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Gamma-ray Bursts May Explain Fermi's Paradox
An anonymous reader writes: A new study confirms the potential hazard of nearby gamma-ray bursts. It quantifies the probability of an event near Earth, and more generally in the Milky Way and other galaxies over time: "[Evolved] life as it exists on Earth could not take place in almost any galaxy that formed earlier than about five billion years after the Big Bang." This could explain the Fermi's paradox, or why we don't see billion-year-old civilizations all around us.
Fermi's pair o' docs
(Shares o' grooming stocks)
Would've afforded fun
To some hirsute civilization
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Unchecked technology wipes out the technologists.
From TFS:
They further estimate that GRBs prevent complex life like that on Earth in 90% of the galaxies.
So, life possible on 10% of the galaxies means that those are none at all? What about our own one? This smells of clickbait.
God created an oasis in the midst of chaos.
It was much later, he insisted I love you heathens.
And I do.
This does not really resolve fermi's paradox. It just helps define fermi's paradox.
The human race has been in mostly the same state physiologically for more than 10,000 years-- That is to say, you could clone a person who lived 10,000 years ago, and never tell them their origins, and they would integrate into our society without problem.
Our civilization has been prevented from leaving the earth by our own silliness. Our big push out of a major duldrum of ignorance has been a bittersweet one; After the renaissance, we discovered that we were capable of much more than we had. We focused on that, and coined a now much maligned term: "Progress."
For the better part of the past 2 centuries, humans were focused on attaining such "Progress", and technological advancement grew at previously unprecedented speeds. We literally went from covered wagons and horses to nuclear power in 200 years.
It wasn't biology holding humans back from this rapid achievement-- It was attitude and social conventions. Things like warring over who's god has the biggest dick, or over who has the most money. (Things we STILL fight about to this day!) When there is a major social focus to improve, we have historically demonstrated the ability to do it.
If we can thus do this-- Go from horse drawn conveyances to nuclear energy in 200 years-- then there is very little reason to expect other potential civilizations from doing so as well, and perhaps not having spent quite as much time arguing over who's god has the mightiest member.
Yet, when we look up into the sky, we dont find any. We strain with our radio telescopes, and hear only the strange EM flux of gas giants, the hissing and popping of stars, and the screams of magnetars.
This finding does not settle Fermi's paradox. It just sets a slightly smaller boundry.
the USA declaring war on supernovas and their gamma-ray bursts.
The only reason we haven't found or met any alien civilizations is that they are simply unwilling for that to happen yet. We're not the nicest of species and civilizations, just read through a slashdot thread.
To explain a bit, I would say that the measure of a species' advancement through the level of their technology is secondary to the real measure, which is how extensively and how easily can a species turn its will into reality.
Based on that definition, then its pretty straightforward then that if aliens are unwilling to let us know about them, then for them it would be extremely easy and simple -- just decide, whereas for us the idea seems impossibly complex, unlikely, and difficult, and therefore hard to accept.
They must've had at least a few thousand years on us, if not millions. Imagine where we will be in 1000 years. It's beyond conjecture. This should make it easier to accept our inability to know how an alien species could just decide to not let us know about them, and have it so, despite any of our efforts to the contrary.
I thought gamma rays explained The Incredible Hulk?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Just because of some gamma ray bursts here and there suddenly speculations such as the "Fermi's Paradox" are regarded as facts ??
Is this Science?
But not due to any goodness in my murderous heart;
Rather, Christ put in an appearance and led by example.
... they're just playing the Galactic Corridor's favorite game: Peek-a-boo. It's our turn, and they're starting to wonder why we aren't taking it.
Soon they'll be insulted by our lack of response, and eliminate our planet entirely. And nothing of value will be lost.
Why is god so petty that he worries about how and what I use my penis on?
It's not petty to worry that you might put it in a blender or an oscillating fan.
For humanity to imagine Fermi's Paradox is worth wasting the time to think about it, consider a door-to-door salesman who, his first day on the job, goes down to his own basement, knocks on the door he finds there, and two seconds later resolves that he's all washed up as a salesman because he hasn't met his annual quota yet.
