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We May Be All Alone In the Known Universe, a New Oxford Study Suggests (fortune.com)
A new study by Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute determined that it's quite likely humans are alone in the observable universe. Fortune reports: The study looked at the Fermi paradox -- the apparent discrepancy between the seeming likelihood of alien life, given the billions of stars similar to our sun, and the scant evidence that such life actually exists. The paradox was named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who famously asked his colleagues at Los Alamos, N.M.. "Where Is Everyone?"
The study authors then examined various hypotheses and equations used to resolve the Fermi paradox. The results weren't pretty: "Our main result is to show that proper treatment of scientific uncertainties dissolves the Fermi paradox by showing that it is not at all unlikely ex ante for us to be alone in the Milky Way, or in the observable universe. Our second result is to show that, taking account of observational bounds on the prevalence of other civilizations, our updated probabilities suggest that there is a substantial probability that we are alone." SpaceX CEO Elon Musk cited the study's conclusions as an "added impetus" for humanity to become a spacefaring civilization capable of extending life beyond Earth. He tweeted: "This is why we must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization & extending life to other planets..."
The study authors then examined various hypotheses and equations used to resolve the Fermi paradox. The results weren't pretty: "Our main result is to show that proper treatment of scientific uncertainties dissolves the Fermi paradox by showing that it is not at all unlikely ex ante for us to be alone in the Milky Way, or in the observable universe. Our second result is to show that, taking account of observational bounds on the prevalence of other civilizations, our updated probabilities suggest that there is a substantial probability that we are alone." SpaceX CEO Elon Musk cited the study's conclusions as an "added impetus" for humanity to become a spacefaring civilization capable of extending life beyond Earth. He tweeted: "This is why we must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization & extending life to other planets..."
we deserve to go extinct instead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
The Fermi Paradox is an utterly useless test. It takes variables you have no data on and then says to compute their probability.
Statistical probability, to be of any use in the real world at all, must by definition be based off already measurable data. That we have basically no measurement of any of this data means it is impossible to use the supposed equation of The Fermi Paradox to determine anything at all.
That this "equation" is mentioned with anything like passing respect should be considered a joke. That a paper from Oxford uses it is, one would hope, a joke from a couple drunk frat students hoping to get an easily published paper out to boos their careers.
DDT is safe for children
"Are we alone in the universe?" she asked.
"Yes," said the Oracle.
"So there's no other life out there?"
"There is. They're alone too."
I think the galaxy is a life distributing system.
As long as we don't have the right estimation of the probability that life exists on a planet, we cannot really assess if life exists or no. Now given the gigantic (known) number of galaxies containing a gigantic number of stars, even if that life probability is low, that would be quite a stretch to conclude life exists only on Earth.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Shitty smelly parasites hindu-chimps are infesting the tech sector. Earth is doomed to drown in shit.
> "This is why we must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization & extending life to other planets..."
QUICK! Do something. Well what the hell can we do in the face of light-year distances and utterly alien environments? I know, I know,... we should subsidize near-orbit launches using hydrocarbon fuels for bored billionaires. Let's call it innovation! Entrepreneurship! The future!
http://brighterbrains.org/arti...
Based on the exponential rate of technological development, I'm guessing the actual answer to where everyone might be is likely some variant of this hypothesis.
Regardless, Elon is right.. Mars. Stat.
..don't panic
The authors do a nice job of pointing out the flawed methodology of many previous writers on the Drake equation, but continue to perpetuate the questionable assumptions that underlie it. Here are a couple for starters: First, why do we conflate "intelligent life" with "civilization"? For us, technological advance has been associated with growth in population and social structures, but intelligence could just as well arise in beings that live much longer than we do and do not feel the need (or perhaps are not even able) to reproduce by the millions. Think of the intelligent ocean on Lem's Solaris, for example. Second, we cannot begin to estimate "detectability" when we have no idea what to look for. Yes, we incessantly communicate and frequently use radio waves to do so, but neither might be true for a less social or less numerous intelligence. How would we detect a lifeform that abandoned its planet billions of years ago and now wanders the galaxy? As in so many discussions of extraterrestrial life, I see people who are looking only for something familiar and who wouldn't recognize something genuinely alien if it was right in front of them.
Just asking for a friend.
https://xkcd.com/384/
"Keeping alive the light of consciousness and spreading if throughout the universe so that it won't die" seems to me for once like a religious imperative worth pursuing. It actually would keep people away from tribal bullshit and have us all work together.
Let's update our cults to that one. I'm all in for it. ... There is even the imperative to have and raise children in it - pretty much spot on a perfect upgrade to the abrahamic revelation cults if you ask me.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
So the conclusion of the article is something weâ(TM)ve known since the beginning of mankind: we donâ(TM)t know if weâ(TM)re alone in the universe.
Not really worth writing about, is it?
-- Cheers!
The time and space for light to travel is the reason we will never "see" anyone else in the observable universe.
If some life were alive at some billion lights years away from us, we would need to wait for those billions years to actually be able to SEE them! (And same for them to see us!)
Giving the fact that our own planet exist since only a few billion years, and that life for only a few millions... there is no way to beat that time and light travel speed
So, EVEN IF LIFE ACTUALLY EXIST ANYWHERE ELSE, we will NEVER KNOW, because it's PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE!!
The homosexuals should from the vanguard of deep space exploration. Pack them into rocket ships and blast them into deep space where they can explore to their heart's content. The technology exists. No need to invent anything new. Rocket ships plus homosexuals equals instant space exploration program. May the force be with you!
I think it is wrong to always drag Fermi into these speculations. He was a scientist, and it was a valid question - but the discussion has moved on a great deal since 1950; he was also famous, which is why his names keeps popping up and is used as 'proof' that we are alone in the universe, which I'm sure he himself would have considered absurd.
With little evidence either way, this is at best speculation, and it is a course of speculation that has been running almost without change for decades - maybe even centuries. The best either side has been able to come up with, at least until very recently, is 'surely ...'.There is, however a growing body of evidence to suggest that at least primitive life may well be an inevitable consequence of physics and chemistry, and my bet is on the side of the same being the case for both complex life and intelligent life.
Life, and probably any complex, dynamic system in which evolution can take place, seem to evolve a steps, with life reaching a sort of quasi-stable state, until somewhere a major "innovation" (for lack of a better word) breaks the stability and rapidly takes over the scene, to the exclusion of any other, similar innovation. (I prefer the word 'innovation' over 'mutation' because I think these major steps mostly involve lucky combinations of mutations, that have accumulated over a longer period). An example of such an innovation would be the appearance of eukaryotes, and one thing that is worth bearing in mind is that it is perfectly possible that there could have been a large number of other, similar innovations at around that time, which just never got off the ground because they were outcompeted. It could be that elsewhere there are 'higher' lifeforms based on a kind of highly optimised biofilms, where similar advantages to the eukaryotes were realised, but without endosymbiosis - after all, why not?
After that, it seems almost obvious that multicellular life and then intelligence must evolve: biofilms are already to some extent organised and cooperating about resources. There would appear to be a continuum from biofilms to simple, multicellular lifeforms - and multicellular life leads to cell-specialisation and a growing need for organisation and coordination - things like muscle cells and nerve cells almost have to follow at some point, and in time, intelligence. Not because of some "plan", but because these developments keep giving adaptive advantages. Intelligence, as I think the scientific consensus is now, is also a matter of degrees - there is no sharp cut-off point, where humans suddenly became self-aware and intelligent.
