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Astrophysicist Believes Technologically-Advanced Species Extinguish Themselves (sciencedaily.com)
Why haven't we heard from intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? wisebabo writes:
In the Science Daily article "Where is everybody? The Implications of Cosmic Silence," the retired astrophysicist Daniel Whitmire explains that using the principle of mediocracy (a statistical notion that says, in the absence of more data, that your one data point is likely to be "average"), that not only are we the first intelligent life on earth but that we will likely be the only (and thus the last) intelligent life on this planet... Unfortunately that isn't the worst of it.
Coupled with the "Great Silence", it implies that the reason we haven't heard from anyone is that intelligent life, when it happens anywhere else in the universe, doesn't last and when it does it flames out quickly and takes the biosphere with it (preventing any other intelligent life from reappearing. Sorry dolphins!). While this is depressing in a very deep sense both cosmically (no Star Trek/Wars/Valerian universes filled with alien civilizations) and locally (we're going to wipe ourselves out, and soon) it is perhaps understandable given our current progress towards reproducing the conditions of the greatest extinction event in earth's history.
That last link (reprinting a New York Times opinion piece) cites the "Great Dying" of 90% of all land-based life in 252 million B.C., which is believed to have been triggered by "gigantic emissions of carbon dioxide from volcanoes that erupted across a vast swath of Siberia." But if we're not headed to the same inexorable doom, that raises an inevitable follow-up question.
If intelligence-driven extinction doesn't explain this great cosmic silence, then what does? Why hasn't our species heard from other intelligent civilizations elsewhere in the universe?
Coupled with the "Great Silence", it implies that the reason we haven't heard from anyone is that intelligent life, when it happens anywhere else in the universe, doesn't last and when it does it flames out quickly and takes the biosphere with it (preventing any other intelligent life from reappearing. Sorry dolphins!). While this is depressing in a very deep sense both cosmically (no Star Trek/Wars/Valerian universes filled with alien civilizations) and locally (we're going to wipe ourselves out, and soon) it is perhaps understandable given our current progress towards reproducing the conditions of the greatest extinction event in earth's history.
That last link (reprinting a New York Times opinion piece) cites the "Great Dying" of 90% of all land-based life in 252 million B.C., which is believed to have been triggered by "gigantic emissions of carbon dioxide from volcanoes that erupted across a vast swath of Siberia." But if we're not headed to the same inexorable doom, that raises an inevitable follow-up question.
If intelligence-driven extinction doesn't explain this great cosmic silence, then what does? Why hasn't our species heard from other intelligent civilizations elsewhere in the universe?
hahaha humans are intelligent. We're everything intelligence shouldn't be, aliens know this and avoid us. nothing to see here.
Why do we care about some guy telling made up stories about extraterrestrial aliens? They're not even interesting stories.
See subject: Better than I ever could (see it if you haven't - you'll love it) /https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE061nUoidY/
* One of my personal "All-Time" favorites!
APK
P.S.=> ... & yes, it is AMAZINGLY on topic... apk
As has already been demonstrated by the permian extinction event, the biosphere can take a hell of a hit, and life will go on.
I think that you really have to understand timescales here. A 100 million years is a long time, just like space is big, really big. So that's a long damn time, and life will go on. intelligent life, maybe not so much.
as for why we haven't heard from anyone, why isn't the simple answer not the best ?
Remember how space is really big ?
if there's no FTL travel, and it's likely there is not, then HOW would we hear from someone ?
It would be an exceedingly difficult thing for the intelligent civilization in the Andromeda galaxy to talk us, and us to them.
First of all, there's the 2,000,000 year latency, and then the amount of power you would need to transmit that signal, etc...
I'm not worried. There's intelligent life elsewhere in the verse. I'm pretty sure we're not going to hear from them any time soon, if ever.
Absolute statements are never true
The universe is just too big to hear anyone else.
Standing on the shore in Spain you couldn't hear anyone shouting from Hispaniola, yet when Columbus landed there he found loads of people. Space is a hell of a lot bigger than the Atlantic Ocean and relatively any radio signal we can send is quieter than the man screaming on the beach in our example. So quit it with the all life will destroy itself pessimism.
Not only is space incomprehensibly vast, but so is time. 16 billion years sounds easy to say, but if an intelligent species only broadcasts "clear", identifiable uncompressed unencrypted radio for ~100 years, then we have only 1 in 160 million chances of finding them with something like SETI.
We have only existed for the blink an eye relative to the age of the universe. Why would be expect to have heard from others?
Every movie and sci fi has an anti-technology and especially an anti-exploration bias ... Now we have an astrophysicist joining in? We won't extinguish ourselves we have many asteroids and planets in our solar system. At some point we will stop f-ing up the environment such as when we switch to solar and nuclear fusion. Food will be synthetic too, so no need to mess around with wildlife. We are the only species to create wildlife sanctuaries and many of us care about other harming others. It's total BS this movement against science.
With respect to the evolution of intelligent life, we have a sample of one.
How anyone can extrapolate the probability of alien intelligence from that one sample is inexplicable.
Other than pulling it out of the rectal database.
fnord
This tells me there never was intelligent life. How intelligent could life be if it seeks to destroy itself AND all the other life forms on the planet?
Dolphins might be intelligent, if they are, wouldn't it be the UNintelligent life, not intelligent life, that wiped them out?
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
So by these principles of mediocrity is all civilised life also bipedal, with two eyes, two arms, and five digits on each extremity?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
https://xkcd.com/638/
Why are we still asking the alien question? Are we so lacking in imagination? We really think aliens will be intelligible to us? Or interested in us?
Most planets with life don't evolve intelligent life. All this time on Earth and it has only happened, essentially, once. Human-level intelligence is actually really metabolically expensive and thus pretty niche, biologically, and most species get stuck in local maximums and will never reach it. On top of that, one needs a long lifespan and the ability to use tools.
IF that link's dead, it's Outer Limits science fiction series episode #16 year 4 (demonstrate why COLD FUSION IS possible Seth...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Exam_(The_Outer_Limits)/
APK
P.S.=> Good THOUGHT provoking stuff... apk
Across several million years, yeah the bulk of large civilizations may just fall to entropy of some crucial resource they can't build past. ...but with sufficient civilization, you'd create artificial intelligences and artificial life.
Those would scale far better over time, and would be far less vulnerable, and across millions of years would be nigh-innevitable.
Even if they're just existing as spores that hop from star-orbit-to-asteroid-to-star-orbit, they'd build up to an enormous mass over time, and be able to try an enormous number of strategies for continuing existence through networking.
The artifacts and legacy of civilization should stand a much greater chance of returning communication over time than just civilization alone.
But perhaps to those creatures, we're the common noise that they have learned to ignore.
Ryan Fenton
You find a nice writeup about the Cosmic Silence and possible reasons for that in Stanislaw Lem's essay "Summa technologiae", published in 1966. Apparently, not much has changed in the last half a century.
We're using AIM and we assume if people have internet connection then they must also use AIM. If we see no one on AIM then there must be no one else with an internet connection.
I'm with the theory that we're just at the beginning of life in this part of the universe. 13.7 billion years from the Big Bang. Multiple generations of star formation and death before getting to our Sun. Then another 4 billion years before complex life. Sounds like it takes awhile for intelligent life to get started.
I don't really know how to say that without going out saying that this guy sounds like a short signed moron. The discover of electromagnetism and eventual radio is a very very recent invention. Like 1800's recent. To suggest that some other species in some other part of the universe would NOT be able to build better communications technology than that is laughable. Eventually given that we're still learning about new about the fundamental structure of the universe.
Now we don't know if we'll every get off this rock, or even if it's even possible for our type of life to leave it's bio sphere. But one thing is almost certain that we don't know everything there is to know now. And to suggest that we will never progress away from radio communications is just ludicrous.
Do you answer every 5 year old you see? Seriously, assuming that there is other intelligent life - more advanced than our own ... why would they care?
We have nothing to offer to the relationship - We bring nothing to the table.
So .. from the perspective of an advanced alien society .. "Carry on.. nothing to see here."
Tim Urban of WaitButWhy explains the Paradox and its various possible causes in great detail here:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
....but they know better not to contact our violent, religious crazed, heartless and fucked up world
The aliens have been here. They've looked at us, and our civilisation. Then they went, "You guys are crazy. Clean up your act, learn to be a bit more rational, and we might let you know we're here. Until then - nope!"
Since then, we've seen the election of idiots to positions of power (see, for example, Donald Trump), we've seen people voting against their own best interests (see: Brexit), and we've stumbled to the point where a single idiot (see, once again, Donald Trump) could start a nuclear war for no better reason than somebody insulted his hair.
Why the hell would any sane alien species want to contact us?
They just aren't there! Why can't people of science accept this?
It's sometimes called the Rare Earth Hypothesis but KS Robinson really explains it well in his Mars Trilogy books.
Basically the theory goes that lower level life may or may not be 'common' in the universe, but intelligent life is so rare that given distances and the speed of light and whatnot we just probably won't ever encounter each other.
