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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.
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.
More simple explanation: Life is out there, it's just too far away to detect, or to visit us--and will ALWAYS be so, because you can't cheat Newton and Einstein. An alternate "simplest" explanation (though less likely) is that we are first.
To suggest that ET hasn't come to visit us because we are "too violent" or whatever, and that they are masking their presence is definitely NOT the simplest explanation--it suggests that every nearby alien species has agreed to isolate us, and every member of those civilizations is on board with the idea. No one is out there playing with an RF emitter in the VHF band, Harry Mudd hasn't stopped by and spilled the beans, no one's even accidentally done anything to give the game away.
Sorry, I'm just not buying that.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Then God was zapped by a gamma-burst, that's why he has been never observed so far.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I'm not really sure what you are saying, but TFS is the CERN courier, reporting on an article in Physical Review Letters. I think your clickbait fears are more than a little unfounded.
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.
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.
The Fermi paradox basically states that if life on Earth is the typical result of similar conditions, the probability is far higher that there are older, more advanced civilizations, and eventually on timescales far smaller than the universe has existed we should eventually have bumped into one of them as they spread throughout the galaxy, even the universe.
The paper suggests two effects of gamma ray bursts that alter that calculation. First, a given location was more likely to be exposed to a gamma ray burst at earlier times in the universe, when the population of large hot stars was higher and overall density of the universe was higher. Therefore, its possible that even though the universe is 14 billion years old during a significant percentage of that time the universe was too dense and the frequency of gamma ray bursts too high to allow a sufficiently high technological civilization to arise. That's why there aren't any really old civilizations, or alternatively why there are so few that they tend to be very far away statistically. Second, even after the universe had expanded enough to make gamma ray bursts less likely to completely sterilize all planets everywhere its still the case that most parts of most galaxies are still too dense to avoid getting hit by them.
So its possible the reason why we have not yet seen a very old highly advanced civilization is that the actual probability of one being old enough, and close enough, for us to have bumped into (or rather for them to have bumped into us) is a lot lower than we might assume, even if the conditions to initiate life are pretty common. Nearly all of them have been wiped out before they could advance to the point of being able to colonize on an interstellar level and avoid being driven to extinction by gamma ray bursts.
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.
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.
99% of alien life can be undetectable for whatever reason. If 1% is expansionist, a representative of that 1% could colonize every star system in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in less than 3 million years, a cosmic eye blink.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.