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."
More likely (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure- you *might* be able to theoretically build a ship that could go further but all politics is local. Look at our politics- could we gather the will to build a 10 trillion dollar multi-generation star ship?
I think civ's do okay, never get off the planet the started on, and eventually die out from lack of resources, some kind of self destruction, or being wiped out by an external event.
Only two choices. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not so much a matter of "if" but of "when". Ask the dinosaurs.
Re:Remain for how long? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:More likely (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's figure out how first.
Besides why would an alien race need the whole galaxy? A small section would do. Even so they could have died out millions of years ago. Or we could be the first advanced race and as we reach out amoung the stars we shall find other less advanced races.
Re:More likely (Score:3, Interesting)
But it seems like it is a very real possibility that the kind of spacetravel required to visit other species might just be impossible. I don't think one could take it as proof that other intelligent life doesn't exist just because they haven't managed to conquer the galaxy.
The fermi paradox is wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:More likely (Score:5, Interesting)
The Fermi Paradox assumes the light-speed limit.
There are an awful lot of hidden assumptions in your bald statement that the speed of light automatically limits travel to a range of 4 or 5 ly. Why not 3, or 6, or 10? It doesn't take much to allow for hops from one star to the next, and if you've got the tech to build starships, you've got the tech to colonize a star system that doesn't have Earthlike planets. (Ie space colonies, not terraforming - although the latter may also be possible.)
I think civ's do okay, never get off the planet the started on, and eventually die out from lack of resources,
Quite likely a civilization that never gets off its home planet will eventually run out of resources. But there are resources aplenty for those that take that first step. That's why people talk about He3 mining, solar powersats, mining asteroids, etc. Remember O'Neill's question: "Is the surface of a planet the right place for an expanding industrial civilization?" The answer is "no".
The paradox with the paradox (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, it has taken primates some-odd half a million years to evolve into humans capable of inventing devices that can decipher energy waves from space. It has taken the Earth some 200 million years (from early life to humans) to evolve life on this scale. Assuming other planets have roughly the same time scale, we can only assume those planets inside a 200 (give or take a 100) million lightyear radius contains no life.
The paradox with the paradox is as follows: Earth contains intelligent life. Earth has not colonized the galaxy. Earth's evidence in space only reaches back into the 1930s when the very first signals were sent into space.
"The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?" (Score:5, Interesting)
This stuff is a big deal, and the Great Filter paper actually manages to draw some useful concrete conclusions from the question, or at least useful concrete questions.
Also related, albeit a little more tangentially, is "Are You Living In A Computer Simulation? [simulation-argument.com]". "We're in a simulation and there are no extraterrestrials in the simulation" must be considered one of the leading possible answers. (I'm not advocating it either way, I don't have an answer. Nor do I consider this post anywhere near a complete list, just some relevant pointers.)
Re:Only two choices. (Score:4, Interesting)
The best way to survive a Chicxulub-style impact is the Dr. Strangelove model. Get an underground complex to ride out the initial fallout of red-hot debris, have a nuclear reactor for power, some parkas for ventures outside into the cold, food to survive for 10-100 years, a force to defend it from looters, and store up the machinery needed to start reestablishing an industrial civilization when things have recovered. It wouldn't even have to be a terribly large population, since you could have a bank full of ten thousand frozen embryos to maintain adequate genetic diversity.
Concievably there are threats where a space program is the logical answer- say, the sun goes supernova- but an asteroid impact just isn't one of them.
NOT being honest! (Score:5, Interesting)
We weren't too small minded to risk lives hiking over mountain ranges or floating in very-likely-to-sink boats across open ocean to other continents, remember? Primitive Asians floating across the Pacific to populate South America or hoofing it in across the northern straights were taking on something at least as dicey as we currently see activities in space. Villages wiped each other out, disease killed off whole tribes - all of the stuff that people say would keep us from colonizing elsewhere. Sure, some of those efforts would fail - just as they have for tens of thousands of years. But some will succeed, too.
we use our resources to make trivial things that amuse us for a short period of time (ipod, iphone, etc)
That's because we evolved from, and still are short-lived primates. Our brains were wired to deal with much more short-term issues. Planning through the coming weather change is about as far as we ever needed to go, mentally. Only some people have the wiring to do big picture stuff... and guess what: they tend to get jobs doing big picture stuff. As for trivial things like iPods: you'd rather have a society with somewhat better antibiotics, but completely absent all of the things that make life a pleasure? The iPod is just a newer take on cave painting and tribal dancing. The fact that we evolved into creatures that put handprints on walls and invent group songs to sing doesn't mean we can't also do things like invent solar cells, fly transplant organs through the air to another city where they're needed, or manage to live past 25. Being productive, inventive, and joyous are not mutually exclusive - they're interdependent.
rather than doing useful things (cure diseases, etc).
