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Advanced Civilizations Probably Don't Exist In Our Galactic Neighborhood
schwit1 writes: New observations of the best candidate galaxies now suggest that advanced civilizations are very rare or don't exist in the local universe. Researchers looked at several hundred nearby galaxies that emitted a high amount of mid-infrared radiation (abstract), which could possibly be produced as the waste heat from civilizations using energy on galactic scales.
They found: "The presence of radio emission at the levels expected from the correlation, suggests that the mid-IR emission is not heat from alien factories but more likely emission from dust — for example, dust generated and heated by regions of massive star formation. As Professor Garrett explains: 'the original research at Penn State has already told us that such systems are very rare but the new analysis suggests that this is probably an understatement, and that advanced Kardashev Type III civilizations basically don't exist in the local Universe.'"
Obviously, the uncertainty of these results is quite high. Nonetheless, the results indicate that either humanity really is the only intelligent species in this part of the universe, or advanced civilizations are far more efficient in their use of energy than is reasonable to assume.
They found: "The presence of radio emission at the levels expected from the correlation, suggests that the mid-IR emission is not heat from alien factories but more likely emission from dust — for example, dust generated and heated by regions of massive star formation. As Professor Garrett explains: 'the original research at Penn State has already told us that such systems are very rare but the new analysis suggests that this is probably an understatement, and that advanced Kardashev Type III civilizations basically don't exist in the local Universe.'"
Obviously, the uncertainty of these results is quite high. Nonetheless, the results indicate that either humanity really is the only intelligent species in this part of the universe, or advanced civilizations are far more efficient in their use of energy than is reasonable to assume.
Planets are common. Planets within the habitable zone look like they are common. So, is this evidence of the Great Filter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ?
Or, who will be our Overlords now?
There is this huge assumption that alien civilizations will be emitting large amounts of waste heat. What happens if they are just more efficient than us?
It's a somewhat 50's point of view that an "advanced civilisation" would produce massive amounts of waste heat. Surely an even more advanced civilisation would be so efficient as to be undetectable?
foo mane padme hum
We already knew we had never seen any evidence of Aliens. And so the longer and harder you look at the evidence, the more likely you're going to think that if aliens exist at all, they're far away. And that "we're n% sure they aren't within this radius" measurement will just keep going up, until we either find something, give up looking, or start over because we thought up a totally new way to look.
> Obviously, the uncertainty of these results is quite high. Nonetheless, the results indicate that either humanity really is the only intelligent species in this part of the universe, or advanced civilizations are far more efficient in their use of energy than is reasonable to assume.
So because we can't see any evidence of a super advanced civilization using most of the energy from a nearby galaxy.. there must not be any other intelligent species than humans? Or they must be super energy efficient?
I mean, someone looking at our galaxy would make the same determination... We haven't grown to encompass and use most of the energy from our home star yet, let alone our own galaxy. Therefore we don't exist or are super energy efficient.
The issue at hand, is that the Fermi Paradox doesn't consider the probability that an intelligent alien life will suffer from RF spectrum sensitivity, and will thus build a civilization void of radio transmissions... I'm just sayin'.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Actually this experiment confirms that there are indeed no other civilizations on a mass scale as stupid, backwards, ignorant, and wasteful as Earth. That's a relief.
Mmmno. The research doesn't indicate anything like that at all. They were looking for civilizations that harness energy and resources at galactic scales, ie. Kardashev III - level civilizations. Mankind haven't even reached Kardashev I yet. The submitter didn't understand what they were reading and jumped to conclusions.
Most old religions imagine God to be some supersized version of some human known to them. These people think advanced civilization to be something that wastes energy like we do, but at some galactic scale.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...as of thousands to millions of years ago, anyway? Speed of light, and all.
in a galaxy far, far away
For how long are we "advanced" enough to emit radio waves?
For how long will we actually emit them, before switching to a less noisy ways?
Isn't it that advanced civilizations make noise only for a (relatively) very short period of time?