So where is everybody? If we think of our ouwn technological level, and how quickly we have gone from messengers on rapid horses to the global internet and radio communication, and compare that to interstellar distances, I don't think it is surprising that we don't see anything of other civilisations - would we be able to see, simply by chance, a radio signal from even the nearest star system? Would we even be able to detect a radio signal if we knew it had to be there, and it was directed straight at us? And how far away would we be able to? And if it turns out that we can, the stars are mostly so far away, that any signal would still be on its way to us, since we are limited by the speed of light. And if it is posssible to go beyong light-speed, we still don't know how to detect such a signal. All in all, I think it is obvious why we haven't seen or heard anything from other civilisations.
then it's as equally terrifying as if we aren't alone.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
the eyes are all around us, watching us, studying us.
We haven't detected any radio waves, so what? Look at most life on earth and think how likely is it that they will develop a radio telescope? Very fucking unlikely! Sharks have cruised our oceans for hundreds of millions of years pretty much unchanged, are they going to ever produce a radio telescope? Note very likely. Dolphins, apes, elephants and ravens are all incredibly intelligent species that don't look like cracking the radio telescope project anytime soon. Even most pockets of human existence were not looking like having any major technological break through anytime soon from Australian Aboriginals, pygmy rain forest tribes, Kalahari Bush Men or Papua tribes men. It seems the survive the long harsh winter of Europe was the anonymity that led to major technological break throughs so I see no reason why the galaxy or at least the universe if not our local neighbourhood can't be filled with highly evolved conscious beings that just never made a radio telescope. Basing our conclusions on we haven't detected anything yet is just plain ridiculous.
That we have basically no measurement of any of this data means it is impossible to use the supposed equation of The Fermi Paradox to determine anything at all.
I totally agree . . . what about the "non-observable" universe . . . ?
There could be critters composed of Dark Energy, living on Dark Matter out there.
We cannot see them, because "they" do not want us to.
That a paper from Oxford uses it is, one would hope, a joke from a couple drunk frat students hoping to get an easily published paper out to boos their careers.
I think the the paper is intentional disinformation, written by critters composed of Dark Energy, living on Dark Matter.
They want to convince us that we should not go out looking for them, because they think that humans would find them very tasty.
Yum-yum.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
All of these estimates of whether there is other intelligent life out there in the universe are based on assumed probabilities which everybody is constantly pulling out of their asses.
To illustrate how little we know so far: our own galaxy is roughly 100'000 light years across. The human-made object that is furthest from Earth (Voyager 1) is a bit more than a 2/1000th of a light year away (which took it 40 years to get there), that's a factor of 50 million in difference. Only in recent years have been been able to use telescopes to find planets in other solar systems that are in the immediate vicinity of ours. A lot of that knowledge is still tentative and subject to revision.
We have suspicions about simple, non-intelligent life on Europa, which is in our own solar system, but we haven't been able to confirm or exclude this just yet.
We have no idea how likely it is that evolution will produce intelligent life on a given planet, as we only have a data set of size one, from which you really can't extrapolate.
Truth is: we simple don't have nearly enough information about the universe yet to be even remotely able to estimate the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
What we can say for certain is that there aren't other civilizations in the immediate vicinity broadcasting in our direction (or in all directions) loud enough for us to pick up. But that is not surprising regardless of whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, because sending a signal that isn't masked by all the noise over cosmic distances requires a lot of power, and why would anyone do that? We aren't sending signals with that much power ourselves, so why should we expect others to do the same?
If at some point in the future we do find signs of intelligent life elsewhere - or we have cataloged enough planets in our own galaxy to have a large enough sample set to properly estimate some statistics - then we might be able to answer this question. But right now everyone is just pulling numbers out of their asses.
Personally, I find it hard to believe that we'd be alone in such as vast universe, but I fully recognize that this is just my own incredulity, and not an actual argument. I also don't think we're going to advance enough technologically to be able to answer the question during my lifetime. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to work on this problem, because I do believe that the journey towards answering these kinds of questions will be very fruitful in and by itself. But just please, stop with the statistics when no reasonable input data is available.
Just amused that all of a sudden the normal /. criticism of Musk it petering out. So let me give it a go:
No, Elon, no. The consciousness of mankind taken as a whole does not seem that light to me - a good reason not to spread it further.
We don't have to worry about LGM's (little green men), but we do have to watch out for the LGM's (large green motherfuckers).
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
There could be plenty of microbial life out there, which came into being independent of life on Earth (i.e. no common panspermia source, if applicable) that we'd never be able to detect via looking for alien spacecraft or radio emissions. Considering how many billions of years life on Earth was limited to single-celled microbes, it's plausible that conditions on some bodies wouldn't be suitable for macroscopic life. Even if microbial, this would have major philosophical/religious implications.
Intelligent life would be cool, due to cultural exchange, but there wouldn't necessarily be any additional implications about the meaning of human existence.
So far, we've sent quite a few landers to Mars, and have acquired an increasing amount of evidence that chemicals that can produce known forms of life are/were present. So we haven't even completely rendered it implausible that microbial life could've once existed on one of the most-studied bodies in our solar system. It's supremely naive and premature to use current data to make any conclusions about such easily-missed details in the universe.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
How about we spend all that money looking after the place where conditions are suitable and we know we can survive?
Long term living on Earth won't work for us. Eventually an asteroid big enough will hit, statistically speaking.
If we never accomplish interstellar travel, then in 5 billion years we die with our Sun's expansion. If we can travel a bit, then we can last perhaps 10^100 years orbiting a supermassive blackhole into the heatdeath of the Universe.
In the short term, like the amount of time to the next election, none of this is of any significance.
>but intelligence could just as well arise in beings that live much longer than we do and do not feel the need (or perhaps are not even able) to reproduce by the millions.
You are not a Biologist. Are you? I am and the consensus in the domain is that "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution". What you are saying is meaningless in light of evolution.
First of all, reproduction is indispensable to compensate the accidental death even if the organism is immortal. Otherwise, the species will go extinct.
Secondly, as far as we know, "replication" (a generalization of reproduction) is a common trait to every living organism. The cells do replicate, the organism as a whole do replicate. No replication, or none, does not make any sense.
Thirdly, lets imagine there is a species long living and do not try to reproduce. As far as we know, there is a large diversity of life. If life developed somewhere there is almost certainly not only one species. At the begin of the life of this planet, it should have certainly expanded, reproduce. Otherwise this species won't exist, it needs a sufficient large number to survive. Then the process should have stopped for all the the planet species because if it only stops for one, this one won't be able to compete to other species that are still growing.
I only skimmed TFA, but the points it makes are interesting. The Drake equation is well known - multiply the probabilities of all the factors required for a civilization. The interesting point is this: those probabilities have ranges, in many cases with a lower bound of zero. In the absence of knowledge, if you actually randomly choose values from the entire range, then odds are good that at least one of the parameters will be close to zero - thus giving you an empty universe.
Of course, our real goal should be to improve our knowledge. As it is, even TFA is purest speculation.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
They're out there, folks, believe me. That's why we need Space Force. Space Force will stop them.
You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here.
Deteriorata. Deteriorata.
Go placidly amid the noise and waste,
And remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof.
Avoid quiet and passive persons, unless you are in need of sleep.
Rotate your tires.
Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself,
And heed well their advice, even though they be turkeys.
Know what to kiss, and when.
Consider that two wrongs never make a right, but that three do.
Wherever possible, put people on hold.
Be comforted that in the face of all aridity and disillusionment,
and despite the changing fortunes of time,
There is always a big future in computer maintenance.
Remember The Pueblo.
Strive at all times to bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate.
Know yourself. If you need help, call the FBI.
Exercise caution in your daily affairs,
Especially with those persons closest to you -
That lemon on your left, for instance.
Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most souls
Would scarcely get your feet wet.
Fall not in love therefore. It will stick to your face.
