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A New Take On the Fermi Paradox
TravisTR points out some new research that aims to update and supplement the Fermi paradox — the idea that if intelligent life was as common as we expect, we should have detected it by now. The academic paper (PDF) from scientists at the National Technical University of Ukraine is based on the idea that civilizations can't expand forever on their own. The authors make the assumption that an isolated civilization will eventually die out or go dark through some other means, which leads to some interesting models of intergalactic colonization.
"In certain circumstances, however, when civilizations are close enough together in time and space, they can come into contact and when this happens the cross-fertilization of ideas and cultures allows them both to flourish in a way that increases their combined lifespan. ... Bezsudnov and Snarskii say that for certain values of these parameters, the universe undergoes a phase change from one in which civilizations tend not to meet and spread into one in which the entire universe tends to become civilized as different groups meet and spread. Bezsudnov and Snarskii even derive an inequality that a universe must satisfy to become civilized. This, they say, is analogous to the famous Drake equation which attempts to quantify the number of other contactable civilizations in the universe right now."
Them that advertise get eaten.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
As the speed it would take to get nearby stars in a short period of time is just not physically possible no matter how advanced you are and no civilization has yet wanted to spend 500 years getting here.
Gene Roddenberry called, and he wants his Star Trek TV show idea back.
Oh, but if you rip-off Earth: Final Conflict, you can keep it.
Take *that* Fermi.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
With just one seeded civilization: http://www.simulation-argument.com/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
If they are as intelligent as we think they are, won't they take one look at us and pretend they're not home?
Have you wondered why our own civilization worries so much about "terrorism" these days?
It's not like our civilization wants to succumb to religious fanaticism. Only a few individuals belonging to one of the many religions present in our civilization believe in ritual self-immolation. However this suicide bomber meme has come to dominate the media.
Now, imagine a civilization a hundred years or so more advanced than ours. Surely, not many people will want to invest five hundred years to go to a neighboring star system. But it takes only one fanatic to dominate the media as, unfortunately, we learned in 2001-09-11.
I think that if we survive and evolve as a civilization a hundred years more we will, inevitably, reach the stars.
Human nature can work for both good and evil. There will be billions who sit at home and watch TV but a few people will not be satisfied until they visit every star system in the galaxy.
The bit quoted as "Eventually die out and go dark" apparently comes from this quote in the second link:
Their approach is to imagine that civilisations form at a certain rate, grow to fill a certain volume of space and then collapse and die. They even go as far as to suggest that civilisations have a characteristic life time, which limits how big they can become.
However, this deals only with civilizations and not intelligent beings. The Civilization may collapse, after expanding to multiple worlds, but that does not mean that everyone on these planets dies. The would live on to create new civilizations.
Using an admittedly imperfect Earth analogy, the collapse of the Roman or Mayan empires din not lead to the extinction of humans, merely a pause in the development of civilization among that species, (us).
So EVEN if the basic assumption is correct, you would still expect to see many inhabited worlds, populated with remnant people having "arrival myths".
They may have once held knowledge of how to build ships, but deciding instead simply to sit tight, and not draw attention to themselves for a long enough period for any ship building knowledge or desire to wane. But new civilizations and technology would sooner or later arrive on these worlds.
When you start with a flawed and pessimistic assumption, it seems natural that you might arrive at a dismal conclusion.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
What do you mean, you've never been to Alpha Centauri? For heavens' sakes, mankind, it's only five light-years away. Look, I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local politics that's your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.
Apathetic bloody planet... I've no sympathy at all.
The reason why no one has found us is that i) With the likes of Simon Cowell, Spice Girls & other media hungry airheads on TV then any other civilisation will probably be thinking...What the F*** should we go there for? ii) Compared to other species we're about as ugly as they come and we scare other civilisations off. Or iii) We've got so much junk around our planet that no other space vehicle could get near us without having something crash into them.
This is a more plausible explanation for...everything.
Eat your heart out, nihilists!
We have no need of Oil
Scientists announced today that, counter to everyone else on this planet, we do not need oil. The researchers stated that with an initial assumption that water will become combustible tomorrow at 5 pm, we will no longer need to use gasoline, diesel or any other oil products ever again. They are expected to receive tenure, and a substantial research grant to further develop their ideas into production. The added, that their plan may also require Indian to redefine the value of Pi to an integer, but pointed out no politician would want to be the one that freed us from relying on foreign countries for our energy needs.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Here's an alternative: Perhaps we are the First. Perhaps humanity is the first culture to rise to the point of being able to leave their home planet, even for a short while.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
But that's all it is. Anything that you cannot measure, cannot falsify, cannot independently reproduce is not science, even if done by scientists. (I'm with Feynman on that one.) Dressing up their superstitions as science, just as the Drake equation did (and they explicitly compare their work to that) does not make it science, any more than the same is true for either Intelligent Design or Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. That does not mean that they are not correct, as science is not the only way to know things, and there are enough unknowns that in fact we might find them to be correct in the end, but this is philosophy rather than science at this point. (Ever wonder why we remember Einstein and not Woldemar Voigt as the discoverer of Relativity? It's because even though he got it right, Voigt was guessing; he couldn't demonstrate that his equations worked.)
