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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.
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 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"
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.
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.
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.
Just remember, that those 1-in-a-billion odds are based on a number of assumptions. For starters there were, if I recall correctly, at least a half-dozen different species of "humans" that evolved on this planet from early proto-humans. Virtually all whales are candidates for being intelligent life, though very different from our own. They're undeniably tool users, though the lack of grasping appendages severely limits tool-making. Elephants are pretty damned smart as well. Parrots have been documented making custom tools to solve specific problems, while ravens are downright unsettlingly smart. And I could list dozens more. And those are only among the 1% of species that exist today.
As we look back into antiquity we're finding evidence of tool-users that predate our understanding of the emergence of human intelligence by many hundreds of thousands of years - we *assume* that those early tool-users were human, but I don't recall any evidence that would specifically suggest that was the case in the absence of a presupposition that pre-humans were the only intelligent species on the planet.
Go back further, say to the age of dinosaurs, and you could have had vast technological civilizations, and all their technology would have long since degraded into unrecognizablity. Just as if we don't make it through the next few centuries, then in a few million years the only evidence that we ever existed will be the geological disruption of our deep-earth mining activity and maybe a few fossils. And even the dinosaurs are relative newcomers - reptiles and proto-mammals covered the surface long before them, and before that insects the size of automobiles ruled the land and sky unchallenged for millions of years. And of course the seas were rich with wildly varied with life long before anything ventured on to land. This planet has had a half-billion years of complex life teeming on its surface, only a tiny fraction of which ever made it into the fossil record, to assume that we're the first intelligent species, or even the first technological one, is an assumption with no evidence behind it.
Perhaps as we colonize the moon we'll find evidence of previous intelligences - certainly there's a much better chance it would be preserved on an inert rock than a living planet. And then there's all those anomalies which have been found in Google Maps Mars - all coincidence, or evidence of previous technological residents? Heck, even if life didn't arise there it might have been colonized by Earthers - after all geological evidence suggests it may well have been a wet world as recently as 10 million years ago, it was probably a far more inviting world when saurians ruled the Earth.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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
A hot looking Babe form Tau Ceti,
Stopped by so she could hump a Yeti.
They humped all night long,
While she sang a great song,
The words of which, the Yeti, forgetti
Burma Shave
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
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.
There is no conclusive evidence that there even exists such a thing as interplanetary travel for a life-form. We've barely touched the moon ourselves.
Now, granted, the acceleration from the beginning of the last century to the Moon-missions was extraordinary. But since then, if anything our acceleration has slowed to an absolute crawl. The expense of a simple one-off mission that we've already done several times just isn't viable any more.
Now, consider, that you could get to Mars. It'd take decades of planning, travel, etc, but you could get there. That's the nearest planet.
Now don't consider distance, etc. necessarily. Consider resources. Now you have to find the time, money, resources, engineering, etc. in order to make fuel to make the next jump. That's not easy at all. Hell, Mars is being talked of as one-way at the moment. And if we got to there, to get to Jupiter would take even more resources, energy, etc. Now there are ways and means to cheat this, but they are slow, and not capable of sustaining human life along the way at the moment.
But let's say, on every planet we visit, we find a ready-built space-base with fuel and oxygen enough to get to the next planet. We land, breed like fuck, and it only takes 20 years - doing nothing else - to plan, fuel, and travel on to the next. That's nearly two centuries before you're heading out of solar system. And you're unlikely to be overtaken at any point, even if Earth finds an energy source 10 times more powerful in that time.
Asteroids - even less resources, even harder to land on, even more difficult to colonise. Let's say we fire out probes all the time we're doing this (ignore where the resources for these probes comes from).
The next star is 8 light years away. Let's assume every star is that far away from the next, every star has the same kind of planetary system, etc. It's going to take several centuries to get to the first. Several millennia to traverse a handful. Meanwhile, all the probes your sending out will barely hit the next star but let's say they hit 10 stars on the way out, and talk back instantly if they find something. We could cover a few hundreds of stars in that time.
