to expose real human problems by superimposing dining plates on pictures of internet cafes.
Seriously, what makes the article author think we have any basis for understanding or drawing comparisons from super-intelligent, super-advanced sentient creatures who have never once concretely manifested themselves to us. There are a VERY few select group of humans throughout history which I'd even consider being super-intelligent, so we have very little, practically no basis of comparison. That is of course, unless you believed William Cooper, in which case you probably are an alien or a high-level operative of the NWO.
From TFA:
Maybe he's more right than he thinks... Perhaps this is exactly what's happening out there, except that it doesn't stop at becoming temptation-resistant super-parents.
Look at how fundamentalists act here on Earth...
Perhaps these alien species have indeed bred some anti-technology fundamentalists, who go on to destroy that technology and revert their civilization to something more in-line with their beliefs. Which then means that they don't have the high-tech goodies necessary to show up on our doorstep.
Perhaps the universe is populated by Luddites.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
if i had a sufficiently advanced technology available, i would put all kids through virtual reality programs instead of school. it would probably be a lot easier to control. the many ways of the flying spaghetti monster are unknown.
new sig
Maybe the aliens just stay away from Earth in order to avoid being infected by popular mainstream rap artists carrying viruses such as ILOVEYOU and Monkey.B.
+1 for creativity. -1 million for lack of supporting evidence.
http://outcampaign.org/
Their signals are probably all DRMed and thus indistinguishable from white noise.
(BTW, this is how our satellite communications would look like for martians)
Clearly the article is a "joke" that doesn't take itself too seriously, but good grief. There are hundreds of plausible reasons why we haven't found sentient life yet that don't involve a society so consumed with pleasure that it destroys itself. No matter how much a society thrives on pleasure there will never be 100% unanimous pursuit of that pleasure that results in the extinction of a species. It's just ridiculous to suggest that as a possibility over some external force.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
ET play World Of Warcraft, Leroy Jenkins!
Yoda Civilization IV play, hmmmm, yes!
Mr. Spock plays Soduko, fascinating.
Captain Kirk plays Modern Warfare 2.0, we come in peace shoot to kill!
Captain Picard plays OMG Ponies!
Commander Data plays Chessmaster and uses the Holodeck too much..
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Fermi's paradox assumes that the alien civilizations out there sent radio signals in the directions of Earth when they were on the same technological level as we now. Or do you thing Earth's radio waves will be detected 1000 ly from us in 1000 years by some alien race which will be on the same level as us now? I pretty sure our radio waves will be undetectable from the cosmic background noise.
Also, any advanced alien civilization must have some kind of 'ansible' device and does not use radio waves. Let's face it, radio waves are _slow_ in space. You cannot build a space civilization with radio waves. So, if FTL is really not possible forget any star trek like fantasy.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
they have tried and discovered that dog eat dog unregulated capitalism requires growth in order not to let the ones in the bottom rung of the income pyramid to riot, and this, in turn requires constant exploitation of planets to the degree of breaking them down ?
maybe they adopted a much more sensible and logical social policy instead of having to start incessant colonization in order to support an imbalanced income/wealth/status pyramid ?
or even, maybe, our position is like the position of 'indigenous' tribes in south america, which united nations keeps under quarantine to prevent them from 'losing their ways and exploited' ? maybe our planet is a huuuuge showcase as such a tribe, and researchers are popping up form time to time, taking footage and readings to research at home ?
Read radical news here
You know, actually that gives me an idea for a counter-hypothesis about how a first contact would go. I mean, if we're at attributing to aliens carricatures of human stereotypes...
April 5'th, 2063, 11:00 AM: The USS Phoenix, the first warp-capable Earth vessel, launches with Zephram Cochrane aboard.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:30 AM: The USS Phoenx deploys the warp generators and breaks the warp barrier.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:35 AM: The warp surge is detected by the Vulcan ship T'Plana-Hath.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:45 AM: After a brief attempt at hailing it, the Vulcans conclude that the alien craft must contain tentacled aliens intent on raping their women, as documented in the several Hentai transmissions they had intercepted.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:50 AM: The T'Plana-Hath unloads all its fore torpedo tubes into the Phoenix.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:55 AM: The T'Plana-Hath deploys several quarantine beacons beyond Jupiter's orbit to warn other ships to stay away from the newfound menace.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Or maybe these advanced extraterrestrials believe in something akin to the "Prime Directive" like in Star Trek:
Translation: Geoffrey Miller: "ZOMG, I hope we run into an alien civilization that can teach me how I can play World of Warcraft all day without having to work!"
Space travel is hard and takes a LONG time. Galaxy spanning empires are unlikely to exist without unknown physics being used.
...and also, if you have the technology to do long-haul space travel in generation ships (the only kind that we know is remotely feasible) you also have the technology to fill your solar system with space habitats (easier because you have solar energy and raw materials floating around) which is going to take the edge off your need for colonization. If your worry about the health of your sun exceeds your love of solar energy, just park out in the Oort cloud. Probes and exploratory missions won't produce the exponential colonization that the Fermi paradox assumes.
I think it was Greg Egan who wrote that "going exponential" Fermi-style "is what bacteria with spaceships would do" (his post-humans tended to upload themselves to computers and explore their own virtual universes or try to prove Goedel's theorum by exhaustion).
The problem with the Fermi paradox is that its extrapolating from one point: us (if someone jumped up tomorrow and said "Good News Everyone - I've invented FTL travel).
