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Swedish Scientist Suggests That There Is Only One Earth (blastingnews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: The conventional wisdom has been among scientists is that a myriad of Earth-like planets exist in the universe, some of which have to be the abode of life, even intelligent life. However, Astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson from Uppsala University in Sweden has run a computer simulation of the universe, incorporating what we know about exoplanets thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, the laws of physics, and the state of the early universe. The computer simulation came up with exactly one Earth, which is to say the one we live on. Every other planet in the universe does not have the conditions necessary to sustain life. Indeed, strictly speaking, Earth itself should not exist, according to the computer model, according to the story in Discover Magazine.
I read it in a book
If his model says that Earth should not exist, then there's something wrong with his model.
Also, considering how life thrives even in hostile environments here on Earth, it's simply a mathematical impossibility that there are no other planets in the universe capable of supporting some kind of life.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I refute it thus. #theoldlinesarethebest
Computer modeler cranks out computer model that predicts that things we know to be true are not true, and then asserts the universe is wrong....
If it didn't, would we all be dead?
`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
It's hard to glean much about his methodology from the linked article, but it seems that he's taken the all the known exoplanets, extrapolated from that data somehow, and came up with some really small values for a few variables in the Drake Equation. Ho hum.
If earth is such an uncommon place to live in, then maybe we, in fact, are the extremophiles
The huge problem here is that his data is based on what we know about exoplanets so far. Of course his model will show most of the planets are much larger than earth. Those are the ones we're able to find so far.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
...somebody funded this? I really need to get into research.
Erik Zackrisson from Uppsala University in Sweden has run a computer simulation of the universe, [proving] ...Earth itself should not exist.
At which point Erik went poof, and ceased to exist.
This headline-ready conclusion seems like a bit of a stretch. From TFA:
The model creates exoplanets based only on the ones we have discovered, which is an extremely small sample size that probably doesn’t provide a representative cross-section of all of the planets in existence.
Seems like we don't have nearly enough data to say there's only one Earth-like planet.
If the Earth itself should not exist in the model, but the Earth does in fact exist, it shoots down the model's other conclusions about the existence of other Earth-like exoplanets. There's not much more that needs be said beyond that
My strictly uneducated guess is that the universe is a garden, full of life. Advanced civilizations however, are probably quite rare. They will tend to self-destruct at just about the place we are now. That being said, i would venture to say that there are maybe a handful of advanced civilizations in the Milky Way.
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
...according to the computer model.
Says something about the model, then, doesn't it?
If this is accurate this is good news. One of the standard explanations for the Fermi Paradox is that Earth-like planets are very rare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis. You may ask why this is good news? The reason is that something is making civilizations rare. We don't see any signs of major civilizations, either in terms of visits, radio waves, or most importantly, megastructures and large-scale engineering projects. At this point, we've looked at 100,000 nearby galaxies and essentially none of them show signs of a highly advanced civilization in terms of energy use http://www.universetoday.com/119931/100000-galaxies-and-no-obvious-signs-of-life/.
The standard explanation for this is that there is some "Great Filter" which is making civlizations rare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter. If this is something in our past (e.g. habitable planets are rare, it is tough for life to evolve, it is hard to get those last few steps to necessary levels of intelligence, etc.) then we don't need to worry. But if it is something in our future, something that civilizations do to wipe themselves(e.g. nuclear war, bad nanotech) out then we're in trouble. We need to figure this out soon, since if there is a future Filter then it likely occurs very close to our current tech level.
Every piece of evidence for early filters should make us breathe more easily since it makes late filters less necessary. Unfortunately in the last few years, almost all new evidence has been in the other direction: we've found lots of planets and it looks like even small, rocky planets are common. So this is a refreshing piece of news. However, I'm very skeptical of it. First, it seems to go against other similar studies suggesting that as many as 1/3rd of stars may have an Earth-like planet (see e.g. here http://www.universetoday.com/119931/100000-galaxies-and-no-obvious-signs-of-life/) and they appear in order to be getting this result in part to be using an extremely narrow notion of what a habitable planet would look like.
There may be life, Jim, but not as we know it.
Sensor scans are inconclusive. I recommend an away team investigate more closely.
The great thing with simulations, is that with the right set of input data you can theoretically proving anything. Heck, maybe the Earth is flat after all? Of course, the quality of the input data and the nature of the simulation should always be up for as much scientific debate as the results.
We are looking at the massive universe from one small view point and assuming that we can learn everything we can from this view point. I believe that is a very narrow view point and arrogant one at that. There is so much we don't know, including the true nature of dark matter (if it turns out to be real), so trying to assume that we can be the only one is akin to religious view points that want to put the Earth at the centre of the universe. Heck, even on Earth we are discovering extremophiles, living in places that no life form was assumed to exist.
My own personal attitude is that we need to send out those space probes, as far as possible as discover the most we can, until we are able to send them out further and discover more - rince/repeat.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
If your model doesn't account for reality, is your model deficient? I'd say yes.
Many things are improbable, but in a vast universe, improbable becomes fairly likely.
So, if he can't account for the Earth we have, the estimation of other ones like it is pretty useless.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The Fermi paradox is easily solved by noticing that the universe is very big, and very empty, and that the limits of technology do not allow sufficiently easy travel.
Of course there is only one Earth, given the extreme odds of Earth developing, what would the added chances be that another planet like ours would develop, AND they would call it Earth, seems kind of slim to me...
Would the Universal Motion Arts Association allow for there to be 2 Earths(tm) without legal action and then send in the Vogons to destroy the infringing planet.
On another track, maybe there is only one earth per universe/dimension ?
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I've had to construct and run a few computer models over the years, and when the result that gets spat out tells me that my one verifiable empirical truth is in fact false I just chuck the model. It's wrong for one reason or another (bad data, poor assumptions, etc.). How does a bad model make the news? That's like me constructing a model that says capitalism doesn't work, and running to the press with my "startling economic revelation that undoes decades of economic thought!" You get laughed out of your professional organization for doing stuff like that.
When one refers to a "1 in a million chance" they are not implying that they actually tried something 1 million times and it only worked once. They are implying that *if* they would have tried something 1 million times it would have only worked once. So if you win the lottery jackpot, your winning ticket was still "1 in 300 million" regardless of how many other tickets you bought or how many exist.
The title of the article is "Earth may be a 1-in-700 quintillion kind of place", but the article cites the 700-quintillion number as the total number of planets, and then goes on to say that according to the scientist's calculations, the earth should probably not exist (i.e. the odds of an earth like planet are even lower than 1 in 700-quintillion). So what are the odds that earth should exist? Who knows, it's not even mentioned.
This would be like if I reported on some guy winning the powerball and said "This guy bought 100 lottery tickets and one of the tickets won the jackpot. That was an amazingly improbable event that happened, making the ticket a "1 in a hundred kind of ticket.""
I have no idea if the statistical analysis done by this scientists is good or bad. But all I ask is that it is presented in a way that is coherent.