Gracefully surrender the things of youth: birds, clean air, tuna, Taiwan.
And let not the sands of time get in your lunch.
Hire people with hooks.
For a good time, call 606-4311. Ask for Ken.
Take heart in the bedeepening gloom
That your dog is finally getting enough cheese.
And reflect that whatever fortune may be your lot,
It could only be worse in Milwaukee.
You are a fluke of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
And whether you can hear it or not,
The universe is laughing behind your back.
Therefore, make peace with your god,
Whatever you perceive him to be - hairy thunderer, or cosmic muffin.
With all its hopes, dreams, promises, and urban renewal,
The world continues to deteriorate.
Give up!
"Deteriorata" - National Lampoon
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
I think if we'll ever find evidence of life on Mars, every "we're alone" theory will be swept away. 2 planets with life in just a tiny spot in the universe would lead to big data probability of life.
Think also about how many planets or satellites have water on them in just the solar system.
As much as its nice to think that ET might come here with magic to wash away all our troubles, the fact is we wouldn't react to it well. Even if ET tried, those mentally ill and greedy among us would use their blessings to subvert the benefits
In all likelihood, ET would not care to preserve us and contact with ET would not be good for us.
Given the possibilities, we are better off alone until our society evolves to control the megalomaniacs.
Greed is the root of all evil.
...are grossly overestimated he said
The problem with the Drake equation is it tends to look at the problem from a physicist/astrophysics point of view. if you look from a biological perspective, things become even murkier.
1. We still have no understanding how life appeared on earth. yes we can propose a mechanism for the creation of amino acids, but that is a long way to creating even basic life
2. We have no way of calculating the likelihood of creating complex life. On earth this appears to go go back to one event during symbiogenesis. How likely is this to happen? How often has it happened since then, but the organisms did not survive
3. What we term intelligent life (insert joke here) has only appeared as far as we can tell once in 4.5 billion years. Why is this? What are the conditions needed and why has it not happened in multiple times
Personally I think the possibility of single cell life arising quite likely given the right conditions, but multi-cell intelligent life highly unlikely. Fortunately the universe is quite large so even very low probability events come about if your allowed to roll the dice enough, but the likelihood of it happening twice in the same neighborhood is so low, to be virtually non-existent
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
duh
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you."
"So ... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat."
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the Universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And th
Maybe they just don't want to meet meat.
Anyhow, by what the --in context multi-level silly-- men in black movie calls the "best damn investigative reporting on the planet", they're out there, they've been here, and by all accounts, that wasn't such a grand idea. Better for us they stay elsewhere. Though for purely selfish reasons I'd still love to get my hands on their tech and go zip around the universe.
I really shoulnd't post this because I like the Oracle's answer's style so much better, but I can't help but post it anyway. With apologies for the inconvenience.
The odds that there is other life is 50/50: Either there is or there isn't.
rewriting history since 2109
... and it's using ours as their lunatic asylum.
Or maybe aliens built a giant unseen wall around our part of the universe to keep us from immigrating to other worlds. . Call it The Great Filter if you will. The aliens heard humans are a bunch of rapists and thugs, and they don't want us infesting other worlds. Make the Universe Great Again!
On the Fermi Paradox when the Drake Equation - more of the variables in that one are getting filled in all the time. Last pass at it shows at a minimum 10,000 possible intelligent species out there in the universe. It's just the distances between us and them is mind boggling long.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This explanation excerpt is lacking the most important parts of Fermi's premise. Basically, it's that the great filter kills off civilizations when they reach a certain level of technological competence. (I.E., where we are right now on earth, with the too-much-knowledge about how to destroy ourselves.).
Fermi basically said that the window of life (from birth to the "great filter" event was too short to occur (very often) simultaneously with other civilizations. (In other words, life exists elsewhere, just not at the same TIME as any other civilization, because they kil themselves off so quickly.
While star hoping within the Milky Way is beyond our current technology and engineering, it does seem plausible with generational ships. What we know about physics and the limits imposed by c, suggest that travelling between Galaxies is not.
You're left with is the improbable, which must Be.
Any species which is out there is too far for us to reach...forget about pace of technological advance...ain't gonna happen! If any species travel here then we would be so taken by there "technology" it might as well be god-like...then they would realize humans are just sinful beings and destroy us...so we are left with focusing on being better humans, or not. I would rather spend my time solving problems that matter to my family, community, and humanity than worrying about whether earth is alone. For goodness sake, there are 7+ billion people on "this" planet...many of a him suffer greatly...do you think they care about intelligent life that's so far away...if it even exists? Assume we are alone and work on solvable problems. I think there is a God, and He bestowed on us freedom of choice...better to get that out of the way and focus on "our" problems.
Just because we havenâ(TM)t seen it, doesnâ(TM)t mean it isnâ(TM)t there.
That being said, perhaps every time âintelligentâ(TM) life develops and becomes more and more (vulnerably) dependent on technology it ultimately either wipes itself out or nature comes along and does it. Look how vulnerable we are now to something as simple as a large solar storm. Wipe out the solid state circuitry on this planet and see how long we last (as intelligent life.)
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
there are aliens
The following possibilities exist:
1. We are alone in the universe and will remain so forever.
2. We are not alone in the universe, being preceded by one or more civilizations.
3. We are alone in the universe at this time but conditions exist for other civilizations to evolve in due time.
Given the vast size and diversity of the universe, #1 seems almost ludicrous absent the intervention of some higher power (i.e. "Intelligent Design"). We occupy a rather mundane planet orbiting a ordinary star in a humdrum galaxy in no particularly special region of the universe. There's no reason to suspect there aren't trillions of other planets just like ours in this galaxy alone, let alone the trillions of galaxies beyond ours. If similar planets exist in similar conditions with similar age there's no reason for life not to have evolved on its own assuming life is a purely accidental event.
Possibility #2 makes more sense assuming humans aren't some special snowflake in the universe like #1 supposes. Humans have evolved and gone from squatting in caves to sending space probes into interstellar space in just a few thousand years. That's a fraction of an eyeblink of cosmological time. If another civilization developed just 10,000 years earlier than us -- again, something less than a rounding error in cosmological time -- imagine how far ahead of us they could be technologically. Imagine where we'll be in 10,000 years given our current exponential rate of progress.
Possibility #3 is a variation on #2 but backwards. Assuming more than one civilization will ever come into being in this universe, somebody has to be first to get there barring a fantastical coincidence. Perhaps we're it. If so, we are alone for now but unlikely to remain so over cosmological time scales.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
More planets for us.
let's at least have enough judgment to contain this on this planet
Why don't we ask Bezos?
And Mars will never happen in this century and definitely not by the USA.
We have already dumped over 2 trillion dollars into the Middle East and the unnecessary wars - thanks to the Republicans.. We have a population that's getting older and it'll put more strains on Social Security and Medicare; whilst don't have many workers coming into the country to help pay for it - thanks to the Republicans.
We have a ballooning national debt - thanks to the Republicans.
Sorry, the Republicans have ruined this country and we're never going to Mars.
Maybe the Chinese will. They can afford it - thanks to the Republicans.
And it's Earth.
Which is what a lot of people thought up until very recently where we now have dozens known to us and the potential for many, many more to be discovered.
We didn't have data to prove otherwise, so we viewed Earth as unique. Now we have data and Earth is proving to be far from unique.
I think how we view the potential for "life" to exist "out there", in whatever form you want to consider life to be, will follow a similar path.
The Fermi Paradox is an utterly useless test. It takes variables you have no data on and then says to compute their probability.
We do have data. Quite a lot of it actually. So far all the data we have has not given any indication of life anywhere but on Earth but it is data all the same. Now the universe is a big place and we've only looked at a tiny bit of it so far but to say we have no data is simply not true.
