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Researchers Say The Aliens Are Silent Because They Are Extinct (theconversation.com)
HughPickens.com writes: The Conversation reports that according to research by Dr. Charles Lineweaver and Dr. Aditya Chopra, a plausible solution to Fermi's paradox is near universal early extinction of life on exoplanets, which they have named the Gaian Bottleneck. "The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens," says Chopra. "The mystery of why we haven't yet found signs of aliens may have less to do with the likelihood of the origin of life or intelligence and have more to do with the rarity of the rapid emergence of biological regulation of feedback cycles on planetary surfaces." According to the researchers, most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable. About four billion years ago, Earth, Venus and Mars may have all been habitable. However, a billion years or so after formation, Venus turned into a hothouse and Mars froze into an icebox. Even if wet rocky Earth-like planets are in the "Goldilocks Zone" of their host stars, it seems that runaway freezing or heating may be their default fate. Large impactors and huge variation in the amounts of water and greenhouse gases can also induce positive feedback cycles that push planets away from habitable conditions. The difference on Earth may be that as soon as life became widespread on our planet, the earliest metabolisms began to modulate the greenhouse gas composition of the atmosphere. "The emergence of life's ability to regulate initially non-biological feedback mechanisms could be the most significant factor responsible for life's persistence on Earth, conclude Lineweaver and Chopra. "Even if life does emerge on a planet, it rarely evolves quickly enough to regulate greenhouse gases, and thereby keep surface temperatures compatible with liquid water and habitability."
It's a fucking good reason to be silent, I admit.
Achille Talon
Hop!
The mystery of why we haven't yet found signs of aliens may have less to do with the likelihood of the origin of life or intelligence and have more to do with the rarity of the rapid emergence of biological regulation of feedback cycles on planetary surface
Monty Python
.. I mean It's the distance .. the distance
err
"Frastra In the fire storms of Frastra, they say, life begins at 40,000 degrees." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Or extinct because their suns have died. Either or.
"Even if life does emerge on a planet, it rarely evolves quickly enough to regulate greenhouse gases......"
Rarely? What is the sample size for the statistics?
"In the long run, we are all dead'. - John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform
That's what that means, right?
born too late to explore earth
born in a universe where the laws of physics prohibits space exploration and communication with aliens
feels bad man
'Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.'
Aliens are just outside our drawing distance duh!!
Why we present conclusions to research that yields no results is beyond me.
Coupled with the odds of being alive and intelligent at the right time ...) long enough.
and putting in the resources to make one noticeable (large laser irradiating the sun, dyson sphere,
I'm not really that surprised there is yet another plausible factor that makes it hard.
A good theory I read about somewhere is that the reason we can not find evidence is simply to do with technology either other alien cultures at the point in time we are witnessing there systems have not developed the technology that we can detect or they have moved beyond the need to blast everything in the entire em spectrum out to space.
How many years have we been detectable by other races and how many years left until our technology gets efficient enough that any trace of our race gets hidden by been simply cleaner with our em pollution.
Will we cease to exist to other races out there when we become undetectable?
They can be built around any reasonably stable star (especially very long-lived red dwarfs) which has some rubble to rebuild into spacious habitations. No need to seek a proper star or habitable/terraformable planet. No need to genetically warp ourselves or live in underground tunnels like morlocks. The Colonies provide the perfect living conditions for the builder species.
Communication networks are likely via line-of-sight laser or some means we can't comprehend, so there's no transmissions for us to pick up. Hundreds of millions in number around each star, they're still too wispy to show up at distance as much more than asteroid fields or protoplanet belts. Being self-sufficient, it's no big deal when one colony decides to make the long, slow journey to the next uninhabited star. There, they get busy populating the colonies pre-built by robots sent ahead. The universe is old enough that there has been time for every star in the galaxy to be homesteaded by now.
We can get started by dismantling our own moon for material, moving on to Mercury and Mars's moons (planets are too big and unhealthy for our biology) until all of the available floating rock has been utilized. The colonies aren't made of girders and sheet steel. They're built by sintering crushed rock in the beam of focused sunlight, building up the superstructure like a gargantuan 3D printer. To simplify energy collection, the second or third generation of colonies are probably towed close to the sun, to minimize the size of PV panels needed.
Just some of the things that had to happen for us to be where we are now:
1) Life had to evolve
2) Multicelluar life had to evolve (this took a billion years after life itself arose so is probably not a forgone conclusion)
3) Life had to climb out of the oceans (dolphins might be smart but they won't be building any rockets with their flippers anytime soon)
4) Suitable intelligence had to evolve. Had it not been for the asteroid the dinosaurs would still be in charge.
5) Humans had to survive numerous climate changes and if the genetics is to be believed we almost died out and everyone today comes from a very small population who made it.
6) Farming had to be created to allow people to do something other than hunting and gathering.
7) For the industrial revolution plenty of freely available energy had to be lying around near the surface - ie coal. You can't melt iron with wood fires.
8) Someone had to invent radio.
I'm sure there are dozens of other things that could fit inbetween those points but my basic point is that a technological civilisation than can broadcast information out from his own planey is very VERY unlikely. IMO we could well be the only one surrounded by planets full of the equivalents of bacteria and jellyfish but little more.
Possibly controversial.