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Democracy is more common than we thought, and the aliems governments cut their funding too.
The time needed for our solar system to develop life was more than a third of the age of the universe so far. Extending the Drake equation to replace communication time before extinction with odds of spreading to the next star before extinction and replacing probabilities with average time taken would make far more sense than the original one.
We're probably just the first advanced civilization in our galaxy. No Fermi paradox, no odd extinction events, no improbably rare Earth. Why would it be impossible for civilizations to travel to another star and why would the typical time to interstellar travel be short enough that current formation rate of generation I stars is a more limiting factor than amount formed since the Big Bang?
Assuming an interstellar civ exists it would have people who live... 50-250k years or more. Anything less then that and you dont get much spread.
Thus anyone capable of getting close enough to us to see us would concider a century to be like a month or even in extreme cases like just a few hours. So even if they saw us in 1700 it might take them 500 years just to get set up to say hi.
As far as why we cant hear anyone.. because they arnt talking to us. Anyone old enough to send a signal powerful for us to hear wouldnt be sending signals we can hear.
I think that travel between star systems is technically plausible, if at a cost of unbelievable commitment in turning over the efforts of a planetary civilisation to building and testing suitable spacecraft.
Providing the sort of transport capacity to move a viable population over that sort of distance is a step further - think of all the trades required to support our lives and manufacturing (raw materials, energy, transport, food supply, health). i think any society that wants extra-solar colonies needs to get molecular fabrication sorted first, and do it ultra-reliably in case they'll be operating 10 light years from tech.support.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
As already mentioned, there is the possibility that we're the first [in our light cone].
Credo sim. - I think I am.
I'd have thought, however risky we are to meet, any civilisation that's aware of us and monitoring would probably start with a generic 'hey guys, want to chat? Check where this signal is coming from if you want to know who we are'
it might not only be human society that thinks turning up unannounced is poor form.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
any and all civilizations advanced enough to spy on us have done so eons ago and reckoned that by the time any life form could possibly get to their own technological level, they would again be far too ahead to care. So they stopped looking in on us. Meaning that we will only contact other intelligent life when we ourselves obtain the technology to do so ourselves, or another civilization does so a little before us.
:wq
If one can send seed ships to populate, one can send seed ships to devastate.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That is actually what the authors call their idea. 'nuff said.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
According to a recent documentary the Xel Naga that created us have merely gone away for the time being. They are returning soon it seems, although it's not clear if their aim is to save or to destroy.
Seriously, there are dozens of potential responses to the Fermi Paradox. What's the point?
Qxe4
Are we even looking for the right signs of life we may be basing to much on what earth is like vs what other life forms needs to live / can live on. Maybe even mars as life but it's under ground and we can't see it that easy.
What about all the UFO cover ups? maybe stuff is being hidden?
Perhaps advanced civilizations are not using EM transmission (radio/light), but some other form of communication that we are unable to detect.
Yes, Trek is fictional, but to use it as an example: We wouldn't detect Starfleet because they use "Subspace communications" instead of radio.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
You mean a set of 7 variables all multiplied together where all of them are unknowns? Remind me how to solve that will you...
We generated our first real radio signals sometime around 1894, give or take. That means that we are completely and utterly invisible in the radio spectrum to any civilizations more than about 116 light-years away from Sol. Our radio signals simply haven't had time to reach them yet. And the same thing applies in reverse: if an alien civilization began transmitting radio signals 200 years ago but they're more than 200 light-years away from us, we won't be able to see them because their signals haven't had time to reach us yet.
That defines the outer edge of the visibility shell. There's also an inner edge. As a civilization develops, it eventually stops transmitting radio signals as it first gets more efficient at transmitting radio (moving from pure broadcast to directed transmissions and then refining their ability to direct the transmission into tighter and tighter beams) and then starts using things other than radio. If you start listening after the last of their detectable broadcasts has passed you, again you can't see them.
So when you're asking "If there are as many civilizations out there as the equations predict, why can't we detect them?" you also have to take into account the fact you're likely only physically able to detect a fraction of the civilizations that may exist. The rest are either too far away for their signals to have reached you, or they've been around long enough that you weren't listening when the last of their detectable transmissions passed your planet.
We can not even set up an economic model for the Earth that would allow decent way of living for each person... how could we set up flurishing co-operation with other civilizations?
Life is common, but so are cataclysmic events. Very few life forms evolve higher intelligence. After a point intelligence isn't very useful for survival; we evolved intelligence far beyond that needed for mere survival because we used it for social competition since smarter people had more chance of breeding (hard as that is to believe today).