I never believed the Fermi paradox was interesting. It seems clear that traveling between stars may be prohibitively difficult even for "advanced" civilizations. To me that alone would explain it. Add to that some of the filters, for example that evolution tends to create short sighted, greedy, and competitive species good at accidental mass suicide, and you're done.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
At least there is no need to worry about aliens coming to take over our planet that sits nicely in the habitable zone.
Bad news: We'll probably kill ourselves before we get the chance to do the same to another planet
This does not work. We can see very far. That explanation would only work if the sole problem was a lack of visitors to our star system. But as I discussed in my comment, we don't see any radio waves nor do we see any signs of megastructures or other large-scale use of the large amount of available energy. The universe looks completely natural. Incidentally, it is also worth noting that the distance explanation doesn't seem to work very well either.
The galaxy for example is about 100,000 light years across. That means that if one is going only 1 percent of light speed (which does seem doable given what we know of the laws of physics) one gets from one end of a galaxy to another in about 10 million years, and can colonize most of a galaxy in about 200 million years, which is not incredibly long in comparison to the amount of time life on Earth has been around.
So the long-distance explanation doesn't seem to work very well for explaining a lack of visitors, and doesn't go anywhere to explaining the complete lack of other signs of civilizations which are the much more puzzling thing.
If one thinks that civilizations tend to destroy themselves then that means we should be very worried. That's the Filter essentially. If that's the case, the question then becomes can we use that information to avoid doing that ourselves?
He is correct, Earth does not exist.
Or did you forget it was destroyed by the Vogons ? The supposed highway is just a bit delayed, that's why you don't see it. Takes some time in cosmological units.
This doesn't work well at all. Lack of signals are only of the three central problems, which are lack of signals, lack of visitors and most severely lack of megastructures. Your fourth point is the most ad hoc hypothesis imaginable given that we can see natural radio signals just fine. Your fifth point requires not just a "Federation" but a federation that also prevents people from building large-scale structures. Moreover, it requires a "Federation" in not just one galaxy but many galaxies, since we don't see any major signs of K3 civilizations in other galaxies.
If according to this computer model, Earth shouldn't even exist, then the computer model is fundamentally and critically flawed.
Is it just cause it's "astrophysics" and therefore automatically worth of attention, even when it's useless?
Computer model saya the Earth shouldn't exist
The Earth does exist
Therefore, the computer model is wrong
QED
So he builds a "model" that is proven to be empirically incorrect from the get go. But of course everyone will believe him.
How is suggesting that there is only one Earth based on a computer model any different than saying there is only one earth because God made only one?
If earth is such an uncommon place to live in, then maybe we, in fact, are the extremophiles
Yeah, but... from where?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Well, sure, when the alarmists are in charge of the measurements.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
my own computer model says that the probability of Sweden actually existing is 1 in 700 Quintillion.
I don't think the lack of megastructures is any indication of a lack of intelligent life. There's no reason to build dyson spheres etc. if you can keep your population levels under control. The idea of a Kardashev Type 2/3 civilization is almost laughable - a society advanced enough to build a dyson sphere but backward enough to reproduce to the point where a dyson sphere may be helpful.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
For those who don't know, here he is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I would think there are a thousand times more thermal vent-based biomes in the universe than solar-based biomes.
But as I discussed in my comment, we don't see any radio waves
Which means very little. Go to the nearest star and aim a large receiving dish at Earth. You won't hear a thing, unless by accident someone on Earth points a focused transmitter at you, at the exact right time.
That means that if one is going only 1 percent of light speed (which does seem doable given what we know of the laws of physics)
At that speed it may take several thousand years to reach another habitable planet. With a million things that could wrong, I can see people voting against the idea of embarking on such a crazy adventure. And even assuming a bunch of people make it to another planet, they have to survive there, and rebuild another civilization capable of doing it again. If the failure rate is too high, the spread will stop.
We cannot say how many different environments there are capable of evolving complex life. We only have a sample size of one.
There may still yet be fairly complex life on/in Europa, Enceladus, and the gas giants. We haven't looked very hard yet.
Table-ized A.I.
We've had several dozens civilizations here on Earth that all died out. Ours is past the peak as well.
You what?
You are welcome on my lawn.
if you assume certain 'starting state' and 'laws' you get certain results if you work them out. if you assume other 'states' and 'laws' you get other results. ... don't get started on chemistry, geology, biology, etc etc .
even more fundamentally we assume we can fully 'know' and 'conceptualize' what makes up a 'state' and what 'laws' are in order to build models. this can be false.
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we have only vague idea about dark energy and dark matter which (allegedly) make up over 95% of universe, and half of the other matter not known too.
quantum mechanics and general relativity conflict with each other . (that is from few years ago, to few years hence, when we find further things, and explain other things out of darkness)
that is just physics .
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and then there are old unanswerable philosophical counters to empiricism, a necessity for science.
for instance there may be nothing outside our minds and 'universe' a mere illusion, and even existence of our minds can be logically questioned into non existence.
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all this is entertaining and challenging and worth think about.
but perhaps not worrying too much about.
it is always better to doubt anyone, be it scientist or priest, who says he/she knows anything for certain, whether it be existence(or non existence) of god , climate change, or earth. much better to care about your family and friends who are entertaining , challenging, and certainly worth think about
>> Indeed, strictly speaking, Earth itself should not exist, according to the computer model,
Their model based conclusion has a rather obvious counter example: Earth.
Hard to miss that detail.
Why build mega structures? What is a mega structure?
Megastructures are a natural thing to want to build if one wants to harvest a lot of energy available. And if we're correct about basic thermodynamics then pretty much everyone wants lots of energy. Many versions have been suggested for ways of actually doing it, such as Dyson spheres (unlikely), Dyson swarms and Dyson bubbles (much more plausible). Stellar engines are also an option https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine. But here's the really important part: regardless of how one does so, an attempt to use a large fraction of star's energy leads to noticeable changes in its light.
2) maybe no civilization has advanced far enough to detect it 3) maybe our telescopes aren't good enough to detect the mega structure, given that we can barely detect the presence of small planets.
But we can detect it if they are there. Did you read the links I gave earlier? We can estimate using basic thermo what these will do, and we can then look for them, and we don't see them. So that's not the issue. Planets are hard to detect for a variety of reasons, especially because they are often not blocking the light. That's not an issue here. It might help if you actually read the links people gave.
The rest of your counter argument, well we're just going to have agree to disagree because there are too many assumptions in what you're saying that you're taking for granted that I don't think are at all certain.
"Agreeing to disagree" is one of the worst thing that educated, intelligent people can do. It essentially amounts to saying that one or the other might be wrong, and that you might both have different data points, and rather than exchanging the data one just goes away. It is an unfortunate trait and seems most commonly done when people don't want to just admit that they are wrong. But here's the thing: if I'm wrong, I want to know that I'm wrong. And you do a disservice to me, and to anyone else reading this conversation if you think one of my premises is wrong but you won't tell me which or why.
