Fermi Paradox Predicting Humankind's Future? 854
An anonymous reader writes "The Fermi paradox says that if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, at least one of them should have colonized the entire galaxy by now. But since there is no evidence of this, humankind must be the only intelligent life in the galaxy. The Space Review has an article on how the Fermi paradox can be applied to human civilization. It says that, like the extraterrestrials, humans have three choices: colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct."
Re:More likely (Score:5, Informative)
An insertion here about relativity: if the ship were traveling fast enough, you mightn't need several generations just for 4-5 years. Because of relativistic time dilation, the astronauts in the spaceship would feel considerably less time elapse, while the journey would seem to take decades to everyone on earth. The question then becomes whether people would be willing to spend trillions of dollars on something only their children and grandchildren would see.
Re:More likely (Score:5, Informative)
4.3 ly nearest star 3.6 years
27 ly Vega 6.6 years
30,000 ly Center of our galaxy 20 years
2,000,000 ly Andromeda galaxy 28 years
Re:Fermi paradox (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More likely (Score:5, Informative)
Not nearly correct. Google for "Eavesdropping The Radio Signature of the Earth", the title of an article by W.T. Sullivan and C Wetherill in the Jan 27, 1978 issue of Science. You'll get links to a number of cached copies of it online, and also some discussions.
One of the hits is to a NASA article [nasa.gov] on the same topic with updated info and some pretty graphs. It also contains the comment "On a cosmically infinitesimal time scale, Earth has indeed become a very bright planet, outshining the Sun by orders of magnitude in certain narrow frequency ranges."
The general idea is that, first, our radio/TV/radar broadcasts aren't omni-directional; from the start our broadcasts have used antennas that broadcast most of their energy horizontally. The resulting 2-dimensional dispersion pattern reaches much farther than an omni-directional signal of the same energy would. Over time, each broadcast station does send in all directions, but from any one direction, the station appears to fade in and then fade out some minutes later, twice a day. The frequency is doppler-shifted due to the Earth's rotation, and also varies over a year due to our orbit around the sun.
And, second, with our own technology, we could detect the most powerful our own broadcasts from anywhere within the sphere that they've reached. This was the basic question in the Science article. But they also addressed a more interesting question: Assuming our own technology, and the ability to measure the signal's spectrum but not decipher program content, what could be deduced about the senders? The results were quite impressive.
Figuring out which star system the signals come from was trivial (to an astronomer). After a year or so of data collection, the planet's orbit would be known, as would the planet's size. The presence of a large satellite (including its orbit and approximate mass) would also be known. It would be clear that the senders are primarily active during the daytime and early evening.
Further study would generate a rough map of all the broadcast stations. They would be concentrated in narrow bands separating two different sorts of terrain. From the planet's orbit and the sun's brightness, the conclusion would be that the planet is roughly 3/4 water and 1/4 land, and we live on land, primarily along the coasts.
Even more study would determine from spectrum details that there were several different kinds of technology in use to generate the broadcasts, and each kind of equipment was distributed across patches of land that we might call "nations", with some kinds of hardware used by nations not close to each other, implying long-distance technological sharing among coalitions of nations.
It was interesting reading 30 years ago. (But I do remember thinking that it might be a good thing if the actual program content couldn't be decoded.
Re:More likely (Score:5, Informative)
This is so ridiculous and illogical: you posit that something as complex as the universe needs a creator, you posit a creator that must be more complex than its creation, and then you say that creator itself is not created by somethign else. Please try to see how insane this sounds to those of us who have not been infected by your mental virus.
There is no responsibility that comes from being in a created universe. Just because somethin gcreated you does not put that thing in a superior position over you. It is in no position to dictate responsibility to you, to say that it is is another of those completely illogical things religion would have you believe.
There is no lack of responsibility that comes from being without a creator. All real responsibility is a form of enlightened self interest. I don't need a creator to tell me to be responsible. If being responsible makes sense, I am perfectly capable of figuring that out on my own. Turns out it does make sense, creator or no.
Whether or not there is a creator is a question that is completely seperate from the question of whether religion is a form of insanity. If there is a creator, it sure has done a piss-poor job of communicating its intentions in unambiguous ways to it's creations. Until said creator makes itself and its intentions known to me in a way that can't be faked by mentally damaged humans, the question of whether or not there is a creator is utterly meaningless.
The question of the impact of religious insanity on human well being, however, is an important one that can be answered.
Re:More likely (Score:4, Informative)
Fermi specifically did not refer to colonisation at all (at least in the original formulation of his remarks), he also never explicitly stated the theorem he is so famous for. He merely pointed out the obvious which is that if the theory of space colonisation and the numbers being associated with it were true, then the hypothetical aliens "... should be here by now."
While the Fermi paradox has been used over and over as a means to prove that alien civilisations don't exist (because they are not here already), Fermi was actually more interested in pointing out the faulty data than he was interested in using this so-called paradox as proof of the concept that we are alone in the universe. While that may have been the agenda of many that followed, there is no indication that Fermi himself had a strong opinion one way or the other.
It's not so much a paradox as an attempt to point out that either something must be wrong with the numbers, or with our powers of observation. There are just as many solutions to the paradox that involve us being alone as there are ones that do not.
Re:Science Fiction answers the Paradox (Score:1, Informative)
5) "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge: The laws of physics vary from place to place, and in our part of the galaxy they suck so no-one ever comes here.
6) "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C Clarke: God is very real, and has been waiting for us to complete some arbitrary task, that's all the universe was ever for.
Re:More likely (Score:3, Informative)
Fermi's argument was statistical. True, much is based on a single data point, us, but most of your quibbles would imply a species that wasn't interested in exploration at all.
Your points:
Earth wasn't colonized, and dolphins (or something else, maybe cats or fleas) are the remains of it Earth wasn't colonized, and they died out due to lack of vigor Earth wasn't colonized, and they died out as a result of an asteroid, etc Earth wasn't colonized, and someone else came along and took exception to it, and wiped them out
Presumably you meant "was" not "wasn't", and these aren't convincing. If any civilisation had been established here any time in the last 500 million years, we WOULD know. We've got hundreds of T-rex skeletons, would an intelligent species leave less? Cities, metals, glass? Moonbases? And it's hard to think of a catastrophe that would wipe out an intelligent species completely, yet leave the planet intact enough to end up with us. And biologically, there would be whole animal kingdoms completely unrelated to native life. There has been some weird stuff found, but nothing that came out of nowhere; we all go back to the same genetic roots. We share most of our genome with "dolphins, cats and fleas". (But thanks at least for not bringing up the "we are aliens" argument.)