I can't find any evidence, thanks for the money! Seeing as God made the planet they are on, our saviour Jesus Christ, and the heavens; are they now going to claim God doesn't exist because they cannot see Him?
Advanced civilizations just build ring worlds like in the Larry Niven novels. Then civilization collapses and they no longer produce waste heat. Or they could be like the Puppeteers, and manage massive empires while basically all living on one planet.
Related article: Dearth of Dyson Spheres.
... human presumption knows no limit.
to explain the Fermi Paradox?
Nonetheless, the results indicate that either humanity really is the only intelligent species in this part of the universe, or
Incorrect conclusion.
The analysis was about civilizations that use energy on a galactic scale. It makes no conclusions about intelligent civilizations that use energy on the scale of human civilization. There could be trillions of human-scale civilizations out there; this analysis would not notice them.
advanced civilizations are far more efficient in their use of energy than is reasonable to assume.
Again, bad conclusion. We have not way to estimate what is "reasonable" to assume for a galactic-scale civilization. Kardashev defined a type-III civlilzation as one that used energy on the scale of galactic energy production, but gave no reasoning as to what a civilization would do that requires this much energy.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So, we're defining "advanced" societies according to the ability to put out more heat than their parent galaxies?
Well, that's a pretty high bar, and I'm also not sure the assumption these societies will exist is based on, well, anything.
From what I can see, maybe if you're talking about energy on that scale you might have better technology which doesn't generate vast amounts of waste heat. Like, maybe, superconductors.
To me this sounds like it's ruled out a dubious conclusion based on unfounded assumptions.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
That we have reached fundamental limits of (until now exponential) development and that building galactic-scale factories or flying around the universe will remain unreachable dream.
with the letters HPLD written across it.
Exactly right. Just means there aren't any level III civilizations. Personal opinion is that they're not possible or feasible or there will be a better way than harnessing galaxies once you get to that knowledge level. We really have no idea how a level III civilization might work or look.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
...other advanced civilizations with nearby locations looked at our planet, said "well, there goes the neighborhood" and right quickly buggered off before their property values took a nosedive?
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
If they were advanced enough to notice us, they probably moved out. Wouldn't you?
Our local galactic cluster is small by universal standards. The Copernican Principle (Mediocrity Principle) would normally place us in a larger cluster. This suggests that the small-ness may have protected us from being assimilated or slaughtered. A spreading civilization would occupy larger clusters before smaller ones because the small ones are too much travel for low resource gain.
Table-ized A.I.
The firmament is peppered with huge concentrations of high-density plasma, supporting computation and communication far beyond the capacity of low-temperature, low-energy, solid-state matter. The byproducts of all that computation and communication look to us like thermal and optical noise because, being advanced, the minds running on them do so efficiently. Why leak information out into the vast, cold universe before you've taken full advantage of your substrate's Shannon capacity?
But, no, you're probably right. If there are other civilizations out there, why aren't we seeing the smoke from their cook-fires?
The odds of a given planet being able to support life is low to begin with, the odds of a given planet that can support life actually DEVELOPING that life is much lower, the odds of that life developing into intelligent species is even lower than that, and the odds that said intelligent life would exist in an adjusted coincidental time-frame with OUR intelligent life on earth is down infinitesimal.
Now there are a huge number of planets in the universe so even infinitesimal odds mean that there is probably lots of other coincidental intelligent life out there. But the odds of it being anywhere near to us (let's say, within 1,000 light years or so) is slim to none.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
They say the IR and radio waves correlate with the predictions of what would happen naturally.
Those predictions of what would happen naturally were created based on looking out at the stars, and assuming that what was seen there was natural.
This is circular reasoning.
Science assumes what they see is natural, and thus are unable to see obvious proof of intelligent life.
Pulsars are clearly an alien GPS system.
Dark matter is clearly alien systems that are so efficient they do not even emit light, but does affect gravity (possibly as an aid to navigation, or possibly due to technical difficulties masking such signatures.) Or, they could be semi-cloaked.
We do not know how much alien tech may exist that does not disturb gravitons, as we would have no way to measure it.