And it isn't like this is "agreeing to disagree" over who should win the Oscars or whether some call in a sports game was right. The answer to these questions *matter*. They are some of the deepest questions out there about the universe and life itself. And they have practical implications, because if there's a Filter in our future our only hope is to figure that out and try to get around it. Agreeing to disagree is the worst thing to do.
No such thing as bias in programming, (sarcasm) besides what we think we know is one thing, what is actually out there is another.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Dyson spheres are not the only type of megastructure, and you don't need them just for population. The primary use of most megastructure proposals is to get a lot of solar energy. No matter what you want to do, you want energy. Want to do heavy-duty computations? That takes energy. Want to find out more abut the structure of the universe with big particle accelerators? That takes energy. Want to send a very high speed probe to another region of the universe? That takes energy.
Anthropic Principle
We tend not to observe universes in which life is impossible.
-Dave
But if it is something in our future, something that civilizations do to wipe themselves(e.g. nuclear war, bad nanotech) out then we're in trouble.
The vast majority of civilizations wipe themselves out though nuclear war. The ones that avoid that wipe themselves out by elevating reality TV personalities to positions of leadership.
If that's at all the case, then we should be taking steps to either a) prepare for that eventuality or b) try to avert it. Essentially you aren't dismissing the Fermi Paradox at all, you are concluding that the explanation is a nigh-unstoppable Filter. That's a possible explanation, and I don't know about you, but if that's the case I'm going to favor putting in every last bit of effort we can to maybe avoid the situation. It is better to strive and to struggle than to just give up.
"Indeed, strictly speaking, Earth itself should not exist, according to the computer model..."
Which kind of blows this whole "model" out of the water and makes it something we should laugh at instead of take seriously.
With literally billions of planets in this crummy little backwater galaxy alone it stands to reason that that there are numerous other Earth-like planets in existence, but extrapolate that to the entire universe and I think we can dispense this whole line of "reasoning".
"Scientific Study Shows Earth Doesn't Exist, And Neither Do You, So Stop Reading Scientific Studies", would be just as credible a headline.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
As I said, the most serious issue is the absence of megastructures, but the concern about radio waves is precisely that: it would take only a small fraction of inhabited planets making radio beacons to notice them.
At that speed it may take several thousand years to reach another habitable planet. With a million things that could wrong, I can see people voting against the idea of embarking on such a crazy adventure. And even assuming a bunch of people make it to another planet, they have to survive there, and rebuild another civilization capable of doing it again. If the failure rate is too high, the spread will stop.
Yes, this would all be problems if you did something like this with something approaching base-line humans with regular human lifespans and no advanced robotics or other aspects to help out. How plausible is it to you that all civilized species end up with a life expectancy close to that of a human and that they aren't able to extend it at all, or to bring along robots to help build new things when they get there?
The authors estimate the probability that terrestrial planets emerge and find a small number. Fine. The more we understand Earth history, the more we see that there were many singular events leading to an Earth as we have. So it is hardly surprising. It is a bit like asking the a priori probability for humanity to produce Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Of course it is tiny.
My guess is that the universe produces many more kinds of planets than the already diverse sample seen in the solar and exoplanet systems, with a huge variety of physical conditions and chemical composition, each allowing nature to explore new phenomena we have not even a starting clue. Some of them may develop phenomena as complex and interesting as life, but too different for our poor imagination to predict them.
it only shows how little we actually know about the universe.. I'll bet my life there is life in the universe other then here on earth...
Effectively we are shooting a flashlight at random locations hoping to see a black cat at night.
Give us at least 50 years of looking before you give up.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
As FA Hayek said about economics but equally applicable here, the notion that we can deduce there's only one Earth from our current level of understanding about the world's complexity is in a word, absurd.
In other words, his model disproved itself, and this discussion is a waste of time that is simply waiting to be picked up by religious garbage collectors.
The simplest explanation seems to be that technology is exponential. Civilizations have an extremely short slice of history where they can start influencing things at a global scale before they become godlike and impossible to detect.
We currently lack the technology to detect civilizations that are not global yet and cannot detect gods, hence, the universe looks empty to us right now. . .
If you CAN create a Dyson Sphere, you probably no longer NEED a Dyson Sphere. Are we trying to genetically engineer giant horses to pull our horse buggies faster?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
The only exoplanets we know about are the ones that are relatively close to us. We would need a large random sample of exoplanets from all over the universe for calculations like this to have any hope of being accurate. We have no idea what the conditions are like in galaxies that we are unable to perceive.
I don't see where we have enough data to make such an assumption. The universe is 13 billion years old and we've been looking at it seriously for a few hundreds years, most of which time we did very little until modern science allowed it. You can come up with all the models you want, but they are based on 5% understand of the universe. To us that 5% might be 100%, but it's still 5% in the face of reality and things like modeling an entire universe over billions of years. If we can't model weather or climate, we can't model a universe down to 13 billion years even if we allow ourselves great margins of error. The margin of accuracy would be many times lower than any margins of error because your using a dataset that simply does not contain the necessary information. We really aren't there on many fields, including just straight brain power. We can't see that far, we don't organize our data well enough, time is not on our side because we've only recorded the universe with real accuracy for a few decades. Anyone who thinks they can take a couple decades of data and quantify the universe with it... is stupid.
And it gives a clue as to where to look. FTA: "Under the assumption that the emergence of intelligent life is tied to the formation of TPs, the prospects of extragalactic SETI efforts are therefore expected to peak at relatively low redshifts."
The idea that advanced civilizations would be releasing tons of concentrated or distinct infrared waste radiation is not a reliable assumption.
For example, they may value spreading fast over reproducing fast because spreading out perhaps ensures their survival more than volume of species members.
They may move past reliance on biological bodies and don't see a need for more than a few billion emulated/artificial brains to manage things.
If you are no longer biology-dependent and want to ensure your species and/or civilization survives, then spreading out as far as possible and not leaving behind obvious hints of your existence may be the more rational plan. It's harder to destroy something that is dispersed.
Maybe there are hundreds of civilizations doing just that and they often pass each other and don't mind much because spreading is more important to them than conquering, hogging real-estate, and reproducing.
It's kind of like the early days of the wild west: Why fight over land when you can get unoccupied land by moving on. (Unoccupied from the settler's perspective. The native Americans didn't see it that way.)
Table-ized A.I.
I'm not sure what assumption you are objecting to. The conclusion of a Filter is made likely based on our current understanding of basic physics being very approximably correct. And many of the things that people would like to imagine highly advanced civilizations having access to (e.g. FTL drives) make the problems more severe rather than less so. We have to work with the base we have, and we can't just dismiss the possibility of a Filter because we might be wrong. If it turns out that there's some nice happy explanation, that will be great, but if there is a Filter, no number of optimistic, wishful explanations will make it go away.
it would take only a small fraction of inhabited planets making radio beacons to notice them.