Plus, every good nerd knows that if you've just colonized a new world, the first thing that happens is that your society collapses back to the stone age because someone forgot to pack the machine that makes the machine that makes the machine that makes the chips that run your high-tech hydroponics modules. That's assuming that, during the voyage, you didn't murder the officers and start worshipping the ship's engine.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I think I believe this, too. I mean, it really makes sense. Damnit /., now I'm going to be depressed all day!
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Maybe we're the first to achieve sentience in the Milky Way and in a million years the dominion of Man will stretch across the galaxy. We'll find a lot of planets with life but no other civilizations. As we study the planets we've colonized, we'll start to realize that sentient life would have emerged in a few more million years...had it not be colonized by humanity first. That is, we're the only sentient life out there right now because we are going to interfere with the development of the rest of them in the future, and since we're the only ones that emerged to observe this galaxy we don't see any others in this galaxy. There's probably many other singleton civilizations in other galaxies (and maybe some binary civilizations), but they're way too far away for us to detect.
The scale of time is just as vast as the scale of space...while a million years might seem like an eternity to us with our short individual lives, it is but a moment in the grand scheme of things. Consider that single-celled life on Earth has been around roughly 4 billion years, multicellular life for 1.5 billion years, and post-Cambrian Explosion life for about half a billion years. On the other hand, humanity has only been around in a recognizable form for 2 million years, and in our modern form for a mere 200,000 years. Civilization has been around for even less time, only about 10,000 years. Radio has only been around since the 1890's.
Even with the best parameters filled into the Drake Equation, the likelihood that two present-era civilizations would form within a reasonable number of light years of one another is astronomically small. It should be completely unsurprising to us that the aliens are either not there or are extremely different from us.
In any case, assuming humanity can colonize the Milky Way in one million years and that we'll start working on that very soon (less than 10,000 years from now), the total window of opportunity between sentient life emerging and filling the galaxy is a mere 3 million years. What are the chances that two processes that take 3-5 billion years would happen to finish within the same 3 million year timespan? Even then, the most likely outcome is that one species would be advanced and find the other species in their long-lasting primitive state. Since that clearly didn't happen (unless the stories of ancient astronauts are true), humanity will be the advanced species discovering primitive species as we expand. The second most likely outcome is that both advanced species meet as they expand. It is very unlikely for any action to occur during the relatively short transformation from primitive to advanced, and especially for both species to be in that phase at the same time.
The most likely outcome is of course the one I suggested above. The first sentient species prevents any further sentient species from arising independently through their meddling. Most non-human sentient life will probably be things we create, like robots or genetically engineered creatures.
Of course, this theory assumes that we are not self-destructive and that we will be willing and able to colonize the galaxy. These assumptions (and others) may be incorrect, so there is certainly plenty of room for other possibilities. Still, when thinking about alien life it is critical to account for the vast scale of time.
For anyone with even a reasonable grasp of possibilities, the idea that aliens would automatically have the same drives as people, or even other creatures on this planet is foolish, and that is being nice about it. There is a tendency in science fiction as well as by many who claim to be looking for other life out there that there will be more of a similarity between us and alien life than differences. Even the idea that aliens would need water(H2O), or that they use what is to us the visible light spectrum, or hearing just assumes that too much of what we have here on Earth would be typical of what we might find out there is a flawed expectation.
What can we expect? The unexpected of course. They may exist based on elements we just wouldn't expect to be the building blocks of life. For all we know, there could be aluminum based life out there that could thrive in environments we would find so toxic, we just wouldn't bother looking. Their motivations, if they have any at all, might be based on the ability to see the future, so they only do things that in the long run would not hurt them(a good reason to avoid this planet). They may emit some sort of radiation that is just felt by others of their kind, not sight, not sound, but a radiation that humans would not perceive, or might be harmful to us. Or they may have some other way to sense things around them that humans just couldn't see, and as a result, have not discovered yet. And, they could reproduce automatically without the need for a mate, where variation might just happen due to exposure to others without any "act of reproduction" at all. Greed, hostility, love, hate may not apply to how things are on other planets, but other things that we do NOT understand might come into play. There might be an automatic instinct to just be closer to other beings, or to attack if something gets close...we just don't know.
So, just because the majority of humans are idiots does not mean that aliens would have the same problems. I will say that with the way that nations currently work on this planet, we are due for a meltdown, because those who really are intelligent tend to be less appreciated than the idiots who get political influence and shouldn't be in any sort of a leadership position.
IT WAS EARTH! DON'T DATE ROBOTS!
(brought to you by the Space Pope)
Sounds like a certain someone just got done reading Charles Stross' Accelerando to me...
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
The aliens just didn't buy the multi-planetary expansion pack so the sim doesn't contain the communications to detect.
no radio signals? how about things that can brake up signals aka rain fade type over a lot of space a signal can be to weak to pick up or what if they are useing a band that we are look looking for or a band that is a lot like what we have now so it gets passed over as being our own one.
that radio signal's degrade over distance and becomes undetectable from background radiation after a few light years. with our nearest neighbor star about 10 light years away i would not be surprised if there were any signal's out there but by the time they reach us they are just part of the background radiation. same goes for our's that we send out.
We wait for radio signals. I suspect we're as likely to get them as the ants. A better way would be look for objects that might be artifacts, odd star formations, etc.