This is a joke, right? That's like someone in the 6th century claiming there are no advanced civilizations because they didn't find any evidence for the extremely large water wheels that would be required to power them.
There is no paradox, the only paradox is due to overly optimistic numbers.
Consider the billions of different species that have evolved on this planet, and exactly 1 has developed civilization past the stone age. Then consider the number of mass extinctions that have occurred and currently occurring on the planet.
Feeding in garbage numbers, then seeing that observations do not match numbers does not make for a paradox in the observations, it makes for a paradox in why people insist on using garbage numbers in their calculations.
[A]dvanced civilizations are far more efficient in their use of energy than is reasonable to assume.
This is probably the best assumption. We only pumped out analog signals for about 80 years.
Then don't use 'probably' in the title.
Perhaps intelligent civilization will originate from Earth and spread across the Universe. Everything has a beginning.
There are nine steps listed in Wikipedia's summation of the Great Filter.
We have one sample.
Outside of counting what we think are "habitable planets" - which are selected by anthropic principles in the first place - how the hell can anyone use the ONE sample we have to infer the odds of the other 8 steps?
The Great Filter is just navel-gazing wild-ass guesswork.
There are decades of reports from credible people of unidentifiable flying objects that cant be passed off as weather, flying rocks or balloons.
We need this to happen, in order to save Humanity: The worst thing that could happen to us, as a race, is to find we're completely alone in the entire Universe. Why? Because it will make the creationists even more fervently believe that everything was created by some unseen, mystical being, and that everything 'predicted' in the Bible is going to happen -- and the armageddon-loving types will proceed to bring self-fulfilling prophecies into reality. We need to know we are not alone so we can stop squabbling amongst ourselves, stop being wasteful of limited resources, stop destroying the environment, because too many people think it's 'part of Gods plan' for the Earth to end anyway. We're at the most dangerous time in the history of the Earth, when we have the capability to completely destroy all life on the planet, and turn it into a wasteland. If we're going to get through this phase of our development as a race we need to wise up, and knowing we're not alone might just be the nudge we need to get our evolution moving again.
Why would an advanced civilization want to fry their planet? I find it more likely that they invented birth control, kept their population at reasonable level and are exploring universe by watching miniaturized robotic probes from the comfort of their beach bungalows. We are defining ourselves as an example of advanced. And civilizations that do that are usually not very advanced.
what is this BS... just look around and inform yourself...you will be amazed whats here and whats only for "need to know"
It's amazing that this comments section has attracted so many experts in this field! Given how many people here know enough to dismiss the findings of this analysis out-of-hand with a few sentences of a priori reckoning, I can only imagine that they will be blessing us mere mortals with the fruits of their vast knowledge and understanding soon! Maybe not through academic papers per se, but perhaps some pithy Dr. Who fan fic!
"how the hell can anyone use the ONE sample we have to infer the odds of the other 8 steps?"
-- The Notebooks of Lazarus Long.
That's how.
If we're looking at other galaxies, we're seeing what happened 100,000 years ago or more. Maybe the people in the Andromeda galaxy went from living in trees scratching themselves to ruling the entire galaxy in that time. Also, who says they have to be Type III? Neither Star Trek nor Star Wars are throwing around galactic levels of energy, but they're way ahead of us. Maybe there are aliens at that level, too distant for us to detect.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
is usually said just before an alien invasion!
My problem is with the Slashdot blurb, not so much the source article.
"Nonetheless, the results indicate that either humanity really is the only intelligent species in this part of the universe, or advanced civilizations are far more efficient in their use of energy than is reasonable to assume."
Humanity isn't even a Type I civilization on that scale. There could be millions of species as intelligent as humans that we wouldn't detect using this method. You can't assume that we're the only intelligent species just because you can't easily detect a civilization that controls the energy of an entire galaxy.
Reminds me of the days that we were blasting high power broadcast signals indiscriminately into space and assumed that of course everyone was doing it -- so lets look for evidence of that. A few decades later and we have moved to a much lower radiated power model using cables, fibre optics and low power radio. Our presence is probably much harder to detect now. Doesn't make me any more optimistic about detecting intelligent life elsewhere. Heck, I am not even sure there is any here...