Maybe all species have to survive corporate ogligargies, climate deniers and nuclear nitwits? That by the time a species overcomes the various forms of slavery imposed on them, the propaganda that is used to combat science and control them, it's too late and thier world starts killing them as they are finally subjected to an decline in birth rates because they were too stuipid to understand that no engineering can survive long enough to contain the radionuclides that will eventually destroy their own genome.
Maybe we're the only race of beings smart enough to get these things right or maybe it's just our turn. Who knows?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I think there are two other points to consider: First, life and even intelligent life does not necessarily mean technology, or technology at an industrial scale. Maybe just THIS is very, very rare, with civilisations going this way separated by enormous gulfs of time and space. And maybe the universe is full of planets with aliens that have some sophisticated culture, but not at an technological scale that would lead to us being able to detect them.
Then there's the bottleneck of how long a species can sustain a lifestyle of full-scale industrial technology. Without forking out into space as soon as they can resources will be depleted very soon and then it's too late. Either that culture will end then or will (have to) become much more efficient and low-key, which again lowers the chances of us detecting anything.
I mean, one very useful aspect of thinking about this is thinking about what is going on here, not there. How long can we sustain this and what do we have to do to sustain it? Maybe we will learn how things tend to go with industrial-scale technological civilisations very quickly, even if too late...
Or National Enquirer ?
That would make them the first species not wiped out by mankind, but by someone else
Without the industrial revolution CO2 may have continued its decline and eventually become too low to support life. 150ppm seems about the range where some plants start dying. We got to 180 ppm. Digging up an burning coal helped raise this amount back to a sustainable level.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The most likely fate of an "intelligent" civilization is to become a very slow brain, capable of fending any threat that is coming its way and capable of maintaining cohesion, which means either not spreading outside its own stellar system or slowing the clock of the brain towards a standstill as information takes more and more time to travel between different stellar systems.
In light of this, sending photons to distant stellar systems is just a waste.
The crazy technological race humans are in is only transient.
Global Warming (TM) killed the aliens!
Gotta get dem grand moniez. There's absolutely no data to base this on. It's all science fiction, a guess. Anyone could make a guess like this and it would be equally valid. No, the real reason aliens haven't contacted us is because they're too busy playing videogames.
Or just as anyone with half a brain already knows, they haven't contacted us because they _don't exist_. Aliens are a sci fi concept, a product of human imagination.
First on the path to extinction. Congrats.
The problem is we don't actually know what to look for. We currently look for worlds where life might be possible that is similar to ours. For all we know the universe is teaming with life but we have no idea how to recognise it as we can't actually get out there and look. It is like looking for a needle in a thousand haystacks when you have no idea what a needle actually looks like or is made of, you could step on it and have no idea you found it.
Aliens just don't want to contact us... Could you blame them? Who is to say that they use the same forms of communication that we do? How do scientists know that life forms couldn't thrive in hostile environments on exoplanets? Just something to think about.
We don't even listen out for SOS morse messages any more, and that was only around for a hundred years or so.
Any method of contacting an advanced civilisation isn't going to be listened for for more than a few generations before its obsolete and nobody's on the other end anyway. Like trying to send a fax will be in a few decades, or how pagers are all-but-dead, and how the first generation of mobile phones was largely incompatible with modern standardised SIMs, frequencies, codecs, etc.
I don't know what we're looking for, but chances are we aren't going to find it.
A more likely scenario is that there are an uncountable number of very old, very intelligent, alien races out there and we haven't got the intelligence/means to even start detecting them. As for them contacting us or making them selves known to us we're probably not remotely interesting to them.
One or more of races probably came by at some point in our history and decided that either the trilobites, the dinosaurs or, if they came by more recently, the almost intelligent, selfish, greedy warlike "ape things" have got a l-o-n-g way to go before they've evolved to the point they are worth a closer look.
I'll have cycled past at least one nest of ants this morning (probably 100s). If I stopped to have a look at one I'd find it interesting to see what they were doing (I like ants) but I doubt that they would have noticed me and I certainly don't think they would comprehend me or my bicycle.
The idea that humans are either unique, the only sentient life in the universe or important (in universal terms) is simply delusional arrogance by minds too small to even begin to comprehend the sheer vastness of it all.
Intelligent life is everywhere in the universe - apart from where politicians gather !
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
They only consider life that would survive in an Earth Zoo or Aquarium.
The Extremophiles would happily exist on planets that they'd ignore. And who says that a colony of bacteria or alien version of it couldn't develop an intelligence? Or even sophisticated intelligence?
It's like these guys watched to much Star Trek or Star Wars - or some other shitty hollywood action adventure western in space. Arthur C. Clark explored some quite credible variations of life in his works.
If life arises at all, it stands to reason that evolution would take hold and life would either adapt to the environment or adapt the environment to suit it.
Even these researchers don't understand the concept of time on a galactic scale. We've been around for a mere fraction of a second in terms of time scale. We haven't been around long enough for aliens to find us, or us to find them. It's why endeavors like SETI are, well, a waste of time.
Maybe that might be part of the difficulty finding intelligent life in the galaxy, though I'd bet it has far more to do with our "technology". We've been making what any interplanetary species would call "progress" (biomedical research, electronics, spaceflight, high energy) for only about 100 years. A species that has had a thousand years, ten thousand years or more time has probably long since moved on from EM for communications. Expecting aliens to be using radio & lasers is like expecting that we would still be using smoke signals.
Life is highly resilient/adaptable, earth itself went through at least five mass extension events. It doesn’t seem to be, by any measure, a game of chance.
