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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
....but they know better not to contact our violent, religious crazed, heartless and fucked up world
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
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
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.
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?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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?
At present, human scientists are attempting to communicate outside our species to primates and cetaceans, and in a limited way to a few other vertebrates. This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap of at most a few SQ points. The farthest we can reach in our "communication" with vegetation is when we plant, water, or fertilize it, but it is evident that messages transmitted across an SQ gap of 10 points or more cannot be very meaningful. What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?
—Robert A. Freitas Jr
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 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 actually read TFA and it certainly seems to jump to conclusions about extinction. It's a big leap to say that, based on one incomplete data point, intelligent life is bound to destroy both itself AND its biosphere. (The one data point is of course us, and our civilization still exists, so there is no closure that demonstrates destruction, at least not so far.)
I thought the author might have been one of those self-hating we're-all-bad, we're-all-going-to-destroy-the-world types, but to be fair that's not the impression I get from reading the article.
It seems clear that, with the data in hand, it's impossible to draw any meaningful conclusion with any significant degree of confidence.
The idea that the universe is immense, travel across it is, at least to our current knowledge, extremely slow, is the reason species have not been in contact--- that's appealing and has consistent logic, but it's well short of proof.
We just don't know, and we can come up with all sorts of theories, but we still don't know.
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.
Even if they are out there, that doesn't necessarily mean they've developed advanced technology. Technology requires an energy source. There's no reason to believe that a planet that evolved intelligent life also has easily available energy sources like fossil fuels on earth. There was plenty of intelligent life on earth in the 18th century, but it had no way to communicate with extraterrestrial life. If we didn't have an energy source like oil, it's likely we still wouldn't.
...and now, the obligatory meat link: http://www.mit.edu/people/dpol...
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
... 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.
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".
They're called trees.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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...
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!”
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'
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Just found the wiki article, and the closing narration struck a bell, when combined with references to the Kardashians earlier on this thread:
"If knowledge is power and power corrupts...how will human kind ever survive?"
The Kardashians are the salvation of humanity - how we can survive!
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
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.
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'
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.
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? -
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.
"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.
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
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... ***
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
Trees and other plants are not fast enough, nor do they sequester carbon permanently enough.
> Do you answer every 5 year old you see?
No, but *someone* would, eventually.
If there's just one species running around in some quasi-ghost form, yea, sure, they'd ignore us for being meat or however the story goes. But why aren't there a million quasi-ghost things, one of which likes to talk to meat dudes? Why wouldn't there be *just one* thing building the Wal*Mart? Given that life on earth has a variety of ways to solve the same problem, one would assume that there would be a variety of philosophies that could be valid at the level of something as big as the universe, and to assume that "why would they bother with us" would be a *literally universal* truism seems... silly.
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.