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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..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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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.
"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."
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...
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
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
"starfaring" may be impossible in practice.
Should we move to Mars? It will be very expensive and mostly pointless.
How about we spend all that money looking after the place where conditions are suitable and we know we can survive?
No sig today...
Yes, and somewhere there are pink unicorns frolicking in the meadow. The Universe is big enough to generate just about anything, right?
If an Asteroid decides to come this way then we can't do much about it.
A few colonists on Mars won't make any difference - they'll be dependent on Earth to resupply them with stuff even if they're making their own water and potatoes.
If we never accomplish interstellar travel, then in 5 billion years we die with our Sun's expansion
Correct, but even 1 thousand more years of living at the current rate of destruction isn't going to work out either so that's not much of a concern.
No sig today...
Instead of multiplying the probably with the total number of stars, we should multiply each probability with the inverse square distance of the star, and then integrate over the universe.
The square distance is a decent measure of detectability.
The renowned cosmogonist Professor Bignumska, lecturing on the future of the universe, had just stated that in about a billion years, according to her calculations, the earth would fall into the sun in a fiery death.
In the back of the auditorium a tremulous voice piped up: "Excuse me, Professor, but how long did you say it would be?"
Professor Bignumska calmly replied, "About a billion years."
A sigh of relief was heard. "Whew! for a minute there, I thought you said million years!"
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Should we move to Mars? It will be very expensive and mostly pointless.
How about we spend all that money looking after the place where conditions are suitable and we know we can survive?
Why not both? It certainly isn't "pointless" to want to expand the human condition and strive to create a backup for earth and all life as we know it.
It's not an either/or scenario. No-one is talking about moving the entire human population to mars- that would defeat the purpose. We can try to restore earth and maintain a population on Earth, which will always be the most suitable place for human habitation AND at the same time expand into the solar system- starting with Mars.
There's a lot of empty space in the Universe. Let's fill it up. Proxima 3 needs a Starbucks.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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
Extending life is easy, cheap and doable: Contaminate Mars and Venus.
Take samples from all reasonably cold resistant bacteria on earth and spray them all over Mars. Maybe something manages to grow there. Do the same for Venus with heat resistant bacteria.
If bacterial life gets a foothold, we might get more advanced life in just a few million years or so.
"starfaring" may be impossible in practice.
Indeed, our current understanding of the laws of physics says it pretty much is. Pushing stuff from A to B is practically a nonstarter. A generation ship is perhaps a theoretical exception, but it will take a big chunk of Earth's resources and is unlikely to reach its destination given all the things that could go wrong with the equipment or crew on the way which could doom the ship. Generation ships might only make sense as emergency lifeboats for when nature, or more likely man, finally puts a hard expiry date on Earth's habitability.
The closest humanity might realistically come to "starfaring" is to have a few outposts throughout the solar system that only need minimal resupply from Earth. Then if our planet gets totally fucked up by an asteroid or conservative environmental policy, it can be used as a factory/mining outpost to resupply the others.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
You can't move faster than light, so transit between stars is largely prohibited at the resource level required to accelerate and/or hibernate your species. Even assuming immortal lifeforms, a transit that fast, hitting even one dust, goes boom. Then, OUR efforts to detect life are lacking and may never work. RF is the only good underlying physicial principle on which to communicate advanced information, but it dissipates after a few AU, even a focused beam would only go a few light years. You'd literally need the output power of a star to make a signal across the universe, and the reward vs effort is lacking when the sender is just as unsure as us they'd reach anyone.
>The universe is still young by cosmological scales. Why do they assume that extraterrestrial life has to be zipping around the universe building Dyson spheres and shit? How do they know that there isn't life elsewhere that is less advanced than us, as advanced as us or more advanced but not starfaring?
Because our sun is pretty young by the standards of similarly metal-rich stars, and life appears to have started on this planet pretty much as soon as liquid water was able to exist on the surface, suggesting that the odds of life forming are very high. Unless we assume there was something very special about the inert rocks here (and it's generally considered poor science to assume we're in an unusual part of the universe), that in turn suggests that a similar process probably occurred around many other similarly metal-rich stars a billion of years before our planet existed. Even assuming life started on one of the other planets and migrated here via early-system impacts doesn't extend the timeline much (and if life migrated here from another star then it boosts the odds that the same thing happened to other stars as well)
And, given a billion-year head start, even one expansive space-faring species has had enough time to colonize the entire galaxy several times over by now. The fact that we see no evidence of that suggests that either we don't know how to look, or that in all that time not one species has arisen that is at all inclined to leave its home planet. Because once a species is firmly established in space, and thus has all the technology necessary for (slow) interstellar travel, and the proven inclination to expand beyond their world into artificial environments, it seems almost inevitable that some group will eventually head for another star - either for the uncontested riches waiting there, or to get away from a stellar civilization they find unpleasant, or even just out of curiosity.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
In fairness, if we have the technology to effectively colonize Mars, then deflecting an "planet-killer" asteroid should be fairly trivial. And if we're able to travel between stars at even a few percentage of light speed, then it's probably easy enough to just keep moving the Earth further from the sun to maintain a pleasant environment - some size large ion drives on the moon, firing for several million years, should tow the Earth along just fine.
Of course, once you've done that it's not such a stretch to put some size-large lights on the moon as well, to illuminate the Earth in lieu of the sun, and head into interstellar space. With the aid of some mildly efficient mass-energy conversion the moon should provide plenty of power for the journey. The real question is, do all the terraformed planets head to the same star, or do we scatter in all directions?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I'm not sure it's all that antropocentric to call it destruction, when of all life on Earth we will be among those to die last. We're omnivores at the top of the food chain - we won't die out until there's no other life left to eat.