Of the few life forms that evolved higher intelligence, very few of them would have won the race to establish viable self-sufficient colonies off-planet before a cataclysmic event wiped out their planet, solar system, or galaxy.
And finally, of course, the obvious -- any really intelligent being wouldn't go around hanging up neon "I'm here!" signs to broadcast their location to potential predators.
Finally, it may be that really advanced civilizations discover a "party line" that enables faster than light communication, which would enable most of the benefits of interacting without other species without the expense of physically traveling to them or the risk of giving away one's own location. In which case, they are merely keeping a low profile while waiting for us to also discover this communications method.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
radio signals also brake up over distance as well so they may to broken up when they get hear for them not to be seen as just junk data.
My own take on the Fermi paradox comes from the observation that modern radio communication systems - spread spectrum and ODFM - approach the Shannon limit of the bandwidth's information carrying capacity. As they do that, they approach the appearance of pure noise.
Earlier transmission systems, such as AM, FM, and analog broadcast's AM/FM hybrid, involve massive inherent reundancy and low bandwidth utilization. This makes their existence detectable (even if not fully decodable) at interstellar distances and at the resulting far worse signal-to-noise ratio than their intended receivers experience. Spread-spectrum and OFDM systems (and no doubt others yet to be invented) fill their assigned bandwidth with a close approximation to white noise, with only a small amount of redundancy to allow the receiver to detect the existence of the signal and synchronize with it. (Even the redundancy from the forward error correction is sufficiently complex that at appears as noise if the particular scheme is not being looked for.) This is why, when the signal-to-noise ratio of a digital signal becomes excessive, the reception drops out completely rather than becoming noisy.
Bandwidth is limited by physice, but the potential valuable uses of it are limited only by imagination and cost. So other radio-using civilizations seem likely to follow a similar path of squeezing as much information as technology allows into their signals.
If this is the case, the L term in the Drake equation ("the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space") becomes a measure, not of the lifetime of the civilization after it begins to use broadcast radio, but of the time from such use to the time it is supplanted by highly-efficient but not-readily-detectable shannon-limit-approaching signals.
When estimating the number of intelligences in this galaxy using the Drake equation, L was ballparked at 10,000 years. But consider broadcast TV here on Earth (the main telltale, emitting far more power per station than audio radio): Excluding early experiments the first regularly scheduled TV broadcasts started in 1930 - and the Analog Cutoff (where most high-power analog TV stations were shut down to free the bandwidth for other purposes) is in progress now, with the US terminating all full-power analog TV broadcast in 2009, just 80 years after the first signals from that first broadcast-service station.
So I have no feeling of loneliness just because we haven't happened to hear any civilizations in the narrow time slot when they might send DETECTABLE broadcasts.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I have a different theory.
I think that in many cases, civilizations reach a point where a small group can convince the mass of population that they have to alter their lifestyles to prevent their own advancement from destroying their environment. Thus cowed, the rulers, without any motivation for advancing the species, and living in luxury by the labor of a vast cadre of dependent and ignorant masses, push the rest of the civilization into more primitive lifestyles.
Preserving this stable lifestyle becomes and end itself, all ambitions of extra-planetary exploration forgotten. Eventually, the civilization runs out of local resources, too late to escape their own gravity well, and die off never having attained their potential.
What do you think? I call it the Enviro-Gorbama effect.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The nearest star to the sun is 4 light years, or 25 trillion miles away. Perhaps the nearest intelligent life is simply too far away to detect? And with no guarantee that alien civilizations will use radio, there's no reason to assume we could detect them with programs like SETI. But how else do we expect detect an intelligent civilization trillions of miles away? We're just barely able to detect Earth-sized extrasolar planets. Maybe we need to get better at looking before we complain about not being able to find anything.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
p.s I may be biased since I believe the drake equation is total bullshit anyway.
Would you want to visit a planet that broadcasts MTV and CSPN and monster movies? How much more confusing it must be for them when Godzilla attacks and the languages varies for each nation... They must think our planet is overrun by dinosaurs.
"Rama Revealed". Not the best book, but same idea there.
I've long felt that the "detectable broadcasts" issue was the most likely weak spot in figuring out whether anyone was out there, but for slightly different reasons. (Although yours are good too.) First of all, if civilization ever moves beyond a single planet, radio communications won't cut it. Would you want to talk to your friend orbiting Saturn with an hour delay at each end? Send a message, wait 2 hours, get a reply, reply back, wait 2 hours, etc. Yes, it's doable, but if non-radio based technology presented itself that would make for quicker communications, that would be rapidly adopted.
Of course, we're still a radio-based species so we'd be looking for radio-based signals. If some aliens are broadcasting their "Anyone Out There?" messages using subspace signals or some such, we'd completely miss them. They could be blasting the signals directly at Earth and we could be missing them entirely.