Not to mention that it's probably a reasonable assumption that civilizations at that level might be far more efficient with their use of energy, and emit much less - either out a desire for efficiency, or because they DON'T want to call attention to themselves.
-Styopa
If some alien culture were to look at Earth and try to determine if there were advanced cultures what would they determine?
Well if they are more then 200 light years away they won't see anything. Why? Those signs of intelligent culture when applied to us would not yet have reached those cultures. Reverse that. We can say that we know of no advanced culture in an approximately 200 light year radius. Of the Milky Ways approximately 100,000 light year radius.
What does that get us? We know that there are no advanced civilizations in 10^-5 part of the Milk Way or about 001 % of the galaxy. Still plenty of room.
I have met several aliens, so this cannot be true.
According to the article linked in the news blurb, "encapsulating the energy of stars by so called Dyson spheres or swarms is one way to harness enormous energies" --the thing that bothers me is, nothing is described about how an advanced civilization using the total output of stars changes the measurable total output of stars. It makes sense to think that light-frequency-and-higher emissions would be reduced, while infrared emissions would be increased --something any appropriately-large dust cloud can do! It seems to me that we should want to analyze visibly dust-free-zones for excess infrared. And radio waves pass fairly well/equally through all dusty and non-dusty zones, which is why radio astronomy is popular, so...what am I missing?
The only example we know is Earth, and we know the criteria causing humans to become prominent on Earth, but we don't know for how long.
There are many traps on the way to fall in. Just because you have species with intelligence doesn't mean that they become technologically advanced. Dolphins are pretty smart, but don't use many tools. Crows are smart too and use tools temporarily to achieve a goal, but they don't carry them around everywhere.
Humans have the ability to predict plausible futures and can therefore know that if firewood is collected it help you staying warm in the winter.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Who was it who "proved" that we can never establish decent communications with the people on the moon, because that would require the signal flags to be the size of Ireland, clearly an impossible proposition...
I think we are looking at this with the eyes of a 4 year old.
We know that 2+2=4, so we presume to think that we know all there is about Math.
We know that e=mc2, so we presume that we understand how the Universe works.
Then, using our faulty assumptions, we presume to say that we are the only ones around.
I expect that should we ever meet a space faring civilization, our best and brightest will be as children trying to keep track of their lunch boxes as they are escorted to their first class in Kindergarten.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I consider any of these types of studies to have faulty logic.
Humans have only been creating electromagnetic signals for about a century. None of them make it to Alpha Centauri, four light-years away. There isn't a radio transmitter with the power.
Furthermore, as we enter an age in which we live largely in virtual worlds of our own design, strong radio emissions (radio, TV) are decreasing. Sure, there's plenty of wifi, but we all know that signal won't make it more than a couple of blocks, let alone four light-years.
Perhaps it's that I'm in the field, but it seems to me that we're ultimately headed for a world in which human consciousnesses are housed in something we would not today recognize as a machine.
If other civilizations followed our same path (i.e. trapped by the speed of light within our own solar system), then their radio emissions would never be detected. They'd also be fairly short-lived -- a couple of centuries at best.
Once you're a "download" (for lack of a better word) and living your life entirely in virtual worlds that only interface with the real world for power and maintenance, why would you broadcast anything?
In short: these types of approaches assume that civilizations emit greater energy and detectable emissions the older the civilization is. I suspect the reverse is true: the older the civilization, the less it emits.
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
First, it seems the assumption is that any intelligent life would be like us and burn fuel, use lots of energy, set their thermostats too high, etc. Ignoring any other possible forms of life, maybe those that would produce a heat signature have learned to shield it to prevent detection.
And if you solely use deductive logic you end up with a paradox. "Where is every one?" Clearly either are facts are wrong or incomplete to the point of drawing inaccurate conclusions.
So... lets loosen up the purse string on definable facts down to "possible" and "probable" and see what shakes loose.
