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?

Comments

Yea

[Seriousity]

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!

Re:Yea

[impaledsunset]

That's one of the most ridiculous hypotheses I've ever read. Sure, it is possible, Sure, everything we know about aliens is based on speculations that don't go against our knowledge. But most speculations at least seem plausible and match the only example of an advanced civilization we know of.

And this single example has shown us a few things for which I would be surprised if they don't apply universally. The first is that no matter what the general population are, there would always be deviations and a small percentage of people who are different is enough to affect world-wide matters. The second is that if these different people don't exist or are unable to push the rest of the society like we do, the whole population would probably still be in the caves, because most of our progress depended on them.

Well, the last one seems plausible, though. However, I thought that the possibility that all aliens are still in the caves was already considered, and thus this story brings nothing new to us.

I don't think there's one reason for it all, though.

1. While I want to believe that life is abundant in the universe, complex life as ours might turn out to be rare.
2. For four billion years all life here was essentially living in the caves. We created our civilization in a wink lasting the mere fifty thousand years because homo sapiens somehow managed to look outside of the box by chance. Sure, being intelligent was an evolutionary advantage for the billions of years that the homo genus survived, so we didn't come out of nowhere, but there's still no guarantee that this happens often in the universe. We might be one of the few advanced civilizations.
3. What makes us think we can hear them? Have they developed the radio? Do they use broadcasts? What if they use encryption making the signals indistinguishable from noise? Why would they care to send signals to us? Maybe some of them "know" that there's a little chance that there's someone out there?

Re:Yea

[Anonymous Coward]

Starcraft players still live in caves.

Re:Yea

[anarche]

Well, at least we've sussed who's been benefiting from the gambling scandal...

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/04/14/south-korea-rocked-by-starcraft-gambling-scandal/

Re:Yea

[CODiNE]

We don't have copyright laws on K-PAX.

Re:Yea

[RickyG]

Yes! I await that defense! "Mom, I wasn't looking at Porn, it was those lazy aliens using our WiFi!!!"

Re:Yea

[rhsanborn]

I suspect this was far less of a hypothesis about aliens and far more social commentary on humans.

Re:Yea

[hazah]

Statistically, the probability of life in the universe is exactly 100%. I leave it to you to figure out why that is the case (hint: we are talking to each other). To say that it's "mathematically impossible" displays a lack of understanding of the term itself. Perhaps your conviction in the matter is a bit misplaced?

Re:Yea

[History's Coming To]

Point 3 is a good one - it's already been suggested that any signal that has perfect compression would be indistinguishable from black body radiation.

Re:Yea

[wjousts]

There are no Genghis Khans anymore, nor Alexander the Greats.

I'm not sure that isn't a good thing. Maybe you should pick some less psychotic examples.

Also I'd add that "greatness" is something that history tends to assess post-hoc. In 100 years time there maybe many 20th century luminaries who are considered as great and as significant as Genghis Khan or Alexander.

Re:Yea

[mcgrew]

I think everyone completely misses the fact that space aliens are going to be nothing like us whatsoever. A bird evolved on the same planet as us, in the same environment, gravity, atmosphere, etc but is little like us at all. A squid evolved in the same planet; how much different will space aliens be? You're not going to see Star Trek's Klingons and Romulans and Ferengi, period. Birds have feathers, we have hair, space aliens are unlikely to have either, but have something completely different that serves the same purpose.

There are some pretty wierd creatures on earth, and if there are other planets inhabited by sentient beings, they will be less like us than squids are. And not only in looks and biology, but social structures, psychology, interaction, communications, etc.

The second is that if these different people don't exist or are unable to push the rest of the society like we do, the whole population would probably still be in the caves

Or still in the farrnglottispods, or whatever you call those wierd things those strange beings lived in when they were more primitive.

While I want to believe that life is abundant in the universe, complex life as ours might turn out to be rare.

And it may turn out that we're the first planet to form life; if there is life on multiple planets, one has to be first.

For four billion years all life here was essentially living in the caves

For most of that time, the caves were underwater; life began in the oceans. But actually there was as much life outside of caves as inside; most animals don't live in caves now, and no more lived in caves then.

We might be one of the few advanced civilizations.

Or one of trillions, or the only one in the universe. Since we've not even found evidence of primitive life anywhere else (yet), it's all just speculation.

What makes us think we can hear them? Have they developed the radio?

For that matter, do they even have the same senses that we do? They may have developed senses we lack, while being blind and deaf.

Re:Yea

[biryokumaru]

Don'd feed the extremely inaccurate troll. The probability of complex organic life coming into being is actually much higher than most people realize.

I think the real reason we haven't found anyone out there is probably things like interstellar hydrogen getting in the way of space travel, and causing scattering and absorption of communications signals. Most people agree that the SETI project is fundamentally flawed in that way. Doesn't make it an unworthy cause, however, just an unlikely one.

Re:Yea

[TheRaven64]

This is where the Fermi Paradox comes from. Our galaxy is only about 100,000 light years across. Sending something at 1% of the speed of light is not too far off our current capability. Sending something at 10% is not difficult to conceive. At this speed, you could explore and colonise the entire galaxy in just one million years. Even if you took a year to set up each colony and didn't take the most direct route, 2-3 million years doesn't seem too long. A single Von Neumann probe could do it in about this time, maybe 5 million years to give it a bit of leeway.

The oldest star in this galaxy is around 13 billion years old. Five million years is a tiny fragment of this, and yet we haven't found any evidence in our system of any visitation. Statistically, it seems probable that at least one civilisation would have reached the required level to be able to explore the entire galaxy in this time, so where are they? Why haven't we seen any evidence of them? The models that we have predict that either life could not develop at all (disproved by the simple fact that we exist), or it should spread out over a massive area and end up covering the entire galaxy.