Secondly, just because it's radio-based doesn't mean we'd detect it as intelligent communication. Suppose I took five recordings, encoded them using five different codecs/formats and them compressed them in five different ways (zip, rar, etc), stripping out any identification as to the file/compression formats. Would you be able to decipher what the recordings were? Now, suppose four of those recordings were gibberish but one was a non-English language of my choice (not revealed to you). Would you be able to tell which is the real signal and which was the noise? Possibly, but it would be more difficult. Throw in an alien compression scheme, encoding schema and language and you raise the task to near impossibility. We could be disregarding a signal as noise when it's really some intergalactic P2P network sharing out the latest tunes from the hot new band from Sirus.
Finally, think of how big the sky is. When the Hubble Space Telescope took its famous Deep Field image, it scanned a mere 0.0002% of the sky. It found about 3,000 galaxies. If we figure that the Deep Field photo was typical of the entire sky, we're talking about 15 million galaxies. Each of those galaxies likely has billions of stars. We can't possibly look everywhere at once. A signal might be sent directly to us and we could miss it because our radio telescopes were looking 10 degrees to far to the left.
If a project like SETI strikes gold and finds a signal from an alien race, I'll be surprised at the discovery, of course, but I'll be more surprised at the great stroke of luck that they were looking at the right part of the sky at the right time and were able to decipher the transmission enough to separate the signal from the noise.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
would we want to hang-out with aliens who weren't smart enough to detect us first?
Sure. But that doesn't explain the paradox.
I think what Fermi said is that if you look at the numbers you would think that it is highly probable that the most advanced civilization in the galaxy has been able to do interstellar travel for tens or hundreds of millions of years by now. They would do it either by sending themselves or by sending self-reproducing robots. Therefore, the aliens or their robots should have been here on Earth for millions of years by now, doing whatever it is they do on planets such as Earth. We should expect to see extraterrestrials or their robots every now and then.
However, most of us never see aliens or alien robots. People that do report alien encounters tend to have no evidence or very poor evidence to support their stories.
The first stars with metals like ours showed up a few billion years before our star formed, and there are a lot of them. So they would have had as long as we have now, at the time when our star formed. Imagine a few billion years of progress from this point.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
some of them ascended to a higher plane and we can see them that easy.
...a tiny mote of dust listening for a wisp of lint.
With apologies to Carl Sagan
If we took our largest radio telescope, made a copy of it, and put it on a planet orbiting the nearest start and started broadcasting back to earth, the single would be too weak for the same telescope to pick up when it got here. Could humans from 100 years ago... or even 50 years ago detect our digital transmissions of today? How about whatever technology we'll be using in 100,000 years? Any civilizations we'd be trying to detect would be at least that much more advanced than us. What's our next big innovation in communication going to be? Quantum entanglement or Gravitons? Both of which we have no way of detecting at the moment (entanglement probably never.) and that's just the technology we'll have in the next couple of hundred years. Just because there are no intelligent civilizations near stars that are directly adjacent to us that are broadcasting in old school radio waves does not mean there are not mean there are no intelligent civilizations. Short of someone pointing a gamma ray burst at us, we simply do not have the technology to detect other civilizations, and I doubt anyone would go to that much effort.
I know this is gonna sound very much like 1970's sci fi, but planets don't last forever. If your Star was near to a cataclysmic change (like how Sol is supposed to change in approx 5 Billion Years, so that Earth will probably no longer be inhabitable), you might want to get off that rock before the whole species dies. However, planets have long enough lifespans that such 'forced emmigrations' wouldn't have to happen very frequently. But, to me that is the most logical reason to get off a planet. There's also, plausibly, the idea that a species makes its planet uninhabitable through it's own avarice (nuclear war, orbital bombardment, polution, something), although, one has to wonder if a species that does this to itself would really have the wherewithal to create colony ships before it's too late. That would require considerable forethought, and if such forethought is prevelant in the species, one would think they would have the foresight not to kill their own world in the first place.
I could see, theoretically, some religious group sending off colony ships to create their own 'utopia', much as some Europeans fled to the New World to flee persecution from other sects, and setup their own Theocracy where they could be the persecutors instead of the persecuted.
1) Intelligent life that communicate or travel into space is very rare. e.g. planet is to large to escape for space travel, Planet is an ocean world (try inventing electricity, radio, space travel underwater).
2) Interstellar travel is really really hard. i.e. FTL travel isn't possible. Anything attempting the trip either decays (even at cryogenic temperatures) or requires too large an energy supply to regenerate itself over the length of the trip.
This sounds a lot like some of the ideas discussed in Vernor Vinge's "Deepness in the Sky". He posited that on an isolated planet, civilizations were doomed to rise and fall in a constant cycle, but could never establish lasting permanence. The Qeng Ho was an interstellar trader group established to take the best things from each civilization it encountered and persist them forever by always continuing to travel and propagate culture between the stars.