It's elegant and explains everything and should be the accepted theory in exobiology (if it isn't already) until evidence proves otherwise.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Maybe the signal is too weak
Actually, we're red-zoned because we alone of all the intelligent species in the galaxy got the definitions of "male" and "female" backwards, and they're afraid we'll have a massive cognitive meltdown when we find out.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
As other have commented - We have one single data point to work from. The science on whether E.T. exists is far from settled, and probably never will be unless we actually do make contact.
Suggested reading:
"The Aliens Are Coming" - Ben Miller
"Five Billion Years of Solitude" - Lee Billings
"Rare Earth" - Ward Brownlee
"Weird Life" - David Toomey
Of all the Homo genus we are the only one that did not go extinct. Whatsmore there is so little genetic varation in humans that researchers believe we decended from a population of as few as 2000 individuals. With such numbers humans were basically on the critically indengered list. Why would you go make up some theory about intelligent life inevitably destroying itself when intelligent life on this planet nearly went extint without ever sending a signal that intelligent life existed on this planet
I think there is one simple concept that many scientists fail to account for and that is that we are the first. We are the first advanced race/civilization and most advanced species in the universe. If there are infinite possibilities then this is certainly one of them.
Yes, I know considering the amount of time that has passed people think this implausible. But consider by the same token of the absolute fact of how much time as passed and the absolute fact of that we're just beginning. Maybe, just maybe we are one of very few, many the only, intelligent race to form in this time.
> it flames out quickly and takes the biosphere with it
I blame electric cars. Soon all the water will be converted to hydrogen in fuel cells, just like what happened on Mars.
I've often thought that our national gov't.s have already been TOLD that by "others" as we value deceits so highly (makes me ashamed to be a human sometimes when I look around us)...
* I'd do the same were I peering in on us - I'd be like Klaatu was in the original THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL @ his final speech, which was in essence "You're all whackos who are insane BUT what you do on your own planet is your own business (which is what all gov't. OUGHT to be like were big $ not really running them all that is) but you bring it out here? We'll blow your SUN away... & it's only a matter of time before you're out here, shortly in fact...")
APK
P.S.=> Adam & Eve from the bible MAY actually be a tale/comparison/analogy of that - think about it - you couldn't even obey 1 SIMPLE REQUEST & even kill your own brother, & all that, from a being that really loves you & now? NOW, you're banished to the outer arm of a spiral galaxy, isolated FAR AWAY from those of us that are sane - you did it, to yourselves as you're mental poison... apk
Stephen Hawking once said that if aliens visit us they will most likely not be friendly. Whether or not he is correct is irrelevant because the aliens aren't coming. Ever.
Our thinking on this subject is very small and limited. The question of why aliens might "want to come here" is fundamentally flawed because we are forming that question from our current (tiny) viewpoint. The word "want" might not even apply to someone 1000 times smarter than us.
Sci-fi stories can ignore the bits that aren't very interesting. Movie aliens rarely get sick or worry about eating. Sci-fi stories rarely mention gravity because, given our limited view, we expect gravity to just work and shooting a movie without it would be a huge pain. So, screw it, all movie aliens and all future civilizations have invented artificial gravity. After all, warp-drive engines and pew-pew energy-blasters are much more fun to think about.
In the real world, however, science tends to advance in all directions, because advances in one field almost always results in advances in many others.
If Stephen Hawking is right, then he is saying that a race of aliens has, at a minimum, perfected faster-than-light travel (or perfected a way to travel for thousands of years at sub-light), conquered the long term biological effects of space radiation, and mastered extreme long distance space navigation, just so they can come to earth and . . . what? Steal our water? That just doesn't make sense.
Currently, we're not even able to get to Proxima Centauri much less get to a place where we think there's an actual planet. Getting us to Proxima Centauri in less than a few hundred years would require technology that is many orders of magnitude beyond what we have now.
Well, maybe aliens want to come here to study us. But, if they are already traveling around the galaxy at warp speed then they've probably seen other life forms already. Remember, in order to make FTL ships, pew-pew lasers and artificial gravity you're going to need math, science and computers that are far more advanced than ours. We might be interesting, but not all that interesting.
If an alien race is capable of getting here, all the other technology they've developed in the meantime would make the trip unnecessary, and more than likely, simply meaningless. We're just not as advanced or as important as we like to think. In the end, there's no compelling reason to think they'd be interested in meeting us.
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.
The age of the universe is too large for humans to grasp. Civilizations could rise over millions of years, conquer their corner of the galaxy or supercluster and die off before we would ever notice them. That's only flaming out quickly in human terms, but not in geological time.
The real problem is that advanced civilizations possibly don't use electromagnetic frequencies, and if they did figure out how to communicate or travel faster than light we don't have the means to detect it. So we would have to be incredibly lucky to find out about a civilization at near the same technological level as ours or at least no more than maybe 1000 years ahead of us. By the time we found out, they would have advanced further.
There's also the notion that any civilization sufficiently advanced would no longer be organic and may evolve into a machine society or pure energy. Sure that's sci-fi fantasy but it's just as valid a notion as all civilizations just died off quickly so we can't find them, or that no sentient life would evolve on Earth after us.
Also tying this to species extinction is silly. Over 98% of all species that have ever lived on Earth are extinct, and that was before humans were sentient enough to realize it.
For all we know, the universe is all chatting with each other via quantum entanglement or something even more advanced, and we're off in the corner thwacking our electromagnetic equipment on the side saying, "Is this thing on? Where is everybody?"
We don't know it yet but animal species, such as humans, are not the masters of space travel. Once we will have crossed the threshold, we will know that radiowaves are a poor means of communications over very great distances and there are much better options that we have not discovered yet. There are hints here and there about this, think Clarke's Childhood's End. You don't need to believe this and it doesn't matter anyway. You could just look closer to home, for analogies. For example, I'm pretty sure some tribes in remote regions of Africa and the Amazons still think that smoke stacks and torches are state-of-the-art communications tools.
It's possible that the reason we aren't seeing any evidence of ancient alien civilization amongst the stars is because there hasn't been any yet. We don't know how long it takes for intelligence to evolve. We know that life on Earth has been here for around 4 billion years, but we don't know if that life, or the requisite building blocks that allowed it to form, first came from somewhere else. It's possible that life on earth is the product of a process that's been evolving since much earlier in the history of the universe. We also don't know what's required to allow for this process to lead to intelligence. Was it just random chance that earth's first intelligent species evolved now instead of a billion years ago, or is there something fundamental in the process that only recently reached a state were intelligent life was possible? If it's the latter, and if life on earth has a history that goes back long before the formation of earth, and a shared history with the rest of life that's out there, then it's possible that the reason we're not seeing evidence of alien civilizations is because there hasn't yet been enough time for any of them to get much farther advanced that we currently are.
I am not so sure.
Everything we can observe (as well as everything we observe about the development of the universe) indicates that the speed of light is actually the maximal speed of information in space. THe only loop hole left is that space itself can be moved or stretched. And if there was an advanced civ out where stretching space on a major level, we most likely would see it via light distortions. With LIGO, we are havig know access to these ripples also directly and up to now, no indication that somethign like that actually exists.
Therapy for liberals.
This is why you do NOT cheat on your exams. Let me explain; Space is very very big. Radio signals and light is really really slow.
OK, with that new knowledge he should try to device a new thesis.
consider an advanced race on another planet eavesdropping on the Khardasians and the news. they want no part of us. enough said.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
If intelligence-driven extinction doesn't explain this great cosmic silence, then what does? Why hasn't our species heard from other intelligent civilizations elsewhere in the universe?
Distance. Distance in space, which renders actually finding another civilization impossible. And distance in time. Any number of civilizations might have already risen and fallen, or will after we are gone. The universe is very very big, and very very old. To expect everything to happen in the instant we are around and aware is quite short-sighted.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm going to continue using the Host File Engine. Your software is well written, functional. The Host File Engine performs exactly as promised by mmell
his hosts program is actually pretty good by xenotransplant
his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources by alexgieg
(APK's) work, I've flat out said it's good by BronsCon
I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works by bmo
APK your posts on this & the hosts file posts, and more, have never been in error &/or bad advice by BlueStrat
Your premise that hostfiles are a good way to deal with advertising & malvertising is quite valid by JazzLad
I like your host file system by Karmashock
* It's recommended/hosted by Malwarebytes' hpHosts!
APK
P.S.=> He's a man after my own heart (& actions) - he gives the PEOPLE what they want (as have I, see above & see subject)... apk
I just threw up in my mouth a little. The POLITE thing to do is to warn people before you link to something like that, you sonofabitch.
Gosh, even trolling is a declining art form.
What if there are other types of intelligence?
It seems a bit early to write off humanity as extinguishing itself. Yeah, so we've heated up the planet, and we put trash where it doesn't belong. But excesses do tend to undo themselves, as we can see with even China and India starting to curb emissions. Survival is a powerful instinct, and it hasn't been exhausted just yet.