Re:Yea

[TheRaven64]

While I mostly agree with you, consider the shark and the dolphin. They have followed very different evolutionary paths, but the end result is quite similar. In the end, there are only so many ways of solving the 'propel through the water' problem. Even squids have a broadly similar structure, although they use jets instead of fins for propulsion.

Re:Yea

[drinkypoo]

You're not going to see Star Trek's Klingons and Romulans and Ferengi, period.

That's a pretty bold statement that's not particularly backed up by anything. Our sample size is 1; by the available evidence, that's the only life we should see that's achieved anything of note. Since we know that 1 is not a useful sample size, of course, we know that's false; but you might as well say anything, since we have no basis for comparison.

It's particularly telling that we are not the only creatures on this planet with a well-developed brain. Our form factor is our primary distinguishing characteristic. But what we need to make statements about the likelihood of encountering intelligent bipeds is to encounter some other life not based on [our] DNA. It seems that the arrangement of eyes, nose, and mouth on the head are biologically convenient; food doesn't fall into the nose, nor snot into the eyes. Quadrupeds are naturally less agile than bipeds, which indeed is likely why one sprang from the other on this planet, so bipedal life is highly likely. So where I am going with all of this is that by the available evidence, Klingons are at least as likely as some insectoids.

Also, in Trek the galaxy was seeded by a master race using pieces of their own DNA; such is not impossible in the really real world, either, only unlikely. But then, how unlikely is intelligent life?

There are some pretty wierd creatures on earth,

but none of them use fire, so zero of them are candidates for space travel, present or future. That's a necessary step to that level of tool use.

For that matter, do they even have the same senses that we do? They may have developed senses we lack, while being blind and deaf.

If you can develop touch, you can develop hearing; A sense of sound is probably one of the senses they're most likely to have. But it's true that they could have some EM sense that made it unnecessary to have either. But then they'd still probably use amplifiers to communicate over long distances, and there would be patterns in their communication, because that's the nature of communication.

Re:Yea

[Thangodin]

It's still a ridiculous hypothesis. Every new form of entertainment is accompanied by doomsayers who claim it's the end of the world as we know it, from the the invention of writing onward, including novels, movies, radio, TV, the internet, and now video games. And every one of them has been wrong.

Miller thinks that our indulgence in entertainment is what is limiting our reproduction, and he's been flogging this nonsense for years, ignoring the stunningly obvious and well documented fact that lower birth rates are caused by global urbanization, combined with reliable birth control methods and low infant mortality rates (if all your children live, you don't need to have as many). Children on the farm are assets--they count as capital; children in the city are liabilities. This is a good thing, because it means that there is a built in social/market force that limits human population to a sustainable level. Unfortunately, the moral panic factor in Miller's hare-brained theory provides it a far higher media profile than it deserves.

Re:Yea

[BobMcD]

The oldest star in this galaxy is around 13 billion years old. Five million years is a tiny fragment of this, and yet we haven't found any evidence in our system of any visitation. Statistically, it seems probable that at least one civilisation would have reached the required level to be able to explore the entire galaxy in this time, so where are they? Why haven't we seen any evidence of them?

I'm confused as to how the larger numbers are making more of an impact on you than the smaller numbers. Five million years compares to ten thousand years exactly how? Some examples...

If the aliens had stopped by, say, twelve thousand years ago, what would be the result? Cave paintings, religion, etc. These would, of course, be dismissed out of hand by modern day scientists as false.

If the aliens had visited twenty thousand years ago, would we have even had the language to communicate with them? Wouldn't we have just run in fear and/or tried to kill them?

One hundred thousand years ago, which is still pretty recent in terms of millions of years, we would have been more zoological than societal. We likely wouldn't have even noticed.

Never mind the time of the dinosaurs, or times before that. We're just getting into ridiculousness at this point.

This is hubris, really. "We don't believe any evidence that aliens exist, so where are they?" As if the existence of alien life is somehow contingent on humanity being present to observe it? Or is it that our brains are so perfect that they could never have visited four million years ago without our noticing it?

It sort of frames up all the tales of gods from on high, the Nazca Lines, the speculations of life on Mars, etc. All of this could have been alien life, but if it happened before the Renaissance, our hubris would require that we deny it.

Re:Yea

[rugatero]

Why go for the cute girl over there when there's Love Plus for DS?

Because until a DS can be interfaced with a Fleshlight there are specific advantages with the real girl.

Now excuse me... I have a project to work on.

Re:Yea

[Mr. Slippery]

This is where the Fermi Paradox comes from. Our galaxy is only about 100,000 light years across. Sending something at 1% of the speed of light is not too far off our current capability. Sending something at 10% is not difficult to conceive.

Bollocks. The fastest man-made object had a velocity of about 150,000 mph -- 42 mps. That's .0002c, .02% of lightspeed. 22,000 years to Alpha C at that rate.

Until we do it, we have no firm evidence that it is possible -- not just physically possible, but socioeconomically and politically possible -- for a civilization to build anything faster.

A single Von Neumann probe ...

Which is also something that we have no evidence is a practical project for a civilization to build.

As usually interpreted, the "Fermi paradox" is a load of dingo's kidneys, which essentially boils down to "We don't see advanced alien civilizations doing what we imagine advanced alien civilizations would do. Therefore, there are no alien civilizations." I hope you see the leap in logic there.

Re:Yea

[Bender0x7D1]

Sending something at 1% of the speed of light is not too far off our current capability.

I think you better check your numbers. The fastest ship we have launched is the New Horizons probe which is headed for Pluto. It has a speed relative to Earth of 16.26 km/s. Note: The fastest ship if we include gravity assists is Voyager 1 at 17.15 km/s relative to Earth. However, the speed of light is 300,000 km/s. So, 1% would be 3,000 km/s and we are running around 17 km/s as our best effort, which means we need to get 200x faster to reach the 1% goal.

Moral of the story: Light is really, REALLY fast and we can't build anything (larger than a few atoms) that can travel fast enough to be conveniently compared to the speed of light. (Yet.)