We don't have a beacon set up. I can see where other civilization don't have one either. An undirected beacon would take an enormous amount of energy to even be detectable at a few light years distance. And keep in mind that nearly all of the "billions and billions of planets" are really far away. Only a very tiny percentage is as close as a 1000 light years, which could even make a fairly strong beacon beyond our means to detect it.
How plausible is it to you that all civilized species end up with a life expectancy close to that of a human and that they aren't able to extend it at all, or to bring along robots to help build new things when they get there?
I don't think anybody has good estimates, but you don't need extreme values to get the expected spread factor below 1.
Consensus is in. Billions of Clock Cycles and Billions of Transistors can't be wrong. Clearly Earth is rare!
Momento Mori
If you want to do heavy-duty computations, you are limited by the amount of energy you have access to. Moreover, this explanation would then require that every civilization is making the exact same set of choices, which seems at best unlikely. If some mildly optimistic thing like this turns out to be correct, that's great. But if there is a Filter in front of us, no amount of shouting at it that we had this happy, alternative explanation will make the Filter go away. So having a potential explanation is insufficient unless we have some real info about it. It isn't necessarily the case that there's a Great Filter or even a Great Filter in our future, but that's something we need to figure out. Right now, we're putting very few resources into it.
It is better to strive and to struggle than to just give up.
If you're going to fail anyway, it's better to enjoy than to struggle.
Do you have any loved-ones? Any children? Nieces? Nephews? Grandchildren? Do you want them to suffer and die?
I don't think anybody has good estimates, but you don't need extreme values to get the expected spread factor below 1.
Yes, you do, because once one civilization figures it out, they can do it. They don't need to reinvent the wheel every time. Moreover, this requires that the numbers are too small for *every civilization out there* and that none of them try to self-modify or upload or anything similar to get around these issues.
Let's say there's an alien civilization out there with technological progress. First of all, they would have to be advanced enough to use radio waves. An "Earth at the 1600's" would be invisible to us. However, they would also need to not have progressed past blanket radio wave bursts. As we communicate more and more via wires or direct satellite communications, less of our chatter will be audible to space. Let's say that the alien race proceeds about how we do. They would have about a 300 span (being generous) from "first visible via radio waves" to "went silent."
This 300 year span would need to occur while we were able to look for them. If the last of their radio waves passed us in the 1200's, we wouldn't have detected them. It would also have to occur in a portion of the sky we were looking at. They would also need to be close enough for the radio wave strength to be detectable. If they are five galaxies over, we'd be hard pressed to detect the signal even if they aimed it right for us.
Let's say we were lucky enough to be looking in the right spot at the right time and they were the right distance away. Would we recognize a signal? The signal would be in an alien language, using an alien encoding algorithm, perhaps compressed using an alien compression routine. It wouldn't be a video in English encoded using MP4 and zipped using gzip. Given all the alien-ness of the signal, there's a strong possibility that we could discount it as mere noise and move on.
Just because we haven't detected a signal (and recognized it as one) doesn't mean intelligent alien life doesn't exist out there somewhere.
As far as megastructures go, space is huge (insert Hitchhiker's Guide quote here) and we're just now approaching being able to detect Earth-sized objects. Why does the lack of "We found a super-Jupiter sized thing that's not a planet" announcements mean that there can't possibly be five hundred alien mega-structures the size of our moon in the Andromeda galaxy.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
There are millions of focussed transmitters on earth, though most of them point toward a handful of spots in the equatorial plane, they are above and below the equator on earth and east or west of the satellites so the trasmissions should fan out.
They're also mainly on land not on the oceans, so perhaps it would be possible to detect patterns of higher and lower transmissions as the earth spins even if it's not possible to make sense of any specific transmission
Nullius in verba
We don't see any signs of major civilizations, either in terms of visits, radio waves, or most importantly, megastructures and large-scale engineering projects.
This reads like the geek projecting his own love of fantastic high-tech megastructures on the universe. If you have a stable population, why are you building a Ringworld?
I don't see lack of signals or visitors as a problem. Anyone from 300 light-years away wouldn't detect any signals from us either. And it's a big universe for someone to go who knows how many light-years to visit, even if there was anything interesting on this mudball.
Interesting theory about megastructures, but even if it's true, it would only apply to very advanced civilizations. Someone at our level, or even well above, wouldn't be able to create them.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Honest question, why do you think we should be able to see megastructures even if they do exist? We can barely see galaxies and there's no way a megastructure is going to be the size of a galaxy! Additionally, lets say there's a megastructure the size of a solar system. Why would we be able to see it exactly? Are they going to cover the thing with lights and make it glow brighter than a star?
We can easily see galaxies, I'm not sure where you get the idea that that is tough. Megastructures change the resulting light curve of stars, making them dimmer (and if one is using it to harvest energy at all) redder. We know pretty well what they would look like. There's been a lot of thinking about this. See e.g. http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm. Moreover, if a large fraction of the stars (say around 1%) of the stars in a galaxy have substantial megastructures, then the infrared signature of the galaxy as a whole will change. This is how they tried to look for K3 civilizations in the link I gave above that looked at 100,000 galaxies.
Remember, that's what they'd have to make it visible. Planets are only visible because they block the light from stars. They show up as absence of light, we don't actually see them.
Right, planets are much harder to detect than Dyson swarms because if they aren't in the way, they are very hard to see. But if you for example took something even the size of Mercury and broke it up in an orbit about where Mercury is now, it would be very noticeable from many parsecs away- we could spot that sort of thing out to at least 10,000 parsecs and probably farther if one had the highest quality instruments available.
As for radio waves, how do you know we don't see them. Remember, seeing them isn't enough, we'd also need to recognize them. I'd be very surprised if a far off civilization received our TV broadcasts and had any idea they were artificial and what the hell to do with them.
The for radio waves is actually even more severe than that, because of spread spectrum techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum which would make it even harder to recognize that a broadcast was artificial, although classical broadcasting techniques would be very easy to notice. But yes, radios are one of the harder things since they'd very likely require some sort of deliberate beacon. As I said, the primary issue by far is the lack of large scale structures.
How many have truly died out, though?
Rome is a great example -- you can argue that the Western Empire fell in 476, or you could argue that by 476 Roman culture had been so influential for so long that the end of an official government empire wasn't really the end of the civilization -- people didn't suddenly drop every last bit of Roman cultural traits. Latin was still spoken, Roman buildings, cities and roads were still used and so on.
To this day, we call one of senior legislative bodies the Senate in a building that borrows a lot of architectural elements from Rome.
Did Roman civilization end, or did it just evolve into what we now refer to as Western Civilization?
Yes, radio and visitors are the two less serious worries. Megastructures are the big ones. But the problem is how long do you have? Do you find it implausible for example that a civilization that arose 10 million years before we did (which would be in geologic time a very short time span) wouldn't have had time to build any? You don't think in 10 or 20 million years we won't plausibly have that tech level?