Our technology is to the point where we could prevent a recurrence of the Great Dying. All you have to do is unshackle your mind from the popular notion that the only solution to CO2 emissions is passive (reducing emissions via renewable energy sources).
CO2 (and water) are popular end-products for exothermic chemical processes (e.g. burning gasoline, cellular respiration) because it sits at an extremely low energy potential. That is, chemical processes which result in CO2 give off a lot of energy. To reverse the process, you have to put a lot of energy into the CO2 to break apart the carbon and oxygen atoms.
If you have sufficient energy, you can actively drive that reverse process. Plants do it via photosynthesis, driving it with energy from sunlight. We could do it with nuclear power - generating massive quantities of electricity (more than can reasonably be obtained from solar, wind, hydro) to decompose CO2. Generating sufficient power to offset volcanic emissions of CO2 would be incredibly expensive, but given the alternative (extinction) we're technologically capable of doing it.
The same is true if this push for renewables as the only solution to global warming fails. If renewables can't be developed quickly enough to supplant fossil fuel energy sources and CO2 levels continue to rise, at some point we concede that renewables aren't arresting CO2 levels quickly enough. Then we'll be forced to switch to nuclear power to buy ourselves more time. This is why shuttering operational nuclear plants as Germany is doing is extremely short-sighted. Nuclear is our ultimate trump card. We want to keep it ready in our back pocket as a hedge in case renewable energy can't be rolled out quickly enough.
I'm not so sure skepticism is merited in either direction.
All advances in physics to date have been based on controlled laboratory observations. With relativity, our ability to make macroscopic measurements across the full range of velocities and energies is quite limited. While we can measure gravity waves and deflection of light, and make inferences based on the behavior of relativistic particles in cyclotrons and linear accelerators, what we have not been able to do is make a macroscopic measurement of matter at relativistic speeds.
All we can say is equations that fit observations at the microscopic scale with matter and at macroscopic scales with photons have a singularity at v=c. The only way to know if that's real or if it's a mathematical artifact is to make that measurement in real life, which I'm sure you'd understand is very hard to do.
Here's another kicker: our ability to measure the force of gravity is limited in accuracy to the point where there could be a whole other force on matter that acts on the scale of meters and is just as strong as gravity, but we wouldn't know because our measurement accuracy is limited and we can't tell it apart from GM/r^2, if it's there at all.
As for LIGO, it's got crap sensitivity, in the grand scheme of things. It can hear two black holes merging, and just barely. So I wouldn't take absence of evidence as evidence of absence on that just yet. All we can say is that no one is bombarding us with RF or light pulses and (maybe) no one is shooting off gravity waves in our general direction. Beyond that, speculation about the presence or absence of other intelligent life in the universe is pointless because there's no way to tell if it's grounded in any sort of reality.
Here's a good analogy: The ancient Greeks noticed something funny happens when wool is rubbed on amber ("elektron"). Three thousand years later, Maxwell wrote his equations, another forty years later Marconi turned it into practical communications technology, and it took another century for it to become widely used. Where we are now with relativity and LIGO and astrophysics is probably closer to ancient Greece than it is to Marconi or even Maxwell.
... if we invest in systems which use solar energy to convert airborne CO2 back into hydrocarbons.
Unfortunately, the gas producing establishment is too strong to push this solution, which will annihilate their profits, which are based upon extraction of hydrocarbons from Earth's depths and burning them.
Or...we are the last.
Given what's been said so far there are actually two possible outcomes. Intelligent life arises, keeps trying to expand it's sphere of knowledge and influence until it consumes all the available energy and other life on the planet a destroys itself and all other life on the planet or, in keeping with Agenda 21, the intelligent life realizes what it si doing to itself and the planet and does a 180 degree turnabout back to a more primitive and sustainable way of living but in the process relinquishes any ope it had of becoming technically capable of contacting other civilizations or leaving the planet. A philosophy already in place since some think that by spreading to other planets in the universe we would just be spreading what amounts to a terrible cancer through the universe.
What a wonderful and positive outlook we all have these days. No wonder all our science fiction is about dystopian futures we'd rather not experience.
Meet better "smartest" people. There is generally an inverse correlation between education and being a Trump supporter. I know many well educated science/engineering types who hate Trump, even if they are conservative. Ironically, the really conservative ones seem to hate him most.
consider an advanced race on another planet eavesdropping on the Khardasians and the news.
They can only eavesdrop because of broadcast TV and radio. But broadcasting doesn't make much sense, and is being phased out and replaced with cable and cellular. So perhaps most other planetary civilizations never make the "mistake" of broadcasting, and start with more efficient communications from the beginning. If so, we would never see them, but they would still be "out there".
It really is quite simple, really. No life = no suffering.
and our computers got better. We'll figure this out.
They're called trees.
Maybe there was intelligent life on this planet millions of years ago. Maybe they weren't human. We can only guess what things were like, and what creatures were like.
What were dinosaurs? Were they intelligent like us? We don't know.
We can't prove anything, because a giant rock fell from the sky and wiped out all life.
The only way to know if there was other intelligent life is to develop time and space travel.
All religious and political systems on earth do eugenics, breeding adherents to support the administration. The track record of all these systems has been extinction. They are selling you rebirth, but first you have to die.
Other civilizations pissed off the elder gods, and the gods killed them off. Simple. We've done a good job of avoiding that so far by creating mainstream religions that worship a singular generic "God", but because "God" is neither identifiable in any way, nor does "God" have an active presence on Earth (unlike certain other gods), the likelihood of a mass extinction event is minimal.
For what little we know about intelligence (only earth examples), primates, birds and cephalopods despite having different type of brains seem to develop a very similar kind of intelligence, e.g the kind that help them to use their environment, survive and communicate better
Maybe we haven't heard from other species because it is physically impossible to bridge the light-years gap. Maybe faster than light information transmission, let alone faster than light travel, is not possible. Maybe intelligent species appear, on-average, hundreds or even thousands of light years away from each other, and the chance of any two species being sufficiently close to overcome the distance problems is astronomically small. Physics seems to suggest that bridging such distances is virtually impossible, why don't we believe it? That would also explain the silence, although it would be a blow to our indomitable technological idealism as a species (especially in the US where we tend to believe there's a tech fix for any problem).
It would also be a blow to the modern analog to believing that the earth is the center of the universe. Who says intelligent life occurs frequently enough that events within a 100-1,000 light-years of each other are common? Our own idealist self-centeredness, that's what. Maybe it happens once in a fucking galaxy on average. Maybe the universe doesn't care if we're a little lonely.
Just throwin' it out there. That's a *lot* of space to traverse for inter-species communication. Maybe nobody's figured it out yet and maybe nobody ever will. Until we have better evidence that we are completely wrong about the severity of that impediment, we should probably be worrying about things that happen here. I don't think we need to come up with science fiction stories (this article isn't about a scientific theory) about how we're destroying ourselves, we appear to be doing so in reality, and we had better overcome it.
That explains why God is dead? Why there is no Santa Claus? Easter Bunny?
Give us a brake. Rationalization is NOT scientific evidence. It is simply worthless jibberish.
You fucking losers can't tell fact from wishful thinking.
The argument also seems based on what human minds can think about. Especially the part about principle of mediocrity. Yet we cannot see the whole universe(s). This is what makes the idea it so interesting.
Even if intelligent civilization extinct themselves, we should still see their TV broadcasts before their extinction.
One possible explanation is that earth-based life made it to radio-emitting civilization the fastest as possible, and no other civilization elsewhere made it sooner enough so that we could see their radio emission.
But unfortunately, that explanation is not incompatible with us extinguishing ourrselves.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
this guy sounds like a short signed moron.
Well, that explains it. He can only see a maximum of 32,767 light years away, or years into the future. That's certainly not enough for this topic, given the galactic scales involved.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
We are looking for intelligent life broadcasting to us using a method we are currently able to detect. There are a lot of factors reducing our chances: If you look back before we discovered electricity, we would have no way of receiving the signals we are currently broadcasting at any distance! The luck involved locating a civilisation of appropriate age to receive this signal would be tremendous. Presumably, soon we will discover a new technology with which to communicate, and again the clock will be reset on how advanced the recipients of any message would have to be. Our thirst for knowledge is pretty unique on Earth, as is our egotism. Aliens would need to be advanced enough to pick up our signal and care enough to broadcast one back. Knowing what to look for is difficult. We see pulsars broadcasting quickly across the universe and presume they are a natural phenomenon, as we do with meteorites. Maybe they are communicating and we are missing it. For example, once we invented the light bulb, we might have thought to look for light to detect intelligent life. In truth, we have made our lights more efficient, broadcasting a narrower spectrum and reflecting the light going in unuseful directions, making them harder to detect. The number of alien races. If there are a lot of alien races, advanced enough to communicate, why would they bother contacting us if we are technologically inferior? What if one of these races goes around destroying all the other advanced races it discovers (Look at human history!) We have enough threats on earth already. Maybe any intelligent beings are content enough with what they have or wise enough to predict how hostile we are to each other and therefore go as far as to hide their presence from us until we reach an appropriate stage of development. There still exist tribes living in isolation in the Amazon, who throw spears at planes. We have decided to leave them to it, maybe aliens have decided the same with us? Maybe the natural formation of the universe is such that at a specific distance there is a block of some kind. Imagine yourself as a cave man. Trying to communicate to the outside world might consist of riding a horse to the furthest corner of the land you were born on. After that point you give up. The same once you work out you can traverse the sea and map the planet. Then you work out there is an atmosphere which changes as you go up with stars beyond. Maybe there is a barrier preventing communication. Maybe at some point in the past, our planet was seeded and they are observing us as an experiment which they don't want to influence by interacting with. To summarise, there are loads of reasons why we might not be receiving alien signals. My opinion is that it is ridiculously egotistical to assume that we are advanced enough to detect them because any intelligent life will be similar to us. I can only hope they are smarter than us and aren't bothering. Sorry for the formatting
I don't see any end game for an advanced sentient species outside of a matrix like existence. Why keep living in this imperfect universe and spend the vast amounts of resources providing luxuries to people, colonizing planets and the like when everyone can just be plugged into a computer and live in the world they want with very few resources used? Exponential growth after that is not at all the type of growth that would be noticeable by us.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
I think we're suffering a failure of imagination.