I'm sorry to hear that you died of Polio. Or was it Smallpox? Or maybe spoiled food because we haven't invented refridgeration yet. Anyway, sorry you died.
Re:More likely (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Remain for how long? (Score:3, Interesting)
More too it than intellect (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More likely (Score:3, Interesting)
Larry Niven did a lot of hard sci-fi; that is he actually took into account things like elementary physics and economics. The book that sticks out in my mind here is "The Mote in God's Eye", where an alien civilization builds a slower-than-light probe with a light sail and launch it to a nearby star system using a massive laser. The detail I remember is that the extraordinary amount of energy required to do this means that it takes almost the entire energetic output of the alien planet in order to build the probe and then power the laser. Combined with the alien's unstable political system, this means that launching the probe results in a complete collapse of their civilization. Getting a spacecraft to even a small fraction of the speed of light requires vast amounts of energy- more than our current entire energy output, if I recall.
That's what we're talking about. The energy and resources expended would be non-trivial. It's not like cutting funds to the National Endowments for the Arts current crop of penis-related imagery is going to do it. We're talking trillions of dollars worth of materials, scientific research, power, and soforth, something that would make the Iraq war look cheap in comparison. That's going to mean less money available for things that directly affect the quality of our lives- roads, research into curing AIDS and cancer, helping to develop Africa, law enforcement, national defense, and soforth. Someone has to pay for the energy, materials, manpower, and research that go into building a starship.
The question is, how much are we willing to pay? A few hundred extra in taxes per year? I could probably stand that. A few thousand? I don't know. Half your wages? I like the idea of space travel, but I don't like it that much. But that's what it might take to do it using anything like current technology. And that's the big question, in my mind- it's not enough to make space travel possible, it has to be economically feasible.
Re:Fermi paradox (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, the Fermi Paradox takes all that into consideration. The time to colonize the galaxy, once a species has become space faring is minuscule in comparison to evolution. The paradox is based on the idea that the space faring civilization will colonize the galaxy before other species have a chance to evolve and the probability of two space faring civilizations existing at the same time is incredibly low.
If another civilization were to have started colonizing the galaxy, it's unlikely it would have been in the time periods you point out, 10,000, 20,000 years ago. It's more likely they would have begun tens to hundreds of millions of years ago, and yes, that is enough time to colonize the entire galaxy.
The Earth is believed to be about 4.6 billion years old. Life emerged in the first few hundred million years, probably around 4 billion years ago. Multicellular life sprung up around 1 billion years ago. Mammals have been around for about 200 million years. Homosapiens started out, probably around 200 million years ago. Now, let's say that instead of taking 3 billion years to go from single cell to multi-cell, it only took 2.5 billion years. That's a 500 million year head start. And there's no reason to think that's impossible. It's believed that the evolution of multi-cell was likely a fluke and not necessarily a forgone conclusion, largely because it took so long to show up. So that "fluke" could have probably happened any time after single-celled life began (well, any time after the first few hundred million years of it, at least).
Also, intelligence isn't necessarily a forgone conclusion of evolution. Dinosaurs had a lot more time to evolve than we have and they never developed our kind of intelligence. So let's say an animal in the dinosaur period had developed intelligence. That was over 65 million years ago. Plenty of time to colonize the galaxy.
The time to colonize the galaxy would, with only modest technological advancement from where we are now, would probably be a few million years. A very thin line on the timeline of evolution.
Re:More likely (Score:3, Interesting)
The idea that you can "run out" of resources is ridiculous. Silicon, the most plentiful element in the crust of our planet, can be used to harness solar power and convert it into electricity. This electricity can be used to harvest other raw materials or recycle those that have already been utilized. It can also be used to crack water and create rocket fuel. This rocket can then be used to harvest other materials from the inner solar system.