And maybe they are silent just because they are “silent”
I don’t understand why everyone clings on the medieval assumption that advanced civilization will have a big footprint, which is a lot of noise and waste, or either spread far and wide in the universe like diseases?
If you just observe our own recent technological evolution, we go for smaller, more efficient, highly targeted communication/broadcasting, lower the waste (well not there yet but we are aware). If you just project our own latest technological evolution a few hundred or thousands years in the future, the likelihood is high that we will be under high constrain to become extremely efficient and therefore difficult to be spotted from afar, at least with our current level of technology.
"Researchers make wild ass fucking guess" because that's pretty much all it is when you have a sample size of one.
In this case I'd assert that the person sitting next to you on the bus has nearly the same chance of being right, so clothing their opinion in the false-authority of calling them researchers is rather misleading.
-Styopa
We're pretty early on in the game. It's been just about two decades since we've confirmed our first findings of exoplanets and we're finding revelations about solar systems and planet building that are even understandable by the man on the street. As much as we do sky surveys the actual search for life has been mostly a humdrum effort. And in the next couple of years NASA plans to launch a space telescope that's going to put our current understanding of exoplanets firmly on its ear.
I think we're a bit premature in making grand statements like this. What we think we know today will likely be considered elementary and childish by what we will know in another two decades. Let the science play out a bit more. We're judging an album by the first 3 seconds of the opening track.
Hell, we didn't even have firm evidence of the Kuiper Belt 25 years ago.
It's Slashdot, so of course the editors can't make the Headline match the Story.
The story states that intelligence life would not have EMERGED.
The headline states that intelligence life would become EXTINCT.
Try harder, new boys.
Its really hard for me to believe in this but i'll do the research on this..
For four billion years, life on Earth was microscopic blobs of goo.
Then 600 million years ago - BAM - complex life emerged pretty much in the blink of an eye.
We have no idea how likely that transition to complex life 600 million years ago was - we have a sample size of ONE.
Now go back an read my first sentence: For four billion years, life on Earth was microscopic blobs of goo.
That four billion years was about half the expected lifetime of the Earth. The probability that complex life evolves may very well be infinitesimally small. WE DON'T KNOW.
Believing the universe must be teeming with intelligence is based on nothing more than faith.
Could ants detect signs of human civilization from their ant hill in the forest? Probably not, but this doesn't change the fact that human civilization exists, and side from occasional lawn extermination are largely unconcerned with ants.
We are not contacted because our civilization is likely not at all unique and not at all interesting to entities capable of contacting us.
Why do we constantly project human problems onto every conceivable notion of life elsewhere?
Why would an alien race need to regulate greenhouse gases? Oh right, because we project our political agendas on everything, and assume that life anywhere else must be exactly the same as life here.
That's just complete and utter nonsense. There is no reason to believe that life somewhere else could not exist in an environment with "unregulated" greenhouse gases. And, besides, greenhouse gases on Earth are also largely unregulated, evidenced by the paleo-record of CO2 concentration being all over the map, and having almost zero correlation with temperature anyway.
This sounds an awful lot like the discussion surrounding habitable planets 25 years ago. There really wasn't enough to raise the discourse above idle speculation because we were dealing with a sample of one (the solar system). The situation wasn't much better shortly after the discovery of exoplanets since the sample was incredibly biased.
The situation for planetary atmospheres is similar today. We have an incredibly small sample of planets where we have studied the atmosphere in any detail (again, the solar system) and hints about the atmospheres of a highly biased sample of exoplanets. Give it another decade or two, and maybe we will have a basis to speculate on the habitability of extrasolar planets ... but that certainly isn't the case today.
i hear the nsa is data minng space too{aliens aren't impressed}
not just that , but to have earth with the mnerals and ingredients , we needed the previous 9.3 billion years and at least one other larger star to go POOF and then we reform our system.....
add to that if the dinsaurs had of survived and that asteroid had not wped htem out we would not be here what might , might not be as smart as you all think, they now say intelligence is not always the way to survive , being big and bad might be long enough until your all wiped out or die off
If it isn't greater than one, your blowing smoke out your ass.
Even here on earth, there are simply more failures than successes..... however to assume that all intelligent life in the universe other than ourselves is extinct and that is the reason we haven't located them or they haven't located us....is pure hubris.
I'd think it far more likely that the fact that the universe is flippin huge and we have no clue what to even look for, might be the bigger problem at hand.
Even if there were advanced civilizations on only 1% of all the planets, that would still be millions or more.
To believe there are no other advanced civilizations out there, that they are somehow obligated to come pay us a visit, or that they blew themselves up, is pretty fucking arrogant of us.
When you move into a new neighborhood and the neighbors don't come to visit you, that doesn't mean they don't exist
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The authors couldn't resist yet another attempt to flog Warmist theory in this paper, but their argument can be applied to any environmental effect that occurs when the technological capabilities of a species become "large" in comparison to its planet.
Gotta love unverifiable assumptions on top of other unverifiable assumptions. If only we had some sort of documented testimony of someone who could actually explain life's origin. Just 4 independant accounts would be plenty.
Are these researchers high school drop outs? Sound like a group of climate change religion fanatics trying to push their religion.
Perhaps other 'civilisations' are smarter than we are, realised the dangers of living sustainably, realised the danger that access to energy brings and were smart enough to live sustainably, in a more 'amish' like existence.
