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New Paper Offers Additional Reasoning for Fermi's Paradox
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Feb 02, 2009 02:01 PM
from the better-odds-if-we-would-just-start-colonizing dept.
from the better-odds-if-we-would-just-start-colonizing dept.
KentuckyFC writes "If the universe is teeming with advanced civilizations capable of communicating over interstellar distances, then surely we ought to have seen them by now. That's the gist of a paradoxical line of reasoning put forward by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. The so-called Fermi Paradox has haunted SETI researchers ever since. Not least because if the number of intelligent civilizations capable of communication in our galaxy is greater than 1, then we should eventually hear from them. Now one astrophysicist says this thinking fails to take into account the limit to how far a signal from ET can travel before it becomes too faint to hear. Factor that in and everything changes. Assuming the average communicating civilization has a lifetime of 1,000 years, ten times longer than Earth has been broadcasting, and has a signal horizon of 1,000 light-years, you need a minimum of over 300 communicating civilizations in the Milky Way to ensure that you'll see one of them. Any less than that and the chances are that they'll live out their days entirely ignorant of each other's existence. Paradox solved, right?"
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Number of ET Civilizations In Our Galaxy Is 37,964 544 comments
KentuckyFC writes "The famous Drake equation calculates the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy right now. But the result is hugely sensitive to the assumptions you make about factors such as the number of habitable planets that orbit a host star, how many of these actually develop life and what fraction of these go on to become intelligent etc. Disagreements about these figures leads to estimates for the number of advanced civilizations ranging from 10^-5 to 10^6. Now an astronomer in Scotland has worked out how to make the calculations more precise so that different theories about the origin of planets, life and civilizations can be compared. His calculations say that the rare-life hypothesis predicts only 361 advanced civilizations in the Milky Way now. However, the so-called tortoise and hare hypothesis predicts 31,573 and the theory of panspermia says that there ought to be 37,964 extraterrestrial civilizations more advanced than our own in the Milky Way."
[+]
Milky Way Heavier Than Thought, and Spinning Faster 285 comments
An anonymous reader writes "The Milky Way is spinning much faster and has 50 per cent more mass than previously believed. This means the Milky Way is equivalent in size to our neighbor Andromeda — instead of being the little sister in the local galaxy group, as had been believed. One implication of this new finding is that we may collide with Andromeda sooner than we had thought, in 2 or 3 billion years instead of 5."
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Rydberg Molecule Created For the First Time 127 comments
krou writes "The BBC is reporting that the Rydberg molecule has been formed from two atoms of rubidium. Proven in theory, this is the first time it's been created, reinforcing the fundamental quantum theories of Enrico Fermi. Chris Greene, the theoretical physicist who first predicted that the Rydberg molecules could exist, said: 'The Rydberg electron resembles a sheepdog that keeps its flock together by roaming speedily to the outermost periphery of the flock, and nudging back towards the centre any member that might begin to drift away.' It's a sheepdog with a very short life-span, however; the longest lived molecule only lasted 18 microseconds. Vera Bendkowsky, who led the research, explained how they created the molecule: 'The nuclei of the atoms have to be at the correct distance from each other for the electron fields to find each other and interact. We use an ultracold cloud of rubidium — as you cool it, the atoms in the gas move closer together. We excite the atoms to the Rydberg stage with a laser. If we have a gas at the critical density, with two atoms at the correct distance that are able to form the molecule, and we excite one to the Rydberg state, then we can form a molecule.'"
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It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:4, Funny)
We humans are God's only children. That's why there's no one else in the universe. And the universe was created 6k years ago. Duh! Scientists... what useful things have they ever done other than bring up heresy?
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Funny)
...the universe was created 6k years ago.
Hey - There's no room for rounding if you're going scriptural on us. The Earth's creation started the night before Oct 23, 4004 BC. [wikipedia.org] (In case anyone was wondering, Earth is a Libra.)
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Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Funny)
Is that Julian or Gregorian?
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Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Interesting)
(Except of course that all the dates for the signs are fixed as they were in the time of the Ancient Greeks, so we're already off by a whole month. If you're a Libra the sun is actually in Virgo on your birthday.)