Through effective recycling and fusion power the solar system can support 100 trillion people. Sure, we might not be able to fund a generation ship, but a mission to mars or pulling an asteroid into earth orbit to harvest minerals is within the realm of a medium-sized government or large corporation.
Science Fiction answers the Paradox (Score:4, Interesting)
2) "Berserker" by Fred Saberhagen: There are civs out there, but they're really, really quite to avoid being noticed by fleets of robotic intelligences sworn on eliminating all biological intelligences
3) "Quaarantine" by Greg Egan: We're cut off from the rest of the galaxy until we prove ourselves. What we're seeing of the sky is cleverly only showing what they want us to see.
I'm a bit of a fan of the "We're living in a computer simulation" theory too: since in the future there will be enough computing power to simulate a huge number of realities, the odds are greater that this is a simulation than that it isn't. It would also explain why socks disappear from the dryer, my car keys aren't where I left them, voting irregularities, etc.: Microsoft has got its hand in the kernel somewhere.
Re:More likely (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the Fermi paradox. If space travel is possible, then the time and scale of the universe is so huge that it would have been done millions of times by now. Hence, space travel is impossible or no aliens exist but us.
Another possibility: aliens have visited us but have not revealed themselves to us. If their technology is so far superior to ours that it allows for space travel over great distances, it is also possible that they have managed to evade our attempts at detecting them. I won't speculate as to why they would or would not want us to know about them, but I doubt stealth technology is beyond the abilities of anyone capable of traveling in space for years at relativistic speeds.
I'm also not sure that the time frame for the paradox might not be misleading. We are talking about so many, many years that maybe some race did colonize the galaxy but has died out in our neighborhood, or perhaps we are their descendants. We haven't been observing the galaxy for very long or in any great detail from Earth.
Re:More likely (Score:4, Interesting)
A factor of time... (Score:3, Interesting)
All of this stuff in us, excluding the H in our H2O, came out of stars. It took several generations of stars being born and dying to get to the raw materials out there for us. I once read, though I can't quote where, that we are relatively early onto the scene, as far as this galaxy goes. Relatively may be a fuzzy term, but I would interpret it to mean that there won't be intelligent life billions of years older than us.
Just like there's a roughly defined habitable zone around the sun, there's also likely a habitable zone in the galaxy. Too far in and the radiation is too great, too far out and there haven't been enough stellar generations, enough scattering of heavy material, to produce complex life.
IMHO, the Drake Equation is optimistic, and doesn't properly address time.
Re:More likely (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, no one here knows enough about your religious belief to make a judgment about you. But if we did know you better we certainly could make a fair judgment based on it.
Re:More likely (Score:4, Interesting)
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/
According to the calculations in that article, using 1g acceleration someone from Andromeda (2 million light years) could reach us with only 28 years passing on board their ship. Sounds nice. Outside the ship, however, millions of years would have passed, which means that the visiting aliens would have had to leave their home planet before there was any human life on earth in order to arrive today.
Also, the fuel requirement, assuming 100% efficiency, is 4000 tons of fuel for every 1 kilogram of ship weight. And that's only if the visiting aliens want to go sailing past us. If they want to stop and visit, they have to start slowing down at the half-way point of the journey, which means:
1. They have to know exactly where they are going so that they know when to start slowing down. Coming from Andromeda, how would they even know that earth would be a desirable destination?
2. It greatly increases the fuel requirement -- 4 thousand million tons of fuel per kilogram of ship weight.
The Fermi growth assumes uncontrolled growth (Score:5, Interesting)
So a simple possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that this is an inherent biological mechanism and that in any population that grows to fill its biological niche, birth rates will sooner or later drop until an equilibrium is reached, and this is likely to happen before there is significant pressure to colonize the nearby solar system or stars. While that would leave visits to other planets still reasonably likely, and perhaps even small "local" colonies, without an expanding population and diminishing resources driving prices up, pure economics would dramatically slow down the tempo of any colonization effort to what private individuals could afford and would want to try.
Look at how long Europeans had the capability to reach America before the wave of colonization started, for example. This was a set of cultures that were aggressive and expansionist. Assume the drive to start colonization gets successively less likely as the cost of doing so goes up and the immediate benefit of doing so drops. Once it takes more than a lifetime for economic value to be derived from a colony due to travel time even at light speed, the motivation for pushing for it dramatically reduces for most individuals (look at how hard it is getting people to even sacrifice spending today vs. getting a good pension until they're getting to a certain age, not to consider getting people to sacrifice now for the benefit of their children).
