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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.
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?
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...as of thousands to millions of years ago, anyway? Speed of light, and all.
My personal opinion is that life is really, really, really, REALLY rare. It only seems like it ought to be common because of the Anthropic Principle. We're can observe ourselves and thus it seems like life is easy. But everything would be exactly the same if we were completely unique in the universe. In fact, if the universe were cyclic and it took 1e1035 universe cycles for life to happen, things would look exactly the same. We simply have no basis for knowing how probable it is. Given how insanely complex we are, I suspect that it's exceedingly rare.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Even if life isn't rare , theres no guarantee that the random steps that led to a human civilisation that can create radio signals, ie:
life -> multicellular life -> dinosaurs -> asteroid impact -> mammals -> apes -> humans -> civilisation -> farming -> nation states -> discovery of coal seams -> metal refining -> industrial revolution -> electronics revolution
would ever happen anywhere else either in another order or at all.
There may be plenty of life in the universe but I suspect the number of technological civilisations is tiny.
It's kinda hard to have evidence of aliens if you never bother to leave your own planet, or send any probes beyond your own star system. Basically, such evidence would require the aliens to travel here to visit us. If there's any aliens out there in nuclear-powered generation ships or whatever, there's no way for us to see them until they're in orbit around our planet.
There's a whole galaxy out there we haven't explored, plus billions more galaxies beyond that. Just because we don't have reliable evidence of aliens visiting us here on Earth (aside from things like Roswell and cattle mutilations and claims of abductions) doesn't mean there aren't any out there anywhere; it's ridiculously arrogant and stupid to even think that. There could be aliens with a civilization similar to ours on one of the planets at our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, and we wouldn't know it because we have no way of seeing them. Maybe they're technologically where we were in 1830 and haven't developed radio yet, or maybe they're 150 years ahead of us and have gone to spread-spectrum communication so their transmissions just look like noise to us and we missed all the detectable stuff.
Exactly. Because we haven't seen them up to now, with our rather primitive, blind searching doesn't mean they're not there, just that we haven't seen them. Takes a great deal of arrogance to think we've seen all, done all, and nothing new will ever be. 35 years ago (when i was in college... how depressing) we were still trying to figure out if quasars were in our galaxy with an unknown reason for their massive redshift, or outside our galaxy with an unknown reason for their massive energy output.
Whether life (intelligent, technologically advanced civilizations) is common or rare, the simple fact is we're not going to have a definitive search done for them in a just few decades, and the fact we haven't seen them really means nothing at all.
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I don't think that's true at all. Anyone who studies technological advancement, or the philosophy of science, can tell that it's a heuristic process. In other words, it's the result of many, sometimes "average" people taking a crack at a problem over a long period of time, until someone is finally able to put all that work together to get a solution.
The oft-cited "genius" making a technological breakthrough by himself is really just a myth.
This Sig does not Exist.
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.
How do we even know the warm dust isn't the substrate for an advanced civilization?
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!