Hah! Actually, I disagree pretty strongly with Nick on that score. But for Filter issues he's pretty correct.
All this speculation is pretty silly IMO, because you're trying to draw conclusions about possible civilizations far more advanced than ours, using a ridiculously small and limited amount of data from a civilization that hasn't even really left its own planet yet, except for a few primitive robotic probes within its system and one manned mission to its nearby moon for rock collecting. We haven't even visited our nearest neighboring system.
We have no idea how many habitable planets are out there, because we can't even detect them. All the exoplanets we've seen have been big and very close to their stars, because that's what our limited technology allows us to see. We would not be able to see an Earth in orbit around Alpha Centauri, much less a much farther star. 20 years ago, we didn't even know definitively about any exoplanets at all, but when we developed the capability of seeing "hot Jupiters" suddenly we started seeing hundreds of them. Most likely, there's an enormous number of Earth-sized planets out there, we just can't see them yet.
The search for radio waves is dumb. We don't even use high-powered radio waves any more, we only did for a very brief time, and radio is very hard to detect over large distances due to the Inverse Square Law. The whole SETI search seems to be based on the silly idea that ETs are out there, working their asses off to build the biggest radio transmitters they possibly can and then devoting all their energy to powering them, just so they can point these transmitters at us to send us a signal. We don't do that, so why do we assume anyone else is going to?
The megastructure thing is pretty silly too: a Dyson sphere (or better yet, a Dyson swarm which is much more realistic) wouldn't be easily detectable by us because it'd be blocking all the star's light, and would only be detectable by IR radiation. Are we even actively looking for such things? And would we be able to detect them?
Honestly, even if there were a Star Trek TNG-level civilization out there in the Delta Quadrant, we wouldn't be able to see it. It's too far away, and we wouldn't be able to detect their technology. There's a lack of signs of civilizations because we do not have the capability of seeing them, and we haven't put that much effort into looking, and certainly not into leaving our star system to check out neighboring systems. It's a lot like living on an island and concluding there's no other civilization out there because you haven't seen any come visit you, when you haven't even bothered building a boat and looking for yourself.
If that's the case, the question then becomes can we use that information to avoid doing that ourselves?
The US Presidential elections prove that the answer to that question is "no".
Due to unfortunate design problems - we do not know about the population of earth-like planets in earth-like orbits around sun-like stars.
Kepler was designed on the assumption that stars that look spectrally similar to the sun were similar to it.
Unfortunately, they're not, and they flicker considerably more.
This means that detecting small planets by the dips in light intensity is hard.
For planets orbiting close in, or orbiting smaller stars, this is mitigated.
But due to this Kepler cannot pick up earth-like planets in earth-like orbits around sun-like stars, meaning we have a dearth in the statistics.
Reality? Post all perceptions below.
It seems clear that traveling between stars may be prohibitively difficult even for "advanced" civilizations. To me that alone would explain it.
Sure, it's looking mighty hard to TRAVEL between stars, but if you place a satellite at the right spot you can communicate between stars using a 100W radio.
You know that humans once believed this planet to be the Center of the Universe. You know of many such grave misperceptions that have always existed among our kind, including the fantasy that your own life has some kind of meaning.
Much of the speculation here assumes the existence of earth and some includes the existence of the solar system, galaxy and universe. Rather than imagine such a vast confabulation, why not be reasonable? These things are only extant in our imagination.
In obvious fact, even our imagination is imagined, each of us under the delusion that our thoughts are our own (and not the IP of the likes of Google or MS or the Invisible Pink Unicorn). Our very existence is questionable and is likely the construct of a greater intelligence that exists in a real 'universe'. We may be no more than a celestial child's experiment in artificial intelligence. Before protesting 'I think therefore I am', take a moment to reconsider. Starting now. Don't rush, make it a leisurely moment. Yes, now you begin to see . . . The question now is "Who is the Puppetmaster?"
...omphaloskepsis often...
Drake's equation is the product of a lot of different probabilities - galactic evolution, stellar evolution, planetary evolution, planetary habitat evolution, the origins of life, the sustainability of life to survive to become something we can study. the evolution of species, the evolution of intelligence, the evolution of a stable society, and so on. Each of these factors has large error bars according to the experts in every field. The best average, which is probably meaningless, has it that there are probably hundreds of civilisations in the Milky way, though probably none with contactable distance in our lifetime. However, the only evidence we really have, from our own planet, suggests that life got going so early that the planet's surface was still part molten when it did it. This suggests that, given roughly the right conditions, life may come into being pretty quickly. It then took most of time to get to a state where complexity took off, which suggests (on a population of one, admittedly) that the initial evolution of life is less of a barrier than something like evolving a decent cell wall. It makes sense to look for life on Mars and Europa, though most people do not actually expect to find it.
Yet, we are told there is this one scientist who has a computer model that says the number of possible earths, modelling all these various disciplines, is exactly one, and with no mention of error bars (and therefore God, and hence Baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary, checkmate atheists). I suspect journalism rather than science is happening here. However, if it is the scientist, and he really claims one person can outsmart everyone else in all these fields, then he really needs to show his working. Science is not a democracy, and one person can beat the majority. But it is pretty damn rare. And most of us do not claim to know what most of the mass of the Universe is just yet, let alone how many lifeforms it has made.
I am not saying God does not exist. Proper science has the humility to recognise the limits of what it can measure and understand. But this is just someone standing on science and using it as their pulpit.
Not widely discussed, but is a logical answer to the Fermi Paradox.
http://brighterbrains.org/arti...
TL;DR: We vanish in a puff of logic.
..don't panic
... you know all that dark matter we've been looking for? ...
That's all the stars already wrapped in dyson spheres by advanced civilisations.
Don't say that couldn't be.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Did you miss a sarcasm tag?
Actually, according to Dr. Drake, the inventor of the Drake Equation, founder of SETI, Earth is becoming less visible all the time. The satellites you talk about aren't pointed out into space, they are pointed towards Earth. We have also switched from analog to digital transmissions, so essentially everything we're transmitting at this point is indistinguishable from noise. Broadcasting large amounts of energy into the universe in analog is not something that we can expect other civilizations to do for a very long time, if our own civilization is any guide. Not only that, but the Sun also produces a fair amount of radio-frequency radiation, so there's a pretty high noise floor. Even when we're trying to talk to Mars, the SNR is miserable.
The odds against detecting extraterrestrial transmissions, or extraterrestrials detecting us, are so insurmountably vast as to defy description. I think that Dr. Drake should accept the logical conclusions of his statements and end the SETI project. We have met the Great Filter and he is us.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Not "every", just the vast majority. It's similar how every civilization seems to eventually develop a writing system. It happened in S. America even though they had no (known) contact with western civilization. And there may be cross-species patterns that "tune" behavior certain ways, as I'll describe later.
