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Aliens and the Fermi Paradox
First time accepted submitter sayhem (1842674) writes Various explanations for why we don't see aliens have been proposed—perhaps interstellar travel is impossible or maybe civilizations are always self-destructive. But with every new discovery of a potentially habitable planet, the Fermi Paradox becomes increasingly mysterious. There could be hundreds of millions of potentially habitable worlds in the Milky Way alone. This impression is only reinforced by the recent discovery of a "Mega-Earth," a rocky planet 17 times more massive than the Earth but with only a thin atmosphere. Previously, it was thought that worlds this large would hold onto an atmosphere so thick that their surfaces would experience uninhabitable temperatures and pressures. But if this isn't true, there is a whole new category of potentially habitable real estate in the cosmos.
Well, it is always possible we are simply the first. We do have an unusually old population I star and it still took billions of years for humans to come on the scene, so it is possible that the typical case simply takes longer and many suns are younger then our's.
It's meaningless.
Space is REALLY BIG. In fact, space s bigger than time is long.
You could have started sending out robots 12 billion years ago and they wouldn't have even made a scratch in colonizing the universe.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Maybe travel at the speeds necessary to reach other star systems is impossible, and there ARE a TON of civilizations out there. But, they're all talking on some type of communication form - like Quantum CB or something - that we haven't discovered quite yet.
One day we will, and we won't make first contact with ONE species that day. We'll meet millions.
:::The Spear in the heart of the Other is the Spear in the heart of You; You are He - Surak of Vulcan:::
At a certain point that starts looking like an attractive option. If NASA announced that they've managed to create a warp bubble, no matter how small, then I'd say the low hanging fruit is that aliens are in contact with certain elements of humanity and that this isn't widely known because a huge percentage of the world would freak the fuck out.
At Los Alamos, right around the time of the Fermi Paradox, everyone was agog at the green fireball phenomenon. One of the greatest collections of scientists ever assembled were pretty evenly split on the subject. Some though the the green balls of fire flying through the sky and changing direction as if being intelligently guided were some kind of secret earthly craft, while many other were certain they were extraterrestrial in origin. No one doubted they were real, however, and no one thought they were natural.
You don't really hear about this, but it's part of what started Fermi along the way towards his paradox.
As for the usual "OMG, nobody could keep that secret!" meme. Even if someone had 100% proof of alien encounters, the signal to noise ratio is assumed to be no signal and all noise. Someone could have been shouting the truth from the rooftops for forty years and nobody would care because they'd be lost in the din of people seeing little green men and anal probes.
Between "every civilization eventually kills itself" and a high level conspiracy to keep the world from shitting their pants at alien life, I'll pick the conspiracy. The fact that half of humanity isn't really ready to stop killing one another over five thousand year old superhero stories is kind of telling. Hell, half of humanity is confused by shoes.
First off, forget Hitler's Munich Olympics broadcast, that's way to new. The most interesting thing about Earth is roughly half a billion years old, and that's its "unnatural" atmosphere. Our atmosphere shouts, "Life!" like nothing else. The stuff in our air just doesn't cohabit from ordinary chemical processes - it has to be maintained. Not as old, but still older than Hitler's broadcast is the sustained presence of pollutants in the atmosphere. This might suggest, "intelligent, if immature/foolhardy life."
We can almost see this kind of stuff with Kepler, though to get to this level of detail we use several instruments in parallel - Kepler is the first-weeder. We're nowhere near having interstellar technology, so any race that does will likely have commensurate technologies in other areas as well. Most notably, if you're going to travel far, you want to know which direction to go, and as much about your destination as you can. They would have tools that make Kepler look like a child's toy. They would know how interesting Earth is. Where that ranks us with respect to other planets in another question, but I'll bet it's not as bleak a prospect as some say.
Personally I think the presence of us on Earth has to do with it's "sufficiently interesting history", including the collision that formed the moon, several asteroid/comet strikes like the dinosaur killer, etc. Not to mention plate tectonics, the magnetic field that keeps the solar wind from blowing our atmosphere away, etc. Like I said, I think Earth would be on the short-list.