Until we have gobs more data the drake equation is useless for actually estimating how common life is in the universe. This paper is a waste of time and effort just like any other "study" of it. But that doesn't make the equation worthless. They are all just missing the point. Its even sadder that is the case because these are scientists and supposed to be smart people. The Fermi Paradox/Drake Equation is just as poorly understood as Schroedinger's cat. I've even heard plenty of scientist misuse Schrodinger as well.
The Drake Equation/Fermi paradox illustrates several things. For one it shows the difficulty in searching for extraterrestrial life. It also helps describe to people just how big and massive the universe is. It is incomprehensibly big and I don't think its possible for any one human to really comprehend just how big, but it does give them an idea that we aren't just talking about big we are talking really big. This is important for scientists as well because even they can get so deep into the weeds that they lose perspective a bit. But the biggest thing is that its supposed to get you thinking about the problem. We know at least enough to know what some crucial variables are even if we don't know their value yet. That's a lot better than the previous hundred years. Perhaps in the next some of those variables can be solved or at least constrained.
So until we've been to the majority of solar systems in our arm of the galaxy at the least we really dont have enough data to use it as a tool. But that's ok, it wasn't meant to be one. Frank Drake developed it as a way to help get people thinking of solutions instead of complaining about the problems.
If we *are* alone, then it's as qually terrifying as if we aren't alone.
What's so terrifying about humanity being alone in the universe?
Nobody said it was terrifying. They said it was "equally" terrifying.
A = B
~B
Therefore, ~A
Person A: I am equally terrified of being alone, as I am of not being alone.
Person B: How terrified are you of not being alone?
Person A: I'm not.
Person B: So, you're not terrified of being alone, then, either.
Person A: Like, duh.
First, there are no physics barriers to visiting other stars, purely engineering ones.
Engineering is applied physics so that statement is something of a tautology.
Second, many stars are relatively close together.
That statement is true in a sense but misleading. The fastest spacecraft we have ever launched will take tens of thousands of years to travel even the 4.3 light years to our nearest star. "Close" when you are talking about distances between stars is in reality still an almost unimaginably vast distance so close isn't really very close.
We see no attempts by anyone to apparently communicate with other civilizations
That seems like circular reasoning. You are saying we don't have evidence of other civilizations because we don't have evidence of them trying to communicate with each other. But since such evidence would constitute proof of their existence your reasoning seems to circle back on itself unless I misunderstand where you are going with this argument.
We also see no signs of any sort of megastructures like Ring Worlds and Dyson Spheres.
Why should we? We have no evidence or credible physics theory that such a structure is actually physically possible in real life. Heck, where would one get enough material to create such a structure? You could strip every planet in our solar system of every useful molecule and you still wouldn't have enough material to surround our star with a ring much less a sphere. Just because we can imagine something doesn't mean it's possible in the universe we actually live in.
Besides, the belief that we are alone, has a weird "we are special God-created creatures" stink about it.
Only to those already predisposed to confirmation bias thinking humans are somehow special. Objectively the only thing we can actually say is that we have not yet found any evidence of life anywhere but Earth. Any further conclusions are unjustified at this time. Thinking we are "special god creatures" is an unjustifiable stroking of one's own ego that is unsupported by any verifiable evidence.
As an atheist, I would assume life is everywhere, as there is nothing special about us. The only question is, how far away are they?
That is a reasonable theory but so far it is unsupported by evidence either for or against. I agree that it seems improbable that there isn't life elsewhere in the unimaginably vast universe but we also must acknowledge that the universe is under no obligation to conform to what we find logical.
we "may" be alone but this way of thinking is based on current agenda (view) of the planetary owners - we for sure don't want to create any panic - go back to work peasant
What's so terrifying about humanity being alone in the universe?
To answer that question look to what religious zealots do when they actually believe that hypothesis to be true. A lot of bad human behavior arises from us thinking we are more special than is justifiable.
I've always hated the Fermi Paradox . "If there's intelligent life in the Universe, why haven't they come here?" There are a ton of possibilities that don't involve no other intelligent life in the Universe. Perhaps interstellar space travel isn't possible so all of the civilizations are stuck on their own planets. Perhaps they have expanded but simply haven't found Earth yet. (Space is huge, after all.) Perhaps they did find Earth and are purposefully not visiting the planet out of some kind of Prime Directive or "Nature Preserve" scenario. Perhaps they found Earth and visited it, but centuries/millennia ago. If alien spacecraft landed here during the stone age, they could have moved on and we'd never know they were here. There are so many more possibilities than "I don't see them right now so therefore they don't exist."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I didn't know hitler was a shitposter....
It is data, but it is wholly irrelevant to the question. We can detect planets, but can't tell if they support life or not from here.
That's not true actually. We can by looking at chemistry of exoplanets which we definitely can measure today. There are markers of life that can be seen from Earth. If we see certain organic molecules then we have strong evidence that life exists there. If we see life on an exoplanet that is likely how we will see it first.
Determining if we are looking at life that has formed what we would consider an industrialized society is a bit more challenging but still feasible. And if there is life then there is always the potential for "intelligent" life.
Entering a black hole without losing structural information would therefore be a considerable challenge to any advanced intelligence and one of the ways it might do this would be by reengineering itself with femtotechnology, structures at sub atomic scales.
A rather BIG assumption on his part. Not only in the engineering aspect, but the assumption that black holes will allow for stable structures within. Also the assumption that anything in a black hole is accessible past the event horizon.
Can I get a refund? It said We are not alone.
> Besides, the belief that we are alone, has a weird "we are special God-created creatures" stink about it.
> As an atheist, I would assume life is everywhere, as there is nothing special about us.
I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but that kinda has a certain "I intentionally choose confirmation bias over following the evidence" stink about it. I'm sure that's not what you mean, though.
We don't know about life anywhere else, and we can't even come close to agreeing what the word "God", even *means*, much less understand and prove everything about the concept. So the honest answer to most questions about these subjects is simply "we don't know". That is, once you go beyond certain descriptions of "God" as meaning basically physics and concepts like "truth".
Given that we don't know, we only get hints throughout my our lifetime, we can choose between two ways to think about it, conclusion-based (faith-based?) or evidence-based.
Suppose I'm introduced to a person I don't know, names Rob Smith. I'm asked to guess whether the Rob Smith is a) a career burglar or b) founded and runs a homeless shelter and soup kitchen. I guess, somewhat arbitrarily, that Rob is a career burglar. I then stumble upon the fact that someone named Rob Smith, perhaps the same person, gives 80% of his income to charity.
I can have either of two reactions to the news that Rob Smith is very charitable. I can either adjust my initial guess, saying "perhaps this Rob Smith is a actually a good guy. What little evidence I have is starting to point that direction." Alternatively, I can say "nope, it can't be the same Rob Smith. I already guessed that this guy is a crook, so I won't believe the evidence."
I can either let my foregone conclusion (guess) affect my view of the evidence, or I can let the evidence affect my estimate of the unknown variable. Although most would argue that logically our conclusions should be based on the evidence, for whatever reason we humans have a strong urge do the opposite - letting our previous guess decide how we view the evidence. We're really, really bad about that in politics. I reject all evidence that Person A is doing anything good, because I voted against them. That makes us tend to say things like:
I don't believe any evidence of X, because a long time I guess that Y was false, and if Y actually is true, that would be evidence that Y could be true - that my guess might have been wrong. I reject the evidence because it doesn't support my guess.
There a million different beliefs about God, "anything that anyone calls God therefore does not exist", based on many different sets of reasoning, some evidence-based, some experience-based, and some more extreme conclusion-based, what some would call faith-based (for an extreme definition of "faith"). The extreme faith-based schools of thought, basically cults, say:
I believe X about God, so I reject / ignore all evidence to the contrary.