Let's go mad... several millennia of this (we'll stick with c as the limit of physics, but that might obviously change - at that point, we'll reconsider Fermi's Paradox anyway!), and the entire race dedicated to populating a planet, building the infrastructure to convert every resource it has to nothing more than space travel "fuel" (of whatever kind), and their sons move on to the next planet, all the while sending out hundreds of probes. Every few centuries, they go to a new star.
That's, rounding UP, (10^4 years / 2 x 10^1) generations, 10^1 stars per millienia in each direction. The orders of magnitude wouldn't get near 10^8 at all.
Do you realise where that gets you? There are a hundred billion stars just in our galaxy. That's 10^11. It'd take thousands of millennia (millions of years) to do this at stupendous speed across the galaxy, stopping to do nothing else.
No doubt there'd be advances and speed-up, but you're still orders of magnitude in debt before you've colonised a galaxy sufficiently. And then you consider the number of galaxies - That's another 10^11 or thereabouts.
And then you add in real-life, where we aren't just able to do nothing but look for aliens. What you're suggesting is that, even if there was a civilisation just a few stars away from us (incredibly unlikely given what we can see), it'll take anywhere from centuries to millennia to discover them. Assuming speed-of-light all the way, and communicating with probes all the way, etc. it'll take longer than man has so far existed in a form capable of doing such things to actually make any kind of contact if only, say, 1% of the galaxy is habitable.
The numbers just get more ridiculous after that.
Now, of course, we're limited by our current knowledge. But that's the point. Our current knowledge says t
Oops, typo: Assume an average spread of one light year every 10000 years and an intelligent species has the entire galaxy covered in 1 billion years.
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 Fermi Paradox - that we don't see billion-year-old civilizations around us and we're not sure why - is a fact.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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
To say that uncertainty is a fact is to put too fine a point on a bowl of Jell-O.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
What's uncertain about the fact that we don't see billion-year-old civilizations around us?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Nice. Will you be participating next Tuesday?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Across a few billion years, any civilization will pretty much do 'all the things', and even if it moved at a very slow rate would expand to fill the galaxy in a few hundred million years.
As for your scientific 'paradox', that is not really a paradox, more of a straw man.
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.
Relativistic effects of being the singularity.
Do you mean technological civilizations? Because whales have a pretty sophisticated globe-spanning culture.
My point was more that there's lots of candidate species that, in the right circumstances, might have potential to cross whatever threshold it is that we crossed. And the evidence suggests that at least most other human species went extinct as a result of our own expansion, had we not evolved one of the other variant would likely have become the dominant species instead.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yeah, I suppose they might, if they were discovered within rock that gave some sense of their actual age. Otherwise they would almost certainly be credited to earlier civilizations of the new species, no doubt confounding their equivalent of anthropologists with the extreme precision with which they were cut. Might even help inspire a lunatic fringe convinced that aliens had visited Earth in the past.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
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
Whales appear to have social stratification and symbolic communication (spoken language) - the others are of course more problematic for a species without hands, and far better evolved to live in comfort in a much more bountiful environment. Though being basically unchallenged apex predators with a globe-spanning communication system allowing them to coordinate between remote "tribes" could be interpreted as providing separation and domination over their environment. But that lack of hands and natural long-range communication system does make it seem unlikely that they would ever develop the technology to communicate over interstellar distances.
As for other hominids, no I don't think their short lifespan is a factor in the Drake equation - they were driven to extinction by competition with another intelligent species. If we had not won the evolutionary/cultural arms race, or never existed at all, then one of them would have taken our place as a planet-dominating civilization - they went extinct only because that aspect of the Drake equation had already been satisfied - in a sense they were a "Drake insurance policy", nearly guaranteeing the emergence of civilization even if our own species hadn't made the cut.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
a machine should never be given the freedom to replicate itself unless it also has the capacity to improve itself.
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.