By the same token, I also think they would observe. Our society and existence are fragile enough, one big kick could easily topple the whole mess. Imagine a preemptive strike by one power to prevent another power from getting "the advantages of alien technology," etc. We're also pretty darned "memetically susceptible," and even allowing an alien idea to reach us might upset the apple cart.
Or as an alternative, perhaps the Catholic Church was right, and Galileo (and Copernicus) were wrong. If not the physical center of the universe, if we're all there is, perhaps the Earth is the philosophical center of the universe.
So:
1 - We're all there is, perhaps to become the Progenitors, perhaps not.
2 - There is other life, hasn't gotten here yet, may not bother, may not be able.
3 - There is other life, observing us, careful to remain unknown - the Prime Directive.
4 - There is other life, getting ready to invade/destroy us.
5 - There is other life, in contact only with the Illuminati and Club of Rome.
Personally I'd prefer option 3. Option 2 is equally likely. Option 1 is rather sad. Options 4 and 5 are IMHO silly.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The Rare Earth Hypothesis is still the strongest contender for the solution to the Fermi Paradox. Suppose that there are a hundred different conditions necessary for intelligent life to evolve. These could include basic requirements (like liquid water and protection from ionization radiation), up to more subtle components (like a moon that massive enough to cause tides or an axial tilt to create seasons). Until we have another data point for reference, any condition on Earth might be considered a necessary condition. If each of these conditions has an independent probability of 1 out 10 or less, then it very well could be that Earth is unique in the galaxy, possibly the the universe. The universe is big, but it is not 10^100 planets big.
People with auto-immune diseases aren't less susceptible to being killed by regular infections. That's usually what kills them.
Autoimmune diseases are an interesting problem where for some reason the chemical self/not-self signalling gets messed up, and the immune system starts attacking a host of identified "not self" cells. Other ones - like asthma - are a hypersensitivity of the primary (non-specific) immune response.
Cancer is the exact opposite problem: cancer is when you get a specific series of mutations which do not result in the normal cellular apoptosis mechanism destroying a body cell. The immune system doesn't target cancer because it doesn't target "self" cells. Cancer is immune-invisible, and the holy grail of cancer therapy has always been to find something unique about cancer cells that the immune system can be sensitized to to attack.
None of this is caused by some weird idea of "balance" of the immune system, and the way you used the phrase to start with was a weird thing to do with antibiotics and nature or something.
I suggest thinking hard about your positions before you start advocating withholding treatment from patients and letting people die, which is what you were trying to circumspectively say without sounding like a monster (also looking up the actual causes of antibiotic resistance and how drug-resistance evolves - it's really not what you seem to think).
1) 2011 "Out of the Blue" - Best researched UFO documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
2) 2001 Disclosure Project - Dozens of high ranking goverment+military officials testify publicly of aliens+UFOs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
3) 2013 Citizen's Hearing - 40 researchers and military/agency/political witnesses testify for 30 hours before 6 former congress members: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (part 1)
4) Bob Lazar Area51/S4 whistleblower - 10.5 hours of testimony : https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
5) Ex CIA death bed confession on reality of aliens/ufos - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
6) List of countries that have disclosed UFO files: (loooong list) - http://www.disclosureproject.o...
I could go on, but there's already week's worth of material here alone.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
The problem is that the power of the signal very rapidly went down (in 1/R^2) so even when we were broadcasting in the 50ies-60ies, our best signal did not even go beyond 1 light year before being indistinguishable from noise , in the best case scenario (actually probably much less depending on the signal). There are only 2 signals which went beyond the 1 or 2 LY, and those were intentional "we are here" signal, sent toward M10 i think (or was it M52?) and those signals were maybe a few dozen minutes all combined together.
We would not be able to detect ourselves if we were located on our direct neighbor, 4 LY away, alpha centauri. By that point even our most powerful unintentional signal is beyond the noise floor (again except those few dozen minutes TOTAl over all our whole civilization time).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
There are no old, space faring civilizations, for one inescapable reason. Technology is incompatible with species. No ifs or buts.