This cultist way of thinking isn't limited to David Koresh followers. There is a cult sect of atheism that says "all of the million or so descriptions of something someone calls 'God' must be dead wrong, so therefore we reject all evidence and reasoning which suggests anything more powerful than a human has ever existed". That's an act of extreme fact, cultish faith.
There are, of course, other varieties of "atheism". Perhaps the most common is "my mom believed X, Y, Z about God. I think my mom was mistaken about at least one of those. I don't believe in the same idea of God that my mom did. As for the other thousands of ideas about different things people call God, I don't even know what all the different beliefs are, so I certainly can't know which ones are right. I'm just pretty sure that my mom didn't have the God thing all figured out. So if my mom's idea of God wasn't quite right, that leaves me with no understanding of God that I can believe."
We are here. You are just not ready for first contact.
Even if Fermi's paradox were proven true as well as Drakes equation, there is no way of knowing.
Most potential civilizations may be thousands, millions or billions of light years away. What we see through our remote observations happened too long ago. If life, intelligent species and a civilization sprang up, just like ours, who could communicate using radio or other media in the electromagnetic spectrum, the distance between means that they would have to be less than120 light years away (the time we have had access to radio, etc) That distance (120 light years) is a truly insignificant proportion of the Universe we can see now. I suspect the Oxford Study presupposes that the other civilizations that we cannot find, have methods, and the science to have faster than light light technology to communicate with us.There are probably just as many civilizations farther out than 1000 light years, that are wondering the same thing.
Except Europa. Attempt no landings there.
Our ability to detect life out there is limited. We're lucky to see anything smaller than Uranus at interstellar distances.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
So where is it? Put up or shut up!
1. Scientists say life was created on earth but it took billions of years.
2. Then they say life happened right away on earth - but how could it evolve so quickly
3. Oh it couldn't, so it had to have come from outer space (transpermia?)
4. Oh now life is super hard, none found in outer space, and we are somehow the only ones and we don't know where we came from?
I read a lot of papers about the Fermi Paradox and most of them are worthless in addressing it - they typically take the form that "all civilizations will (or won't) do X and so the problem is solved" and in the "will" case is based on something that the only civilization known has not yet done. The assumption of some special behavior does nothing to address the paradox since it is universal in nature - it has to apply to all cases given that we see no evidence of civilizations at all.
This is one of the best papers I have seen, since it directly addresses the paradox, addresses the fundamental problem with analyzing it (uncertainty of the Drake parameters) and does not appeal to some special case solution. Also, given the valid formulation (many random variables with broad logarithmic distributions) their result isn't very sensitive to whether there are defects in the distribution modeling of any particular parameter.
But I do have a few of comments about their treatment, and about the subject as a whole.
First about the subject as a whole
Point one. Tthe probability of civilization in the Observable Universe is not relevant at all to the Fermi Paradox. Intelligent signals from distant galaxies would have to be broadcast to the entire Universe to have any useful chance of us being in the way of the signal to intercept it, which means the signal would have to have a power larger than actual stars. The Hubble telescope could not detect an optical signal at all as bright as the Sun at a billion light years, similar limits exist for radiotelescopes. Also, no intelligent civilization is going to be arriving here from distant galaxy groups. Even fusion propulsion will limit probes (that slow down) to about 5% c. The Universe has only been able to support long-term life for about the last 8 billion years (early Universe was too violent, heavy elements had to accumulate) so no probe from a civilization farther away than 400 million light years could even reach us. Thus even the most extreme volume relevant to the paradox is only something like 1/100,000 of the volume of the Universe, and I would argue really only the two large galaxies in the Local Group is relevant (the next closest group is 10 million light years away).
Point two. Arguments that we have "only one data point" when discussing life on Earth abuses the term "data point" horribly. We have only one system to observe, true, but it covers vast numbers of natural experiments across a billions of years, so it provides a great deal of data about the properties of living systems. In fact rare events in that history tell us a lot about the likelihood of those events.
Now about the paper. I have some objections to their modeling of two of their parameters, but the objections go in opposite directions and thus tend to cancel out to some extent.
Their distribution modeling of the origin of life is astounding. Due to our poor understanding of the processes of biogenesis (which they attempt to model) they assign a range of greater than 200 orders of magnitude (there are no more than 10^82 atoms in the Observable Universe). Given that life on Earth developed almost as soon as conditions permitted it (~100 million years after the end of sterilizing bombardments) actual evidence indicates that with suitable conditions is happens rapidly, and thus with high probability over a planet. It would be appropriate to consider the probability of a clone of Earth, but the approach they take to try to model biogenesis is not credible. In this case we do have actual evidence supporting a conclusion that it is likely with the right conditions. In other words, they are relying not so much on real uncertainties, but on poor arguments about uncertainty.
But by the same sort of consideration their uncertainty range for the probability of technological ("intelligent") life is implausibly large. They assign a log-uniform from 0.001 to 1 (based on "the literature", no discussion is offered), thus asserting that given life the likelih
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
until we invent Warp Drive. Then the Vulcans will show up.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Folks. The universe is billions of years old. We've been transmitting radio since the 1890's That's under 125 years ago. And even then was insanely low powered. That's not far. If you add a bit, and look at what's within 100 light years of us, there are around 512 G type stars within that 100 light year range.
That 100 years is a tiny amount of the time that we've had civilization, and a minute amount of time that we've had life on our planet
512 is not a lot. And they'd need to be looking directly at us in the past 100 years to even have a chance of noticing us. What are the odds that they aren't at that level of tech yet, or have gone past radio waves to something else that we'd not be able to detect yet?
They may be out there, or not, but the odds of them screaming at us in the last 100 years is pretty low. The further out you get, the harder it is to even pick up a signal, and they've got no reason to suspect that they needed to broadcast at us, since our signals haven't gotten there yet...
"We May Be All Alone In the Known Universe" is what has been at least suggested by 100.0% of our observations, since nobody-else is what we keep seeing, over and over again.
If you ever looked up with a telescope, our aloneness was suggested to you too, whether you noticed it or not. ;-)
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The more interesting thing is not the paradox itself, or the modeling. The intersting part is the explanation for the paradox, which the author attributed to technology growing beyond the level of wisdom needed by a species to survive it: also known as the "great filter".
Some called out nuclear science or genomes as the crucial tripping point for the great filter, but I think the trip point is really when a species/civilization (alien or not) grasps and understands quantum entanglement.
Elon is right and this is precisely why I argue that people should have more children, and read to them. (The start of the path of education, encouraging minds.)
We need a LOT more people.
It takes a LOT of people to support the people at the edge who move us onward and outward.
Don't bother arguing that the planet can't handle more people. That is merely a consumption problem. Reduce your footprint. Based on the resources my family consumes the world can handle 50,000,000,000 (50 Billion) people sustainably leaving 25% of the land area, all of the polar areas and almost all of the oceans alone. If you can't do it you're doing it wrong.
And if you don't want to have kids then please don't. I wasn't really talking to you specifically although you can support your sibs, friends and society in the endeavor.
NASA has a group wondering if we'd recognize alien life if we see it.
The Fermi Paradox... I have a really simple answer. the requirements for us to observe them:
1. they need to be located within range that we can detect.
2. they need to be a techological species, as we define "technology".
3. their tech needs to be within +/1 150 years of our current tech.
Otherwise, they're either too primitive to send aignals that we can observe with current tech, or too advanced. Quick: how many Victorians could have read this post, over the Net?
I'll also point out that we mostly stopped broadcasting 100,000 watt radio stations.
Where does this come from. And civilizations can spread across galaxies in "reasonable" time-frames.