Re:Yea

[Creepy]

From what I remember of the Star Trek universe, all the races are somewhat human-like because they were seeded that way by some God-like being.

I don't think quadrupeds are more agile than bipeds - in fact, I would argue it the other way around - just watch a dog or cat in action. Bipeds like humans are better designed to scale trees by grabbing branches, however, and bipeds like birds benefit from less weight for unneeded limbs.

Personally, I think there are lots of possibilities for no radio signals:

1) in the billions of years of earth history, our radio window of time is trivial and even if the alien races developed as fast or faster than us, they could be too far away for that radio signal to get here yet. For all we know, the aliens moved to tachyon communications and closed the radio wave era before we even set up.

2) we have the technology to grow children in vats and sustain the human race and are already doing it to sustain some species like rare sharks that eat the rest of the brood while still in the womb. Once we get over the religious and ethical issues (e.g. superrace), it seems like a natural progression, at least. If the "mom" wanted to breast feed, she could then take hormones for that.

3) We've been sending out radio signals for what, a little more than 110 years, and we didn't start listening until much later. At best you are probably talking about 20000 stars that could have heard us in that time (I recall 100 years being about 15000, so I guesstimated), and much less could respond if they were listening. And that is assuming they are using radio waves, not, say, microwaves. For all we know, radio waves are annoying noises to them and they wear tinfoil hats.

4) The assumptions are based on aliens followed a "European" style technological progression, but the only reason most of the world followed that progression was because of European expansionism. If America had been left untouched by Europe and/or China, how much do you think Native Americans tech would have progressed by now? My guess is not much.

5) Our galaxy is unpredictable, and that probably is true for the majority of galaxies. Just because a meteor struck us and ended the age of dinosaurs doesn't mean it happened there, and maybe having a tiny brain and giant teeth was more valuable for a lot longer there.

6) No aliens have come here yet because they either don't know of us, can't move fast enough to get here, or knowledge is being intentionally repressed by our governments. I personally think warp travel would be possible if we can prove there is a 4th dimension in the same way 2D distances can be shortened in a third dimension (fold the corners of a piece of paper together - they are nearer, right? it even would be possible in 3D if space folds in on itself).

Re:Yea

[wurble]

We have the technology to go 1% the speed of light. Maybe even 10%. But the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty prevent us from using that technology. It's called nuclear propulsion. We had the technology in the 1950s to create a ship capable of transporting as many as 10,000 people to anywhere in our solar system in a relatively short amount of time. Just look up the Orion Project. It involves using small nuclear bombs to propel a ship and tests were quite promising. The test ban treaty put an end to the project.

Project Daedelus and other similar more recent projects have looked/are looking for ways to bring back nuclear propulsion using "bombs" that produce no radioactive fallout.

Anyway, the point is that we have the technology NOW to do it, but we have political barriers preventing us. It seems somewhat unlikely that all civilizations who have developed such a technology would be restricted by the very same political barriers.

Re:Yea

[ultranova]

We created our civilization in a wink lasting the mere fifty thousand years because homo sapiens somehow managed to look outside of the box by chance.

No, we created a civilization because we can transfer information through symbolic language, which in turn allows us to function, in some ways, like a single organism, in the same way as your brain- and other cells work together as you but a lot less tightly bound, due to your internal bandwidth being much greater than external bandwidth.

All pack animals act as a single organism in some sense, but they have a hard time passing learned information between members, so the pack as a whole doesn't learn. With sumbolic language, humans overcame that, allowing concepts of any abstraction level be passed between people. The human pack began to learn, and as it learned it became better at utilizing resources, causing it to grow, which in turn made it smarter. That's why culture really took of after the invention of agriculture: the number of people, and thus their collective brain mass, exploded.

The problem humanity solved was not how to make its members more intelligent, it was how to exceed the practical size and complexity limits of the nervous system a single organism can carry with it. A single human - any human - is nowhere near smart enough to go from a cave to a skyscraper, but humanity as a whole is, especially since it's not burdened with limited lifetime.

All of this raises a question of what happens as technology increases our communication bandwidth - if I can access your thoughts as easily as I can mine, there's no real difference between the two, now is there? And if there's no difference between your thoughts or mine, are we really two different people, or a single one using two bodies? And what happens when you keep adding brains and computers and databanks and whatever?

Re:Yea

[TheRaven64]

A factor of 200 really isn't very large. Ion drives and solar sales both have the potential to reach this sort of speed and could be built with small improvements on current technology. 1% of C only requires you to accelerate at 1g for 3.5 days, or for about a month at 0.1g. If you can sustain 0.01g for long periods (which ion drives should soon be able to do) the it will take you a year to get up to 0.1C, but that's not a huge amount of time in comparison to the time it takes to travel from one star to another at that speed.

Even a short trip will be a few centuries, so one year for accelerating and one for braking isn't really relevant, especially if you can use solar energy at both ends and only carry a small amount of propellant that you accelerate to very high speeds. Special relativity actually helps with reaction drives, if you can accelerate the propellant to a nontrivial fraction of the speed of light (ion drives work on the same general principle as particle accelerators, so this is not entirely unreasonable).

Of course, I said technologically feasible, not economically feasible. A craft capable of crossing interstellar distances and doing something useful on arrival could probably be built today, but it would take the entire output of several industrial nations with no hope of any payback. By the time it arrived, it would be obsolete; even a 1% improvement in acceleration would get a second craft to the destination years earlier.

The craft that you cited are chemical rockets. These have a much lower power to mass ratio than an ion drive. I said in the near future, meaning the next couple of decades, so it's not unreasonable to assume that drives that are currently being prototyped would have made it into general use. They could be in a much shorter time given enough investment, but sending things to other stars isn't really a priority for anyone who could afford to at the moment.