So many declarations of faith here. It's true though the declarations come masked as scientific sounding rationalizations about why no advanced alien civilizations have bothered to come visit us, but the conviction found in the tone of many of the posts here is identical to the tone of evangelicals explaining the wondrous paradise that awaits the faithful when they shed their mortal coils and ascend to Heaven. Truly inspiring.
They're just pining for the fjords. They're merely resting, due to bein' tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk.
Doesn't anyone else remember Lovelock and the Gaia hypothesis? I think his books on Gaia were very popular back in the late 1980's
It is of course not the Deepak Chopra but, thanks to him, that name will for a long time be associated with New Age nonsense.
For live to have a chance, the planet has to have a large body which shields from periodic life-wiping asteroids hitting it. Every crater on the moon was caused by something hitting it which would wipe life on earth if the moon's gravitation didn't pull it in. Because the moon is far enough from earth and rotates quickly around it, it's able to attract most of the asteroids with a stronger gravitational pull than the earth's pull.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Or all the Aliens reached the End Game long time ago and we are the few who still try to finish it...
They don't communicate because they have uploaded themselves into a universe far richer and more fulfilling than this one, leaving behind only ASI guardians who only care about protecting and providing resources for their uploaded charges. If they wanted to communicate, they would, but they don't care about us, or anyone else. Just don't try to destroy them and they will leave you alone.
Also, they likely discovered much more advanced energy production or much more efficient computation technology, meaning they have no need to devour stars to fuel their virtual worlds (something we would be able to see).
A huge thing I don't see being brought up here is what is sometimes referred to as the 'transcendence theory.' Maybe I'm butchering it a bit, but here's the gist of it:
The reason we don't see alien life is because we are looking for the wrong thing (many touched on this point but there's more.) Traveling between stars/planets etc. takes massive amounts of energy and time (even at the speed of light.) This proposal theorizes that as intelligent life advances, it will try to be more efficient and do everything on a smaller scale (instead of larger.) Imagine a video game like the Sims, etc. An entire world stored on something the size of a computer (or smaller.) With the ideas we're already tackling now (uploading your mind to a computer,) why would you not propose that a more advanced civilization has already accomplished this? From an energy standpoint, it makes sense to travel inward not outward. Intelligent alien life has miniaturized itself, not foolishly wasted energy trying to cross galaxies.
When you move into a new neighborhood and the neighbors don't come to visit you, that doesn't mean they don't exist
True but usually you can see some signs that there are neighbours there such as hearing their car or the music they are playing. In our case we have not heard anything so either we are not listening in the right way, they make practically no 'noise' or they don't exist at least close by. However I completely agree that detailed, but wild, speculation like this is a waste of time because it adds nothing to the discussion since they provide no firm evidence to support the conjecture.
The universe is still very young by cosmological time scales.
The evolutionary timescale is the one that matters for the development of life and based on our sample of one this seems to be a lot, lot shorter than cosmological timescales although getting to the multi-cellular stage took a while so it is possible we were just lucky.
We have not progress enough as an civilization to warrant introduction in the galactic community, we have people in 2016 that thinks socialism is an fine idea.
The universe is full of life. The building blocks of life self assemble. 300 billion stars in the milky way galaxy alone, 300 billion galaxies. Do the math. Its the sheer size of the universe keeps us apart. Even traveling at light speed, which the universal speed limit, would be too slow for any species to explore any significant portion of the universe, This is probably a good thing, because it naturally prevents intergalactic wars from happening. Intelligent life, if it anything like our own, seems to want control, expand and consume more resources as it evolves.
Unbelievable amount of anthropomorphism going on here. Did they speak English too? Try watching a little less Star Trek.
Consider this: particle physics shows us that entangled observation (not to be confused with human or intelligent observation) ties past and future events together into a causative vector of influence.
Extrapolating from this using entangled observation similar to Einstein-Rosen bridges between quantum events suggests (mathematically) that there is a correlation between frames of references in real-space once a chain of events is initiated.
This would have the effect of linking independent causative frames such that the 'arrow of time' would diverge, probabilistically, between relative frames.
Or, attempting to explain this analogically:
The light from a distant star contains a tremendous amount of observable information about a star, and a limited amount of information about exoplanets (Doppler shift, chronographic direct imaging, etc...). As technology advances, however, it should be possible to tease out (observe) direct evidence of extrasolar life from this meager data due changes over time to how life changes a planetary atmosphere (specific to biome, but similar divergence vectors).
Depending on how one interprets causative entangled observation, this could actually have a strong anthropic effect on life. Evidence that alien life, intelligent or not, exists on an exoplanet would strongly influence the actions of any intelligent species towards visiting and exploring the planet. This would be very close to a strong motivational influence towards any intelligent social network, yielding a high probability outcome of events.
Depending on distance between planets and assuming that technological development is generally rapid, there becomes a high probability chance that any technological species would, inadvertently, directly affect the development (probably adversely) of all emergent evolutionary biomes within observational range.
As a species matures, they would probably realize this at some point, and take one of two divergent vectors: Some level of apathy (no empathy, just settle habitable planets or destroy competition) or avoidance (let them develop, don't interfere). Extrapolating those two motivational vectors, it's likely that there are those that would visit for nefarious reasons, and likely that there are those that would seek to prevent that type of interference due to social morays based on the above principles.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Posting to undo mod.