Perhaps our ability to modify ourselves is going to outpace our ability to get enough people off of the planet to keep our population in check (maybe 100 million per year or so?).
This will drive us to start modifying ourselves and our way of living to require less resources. Ultimately, that should end as a people with no physical bodies living in a virtual world far more fantastic than the real galaxy due to not having to follow laws of physics in its models. Nobody would care to go exploring reality. Too boring.
The ultimate limit of population growth would be determined by how much of the planet on which we exist can be turned into a computer and the length of our existence would be determined by the energy available within our solar system.
Meat
Have gnu, will travel.
The atmosphere was different during the time of the dinosaurs. Maybe a raptor-decented intelligent race could have appeared ina few millions years if the meteor hadn't hit? I just think that it's impossible for one intelligent race to ruin a planet for other species to emerge. There could be some new species that emerges post-humans that will like the hot, CO2-rich, irradiated cinder we leave behind?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
It took less than a million years for apes to become us. Any civilization starting a mere 50K earlier than ours would most probably be far advanced. Now make it 1M years. A mere .00025% of life on Earth's existence. So us being in the "first wave" is pretty meaningless.
Sir I do believe you just found the next goatse.cx, my condolences .
Years into the past.
We've been looking for RF transmissions. Those fall off at 1/d^2, so they're quickly going to fall to an intensity that is extremely difficult if not impossible to isolate from background noise.
Second, civilizations get quieter over time (assuming we're typical). Our massive analog TV and radio transmitters have been replaced with much weaker digital transmitters. The transition from our peak noise to our now much quieter noise took about 40-50 years. That's not a lot of time to be noticed.
In addition, there's time. One generation of stars was necessary to produce anything heavier than lithium. To get a significant concentration of those materials, you're likely talking about 1-3 more generations of stars before you have enough raw materials available in a planetary nebula for complex life to evolve on the resulting planet...and that's with the assumption that planetary nebula were easy to form in the early universe. That leaves a "bubble" around us that encompasses that time frame is relatively small.
Also, the claim that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life assumes our solar system is not extremely rare. We don't know that yet. We're just starting to be able to detect rocky, habitable-zone planets, so hopefully we'll soon find out how common a rocky, habitable-zone planet with water, not over-nuked by a star, with a stable rotation, in a relatively clear area of space is.
Finally, it may turn out there isn't some great trick to travel faster than the speed of light. That makes it pretty hard for your civilization to outlive your home star. Sure, you could do generation ships when things get dire enough. But the newly-settled planet is going to be in the same no-FTL boat.
Unfortunately, the gas producing establishment is too strong to push this solution
Uh...it would also cost several trillion dollars to do it on a sufficient scale to reverse climate change before it's pretty disastrous. That just might be a factor in this approach.
You need an absurd number of carbon-capture-factories built in a couple decades. That's not cheap.
Guys, imagine that some humanoid form of life is capable to visit us. That means they cross universe faster than light, so when they go around our globe we are not capable to see them at such speeds. We are just still photo for them. We can see traces of their activity only in case of their accidental catastrophe at our planet in all other cases we are not going to see them. If they do visit us lets ask ourselves why they don't communicate to us. See the answers in our culture. Look at our Hollywood movies and all that crap we dream about. It is non stop war and fight for dominance. Now, look at our universe from perspective of density of intelligent life forms. At our earth we have 7 billion people of intelligent life forms and its square size is 510.1 million km. It is 13 people per km. If we stretch our population to the size of Jupiter which has 60 billion km we are going to have just 0.1 human per km. If we stretch humans to the surface of the sun we are going to have one human per 1000 km. If we stretch humans to the surface of our Solar system which is equal to Hill sphere radius = 1 - 3 light years, then we are going to have following number of humans per km =7000000000 / (4 * 3.14 * 9460730472580 ) = 6 * 10 power -18, in other words we are going to have one human per 6 000 000 000 000 000 000 km, so it is one human per 10 billion Earths. You should understand that the greatest gift for intelligent life form living in such space void is ability to communicate with another intelligent life form. I cannot imagine that anybody who travel such void will ever speak to us, we have absolutely sick minds.
There is a lot to be said for diminishing signal strength over the distances involved and the difficulties of picking a dispersed signal out of background noise.
Also, we are only looking at a narrow band of spectrum called the water hole.. AND we listen there because it is relatively quiet. The supposition is that will make it easier to get signals, but it could just as easily be that we are looking in the wrong portion of the em spectrum.
So you're telling us we need to take the long view here. Got it. -PCP
It's even worse than that, the signal has to be in some form of format that differentiates it from background noise, on a frequency that we are monitoring, and strong enough to hear. So it's not just about the narrow time frame it has to have been sent in to reach us, and for us to have received it, there's also the exact method of sending, and a signal strength that raises it above the noise floor.
Unfortunately I agree that there's a high risk that any intelligent species would wipe themselves out. We know that we've come close to nuclear war a few times, and in the future there are probably inventions we can come up with that will be far more destructive if used incorrectly. That said, I have trouble believing that the odds of that are 100% I think it is far more likely that the vastness of the universe is the culprit, beyond that we really have no idea what time frame were working with or what density we are working with. It's possible that the closest intelligent life is far too far away for us to detect, or that we are among the earlier developed ones and that anyone else has not had the time for their signals to get here, (a species that is a thousand years ahead of us, but 1200 light years away, would still not be visible to us today.) The truth of the matter is that with a sample size of one, we really just have no way to tell.
Australian aborigines have lived an advanced life on this continent for over 50,000 years.
Since white colonisation 250 years ago we've nearly destroyed the continent.
What's different, aborigines lived a sustainable lifestyle, whities are greedy fucks.
We always looked at aborigines as primitive, but we are coming to realise they used sensible technologies.
So is it technologically advanced to use technologies which, in the (not so) long run destroy you ?
And as we 'advance' we accelerate destruction on ourselves.
So let's not say technology extinguishes, but rather, being greedy fucks does.
Go well
They can see the blue haired vicious abusive screeching harpys we let run loose on the world too.
Intelligence won't vist that.
It just dawned on me what the problem is: the Intergalactic ASCAP got our solar system region-locked so we can only hear our own stuff.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Possibly we don't hear them because they don't want to be heard and/or they have more efficient communication schemes.
If your species is relatively stable sociologically the last thing you want to do is upset the apple cart by interacting with another species. There's essentially nothing they can provide you that offsets the risk that they'll be aggressive and any species intelligent enough to travel between star systems can wipe a planet out with a well placed asteroid. Start it off out by the Oort cloud accelerating all the way and by the time it gets near earth there's not much one can do.
Secondly there may only be a brief period where they're noisy. 40 years ago we were blasting signals all over the planet but more and more we're using directed signals mostly focused back on earth. Why waste energy sending signals out in an expanding sphere, within 100 years we could be radio quiet. 200 total years of detectable signal then nothing, that's a very short window.
Just because this guy was/is an Astrophysicist doesnt' qualify him as an expert in 'why we haven't found any other sentient species yet' OR 'why a sentient species MAY go extinct'. The first of those still has ALOT of surveying of the Universe to do for a VERY long time (we've been listening for what amounts to a microsecond in human history & less in terms of history of the Universe). The second can't even really be commented on from any 'measurable data' as we're the only example we have & we aren't extinct quite yet now are we?
In any case, this is pure ass OPINION and everyone has one of those.
I have a PhD... I think he's the best president we've had in 40 years.
Your anecdote? It's an anecdote.
Goatse.cx and tub girl are much preferable.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Our ability to detect civilizations is currently based on them producing high power omnidirectional radio signals.
Our own species, after a little more than a century of use, we are already increasingly abandoning that technology in favor of things like fiber optics and low power spread spectrum radio. It could be that intelligent civilizations aren't silent, they've just stopped using telecommunications we can easily detect.