Re:Yea

[drinkypoo]

Humans can travel more miles in a day or week than almost any other land animal, including many bipeds. The free hands let us have hands specialized for making and using tools, which gives us an advantage over all other creatures. The limits of human agility are well-comparable to anything else of similar scale in the animal kingdom; most of us simply have little use for those upper bounds, so we do not develop them. If you've watched a bird weave a basket nest you know how unfortunate it can be to not have hands. You're basing your experience on couch potatoes; ask some hunter-gatherers about agility and endurance sometime.

Re:Yea

[Daimanta]

"Bipeds are much slower, tire much easier,"

While the first statement is true, the second is most certainly false. Bipeds actually have a more efficient way of walking(and running) which allows us to run greater distances than quadrupeds.

In fact, some tribes in Africa use this advantage in their huntings methods. They simply run after a prey(I believe they favour fleeing prey to fighting prey) and chase them until the prey tires and then they strike when it is exhausted.

This meager Wikipedia article has some information about this fenomenon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

Re:Yea

[BobMcD]

Ephemeral contact via visitation is completely besides the point and slightly illogical to consider. As far as we can tell, FTL is either impossible or utterly impractical. So why would aliens go through the trouble of sub-light speed exploration of our system without colonization? That's a huge waste of time and resources.

A few hundred years ago it was nearly impossible and highly, highly impractical to load up goods and persons on little wooden ships and sail them across the Atlantic. Yet we did. And yes, we colonized as we went. Did we, though, colonize every single leaf of grass we passed over? Not exactly. There are still wild areas of this Earth, even with humans being able to readily and easily travel to each inch of it.

Your logic implies that, due to the invention of concrete, every inch of the surface should be paved.

Is it not even remotely possible that another, more attractive system is nearby, and that was the one colonized?

Or could we not be marked off as 'conservation' territory?

Look to our own behavior before you start dictating what 'must' or 'should' happen.

Re:Yea

[mcgrew]

By the same token, an advanced civilization almost certainly is social with a basic code of ethics that we can understand... Utilitarian ethics, like don't steal from others because you wouldn't like it if they stole from you, may be a constant.

I sincerely doubt that. When I was stationed in Thailand in 1974, it was a completely alien environment. The hills were different shapes, the grass was a different color green, the sky was a different color blue, none of the vegetation was the same.

The mores and morals of the Thais were alien as well; I had a .45 pistol pointed at my face because I didn't want to drink a shot of whiskey, because (as I then found out) it's a grave insult to refuse a gift there; more like a sin. OTOH it was a bhuddist country, and one woman was horrified that I would swat a fly; killing any animal, even an insect, is an abomination to them. And these are people of my own species from my own planet. Even stealing or killing, many humans have no such ethical constraints, and murder is even acceptable in war or punishment. There are those who disagree that adultery is wrong. Some societies think drinking alcohol is wrong but smoking marijuana is acceptable, counter to my own society.

There is little liklihood that they will be like us in any way, shape, or form.

Re:Yea

[holmstar]

I don't think quadrupeds are more agile than bipeds - in fact, I would argue it the other way around - just watch a dog or cat in action. Bipeds like humans are better designed to scale trees by grabbing branches, however, and bipeds like birds benefit from less weight for unneeded limbs.

I think you meant to say that you do think that quadrupeds are more agile.

1) in the billions of years of earth history, our radio window of time is trivial and even if the alien races developed as fast or faster than us, they could be too far away for that radio signal to get here yet. For all we know, the aliens moved to tachyon communications and closed the radio wave era before we even set up.

While I concur that it is not unlikely that advanced aliens might use a non-radio based method of communication, I wouldn't jump to something like tachyons (faster than light particles which probably don't exist). More likely they simply use a signal we don't recognize, a method that doesn't propagate through empty space (for example: fiber optics), or aim their communication beams so precisely that we wouldn't have a chance to receive them unless they were directed exactly at us.

2) we have the technology to grow children in vats and sustain the human race and are already doing it to sustain some species like rare sharks that eat the rest of the brood while still in the womb. Once we get over the religious and ethical issues (e.g. superrace), it seems like a natural progression, at least. If the "mom" wanted to breast feed, she could then take hormones for that.

What the heck does that have to do with the likelihood of anthropomorphic aliens?

3) We've been sending out radio signals for what, a little more than 110 years, and we didn't start listening until much later. At best you are probably talking about 20000 stars that could have heard us in that time (I recall 100 years being about 15000, so I guesstimated), and much less could respond if they were listening. And that is assuming they are using radio waves, not, say, microwaves. For all we know, radio waves are annoying noises to them and they wear tinfoil hats.

Microwaves ARE radio waves... *WE* use microwaves for transmitting data. (in addition to most of the other parts of the EM spectrum) Do you think that radio only means FM and AM?

4) The assumptions are based on aliens followed a "European" style technological progression, but the only reason most of the world followed that progression was because of European expansionism. If America had been left untouched by Europe and/or China, how much do you think Native Americans tech would have progressed by now? My guess is not much.

That might be true, but there were also rather advanced pre-industrial civilizations present in the Americas before Europeans showed up. The Maya, for example. Given another thousand years or so, the Maya could easily have become a civilization as technologically advanced (or more) as europe was in the 15th century. That is a fraction of the blink of an eye in the time of the universe.

5) Our galaxy is unpredictable, and that probably is true for the majority of galaxies. Just because a meteor struck us and ended the age of dinosaurs doesn't mean it happened there, and maybe having a tiny brain and giant teeth was more valuable for a lot longer there.

True, dinosaurs existed for a lot longer than mammals have, and didn't evolve a technological civilization in that time, but that doesn't prove that it couldn't happen. Most likely they would have had to be warm blooded in order to have the energy budget for a large brain, but there is evidence to suggest that at least a few dinosaurs were warm blooded. So there's no way to say that it was impossible.

It might be unusual for a planet to remain as stable as earth has (even with the dino-killing chicxulub impact),

From the

[djupedal]

...did-just-one-too-many-dailies dept.