This is pretty much what Baxter hypothesized in Manifold: Space - an excellent hard sci-fi novel.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Aliens are silent because they don't use radio waves to communicate.
* Our usage of radio waves as a species is extremely short in a cosmological time frame.
* If we discover a better medium of communication (gravity waves?), we would quickly stop using radio waves.
This is not a theory, not even science, but sheer speculation. Proving it would not be possible because such an experiment cannot be carried out, let alone be reproduced. A simulation is not possible either due to the complexity of the systems involved. And words are cheap.
We are there yet.
We have millions of years of history with no evidence of civilization developing; the dinosaurs were around for 165 million years, and the current era is only 65 million years old. So the dinosaurs had 100 million more years to develop civilization that we have, and they didn't leave a bunch of debris on the moon for us to find.
If the odds of life developing are less than 1 in 100 billion, and judging from the number of lifeforms that have existed on the planet that haven't developed civilization, not an unreasonable number, there might be 1 other civilization in the galaxy. At 1 in 100 billion, we could well be the only civilization in the Local Group. Once you get past the galaxy, the relevance of alien civilization pretty much approaches null.
all suck.
Why does slashdot connect to ntv.io
http://www.downtownlongbeach.org/Business-info/Nativo-Inc
http://www.nativo.net/
https://www.easywhois.com/
This isn't a story on aliens. This is a story on greenhouse gases and some guy that I am sure will want funding to study "regulating" it. Thinly veiled native advertising for his cause.
It has been theorized that organisms based on solvents other than water may exist. These may be able to exist on planets outside of the goldilocks zone. Why aren't we expanding our search?
yesterdays news, dumbed down: a web site that no longer matters
This is a very important area of study and will tell us a lot about our future.
There are 4 broad possibilities:
1) The galaxy is teaming with advanced intelligent life and we just can't detect it.
2) There are not many earth like planets
3) On any given earth like planet the probability of intelligent life evolving is extremely small
4) Intelligent life never leaves its home world and doesn't last very long.
4 is looking like the most likely answer to the Fermi's paradox.
1 seems unlikely. If we increase our energy consumption at just 0.1% a year for part of the next million years we would be pretty easy to spot. 2 is looking very unlikely, we see planets everywhere we are able to look. If 3 is also incorrect we had better start being very careful about what we do because the chances of us lasting another couple thousand years would be pretty small.
Successful organisms adapt to the environment or become unsuccessful. The development of feedback systems is a by product of evolution. Most life forms on this little speck of rock have gone extinct, but some are still here evolving our little asses off. People who write studies should read them before publishing.
JoeR
About four billion years ago, Earth, Venus and Mars may have all been habitable.
That's when they were created.
Things were quite messy back then.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
they don't talk to babies. The period of time a civilization will use radio is only a few hundred years at most. The period of time a civilization is at the stage where they can relate to us without disrupting our civilization is only a few thousand years. The odds are that there are no other civilization at the right stage within communication distance.
You know, it might be a great idea to make it so the first post has to be a declared user. No ACs for first post.
Writing articles on why we don't see ET not need spicing up?
Add global warming issues to make them more fundable.
Every species has its own evolution path. There were many species before us, that at that time looked like the winner, say dinosaurs, what would had happen if other species instead of following their own path will had adopted/copied them?
I think many civilizations, like species, are doomed to “fail” while others will choose a different path and move forward, yet maybe to fail in the a next step. Life if anything is about diversity and walking your own path just a thought.
So if a planet in the Goldilocks zone is usually destined to freezing or burning up it seems to suggest a path to terraform Venus. We just need to export an organism that can live there and absorb the CO2 and survive the acidic environment. Some set of microbe that already lives on earth perhaps would fit the bill. Something that could float around in the atmosphere where it isn't quite so hot.
That there is other intelligent life out there but not in a form we are used to and that doesn't use things we are familiar with? Maybe the advanced species is as small as ants and travel through dark matter using light to communicate. Maybe it exists in a dimension we can't comprehend. Maybe it is extinct or has evolved to a point that it is just undetectable as life? Maybe it evolved to a point where it recognized it's own limitations and capabilities for destruction where it just accepted the natural course of things and eventually faded. Maybe it exists in a part of the Universe we have limited capabilities to examine. It is very naive to think that just because we haven't found it that it isn't out there. It is also very arrogant to think that our understandings of things demand that they take a form we demand.
Aliens are just too busy watching alien porn to care.
The sad thing is I'm probably right.
After all those years and all those folks with huge credentials went on record, we are still pushing this demiurge crap? Good jobs human masters, you doing well!
Chances are, the conservatives among them ignored the warnings of impending climate change, they maintained their status quo and trajectory, and they made their planet uninhabitable for their species.
The planet doesn't even notice that they're gone.
Just like climate science research. Faked results. Faked questions. Faked procedures. Shame on these people.
Aliens likely have discovered more advanced forms of communication that are faster than light. They wouldn't use radio or other EM spectrum forms of communication and that is probably why we haven't heard anything.
Say you have two antennas, one sitting 1 mile from a 100kW (maximum allowed power for radio in the US) radio broadcast tower and one sitting on a relatively close planet 100 lightyears away. The ratio of the difference in intensity will be 2.9E-30. In other words, only a handful of photons actually reach the antenna placed on the exoplanet, certainly not enough to generate any kind of recognizable signal. THERE IS NO PARADOX. We're simply too far away.