So which is more probable: an advanced civilization wiped out by a nearby cosmic phenomena, like a 1 inch start quake in a near by magnetar or a supernova, or a war culminated to a nuclear extinction wiping off the entire biosprehe? Space is a dangerous place, and we have been here for a 0,8 permille of one galactic revolution.
You are actually an outlier to my data. I provided no anecdote. Additionally, as anyone who has been through grad school should know, having an advanced degree in not an indicator of general intelligence.
When you ask a historian about biology, you get crappy answers.
Astrophysicists are not specialists in non-human life, non-human psychology, or anything else related to this.
Wrong scientific field means you get a stupid answer.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Interlocated intelligent life that has survived to ensure their survival generally communicate with each other via entangled masses.
There's absolutely no reason to assume that technologically advanced races eventually extinguish themselves. Who knows? There's no data (right....I don't trust the one data point is the average thing) to even make an intelligent hypothesis about it.
Why haven't we heard from them?
-maybe nobody else has figured out a way to travel fast enough yet either
-maybe they've heard from US! And are just watching and waiting...
Some other possibilities that this hypothesis seems to overlook
If God created the heavens and the Earth, maybe he's insane enough to create all the other junk for our sole amusement.
I was exhibiting my atmospheric CO2 loggers at Maker Faire San Mateo and a gentleman walked up to me and explained to me this self extinction hypothesis.
Due to three years experience of using a CO2 meter and measuring things like my car CO2 emission, I have started thinking about the CO2 problem in terms of identifying and implementing a low CO2 emission society at a low level, such as a school district.
What I would recommend to every Slashdot reader is: Buy a CO2 meter and start developing a hands-on understanding of the CO2 problem.
Here is my blog, 2 years out of date: https://lessco2essay.blogspot....
This ingenious analysis of why we don't hear any extraterrestial signals means the time to begin converting to an equitable, fair, reasonable and enjoyable low carbon emission society is now.
Maybe, just maybe, we are just not interesting.
At this point, I doubt they've seen anything more recent than I Love Lucy or the Bickersons.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"In the case where we lack more information.." we assume "we know the reason".
Circular logic that could come to any conclusion.
Could just as easily say.. we throw out the "possibility" of us being the "first" or the "last" or too young to detect "equal or more advanced" civilizations.
Its "fashionable" to take the point of view our moment in history is unique and "knows all".. its comforting.. and self serving.. but many civilizations have assumed that and been proven wrong. There's more data supporting the idea that whatever we come up with is the "wrong reason" than there is for the idea we will be "right".
I don't see anything more convencing in this theory of doom and gloom than in any other.
if there's no FTL travel, and it's likely there is not, then HOW would we hear from someone ?
We need a bit more than the absence of FTL we also need EM radiation broadcasts to have a limited technological span. While transmission power is an issue 2 million years is a blink of the eye to evolution: an intelligent species could potentially have evolved a billion years earlier than us. However, if in another century or so we find a better way than EM radiation to transmit information - or avoid transmission into space - then our signal will be a very thin spherical shell even on a galactic scale.
Of course, the other alternative is that the evolution of intelligent life is vanishingly small and that we are largely alone in the galaxy. We only have a sample size of one so we have literally no idea how likely intelligent life is to evolve.
In any viable biological system, intelligence evolves without bound.
Until it invents an internet, at which point it quickly drowns in its own vice and stupidity.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
We have some pretty concrete ideas about construction of megastructures, such as Dyson spheres
There is no way to know whether, by the time we have the technology to build mega-structures which can block all light from a star, that these are actually useful. If we discover an easy way to harness fusion or even something more exotic - for example small, contained singularities can convert mass to energy - then there would be no need for such structures.
The second problem is that if a species does survive even a relatively small amount of time, it should be able to spread throughout a galaxy.
Again we would only notice if they stayed. It's possible that they have explored the galaxy and that their rate of settlement is a lot slower. Alternatively perhaps they are not interested in exploring or have very tight social groups which makes exploring less undesireable/useful. There are really just too many unknowns to sensibly conclude that there is any sort of "filter" - it's certainly possibly but likely? we just cannot say.
But the point is even that KIND of specie might not even exists at all. The energy requirement to fly at 10% c are enormous - for the time span you cite-, and pretty much the only things which could provide a fuel for that is anti matter. Problem is, anti matter is expensive to produce so you would need enormous facility around your sun to catch the energy and then use it to produce at a factor lower than 1 anti matter, then store it. That is quite a few steps which we are not even sure is even doable.
IMO parsimony principle here is at play : maybe the energy and dedication requirement are high enough that no specie make it. Other stuff kills high tech civ , collapse them, before they can go that far, heck maybe global warming is enough to kill their infrastructural and food production in that they spend their time and energy fighting it. Maybe far more simply, the universe is a serie of island of life, which are too far away in both time , distance and dedication to travel - and thus never ever communicate or are aware of each other existence.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
... inventions we can come up with that will be far more destructive if used incorrectly.
The kinds of inventions we have now that could do the job only do so when used correctly. Just sayin'
It's even worse than that, the signal has to be in some form of format that differentiates it from background noise, on a frequency that we are monitoring, and strong enough to hear
In other words if they start doing encryption on all their communications they'll go quiet...?
Why hasn't our species heard from other intelligent civilizations elsewhere in the universe?
Who says our species hasn't heard from other intelligent civilizations? Let's face it, we propably already heard from them a long time, but out goverments are not telling us that. Why? To prevent mass hysteria, you have to get such a big civilization ready for the idea of extra terrestial life, that's why we now get simple news like 'maybe there are microbes on europe', and we'll get more and more news about planets like earth found in distance galaxies. This will ease people into believing there might be others out there, and once people get there they will say they found a real signal, and from that it will grow and grow until they show them.
It's simple psychology, for a large group of people the shock would be too big (let's not forget most religion doesn't account for visitors from outer space and even deny it)
Another problem is that species evolve on a time scale that is short compared with the time scale needed for galactic colonization. "A few million years" is all it takes for a species to become extinct because of they reach an evolutionary dead-end. They may start the colonization of the galaxy, but they may become extinct along the way simply because of biology.
Some retard has to put in > FIRST POST!
http://newatlas.com/fermi-para...
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I think the real issue that people don't bring into consideration is the likelihood of the timing. Even if the time it takes for intelligent life to form was somehow precisely 13.8 Billion years and it happened to form in a trillion other planets in our observable universe all roughly within the same 5 Million years; It would be incredibly unlikely for any one of those civilizations to reach inter-galactic travel (FTL or otherwise) and expand out of their solar system and by chance be reaching directly to Earth and arrive or communicate with us during the last 10,000 years. Perhaps even more likely that it would have to be the last 2-3,000 years to not have been considered Gods.
Sooner or later they must understand that the Universe is not schizophrenic. It doesn't have multiple voices in it's head. We are the Universe asking itself what it is. As for every intelligent species destroying itself. Really? 100% with no possibility of exception? No. They don't exist because there is only one path to our level of intelligence: US. No intelligent squirrels, fish, moose, dinosaurs etc. The universe is not a children's cartoon or a science fiction movie.
E Proelio Veritas.
All these discussions are interesting, but seem to miss one obvious point. Back when radio astronomy started, it was common practice for radio and TV to be broadcast by powerful transmitters that just pumped it out, indiscriminately. Today, broadcast uses a narrow range of much lower power signals. My internet service is a wifi signal from a local tower that has highly directional antennas. Someday it will be a length of fibre that won't broadcast at all. Technological change to use lower power for shorter distances in part because of how crowded the airwaves are becoming. And I dont know how any of this would look to aliens - but most of it seems like noise to me.
There was ~180 million years of dinosaurs, and no evidence of evolution of civilization building intelligence.
Yet in the age of mammals intelligence building civilization took only 66Ma.
That's a simple indicator the intelligence is peculiar to the cyclic nature of evolution on earth, and a crap-shoot with each mass extinction. When I put my numbers into the Drake Equation, even setting the odds of life developing at 100%, I still come up with about 1 species per galaxy.
That's the same question other species in galaxies far, far away are asking right now...
The article doesn't seem worth reviving this topic. Fermi Paradox is too old even to dig up some of my old writings along the same lines reaching the same conclusion.
Actually, my later conclusion is that designed intelligence (AI) probably exists but is just watching us. Evolved intelligence (us humans) isn't worth talking to, but probably interesting to watch. Probably gambling quatloos on whether we produce our AI successors before exterminating ourselves.
Also possible they intervene to prevent premature extinction. We almost went extinct about 50,000 years ago, and I've often wondered if we had some help to get over that little hump. Not sure why they would bother if designed intelligence converges, as I suspect it does. The paths might be wildly different and even interesting, but the end results would be pretty much the same sorts of machines...