Even with dramatic population growth, a colony would either have to bring economic value (in the form of resources) OR cost little enough in terms of resources to initiate and transfer colonists to than leaving the people the colony would have been made up of in place for a long enough amount of time to make giving up those resources seem prudent. If improvements in how we exploit various resources keep improving, that in itself might put a significant damper on any colonization efforts.
That leaves us with possibly the odd colony here and there or the odd probe. Small colonies would face high odds of dying off, and would be unlikely to be established far away - presumably nearby stars would be targeted. Unless these colonies then enter an aggressive expansionist phase, and either had the technology to pull it off (provide resources for itself) or had the fortune of finding a location that provides abundant resources, it would take a lot of time before such a colony could produce offshoots further away. Chances are they'd grow to fill their new solar system first, and run into the same hypothetical growth reductions as we're currently seeing with developed countries on earth.
That leaves radio. Why haven't we heard radio chatter? Stephen Baxter suggested a simple solution in the novel "Space": IF there are aliens out there, we might not want to make a big fuss about our existence, and also, a civilization may simply grow past broadcasting (That book does also, btw. pose an alternative explanation for the Fermi paradox, but stating it here would be a huge spoiler - it's a good read). We might already be nearing the time where we'll "go silent", as technological advance continues. Given the number of possible stars, how short time we've been listening, and how short periods potential civilizations may broadcast, it's very possible that there just aren't enough civilizations at the right stage of development that their radio chatter happened to intersect with the time periods we are currently monitoring. We may for that
Simulation and Imagination Argument (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the answer to the Fermi paradox is this:
Once a civilization has derived the laws of physics and chemistry to sufficient precision and certainty, there is no longer any pressing need to pursue direct observation of extraterrestrial intelligence. You can simply assume that it exists, based on your local knowledge.
We are reaching this same point with our knowledge of biology; everywhere we look on Earth, we find life. Simply confirming the existence of microbial life on Mars would make it a bit less urgent to get all the way to Europa and verify that it's there too. If we did make it to Europa to confirm that life has evolved there as well, I'd be reasonably comfortable making the prediction that life exists pretty much everywhere else in the galaxy.
If there's no reason to doubt life elsewhere in the galaxy, there's probably intelligent life too. So why worry about going there and confirming something by direct observation, when there's a 99.999% probability that it's true? It makes more sense to stick around here for now and simulate what they're like instead of going there and seeing it directly.
Once we have learned how to just simulate the biochemistry of Europa with high enough fidelity, there's no longer any pressing need to go there, is there? If we make it that far and our simulations and models indicate the presence of life on extrasolar planets, that's good enough for me.
In other words, the reason the aliens haven't bothered to travel here, land, and say "take me to your leader" is because they know what would happen already. It doesn't matter what we are actually like. It doesn't matter what they're actually like either, because we can imagine them now and we will be able to simulate them soon enough.
The reason we don't run into aliens is because we can imagine and simulate them and they can imagine and simulate us and there's no point in actually confronting each other expensively IRL.
Simple solution to this paradox (Score:4, Interesting)
2) Organization requires competition. The better the competition, the better the organization
3) Competition promotes conflict - either between species or within competing factions of a species
4) As the ability to colonize space develops, so does the ability to destroy the whole species
5) Since colonizing a new area is the essential goal of all species (survival requires species to spread as far as possible) reaching this "ultimate" goal will require overcoming the competition at all costs including destroying the original habitat and all members of the species.
6) All species capable of colonizing space must enevitably destroy themselves.
Colonization is not possible. Cooperation will NOT lead to galactic colonization as it will ony lead to cooperative use of existing resources.
At least that's my two cents.
Re:More likely (Score:3, Interesting)
To answer the question why extraterrestrial civilizations haven't colonized the whole galaxy you just need to answer the question why hasn't terrestrial civilization done it.
Or are we assuming too much about the form of colonization; perhaps we're destined to colonize via panspermia. And has this already happened? And if so, have we in fact colonized the whole galaxy already with the consequence of resetting our own evolution each time in order to adapt to our new environments?