This-one-just-sucks-alot. Give-it-up-you-morons-please....

From the TFA

[mrsam]

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

Re:From the TFA

[Thanshin]

Great job, if you can get it: spend government money to study if aliens are busy playing videogames

Massive fail if you lose the opportunity of spending government money on the study of junk food and porn.

Re:From the TFA

[mindbrane]

Geoffrey Miller is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at University of New Mexico.

Lucky bastard, obviously the peyote still grows wild and free in abundance down there. Although, given the hypothesis as put forth in the article, I sense there's a pipeline for good B.C. bud running down there too.

Let's not project human attributes onto aliens.

[master_p]

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.

Re:Let's not project human attributes onto aliens.

[V!NCENT]

What would you do after all the research you find that the answer to the greatest mystery in life is... 42?

You go like... "Is this it?!"
-"Damn... for the love of telepathy, what do we do now?"
"Fsck it, let's fire up Quake 25!"

Re:Let's not project human attributes onto aliens.

[sco08y]

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'.

Instead of "I'm going to play Half Life" the ants would be saying "let's play Half Life." Same end state.

Re:Let's not project human attributes onto aliens.

[hallucinogen]

There are 20 000 drops of water in a litre. Volume of a typical bucket is 10 litres. Thus there are 200 000 drops in a bucket. So, in cosmic terms 10 000 years is 1.5 drops in a bucket.

I hope it is a humorous article

[hansraj]

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 /.?

Re:He must spend too much time on games himself

[Mindcontrolled]

Meh, this is just the same old puritan crap all over again. Beware of pleasure! Pleasure is evil! Only this guy puts forth the secular version - pleasure shall not lead to eternal damnation, but rather to species extinction in this case. Nothing to see here.

Simpler explanation

[Cold hard reality]

((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.

Re:Simpler explanation

[Cold hard reality]

How much time? Years?

Oh, and they're right next to a star. So lots of noise.

OP failed Evolutionary Biology

[ShooterNeo]

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)

Re:OP failed Evolutionary Biology

[rtb61]

Societies and technology have also evolved over time so that collapse whilst it remain a risk, in more modern more evolved societies, activities and practices can be established to stabilise societies and allow them to continue to evolve in a positive fashion. Simply birth control targeted at the most inept portions of society, say the supply free intoxicants conditional to consuming the incorporated oral contraceptives. In a similar fashion targeting certain psychological birth defects like psychopathy and narcissism and restricting the ability of those extreme anti-social destructive elements from continuing to influence society. The act of extending life also enforces greater stability upon society, as the older more experienced elements those with living memories of failed decisions are more dominant whilst also be more active (not physically weakened by age).

From an external viewpoint human society is likely to be viewed as still primitive due to it's inability to direct the continued evolution of it's societies in a more positive fashion. Demonstrated by it's continued desire to indulge in self destructive violence upon a global scale, for allowing those that do suffer from anti-social psychological conditions to have so great an influence upon their societies, for continuing to allow a minority to destroy the environment of the majority to feed insatiable egos of that minority and, for the deceit and dishonesty demonstrated at all levels of society.

Likely stoned gamers, who do not consume extremes of resources, who do not indulge in violent anti social activities, who do not demand the celebrity worship of others, who do not need to pollute the environment with super polluting cars, jets, mansions and yachts and who whilst gaming still contribute to society in a peaceful fashion, sharing thoughts and ideas, creating free content, sharing some of the work load without being a fanatic and not demanding that others work for them cheap, would likely be seen in a more positive light. After all that game play is often a way to escape from the hypocritical, destructive, antisocial, deceitful viciousness of all the other short hair, crested, cranky, rock throwing monkeys.

Re:OP failed Evolutionary Biology

[Lord Ender]

You are overlooking the possibility of games eventually being so good that all humans become addicted. Forget your LCD and joystick; think about direct neural I/O to a VR world that is seems better in every way than the real world--a game designed specifically to match the human brain's desires precisely.

Despite "DIFFERENTIAL REPRODUCTIVE SUCCESS," species have and will continue to go extinct. Humans could go extinct, too. This is just one possible mechanism.

Call me bizarre but theory sounds backwards

[mnmlst]

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.

Decision point may be now

[mattr]

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.

Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[jonadab]

> And if c really is the speed limit, and space being that big

The speed of light is only theoretically the speed limit, an absolute upper bound. In practice, nothing with enough mass and complexity to be alive, much less intelligent, can travel at anywhere near c and hope to survive. Interstellar travel is wildly impractical. It makes for interesting fiction, but unless our understanding of physics is TOTALLY messed up (*way* more flawed than we currently think pure Newtonian physics was), there's absolutely zero practical application, ever.

Even interstellar *communication* is wildly impractical. I mean, come on, latency measured in *years*? What kind of conversation could you have, EVEN if you already spoke the same language? And if you don't, how are you going to learn it? Cultural immersion is NOT possible. Back-and-forth dialog isn't even really possible. With no pre-existing linguistic information to help you bridge the gap, *and* no interaction, how would you characterize an alien language? You could spend centuries analyzing a single hour's worth of message and get nowhere. It'd be like trying to read the Voynich manuscript, only much worse (because the Voynich manuscript was written by a *human*, and furthermore by a human who was obviously familiar with a number of popular human writing conventions that we understand; an alien message wouldn't be so comprehensible). You almost certainly wouldn't be able to figure out for sure if the signals you were getting were language and represented actual meaning or not.

If there were any *intelligent* aliens, they would eventually figure this out and give up on the idea.

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[selven]

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.

Or, alternatively:

Terran President: Ok, Alpha Centauri expedition, go to Alpha Centauri, and mine the resources and send 20% of what you get to us because you're our colony.

Alpha Centauri Expedition: Ok!

(15 years later)

ACE: Ok, we arrived at Alpha Centauri, let's start mining now.