I'm confident that life exists on other worlds in the universe, throughout time, and right now, even occasionally INTELLIGENT life, but that worlds that can harbor such life, and worlds that can harbor INTELLIGENT life, are so few in number and so far in between in space, etc., that we'll most likely never meet them. Space itself is the barrier.
One more analogy might help you to understand. Imagine an amoeba astronomer, if amoebas live for an hour. One such amoeba is in Beijing, China. Another is a few hundred feet below the surface of an underground lake on or near Madagascar, east of Africa. The odds of them being able to talk to each other, or even know each that the other EXISTS is much higher for THEM to find out each that the other exists, and be able to communicate. They'd have an easier time of it, too.
If the light from a star is hard to pick up at the distances we are from many stars, how much harder would a radio signal that is about a trillionth to a quadrillionth times fainter than a star be to pick up? A quintillionth? Remember that these are stars too far away, as bright as they AREN'T, to see at all; even our most powerful telescopes can barely pick them out. Picking out a radio signal at that distance, would be a bit like spotting an individual bit of sand on a beach, from many miles out at sea. Then reading words micrographically printed on them.
Instead of traveling interstellar distances to colonize extrasolar planets would it not make much more sense to build out inhabitations in empty space. Imagine how much more economical the Death Star would be without light speed engines or super-powered lasers.
The only paradox is why people seem to keep making overly optimistic estimates of the likelihood of intelligent life occurring.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event Not the best source, but it works here
Although there are 10–14 million species of life currently on the Earth,[2] more than 99 percent of all species that ever lived on the planet are estimated to be extinct.
Of those 10-14 million species of life on earth now, exactly 1 qualifies as intelligent. so considering that that now amounts to 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance of intelligent life occurring. It also debunks the idea that intelligence is survival trait.
Plugging in reasonable numbers: 100 billion stars, 50% planets, 3 planets per solar system, 30% of those planets evolve life, 1/100,000,000 chance of a given species to be intelligent, 100% fraction that communicates, 10,000 years life span.
There's no fucking paradox. In the millions of years between extinction events, there's no evidence for intelligent life having evolved between them. So put some reasonable numbers into that fucking equation and see what pops out.
Regardless even if billion year old civilizations do exist, as posted above, there may well be hard physical limits on expansion due c etc. And just listening for radio evidence is unlikely, both due to distance, and the fact that out own radio window (and any other species) is likely to be short. already more and more of our radio transmissions are low power and directed. This will only continue, reducing our emissions, Listening for any leakage from a great distance is akin to trying to smell a fart in a hurricane.
Silence is a state of mime.
An alternate "simplest" explanation (though less likely) is that we are first.
Just curious but why do you say that? We have no clue how likely intelligent life is to evolve. All we know is that it has happened once, and it took 3.5 billion years from the formation of the first like on Earth. Suppose that this was very much faster than average and the the mean time for intelligent life to evolve (once life itself has started) is 30 billion years? Such a long time would hugely reduce the number of intelligent species since you need a very stable environment for a long period of time and even then you have to get lucky.
Trying to quantify what you don't know is a mug's game...in order to be able to do it you really need to know what you don't know. If anything I would argue that there is, perhaps, some weak evidence for intelligent life being rare: travel might be hard but radio is easy. We have not heard ET's broadcasts which would suggest perhaps that there is no intelligent life nearby (or they use some technology beyond EM waves).
Loves humans so as to never say something like: "Thou shalt not keep humans as property".
Then God was zapped by a gamma-burst, that's why he has been never observed so far.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I bet other civilizations failed to travel outside their star system because they devoted all their energy to trying to solve the Fermi Paradox.