When artificial brains make biological ones obsolete, making biological beings second-class citizens, then volume reproduction may naturally stop being a top priority/urge.
Maybe there's a point of diminishing returns such that turning a galaxy into a server farm is only slightly better than a star cluster server farm. At that point, the logical allocation of resources would be to spend your efforts on spreading out than on galaxy-sized server farms.
Or maybe large server farms keep getting hijacked. If you are focused on spreading, you are not going to be a big target. If you start building a galaxy-sized server farm, then maybe multiple other civilizations will partner up to swipe or destroy it, being it's a big single target. After it happens a few times and news gets outs, civilizations go back to cluster farms and spreading.
Thus, stationary "farmers" get weeded out.
We don't really know the aggregate patterns. Due to the relative newness of heavy elements needed for forming complex life, most civilizations are probably relatively new, and find it's easier to spread than mass-farm due to natural invasion patterns. When real-estate becomes scarce, the pattern may change.
Table-ized A.I.
Economists are prone to say that everything will be exactly like it was, according to an equation they came up which fits all data up to today.
Scientists should avoid this kind of logic, especially when considering extremely broad areas like cosmology and life. Compared to what life is and how the universe works, we're incredibly brilliant about economics. And then we had that unexpected near depression of 2008. In 2016 we have new data and I'm sure that we have a brand new model that incorporates what happened, and the 2008 events make perfect sense retrospectively using that new model.
There are too many holes in what we know to make any kind of conclusion about whether other life exists or has existed. We can't yet make our own life, so the only data we have for what is possible is the tiny subset of life on Earth that just happens to exist right about now. We can glimpse examples of life that have existed but many attributes can only be inferred mathematically (e.g. no DNA). We don't have a detailed catalog of the life that has existed right here on Earth. We don't even know much about the life that exists inside our own bodies, except crude measurements like total mass. To be able to make conclusions about what might be possible for life elsewhere seems rather premature and any model based upon what we know so far is bound to be naive.
>strictly speaking, Earth itself should not exist, according to the computer model, according to the story in Discover Magazine. Long ago, in the country that does not exist anymore, a respected organization nominated 6 projects for a very prestigious award. They were told only 5 projects could receive this award, so they had to eliminate one project. Of course, every nominated group insisted that their project was crucial and someone else's project should be cut. A big boss suggested cutting a device that could figure out whether a new planet had life on it. When its inventors objected, the big boss took the device far into steppe and left it there overnight. In the morning the display read, "NO LIFE ON THIS PLANET".
Yes, and they haven't been transmitting very long. Space is big, remember?
The amount of space that we have "impacted" with our radio transmissions is a drop in the ocean compared to just our own Galaxy.
Imagine if you were given the task of finding a single drop in the ocean, one specific one? How hard would that be?
Why would you assume a civilization advanced enough to build a mega-structure would still be collecting energy from 'open fires'?
If you have the energy to build a mega-structure, you have already solved the energy generation problem.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It just means that our kind of solar-energy driven carbon-chemistry in water based life is likely to occur only once. It is possible to have life based on other energy sources, chemistry, and solvent media.
I am quite sure that since we do not know all the other possible ways "life" ..i.e self-replicating information manifested in physical entities maintained at the edge of chaos can occur, this simulation did not test these possibilities.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
If you have the energy to build any mega-structure, you have already solved the energy generation problem. Likely with something much better than solar collection.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I know many of you don't like the idea of this possibility. But I'm fairly certain I once heard Carl Sagan say something to the effect that we may someday have to face the reality that we are the only ones. And I have to ask: is that such a bad thing? I know for sure that Sagan suggested that there would be no place else we could travel to and settle any time soon. This is the only world we know, and it may be the only world we, as a species, will ever know. Therefore it is most important that we take care of this blue dot that we live all live on.
If this is the only blue dot there is, then the care of this home is of even greater priority.
Proverbs 21:19
The computer simulation came up with exactly one Earth
Indeed, strictly speaking, Earth itself should not exist, according to the computer model
Well which is it? Either the simulation came up with exactly one Earth, or it didn't. From my reading of the article, the suggestion that "the simulation came up with exactly one Earth" is incorrect, which suggests to me they've just been too strict with deciding what constitutes an "Earth."
If you mean a planet exactly like ours, to the molecule, then no, there is very very unlikely to be another. Widen the window and you can decide to find as many "Earths" as you want.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Considering that we ourselves have not even begun attempting to colonize our own solar system, I find the notion that a sufficiently advanced society is bound to spread across a galaxy like fire ant colonies, almost laughable.
We have a universe so large that it numbs the mind trying to consider just how many planets exist. It is unrealistic to think that our planet is somehow superior in producing life. The better odds would be that there are so many planets with intelligent life that we can not even hope to list them as a book large enough to write down each of them might be larger than our own solar system. And that does not include the planets that are seriously different from Earth that developed life forms that we have yet to even dream about. I suspect that life as well as advanced life is super bountiful in the universe.
No, you haven't. That just means you have enough energy to go and build large-scale structures. The estimated energy put about by a star is many orders of magnitude more than the amount you need to build most proposed megastructures.
They would have about a 300 span (being generous) from "first visible via radio waves" to "went silent."
Unless they're transmitting signals into space in a deliberate attempt to be noticed.
Using the Arecibo observatory - the detection radius for the Earth, even at it's 'loudest', isn't even to Proxima Centauri. So in order for aliens to detect us, or presumably for us to detect aliens at the development level we were at, would need a radio observatory of unprecedented sensitivity to be looking in the right direction at the right time.
To be blunt - In order to communicate with aliens within ~100 light years, we would need a transmitter, probably in space, that's as large or larger than Arecibo, hooked up to a gigawatt level power source.
We'd need a good candidate to target before bothering with that. So - back to ever more sensitive telescopes, to find those 'earth like' planets.
I don't read AC A human right
My dad was color blind, and he hated that term. âoeI can see colors,â he would say, âoeJust not the same ones as you.â
He was one of the five percent of males with the red/green color blindness, as was his brother Bill. They couldn't tell the difference between red and green at all.
When I was small, stop signs in Illinois were yellow. Dad was mad as hell when they changed all of them to red, because the red stop sign stands out against a green background for most people, but for someone with this type of color deficiency the sign becomes practically invisible when there are green plants around.
He got a ticket for running a red light once in Arizona. For you and me, green means go, red means stop. To him, the light on the top means stop and the light on the bottom means go. They had installed the traffic light upside down! He still had to pay the ticket, even though it was the city's fault that he ran the light.
Now, imagine not color deficiency like my dad had, but a true color blindness, where a truly color blind person could see no color at all, only shades of gray.
Imagine a world where half of the people were truly color blind and could only see gray. How could you describe âoeredâ to such a person? I don't think it's possible; one needs a referent, and there would be none.
People who could see color would know for sure that color exists, even though they couldn't explain color to someone who couldn't see color. But what would a color blind person believe? Probably half, who have half of the people they know able to see color and half who donâ(TM)t telling them that color exists, and they would believe that they were lacking in this useless ability.
