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Are Habitable Exoplanets Bad News For Humanity?
An anonymous reader writes "The discovery of Kepler-186f last week has dusted off an interesting theory regarding the fate of humanity and the link between that fate and the possibility of life on other planets. Known as the The Great Filter, this theory attempts to answer the Fermi Paradox (why we haven't found other complex life forms anywhere in our vast galaxy) by introducing the idea of an evolutionary bottleneck which would make the emergence of a life form capable of interstellar colonization statistically rare. As scientists gear up to search for life on Kepler-186f, some people are wondering if humanity has already gone through The Great Filter and miraculously survived or if it's still on our horizon and may lead to our extinction."
But the way the human race is behaving currently, getting off this dirtball in any meaningful way seems exceedingly unlikely.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
answer: Space is really big.
A race could have populate half the galaxy's out there and we still wouldn't know.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Maybe the inhabitants of those other planets aren't ravening imperialist douchebags. In that case, I'm liking our odds.
Consider Jack Handey's observation:
--Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
If Kepler-186f is teeming with intelligent life, then that would be really bad news for humanity because it would push back the Great Filter’s position further into the technological stages of a civilization’s development. This would imply that catastrophe awaits both us and our extraterrestrial companions.
No it wouldn't, because then Fermi's Paradox is solved - Fermi's Paradox exists because we Earthicans are, by all appearances thus far, the only life that exists, intelligent or otherwise. If the first exoplanet we manage to check harbors intelligent life, then it would suggest that there is a lot of intelligent life out there, and it is just effing hard to communicate and travel over interstellar distances.
That's an interesting alternate God. Most conceptions of singular-God that I'm familiar with have him as a creative force, not a destructive force actively eliminating all life in the universe that does not lead to humans on Earth, like a cosmic bansai bush cultivator.
The idea that Homo Sapiens is a form of intelligent life is ludicrous.
The proof that the Universe is inhabited by intelligent life is that it has not contacted us.
--Calvin
The basic problem with the Fermi Paradox is this, we don't really have a technology we ourselves would reliably use to communicate between stars, thus the fact that we can't find alien civilizations using a technology we wouldn't use proves nothing. Arguably the whole radio search is a waste of time since we have no reason to believe we will find anything, indeed we have one reason to believe we won't! For all we know, there could be lots of miniature alien probes all over our solar system right now, or maybe they communicate with wormholes, or it is impractical to communicate long distances, or who knows? Basically, we really don't even know what we are looking for in the first place, so the Paradox falls on it's face for lack of information.
There's about 5,000 years of recorded human history. But there's only about 200 years of industrial civilization. It's been just about 200 years since the first time a paying customer got on a train and went someplace. Think of that as the beginning of large-scale deployment of powered technology.
It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that human activities started making a big dent in planetary resources. By now, we've extracted and used most of the easy-to-get resources. There's argument over how long it will take to run through what's left, but it's not centuries, and certainly not millennia. More difficult and sparser resources can be extracted, but that's a diminishing-returns thing.
It's quite possible that high-power technological civilization only has a lifespan of a few hundred years before the planet is used up. We might be saved by the Next Big Thing in high-power technology, but there hasn't been a major new energy source in 50 years. Nobody can get fusion to work, and fission is riskier than expected.
Incorrect. Evolution is sick, twisted, and blind. We deserve better. I believe we still have time to take control and become a better, post-human species.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Ours is not one of the early-generation stars, but life as we know it requires some trace heavy metals, so complex organism require later generation stars (so that the older stars can generate heavy elements and nova them out). So we are a young system, but could be the oldest capable of life as we know it.
Learn to love Alaska
Which is why space travel is important, especially colonization. Think of it this way: a herd of animals lives in an area with plenty of food and water. Now, after a while, the food and water starts to dry up. Does the herd just sit around and wait to die, or does it venture out into other areas, expanding its territory. Essentially it is a natural process, and the only hope humanity has of any significantly long term existence.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
We've seen fossils of simple (prokaryotic, bacterial) life that are at least 3.8 billion years old. Basically the instant it became possible for single-cell life to exist, it did. That suggests that simple life is *easy*.
It took evolution roughly a billion years to produce eukaryotic life, suggesting that step is hard. It also took 2 billion more years to produce a eukaryotic lifeform capable of space flight, suggesting that step is also hard.
The sun is predicted to make life on earth impossible in roughly ~1 billion years. An oops anywhere earlier in the process, and evolution wouldn't have had time to recover. We're lucky to exist.
So my suspicion is that the universe is relatively teeming with simple life anywhere it is possible (there are tentative signs that there *might* be life on Mars and possibly Titan too) but complex life is much rarer, rare enough that it's not surprised we haven't found any yet.
Also, wanting to communicate and explore is inherently a human desire, and whatever neo-human-cyber-whatever descendants emerge from the Singularity might not have the same desires. And I can predict their desires much more accurately than I could an aliens.
And if you think this is too harsh, you haven't studied our history like I have.
Through a pair of shit-tinted spectacles, apparently. It's a wonder historians aren't throwing themselves off bridges all the time, the way you paint it.
Or maybe you're just manically pessimistic.
Death is what we deserve, and if we do not change, death is what should be for every man woman and child on this earth.
So what are you doing about this apparently dire situation? Apart from posting admonishments on Slashdot?
Go play fetch with a dog in the park.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I think we are capable of that without the assistance of artificial intelligence.
But are we willing to take that risk?
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Life itself is the 'original' Von Neumann machines...
My theory on it is a bit different: If you posit that travel is indeed restricted to 'slow' speeds, IE 1-2% of light speed, and that habitable planets are rare enough that they're quite far apart, you run into that travel between solar systems with habitable planets can take sufficient time for significant amounts of evolution to take place.