As usual for Slashdot these days, I was disappointed by by the comments moderated as funny and not much impressed with any of the comments moderated insightful. I'll look again tomorrow, if the story hasn't expired already.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
the late Sir Arthur Clarke's quote... As civilizations search for more energy. the expectation is that someone will screw up. Remember the kerfluffle about the LHC creating black holes ? (Yes, I know, rogue physicist using crappy math pushed that idea, mostly because he was pissed at being kept out of the project)
consider an advanced race on another planet eavesdropping on the Khardasians
What if the Cardassians are eavesdropping on the Kardashians?
Ezekiel 23:20
It is people like APK, anti-vaxers, Trump, Hillary, various world leaders from shit hole countries, flat earthers, televangelists, etc. that make me ashamed to be human.
What makes you think they didn't? Just because we found no cities or cave paintings? Consider the following:
We hardly find evidence of our earliest human ancestors which is just 1.6 Million years -- the Dinosaur period, for what we know, ended 65 Million years ago which is the 40-fold timespan and so long that even the continents were moved and reshaped significantly.
But even without such major geological effects: What makes finding evidence of earlier humans, even just 20.000 years ago, so hard?
Because people reused anything they could make use of. Cutting wood was so time- and labor-intense that you reused timer until it could only serve as firewood. Later, making bricks was such an effort that bricks would also be reused as long as they were half-way intact (have a look at post WW2 Germany where the "debris women" (Trümmerfrauen) spent lots of efforts cleaning up the mess and saving what can be reused, and that was just 70 years ago).
Where we find bones, this is either from dedicated graveyards or where people were accidentally buried like in Pompeji during the Vesuv eruption.
So if we don't find anything from a prospective dinosaur civilization this might well be that during the process of fading away (due to whatever circumstance) they erased their traces simply by reusing available resources.
Just like we would when The Don and Li'l Kim escalate their current tug-o-war into a full-blown nuke scenario. With the so-called civilization having broken down and in no supply of essential daily needs, we would first raid the cities for immediate and easy resources, and later even start tearing down buildings and ripping apart cars as this would be the easiest way to e.g. get steel (from concrete reinforcement) and copper (from electrical wiring) or sheet metal (from cars).
Add a little bit of destruction for sheer reasons of destruction, burning up crap (heck, with no supply for combustible material even raiding the landfills for plastic material would make sense), and within a rather short period of time the traces of our civilization will already have faded greatly.
Plant life and, for organic matter, bacteria and fungi will do the rest, and in 65 million years you might find nothing but stuff that was accidentally conserved by falling into tar pits or quickly being buried.
It is funny how every poster here says "Yeah, but remember that our radio waves have been propagating only for a hundred years or so, they can't know there is any (intelligent) life here". That is wrong on all levels. We have been *very* visible for a long long time, even our intelligence.
Our unnaturally (galaxy-standard) oxygen rich atmosphere has been like this for the last three-point-five BILLION years or so. Our atmosphere has been showing elevated levels of lead and other isotopes for thousands of years, those do not occur naturally. Specially, when the observer has millions or billions of years data of our planets atmospheric contents, our planet should raise an alarm. There is something going on here.
Also we humans are soon able to use telescopes, which can see the gas contents of distant planet atmospheres. So the time from the first amplified observation to planet sensing telescopes is ridiculously short, 500 years in our case and lots of damage from different religious rulers/religion itself. What do you think an advanced civilization would have been doing meanwhile? "Oh, but they are so advanced that they do not need any astronomy anymore" or "They are so noble that they refuse to talk to us" are wrong answers, because the possibility of "history eraser" size rock coming from nowhere, and eradicating their noble alien life, is too high.
So even if they are so noble and advanced, that they refuse to talk to us commoners/newcomers, they still need to keep watching the skies so that their royal asses won't get accidentally wiped out. That leads automatically to a situation "Yo, have you checked out that blue planet on quadrant 42? Haven't seen anything like it!" - "Send probes, now!".
They need to know if there is a bad case of religion here, for example one which says that all other lifeforms are Satan's creations and must be destroyed with C-speed kinetic weapons. That is something what we need to know and be prepared for too. Some humans kill when some other human draws cartoons of the others prophet. If we let that continue and develop technology at the same time we soon face a situation where someone issues a fatwa against alien civilizations. Then we become a galaxy threatening Saudi-North-Korea, which is bad for everyone else. Of course, the explanation for the galactic silence may be that there is already one..
The universe is supposed to be of an infinite size. We keep assuming that intelligent life must be far more advanced than we are - even though we all "started with a bang" around the same time (given the random flicker required to make life emerge).
Why is it that these other life beings can't be 5 kazillion light years away and we just haven't heard from them yet. Or another race of "humans" just like us barely walked on their own local moon 50 years ago -- and they too are beaming signals into space wondering where everyone else is?!
The scientist types sure have an inferiority complex.
I thought you liked the Donald because his tiny hands make your little faggot dick look yuge.
Either that or it is because his ravings are only slightly less schizophrenic than your own.
I find it amazing that you have to spam you shit hosts file engine every chance you get, it is almost like you are that retarded kid in class who smears his snot into their own hair.
Actually you are that retarded kid and you prove it every time you post.
That would go a long way to explaining the Cardassian tendency to live ascetic lifestyles.
What's more likely for each of the following?
That every advanced species believes in multiculturalism? Or that they come to see multiculturalism causes irreparable change/harm to both cultures involved?
That our knowledge of physics, knowing that relativity and quantum mechanics cannot even be reconciled currently, is incomplete? Or that it is complete and no better communication system than radio waves will ever emerge?
That we can even detect a transmission at the level of a standard TV broadcast tower from the nearest star? Or that we can't? (hint on this one: we can't.)
That runaway empathy will cause any advanced civilization to burn every resource on their planet to the detriment of the whole species in the futile hope of feeding people they have no relation or indenture to without addressing the runaway birthrates thereof? Or that they won't?
In each of these cases it would be dumb to assume that any advanced civilization is anything like us. We aren't even to the stage of being hairless apes yet, we're practically still feral borderline-sentient primates. Moreover, we happen to have the perfect storm of one-off events destined to bring us to where we are today from the dark ages culling the scientists, to the NAZIs vilifying eugenics in the public mind (opps, no turning back on the damage the dark ages did,) to the sinking of the Titanic (everyone who was going to vote against establishing the federal reserve/world banking system went down with it,) to runaway capitalism to the point of wealth disparity so extreme that an objective frequency distribution with the Rothschild's ~2.9 trillion net worth at the top divided by 9 people places only Bill Gates in the middle class (which itself is debatable, assuming he shares any of his wealth with his family,) to building planned obsolescence into every device under the sun.
As a species we've made quite literally every mistake under the sun, why would ANY alien civilization want to engage in a cultural exchange with us? There is nothing for them to gain and everything for them to lose if we rub off even in the slightest.
Not necessarily, we do monitor for the presence of a signal, not just it's content. But even that presence can be hidden in various ways by technologies that we have already developed.
Honestly though I think signal strength is the larger issue for us, someone up thread used the example of someone standing on the coast of the pacific ocean, yelling across and expecting someone on the other side to hear them. It's just too far, and you just can't yell loud enough. Sure we have some pretty sensitive instruments pointed at the sky, but unless the signal is coming from relatively nearby (on the cosmic scale) it would have to be either focused directly at us or have a LOT of power (or both) before we'd hear it, and it's just not practical for alien races to do that unless they already know we're here, and for all the radio signals we've sent out, there's a good chance none have been strong enough, pointed in the right direction, and long enough ago for someone to realize we're here, and respond.
Sure we've been using radio for a little while (infinitesimally small time frame in the grand scheme of things) but it's mostly been stuff designed to make it to other parts of our own planet, or maybe a spacecraft in our own solar system, this is really short range stuff, and we don't tend to use orders of magnitude more power than are needed to do the job.
"If intelligence-driven extinction doesn't explain this great cosmic silence, then what does? Why hasn't our species heard from other intelligent civilizations elsewhere in the universe?"
because we're too far away?
What idiotic space faring race would use something as slow as radio waves to communicate over vast distances? Even in our own sci-fi literature, we've already acknowledged that it's stupid, and used quantum entanglement for communication (Beacon 23, by Hugh Howey - an excellent read). What's more, even if they used RF in their infancy, why would we expect it to be in the narrow range of frequencies we're looking for, or can detect at interstellar distances?
Humans fall into this stupid trap of "it's different" meaning "it's different, just like us" FAR too often...
Slow news day, /. ? You could as well have titled this "Pensioner adherent of alternative explanation". More specifically, this is an (at least) decade-old proposed explanation of the Fermi paradox, among many others. Not to mention that the paradox itself is subject to debate; plug the right parameters in the Drake equation and there is no paradox....
So, nothing new to this story whatsoever - though it has lent itself to good science fiction (culture barbarian's link but I'm sure you guys can find "proper" classics illustrating my point).
It's my theory that there is intelligent life out there. They just have no interest in the likes of us.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
This is what happens when Narcissists become scientists.
So wrapped up in the idea that of course an intelligent species would want to visit us that they contrive an explanation for why they haven't.
A species near our level of development is most likely unable to visit, even if they wanted to.