Table-ized A.I.
he wasnt. the clergy was
Also look at how our own communication signals have evolved over the short short time we've had technology. What was once analog, arguably easily identifiable signals, now that we are going digital; Highly compressed digital signals would likely hardly be identifiable to static by techs 60 years ago. So it could be advanced civilizations use/used something we would not 'see' even right into our dishes
earlier than about five billion years after the Big Bang
There's still about 8.7 billion years of potential time for intelligent life to evolve. Assuming 3 billion years needed to accomplish the goal, there is still over 5 billion years of civilizations left.
It's quite simple; the known elements, four forces, and vast distances simply prevent the kind of extravagant sci-fi "technology" (more like daydreams) that is required to make contact.
Toss in the fact that evolution is still happening, any long-term "contact" project would likely involve the extinction through perfectly natural and non-cataclysmic forces of the species that started it.
There is no Fermi Paradox. Given what we know, we can't see each other. It's that simple.
The real paradox is: why would anyone still think any contact is possible? That's a planet-centric view that ignores the reality of space.
Some of the Asian countries do have cultures that love learning and the very smart. However, they have various other cultural problems.
There's this old joke, heaven is English policemen, German scientists/engineers, Italian lovers, Swiss bankers, and French cooks. Hell is English cooks, German policemen, Italian bankers, Swiss lovers, and, well, I don't suppose French make bad scientists/engineers, but I'm botching the joke some. But the point is that if we could take the very best of all our cultures and fuse them, humanity would advance far faster.
The Chinese have admirable work ethic and love of learning, however, their government needs improvement in inclusiveness and combating corruption. Some of the European governments are far superior in these respects (or so it seems from the outside.) The anti-intellectualism of the USA is rapidly degrading the US political system, its economy, its worldwide power, and its future prospect for maintaining dominance in science/tech/economy/military. However, again, not everywhere in the world does humanity glorify sports or singing and hate learning and intelligence.
Perhaps we can hope that the negative aspect of humanity will cause their own self-destruction without destroying the best aspects of humanity.
While studies show that a gamma ray burst most likely hit the earth causing the "The Ordovician–Silurian extinction events"= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...–Silurian_extinction_events. The extinction occurred 443.4 million years ago, during one of the most significant diversifications in Earth history."
Yet we survived as an intelligent life form.
Or survival has been protected in no small way by the fact were in a fairly unpopulated spiral of the galaxy. The closer to the center of the galaxy, the more populated (with stars) it becomes and chances of any intelligent life greatly reduced.
Now with the Andromeda galaxy fast approaching things could change, but Earth will be long gone or uninhabitable.
To note: one large star very far away when it goes black hole, it's polar emissions has us targeted, but it's not expected to happen for quite sometime so as not of any concern; again Earth pry won't have any life at that time.
I wonder how it happens that a cosmological constant (one presumes with nonzero value) must be present. Any expansion acceleration that such a constant implies would not seem to be able to have much effect within a galaxy; the volumes of space within galaxies are a tiny fraction of the volume between them, so how would a constant be required to allow life to develop?
GRBs clearly haven't prevented life in *our* galaxy, so the Fermi Paradox still stands.
The caluculations probably rule out life in the core of our galaxy, but systems further out would be exposed even less often than ours is. And even though GRBs can periodically sterilize a planet, their directionality means that one burst would not likely sterilize all the planets in an intercellar civilization simultaneously.
So, to modify what someone said above, we can add another term to the Drake equation, but this doesn't do much to answer Fermi.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Time to get cracking and build some Stargates.
Manifold: Space (Stephen Baxter), anyone?
Why would god create something if he cares not of its function?
They're not advanced because they're all Hulks!
http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.2506 (not behind paywall)
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
The abstract doesn't say how bad it is to be hit by a GRB beam. GRBs don't last for more than a couple of minutes. It seems that would fry the side of the planet facing the GRB, but the other side would be shielded from much of the radiation. So you zap half the lifeforms and maybe you boil some ocean. No doubt it's unpleasant on the dark side, but is it lethal?
Fiat Lux.
For an EXTREMELY GOOD treatment of this subject I would like to recommend "Diaspora" by Greg Egan, possibly the best science fiction novel ever (certainly the one with the largest scope!)