Summary: By the time the generation ship manages to reach the new system, it's significantly likely to have evolved to be more suited to live in space, not a planet. At which point it concentrates on colonizing the asteroid belt and such, not bothering with the planet that so interested their ancestors.
Alternatively: We're becoming more and more concerned with conservation today. If this is a common function of intelligent life, our system could have been identified as a potential life-evolving one millions and millions of years ago and declared a nature preserve or something, in the hope that something like us would evolve.
I don't read AC A human right
This is completely absurd. There are roughly 7 BILLION people on this planet that you insist on painting with the same brush in the same stroke. And that counts nothing towards the countless other humans that have gotten us to this point in our evolution. Yes, humanity at its extreme can be a toxic parasite on its environment and fellow man; however that totally disregards the ability of the capable to rise above the morass and drag the bottom up with it. Don't think that's how this story will end? You think we'll end up in oblivion, fighting tribal battles for the rest of our existence? You sit there, typing your rant on a device that wouldn't have been within the wildest reaches of imagination a few short generations ago, and you condemn the greatest of humanities abilties and achievements down to destruction.
Life is a process. Historically, the pressures were strictly survivalist. Now? To me and a great many like minded, survival means a good deal more than our next meal. So instead of seeking to drive humanity down and out, how about joining those of us trying to pull the least of us out of the muck?
"Watch your cornhole, bud."
I wouldn't go so far as to call evolution sick and twisted. Evolution is just an optimization system that doesn't give a flying fuck about anything that doesn't increase the number of your offspring in the world. By the way, this is the mistake that social darwinists make - they think evolution is sacred and precious because it favors strength and intelligence, but evolution does no such thing. If evolution were a sentient being, it would be euphoric at its invention of insects and bacteria and tardigrades, and probably look at humans as some side project that didn't get very far before becoming self-destructive. A lot of people complain about the increasing number of stupid people in the world, because "intelligent people don't procreate". Even if that's true, that's evolution in action for you baby! Turns out, too much intelligence is destructive, better evolve some beings that are stupider and will shut up and procreate without asking too many questions.
Evolution doesn't need us, but the good news is that we don't need evolution. We've figured out alternate ways of survival and optimization, involving intelligence and ideas. I think we should spread our better ones to the stars, and leave our destructive evolutionary baggage at home.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Going with your herd analogy, the herd spends years chasing after dwindling water supplies until it finally goes extinct. Meanwhile, other organisms evolve that are better suited to the new drought conditions.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
The core of the Fermi Paradox is that there does not appear to be any basic physical limitation that would prevent an intelligent civilization from colonizing the entire galaxy in much less than a 100 million years - yet there is no case that can yet be made that Earth is anything like a boundary case of the "earliest possible biosphere". It is not a solution to the Fermi Paradox to postulate reasons why one intelligent species or another might fail to do so, it has to apply to every one of them since one outlier would go on to colonize the galaxy.
I think part of the resolution of the paradox is the implicit notion common to us humans that our form of tool-using symbolic-communicating intelligence is some sense "inevitable" and will arise given enough time. Yet observing the evolution of the large animals on Earth does not give any reason for thinking this is some sort of normal progression. The Great Apes, very similar to hominids, have not shown any trend toward evolving larger brains since the hominid-ape split 7 million years ago. No general trend toward developing human style intelligence is evident anywhere. The emerging story of hominid development is that a long series of lucky accidents seems to have been necessary to bring it about.
Human-style intelligence may be extremely unlikely to evolve at all.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Even if the "Great Filter" exists; even if it were 99.999% effective at wiping out civilizations, that would still mean there have been billions of years, for billions of civilizations to arise, and of those billions, perhaps tens of thousands survived to colonize space.
This is why I believe in the Zoo Hypothesis.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
In good sci-fi literature we see this come up again and again in many hypothetical scenarios. Ian Douglas answers the Fermi Paradox by positing a future where a galaxy-spanning race of hyper-darwinist xenophobes mercilessly wipe out any space faring "other" race much to humanity's horror when they stumble across ruins, relics, and artifacts left by other races.
In the Crystal Spheres by David Brin we see a future where all intelligent life is closed off from habitable worlds until they themselves become space faring, and humanity is among the first to reach the stars.
In To Outlive Eternity by Poul Anderson we see a possible scenario in which humans are first by design.
Peter F. Hamilton takes us through another possibility in the Night's Dawn Trilogy where intelligent life is fairly rare and what there is out there doesn't really have an interest in "lesser" forms.
In all, we won't know for sure for a long while yet, but I think there are some good possibilities out there. And until we actually do make contact or prove ourselves to be alone, good sci-fi keeps us company in the meantime =)
While they would probably still be using radio waves, or at least EM radiation of some kind, for communication, they might be using them in such a way that we wouldn't be able to pick them up. For example, they might be using highly directional communications and spread spectrum signals carrying complex communications protocols that look like noise if you don't know exactly how to read them. That's not particularly far-fetched since that's what most of our telecommunications consist of now.
We've seen fossils of simple (prokaryotic, bacterial) life that are at least 3.8 billion years old. Basically the instant it became possible for single-cell life to exist, it did. That suggests that simple life is *easy*.
It took evolution roughly a billion years to produce eukaryotic life, suggesting that step is hard. It also took 2 billion more years to produce a eukaryotic lifeform capable of space flight, suggesting that step is also hard.
Since we only have one data point, all of this is basically a guess though. Maybe it doesn't take a billion years to produce eukaryotic life - maybe it's really quite fast, but the conditions just weren't right for a long time and that held it back. Get another planet with more suitable conditions and you might be talking millions instead of billions of years. My point is that we just don't know because we don't have enough data to tell the difference between low probability and high probability events.
http://blog.nexusuk.org