This also means that the autumnal equinox in 4004 BC was somewhere around the end of June.
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Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Funny)
That explains the drama-queen mood and temperature swings, then.
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Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Funny)
True. But it appears the Almighty actually spent his day of rest at the mall looking for a good costume to scare the bejeesus out of Adam and Eve.
Unfortunately, by the time he got there, all they had left was a dorky snake costume.
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Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Insightful)
Fermi's paradox is paradoxically absent any real facts. We know not nearly enough to know if it's even relevant.
For example, one prime assumption is that alien life would communicate on the EM spectrum someplace using technology similar enough to ours to be in a form that we would understand or recognize. Yet dolphins are quite intelligent, and we have no idea what they are saying. If we can't decipher communication in a biological form that's based on the same exact biology as ourselves, that is 99% identical at the cellular level, how can we justify our arrogance in believing that we'd know truly alien communication if we saw it?
Obviously, if we did come across some communication on the EM spectrum that we were to show wasn't some mere physical process, we'd have proof of alien communication or related phenomena. But there's no evidence at all that they would. In fact, it's rather unlikely that we will ourselves, in just a few years: take a look at spread spectrum transmission [wikipedia.org] for a method that we already use today in many uses that would be virtually undetectable by SETI.
Fermi's paradox is based on a large number of assumptions of scale that are, quite frankly pulled from Fermi's backside, and aren't even well supported by technological developments since its inception. They are the best assumptions available, but they demonstrate nothing other than a weak foundation for conjecture.
And if some of those assumptions are already demonstrated irrelevant with applicable technology HERE, TODAY, how can we give Fermi's paradox any more than the time of day?
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Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, IIRC, the Pope made a declaration a while back that there's nothing biblical that bars the existence of extraterrestrial life. For many people who are strongly devoted to one religion or another, even finding a note from their messiah announcing "Just kidding - I didn't think that y'all were going to take me so seriously. Hopefully after I die, somebody will find this and avoid any real disaster," would defer them from their beliefs.
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Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Informative)
The Catholic Church also accepts evolution as "how God did it" so good luck trying to get through to the Creationists who obviously don't want anything to do with St Peter's successor.
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Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Insightful)
Religion and science are fundamentally opposed on the issue of epistemology. In science, everything has to be compatible with observations or it can't be properly claimed to be true. In religion, truth is established by authority: the preacher or the bible or (fill in the blank) says it's true, therefor it's true.
This explains why some people are so enthusiastic about finding errors in religion. Logically, once the flaw is found, the authority is dethroned, and the whole religion should collapse. Alas, religious people can be remarkably immune to logic. So although it is worthwhile to point out religion's inconsistencies (both internal and external), it won't change the mind of most people who want to believe.
As an illustration of the division between religion and reality-based belief systems, consider what happens when something in religion is found to be in incontrovertible agreement with observations. If it's an old event, then the item ceases to be religion and becomes history. If it's some principle of behavior, then it ceases to be religion and becomes part of the soft sciences like psychology or political science, or (worst case) part of the humanities such as ethics. When something is proven, it's no longer religion.
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Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong.
Faith can be falsified quite easily. I once had faith that creationism was the truth. I read plenty of books and pamphlets to back up that idea. But then one day, it occurred to me that in order for creationism to be the truth, there had to be a vast scientific conspiracy out there, ranging from paleontologists to biologists.
So I started paying attention to science.
I now know that I was incorrect. My faith was wrong. I was blind and now I see.
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Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Funny)
Then I for one welcome our Alien Overlord. Oh wait, I'm atheist. Shit, now I'm all confused.
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Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Insightful)
Nature holds no distinction between "can" and "should". Morality is a product of idealism and virtue, both properties primarily ascribed to sentient beings: we have chosen a way to live that we consider "right" (whatever that is) and we are willing to restrict our behavior to accommodate this ideal.
It's one of the noblest things about us, and I hope that sentient extraterrestrial life would also possess a sense of morality. But don't think for a second that nature itself is moral. Nature is completely impartial and completely absolute. How good or evil someone is does not factor into how quickly he falls if he walks off of a cliff.