I have a feeling periods would be the first victim of such interference
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
We are in "Not So Good" economic times and birth rates, not surprisingly, are down. After all, it went down during the Great Depression too.
However, the overall trend is for smaller families in good times as well. In the 1960 the average American family had 3 children and the average Mexico city family had 9. (WHO numbers)
Today, the average American family has 1.8 children and in Mexico City 3. Cheap, available birth control, education, and societal old-age support all contribute.
But to say Video Games is the big draw for smaller families is too big of an assumption. Simply chasing the next wrung up the ladder of self-sufficiency and affluence is all you need to explain this.
If you ask me (and I know you didn't) the only way to make people have bigger families is to have complete government collapse for at lease a full generation, i.e. a Dark Age.
That or gestation chambers, of course.
This already happened back in 2306. Were all just on a loop-tape.
Dom
Isn't this hypothesis pretty much the exact same as Pixar's idea of what happened to humans in WALL-E's dystopian future?
Original thinking nowt?
What about the simplest answer provided by our fellow Amish:
Perhaps a truely advanced civilization achieves a sustainable parity on their planet and have no reason to colonize the galaxy.
[Being Rambling Optional Commentary]
Perhaps the logical conclusion to an advanced society is the development of a simple "Our planet can sustain X number of us. We achived that goal and now live sustainable on our planet with a targeted X population."
The Amish lifestyle, if they were a majority of the planet, would be pretty darn stealthy.
Leveraging the Samer theory (if true) then likely they would bury most artifical EM to shield people from the normal white noise we are used to and optical carriers used for data as a best-in-class communication medium.
A technologically advanced civilization would be efficent and leak very little "noise" into the universe. Also their ability to live "sustainably" on a planet would likely drive the need to colonize more then a system or two moot. More then likely large city-ships just out in the middle of nowhere are more likely.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I think there are better reasons for us not being able to find alien radio signals than "they're all playing video games." Any alien civilization out there could be undetectable by us for a number of reasons:
1. We've only been listening for alien signals for 40 years. That's not even a blip in the cosmic scale. It's sort of like being in the middle of a giant warehouse, taking two steps forward and declaring that your intensive searching has revealed no "outside world." Perhaps we need to wait a few more decades, centuries, or millennium for the signals to reach us.
2. Perhaps the signals have already passed us. Maybe, sometime during the building of the pyramids, radio signals from an alien world were passing by us. The humans of the time would have had no way of knowing that proof of alien life was right in front of them. By the time SETI began searching for life, the alien signals stopped either due to the civilization dying out or due to the aliens moving on to technology that "leaked" less. We've used radio for a little over a century and are already switching to technologies that don't involve tossing unencrypted signals in the air all over the place. Perhaps there's only a 1 or 2 century window from when a civilization first uses radio to when they move to a different, more undetectable, technology.
3. Perhaps we've seen it but didn't recognize it. Who says that we'd actually recognize an alien signal. If I gave you some network monitoring tools and sent a few hundred streams of data down the pipe, most of which was random but one of which was encoded information, would you be able to tell the random from the information? Even if you didn't know the encoding scheme or what kind of information you were dealing with? I'd bet that it would be tough to do and that's dealing with human-created encryption schemes. Add an alien intelligence to the mix and the difficulty would skyrocket.
4. Maybe we haven't looked in the right place. The universe is huge and we've only searched tiny fragments. Going back to #1's warehouse analogy, it'd be like searching a giant warehouse, opening one box and declaring the item to not be in the warehouse because it wasn't in the first box you opened.
Any of these could easily be the reason why we haven't found intelligent alien life yet and are more likely than "the aliens are playing video games."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
But integrated over enough time the level will start to stand out from the noise. They just need to keep the signal going long enough
Yes, but a signal whose reception can be be improved by integration will not be very complex and/or has to be repetitive with a known repetition rate (and bandwidth).
Or, maybe we have heard it but:
That is enough for now.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
...it's called projection;-)
Look what it did to the Dinosaurs.
And apparently so is theorizing about why we haven't heard from the aliens yet.
Maybe they killed themselves off in an awful world war. Maybe they poisoned their planet with chemical weapons. Maybe they poisoned their planet with radioactive fallout, triggered nuclear winter, and all froze in the radioactive dark. Maybe they discovered Communism, and turned into an unfeeling murderous hive-mind, and then starved to death. Maybe they discovered CO2-emitting energy sources, and runaway climate change did them in. Maybe terrorist nanotech turned them into grey goo. Maybe they're too busy playing video games seek out new life, new civilizations, and new green-skinned hotties.
Somehow no matter what the theory is, it reads like a tract condemning whatever humanity is doing wrong at the time, rather than a serious attempt at squaring the Drake equation with our lack of credible signals from extraterrestrial life.
0 1 - just my two bits
It took 3.5 billion years for life on earth to go from self replicating molecules to us, which is about 25% of the total age of the entire universe
Aside from general human evolution, even recent human technological development is a mere moment in time...
I think about 200 years ago, radio communication pretty much didn't exist. [While spark-gap transmitters were an amazing achievement, I suspect alien cultures would assume such transmissions to be electrical storms or noise].
Due to their simplicity, it seems to me that our basic AM and FM radio transmissions (from the past ~50-75 years) would be recognizable...