One possible clue is that we are on a galactic island, relatively speaking. The Copernican principle would statistically put us in a denser cluster of galaxies. Our galactic neighborhood is sparse. Our isolation may suggest some kind of filter is active. There may be a reason we are in the boondocks such that we are alive pondering why we are in the boondocks because being in the boondocks either helped bring us about or protected us from a danger.
For example, perhaps beings in most dense galactic clusters have been dominated by a single force, self-annihilated by some run-away inevitable technology, or there is some kind of "dark radiation" we don't know about that's too high in big clusters.
Table-ized A.I.
"I think the surest sign that there is intelligent life out there in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
-- Bill Watterson, spoken by Calvin in his Calvin and Hobbes comic
The study sets out to explain "the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe".
But that is bollocks.
We have not observed far enough away with enough precision to determine lifelessness, and given the low resolution (spatial and spectral) of our observations, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
We are only now starting to catalog exoplanets, and have not observed any of them in spectrographic detail.
In terms of time, any civilization looking for us would have to be within 150 lightyears of us (a tiny distance on "observable universe" scales, to have detected our radio emanations phase. And that phase of unencrypted (i.e. non-random) and/or analog radio communications is quickly coming to an end, as we move to fibre-optics and encrypted digital which seems like noise if you don't have the decryption key.
So we have not done anywhere near enough observation to even establish an empirical probability of absence of life in the near quadrant of our own galaxy, never mind the observable universe. Preposterous assumption underlying this study.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
*Ours* implies that *we* are among those who will do the taking. Even assuming it is our race who will do the taking, it is highly likely that those doing the taking will have no use for you and me, so will we, as in you and I, even consider it *our* achievement? If they even let you and me live under a bridge in a cardboard box, will you consider it a shared achievement if *they* take the entire universe?
I suspect GP was thinking of 0 Kelvin, absolute zero. Saying Celsius may have been a mistake.
You seem unaware of the book The Rare Earth Hypothesis.
The proto-Earth/proto-Moon collision that is believed to have formed the Earth and Moon are thought to be a freak according to models.
Such a collision ejected proto-Earth's atmosphere into space.
Otherwise, the Earth would have a crushing massive atmosphere like Venus.
The atmosphere of Venus has 200x the mass of Earth's atmosphere and the Earth's gravity indicates it too should have a heavy atmosphere. Even Saturn's moon Titan has a more massive atmosphere than the Earth.
If a freak collision event is one of the factors that made Earth a friendly environment for life too form, the statistical odds drop like a rock.
And The Rare Earth Hypothesis book notes several other factors that may be statistically unlikely such as a small planet like Earth having a powerful magnetic field.
The majority are clustered near the center. If they are too close to the center of the Galaxy then life doesn't have a chance. Near the center, star systems are too dense and the likelihood of super nova or other catastrophe is very high and very periodic. Once the majority of stars are excluded from having life, the results of the Drake equation are not as optimistic.
The Drake equation was the beginning of Junk Science. Multiply a bunch of either meaningless or unknowable numbers and then try to make some inference from the results.
Nooooo no no no no, it is mine!
There's nothing paradoxical about the Fermi Paradox in the first place, so hinging a study on it is already wrought with problems.
The seeming lack of evidence for technologically advanced species out in space comes down to two problems: the speed of light and the inverse square law.
Think of humans being detected: we've had radio for just over a century, making any detectable radio transmissions detectable to a maximum of just over 100 light years (due to the speed of light). This assumes that such transmissions are sufficiently powerful to be detected above the background radio noise of the galaxy, and the further from Earth we go, the weaker those transmissions will be (due to the inverse square law).
As such, we need to be within detectable range of an advanced race, or they have to be within detectable range of us. As the distances to be covered are massive, the two above laws make it unlikely, without a massive revamping of our understanding of the nature of the universe, that any advanced races will ever detect each other.
We could be 500 light years from an advanced civilization and have absolutely no idea.
There's not really any conceivable way to do any such thing, nor any purpose which would be best served by it, and other side effects of that much energy expenditure would be of far more immediate concern. If my math is right, the energy required to move Mars to Earth orbit would be about 20x its gravitational binding energy. You probably don't want to just give it a big whack, and the list of things that would probably be easier would probably include disassembling the planet and moving it to a new orbit piecemeal.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The universe is only 'old' from our point of view. A much colder planet where its life's metabolism and reproductive rates are low, might evolve much slower than life on Earth.
Assuming that even is possible you then have to explain why we are the only planet in the galaxy and possibly the known universe where evolution occurs at a much, much faster rate. The simplest explanations for the Fermi-paradox are that interstellar travel is extraordinarily hard and takes lots of resources and lots of time or that the evolution of intelligent life is exceptionally rare - after all, it took 3 billion years to evolve multi-cellular life on Earth. Our current understanding of fundamental physics suggests that the former is probably true and we have no reliable data to estimate the other. However, if interstellar travel is exceptionally hard then, even if intelligent life does evolve it might not make it that far from its homeworld so it might not need to be that rare for us to never see it.
We're the only intelligent species stupid enough to broadcast "Here I am, come kill me!" to every xenophobe in the universe.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I think it's not so absurd to think that it could have happened only a very few times in all the universe.
We have literally no idea. After that initial spark of life on Earth it took 3 billion years before the first multi-cellular lifeforms evolved. So while life may be highly probable multi-cellular life might be exceptionally rare but then again perhaps we are an outlier. With a sample of one planet, the only thing we can really say is that the probability of life evolving is not zero but whether that probability is 10^-40 or 10^-1 we have no way of knowing yet the difference is a galaxy teeming with life vs. just us in the entire observable universe.
At what magnitude does any finite number become probable (more probable than 1 or 2)?
Has your argument eliminated 10, 100, 1000 with equal weight? If not, estimate—if you dare—your coefficient of enhanced probability for these (very slightly) larger integers.
———
Or, how about we get first things first?
We don't even know if the process of life formation is fat-tailed or thin-tailed. (Or do you somehow know this, and you just haven't shared this yet?)
Back-of-the-envelope works pretty good for thin-tailed distributions.
Back-of-the-envelope barely ever works out right for fat-tailed distributions (and this particular envelope is made from the precious fibres of papyrus durphdurphi to begin with, which does not bode well).
———
Here's another N=1 anecdote. So far life on earth—over the past 4 billion years—has observed precisely one celestial phenomena in both the gravitation and electromagnet spectra at the "same" time (those are not scare quotes, they're the lesser-used Michelson–Morley conundrum quotes).
Now isn't it amazing, given the observable size of the universe, that any measurement perched at the top of the charismatic, existential food chain could pass through the value one, even for a few short years?
The way I was educated in the mathematics classroom, counting sequences that rarely pass from 0 to 1, tend not to achieve 2 with great frequency. But actually, in this matter, I disagree with my education. Lines this bright tend to be arbitrary in the first place, and actually represent an abstract limit on a far messier process in the real world. (What's the slope at human conception? I doubt we could pinpoint the precise moment of conception with resolution better than 1 ps, so I rate limit God at a trillion souls/second per fertile woman. Concerning the second derivative, this immediately devolves into two challenging problems, perhaps of equal, or lesser (or greater) difficulty: (1) determining the precise moment of fertility—lessor?—and (2) the precise moment of woman—greater?—though perhaps this second determination was a singular N=1 event in all of cosmic history, for a sufficiently sharp (and local) definition of "human" (again these are not scare quotes, they are the lesser used Ramakrishna–Vivekananda conundrum quotes, who, more or less contemporaneously with M–M, were busy observing a second corner of the "same" elephant).
