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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.
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 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.
Interestingly, I oftened wondered if it was in the interests of intelligent life to focus their "expansion" inward to cyberspace vs. outerspace; transcending their evolution via forgoing the flesh bodies to machines of silicon based computers (or some such). Meaning, we're looking in the wrong places.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
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.
We used to wonder what in the hell was making these ultra-bright quasars; now we believe that they are "active" galactic cores which are in the process of forming a supermassive black hole in the centers. It's possible that two such black holes might form and orbit their mutual centers of gravity, but eventually they would merge. This merging is probably the source of the gamma ray bursts.
Planets couldn't form until enough hydrogen had been fused into metals and expelled by supernova. Complex life couldn't form until there were enough different heavier elements. It's at least possible that early races and civilizations were exterminated by GRBs when their galaxies were new; it's even possible that intelligent life formed near the Galactic core of our own galaxy before the supermassive black hole formed. (Larry Niven may have been right! Thrints!) They were all killed in the GRB when our own galaxy shined like a quasar. Now that the Milky Way has settled down into gentle middle age, other races can develop.
It may be unlikely, but it's possible that humans are the most advanced of these third-generation beings.