Today, would an alien civilization be able to detect and decode spread-spectrum signals? [I think not!] What about our encrypted wireless networks, cell phones, etc? Basic DMT/OFDM transmissions might be recognizable as being artificial (they are easy to see in the frequency domain), but I doubt they could be decoded.
Assuming human civilization doesn't destroy itself, how complex are things going to be in 200 years from now?
Also, our electrical technology is based on the materials and minerals we use to make electrical components (PCB boards, oscillators, etc)... Alien civilizations would very likely have a much different composition of minerals/etc on their planet... Even if they developed electrical technology, they might operate in entirely different frequency ranges (e.g. very low frequencies or very high frequencies). Their atmosphere might also enhance/inhibit radio propagation.
And even they are are similar to us, they may have similar arguments as the above and just give up...
We call them South Koreans.
A few weeks ago, I bought a pack of candy. The gummy objects inside consisted of two shapes - long squiggly lines and closed circles. They had two groups of colors, warm reds and oranges and cool blues and greens, matched to the shapes. They also were dividable by sweet and sour, again with tartness matched to shape and color group.
Hey, I realized, the whole candy is binary bits, testable by any of several senses to determine state. Now who needs several different ways of reading the same binary bit? Obviously, there are at least three alien species making these things. When the bits show up on Earth, we package them and eat them, but somewhere else, they are being sequenced and stuck to very large drive platters (Obviously why they are slightly self adhesive). This explains why aliens haven't contacted us in person. Being all very large species (as their lack of miniturization in data technology should show, but if they didn't start out titanic, they have obviously grown that way from eating so many candy bits during erase operations), travel costs are proportionately magnified.
Who is John Cabal?
Looks like almost nobody here read the last 3 paragraphs. Too bad - they appear to be the most interesting.
Even so, I feel Dr. Miller is a bit too extreme in his view - one doesn't need to be a luddite to resist the self-indulgence pitfalls of modern society. Hard drugs such as cocaine an heroine (not to mention alcohol) short-circuit the brain's reward system in a much more brutal and direct way that video games and porn. These have been around for more that 100 years. Did they cause socio-economic problems when first introduced? Sure. Have they led to collapsing societies? Not quite. What we're seeing now is a plague of young people ruining their chance of a good jobs by playing MMORPGs all day. While this causes many personal tragedies, the good jobs still get filled in by those that are not addicted, and society still rumbles on. Same on a bigger scale: there are still people not working in the entertainment industry, there are still people pushing ahead science and technology...
I think in the (not-so-)long term, addictive video games will get a similar status as porn and alcohol: restricted to adults, and over-indulgence would be highly frowned upon. A certain percentage of the population will fall for them, a certain percentage will abstain from them, and the vast majority will suffer mild loss of productivity because of them (and have fun doing so).
This is hardly a new hypothesis. That an advanced alien civilization would turn inward to virtual reality is _the_ canonical formulation of "the Singularity" (after the achievement of which a civilization would not see non-Singularity civilizations as being at all intelligent, and would turn inwards) and this idea is basically the sole purpose of such decades-old concepts as Dyson spheres and computronium. And it's always offered as an explanation for Fermi's Paradox.
Intelligence is off-putting. The quirks intelligent people tend to develop are even more off-putting.
Many a geek would have happily produced children in their teens or 20's, but were rejected by all potential mates.
By the time they were old enough to have potential mates who were willing to marry and breed in return for mere financial security, they found that:
1) the geeks no longer needed mates, having been forced to learn to turn inward and find fulfillment by themselves
2) all such mates were themselves repulsive, hence their being single
3) most such mates already had kids anyway, and didn't want more, thus making the point moot.
This is not a new idea at all. It's been offered as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox many times in decades past, and this turning inwards to virtual reality is one of the canonical definitions of a post-Singularity civilization. All Geoffrey Miller has done is substitute "computer game" for the historical term "virtual reality." See: Matrioshka Brain, computronium, Singularity, et al.
" why 40 years of intensive searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing: no radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind"
40 years of SETI is the equivalent of going out into the ocean, dropping a hook into the ocean for 10 seconds.
" why 10 seconds of intensive searching for sea life have yielded nothing: no fish bites, no boats sightings, no fish of any kind"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...like how to make one that's directional. You're talking about eavesdropping on an omnidirectional transmission, not one targeted at us.
We can pick up Voyager's 20-watt transmission (from a 3.4-meter reflector pointed straight at us) with a 34-meter dish at a range of over 1/1000 of a light year. To get the same signal strength at four light-years, you could bump up the power to 300 megawatts, or you could make the transmitter a lot more directional, or you could make the receiving antenna bigger, or (most sensibly) some combination of the three.
"What motivates human beings may not be what motivates aliens." We climb mountains because they're there. We want to go out into the universe for the same reason. Maybe aliens don't.
My guess is the answer is one of the following:
1) The lifespan of civilizations is short enough that the chances of any two lasting long enough to be contemporaries is low.
2) Tech development is so rapid that the odds of any two civilizations being at the same level to interact are low.
3) There may be tons of interstellar chatting going on between far-flung civilizations but they're using something we haven't discovered, subspace radio or ansibles with QM entanglements or psychic projections through dimension Q. The radio spectrum might be considered as primitive as smoke signals.
4) Civilizations might be insular by nature and not friendly. They might not want to go larking about the galaxy looking for people.
The idea of a civilization turning decadent and inward, of indulging in pleasures and fantasy is very human. Human empires have fallen in the past due to that sort of thing and it's only likely to occur in the future.