Assumption 1: "Alien life perceives reality and exists in reality just like we do."
Between plant life and human life there is a huge divide. We are at the top of that layer, but there is a layer above us with just as much distance between the two points. We know this because we are told this via channeling efforts by beings living on that level above us. The UFO phenomenon is not a nuts and bolts thing; it has more to do with inter-density travel. Imagine beings living in a reality where they can re-focus their awareness along any point of their personal time line at will, and manifest changes along that line. Here's another way to look at it. . .
If you took a rocket ship from earth and accelerated to the speed of light and then landed on a planet which was also moving at the speed of light in the same direction, relative to each other, you are not moving. So you land, you spend a year there, you get used to your new environment. Then you refuel, wave goodbye to your new friends and launch again, and again you accelerate to the speed of light this time relative to the second planet. So are you now moving at twice the speed of light relative to the first planet? No. That's not possible. What HAS happened is that from the perspective of observers on the first planet, you have vanished. No communication can take place between them and you. You effectively exist in a different universe. This scenario is logically possible; sure, we can't make a space ship go the speed of light, so then make it go a quarter the speed of light, and do it four times in four stages. You can in theory, using current technology, achieve the result described above.
That's a simple and ugly example, but it gets the point across. Different universes can exist right on top of one another without one being able to see the other. And with the right technology, if we follow the right procedures, we can travel between them.
UFOs pop in and out of our reality at will. They are using more advanced technology and are able to perform the trick without the whole speeding up and landing on theoretical way-stations. They are starting from that higher realm with different physical properties available to them. "Time" for a UFO is not a barrier, and neither is space. The being piloting those ships are beings of biologically advanced awareness which can think and perceive in four dimensions. To them, you are Mister Flat in Flat Land.
Actually, it's worse than that. We are cattle in Flat Land. We are like wheat or corn. We are food, and like wheat or corn, we are barely, BARELY able to even recognize that they exist and manipulate our entire world and existence. I'm sure the corn isn't aware of the farmer.
This is the reality we live in, and it is why Fermi is utterly redundant. If corn were to explore its own science and dream of the stars, it might imagine advanced life to be plants with the same basic cognitive abilities as Earth-based plant life, maybe with a few little flourishes for dramatic effect, but essentially the same. And they would dream that space-corn would want to communicate with Earth-corn, and that brotherly love would extend across the corn-verse. And that's just as ridiculous as our mammalian sci-fi dreaming.
All that "junk" DNA we carry around? It's not junk. It's the stuff which was turned off so that we would remain unaware of our full reality. The illusion of "time" is a result of that manipulation. We were planted here.
As Above, So Below. We manipulate DNA of plants as well for our food benefit. We also keep cattle for our consumption. We eat the lower beings. We are food. They just eat us in a way which we have trouble comprehending. I'm sure the corn stalk would have difficulty trying to envision the cow's digestive tract as well.
-FL
They're all at home playing on their xboxes.
The Fermi Paradox is implied by Quantum Physics, in its many-worlds interpretation.
Where are they? Likely in different branches.
http://xkcd.com/638/
Seriously though, I actually find this a fairly depressing theory as it suggests two states for the galaxy - either galactic civilisation, or very low chances of contact. And it doesn't really seem like we're in the former.
That paper doesn't look like a published paper btw, just an arxiv post.
I once read somewhere that the easiest way to tell there's something unusual about our solar system is to notice that an otherwise unremarkable G-class main sequence star is a powerful radio emitter.
No matter whether or not the radio waves look like noise, the Earth is giving off a lot of radio emissions, enough to rival an entire star. How? By being very concentrated in the radio band of the emission spectrum.
If life evolved at close to the same time throughout the universe, then the Fermi Paradox is self-contradictory and invalid.
The universe must go through several specific stages: first star formation epoch, first star death epoch including supernovas, next star birth epoch where the solar systems include the heavy (structure component) elements produced by the supernovas. Then 4 billion or so years to evolve life to our level of complexity.
If in fact it takes the universe roughly as much time, from its beginning, as it took to create us, to create equivalently complex life elsewhere, then we can see that the other civilizations' lack of travel to visit us is explained by our lack of travel to visit them.
We haven't got there yet (plus it's damned ridiculously expensive/energy intensive to do it right and widely, so we might not bother.)
It's plausible that they haven't got here yet for the same reasons.
Oh and of course the vast distances mean that if we started sending the ships tomorrow, they wouldn't get to where they may be for hundreds or thousands or 10s of thousands of years.
So they may have beat us by a day, and just launched their ships today, but there is still no paradox.