If that sentient life poses a threat to us, we can attempt to resist to the limits of our power. Should our capacity prove inadequate, we will be destroyed no matter how much morality we possess or how much morality that alien civilization lacks. Is it "ok"? No, it's awful! But that is how reality works. Species go extinct, volcanoes erupt, and people starve despite our best efforts. We can't shape reality by our whims alone; we can only try to change things by working within its rules.
This is true irrespective of religion. Unless you believe God is going to save us from the aliens... in which case maybe He already is, by keeping them from contacting us. Now there's an interesting solution to the Fermi paradox.
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Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Funny)
I, for one, found his ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to his newsletter.
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What paper? (Score:4, Informative)
No link to anything but Wikipedia and a blog?
Re:What paper? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know about you, but I prefer a link to a blog over the actual paper. Mostly because I don't speak Astrophysicsese.
I went ahead and clicked on the blog for you, and the link. Here's the paper (You can get a PDF if you want), it was submitted to the International Journal of Astrobiology.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.3863 [arxiv.org]
I understand your reluctance, after all you're the one who posted:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1112493&cid=26694469 [slashdot.org]
Don't worry, you can continue to click on links out of curiosity. I put one above, go ahead, click it. You know you want to. everyone else is clicking it. Now with more fiber, and it cures Alzheimer's too.
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Re:What paper? (Score:4, Informative)
Now THAT is funny!
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And I thought... (Score:5, Funny)
I thought it was because as they reach our level of civilisation, they built giant particle accelerators for research and turned their planets into black holes.
The First Ones (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The First Ones (Score:5, Funny)
FIRST POST!
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Re:The First Ones (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe a zillion races have achieved the capability at roughly the same time, and are just more than 100 light years away from us.
What are the odds of anyone picking up our broadcast noise anyhow? It's not like we're aiming high wattage transmissions directly at likely stars, and with the transition to digital, our signal becomes even more ellusive (smaller spectrum footprint).
It's just as likely that other races only went through a brief period of wideband, and then switched to wired or line of sight optical or quantum bits or some crap we haven't even thought of yet.
The whole paradox is the height of hubris: aliens have to be like us, they have to advance along the same technological track, and they have to be broadcasting on a scale that we can easily pick up...We haven't cataloged every star yet, and that's an order of magnitude over any artificial broadcast we can understand.
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Re:The First Ones (Score:4, Interesting)
Though it's possible we are the first, it's as likely as winning the lottery. Someone has to do it but the chance of that someone being you is so small that you should first rule out other, more plausible, scenarios.
My favorite is that only the paranoid survive. Civilizations that learn to communicate quietly are the ones that survive. Broadcasting your existence is a great way of advertising 'livable real estate here!' and inviting other civilizations over for a look see. Not too smart if it turns out they end up wanting your planet.
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But if that's right... (Score:5, Insightful)
God I hate Fermi's Paradox. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is hardly a new idea. It's so not new that I think I remember saying something similar about two years ago [slashdot.org], and I'm not exactly an expert.
Analog signals degrade quickly, and digital signals are worse, in their way, because they don't tolerate degrading as well. Couple that with broadcast limitations imposed by local governments to keep signal strength down, and I can't see how our signal could be reliably detected more than a few light years away without a HUGE radio antenna array.
only humans think in this way (Score:5, Funny)
We humans are still a bunch of young, angsty teenagers. We desperately want to make the "first contact", crying and yelling and suffering from the depressive thought of loneliness.
Other galactic civilizations simply matured and stopped worrying about such pointless things. They make themselves busy with real business.
Grow up, humans.
Lots of other reasons, too... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless it's been vastly misrepresented in mainstream presentation (like TFS), Fermi's Paradox sounds pretty ridiculously simplistic.
Other bad assumptions it makes, just off the top of my head:
1. Other intelligent civilizations want to engage communications with aliens who, for all they know, might try to blow them up or eat them.
2. Those civilizations are willing to spend resources to beam electromagnetic radiation out into space in the vague hope of someone noticing.
3. Other intelligent civilizations "capable" of "communication" will follow the same technological arc as us and develop electromagnetic communications rather than, say, quantum communications or something we haven't even thought of yet.