And while other forms of life do indeed push beyond existing boundaries, we're fairly unique in the sheer scale and effectiveness of the destruction we can wreak on other life. The only other species I can think of that has demonstrated anything similar was the blue-green algae that first wiped out most life on the planet by poisoning it with toxic free oxygen.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Or, maybe even huge, spacefaring civilizations that have colonized the galaxy are hard to see. Maybe weâ(TM)re already inside one and weâ(TM)re leaving on a reserve of some kind. Off limits to everyone except anthropologists. Or maybe only half the galaxy is populated by star daring civilizations, and we arenâ(TM)t in that half.
Whatâ(TM)s interesting about the question is that it is one that can only be asked by people who are not in contact with a spacefaring alien civilization. We only ask, where is everyone, because we donâ(TM)t know. So maybe we are in special circumstances, but that doesnâ(TM)t mean that weâ(TM)re alone.
What this kind of argument always makes me think is that people who canâ(TM)t bear the thought of a kitten dying should never get good at math. Domestic Cats produce large litters and are fertile after a few months. Domestic cats have been around for at least four thousand years. For some reason, however, the earth is not covered in a thousand mile thick layer of cats. Of course, a thousand mile thick layer of cats is obviously ridiculous and unsustainable. So is being knee deep in cats. There is an equilibrium level of cats that is sustainable, however. Exactly what that level is depends on a lot of factors, some of them quite unpleasant for kitten-lovers. The point is, I donâ(TM)t see a cat right now. I could search the entire building I am in and I would not find a single cat. And if I could only remember back a few hours, and/or if my eyesight, hearing, etc. had dramatically improved since this morning I would have to conclude that cats are probably not real. Even though I have several cats in my home, and even if one had been sitting on my lap, purring this morning. And that is the way it goes with the search for intelligent life. Our civilization has not been looking for long (and, frankly, not very hard at all really) for life elsewhere in the universe and even if weâ(TM)d encoutered it directly, our historical records of anything like that from more than say 500 years ago would probably be useless (consider that the Romans were quite literate and kept lots of records, and we are still not really sure if, for example, Caligula actually existed).
Basically, until we get out there ourselves, we canâ(TM)t really conclude anything. Right now weâ(TM)re massaging the data we have (which is mostly an absence of data) into something that itâ(TM)s not. Sure, we know that there isnâ(TM)t an alien civilization slapping Dyson spheres around every nearby star in recent history because we would see the stars going out. On the other hand, if thousands of 100 km long starships weâ(TM)re traveling back and forth every day between every other star in the galaxy, they would be completely invisible to us. Ditto if itâ(TM)s much lighter traffic and much smaller ships. So, sure, we can rule out some levels of technology (at least nearby and recently), but we really havenâ(TM)t scratched the surface.
As we automate, communism becomes almost a requirement. Capitalism will not survive our current path of evolution. Already America, the beacon of capitalism is forced to eliminate massive numbers of people from the work force by maintaining a huge military, an enormous TSA, gigantic bureaucracies, a massive prison system, etc... if the US government canâ€(TM)t build a capitalistic society without massive socialist programs, what about China, India and other countries?
We will have to embrace communism and live something of the Wall-E life of people generally producing and contributing nothing before we adapt the system to let people like me work because we enjoy it and let everyone else live a perpetual vacation.
Next time you visit a Walmart or similar store, count the massive amount of crap that exists for no other reason the producing eventual toxic landfill because we need to make sure people produce crap so other people can sell crap so other people will buy crap simply because we need to support capitalism.
I bought a BMW i3 recently, 2 years ago I think. I expect it to my last car. It has almost no corrosible parts and once self driving ride sharing happens, Iâ€(TM)ll leave it parked most of the year. Even now, lots of people in cities are using car sharing instead of owning vehicles. This means jobs for mechanics, parking attendants, car assembly line workers, etc... will disappear. Once an app for farm vehicle sharing comes around, there will be a similar trend in rural areas.
Information sciences will destroy capitalism.
So, once that happens, money will have far less value. And to be fair, China or some other country willing to embrace communist ethics sooner will invest the time and materials to send us to the moon, Mars and beyond. The U.S. will fail because there is an inherent belief that competition is better than cooperation in America.
Iâ€(TM)ve been talking with my kids about the value of micro houses instead of contemporary home ownership. They agree that the only reason you really need so much space is because of all the useless crap we collect. They donâ€(TM)t need book shelves as they have ebooks and libraries. They donâ€(TM)t need desks as they have laptops. They donâ€(TM)t need a 75†TV because the room is small enough to enjoy a 40â€. I believe their generation will favor living in structures similar to â€oethe stacks†from Ready Player One. Theyâ€(TM)ll need less money, theyâ€(TM)ll buy less crap, theyâ€(TM)ll use less energy, theyâ€(TM)ll generate less trash. Theyâ€(TM)ll depend on communal resources as opposed to personally owned. If they use clothing rental instead of ownership, they can avoid having so much crap theyâ€(TM)ll never wear.
No, I think cost will not be an issue. Time will.
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.
If an Asteroid decides to come this way then we can't do much about it.
If an asteroid decides to come this way, we're not alone in the universe.
Never anthropomorphize asteroids. They hate that.