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. " - John 3:16
Maybe God was the gamma-burst. "Let there be light" and all.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. " - John 3:16
Little more than velvet-lined chains with which to enslave the mind of Humanity.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
I've always thought the universe seems very young. The Earth itself is what? nearly 5 billion years old. I don't expect any first gen stars to still have habitable zone. So, is Sol a second or third gen star? Can't be any more, surely.
The assumptions behind the Fermi paradox are quite anthropocentric. For all we know, our searching for radio transmissions could be the equivalent of looking for smoke signals. Their methods of communication could be so advanced by our standards that we couldn't detect them using any technology we possess. On the other hand there might be good reasons why they don't visit - so far we know of no method of traversing huge distances efficiently. It could be that the nearest intelligent alien would have to spend 50,000 years of travelling to reach us - in fact they might be so far away that they're not yet aware of intelligent life on earth.
The reason why we don't see any billion year civilizations, is that no civilization, society or relation consisting of more than one person is stable.
Religions tend to survive the longest, by doing exactly the opposite of promoting the [technical and other] progress that would get us off of this earth.
Bullshit : energy and distance requirement belie this.
Look at the energy we have to expand to get out in LEO now. Even counting that and assuming you have a refuelling station , look at those requirement to go at 0.1%c speed and have enough fuel to brake. Even getting something like 0.1% C would be difficult. And at the distance we are speaking 0.1% c means thousand of years of travel. At such timescale, the GRB would still be able to wipe full quadrant out. Let us not get misty eyed, there is a lot of obstacle to going out there, and IMHO many people vastly underestimate the requirements. Technology helps us access more better energy source, and utilize that energy better, or make stronger material, but it does not remove the time length and energy requirements.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I remember reading a book over a decade ago by hard science fiction author Stephen Baxter called "Manifold: Space" that tackles this problem and gives this reason as an explanation. I would reccomend it to anyone who enjoys science fiction that actually uses science.
impossible! Since the universe is only about 6000 years old GRBs could not have been a problem for Him.
Biblically you can not keep humans as property, for certain values of 'human' at least. That is the moral loophole, not everyone is a person.
There was still plenty of room left in Europe when pilgrims settled in America.
You're assuming that the task of crossing the Atlantic in the 17th Century is a feat comparable to a more advanced civilisation travelling dozens of lightyears in space. We are a more advanced civilisation - and not only are we still doing pretty badly at human space exploration, we're staring to form pretty successful scientific theories that show the task will be very, very difficult - and could be impossible. You're basing your argument on the (non-falsifiable) notion that an advanced civilisation will develop technology indistinguishable from magic - in an age where science is capable of asking quite a few awkward questions about magic w.r.t. little things like causality and the laws of thermodynamics...
At that time, travelling to America may have not been a picnic, but was still "only" a matter of months. Ships were readily available (the Mayflower was just a garden variety merchant ship). Coming back was unlikely (for the majority of the passengers) but not impossible. Trade with the old world was still feasible (much of the exploration of the new world at the time had a view to bringing resources back to Europe) and the climate on the East coast of America may have proven to be a bit nippy, but you could breathe the air, drink the water, eat native plants and animals and be reasonably confident that your seeds would go.
So, the question is, would the pilgrims still have left Europe for America if it meant a shipbuilding programme that made Apollo look like a science fair project, then spending the rest of their life on a ship, never seeing land, in the hope that their great-grandchildren would finally arrive in America - and then face the task of another generation or two on the ship terraforming the land before they could start ploughing and planting?
Especially given that, if you could buy a ship that could survive for many lifetimes in the middle of the Atlantic without support, wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier just to build a big raft and park it sufficiently far offshore that the people you were running from wouldn't bother you?
Then, seriously, what do you think the chances are of a bunch of religious fundamentalists crewing a generation ship without overpopulating, schisming, squandering resources, killing each other and regressing to savagery (the 56th law of Science Fiction)? Yet in a society without the tendency for people to persecute each other in an argument over the colour of the sky fairy's wings, their motivation for embarking on the journey wouldn't have existed...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
They described earth's civilization as one that will destroy itself by creating a black hole and shrinking the planet to the size of a pea.