They're just smart enough to not talk to us, you know, with all the Warring and stuff...
It's like a bunch of savages saying their can't be other people around because we don't hear their drum messages. Technology advanced enough to produce that much detectable energy would use an energy we don't detect.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Or Plausible...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Like this one: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap14...
Squirrels bury nuts. My cats used to save them as toys for play when I wasn't around....found an entire stash of hazelnuts behind a sofa cushion after they had gone to the great food bowl in the sky...I never could figure out what they did with them after I had rolled them around for them to chase.
My money is on the warm dust, mentioned as a naturally occurring phenomeon that would account for the high levels of mid-IR emissions sought by these researchers.
Why anyone is distracted by the discussion of the Kardashev scale is a mystery to me. It was proposed in 1964 before science was forced to jigger up Dark matter and energy so as to keep consistent with the elegant maths on its revered historical blackboard after Einstein's cosmological constant was thrown out with his bathwater.
Now that we know our universe is only 5% detectable, at best, there's much less reason to believe advanced life is hiding amidst our piddlingly little pile, not withstanding our creation in the image of God and all that.
Hat's off to the author's sense of self-promotion though!
Interstellar travel of big masses at an appreciable clip should produce trails of IR signature heat on both legs of the journey; both jetting away and on deceleration. There should be long lasting contrails of this heat in case there is regular spaceliner service from Gliese 581 to Proxima centauri. Should SETI be looking for the smoke?
You couldn't detect radio signals from a planet. The electric field of a radio signal drops off inversely with the distance that it's traveled, the intensity inversely with the square of the distance. The closest large galaxy is about 2.4 million light-years away. Compare that to the measly 100 light-years that our radio signals have traveled. In Andromeda, the intensity of our radio signal will have dropped off by a factor of about a billion -- 2.4 million years from now-- compared to the already weak signals that we sent 100 years ago. So we will not likely find a signal from another civilization like our own.
As far as detecting extremely advanced civilizations goes, it's silly to assume that they will output enough infrared heat to be detected on a galactic scale. Assuming they're able to overcome their population constraints (lack of resources, planets, living in space far from another star, etc), the heat that they generate on their own would still be negligible compared to even the dimmest brown dwarf stars that we can detect... unless you think that their population exceeds the mass of many thousands of stars. It's not downright impossible for a civilization to have spread throughout a galaxy -- it only takes about 250 million years to orbit your own galaxy -- but it's rather unlikely that we could see them from such distance.
Furthermore, it took Earth about 4 billion years to form (mind you, just the planet... the evolution was much quicker with a bit of luck). As far as we can tell, the universe has only been churning out planets for 13.6 billion years. So you might be hard pressed to look at galaxies much farther than 9 billion light-years, since we can only receive light from civilizations that have had the time to develop on formed planets with good chemicals.
I suspect that our best bet is looking at exoplanets within our own galaxy. As of now, we don't have a sun-sized telescope, so we'll have to stick with examining planetary atmospheres via transits (so absorption spectra of light coming from the star through the atmosphere). With some extreme amount of luck, we may be able to see the byproducts of an organic life-form within a planetary atmosphere, but there's no reason that it'd be life with advanced intelligence.
If you wanted to search for a signal from another civilization similar to our own, they'd probably have to be directing a strong signal towards us intentionally (and from within our own galaxy). I suggested to Geoff Marcy during a colloquium that we should look for signals within our own ecliptic, since if we've been discovered as a non-advanced life-form (remember we've only been technologically 'advanced' for less than 100 years), they would most likely have discovered our atmosphere via the transiting technique. You can actually detect transits in mass simply by observing the intensity of thousands of stars over a few decades. No need to zero in on a planet with a *giant* telescope. He seemed to think it was a decent idea, but I probably would have been better off by emailing someone at seti :P
If biological life is as simple and DNA/complexity free as Darwin taught us ... why isn't there more biological life?
...
Unless, well, Charles assembled his theory out of his hostility to God.
As a model, I'm not sure what else evolution is good for.