———
Well, suppose we even knew how life originated here. Suppose even that's there a biochemically preordained sequence of complexification that leads inexorably to modern humans, modulo epicanthic folds and minutia of that nature. Let's further suppose that the primordial soup isn't faster than God, so it can't spit out the first fully formed cell wall in less than `1 ps. Then there would necessarily be some kind of tau, a time constant, wherein chance and probability are given a discrete interlude do their thing.
Would this ladder have ten rungs? Or would this ladder, observed more closely, have one hundred rungs? Or observed yet more closely, one million rungs? Each with their own tau, along the inexorable monorail of complexification?
Bear in mind, that this monorail could well extend beyond human life in its present form. And presumably, if you sampled far enough down the line, you'd eventually find a stage of pan-galactic convergent evolution which only a single life form in the entire observable universe had yet attained, sapiens xenohari.
———
Big data to the rescue! [auspicious horn tootle]
Suppose we sample every suitable rock in the observable universe in the enthalpic, e
I always liked to think that we might be alone and we are the First Ones. First Ones as in Babylon 5 first ones. The universe is still young, 14B years, and has a lifespan predicted to be in the trillions of years. Some one has to be first, why not us?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Ok, science says there was a big bang that started everything off a long time ago. What if, all the processes, and the evolution, and changes that happened here on earth over the past how ever many billions of years is how long it takes for a planet to get to the point that it can support life? So, would it follow that life on other planets is at the same point with their technology that we are at? Thus we can't see they are out there because the light from their planet won't reach us until we are all dead and they are all dead?
Imagine the first amphibian to walk on land. It probably wasn't very good at walking. Imagine the first bird to fly. It probably wasn't a very good flyer.
Homo Sap is the first animal to achieve what I will very loosely call 'civilization'. How good do you suppose Homo Sap is at it?
The descendants of those first amphibians got better at walking, and the descendants of those first flying birds got better at flying. (Most of them anyway, not the ostriches and emus.) With homo sap things may be a bit more complicated.
Personally I think part of the ability to be civilized is being able to follow leaders. Presumably you should pick good leaders to follow. That's at least one of the places that could stand a lot of improvement as far as human nature is concerned.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Serious question. Why are we necessary to the universe? I like being alive but we're not the central actors in the drama of the cosmos. If humans or sentient life didn't exist, it would obviously be bad for us as living creatures with an interest in survival. I'm unclear on why consciousness is important to anything that isn't the conscious entity wanting it preserved for the sake of their own survival.
It might actually be better for the universe if we didn't exist. Our species is like cockroaches. Everywhere we go we destroy the ecosystem and proceed to murder each other over whatever resources remain. We leave trash everywhere and pretend it's someone else's fault or some natural phenomena instead of taking responsibility for our actions. Why is this something that should be perpetuated throughout known space?
that the universe is full of people with all sorts of different latex and makeup on their faces!
We CAN'T be alone!
Instead of facing reality as it really is, I have been wrapping myself in SciFi movies and TV shows for decades and all that escapism has me convinced the universe is full of smarter, wiser, more technically-superior "others" ("alien" is such a judgemental and toxic word these days) and they are the "angels" of my modern non-religion religion. They MUST be there, they simply MUST, otherwise I might have to focus more on the human race and all the failings and hassles of the real world and that's just too depressing.
[/sarc]
Businessheads might want you to give them money to travel in orbit like space junk for a few hours, but I've been on long flights across oceans and they unequivocally suck.
How the hell are we ever going to get another planet in better shape than what we have here now if we keep pretending it doesn't matter because we are moving on in a decade or so (more like another billion years)? Take care of this planet, seriously. I guess it's going to take capitalism or some crazy kingtype somewhere to change the human culture in order to keep the planet Earth livable.
Given the silence of the galaxy and the universe in general, and examining outward and our own history, it seems safe to say there are some boundary conditions: 1) Our galaxy has not been mass colonized by any single or multiple set of alien civilizations (barring a Zoo Hypothesis). 2) If alien civilizations do commonly exist, none of them have put forth a fully-engaged attempt to broadcast their existence. 3) Life is delicate but arises quickly and perseveres when environmental conditions allow for it. 4) Evolution tends to become static unless periodically disrupted.
With what we know of chemistry, it is difficult to conceive of any type of life not based on liquid water. No other substance has the unique properties it does. Planets with continuously liquid water are likely relatively rare. It takes a 2nd or 3rd generation metal-rich star to allow for heavier elements to exist. In particular, any planet without a spinning metallic inner core will not have a magnetic shield in place to protect its water from being sandblasted away by solar wind over billions of years (as happened with Mars). It’s one thing to have rocky planet covered with liquid water, but protecting the water for billions of years from slow solar radiation destruction is likely rarer still.
The first 3.5 billion years, all life on Earth was single-celled. Only in the last 500 million years did life evolve in to a complex multicellular variety. Given that the majority of the history of life on Earth was single-celled, this likely means that where it does appear, life probably some portion of the time never evolves past the single celled stage. What evolution requires to become multi-cellular are mutagenic boosts such as ultraviolet radiation. The ozone layer on Earth allows just enough of solar radiation through to promote genetic mutations without being deadly. Many planets with rare, ultra-long-term stable liquid water may lack this evolution jump-starter.
It took 500 million years from the appearance of multicellular life, with several long-term stable periods punctuated by violent upheavals and resets (e.g. dinosaur asteroids extinctions), for the appearance of intelligent life to finally appear. Without major planetary upheavals, possibly multicellular life tends to fall in to static stable long-term dead-ends. Those rare, stable, liquid-water-filled worlds with sufficient mutagens to encourage the development of multicellular life sometimes never get the periodic kick in the pants to reset the course of evolutionary paths out of dead-ends.
Possibly many stable, watery planets with sufficient radiation and punctuated evolutionary disruptions never develop intelligent life. It took 500 million years for it to arise on ours, which is anecdotal evidence that some significant portion of the time, it never arises. Out of the few planets that do evolve intelligent life, a couple questions arise then as to their likely destiny. It seems universally inevitable that intelligent species eventually have to deal with advances in biological and artificial intelligence technology.
How long will it be now before our species obtains relatively full technological control over our genetic code? There will be natural temptations and drives to use the technology to eliminate disease, choose traits, then maybe even super-enhance the physical and mental capabilities of our offspring. Fast forward a thousand years of having this technology of gene splicing and tinkering, will our designed descendants eventually not much resemble the original naturally-evolved species? It’s hard to imagine what stable end-state this technology might result in over the long term. Possibly we could eventually design and create immortal, super-strong, super-intelligent beings which we in our current form would be completely inferior to. Along with those changes, maybe we might seek to eliminate the traditional instinctual drives that pushed us to survive, spread, and procreate. As a matter of societal stab
Its probably because interstellar travel given the distances is involved is nearly impossible to do, they decided it wasnt worth the effort and environmental damage it would cause their own planet. That is interstellar travel attempts could be a threat to the habitility of our own planet unless we use resources from other planets like pick up Hydrogen and other gases from Jupiter.
Plus you have all of the radiation in space and the fact that travelling through space would pretty much suck, being stuck in some nasty little capsule. This is really the best explanation for the paradox.
The universe is probably teaming with life but no one wants to go to the trouble to try interstellar travel and its just way too hard to do.
And once again some people make the retarded assumption that somehow we are special. From discovery of evolution to special relativity, we found that our notion of 'special' status in the universe is extremely misguided. It is sad and pathetic to keep seeing this from people, maybe even scientists no less.