It's actually a conundrum I had with a story setting I was working on. What would supremely high-tech societies do if they had this kind of mastery of technology and the mind? Through history we've seen kings and the obscenely wealthy create pleasure palaces, trying to recreate Eden or heaven on Earth. But wouldn't that sort of thing pale in magnificence to consensual hallucination within virtual worlds? Like they said in the Matrix, what is real? The answer I came up with is that the richest of the rich of the galactic society lived in hidden worldships. These ships stay hidden in interstellar space, locations the most closely guarded of secrets. The denizens spend their time in their dreamtime pleasure domes, the physical receptacles of their consciousness jacked into the system, kept biologically immortal. What do they occupy their time with? All sorts of esoteric plots and intrigues and arts that are incomprehensible to anyone not immersed in it from the start. To those on the outside, it would seem as foolish as a french peasant looking at the rich in the years before the revolution.
The kicker is that the demands of running these fantasy afterlives is enormous and requires an immense draw of resources from living worlds. The particulars are a little involved but what they need has to come from a living biosphere and cannot be replicated in anything so small as a space-faring habitat. It requires full-scale planets. The peasentry live dirtside and their contact with the galactic gods (which, for all intents and purposes, these people may as well be) is through their emmisaries.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
This species has amused itself to death.
--Ariston
"I'm never wrong--sometimes reality just disagrees with me."
...amused itself to death.
But wouldn't an advanced species have overcome their "Earthly" desires?
The fact that we seek instant gratification through food, games and porn is that our
brains still more closely resemble those of our ancestors who lived in caves
than those of a technologically advanced civilization.
Just the other day I was thinking that even 50 years desktop computers had not been invented
so we still have these animal brains meant to deal with threats from snakes and lions trying
to do VBS Excel calculations, while writing an email, and it just doesn't work out so well.
More specifically I was thinking about the level of concentration and critical thinking skills
necessary to be a Star Fleet Officer, and how many people can't text and drive at the same time
let alone calculate the approach angle of a photon torpedo while maximizing shields, for example.
Furthermore I believe that the author falls into a logical contradiction in that he assumes
that in the future we will be like ourselves only moreso. If we have video-game addicts today
then tomorrow's society will be all video-games all the time, instead of thinking that
maybe we will develop tools and social norms to deal with that behavior which will allow us
to divert our reasoning and creativity into more productive endeavors.
This Sig does not Exist.
Hello, I am a member of the Galactic Police Force. You humans haven't seen any SPACE CASH around here, have you?
I think this just summed up everything I've seen in Japan.
We assume that alien civilizations will be like us in part I think because we are all we know. Humanity is the only example we have of what is possible. However, we have all of humanity to use as an example for what alien civilizations might be like, not just our own local neighborhoods. There are still many places on Earth where people are still struggling for basic survival. If here in the first world we become too pre-occupied with our pleasure to maintain ourselves I'm sure the people of the third world will happily take our place and we will fall into theirs. Actually.. come to think of it.. it kind of looks like that is what is happening. Maybe it is cyclical... If Alien civilizations are so similar to ours as to resemble the conjectures in this article they will probably be similar enough to have their own third world too.
Lets say he's right that all alien societies do succumb to VR instinct fulfillment and abandon all further progression of society. Perhaps our universe is filled with the empty husks of species that progressed to the point where they could tap their own pleasure center neurons and then died out.
If you believe that by pointing this out we can somehow prevent our species from succumbing to the same result, then the problem of the paradox comes right back. As these aliens species must have had the same reservations before they fell to the darkness of VR.
Or he believes to be so clever that no alien species could have pointed out this trap in time. So they all fell to ruin. But we are more clever so we can prevail, now that we know, whilst all of the others have clearly epic failed.
Or he is just a philosophical pessimist languishing in the doomy juices of determinism. As no amount of pointing out the impending doom will change the course. Thus the paradox is avoided and we all get to die a pleasure filled VR death.
Or he is just doing some geeky mental imagination masturbation and wants to share the "fruits" of his labor.
The last choice I actually have the most respect for as it might eventually lead to something useful. Possibly sowing the "seeds" of other great ideas.
I was thinking about this issue the other day in connection with transhumanism. Let's say that, around the same time that sending interstellar signals becomes feasible, intelligent species also develop AI and the ability to transition from biological minds to solid-state minds. Odds are that when it is possible, it will be broadly adopted: despite uneasiness about the idea, everyone is eventually confronted by the choice of dying of old age or having their mind uploaded into a machine. In a relatively short time, you have a machine culture.
You also have one probably unanticipated side-effect: machine "brains" would almost certainly operate several orders of magnitude faster than biological brains. Suddenly, the lag time for signals between star systems goes up -- subjectively -- by a factor of ten thousand, perhaps even a million or more. Actual travel between star systems? Forget it. The aliens could, of course, slow down their clocks and experience time at something more like their original biological rate, but they probably wouldn't, as it would amount to vastly shortening their lives. The change in temporal perspective changes everything.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
They're just masturbating on 4chan all day.
QamuIs Heg qaq law' lorvIs yInqaq puS
We're still doubling the world population every 40 years. I tend to think we'll lose a lot of people to war, disease or simple lack of resources LONG before we die out due to apathy and our enjoyment of fast food and porn.