4. Those aliens will assume that WE (or some unknown aliens) will be listening carefully for extrasolar broadcasts.
5. Those aliens even have a concept of "communication" and aren't just some hive-mind that never needed to evolve social skills.
6. They didn't cut their Alien-SETI funding to pay for medical research or an Alien-Wall-Street bailout package or something. (I mean, what do you think the chances are that WE will broadcast for a thousand years?)
And so on.
Really, Fermi's Paradox sounds like me saying that if I sit on a lonely beach for a week and don't find a bottle with a message in it in proper English, there are no other intelligent beings in the world.
Middle of nowhere (Score:5, Funny)
It's not like we're located close to Downtown Galaxy. We live out on the edge. There's probably some galactic equivalent of AT&T or Comcast that is telling everyone else "We'll be providing them with service 'soon'. So our monopoly is justified."
Either that or the installer showed up and we were too busy/unaware to answer the door. So they said they'd be back later.
Where is everybody? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Solved? (Score:5, Interesting)
And if they're communicating by some mechanism that we can't read? E.g. the equivalent of "subspace radio".
Or maybe it's a point to point via laser (see Niven's Known Universe).
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Re:Solved? (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly. Maybe all those "crazy" people are actually talking to aliens.
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Re:Solved? (Score:5, Funny)
No - Those people really are crazy.
The aliens talk only to me and I have the good sense not to answer them (at least not out loud). I just carefully carry out their instructions and try to get mixed up with those crazies.
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Re:Solved? (Score:5, Interesting)
True. The calculation of 1000 years seems a bit too long. We can't figure out how to shorten it because we don't know how long we're going to be using broadcast signal based communication as opposed to some other more direct means.
Besides . . . attempting to extrapolate with so many unknowns is, at best, an exercise in postulation. At worst, it is dangerously misinforming.
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Re:Solved? (Score:5, Funny)
Right now our civilization is like a closed source application running on a dev box off the network. If the hard drive dies, the code is toast. But as soon as you get that code in Git, its a whole lot harder to kill.
Ok, so that was a terrible analogy.
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Re:Solved? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Solved? (Score:5, Insightful)
The 1,000 year thing seems like the weak point of this theory.
Actually, the estimate of the probability of the kind of intelligence that makes complex machines is a bigger problem, and a plausible solution to the paradox.
We have ample evidence that if a thing is possible at all, evolution will reproduce it many times. Wings, fins, eyes... all of these optima have been found many times, across genera and families and whatnot. By one estimate the eye has evolved independently a couple of dozen times, based on the proteins used in the retinal structure.
There was an article here on /. a while back pointing out that two birds previously believed to be related were the result of convergent evolution. Evolution finds the same optima over and over again.
The kind of intelligence that makes complex machines has evolved on Earth exactly once, and that is the only kind that is of interest in Fermi's Paradox.
Furthermore, the current best guess at the evolutionary driver of kind of intelligence that makes complex machines is that it's a peacock's tail, and extravagant sexual display that had relatively little utility outside of attracting a mate or two. Therefore the whole "making complex machines" aspect of our intelligence is more-or-less an accident, not the result of direct selective pressure at all.
Men are very slightly better at some spacial reasoning than women because we hunted more, maybe, but that very slight difference is a measure of how little practical, non-sexual, selective pressure their actually was.
So based on what we know at the moment about the kind of intelligence that makes complex machines it seems likely that the resolution to Fermi's Paradox is that it is unbelievably rare. We may well be the only species to have such an intelligence in our galaxy, although even I have a hard time believing we're the only one in the universe. It could be, though.
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Alternate solution: High-efficiency communication (Score:5, Interesting)
The calculation of 1000 years seems a bit too long. We can't figure out how to shorten it because we don't know how long we're going to be using broadcast signal based communication as opposed to some other more direct means.
My own contribution to the debate:
As technology advances the limited amount of available bandwidth becomes more valuable, while costs of utilizing it drop. The civilization migrates its bandwidth use from simple, extremely redundant, coding schemes (like AM and FM) to subtle, highly-efficient schemes that are virtually indistinguishable from thermal noise (like OFDM). They also use spacial multiplexing to re-use the same bandwidth over and over at various locations. This buries the few redundant parts of the signal (like the pilot subchannels used for synchronizing the receiver) in interfering noise.