In addition to that, the earth is becoming radio silent as we shift from broadcast towers to low power communication and internet. It's pretty likely aliens would do the same thing, meaning there will be only brief periods of radio emanating from worlds where intelligent life forms. We've only been listening for a couple decades. Pretty unlikely that our period of listening would coincide with an alien world's period of broadcast and that we would actually be close enough to collect any signal.
I submit that there is no paradox here. It's all a consequence of being too far apart, radio signals attenuating (inverse square law), and brief periods of popularity for mass broadcast technologies followed by radio silence as internet/other tech replaces it. Makes total sense.
There's a much simpler answer.
We didn't have the *capability* of listening or talking (controlled radio transmissions) to anybody off world until less than 100 years ago.
Today, thanks to digital transmission and spread spectrum transmission, our transmissions look like noise unless you already know how it is encoded. Additionally, we're transmitting at much lower power levels than we used to.
If that's a typical scenario for an advanced technology (and we have no reason to believe it isn't), then we could have intelligent neighbors 20 lightyears away, and the odds that we'd ever have pointed a radio dish in their direction while they were pumping out detectable levels of radio transmissions that were obviously *not* noise would be vanishingly small. They may have hit the noise stage before we even knew what radio was. They may start transmitting clear radio in 100 years, and spend the next 30 years getting to the 'noise' stage. Unless we happened to point a dish at them in *that* specific 30 year span, we'd never know.
Think of it this way. You're looking for someone to turn on a light that's a specific shade of blue, somewhere within sight. You don't know where. You don't know when. You don't even know *if* it will happen. To top it off, your view is restricted to looking down a drinking straw. If you're not looking in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, you're never going to see it. The light may have flipped on and off for a minute *last week*, before you had invented the drinking straw. Or it may go off tonight while you're in bed. Or 50 years from now when you're in the ground.
I always figured it was because radio waves get exponentially weaker as distance increases. Or maybe because space is really fucking big and mostly empty. But sure, maybe the aliens are all dead now, too.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Last week there was a story of Elon Musk saying there was high odds that our universe is a simulation. Maybe this is the "no aliens" simulation.
We are in an overshoot scenario now (and have been since the 1980's so it's too late to do anything about).
In the near future, we'll exhaust a lot of industrial metals at the same time. Unless we find replacements for all of them at the same time, the most likely result will be a greatly lowered carrying capacity and much more expensive (and so lower) industrial capacity. It's likely to be combined with civil unrest and a mass die off.
For example, we used as much chromium in 2014 as we did from 1900 to 2000 combined (it's likely to be exhausted at reasonable prices in our lifetime).
Since it's so common for species to overbreed their environments here on earth, I think it's a likely scenario on any other planet as well. I think it would be pretty common for species to hit this wall too hard before they get past it technologically. So the universe may be full of planets with fallen civilizations and a couple billion intelligent beings looking up at but unable to reach the stars.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The "paradox" they're worrying about simply doesn't exist. If you assume the universe is full of intelligent life, you expect to see exactly what we've seen: nothing. The distances involved are just too huge. Barring some major new revelation about the laws of physics, humans are never going to be traveling throughout the galaxy. At best we might send small, unmanned probes to a few nearby stars. There could be thousands of advanced civilizations scattered through our galaxy right now, and we'd have no way of knowing about them. They'd be invisible in the ocean of 100 billion stars, with no way to talk to each other and not much reason to even try.
As Douglas Adams put it: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
We know the composition of earth roughly of its crust average, and the expected materials to find. Basically, nobody before us mined anything whatsoever. Neither iron, rare earth, radioactive materials, copper or anything remotely useful for a civilization, we basically find what we expect where we expect. So that leaves out advanced tech. Now there could have been an intelligent specie of dinosaur on the level of say nomadic hunter (primitive / no advanced tech) gatherer we'll never know as we found no traces whatsoever of them.
TL;DR : even if our city disappear there will be some traces of us if only by what one would *expect* to find and do not find, what we removed.
In atmosphere you can generate easily exothermic reactions and thus have tools. In ocean you cannot easily maybe some rare hot vent but even those do not go very high in temperature, and without protection I am guessing such a specie would find the contact very painful. So you have a problem of kickstarting the tools. That's why ocean intelligent specie getting out are more like idea ->????->profit : it waves over some intractable problems. In any likelyhood such a specie would have to evolve amphibian or into an oxydant atmosphere (be it oxygen or something else) before even starting with tools.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Our initial signals were mostly omnidirectional , so what we blasted went into 1/r^2 in intensity. Needless to say it did not go beyond a few dozen au before being lower in intensity than random galatic/solar noise in the same frequence. If you were on alpha centauri 4 light years away you would not detect us with a SETI programs. All those "alien caught our tv signal and found us" stories/films are bullshit. The truth is that SETI can only detect intentional signal. And how many such intentional signal have we made ? If I recall correctly at most in the last 40 years about 2 hours directed at M2 or M10 of directional highly powered radio signal. that's it. And that is the only signal somebody elsewhere could detect (and it was highly directional).