Of course, there is likely a wiggle factor in the gestational time of complex life in the universe, but it may be only measured in terms of a few millions or 10s of millions of years, and the vast distance argument, and the difficulty/cost argument could plausibly explain lack of contact, with such a narrow time-window of contenders.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
There's no reason to stick around in the majority of universes when you can selectively pick the wavefunction you'd like your own personal branch of the multiverse to collapse into. Link enough massive bombs together and you could enclose almost any region of space in a quantum suicide machine that only triggers on unhappiness and presto; the utilitarian goal of universal happiness is achieved through the natural selection of universes that satisfy the happiness of the civilization. Of course, everyone else just sees a big boom at the point when the civilization in question isn't working out absolutely perfectly in their own world line.
I don't see anything, but my hand feels sticky.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
FTFY
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not sure where I read it, but there is a similar theory in sociology to explain the lack of the wheel in the americas. The large, connected landmass of eurasia / africa allowed the retention and advancement of knowledge because of the advantages of transmission of technology and the ability to isolate disparate civilizations from each others decline. For example, after the fall of the roman empire knowledge was transmitted to the arabic caliphate through the byzantine empire. When the european nations were able to regroup the venetian traders brought the lost knowledge of the roman empire back from the great libraries of the islamic world. The invention of continental mobile warfare allowed Genghis Khan to get european bell makers and chinese fireworks engineers together to invent the cannon. That type of interaction was not possible in the americas because of the limited number of civilizations, and the fact that a disaster in the area tended to affect all of the civilizations, or to leave too few of them standing. Although this article is interesting, and they may be on to something, I think it may be too simplistic of an analysis, and that in fact there may be a set number of civilizations that need to occur in a group of cells in a not fully contiguous but accessible area that would provide a critical mass that could extend the lifetime of all. That would be more in line with what has been observed here on earth.
Or another alternative... "They" are not using omnidirectional communications, but rather aimed and relatively focused comms (picture the lasers used for communications in Niven's Known Space). If we aren't in direct line with the beam, we don't get it.
Consider that a lot of terrestrial broadcast has shifted to wired (cable) and or directional communications (Satellite).
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
That makes perfect sense!
Good point..
And maybe dark matter is just the civilizations that are trying to hide from us.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
For the one travelling it is not 500 years. Thanks to time dilation the traveller will experience a far shorter travel time himself.
You assume that like the past civilisation can regrow from their ash. This is true for a non-technical civilisation. But for a technical civilisation , it is dubious. The reason is energy consumption. Look at us, we need increased technological advance to extract oil, get solar power, and fusion is far off. If our civilisation collapse, it is dubious we would be able to go beyond renaissance or enlightenment age technologically. Our oil reserve would be in-exploitable without the advanced meaning of exploiting them. Our coal reserve are being mined deeper. Nuclear fission has a finite amount of material too. Without the heavy duty energy, our civilisation almost certainly would not be able to jump-up from low energy duty to something much better, the re-grown civilisation would not be able to have the incremental advance we had, but would have to jump very high and far to advance technically. This is a dubious proposal at best, even if the knowledge is not lost. Going Dark, does not mean the civilisation member are dead. In fact I think in this case going dark would mean that the civilisation is barred forever to expand outside its planet, cannot go beyond a low technological level. That is enough for the Fermi paradox to be explained !
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
There is a decay of the signal due to the reverse square law, so basically none of the radio signal or TV signal or radar signal we sent in space unintentionally has gone beyond 1 light year before being drowned by the interstellar noise. Not enough power. The *only* signal which travelled further are the directional signal sent by arecibo 30 years ago. And that's it. A Seti project by alien on Alpha Centauri would not detect us.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
So what you're saying is that those people who have faith would go around murdering their neighbors, raping and pillaging, etc. if they didn't have "faith"?
That's complete bollocks and you know it.
Good people are good and bad people are bad. Religion is a system of control which can be (and has been) leveraged for both good and bad.
HAND.
All to obfuscate the obvious: if there were aliens out there, we would know it by now. More obvious: the first system to reach our level of consciousness always recycles the universe by creating the Higg's particle. When the Higg's field comes into existence, it will expand to the size of the universe in nothing flat, representing a force which will strip the elementary particles of their characteristics, leaving a universe which is supersymmetric, has zero entropy, and is timeless. The Higg's field will then cool and undergo a phase change and collapse which will return the characteristics to the particles and, Bob's your uncle.
> "when civilizations are close enough together in time and space, they can come into contact and when this happens the cross-fertilization of ideas and cultures allows them both to flourish in a way that increases their combined lifespan."
This is a positive stand which is unproved by history.
During centuries human societies have eradicated other societies they felt inferiors.
Even during this "enlightment century" we have been witnessed of slaughters. Darfour is just a close example.
I strongly oppose statement that human car fertilize any idea with aliens. It is a carebear dream.
Hope aliens will never encounter Human race.