The result is that, after a fairly short time, at a distance they are virtually indistinguishable from a hot black body - and lost in the sagans of other hot things in the galaxy.
Our first AM voice radio broadcast was at the end of 1906. 102 years later we're taking a big step in the transition to OFDM-or-CDMA-everywhere by shutting down "analog TV" and replacing it with OFDM-based digital. AM and FM are already using digital variants to squeeze more out of their spectrum. Any bets on how long until they switch, too?
Once the simple-modulation blowtorches are switched over the few remaining detectably-patterned signals will be soft voices crying in a wilderness of high-noise-floor. If we don't DELIBERATELY send some intended-to-be-noticed beacons we'll again be lost in the background - our own and the galaxy's.
A thousand years? In our case the detectability sphere looks to be only a tad over 100 years deep.
Don't blink!
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Re:Solved? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Solved? (Score:5, Informative)
(See this wiki article [wikipedia.org] as an example of a slightly technical description of why)
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Re:Solved? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe there really is no FTL, and other alien races are as leery of sending out giant seedships that they themselves can't ride in as we are, and are thus still hanging out in their home starsystem.
Maybe aliens are everywhere, aware of us, and simply choosing not to communicate.
Disproving aliens deductively is the opposite of science. The lack of easily obtained evidence for alien life is far from damning given the area that we are capable of observing with any real scrutiny.
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Re:Solved? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is you don't need to have a population that is astoundingly wedded to the idea of spreading out across the stars. You need a tiny, tiny fraction of the population to be wedded to the idea - just a handful of pioneering types who are okay with being placed in stasis for a few centuries, or raising their children and grandchildren inside a giant hollow cylinder. If you can find 500 people every few years who are willing to do something like the above, you will eventually become a pan-galactic civilization.
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Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Building a generation ship will easily be one of the most expensive and large-scale projects that our species has ever undertaken. A couple of willing colonists can't afford this alone. They need the entire population behind them.
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Re:Solved? (Score:5, Informative)
Think about the transit time, think about the number that would be lost. You can't really assume a straight geometric progression for something so incredibly fraught.
Well, almost, at least for the purposes of ballpark calculations.
Now, we have to make a couple of assumptions -- such as that they have the technology to send out self-replicators that will last long enough to get to the next star, which is a function of speed and durability. For the sake of argument, let's assume that the Voyager spacecraft (which just left the Solar System) are capable of self-replication, have a very long-lived power supply (long half-life radioisotope, for example) and their electronics will survive long exposure to galactic cosmic rays. (All big assumptions, but imaginably within range of our technology.)
Also assume an average spacing of about five light years apart for stars.
At the current speed (about 16 km/sec), it would take a Voyager about 90,000 years to reach the next start. Allow 10,000 years for the laborious process of self-replicating from raw materials and launching another of itself on its way, for a total of 100,000 years per generation. Assume each vehicle replicates itself only twice, and stays put (perhaps assembling large black monoliths on the local planets for the mystification of any eventual inhabitants). So we have a doubling rate of once per 0.1 million years.
Assume about 100 billion stars in our galaxy (this is the number I found most frequently mentioned), it would take between 36 and 37 doublings to send a probe to every star in the galaxy (less because stars are closer nearer the core). Call it 40 to allow for probe loss.
So in a mere four million years, self-replicating probes travelling no faster than Voyager could visit every star in the galaxy -- except for the speed problem. That growth rate can be maintained initially, but like any spreading colony (such as bacteria in a petri dish) the edge of the colony can only advance at a certain speed, and the doubling rate has to fall off (it's ludicrous to think that the number of visited stars could go from half the galaxy to the whole galaxy in a mere 100,000 years, the probes would have to be approaching lightspeed for that).
Take the galaxy diameter as 100,000 light years, it'd take nearly 2 billion years for a Voyager-speed probe to cross it, or near 3 billion to go around half the circumference (to avoid the black hole at the core). The galaxy is old enough that there probably sun-like stars (our Sun being a second-generation star, necessary if you want enough heavy elements for terrestrial planet formation) a couple of billion years older than ours. (And if we assume faster travel speed, say 0.01 c instead of 0.000055 c, the numbers get a lot better.)