I like when pretentious, know-it-all grammar nazis suck thier own dick:
I do not know why you mentioned footwear, but probably it is because you do not know what we are talking about. You don't even know what the fuck you're [sic]ing here. The word is boost. Boost their career. You're probably a Euro-twat, most likely Italian, Mr. Il Guido, who doesn't know the colloquialism but feels like you can pontificate on American English. I find it particularly annoying that random guys on the internet think they are masters of what people can and cannot post, and _every time_ there is a discussion, you have to read caustic, trenchant comments using words like "caustic", "trenchant", and "mindless commoners".
Note: You ain't perfect as I've just shown, Il Douche, so why don't you go take your Asspie meds, get off your high fucking horse, and be glad that anyone at all is even talking about this boring and UTTERLY USELESS subject. If we find life, we find it. If we don't, we don't. Why even bother arguing "the possibility"?
Aliens exist, they are just all trapped on their planets by centuries of accumulated space junk.
Both the summary and the article fail to describe the main idea behind what such "proper treatment" is, and that alone was the only interesting thing about the story.
I came here looking for someone with a proper background to weigh in... but apparently nobody who's commented actually read the paper. Oh well.
For 3,500 million years, life on earth was green slime.
For 1 million years there were humanoids.
For 0.01 million years civilization
For 0.0001 million years, fairly advanced science.
In another 0.0001 million years there will only be robots. (Why would they want us around?)
So the likelihood of stumbling upon little green men just like us is very remote. But it is not so unlikely to find another planet that has green slime, and we my develop tools sensitive enough to detect that.
Remember also that bad things happens to planets. E.g. a passing star swipes them. Over billions of years that becomes more likely.
Also note that soon, intelligence will be robots, and is software. And software can travel in radio waves at the speed of light.
Suppose there is a much more advanced 'civilisation' that has become unitary, and that does communicate, and that the 'meat' on this planet is ill-equipped to understand (and our recent tecnology can't detect - it's not 'serial' in time or 'descriptive' in space). Suppose we apes were dimly aware of it, and some of our irrational behavious (dolmens, obsessions, religions...) were the only evidence of imperfect reception. No, I don't belive that at all, but if our Vicar invited this atheist to give a talk, I might not disappoint him.
Wow, just literally a few seconds before I clicked on your Youtube link I had been watching the same clip!
It took 2 billion years to evolve something remotely sentient, then another million years to develop critical thinking, and another 40,000 years to create a civilization capable of talking to the universe. It's likely we're only going to have that capability for a thousand years all together, after which we either become something we can't possibly comprehend at our current level, or we, in our complete ignorance, blow ourselves to kingdom come, and the process starts all over again with another species on another world.
Given these timeframes, how likely is it another civilization just happens to establish itself at the same time, and develop interstellar communcation abilities at the same time, and that they just happen to be close enough for our limited ability to reach them? And how likely is it that they just happen to be listening when we're broadcasting? And how likely is it they hear us and they happen to want to talk?
I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out there really aren't anyone else around to talk to, and won't be for many years to come.
You made the argument, so you need to provide links that support your argument. Is that hard to understand?
If you have time to argue you have time to search. Took you more time to act petulant about it than it would have to actually do the research yourself.
No it isn't. The point is that this is something where things like nuclear propulsion should work; there's no fundamental physics barrier (unlike say with an FTL system or any other made-up technology).
A dyson sphere (which you brought up) is a fictional technology. We have NO existing technology that would allow us to visit other star systems therefore everything in your argument is de-facto made up technology even by your own description. We have little more than a few thought experiments about how to visit other star systems and we can barely get into low Earth orbit economically. When we actually have a significant manned presence and sustainable economy in space then we can start talking about way out there ideas like visiting other star systems. Your claim that there is "no fundamental physics barrier" is an argument from ignorance by claiming that because something hasn't been proven definitively impossible that it must be possible.
I'm not sure what your point is here. The point that "If X exists, we should see Y. We don't see Y. So this reduces our credence in X" should be straightforward.
We have barely searched a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the universe for life. It is WAY too early to start drawing serious conclusions about what we should see based on what we've already seen since we've barely seen anything. Your argument is kind of similar to saying "we've looked at the other 7 planets in our solar system and haven't seen anything so we should conclude that life in the rest of the trillions of other galaxies is unlikely". I understand what you are saying but I think you are making a hasty generalization.
We shouldn't necessarily see them. But if any sort of megastructures are doable,the incentive for an advanced civilization to try and make them will be high.
You could make the same argument about an FTL drive but that doesn't mean it's possible under the actual laws of physics of our universe. Just because you can imagine something doesn't mean it's feasible to accomplish. Lightsabers are cool but good luck actually making one. And even if something is technically possible it isn't always economically realistic. We can and have sent men to the moon but we haven't figured out a way to do so that is economically sustainable so we don't do it anymore. Being an advanced civilization doesn't require the building of structures that are in all likelihood impossible to build.
Moreover, the swarm variants of Dyson spheres and ring worlds don't require intrinsically advanced materials, and don't require that much material.
I get that you really like the idea of Dyson spheres and I'll agree it's a really cool idea. But there is no evidence that any version of them is feasible outside of a science fiction book. It is a thought experiment and in all likelihood nothing more. Lots of really bright people have given the notion a lot of thought and there is no evidence that it is actually possible in the real world. And yes it would require a lot of advanced materials, even for the less resource intensive versions like the swarm. Do you have ANY idea how large even a modest sized star like our Sun is? The circumference of our Earth's orbit around the Sun is nearly a billion kilometers. Where do you expect to get enough materials for even the most modest of habitable rings to exist on that sort of scale? Forget what it would need to be made of, first you have to even find that much raw material. Good luck with that.
Volume of Earth: 260,000,000,000 cubic miles.
Length of Earth's orbit: 584,000,000 miles.
Dividing, that results in a cross sectional area of 445 square miles for a ring around the sun, using only the materials of planet Earth. Allowing a thickness of 528 feet, that gives a ring width of 4,450 miles.
A little back of the envelope geometry doesn't equal thinking this through. You are effectively arguing the following:
1) That we could and should turn the entirety of Earth into a ring (seriously?)
2) That all the materials Earth is composed of are actually useful and adequate for such a purpose (spoiler: they aren't)
3) That a thickness and width you calculate (if true since I can't be bothered to check your math) is actually sufficient to be useful
4) That you have a means to provide adequate gravity or simulated gravity
5) You have a means to shield inhabitants from solar radiation and create an inhabitable and sustainable atmosphere
6) How any of this is economically justifiable given the almost unimaginably high cost of such a project
7) How you expect to recreate an entire ecosystem basically from scratch that is well suited to existing in such an artificial construct
Basically even if you stripped every ounce of useful material from our solar system you really would still come up short. And how you would economically justify such a project you haven't even begun to address. Seriously, it's a cool idea in the same sense that a lightsaber is cool but that doesn't make it possible to actually do.
... the exclusion of UFOs as possible sign of ET visiting earth.
All the other civilizations are superior to ours and they know that we have that fucktard Trump in charge...and will never show themselves with him around. It was questionable that they would before, but a definite NO now.
If it takes Elon Musk waxing rhetorical to convince Well-Off White Suburbanites to pay more taxes so that we can accomplish great things as a nation, good.
Very interesting to me, how being an academically-trained expert is suspicious, because they are assumed to be more devoted to the community of fellow-experts (in that ivory tower) than to other Americans, but if someone is very, very rich, no similar assumption is made, that they only care about the welfare of their fellow very rich people, to the point where it makes perfect sense to plunder other Americans.
Americans are weird.
I guess Red Dwarf got it right. There are no aliens in the universe.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Same video, but on the actual Monty Python channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
sub;Fermi paradox-useless scrap
Save Earth planet- life support. searching minds -Guiding spirit
what ? Where ? how ? are you searching at !!!
There is a 100% chance that there's life on other worlds besides Earth!