I think it's far more likely alien civilizations all do what we're doing... Expand uncontrollably until we consume every resource on our home planet, and then destroy everything in the following wars and conflicts.
We wait for radio signals. I suspect we're as likely to get them as the ants. A better way would be look for objects that might be artifacts, odd star formations, etc.
Tsk, tsk. Making intelligent posts instead of just going "ObXKCD LOL!". Newbie.
is the one I've been offering for well over thirty years:
1) how many planets sustain life?
2) how many such planets evolve what we would recognize as technologically-bent intelligent life? (remember the hundreds of thousands of years we had only stone technology?)
3) how many of *them* are within 300 years of our technology level - too soon, no radio or spaceships or...; later, and why would they be using such a low-tech and wasteful technology as broadcast radio?
4) How many of the above are within 40 ly of Earth?
5) For good measure, how many cut their budgets for space exploration, it being a wasteful government program, and, after all, private companies can do everything?
mark
Here's my theory: Extraterrestrial beings probably know the kind of people that live on earth. Earth is full of greed and people who strive for more power over anything. I would stay as FAR AWAY from this planet if I knew anything about it, which I'm sure they do. Severing communications between you and a hostile, primitive life-form is, in the end, the smart thing to do, isn't it?
...never tells me nothing. Not a peep. And I've checked all the cords'n'everthing.
On the other hand, maybe "they" have gotten lives and aren't waiting for the phone to ring.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
...2 years ago. #3:
http://www.cracked.com/article_15655_5-awesome-sci-fi-inventions-that-would-actually-suck.html
Assumptions will block all the possibilities, and you will miss the most statistically probable, or just the ones more interesting to think about than just "pure" evolution from dirt and water. Why could not humans be genetically engineered? It may sound improbable and fantastic at first, but if you go look into it, you will see there are actually pretty strong indications of this. What is blocking people to find this out, is actually their own conditionings and bias - which is severely detrimental to the scientific method actually. How can a true scientist dismiss -ANY- idea out of hand?
Everyone assumes we weren't planted here in the first place, except for maybe die-hard Bible-thumpers. Where is the "missing link"? We have all the evolution up to apes, then a period of "missing link" where we can't find fossils and bones of our ancestors, then all of a sudden homo sapiens arrives, coincidentally sharing 99% of genes with apes, but being distinctly different also. We haven't really evolved much since. The last hundred of thousands of years we are basically the same as then, not more or less intelligent although societies have had different empasis on different knowledge and practicalities. Humans as they are today arrived on the scene 200,000 years ago. Neanderthals died out 25,000 years ago. Why didn't the neanderthals evolve and where did humans come from? 200,000 years is a long time of lost history, but it makes no sense there are no traces of us as we are today before that.. All of a sudden humans arrived on the scene, and posed a radical threat to all competing species.
I'm afraid bias and prejudice is the reason science is today unable to investigate this properly. Bias will be an assumption that blocks your vision for what is possible, and most probable..
Who where the "Gods" and "Giants" in the ancient times, who could fly aircrafts (mentioned in Vedas "vimanas", flying -aircraft-, complete with pilot manuals!, bible - Esekiel 1:4-25, 3:12-15, Maya, Hopi-indian religion, Egyptian, Greek mythology, pretty much every farking religio/tradition out there?), and also bomb cities with missiles of great powers (mentioned in Vedas, Bible (Sodom & Gomorra)? Where did people get these fanciful ideas, before we had aircrafts and nukes? There are mentions of both heart and brain! transplants being done successfully in various traditions. Where did these simple people get all these advanced ideas from? Of course this was mixed with their own superstition and culture, but if you read the bible verses, or Vedas, it is pretty clear what is actually meant. We can understand today, because we are able to build similar vehicles and missiles ourselves.
From Esekiel 1:4-25 (The Bible, New International Version). How can this be nothing other than a description of a manned aircraft landing with a pilot inside:
"4 I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north—an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, 5 and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was that of a man, 6 but each of them had four faces and four wings. 7 Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze. 8 Under their wings on their four sides they had the hands of a man. All four of them had faces and wings, 9 and their wings touched one another. Each one went straight ahead; they did not turn as they moved.
10 Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a man, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. 11 Such were their faces. Their wings were spread out upward; each had two wings, one touching the wing of another creature on either side, and two wings covering its body. 12 Each one went straight ahead. Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, without turning as they went. 13 The appearance of the living creatures was like burning coa
...the hypothesis would be that the reason we haven't seen alien signals is because they are all too busy dancing down at the disco.
At which point we realize how incredibly myopic this video game alien laziness hypothesis actually is.
maybe they encountered an Intergalactic Economic Crisis, their mighty president came up with an Intergalactic stimulus plan and consequently, they stopped funding all their IASA (Intergalactic Aeronautics and Space Administration) activities.
they may have solved every possible problem but I think they need more to solve problems with alien greed and economy.
Our formal species name is Homo sapiens sapiens.
Neanderthals formal species name is Homo sapiens neanderthalis
Modern man and Neanderthals are exactly the same species and there is actually genetic evidence that says we could interbreed.
The difference between moder man and neanderthals is equivalent to the difference between Great Danes and a Labrador Retriever.
They are capable of interbreeding but have some distinct traits. They are sub-species under the same species.
There is actually a lot of evidence that the Gallic tribes merged with Neanderthals through interbreeding rather than killing them off.