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
I think that within a few hundred years humanity will develop technology so advanced as to be approaching the limits allowed by physics. (by developing means to enhance human intelligence that are rapidly self improving)
I don't think that any cataclysm is likely to stop us, because the earth has had a survivable biosphere for 3 billion years.
And that's just it - the earth has not been subject to a gamma ray burst or any other biosphere sterilizing event in 3 BILLION YEARS that it took for humans to evolve. The universe is only 14 billion years old! And the earth is a planet on the outer part of the galaxy, where it is more stable. And in the past, a few billion years after the big bang, planets with the complexity and variety of elements needed to form organized self replicating life like we perceive it didn't exist. And gamma ray bursts and other nasty events would have been far more common, as the universe had a much higher density.
That's the true explanation for the Fermi "paradox" : it is only a paradox to those unaware of just how long evolution took to get to this point, and how evolution is a process that can easily develop in a direction that never led to our form of intelligence.
In an infinite universe our existence proves that the odds of intelligent life are more than 0. Higher than zero chance in an infinite universe means infinite intelligent species. All we need to do is not to kill ourselves until we find ET and exchange business cards.
We get nerd-ons thinking about intergalactic travel and want so desperatly to contact other civilizations but many have trouble interacting with "other races" on their own planet.
All clichés and cultural differences aside; if you meet up with a civilization on another solarsystem, the cultural differences you might like or not will be a massive magnitude greater.
In short: Why would you think to be able to interact with an alien race while you cannot properly interact with the wide array of cultural differences on this planet?
To me it seemsit's often fantasized about as superiour in intelligence and peaceful thus able to teach us things, or massively inferiour and able to be dominated or controlled. But what if they are a bunch of weirdo's alot of people are avoiding in real life and are unable to interact with, even when the cultural or behavioural differences are marginal and limited to one planet? Are we mature enough in that regard to go out and deal with cultures unknown with unknown (to us) origins and behavioural patterns?
Can someone please elaborate on this?
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
In an infinite universe our existence proves that the odds of intelligent life are more than 0. Higher than zero chance in an infinite universe means infinite intelligent species. All we need to do is not to kill ourselves until we find ET and exchange business cards.
Science? Please post this shit in idle! Thanks!
Life is common...
This is not a given.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
A common statement seems to be, "If they could dismantle a Jupiter-sized planet and beam the energy out, they would have the energy to send a small manned craft to another star." Faced with that energy cost, I think any civilization intelligent enough to build the technology would ask whether they _want_ to. Which would also explain why SETI isn't finding interstellar traffic among the empires. I suppose there is still the possible scenario of a dying star system and a super-intelligent species putting everything into a colony ship (with perhaps a few individuals or bots and a lot of zygotes?) but it would be far rarer and probably less grand than pop fiction space travel.
We've had decades of pop media telling us that FTL is just a matter of finding the right rabbit hole to drop down into, but if FTL just isn't happening it's a different ball game.
Why are we making the assumption that another species of similar or greater intelligence than ourselves would be living under the same social organizations that we have? For all we know, "civilization" may be an abornmality for highly intelligent species. Furthermore, the social organization of alien species may be more radically different from our own than we can imagine.
At the risk of sounding kitch, the most intelligent species in si-fi series Star Gate wandered the forest instead of the stars.
Sure.
E Proelio Veritas.
The Fermi Paradox is an interesting thought experiment, nothing more. According to the Fermi Paradox logic, bacteria simply didn't exist until somebody was able to build a microscope. Why haven't we heard them yet? Maybe we don't know how to listen.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
SHOW ME THE ALIEN!
E Proelio Veritas.
Sometimes I think the best indication that intelligent life exists is that none of it has tried to contact us.
0,0002 = 3000
100 = x
x(0,0002) = 3000 * 100
x = 300000 / 0,0002
x = 1.500.000.000
What if I'm a predator who wants to get you to respond so I can garner your location?
Maybe the first signal we detect will be one giant case of interstellar spear fishing.
"Our records indicate that you may be overpaying on the mortgage on your planet. Please call.....etc"
One assumption is that intelligence is the optimal survival mechanism, and if you think about it is, but you would think that way wouldn't you? So possibilities are: we are in a 'young' universe such that we are one of the first to acquire at least tech level 2. Somebody had to be first. Good news is it gives us a great chance to conquer the universe (all the other base), but we need to keep getting smarter and stronger somehow.
Another possibility is that anytime 2 independently evolved civilizations come into contact their microbes eat everyone alive.
Hello Cruel World
+1, Sir!
That is exactly the reason why I never installed SETI@home, and encourage people I know using it to switch over to FOLDING@home instead.
A pet hypothesis of mine is that perhaps as an object with mass approaches C, conventional laws of physics break down and we need a whole new set of physics to figure out what happens at those velocities
Why make it your own pet hypothesis? Why not investigate whether our actual experience with observing masses' velocities near C has yielded anything of the sort already? There's plenty of evidence which will give you an idea of whether or not we think we understand what happens at those velocities.