A very large percentage of the color blind population would believe that those who believe in color were fools or insane.
âoeProve that your âcolorâ(TM) is real!â
"I can't.â
âoeThen it doesn't exist.â
Now, imagine that God exists. Guess what? He does. I can no more prove that He exists than I can prove that the color red exists. I can prove that the frequency 4Ã--10^14 Hz exists, but I can't prove that I can perceive that frequency as the color red, which is what you want me to prove.
Half of us know God. We donâ(TM)t just believe, we know. We can see his handiwork everywhere, feel his love. Half of us can't, so must either believe me or think I'm full of bovine excrement.
Such is the color of God.
Free Martian Whores!
Not just any rain. Acid rain.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Megastructures are a natural thing to want to build if one wants to harvest a lot of energy available. And if we're correct about basic thermodynamics then pretty much everyone wants lots of energy. Many versions have been suggested for ways of actually doing it, such as Dyson spheres (unlikely), Dyson swarms and Dyson bubbles (much more plausible). Stellar engines are also an option https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... But here's the really important part: regardless of how one does so, an attempt to use a large fraction of star's energy leads to noticeable changes in its light.
Can you demonstrate that such things are actually possible to build? Any of them? To harvest any significant percentage of a star's energy may simply be impossible or impractical.The scales involved are truly immense even if a society of intelligent entities could use all of the mass of the rocky planets and moons in a system I don't think it would be enough to create such immense gigastructures. Even if it is possible it may take so long to build that the lifetime of the star may become significant and all that effort would be wasted when the star dies. For that reason perhaps black holes are considered far more practical sources of energy which presumably are more stable and predictable and long lived.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
It may be that many civilizations reach the industrial level know seen at earth and not much further. Remember that radio signals that are normally produced for practical terrestrial and interplanetary communications (mars probes) are far too weak to be detected by the aliens version of whatever radio telescope we have ever built on earth;. So not finding a radio signal means little, the ETs version of Channel 8 NBC is simply too weak to be easily detected from earth.
The empire state buildings they build are far too small to be seen from a telescope from here, of course. So, there could be huge numbers out there but it is highly likely that anything they build will be too small to be seen from earth by a telescope.
So, looking for radio signals or looking at stars from 10,000 light years away is not going to give you a yes or no answer if there is anything there.
You have to also consider the economics of running some kind of galactic lighthouse. It would take a lot of energy and so probably alot of money/resources. The science fiction author Gregory Benford along with his brother James Benford who just happens to be in the business of building jthe sort of transmitters that would be required for any sort of beacon wrote a couple of interesting papers on the subject. One is called Searching for Cost Optimized Interstellar Beacons and the other is called Messaging with Cost Optimized Interstellar Beacons. Both well worth reading.
According to the Benfords we should be looking for pulsed rather than continuous signals and up around 10 Ghz rather than around the so called water hole in the 1.42 to 1.666 Ghz range which would be a massive waste of energy for a galactic beacon. A real signal is a lot more likely to resemble the WoW! signal than the sort of continuous directional beam signal SETI has searched for. A short blip that never repeats.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Indeed, strictly speaking, Earth itself should not exist, according to the computer model, according to the story in Discover Magazine.
If a known state cannot be shown as being implied by the theory, then how can the theory be valid?
If there is a place called heaven and if there is a just god that could not deny a place for that child than giving the child cancer would be a great gift. Ask me if I would have rather spent the 67 years that I have existed so far in heaven rather than here, and I would tell you like most people that I would have much preferred to be in heaven. Even if all of my descendants would all not exist, it is gods problem to ensure their existence not mine. We should all take all of the unused eggs out of all of the females and than fertilize them and let them die. This would ensure that there would be billions of people in heaven. Of course all of this is totally nonsense so in my opinion it totally destroys the notion of heaven and a test to get there.
Any other "earth like" planets will have other names. So yes there is only one Earth.
On a more serous note. If the computer model doesn't predict the one that actually exists then how can we trust the rest of the data. Seems to me the computer model is wrong.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
No it's not.
IIRC the kinetic energy in a ringworld is the equivalent of 1000+ years output of an M class star.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Do you have a citation for this?
Radio transmission is one of the less concerning issues certainly, but you are deeply wrong about megastructures. We have a pretty good idea what their light profiles look like and we know how to detect them. There have been a lot of papers on this aspect of things. That's how they did the search for K3 civilizations I linked to in m first comment. Meanwhile, to answer your question, yes we have looked for Dyson spheres and swarms. See e.g. .
No, obviously we can't demonstrate it other than to say that it looks reasonable given the laws of physics. But that's not the point. Sure, it could turn out that it is wrong, but the idea that maybe we're wrong on estimating things isn't enough to make the Filter concern go away. Having a happy explanation won't get rid of the Filter if it is front of us. That's why we need to figure out what the explanation is for this *now*. It could turn out to be something like what you suggest, but we need to actually investigate and not just simply say here's an idea so wow we can go back to doing everything else because we have a semiplausible explanation.
The reason is that something is making civilizations rare.
Maybe the other planets did something idiotic, like allowing religious fanatics in a politically unstable region to build nuclear weapons.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Ummm, I expect them to die. And everybody suffers from time to time.
I expect great-great-great-nephews and nieces to look back at our current 'Science Fiction' and say 'the stuff that was based around technology is real crap, but there was some pretty cool wondering when they weren't navel gazing at their gadgets.'
Have you ever read the description of the Christian heaven? What a torturous place to have to spend eternity. Even for those that love gold, I'm sure it would get old after a few billion years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
so if the earth shouldnt exist, but it exists, doesnt it throw out his theory out of the window?
Isn't the article about the likely densities of planets formed during galaxial (haha) evolution ? If you look at the paper referenced, they talk about the time it takes (in billions of years, it seems) for dust to collect into large objects. If most of the universe ... if there aren't enough of these things that are old enough, then there hasn't been time for life to develop ... which for me would be a solid argument for the probably lack of life in the universe.
> That explanation would only work if the sole problem was a lack of visitors to our star system. But as I discussed in my comment, we don't see any radio waves nor do we see any signs of megastructures or other large-scale use of the large amount of available energy. The universe looks completely natural. Incidentally, it is also worth noting that the distance explanation doesn't seem to work very well either.
If another planet is looking at earth from further away than, say, 1000 lightyears, they too will not receive radio waves, won't see megastructures etc. If they're looking at earth from, say a million light years away, they'll conclude there's nothing here.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
One could just skip the whole god is here concept and say; you can hear color in the same way you can hear radio.
I wonder how broad the spectrum is among humans in the ability of smell, sense and hearing. Considering the how bad we are att making output devices for anything else than vision I'm guessing it's hard to find a common denominator.