Feeling less guilty about stealing GoT episodes I guess
I mean, seriously, when you have a bunch of really noisy neighbors who behave badly, you just don't talk to them.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
our star is 2nd generation at least as is our solar system cause of all the heavy elements present that have to be available for life....
THUS we could very well be one fo the first civilizations to gain our level of tech or if not others are only just getting it or are so far away any communication tries would not or might not yet be reaching us....
what would the dinosaurs have become had they not gone extinct? Would sentiance and a tech reptile race have evolved by now? NOT likely given the fossil record on them bigger dumber and more predator seems ot be the 1st try at evolution until disaster like what happened does and it has ot happen many times before a form a life evolves and does so fast enough to become us....if a dinosaur like event happened yes many might perish but humankind would survive because we have the intellect to cope...
All this really says is that civilizations emitting IR were not found in Y regions of the galaxy at time X in history.
Since these regions are different 'light years' away in distance, what reaches us is not the current state of what's going on there.
An advanced planet 500 light years from Earth looking today for other advanced race would not find us since 500 years ago we were not creating IR signatures.
Likewise, if we found such a signature, the possibility exists that during the time the IR got here, that civilization ceased to exist.
The results presume that they use Radio to communicate with and that all civilizations will pass through that particular phase of development- which is wrong.
So, no intergalactic kegger?
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
...we are certainly proof of THAT.
no galactic bureaucracy. https://youtu.be/XFtmkILu6xg?l...
There isn't much evidence of advanced civilization on Earth, so why would we expect to find it in nearby starsystems?
Given the current state of civilization on Earth and this new finding about the possibility of other intelligent civilizations, it way well be said that there are actually no intelligent civilization in existence in the known universe at this time at all.
Which means I can trash the rest of the universe and nobody can hold me accountable. Think I'll go destroy some exoplanets and take a colossal crap in a black hole.
"how the hell can anyone use the ONE sample we have to infer the odds of the other 8 steps?"
-- The Notebooks of Lazarus Long.
That's how.
What the fuck does that have to do with trying to determine the odds of there being extraterrestrial civilizations by guessing the probability of a whole chain of guesses? Why the hell does anyone assume eukaryotic cellular life is a prerequisite for civilization, FFS?
We don't know the odds of life developing.
We don't know the odds of cells developing, and we sure as hell don't know if cells are necessary for life.
How the hell can we calculate if there's a "Great Filter" or not when by the third step of nine the steps, the process has already run off the rails?
And that's after the very first step of selecting the "right" star system, where we calculate the odds using anthropic principles.
Spouting nonsense about being trapped by deductive reasoning is just piling bullshit on top of guesswork.
...but would they listen to me? Nooooo.....
And don't broadcast their existence to every potentially hostile entity in the universe.
If an advanced civilization existed nearby, and they were advanced enough to realize that they probably weren't alone in the universe, might they have taken the precautions of removing/masking any signals that would signal their presence?
"What the fuck does that have to do with trying to determine the odds of there being extraterrestrial civilizations"
Probably very little, but to Space Nutters, quoting sci-fi is like reciting Holy Writs.
"Spouting nonsense"
I already said "Space Nutters".
How do you recognize a compressed message as different from static?
enjoy your mind control
This post is like a blindman trying to hypothesize if elephants exist when he has never sensed one and has no information about what they're like.
What's hilarious is that we automatically assume that we are an example of an advanced civilization. Maybe we are on the "barely-hatched" end of the scale, and the rest of the universe moved past us aeons ago. What we are trying to find are "similar" civilizations, that are in the same 100-1000 years of the technological scale that we are. I don't find it hard to believe that such civilizations are rare, since its such a tiny timeframe, universally speaking.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
If they are really advanced civilisations they might just be really energy efficient. "Radio waves, how quaint." So the only civilizations that might be vaguely detectable are those that are a bit more advanced than ours and have harnessed things like fusion and have gone to town making a mess and lots of noise.