ACE: Wait, why do we have to send 20% to them again? It's not like they're doing anything for us.

(30 years later, TP finally finds out what's going on)

TP: Wait, why aren't they doing their colonial duties? Let's send an interstellar war fleet and enforce our will with an iron fist! After all, they're just a puny colony.

ACE: Unfortunately for you, we, with our planet full of fresh unmined resources, have actually grown quite big...

(15 years later, TP and ACE's respective interstellar war fleets reach each other, nuclear war ensues, 4 billion casualties)

Rinse and repeat. Expansion would turn out to be a very slow and painful process if that were to happen.

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[roca]

Regardless of what the majority of the aliens do, surely at least some subset would transition to intelligent machines that can and wish to reproduce, travel interstellar and colonize the galaxy.

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[Smallpond]

What kind of conversation could you have, EVEN if you already spoke the same language?

I know you will be surprised to hear from me, as we have never met. I have recently come into possession of 25 billion galactic zorns which belonged to the late Supreme Ruler Zardoz ...

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[delinear]

Even interstellar *communication* is wildly impractical. I mean, come on, latency measured in *years*? What kind of conversation could you have, EVEN if you already spoke the same language? And if you don't, how are you going to learn it? Cultural immersion is NOT possible. Back-and-forth dialog isn't even really possible. With no pre-existing linguistic information to help you bridge the gap, *and* no interaction, how would you characterize an alien language? You could spend centuries analyzing a single hour's worth of message and get nowhere.

But something as a big as a recognisable alien communication would be enough in itself to prove the existence of aliens (or a deity with a sick sense of humour). People would happily devote centuries to studying such a message. If we even just swapped Wikipedias that would give enough data to be getting on with for at least a few centuries.

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[Cougar Town]

Or they've found a way around such limitations. Remember how 640k was enough for everyone, how the world was flat, humans could never possibly fly, and how the human body would never be able to withstand speeds greater than 21 mph? Yeah.

The thing is, you never know, and should never *absolutely* say it's impossible, impractical, has zero application, etc... Based on our current understanding of things this is true, but any scientist will tell you that we have FAR from a complete understanding of everything. Unless you're from the future, you really can't say with any certainty what new theories and discoveries in physics and our understanding of the universe might bring or not bring. You can only speculate based on current theories.

And by the way, our current understanding of physics IS totally messed up. On one hand we have general relativity, explaining things on a large scale (gravity). Then we have quantum theory, explaining things on a small scale (beyond gravity). Each describes its respective area very well, but they don't fit together. And they are both only *theories* that describe observations. Although they fit the observations quite well and have made accurate predictions, both are incomplete. The true story behind how the universe works might be very different from these theories we've designed to match what we see.

Just saying. A good scientist is never too set in his ways, and is open to new ideas and possibilities, and realizes that he doesn't know everything.

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[timftbf]

Right now, we are very close to having 4 day work week purely because most of production systems are more efficient and require less human labor.

No, we're not. We really should be, but we're not.

How many CEOs do you know who would choose the same amount of productivity for less employee time (maybe less employee cost), over more productivity? Growth is the only metric that counts, it seems.

How may workers do you know who would campaign for a four-day week at the same pay over a five-day week for more pay?

Both sides still put too much value on Stuff...

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[chocapix]

And on the seventh day, God said : "299,792,458 m/s is enough for everyone".

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[MBGMorden]

It'd be like trying to read the Voynich manuscript, only much worse (because the Voynich manuscript was written by a *human*, and furthermore by a human who was obviously familiar with a number of popular human writing conventions that we understand; an alien message wouldn't be so comprehensible).

Sort of, but with a very (very) important difference:

The Voynich Manuscript - if it isn't a hoax containing just gibberish (which is actually a likely reality), was written by a human with the goal of making it as difficult as possible to decode. It's intentionally HARD to figure out. Messages between civilizations would be the opposite. You'd know just as little going in, but they would instead be crafted to be as easy as possible to decode.

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[Stormwatch]

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?

Resources? Do you mean... vespene gas?

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[Glock27]

My preferred version:

299,792.5 km/s - it's not just a good idea, it's the law!

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[TapeCutter]

"liquid water is the only environment where life has a chance to appear spontaneously"

That's a reasonable assumption from what we can observe about life.

"It is bad practice in statistics to use only two observations to do a projection."

It's not a reasonable asumption that people are simply extrapolating from what we see on Earth. They are looking at the spectra of the cosmos and finding that there are billions of galaxies chock full of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon. These elements condense into gigantic clouds light years across that are composed of the same organic building blocks we find on earth. In fact the silicon, iron, nickel, etc, that you are standing on are much less abundant in the universe than the basic organics and water you and I are made from. As Carl Sagan once said "we are star stuff".

"and that the earth is really the only one with liquid water and liquid water"

Hydrogen and oxygen are the 1st and 3rd most abundant elements in the universe and spontaneously react to from water. Given what we know about galaxy composition and the formation of planetary systems the odds that Earth has the only surface level ocean in the cosmos are so impractically small that they could be used to drive an infinite improbability machine. Just in our own solar system you have Earth's current ocean, past oceans on Mars and most likely Venus, an ocean under the ice of Europa that has more water than Earth and a high probability of smaller sub-surface oceans on a handfull of other icy moons.

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[baKanale]

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?

That's a good point. Thinking about it, the chances are that any members of a species too busy with video games and porn to remember to upkeep their civilization would probably be too busy to take care of their offspring, and thus would weed themselves out of the gene pool. And there would always be ones, especially in the early years of porn and video games, who would be more interested in taking care of themselves and their civilization. After enough time, presumably, only those not overly susceptible to distracting stimuli would remain, the rest having been to busy playing with their joysticks to successfully reproduce.