Well I don't find Fermi's paradox to be a particularly compelling idea. There is no Great Silence. It's just an expression of frustration really. Yes it would be nice if our galaxy was teeming with life. It probably isn't. Probably planets with intelligent life capable of building radio telescopes and lasers and pulsed neutrino transmitters are distributed at 1000+ or even 10000+ light year distances making communication, travel, and even discovery quite difficult even for advanced societies.
Maybe there are only something like 40 technological societies in our galaxy with another 100 or even 1000 planets teeming with life but with no intelligent life or with intelligent octopus-like creatures whose lives are mostly lived deep in an ocean and who are just not interested in building radio telescopes.
All the Great Silence and Great Absence indicates is that life in our galaxy is probably not very common and yeah that sucks, but it doesn't mean there is some mysterious force ending every advanced technological society. It doesn't mean that every such society is doomed. It just means they are rare and that few if any are capable of or interested in the sorts of grand scale science fiction projects that would make them obvious to every observer in the galaxy.
Although to be fair we haven't even done a proper search yet. We don't even have much in the way of the sort of advanced communication tech that real aliens might use. Neutrino pulses would make for a very compelling interstellar transmitter. We can still barely detect them. Do we have orbiting or lunar based kilometer scale radio telescopes listening at the right frequencies? No. We are at the bottom of a thick sea of mixed gases that attenuate the hell out of the more optimal higher frequences at or above 100 Ghz and we haven't launched any SETI listening stations outside of our thick atmospheric soup. Have we tried listening at many different frequencies? No. Just some stupid 'water hole' frequencies that are almost certainly not actually used by anyone. Have we looked for the much more likely pulsed transmissions? Not really and that is despite the tantalizing Wow! signal. Laser or neutrino pulses? Again, not really. Have we begun an Active SETI program to try to ping likely systems for a while before listening for transmissions from them? Nope. We are too scared and even if we weren't there's no money for such projects.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Consequently the swedish scientist AND the Discovery magazine should not exist.
Those friggin' alien postmen STILL keep losing my mail.
I've had it. Let's contract it out to the postal service on Omichron Persei VIII and be done with it.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
wrong. all this math is dumb because it's based on assumptions. You can 'prove' with math your statement. You can prove with math OPs statement. The often repeated in science rag line "the math/odds show there will be many living planets" has always been bad science.
Oh gee, thank you. "Space is big", nobody ever thought of that before. Paradox resolved, everybody go home.
Your "educated guess" is #9 out of 20 of the proposed solutions in the list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Uh, editors, it's "myriad", not "myriad of".
Finally someone gets it. Not only gets it, but gets it right! So, there is a God Richard Dawkins!
Ellie Arroway: The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just us... seems like an awful waste of space. Right?
We don't want to agree to disagree when we can determine which of us is right, but I don't think that applies here. We have a very limited amount of data to try to draw very large conclusions. As far as technical civilizations go, we've got a sample of precisely one, and our data cuts off around the development of slightly less primitive space flight and good superhero movie series. (I think one of those is far more significant than the other, but to be honest I'm just almost absolutely sure which one. My precognition is unreliable.)
We may have seen a megastructure already, with that weird erratically variable star that doesn't seem to have a natural explanation. Granted, we'd expect to see more, but that's just our expectations.
We're assuming that civilizations want all the power they can get, and I think that's a very reasonable assumption, but we don't know that for sure. It seems virtually certain that the best energy source is a handy star, but it's conceivable that that's not how it works. With our current level of advancement, we don't see any insuperable problems with megastructures, but when we start to get the capability to build them we may be surprised by some limitation or some good reason Not To Do That. We may be doing a very subtle and advanced equivalent of calculating how much horse manure would cover Manhattan as New York City grew. We've wondered why we weren't finding radio beacons, and found that a more advanced civilization is likely to use less indiscriminate high-power radio, and there may be a similar explanation for the lack of megastructures.
I'm also not real concerned with figuring out where the Filters are in general. I'm more interested in what's coming up specifically. It may be that almost all potential technical civilizations wipe out long before where we're are now, having failed to develop hands, fire, flush toilets, or the desire to understand the Universe scientifically, but that doesn't mean we're not going to be the 1% of the remainder that is wiped out by infected telephones or whatever. We need to look at potential dangers and figure out ways to advance past them, regardless of where the usual Filters are.
For example, scientific and technological advancement will put greater and greater destructive power in the hands of individuals and small organizations, and I believe that's something we should be at least speculating about. Alternatively, it may make large organizations far too powerful, and to subject to individual vagaries. China used to have by far the biggest and best exploration fleets in the world, until the shipbuilding industry backed the wrong side in a civil war. In terms of human advancement, this wasn't critical, since there were some reasonably advanced civilizations on the other side of Eurasia that were not nearly so unified, and some of them didn't give up on maritime exploration. Get a sufficiently powerful world government and it might effectively stop scientific and technical advancement, for petty or noble reasons. Perhaps we can make a society where we're all happy and spiritually fulfilled if we give up such advances, and perhaps it will just seem that way, and perhaps this isn't a problem at all.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Well, the sun puts out about 3.8 x 10^26 J/s. In 1000 years, that's about 1.1 x 10^37 J. The Earth is moving at about 32 km/s. So with that much energy you can accelerate about 1.1 x 10^28 kg to 32 km/s in 1000 years. That's roughly 2000 Earth masses, which is probably a bit on the low side for your Ringworld, but I guess it depends on how strong scrith really is.
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. . . .decades, subjectively! Why would you bother leaving Earth anyway?
Article: There is only one earth.
Bulk of comments: There is no way to travel among the stars! It takes WAY too long! It might take hundred of years to get anywhere! Even if you get to relativistic speeds, that could be . . .
Article: What happens if we perfect anti-aging technologies:
Bulk of comments: There will be too many people! There are no places for them to go! It's already too crowded! Besides, if you had hundreds, or thousands, of years of life, what would you DO with all that time, anyway?
. . .
The only thing is missing, currently, is an article on fusion energy, whereby the bulk of commenters wonder why you would need fusion-levels of energy, and what on earth could possibly use that level of energy output. . .
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
More like likely his model spits out some function of probability of Earth like and life. Even if that value is ridiculously low, and at a glance might seem to be more less zero, the fact is that the Universe is big. Incomprehensibly big. Big enough that any value that isn't absolute zero pretty much guarantees the existence. It may not be very prevalent, and it probably involves distances that pretty much for all intents and purposes makes it a moot academic point, but simply by the sheer scale of it all combined with some value of significance makes it almost a certainty (literately, because we do exist unless you want to get really weird about simulations and philosophy or whatever).
The fact that his computer model denies Earth's existence, doesn't give him pause? I've never been that confident a programmer.
Seriously? If your model can't predict earth itself, then your model is wrong.
Perhaps your model is a missing some element.
Once your model properly predicts earth, then talk to us about what the rest of the universe is like.
Obviously I need to RTFA, because the summary seems to say the theory predicts no life on earth.
Last I checked, there was, which rather disproves it.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.