I always love to think about how well a modern day time traveller could hide in ancient Rome with a whole bevy of modern tech. I could be walking down a busy street in ancient Rome with a 9mm silenced glock strapped to my side my iPhone in my pocket running up to small earphones, I could have clothes all modern materials, just in their style, a top of the line bowie knife on my other side, I could even be smearing suntan lotion on before taking pictures of everyone with my DLSR (with the screen and lights taped over) and beyond my obvious height and health, not turn any heads.
Even if and when I used my silenced glock I doubt that many would find it wildly incomprehensible as they would just translate it into their knowledge. So it would be some ingenious use of a sling that threw the lead shot into the guy's head. Not magic fire stick.
It simply would not occur to them that anything I had was much more than some jewellery or an interesting tool. Thus I see the same with us. I doubt that civilizations are wasteful to any great degree as they move forward. I would not be shocked if as they solve things like the GUT that whole other ways of dealing with energy are available. Such as "borrowing" energy from another dimension and then returning that energy to the dimension in the form of waste heat. Something completely fantastic but to them it would be routine and power their iPhones or their interstellar space ships. Or they have learned to live a very simple happy life. They might limit their numbers and spend time with their friends and family immortally exploring the entire universe; not setting up massive galactic civilizations.
Oddly enough the universe might not be a mirror of what we are now.
Any research or theory that is validated by the assumption that we could have any idea about the capabilities, motivations and actions of such advanced civilisations is naive, because it does not accept how naive we are given our level of scientific knowledge and how far beyond our current understanding of the universe that such an intelligence would be. And I do mean intelligence, singular, because that is an inevitable precursor to a singularity and whatever follows. If an advanced civilisation's computational resources operate using the patterns in the interaction of seas of virtual particles there would be no easily detectable entropy change from the computation itself, only the I/O may touch the sphere of physics that we have knowledge of, and even this is not necessary as the computation manipulation of what we see as the known universe may be as subtle as simply influencing the probability of outcomes at a quantum scale. i.e. This study is the equivalent of a Victorian amateur scientist looking for grandfather clocks in the hope of proving that nuclear reactors exist on Mars.
Why would aliens stoop to the level of 20th century, radio-technology, in order to communicate with us? Which among us could communicate with a Teletype Model 15 which is only a few generations old? That in mind, why would aliens communicate with radio? There must be, oh, one or two better, more profitable means of communication, surely.
Any civilization sufficiently intelligent to colonize a galaxy is assuredly intelligent enough to do so sustainably -- or thy wouldn't be around very long. Either way their isn't going to be a tall tell trail of IR.
We're in the nursery.
They're on the other side.
When we grow-up, it'll be time to join the party.
Not before.
" Nonetheless, the results indicate that either humanity really is the only intelligent species in this part of the universe, or advanced civilizations are far more efficient in their use of energy than is reasonable to assume."
Or:
Advanced species abandon or never develop the human invention of "civilisation". These other species may be the dominant species on their planet, they just know how to live in harmony with its biospere and have no need to invade other planets, much less each other's social groups.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Maybe such highly advanced civilizations are trying to save the environment?
It's like saying that no one lives on earth because no large planetwide clouds of wood smoke are seen! 8-)
Agreed. I think the main problems to the equation are the variables and how they all add up, the last on being evolution and light-year distances between not only other galaxies, but also solar systems within our own. Where we stand on the evolution scale and where other planetary beings would stand could be completely out of sync. Assuming a civilization elsewhere in our galaxy evolved at the exact same time (which would be very very very unlikely), we would also need to factor in the distance between us/them for any kind of contact/detection. I cannot guarantee, however I think most would agree that in 1000 years from now, things here we be very very very different, which may or may not help the cause. S.O.S. signals have already been sent our way.. too bad we missed it by 100 years.
When read in detail the basic assumption this is all based on is totally stupid. A basic simple rule (from me) is that once you have the technology to build Dyson spheres you will have no reason to do so... Nuclear power - fusion power - atomic conversion - all provide far better and far more compact sources of energy than things like Dyson spheres. Space is so large and so full of plants that there is no reason build one in terms of living room.