A species advanced enough to travel here, is probably advanced enough it would be the equivalent of us visiting with Neanderthals or monkeys. Not much point and you can probably get what you want just through observation, which can be done from a distance.
And we make it easy for that. Beaming out every facet of every mundane thought out for everyone to see and hear. If we really want to get the aliens to visit, we just need to go into media silence and they'll come running to find out what happened to their "stories".
Brought to you by: "Al"toids - the curiously weird mint.
There is nothing new in the theory that advanced races extinguish themselves. SF writers have been kicking that idea around for (at least) decades.
Alternative/parallel theories may include natural events doing it so we dont' have to, huge meteor strikes, global warming run amok, alien invasion (reminds me of the alien book "How to serve humans" which is how to cook, not how to be servants to). Major events (e.g., nuclear war) damaging us so badly that we lose control of our ability to, e.g., generate and distribute electricity or other critical infrastructure. Imagine the house of cards we've build and upon which we depend suddenly not being there.
You go visit Central Park. In the middle of the park, next to a statue, sits a disheveled man. He's holding a gun, and staring at his own navel. And he's yelling, mostly belligerent talk to someone inside his own head. He appears not to notice you, or really anyone else. You can:
1. Try to talk to him, and take the gun away.
2. Disarm this obvious madman !
3. Walk quietly away and hope someone else deals with this before he hurts himself or others.
Almost all of us, not being police, will do (3). We have many satellites in orbit - almost all looking/talking right back at earth. We're certainly belligerent, and our radio/TV broadcasts will reflect it. We spend a pittance looking for other intelligent life, and nothing broadcasting to it.
We're the insane maniac, sitting in his crapped drawers yelling at himself. Is it any wonder no one's interested in getting our attention ?
they haven't heard from us.
Listening is cheap. Talking is expensive. Transmitters on interstellar ranges need to be very powerful and thus very expensive - which you must build to send messages with no real idea which direction to send in, no idea if anybody is even listening, and the absolute knowledge that - even if somebody is listening they may not be there anymore by the time your message arrives. Even if they are, you can't be sure they would understand the message. Even if they do, you can't be sure they would want to reply. Even if they reply - any reply will not arrive for centuries.
That's a lot of money to spend with low odds of getting anything for it - and a guarantee that even if there is a payoff you won't live ot see it, nor will even your grand-children. In fact, it's likely that by the time a possible reply does arrive, nobody in your world will remember building the transmitter or sending the original message !
So, using the sam principle of mediocity, I conclude that any and every other intelligent lifeform out there likely invested a bit in listening stations, and not a single one has invested in transmission systems. Just like us, they are all waiting for somebody else to make the first move in order to justify spending the money needed to send a reply (and know where to send it to - a directional transmitter can be a great deal cheaper since it doesn't have to be as powerful to have the same range).
I guess it's time to bring this up. I have been waiting a many years, but I think the day has arrived.
Ceti Alpha Six exploded?! And everyone just glosses over that and accepts it?! WTF. Planets don't just explode. But this one did? Uh huh. Why? How? What happened?
"The shock shifted the orbits?" WTF. I'm supposed to believe that not only did a planet explode (how?!) but there was a shockwave through the medium of space .. ? .. and it travelled across interplanetary distances losing energy at inverse-square rate, and it hit Ceti Alpha Five so hard that it changed its orbit. Um.. okay. So, I think we are probably talking about an event with considerably more energy than a nova. Depending on the distance, this might be a bigger deal than a supernova.
And nobody in the federation happened to notice that it happened.
But, years later, they sent people to the Ceti Alpha system for possible Genesis testing. And they not only didn't notice a missing planet and nothing being where it's supposed to be (and if you're not using old pre-explosion charts, then how were you counting up to 6 to guess which planet was Ceti Alpha Six?), but they didn't notice there's probably a new asteroid belt, etc. It's going to be a very interesting looking system to any astronomer.
I think Khan's story doesn't add up. It's so bullshit. They were on Ceti Alpha Six. So how did Khan and team get there?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Less advance Civilizations by sending them back to the Stone Age as soon as they start launching rockets. Our end date is coming soon.
Why would an advanced race be interested in us? They would think the automobile is the dominant form of life.
The first radio signals from 1886 were merely telegraph longs and shorts. The first transmissions of voice were in 1900. 1909 was the first truly omnidirectional broadcasts, and 1916 for the first continuous broadcast, of a whole 3 hours. Roughly around 1919 regular nightly broadcasts of music et al started occurring, so we have a sphere of less than 100 light years of very weak and intermittent signals. Television started in the early 1930s, with a stronger signal, but truly strong coherent signals probably didn't develop until the late 1950s at the earliest. That gives a less than 60 light year diameter sphere where there's a potential of picking up a signal. Currently, there appear to be about 1400 star systems within 50 ly of earth, of which 133 are believed to be similar enough to ours that they are the best options for earth like planets that could harbor life similar to ours.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
That's why we cannot see them and they don't dirty their shoes with us.
Because truly intelligent species don't go broadcasting their location to lesser more violent species, obviously.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Didn't we already know that? After all, the Krell destroyed themselves overnight. Beware the monsters from the Id!
ðY'
Cellular is a broadcast technology when you have sufficient power to decode it.
252 milion years BC.... really?!
You haven't heard because your instruments couldn't pick up an advanced civilization on the closest star.
The allen telescope array. couldn't detect our civilization on alpha centari. The only way we could detect a signal would be if it were both extremely powerful directly focused in our direction. The only possibility would be if we captured rare events of a focused beam sweeping past out position in space and they would have to swap the beam extremely slowly for the beam to be on us long enough to notice.
Not just any scientists, an astrophysicist is asking why? Someone that should know about distances, radio waves and such and the fact that you have to be in the right place, right time to receive those signals? We've been watching the sky for oh a couple of decades, which is really nothing. Not even all of the sky. It's like listening to channel 14 for a minute and not hearing anything concluding nobody is ever going to use it.
Another alternative is their signals are all around us. We just don't realize it. Just as some signals we put out today is just noise to people in the 1950s.
I like the whole dark forest theory. The universe is a dark forest and all smart sentient species know to hide and make as little noise as possible so as not to get obliterated by more advanced civilization. We apparently are too stupid to stay quiet. Why would you ever want to attract the attention of a more advanced civilization? Tired of living much? Go read some Liu Cixin books.
we'll probably need to develop a better sense of empathy and learn how to live and take both the planet (environment) and other peoples' needs into account.
I imagine the same would be true of any other advanced technology. Those that can't get beyond the Caveman "Ugh... want... take... " would seem most probable to destroy themselves and their planet.
Is it unreasonable that if you take that view that you would also have learnt what happens to relatively technically backward civilisations when contacted by more advanced? The record seems to be 100% destruction here.
If a civilisation had developed like that wouldn't they hold of letting us know about them, until we were mature enough to cope?
if "Faith" could be proved with facts - would it still be faith? So why does "Faith" try to present beliefs as fact? -
The great filter could be an option. Another possibility is simply our own lack of intelligence creates disincentives to communicate.
Sure by the standards of our ape ancestors we are geniuses but we've only been able to communicate via radio waves for less than 200 years. How would a civilization that was a thousand years ahead communicate? How about a million? A billion?
Some ants communicate with chemical trails. We were communicating with smoke signals not so long ago. Although radio signals are fast from a local perspective from a cosmological perspective it's a stupendously slow way to communicate and very limited in range. Intelligent life is clearly rare so it's improbable we'll find it within the range of radio waves. We plausibly might be flooded with advanced form of communication signals but we are too dumb to recognize it because we are looking for smoke signals...
Ok we are too dumb but why then aren't aliens visiting us?
Answer: Why in hades would a civilization with technology so advanced they could make the distance to earth... want to communicate with us? So they can share knowledge with a species that thinks pointing nuclear weapons at each other represents security? To survive advanced technology, an advanced species would have to be extreme docile. As violent savages we don't have much to offer them other than perhaps in a zoological sense.
There are probably advanced civilizations out there. The Universe is a big place. What we don't get is we aren't one of them. We've confused our domination over local species to mean we are uber intelligent in some cosmological sense. This is like confusing the Sun with being special to anyone but us. Egotistical nonsense.
no Star Trek/Wars/Valerian universes filled with alien civilizations
Really, you tried to throw in Valerian, a dude movie that nobody watched, with Trek and Wars, two of the most successful sci-fi franchises ever?
"The first atomic war wasn’t a bad one—the first one never is."
Also:
Earth
by John Hall Wheelock (1886-1978)
"A planet doesn’t explode of itself," said drily
The Martian astronomer, gazing off into the air.
"That they were able to do it is proof that highly
Intelligent beings must have been living there."
Why the Cosmic Silence? That's an easy one: we're not allowed to contact or be contacted by similar or lower level civilisations until we cross a certain social or biological evolution level.
Was this one modded down? Stupid intelligent species wipe their tech system early, while more intelligent species develop scientific psychic methods to meet God and get to understand they don't have to spread the Gospel to other planets / galaxies since God already gets the job done, so everyone just focuses on cleansing the little piece of soul they were given and making it shine and get to enjoy the resulting cosmic bliss, for which no material technology whatsoever is needed so they just forget this whole bullshit.