So Fermi's question was simply "where are they?". If they're really not around (vs simply ignoring us or being undetectable to us), then the above assumptions are too optimistic.
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Re:Solved? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Paradox solved, right?"
No. Some planets suitable for life have almost certainly existed in this galaxy for billions of years longer than the Earth. By now, one would expect there to have been civilisations that spread throughout the galaxy and therefore brought Earth within detection range of their signals...
But they would have to be within earth's range in the last 100 years or so for them to detect us. "Billions of years" means they could have existed on Venus before humanity ever showed up, for all we know. If they were that close, the signals would have long since passed us by at the point we were discovering fire.
Or they could have been reasonably nearby, but too far for the signal to reach us without fading out completely.
Or they could be using a different form of communication than we are able to perceive.
So, honestly, "expecting" anything is a little silly and assumes far too much.
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Re:Solved? (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming you can't skirt around the light barrier then that basically means sending small groups of people (or aliens or whatever) across trillions of miles, probably in some kind of hibernated state, in the hope that they'll bump into a habitable somewhere, set up shop, and begin to populate. Any returns on investment will be very intangible indeed- physical goods have to come back the same way they came (meaning it would have to be extraordinarily valuable to merit the shipping and handling on an interstellar ark) and information is cheap. You'd need to expect a very valuable treasure-trove of knowledge indeed for information to start making sense as an expected ROI.
I know many people just assume that interstellar travel is the "next step" in the development of societies but the longer I look at it the less it seems to offer tangible benefits for the people who have to invest in this.
I expect a society thinking in the long-term would obviously see the benefits of spreading one's seed across multiple star systems... but you have to postulate the existence of a society that takes the long view. Considering how easily a society as advanced as ours (not saying we're very advanced: just a society at the same level of advancement as us) is busily undermining its own biome, knows it's doing it, and doesn't care, and took pains to smother other societies which might have taken the longer view, I don't think we should expect many societies to reach the "long-view" stage before they wiped themselves out or got wiped out.
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Re:300 isnt teeming with life (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:intellgient life... (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that intelligence doesn't necessarily take 4 billion years to evolve. It's not a nice, clean timeline. The real hurdles were evolutionary events like the spark of life, sexual reproduction (leading to more mutations), and multi-celled organisms. Evolution, through nature's nasty tendency to wipe the slate clean, has to keep taking steps backwards. Dinosaurs lost their place on top of the heap after 100s of millions of years of dominance and 65 million years later we have intelligent life.
Imagine if there are worlds where there are fewer extinction level events or environmental factors that favor jumping the hurdles sooner. We just don't know enough about other planets to know how long it takes for intelligence to evolve.
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Re:Hello, (Score:5, Funny)
Hello (hello, hello)
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anyone home?
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Re:Do we want to be found? (Score:5, Insightful)
...Why are we soooo certain that we *want* to be found?...
Anybody intelligent enough to be able to travel throughout this galaxy or beyond, or even just communicate, would certainly study us for awhile. They would have learned by now that we humans are a warlike race that cannot get along with one another even on our own world. Even in our fictionalized scenarios, with imagined technology, such as Star Trek or Star Wars, there is nothing but war and death, such as the destruction of entire planets by some of our imagined technology. Human history provides an absolute guarantee, that if we would meet such an advanced civilization, we would use their technology against them and one another.
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Re:Do we want to be found? (Score:5, Insightful)
The flip side of this argument is that a species comes to dominance over its own planet through competitive behavior, i.e. aggression. Just because they have superior technology doesn't make them morally superior.
As for what we have to offer? There are a plethora of movies that spell this out: natural resources, a habitable planet, an enslavable population. What do you think our own warlike, inferior race would do if, say, Mars were humanly inhabitable tomorrow? Crossing the ocean in the 1500s to settle the New World was a scary proposition, and yet the Europeans didn't let that stop them. It was precisely their ambition, competition with their neighbors, and their desire to claim the wealth of those new lands that drove them to do it, even with primitive technology.
Peaceful races may fail to contact us not because of their moral superiority, but because they lack the incentive to bother.
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