"How many years have we been detectable by other races" : Not year, not month, not days : we have sent detectable signal for a few hours about.. The fermi paradox is more that we cannot detect anything but there is a solution to that paradox : we cannot detect anything because it is frigging hard to detect signals or send some. And nobody bothers sending "I am here" due to the cost and the very low probability of getting any answer.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Okay it's not really the Omega molecule from Star Trek Voyager but it's possible that interstellar travel via spacial warping has like a 99% chance of destroying the planet or pushing it out or orbit or something. That or the energy required is so dangerous, it could blow up a planet, which current math suggests is very plausible. So eventually all aliens blow themselves up via common technologies based on similar physics of how the universe works in all cases.
I've got an idea. Piss off with your speculation that's not backed by science. Thank you, carry on.
It does seem "lucky" that the Earth has remained relatively stable temperature-wise for roughly 4 billion years.
I was always curious about this fact. I generally attributed it to some kind of negative feedback mechanism whereby if it drifts too far in either direction, then a "feedback factor(s)" kicks in to correct it.
But so far no consistent factors(s) have been identified that I know of. The chemistry of Earth's upper layers has changed a few times such that a correction mechanism that works under one chemical configuration often doesn't work well in another. (And life seems to eventually learn to gobble up excess and change things yet again.)
One consistent factor that's been proposed is that if the Earth becomes completely frozen over, water insulates volcanic heat enough that it eventually triggers higher than usual volcanic action, blowing dark, energy-absorbing dust onto the surface, melting the ice.
But, this requires just the right amount of volcanic action: too little and the dust-ice-melt scenario doesn't happen, and too much and we get more mass extinction events.
Civilization may just be rare and we may just have won the cosmic lottery.
It does seem a bit if a coincidence that we are in a smaller-than-normal galactic cluster. The law of averages should put us in a medium or large one (Copernican principle). This suggests a filter of some kind.
It's possible that civilizations form fairly often in large galactic clusters and conquer or absorb any competitors. We may just be too rural to be worth messing with and/or found.
If we had formed in a larger cluster, which statistically we should have, we'd be conquered or absorbed by now and wouldn't be here wondering why we are alone.
Based on this line of speculation, civilizations (C) arise approximately once in small galactic clusters and a few times in larger ones. If C were more common, we'd wouldn't be alone, and if C were less common, we'd be in a larger cluster.
I believe this a natural "statistical" conclusion of the known facts that 1) we are alone, and 2) we are in a small galactic cluster.
(There is still "zoo theory" that aliens keep us protected but hide from us.)
Table-ized A.I.
It was not 'Christianity' that had an iron grip on the continent - it was Homoousian Catholicism. Wiki that.
researchers hypothosize this every few years
since the Vimana days 6000+ years ago
and here we are on slashdot again, with a 400 comment article
Perhaps the aliens think we are dumb piss ants?
Do I go out of my way to pay attention to the piss ant on the ground in my daily routine?
Perhaps we are actually that unimportant?
What's to be gained, information-wise, by exploring the wider universe? Once you've figured out the laws of nature, and see they apply everywhere, there's not much point in examining chunks of rock other than the one you're sitting on. Entertainment, on the other hand, the creation of limitless novel fantasy universes, might be where all sentient beings are headed. So maybe advanced civilizations just aren't interested in colonizing the galaxy, or communicating with it.
The aliens knowing that they've received a sentient-species-transmission, and then more importantly, deciphering and understanding it is another order higher in requirements for successful communication, but pales compared to the sheer vastness of space. Due to distance, interference, evolution and power requirements the odds are against:
Consider we've been transmitting into space for 121 years so far, that encompasses (from what I can find on stars within 100 ly) something like 10,000 stars. A response at that point takes effectively two and a half centuries to return, so for all intents and purposes they should be considered extinct, while being a mathematical possibility. And that's at the speed of light, not at the speed of Voyager.
Communication networks are likely via line-of-sight laser or some means we can't comprehend, so there's no transmissions for us to pick up.
Spectrum is a limited resource. The more efficiently it is used, the more the resulting signal looks like thermal noise.
Early modulation schemes (CW, AM) were simple, sending extremely redundant signals. These would survive substantial noise and be recognizable, even at interstellar distances.
Thanks to the enormously improved price-performance of modern electronics, a lot of computation can be thrown at constructing and decoding waveforms that can squeeze the most out of the spectrum - and we have enough information to send to make it worthwhile. So modern modulation schemes (ODFM, CDMA, and other spread-spectrum techniques) look almost like noise - with a tiny bit of redundancy to synchronize the decoders at the receiving end. If you don't know what you're looking for, or there's just a little to much noise (for instance, if you're just a little to far away from the transmitter to recover the pilot signals) the rest of the signal might as well be thermal gibberish.
Heck, some of them (like CDMA) work by convolving the information with a pseudo-random "spreading function" to make it look JUST like noise if you can't regenerate the same pseudo-random function. Then they share the spectrum by using different spreading functions, so on decoding their signal "piles up" into something intelligible that rises out of the "grass" while the competing signals just get mushed around, changing from one pile of random junk to another.
So my preferred solution to the Fermi Paradox is that, a very short time (like a century or so) after a new civilization becomes detectable by radio signals, it doesn't necessarily die out, but does becomes UNdetectable again, as its radio technology improves beyond recognition at a distance.
Thus there's no need to assume, as TFA apparently does, that (oh HORROR!) virtually every civilization that made it to an industrial revolution immediately made their planet uninhabitable by intelligent (or any) life and died off. (Or fell victim to anti-technological environmentalists and reverted to freezing in the dark and not having the energy to transmit detectable radio signals.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"So my preferred solution to the Fermi Paradox is that, a very short time (like a century or so) after a new civilization becomes detectable by radio signals, it doesn't necessarily die out, but does becomes UNdetectable again, as its radio technology improves beyond recognition at a distance."