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[TheRaven64]

Actually, God created light on the first day. There was nothing other than light and the void, so 299,792,458 m/s probably seemed fast enough for anyone, when there is nowhere to go. There's probably a comment saying:

/* Note: I picked a pretty big number for the speed here. It ought to be fast enough, but test it during QA - we can always increase it later if it isn't. */

Unfortunately, the seventh day was the one reserved for QA, and after creating cannabis on the third day, things started to go a bit wrong...

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[CrimsonAvenger]

How many CEOs do you know who would choose the same amount of productivity for less employee time (maybe less employee cost), over more productivity? Growth is the only metric that counts, it seems.

Productivity is measured per man-hour. If we made the same stuff in fewer hours, our productivity would go up.

How may workers do you know who would campaign for a four-day week at the same pay over a five-day week for more pay?

Based on the people I know who prefer the 9-80 work schedule to the conventional 5-40, I'd guess that quite a lot of people would prefer to have a four-day workweek.

Note, by the way, that your arguments are essentially the same as those that opposed the five-day workweek, back when six days was the norm.

Personally, I don't expect to see a four-day workweek within ten years. I'll be surprised if I don't see one within twnety, though.

Re:He must spend too much time on games himself

[neumayr]

Aren't you romantic.
The primary purpose of having a sexual relationship remains the continued survival of the species. Love and companionship - that you can get from friends, without the strain of an exclusive, longterm relationship that's ultimately founded on two people's need for sex and self reproduction, i.e. their instincts.
Naturally it's nice to reproduce, if it weren't the species would have died out a long time ago.

Not really.

[Kashgarinn]

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.

Re:Not really.

[Archtech]

I don't think people of our current society really understand how good we have it.

Damn straight. Nor do they understand how tiny a fraction of the human race, past and present, were responsible for all the practical improvements that have led to our current state of (fairly) contented security. It's getting on for 40 years since Heinlein wrote that "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects". How many of those things can YOU do? (I could change a diaper, balance very simple accounts, take orders with an ill grace, program a computer very crudely, and maybe a couple of other things. Possibly par for the course?)

How would we get on if we suddenly found ourselves naked and without possessions, alone or in a small group in the middle of nowhere? Even if we didn't freeze, roast, die of thirst, or get eaten within hours or days, what would be our chances of making it for even one year? Anyone fancy himself as Robinson Crusoe?

Reflect on those matters for a while, and then consider how unbelievably our Stone Age ancestors acquitted themselves. If you look down on them you merely demean yourself. They were very probably twice the men we are.

Re:Not really.

[TerranFury]

Sociological studies of hunter-gatherer societies have indicated that they even now have more free time than we do, not less. Moreover, it was only within the last 400-500 years that agricultural societies began to overtake hunter-gatherers in terms of nutrition (as measured by looking at the height of skeletons, and signs of the presence of malnutrition-related diseases). In other words, it was only very recently that agricultural civilization became good not just for those at the top but also for the majority.

The argument, then, for why agricultural civilization came to dominate the world even if it did not result in a better quality of life is this: Although the diet of cheap carbohydrates provided by agriculture did not result in healthy people, it did provide energy to sustain more people (albeit with a lower quality of life), whereas hunter-gatherer civilizations need to practice contraception and infanticide (and they did, and do, both) to avoid overexploiting their range. The societies with larger populations (the agricultural ones) were, in turn, able to field armies and otherwise exert power in ways that hunter-gatherers were not, and in this way also out-competed them.

In other words, until very recently, if you wanted to create a large and powerful society at the expense of individual health and leisure time, your best bet was to practice agriculture. If you wanted to create a small society of well-nourished and healthy people with more leisure time at the expense of collective power, you'd want to pick the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. And even now, although hunter-gatherers no longer have the nutritional advantage, they still win on leisure time.

Virtual realities and human needs

[Aceticon]

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.

Brilliance

[CuteSteveJobs]

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!)

It's really hard to recognize brilliance

[Archtech]

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).

Re:Simple:

[Hognoxious]

That's exactly what they want you to think. Hang on, BRB, mysterious glow in the sk.kz'&^u ] @.
n o c a r r i e r

Fermi's Paradox isn't.

[Inominate]

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.

I saw that theory on Futurama

[silentcoder]

In the "Don't that Robots" propaganda video !

Re:Simple:

[Smallpond]

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

Self-replicating planet-destroying machine army released in a war 3 billion years ago are exterminating any sign of intelligent life as soon as they see the first radio waves. The closest were 41 light years from us.

Re:Idiocracy...

[silentcoder]

Jerry Springer begs to differ.
Also: American Idol, Soap Operas, Beauty Contestants wanting world peace, the ENTIRE fashion industry, Hannah Montana, The Spice Girls, Pro-wrestling fans, Hollywood movie stars (ever heard one of them when talking unscripted ? With a few rare exceptions... they sound like they learned English from a user's manual for a Taiwanese VCR translated from Korean by a Japanese toddler), G.W. Busch, Homophobes, $Religion Fundamentalists, Soldiers, Patriots, Censorship-advocates and people who use the phrase "think of the children", MTV, voters, racists, christian scientists, scientologists ... and that's just what I could think of in five minutes.

Basically... the sad reality is that if thinking I'm smarter than those people makes me an elitist, I'd rather be an elitist than an idiot. Unfortunately, the reality is that everyone of those elitists probably will have more children than me- on account of I figured out how to use condoms and even more than most of the rest of slashdot on account of actually having sex sometimes.
While the smart people are on slashdot watching porn, we're not exactly the highest reproducing members of the gene-pool anymore...

That kinda gives me an idea

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:Oh stop

[MrNaz]

Seriously though, it's unlikely. Runaway consumerism is such a self-destructive state of existence that it's unlikely that any planet could sustain it for more than a few centuries before completely collapsing. Look at our own as an example; a single century of consumerist society in the presence of industrial technology has brought us to the most rapid phase of extinction in the history of the world. Given that this process is only accelerating as our industrial might increases, what are the chances that the agricultural resources of the planet will be able to continue to feed us?