Relativistic effects of being the singularity.
If we can thus do this-- Go from horse drawn conveyances to nuclear energy in 200 years-- then there is very little reason to expect other potential civilizations from doing so as well, and perhaps not having spent quite as much time arguing over who's god has the mightiest member.
Yet, when we look up into the sky, we dont find any. We strain with our radio telescopes, and hear only the strange EM flux of gas giants, the hissing and popping of stars, and the screams of magnetars.
This finding does not settle Fermi's paradox. It just sets a slightly smaller boundry.
Looking at this from another perspective:
200 years ago, if you pointed a radio telescope at our solar system you would "hear only the strange EM flux of gas giants" and "the hissing and popping" of our star.
120 years ago, you would hear the same.
As of ~110 years ago, you'd be listening to Hitler.
From ~115-~50 years ago, you'd see a *huge* volume of radio transmissions.
From ~50-~20 years ago, you'd see that volume tapering off.
As of ~15 years ago, you'd find that the huge burst of radio signals had gone virtually *silent* because we no longer rely on high-powered radio transmissions for communication over long distances. We now use fiber optic cables, and point-to-point transmissions bounced off satellites, using *much* lower power for the signals. The majority of our radio signals these days are short range, *extremely* low power, and hop across the spectrum in ways that look a *lot* like noise when you don't know how to decode it.
If we are typical of developing civilizations, then there's a *very* short window in which to observe a civilization by its radio transmissions. That window exists while the civilization is using high-powered, omnidirectional signals to communicate. Once it starts to go to low-powered, and/or *directional* signals, the window for observation closes *quickly* because: 1) highly directional signals can only be observed if you happen to be in their path, and 2) low-powered signals are *quickly* drowned out by the background noise of the surrounding galaxy/universe.
If the assumption is that civilizations we might find will likely be *more* advanced than us, why should we expect them to still be using communications technology that *we* have already largely abandoned?
If we abandon that assumption, what are the odds that we (or they) happen to be 'looking' at the right star during the *very* small window where civilization is observable via it's radio leakage?
http://io9.com/11-of-the-weird...
But yes, there could be all sorts of hazards out in space we are unaware of and have been very luck to avoid. Including "Galactic Superwaves":
http://starburstfound.org/gala...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I have heard of those movies... Brrr... horrible.
It's not a paradox if life is unique to Earth. This idea that, because there are trillions of stars, and because many of them have planets, ergo, there must be life on many of them, is a statistic based upon a sample of one. Until we understand how life began, I don't know if we can really say anything about the chances of life elsewhere. It's pure speculation.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
a machine should never be given the freedom to replicate itself unless it also has the capacity to improve itself.
And we continue to see gamma ray bursts because GOD-HULK SMASH!
We don't see 'billion-year-old civilizations all around us', doesn't mean that none exist, also, just because human scientists theorize something, doesn't mean that it's actually true!
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
There seems to be a trend in our own civilization toward more and more experiences being constructed purely from information.
We are heading toward the capacity to transform ourselves into information when our bodies fail.
Information appears to be the only thing with any hope of overcoming the limits of the speed of light.
Our civilization is a few thousand years old. We dream of visiting other stars and we invest a little bit of our wealth in preparing to do so.
If spreading to other planets and stars is a common feature of civilizations and existing as information is the only way (or the most efficient way) to operate at interstellar scale, then a billions year old civilization would have transformed into either pure information or something close to it well over a billion years ago. Being made of a specific bundle of matter would just get in the way.
For all we know, the cosmic background radiation could be crowded with ancient civilizations "visiting" earth and a million other places simultaneously.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
A black hole appearsed wherever God tried to divide by zero. Eventually, the universe evolved a way to trap this error condition so the Great Compiler could create beings that wrote their own code.