I agree, and this same argument was made a couple of decades ago as humans transitioned to cabled transmissions from transmission of tv and radio over the air. The overall level of radio energy broadcast into space was thought to be dropping. Wifi and cellular phones seem to have flipped that trend again, at least for now. However, the way we use radio now possibly makes our transmissions less detectable over great distances. They'd just be seen as peaks in several bandwidths. Alien skeptics can probably find plenty of reasons to explain these as natural phenomena, lol.
Would we want to communicate with amoebas ?
"I've been listening, but I can't hear anyone talking on the other side of the mountain."
"I know ... that's because there's nobody over there."
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
is they're doing everything they can to keep their crazy ass neighbors, ( that's us ) who kill each other out of boredom, from noticing them.
You probably have one on your street. The crazy family you do everything you can NOT to interact with ?
Not that I can blame them. A species that can't even get along with themselves have no place in the rest of the universe. Better to let us die off from our own stupidity.
On a psychological level, what motivates us? The thirst for knowledge is a big one. An intelligent species without a thirst for knowledge might simply not have any motivation to visit the stars. It might not know its star is going to explode one day and thus have no real motivation to get off of that planet onto somewhere else to the sake of the species.
Who said that aliens must have similar environmental parameters like humans so? Why can't there be some kind of alien form that requires extreme heat or cold? And maybe there's aliens who might be living not in air/oxygen but in solid rock or metals. Who knows? You need to have a more open mind about this.
because it would show that the Great Filter (such as a planet-killing industrial accident) is not in front of us.
Ahh,I presume these "researchers" have an ftl drive and/or a time machine ?
Oh no,their just like the rest of us,making guesses from not very much data..
Because people take it as cannon whatever our scientists say as fact, just because we [Humans] haven't achieved something yet that aliens have done already or now saying they are 'extinct' because we haven't heard from them yet. But seeing all the UFO sightings, etc. say otherwise!
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
A favorite recording artist shared this explanation he got from an astrophysicist friend: It might be an oversimplification, but it works for me. https://youtu.be/sNGUkdovn_8
The aliens came down and ... saw Trump! Then said "Shhhhh! Be silent! This species is worth avoiding! They'll be extinct soon anyway."
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
realito nonsense
Had the Horrorworld Scenario not occurred to them?
As a disabled person, I've experienced no small amount of prejudice. And I've figured out that the reason we're pretty much terrible is because of five biological imperatives which the vast majority of the earth's populace aren't aware of and easily obey. This includes other animals.
Reproduce - This can increase exponentially depending on the success of the species, to the point where the reproduction goes far beyond what's actually sustainable for the host body. This is because this is the base imperative from which all others are formed, it is the very core of life itself.
Consume - The desire to consume to perpetuate one's self, even at the expense of those who may have less access to comestibles. One must sustain and perpetuate one's self in order to have the chance to be healthy, and to breed, to pass on one's genetics. We consume without thinking to increase our breeding chances.
Expand - The need for the above two imperatives results in a constant requirement of new resources. This is why we will stripmine, deforest, and make food out of everything on our planet in order to ensure that we are in a position where we are healthy and able to consume, and in an environment that's suitable for us to breed. This is where the only conservationist element is seen, in that one guards that which is suitable to one's self.
Hoard - The first two imperatives also result in this one, where materials and resources are hoarded for the purpose of perpetuating one's self and those similar to one's self. Especially at the expense of those who aren't like one's self. This gives rise to the excessive distrust of everything unlike one's self as well, as they might take resources away.
Overwrite - That which isn't like us or familiar to us must be overwritten with that which is like us and familiar to us. Often, this is because that which is like us also has resource requirements and their unlike us status results in a negative bias toward them. Easier to overwrite them with us than to share.
What this results in is a world with the 1 per cent, a world where we will make war with, otherify, and commit genocide upon those unlike us. Where we have apartheids over the most ridiculous things. And where even our animals are constantly ripping and tearing one another apart just to see another day.
Consider that the dominant form of life might be a natural or robotic form of photonic or silicone life, never having seen carbon life. Or perhaps even a form of carbon life that has evolved on a much more tame, peaceful, open-minded, kind world. They would look upon our planet with horror. They would see all the xenophobic people killing one another, they would see how they fear just about everything and how every fear turns into a hatred, then they would just nope, nope, nope right on out of here.
We may not be up to the standards of a galactic civilisation. We might not be for many millions of years. And we may achieve space travel even before we've reached a point where we can (or have) overcome our biological imperatives. That's when we'll likely meet them but largely due to the entirely logical realisation that if we were to actually achieve space travel, we would spread like wildfire across the cosmos, decimating everything.
In the interim, they might just be hiding and biding their time, hoping that we destroy ourselves before we become their problem. Or that perhaps, on a crazy off chance, we figure out how to overcome our biological imperatives. Which seems like as good a reason to create and be conquered by an AI as any, to be honest. As a species, our biological imperatives have made us incredibly terrible, and we've done atrocious, unimaginable things to so many people for no good reason.
Like I said, as a disabled person I am innately acquainted with the most depraved aspects of humanity. And if I were an outsider looking in on all this... Well, unless I were equally as terrible or worse, I wouldn't want anything to do with us.