Most people don't know how many acres of land are required to stock a single square foot of supermarket space. Most people also don't know just how badly areas in the third world have been devastated by strip mining and other activities that have been brought about by the insatiable appetite of the first world for the trappings of consumerism.

No, if aliens were ever like us, they either killed themselves long ago, or ceased to be this way after a very short period of stupidity. We now face a decision: become rational really fast, or die.

Re:Oh stop

[Shakrai]

a single century of consumerist society in the presence of industrial technology has brought us to the most rapid phase of extinction in the history of the world.

I don't think you've studied the history of this planet very well if you've concluded that this is the most rapid phase of extinction in history.

what are the chances that the agricultural resources of the planet will be able to continue to feed us?

They will feed us just fine. Even discounting the fact that there is untapped arable land out there, the agricultural system as it exists now is riddled with inefficiencies. The simple act of cutting our meat intake would result a sizable expansion of calories available for human consumption.

We now face a decision: become rational really fast, or die.

How many times in history have we heard some variant of this prediction? We are still here.

Bacteria with spaceships

[itsdapead]

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.

Re:He must spend too much time on games himself

[delinear]

Meh, this is just the same old puritan crap all over again.

He even scored a hat-trick: video games, fast food and pornography.

Now he just needs to tie those back into the internet, or even better Facebook or Twitter (and let's face it, two of the three are easy) and he'll be an overnight tabloid sensation.

We are the game!

[stuckinarut]

Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?

The aliens just didn't buy the multi-planetary expansion pack so the sim doesn't contain the communications to detect.

Re:Oh stop

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

We now face a decision: become rational really fast, or die.

How many times in history have we heard some variant of this prediction? We are still here.

Actually we've heard this many times. And we've died by the millions many times. The holocaust, the soviet genocides ("engineered famine" is the preferred term, although how exactly that covers shooting civilians is beyond me), the muslim massacre on armenians, the rwanda massacres, the (ongoing) muslim-on-sudanese genocide against blacks, ...

And that's just the 20th century. Many idiots seem to think the 21st century will be different because they live in the by-far longest stable state (ie. the United states) where this hasn't happened for over 200 years. Hell, even Europeans, whose last genocide was little more than 10 years ago (but far away from Western Europe), the last Western European genocide was about 60 years ago, which is more than 1 generation ago. So everyone thinks these things "don't happen" and somehow believe that "diplomacy" (or worse : "international trade") will prevent another one. Or perhaps just the inherent human goodness will prevent it. Meanwhile that inherent human goodness doesn't seem to be stopping sudanese muslims from raiding, killing and enslaving like their religion demands ... Also one is to ignore that the peak year for international trade in the 20th century was 1913 (that level, as percentage of global gdp, was only surpassed in 1996), and 1939 was arguably the year the most money was invested in diplomacy.

The key is evolution. Everyone does things differently. Some people don't defend themselves, some others beat the crap out of any attackers, ... and some survive and some die. Evolution. Whichever tactic works will be the surviving one. Maybe comitting genocides is the key to survival, maybe not doing anything against these things is the correct tactic, maybe wars are the correct tactic.

The same goes for food production. Many people will try, some will have working strategies and live, some will have failing strategies and die. Of course this is "unfair" although what exactly is so very unfair about living in reality is beyond me.

Of course, this is how evolution works :
1) breed, making small mistakes in copying genes (and ideology)
2) die "en masse"
3) goto 1

Everyone seems to be skipping step 2, especially when professing to "believe" in evolution and what that supposedly means (you know the "evolution means jesus doesn't exist, but has nothing to do with children or death" crowd. Hell I've actually heard one person claim that genes were unfair and that "therefore" evolution cannot have anything to do with genes. Although I must agree with the part that genes are VERY unfair things indeed)

There are better reasons

[Jason Levine]

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."

Yeah, sure....

[DaveV1.0]

Or, maybe we have heard it but:

• They advanced beyond radio before we ever had radio.
• They have developed at the same time as us, but a few thousand light years away, so there is nothing in our neighborhood to hear.
• Their compression and encoding is so good, we can't tell the signal from the noise.
• Their receivers are much more sensitive than ours so the signal is much weaker than we can filter out from the noise.
• They developed a different kind of encoding scheme that we don't recognize it as a signal.
• They never developed radio, using some other kind of technology instead.
• We have been listening for 40 years. The universe is 14 billion years old. They have lived and died and all the signals have passed us by before we stood upright.

That is enough for now.

Forget about the age of the Universe...

[woolio]

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...

Re:Oh stop

[TheRaven64]

The simple act of cutting our meat intake would result a sizable expansion of calories available for human consumption.

You don't even need to do that. We're producing more food than is needed to feed the population, the problem is distribution. You have hippies buying fair trade roses from Kenya, instead of locally produced ones, driving up the cost of food there and causing people to starve because they can't afford imported food. No one starves because there isn't enough food in the world, people only starve because they can't afford to buy food that will be thrown away if it isn't sold.

RTF last 3 paragraphs

[OneAhead]

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).

Re:Oh stop

[mcgrew]

what are the chances that the agricultural resources of the planet will be able to continue to feed us?
They will feed us just fine.

Back some time in the '70s there was more than one book that extrapolated population growth with arable land and other factors and concluded that most of the world would be starving by the year 2000. They didn't take into account technological progress; but then, you never can. Few would have envisioned the internet, for example, or genetic engineering.

Re:Smart people are repulsive

[Omestes]

Growing up as "gen-x" made me somewhat jaded to the institution. Of all the people I know in my rough age-group, perhaps 10% came from a happily married family, the rest were children of divorce or single parenthood. It makes it hard to even see marriage as a commitment, when over 50% of them end in divorce, making it nothing more than a social agreement with a horde of lawyers attached.

I'm not disparaging people choosing to get married though, since the institution is only as strong as the amount of faith the participants wish to put into it.