Brief explanation: Life of any kind, in any environment must always evolve as species - defined as multiple beings sharing a common 'genetic code base' - regardless of how the information is encoded. In our case it's DNA. In all species the individuals serve as reproductive vectors for the code they carry, and individual survival of the fittest is required for any species to evolve and adapt to its environment. This implies that individuals also die - this is necessary, otherwise natural selection cannot operate, hence no evolution.
Life is likely quite common in the Universe. Even if intelligence is statistically a rare development, there still should be countless instances, including plenty long ago, where 'long' means more than one star lifetime. So if intelligence results in technological cultures, including any kind of major engineering or space travel, where are they all? Even if such civilizations choose not to say hello to us, we should still see evidence of their works.
But we don't. There's apparently nothing. Just elusive local UFO sightings, of unknown reliability. Certainly no daylight landings in city park, so to speak. That was just to restate the Fermi Paradox. Where is everyone? We exist, so there should be other civilizations like us, but much older and more technologically advanced.
The logical error here, is to assume that technology is a continuum; that a society develops technology and then just continues to progress as a society - a cooperating population of individuals with a common genetic heritage, hence species.
But this NEVER happens. Can never, will never, never does. Here's the inescapable reason.
As a species develops technology, they inevitably discover the nature of the physical encoding scheme of their own biology. They develop the means to manipulate that coding scheme. Our fledgling genetic engineering is an example of how that starts. Quite rapidly the science of engineering their own coding will advance, since after all it's just a messy 'wet' version of computing science, and you can't have high tech without already being well advanced in computing technology.
Somewhere in the process of unraveling their genetic coding, an intelligent species will also develop a science of consciousness - what we presently think of as AI, but which is ultimately about minds in general and how they work, including our own.
As these two science threads advance, genetics and mind-science, it is 100% totally inevitable, that at some point individuals will gain the technological capability to begin modifying their own nature. We already do this - for instance using altered viruses to perform corrective edits of faulty DNA, eg the Cystic Fibrosis cure.
But that is primitive stuff. Ultimately, gene engineering and AI technology provide individuals with the means to 'transcend' - to embark on total self re-engineering.
At this point in the analysis, most people become incapable of logically carrying through. It seems there's another strong cognitive bias or two, not listed in the Wiki. One is that most people seem incapable of thinking impartially about the probability of termination of their own species. Another is a mental block against thinking logically about the likely motivations of entities that do not share the species-centric world-view of us genetic humans.
Here's an idea: try thinking about an intelligent entity, that does NOT share any of our reproduction-motivated species-protective instincts. Nor any of the many cognitive biases in the Wiki list.
Because that's what you get eventually, after any species-based individual achieves self-engineering capability, then immortality, an ability to deliberately optimize and enhance it's own mental capabilities, weed out instincts no longer appropriate to it's new existence as an immortal space-traveling entity.
Anyway, the point is that 'technological speci
This has not happened once, it's happened multiple times in the Homo genus
Homo gautengensis
Homo habilis
Homo erectus
Homo antecessor
Homo ergaster
Homo rhodesiensis
Homo heidelbergensis
Homo neanderthalensis
Homo floresiensis
Denisova hominin
Red Deer Cave people
That's 12 species, including homo sapiens, though homo sapiens killed off or absorbed the other 11 (remember, Homo sapiens are upto 30% Homo neanderthalensis due to interbreeding). Homininae are close enough genetically and many have shown the ability to communicate that they, given the lack of human presence, could evolve to our state as well. That's another 39 species.
Also, while you're taking the past into account you're not taking the future. In 4.6 billion years whether you want to say 1 to 12 species evolved depending on how you want to frame it. The Earth has an estimated 5 billion years remaining... so lets say in the next 100 years, even a million years, there's an extinction event and primates all die. That's 4.9 billion years for another intelligent species to develop.