Personally, I argue that we wouldn't even have relativistic theory itself today without such observations. And that, just as relativity refined classical ideas, a few generations' observations and experimentation might have been just the thing for obtaining any potential refinements of relativistic ideas.
If you had a pet hypothesis, it wouldn't just be the idea that a whole new set of physics would be needed, it would be an actual description of that new set of physics.
Say it right: "Nuc-le-ah Powah".
three words: Matrioshka brain enshrouding. http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/index.html
If it is natural to die, then to hell with nature. --FM 2030
The most likely scenario is that life is EXTREMELY special. Earth is most likely the only place in the universe that has life. Technically we should not even be here. Technically the universe should not even be here. How did ANY of this even get created in the first place? Nothing is ever created or destroyed so how did it even manage to get here? Even if you take far-fetched theories, something like string theory, HTF did the strings get there?!?
Life is extremely special and extremely mysterious. Without us here to observe the universe there would be absolutely no reason for it to even exist.
Look around. See any wildcats? Beavers? Wolves? Bears? If you do, you live in a *very* atypical area.
There are very few left. And why? Because they tend to inconvenience humans. So humans kill 'em off. Ruthlessly, and with zero thought to their experience of the matter. No reason to expect an alien race to do us any different, is there?
And consider: We're far more dangerous than any of the above. Nuclear weapons. Bio weapons. Viciously territorial to a fault and beyond. Uncontrolled breeders. We create huge amounts of waste. We have very little care for our environment. We're both technically sophisticated and massively superstitious. We regularly kill our own for reasons ranging from mating to religion to entertainment, so what hope would an alien race have to think they might be exempted?
I'll tell you what, if I was the alien race, I'd wipe us out just as a prophylactic measure, and then use the remains as fertilizer to try and repair the damage we've done.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I once read somewhere that the easiest way to tell there's something unusual about our solar system is to notice that an otherwise unremarkable G-class main sequence star is a powerful radio emitter.
Problem is that, once the radio emissions look like noise, the emissions from a sun-plus-inhabited-planet(s)-and-spacecraft solar system just look like it has a lot of stuff - like an accretion disk / asteroid belt in a near-sun orbit - heated to a nice, radio-noisy, temperature. Maybe the energy vs. frequency distribution wouldn't be quite thermal. But even that wouldn't necessarily be particularly noticeable (or distinct from various other natural phenomena, like a multiple-ring system or band-slotting from resonant absorption) at galactic distances.
There'd be nothing particularly surprising, or interesting, about finding such things in the sky.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Would you want to talk to your friend orbiting Saturn with an hour delay at each end? Send a message, wait 2 hours, get a reply, reply back, wait 2 hours, etc. Yes, it's doable, but if non-radio based technology presented itself that would make for quicker communications, that would be rapidly adopted.
Such a faster-than-light communication medium would seem to violate fundamental physical laws as currently understood. In particular: If the speed of light was beaten by enough to usefully improve on lightspeed message latency at planetary distances, the technology would also enable the construction of a rather simple machine for sending useful messages from the future to the past - violating causality. (Also: If information can do it, matter probably can, too. Warp 5, Mr. Sulu!)
So I expect that the normal mode of rapid communication at interplanetary-and-larger distances to be electromagnetic - radio, light, etc. - despite the delay. It would be the best that can be done, barring a fundamental physics breakthrough of an all-bets-are-off magnitude.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The last time I tried to figure this out, what I came up with was that you could detect a megawatt-level signal out to a distance of a dozen or so light years, using a dish like Aricebo on both ends, and the best available detection technology. The whole SETI project presupposes that other cultures are making an explicit, extremely expensive effort to contact us. We aren't doing that, so I suspect they aren't either. I imagine the folks on other planets have built their equivalent of the Very Large Array and are patiently waiting for signals to come in that they couldn't get the funding to send out, either.
This actually turns out to be an argument for having SETI concentrate on visible-light signals, rather than radio. Higher-frequency signals would have much lower divergence, helping with the collection requirements at the other end. http://www.google.com/search?q=optical+seti
But I don't wanna go beyond the rim!
If the universe started x years ago and it's taken this long for us to reach a point of technological understanding, couldn't we assume that another planet would take a similar although different course and take roughly the same ammount of time to advance. The nearest planets, outside of our solar system, are millions of lightyears away. It would take millions of years to see where those planets are at in their development right now. Maybe they are trying to contact us. Ask the debris man leaves behind in a million years if it hears anything...
Even if the communications look like noise, they will raise the noise floor over the normal cosmic background radiation. No matter how the signal is encoded, the RF power will be detectable. All we would need to look for is bright spots in the sky where the "noise" floor is higher than normal.