Re:More likely (Score:5, Interesting)
(1) Teeming with constrantly mutating alien bacteria
(2) Lifeless and ready for terraforming
I know which one I would choose. Seriously, why risk alien disease when there are so many "clean" places to choose from? If you were looking for a cave to sleep in, would you choose the empty one or the one with animals already in it? Unless space travel is instant, I really don't see a race ever expanding fast enough to need to use every planet. Besides, it is selfish to think alien life is "as we know it" and would even care about our planet; If they aren't water-based our planet could seem like the same kind of hell that Venus seems to us.
They're already here. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. .
Okay then. Many people have pointed out the numerous and embarrassing flaws in this logic, but I really don't think Fermi was being stupid or ignorant at the time he posited his question. It was the 50's, after all, and people trusted their government. People did not yet grasp how the world worked with regard to government secrecy and population thought control. From our stance today, we have a great deal of available insight into this; we know about Joseph Goebbels [wikipedia.org], we know that advertising is incredibly effective, we know that the strobe effect of Television puts the human brain into a highly suggestive state [cognitiveliberty.org]. We know that what you teach kids at a young age shapes them for life. And if we dig deeper, we know that the human brain is easily manipulated in far more disgusting ways; (Greebaum) [cassiopaea.org].
It is easy to control people's beliefs. Churches have done it for centuries. For those who reject religious dogma, the media picks up the ball; ie, replace 'religion' with 'cult of science'. Real scientists don't care about embarrassment or being laughed at; they can't afford to because at some point every new and important idea posited by a scientist is going to be ridiculed and attacked by the layperson. So those who fear to talk about UFO's in an open manner, without any trace of fear or bias or mocking doubt in their tones, are not really scientists. They are just another brand of dogmatist.
As I've said, it is easy to control people's beliefs, --and by extension, their perceived realities.
So continuing Fermi's logic. . , If logic implies that the Milky Way is teeming with life, then perhaps it IS, and perhaps there is another reason we have not heard from that life.
Consider: There are UFO's constantly buzzing our skies. We have seen hundreds and hundreds of crop circles. We have countless reports from people who claim abduction experiences.
How can any rational person live in the same world as all of this and insist that there is no evidence? That's kind of strange. Crop circles are the perfect example; they are there in a manner which is available to anybody, (One recalls the old complaint of the sceptic, "I'll believe it when there is some evidence layed at my feet!"), they cannot be rationalized away; (the Ropes and Planks explanation falls hopelessly short when you get close enough to actually look at the details of the problem.) And yet, the world carries on as though nothing were happening.
It reminds me of a Douglas Adams creation; a system of invisibility where rather than bend light, you bend minds. --So that people ignore like crazy that which is right in front of them.
Aliens are already here, and they have been for centuries. The logic, if expanded to include this, might want to ask this little question...
How much effort do humans make to communicate with the cattle they raise? (As above, so below.)
Well, we've got the crop circle side of the equation. But we also have the abduction side. There are two different approaches to anyt
Re:There is nothing as unusual... (Score:3, Interesting)
Jesus H. Vishnu! Do I have to do all the thinking?
Re:More likely (Score:2, Interesting)
machine intelligence is the next logical step in our evolution, and at this point there's really very little reason in reasoning about a machines reason to 'spread and multiply', or other stereotyped carbanoid evolved behavorial patterns.. Also, if indeed have had or do have or will have some connection with intelligence 'out there', i can only deduct it will be of mechanical origin.. the biological construct is just too fragile on so many levels. If i was a machine intelligence i could imagine looking at earth like a egg ready to hatch
Re:More likely (Score:3, Interesting)
They "live" long enough, can eventually be repaired easier, they are likely to remain sane, and they can be safel shut off/stored so centuries of travel passes in an instant to them. They could probably travel to stars at
I almost think if we are going to send humans, a first step would be breeding for 2' tall humans (there's no reason humans have to be big to be as smart as they are).
Re:More likely (Score:3, Interesting)
What I'm saying is that the anthropic principle applies. It could have been, pre-our-evolution, that the probability of our evolution was 0.000000001. But now, post-our-evolution, the probability is 1. So we can't really make arguments are about "how probable" it is that we evolved the way we did, and what that implied, because the number could have been completely arbitrary---anything inside the interval (0, 1]. The information of what that number was is lost to us, however, since now that number is 1.