Such vast hyper-structures as Dyson spheres or ring worlds require almost insane levels or resources to build, are fragile, vulnerable, naturally unstable, and almost by definition would tend to be short lived..
The real truth is that even very high level civilizations might be almost undetectable. If we look at say an example from sci fi - then something equivalent to the Galactic civilization from Star Wars would be almost entirely undetectable..
Even with a galactic civilization of a million worlds, in an average galaxy that only achieves a density of 1 in 100,000 stars. That's a needle in a haystack..
Finding a single one star civilization among 400 billion stars with today's technology and SETI resources is a joke.. If you take our own civilizations current Fermi Distance its probably only about 10 to 20 light years if that - a few hundred stars at most.
I'm strongly in favour of SETI but it needs to be done on a far larger scale and with better resources. Also not just with radio, but with things like laser beacons and laser detectors, plus we need to keep looking for other better methods.. I don't like the current odds..
The real solution to the Fermi Paradox is simply that space is big - very big, bigger than your/our tiny minds can even begin to imagine.
Douglas Adams solved the paradox decades ago. Now go and write that down 1000 times.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Black holes could be just caterpillar drives getting energy for a jump. They... Um are fucking holding life. Do some energy calculations next time and find out how far it is going.
Instead of getting larger by orders of magnitude to fill out a galaxy, advanced civilizations get smaller by using nanotech.
Biologic cells as we know them are too bulky, slow, and inefficient. As a result, to expand by orders of magnitudes we would have to take over planets, star systems, and eventually galaxies.
But maybe instead we could convert from biology to computers based on nanotech. By shrinking ourselves we could still expand by orders of magnitudes and not take up more than a few star systems.
Why do we make the assumption that all life will behave like bacteria?
This. Whenever I see articles like this I always wonder who the heck writes these things. What you stated is one of the most basic fundamental problems with observation and detection in an astronomical sense. Entire civilizations could rise and fall in the intervening time between when something is emitted, and we happen to maybe detect it because the medium is so slow relative to the mind boggling scales being dealt with.
If we assume for an instant that we're the poster child for civilization growth and evolution (as we have zero observations of anything to the contrary of us being late bloomers and there being plenty of super advanced ancient civilizations out there), and draw a sphere around what we've managed to emit in the short time we've been around, then do likewise around every conceivable planet that might be even remotely like ours (i.e. approximate size, rocky, in the goldilocks zone), I think we would very quickly see how fruitless that sort of thinking is, in that no one is going to be detecting or observing anything until we come up with some more exotic way that bends out current knowledge of physics and speed limitations.
On top of all of that, it isn't like the universe is a static thing standing still, entire chunks (pardon the technical term) are either moving further or closer away (though from my limited knowledge of an assumed expanding universe, mostly further), making the distances and limitations involved even more difficult. It would be like me concentrating really hard and listening and looking towards China, except it is many magnitudes even further away, not seeing or hearing anything and thus formulating the conclusion that there is no Chinese civilization because I haven't been able to see or hear anyone. Silly.
the results indicate that either humanity really is the only intelligent species in this part of the universe, or advanced civilizations are far more efficient in their use of energy than is reasonable to assume.
No. It doesn't say that. The more obvious result is that stellar energy production and usage is difficult or impossible. The article is not talking about intelligent life like us. We do not have the ability to harness all the energy from our galaxy yet. Probably never. So the search does not preclude intelligent life. The article does not say anything about life like us. Not in our current state.
We developed stealth tech for military use so the enemy would not see our attack until it was too late so what if an advanced civilization took it a step further and developed the ability to cloak their civilization so as to make it more difficult to detect ? It makes sense because not seen it to be safe from possible Predators and prying eyes such as ours. Why attract unnecessary attention no matter how long it takes to get to you.and besides we hardly understand ourselves let alone anything else that might be out there in the big wide Universe.
See here for an example of what the so-called "experts" think: http://www.newser.com/story/20... There is NO WAY we can know anything about anything (not yet).
I am tired of arguments like "civilizations using energy on galactic scales". Why would a civilization do that? It's the same with Dyson spheres which are equally ridiculous.