It is EXTREMLY unlikley that two tool using animals capable of symbolic communication would happen to evolve at the same time. If they evolved near each other from the same ancestors then they would likely compete for resources and one or both would die out before they expanded. If they evolved seperatly from different ancestors then they would ahve to do so within 50,000 years of each other since that is about how long it took Man to completly colonize the planet. Once a tool using animal takes over the planet we change the environment too quickly for another intelligent species to get a foothold.
This is the Fermi paradox but on earth. We are here therefore it is unlikly that any other tool using animal has evolved since the dinosaurs died out.
Calculating God was a book about this subject. Was it referenced as his inspiration?
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Teleportation is far more likely a solution than moving matter anywhere close to the speed of light. It's simply logic that larger things equates to slower, basic Newtonian. Just don't ask me to figure out the Teleportation thing because I feel we haven't discovered something necessary.
Black body radiation? Possibly more like bandwidth limited white noise? Spectrum congestion should be acute for the more advanced life forms, ergo possibly narrow bandwidth and data compression. The alternative: multiplexing and wide spectrum would presents signal amalgamation issues unless DRM has limited signal generation to a few large powerful organizations*. )
* unlikely, as I suspect DRM will limit the continued evolution of intelligent life forms.
Chas
So, I find it odd that we are constantly separating the notion of "aliens" from "computers." I look forward to the day when we just start building computers from biological life. Maybe stem cell research will allow us to grow vats of neurons and other cells that can be shapped and arranged and connected to various I/O. I assume that this is a natural and efficient next step in the evolution of computers. Biological computers/wetware, makes a lot of sense because you it is self-maintaining (it regrows itself). So then, why wouldn't sentient beings and computers become one and of the same? Neurons seem like good processing units and they are relatively efficient. I bet we could make them a lot more efficient. And I bet we can begin to make direct neural connections a reality. In this sense, I hope one day our notion of computers is one based upon biology and information exchange amongst various biological agents. As such, I expect computers will just be some subset of forms and functions of biological agents (or hives or whatever individual vs. grouping construct you wish to have).
Of course, that is a very human perspective on biology and frankly my notion of sentience and of "being" is rather naive and not well understood and worse I cling to it and believe it and trust it and think that I know what "I am."
I'd venture a guess that, like us, high powered radio transmissions are only a transient event in the progress of any civilization. We will almost certainly progress from no radio, through megawatt transmissions and on to milliwatt mesh networks in less than a few hundred years. And so our radio signature, as seen by other civilizations, will appear as nothing more than a brief pulse. If thhey don't look at the right time, they'll miss us. The same holds true for us.
Establishing radio communications with distant civilizations that have lifetimes similar to ours (even differing by an order of magnitude or so) is pretty pointless. Send a message and hope that your distant descendants will receive a reply? Why bother? We are just starting to scratch the surface of understanding various phenomena like quantum entanglement. Where the observation of one particle of a pair can influence the observation of the other a great distance away unrestricted by the speed of light. Its possible that advanced civilizations are harnessing this effect for communications. Once we figure out how to detect these channels, some useful form of communications between us will be possible.
Have gnu, will travel.
The author extols the virtues of Christian and Muslim fundamentalists and anti-consumerism activists, along with hyper-vigilant environmentalists in the conclusion of his article. This is extremely ironic in that these groups are almost completely anti-progress and would certainly be against scientific pursuits and space exploration. If you actually parse this article down to its purest form, you can see that he really is arguing against the creation and consumption of art, claiming that it hinders human progress. Even a cursory analysis of human history would reveal this as one of the most ridiculous notions ever presented by an academic of any kind.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. When the population becomes low enough big corporations will simply spin off a few companies to manufacture consumers.
A nuclear powered electrostatic ion thruster means that even slowly we could go anywhere, it would just take thousands of years. Ok well humans only live 100 years... so you freeze a few hundred thousand embryos, and you crew a large vessel with women, and only women. They each have one child (or two, if the crew loses a member unexpectedly) all the children will be girls. After many hundreds (or thousands) of generations, they land on an M Class planet, give birth to some boys, and start a colony. Food will be an issue but it is not an unsolvable problem, not even with our current tech.
While some aspect of the male in me would be entertained by the thought of thousands of beautiful Lesbians (because after the first generation had died, they wouldn't have much choice in their preferences), sailing around on a ship and eventually arriving at another star system in hopes of colonizing it (and ratings for the TV show might be pretty high), what is the actual reasoning for excluding any males from being bred in your theory? What about the first generation that includes males, but has to adjust to their existence in a culture that doesn't know what to do with them and has no male traditions per se. I think this would place a lot of unnecessary stress on the colonizing generation, don't you?
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
There is lots of it.
I don't think many people really grasp how big "space" is or the magnitude of distances involved. I also don't think people understand the time frames involved in moving something from point a to point b, be that light, radio, or physical objects.
I have little doubt that life does exist (other than our own), and in fact I think it is not only possible, but highly probable, and will even go so far to say that I don't think intelligence is all that uncommon either.
I do believe in life cycles however, and until shown otherwise the potential upper limit of what technology can do VS basic physics. Combine all that with HUGH distances, and LONG periods of time.
I mean until we get to the level of technology that is essentially what would seem to us as "magic" the challenges are too insurmountable to overcome.
If you look at science fiction, it abounds with war, trade, communication, etc... however all of them cheat on the scale of things, even when making up "magic" technologies including FTL travel.