Well, there's the very rare case of runaway AI systems that never evolve conscience and soul, but thanks to the Universe expanding most galaxies are forever out of reach of these rogues.
As a result, there's a cosmically small chance we'll ever get an answer to our "Anybody there?" messages, and if ever we do, we should definitely stay away from them until they or we either collapse or get more intelligent.
I didn't know they had PhDs in Communications. Interesting.
You have heard from life elsewhere. In many forms. And you have this wonderful habit of fictionalizing the things you're not intellectually prepared to believe or understand.
No, it's not that advanced technological life extinguishes itself. It's that you as a species extinguish evidence of it.
"If intelligence-driven extinction doesn't explain this great cosmic silence, then what does?"
No one is blinder than he who will not see, or in this case, hear. You aren't listening.
This is literally what most religions preach: "I can hear God (and/or his associates), and they are telling me things I didn't know before yet seem quite helpful. We should give their suggestions a try."
"If intelligence-driven extinction doesn't explain this great cosmic silence, then what does? Why hasn't our species heard from other intelligent civilizations elsewhere in the universe?" Maybe time. In the scale of the universe's existence, we have been aware and looking for intelligent civilizations for a very brief span of time. Also, what we would be able to recognize as intelligent civilizations may not even be recognizable for us or for said civilization.
As technology progresses, one of the simplest metrics is that our ability to use energy goes up (transport, work, environmental change). As our the amount of energy available to us increases, it also increases on a personal level in our ability to use this energy for destruction.
Since the 50's, a population of a hundred million has been able to make a nuclear bomb. As time progresses, more have access to it. We couldn't even keep the bomb from North Korea, and in another 50 years we'll probably lament that any rogue group could get their hands on one.
Later, sci-fi technologies will enable even higher destructive capabilities, often requiring less effort than constructive ones. At some point, if technology keeps improving, any small group of a few dozen would be able to obtain the power to destroy a world if they so chose. Eventually, any single person could decide on a whim to destroy civilization. If you could build a Dyson sphere or move planets, you sure as anything could destroy them as well.
Now, even at lower tech levels, what is the likelihood of surviving even 1000 years given that all it takes is a small number of people, at any moment, to decide to screw it all? Given that 1000 years is a flea on a beach to geological time, how could we imagine ourselves coexisting with another civilization even if there were hundreds of civilization-prone worlds in our vicinity?
Add to this the fact that even an incident with survivors could easily cascade to extinction (high technology, everyone in survival mode, no more societal checks), and all civilization is truly doomed in the long run.
Because advanced civilizations communicate in a medium that we are still unable to detect? How hard of a concept is that to grasp, sciencedaily.com?
We all know the raptors evolved intelligence, then killed off their entire civilization in a nuclear jihad! What do you think those trace amounts of Rhodium in the crust from 65 million years ago was from...it was the rocket nose-cones of their weapons!
Geez, it's like you guys weren't even listening in school.
If intelligence-driven extinction doesn't explain this great cosmic silence, then what does?
Inverse square law explains it. Universe is huge, energy required to communicate in all directions quadruples if the distance doubles. Even gigantic stars are mere fireflies stuck on that big blue thing, as the wise philosopher Timon Meerkat said. How can anyone communicate over such long distances?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Pretending to have a sensitive little tummy is not funny
You need an absurd number of carbon-capture-factories built in a couple decades. That's not cheap.
I've got a bag of seeds that says you're wrong.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Maybe if we all shut up for five minutes, we might hear someone talking back. But nooooooo, Donald Trump has to flap his big mouth every day. Ain't no one gonna hear anything over that loud mouth. Even if we did manage to get everyone to shut up for once, he'd tweet something obnoxious, at which point everyone would be back on their phones with "ZOMG, what the hell is wrong with you!" And it devolves from there.
[from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest] ...
The universe is full of life. Life in the universe functions on two axioms: 1. Life's goal is to survive, and 2. Resources are finite. Like hunters in a dark forest, life can never be certain of alien life's true intentions. The extreme distance between stars creates an insurmountable "chain of suspicion" where any two civilizations cannot communicate well enough to relieve mistrust, making conflict inevitable. Therefore, it is in every civilization's best interest to preemptively strike any developing civilization before it can become a threat, but without revealing their own location, thus solving the Fermi paradox.
The Dark Forest (Chinese: Hi'àn snlín) is a 2008 science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. It is the sequel to the Hugo Award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem in the trilogy titled "Remembrance of Earth's Past" (Chinese: Dìqiú wngshì), but Chinese readers generally refer to the series by the title of the first novel.[1] The English version, translated by Joel Martinsen, was published in 2015.
My recollection, backed up by a little bit of google searching, is that the mentioned "mediocrity..." 'principle' is a phiolosophical premise, not a statistical one.
Broadcasting is vastly more efficient than cable. You set up one structure in the middle of the area you want to talk to and everyone in that area immediately gets whatever you send out. No digging trenches through people's yards, no stringing miles of cable, no having to go out all the time and fix the cable because some nutmeat in a backhoe broke it, no having to go to each person's house individually every time someone moves or changes providers, etc. You just turn on the transmitter and start talking.
Cable is popular because you can charge the viewers directly. Broadcasting has to charge the viewers indirectly, through time wasted watching advertisements and then hope the companies placing the ads will agree it's worth their money to continue to do so.
Decreasing flux density means they aren't watching those, either. Anything more than a few light years away probably isn't noticing anything coming from us. ... And vice versa, so we can relax - there probably *are* aliens out there, but unless they're building a galactic cantenna and aiming it at us, we're not going to hear them.
Trees aren't going to save us. They don't work fast enough.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I agree that we will probably doom ourselves, but the silence doesn't seems surprising for other reasons. I am no astrophysicist, but are we just not listening correctly? If you were a species that is spread out all over the galaxy, would you rely on radio communication? The latency would make it useless. Wouldn't things like quantum entanglement or things we can't even understand yet make more sense?
Or, World Irony Day?
‘Cause according to Google “mediocracy” is defined as “a dominant class consisting of mediocre people, or a system in which mediocrity is rewarded”.
Back when I was in my learnin’ days, I could swear that we were taught that one of the immutable truths of quantitative analysis (a.k.a. applied statistics) is that you cannot draw any inferences from a single datum.
When did that change? When -- and more importantly who -- came up with this dumb-ass concept of "mediocracy"?
No wonder the statisticians were telling everybody that Hillary was going to win by 20% last fall. Their surveys had sample sizes of one.
Trees and other plants are not fast enough, nor do they sequester carbon permanently enough.
I can't believe this stuff parading as science these days. There are more advanced papers than this that foresee a 20% probability of humanity "distributing" through the cosmos before the final apocalypse leading to the formation of other independent biospheres (artificial), and the human race becoming a super-race throughout the Local Arm.
However even with this, intelligence does finally kill us and the projected ways are far worse than even the fallout aftermath of a fusion-based nuclear war. Some of them include our leaders having to euthanize us en mass for reasons of mercy.
@32K LY That's an interesting number, it matches ours as the median size for a human genome who decides to go "galactic".
Just because your technologically-advanced species is emo af, doesn't mean they all are. I might as well have went to read nihilist memes this morning.
....
How about a massive reforesting effort? That wouldn't cost trillions of dollars and can be done by planting fast growing trees.
Our unnaturally (galaxy-standard) oxygen rich atmosphere has been like this for the last three-point-five BILLION years or so. Our atmosphere has been showing elevated levels of lead and other isotopes for thousands of years, those do not occur naturally. Specially, when the observer has millions or billions of years data of our planets atmospheric contents, our planet should raise an alarm.
Oxygen would be an interesting observation, since it's not natural. However, that doesn't mean aliens would notice it. The first possibility is the galaxy is filled with many planets with oxygen-producing lifeforms, and of the millions of planets the aliens could visit, they did not visit ours by chance. The second possibility is that they are too far from us to see our atmosphere. After all, we've not been able to directly image any exoplanets smaller than Jupiter. Even the Jupiter-sized ones are only visible to us if they're within 500 ly. The third possibility is that they are sending signals at us, but we haven't looked in the right direction or don't recognize it as artificial.
I have no idea what you're talking about regarding lead. Those are produced naturally via volcanic eruptions, not to mention since they are trace elements, the aliens would need to have a sample of the atmosphere to detect it.
Entertain the following assumptions, some in combination;
1. SJW/introspective behavior that compromises science education (hard sciences become unattractive)
2. Automation/AI development stumbles due to lack of development (human pipeline got choked)
3. "good enough" computing hardware that is increasingly recycled via jerry rigging batteries (dieselpunk-esqe), because most of us increasingly can't make anything new
4. Demonization of high density energy resources, leading to active destruction/dilution thereof
5. No singularity (peter out of resources/energy before the exponential curve can set in)
6. Wallow in self-pity over the passing of a golden age that wasn't all that golden.