The much maligned L. Ron. Hubbard even wrote a nice "what if" book all about it. Battlefield Earth's main premise wasn't Earth, the struggle, Scientology, or any such nonsense. It was an examination of what would happen if a race actually did manage to invent something that enabled instantaneous travel, because without it, all those things like trade, war, communication, anything really between cultures is pretty much impossible.
The Forever War is another good example, that with time dilation due to approaching the speed of light, it makes all those activities irrelevant. So much time would elapse that it would make such endeavors pointless, unless of course everyone involved is immortal or something like that. Again magic technology.
I guess what I am trying to say is that while I think there is plenty of life out there, even intelligent life out there, there is little if any chance of us to become aware of it. Even if by some miracle we just happened to be in the exact right place, right time, right part of the cosmos, and somehow were able to identify some alien signals, and we also somehow able to interpret them, it would mostly be academic, other than to finally know that someone else is out there. Actual interaction would be impossible.
Not to mention our collective definition of what we consider alive or what is consciousnesses might be in need of revision. Also time scale may also play a big part here, as potential alien life span may be magnitudes more or less than we currently perceive. (though the type of life we are looking for, i.e. a lot like us for example, probably isn't all that different) Perhaps we are not so special, just an occurrence that happens every so often here and there that comes and goes, and really on a galactic scale makes very little impact. I mean people can barely (and many cannot) concive of "geologic" time, let alone anything many magnitudes longer than that.
I am reminded of an interesting possibility. Computer modelling is often more efficient than carrying out the task itself economically speaking, although within bounds of accuracy. Could the same be true for SETI?
If an intelligent civilization had some kind of high performance computing capable of modelling at many scales simultaneously (astronomical, chemical, sociological, biological) it may not be necessary to greet other life with space ships or radio signals. For example, given enough data and computing time an advanced civilization is able to accurately model what is happening on Earth from many light years away.
Given this notion it is no longer insular to "ignore" other civilizations, it is a gesture of respect; perhaps we will someday be able to achieve a similar effort. This is somewhat counterintuitive, but the galactic civilization would be by definition separate, yet connected by a shared mathematical model of the universe.
40 years.
So given that the ultimate speed of anything is light, that is 40 light years distance. If they are communicating in light and not radio waves, and if it doesn't get scrambled between here and there. I mean my WiFi only goes 100m before signal loss!
I mean on a universal scale what is 40 light years really? The area of the head of a pin, located in New York, as observed from the moon? Scale of time is all wrong.
In this type of mission, males are a waste of resources, since genetic diversity could not be maintained without pre-selecting embryos, so males would not be needed for fertilization, or gestation. If you want the best shot at actually surviving it, then maybe one male per generation would be sound, as a contingency. Sorry I seem to be using Slashdot to write my own Sci-Fi here.
The ever aging and re-birthing crew serves as an organism to simply outlast and survive the crushing time requirements of interstellar colonization. A man cannot gestate a child, and it would be dangerous for genetic diversity for that man to conceive a child or children, so a man serves no purpose other than to eat precious food.
The first generation of E.T. humans would have it rough no matter what, but the truth is all but the first generations of crew members are slaves to the process, with no agency, so 1st generation male or 1000th generation female springing a new culture would be equally difficult.
The aliens would be mass broadcasting tweets and stupid facebook pictures to the entire universe.
When you don't have to forage for food all day, you can spend more time fighting and get good at fighting. When you don't have to fight all day, you can spend more time foraging for food and get good at it. Two specialized individuals, with complementary skill sets, can accomplish more than two generalists with mostly overlapping skill sets.
With all due respect to Heinlein, whose works I enjoy very much, let's not take that quote to seriously. Heinlein did not do all those things, and the ones he did do, he had the luxury of choosing to do because he was so proficient at his chosen specialization.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I'm addicted to the new Fermi game. Change a few parameters and get different aliens, etc. Can't take my eyes off it.
Table-ized A.I.
They are all playing second life, 'cause no humans play it.
Be seeing you...
It's painfully simple. Industrial civilizations run out of resources in only a few hundred years.
Industrial civilization on this planet is only about 200 years old. Until the industrial revolution, humans couldn't really make a serious dent in the earth's resources. Now, most of the easy to extract resources have been extracted. Almost everything runs out in the next 200 years. Some things run out much sooner.
Recycling helps, but each time around the cycle, you lose some. There hasn't been a new energy source in 50 years. Nuclear power was working 50 years ago, and since then, nothing better has come along. Science itself is not a renewable resource; most of the easy discoveries have been made. The resources required for a new discovery keep increasing. This is why companies no longer have pure science R&D departments. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that was profitable.
About fifty years ago, the advanced countries finally were able to make enough stuff for everybody. That was new; it had never been achieved before in all of history. People living today will see the end of that. There will be wars over the remaining scraps. Nobody will win.
Space travel won't help. Within the solar system, the real estate off Earth is worse than the worst real estate on Earth. Interstellar travel is hopeless.
The last 25 years were the high water mark of industrial civilization. From here on, it's all downhill.
...theory of civilization's evolutionary re-adjustment, where gamers and Slashdot mega-posters are put on a spaceship to escape (MEGA-AIR-QUOTES) "the planet falling into the Sun." ... or was it the Sun exploding?
"Have you heard of some type of thing?" -- anon
Have anyone noticed that this is a 2006 article?