The Fermi Paradox is Back 713
nettxzl writes ""Sentient Developments revisits the Fermi Paradox which is "the contradictory and counter-intuitive observation that we have yet to see any evidence for the existence of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI) although the size and age of the Universe suggests that many technologically advanced ETI's ought to exist." Sentient Development's blog post on the Fermi Paradox states that "a number of inter-disciplinary breakthroughs and insights have contributed to the Fermi Paradox gaining credence as an unsolved scientific problem" Amongst these are "(1)Improved quantification and conceptualization of our cosmological environment, (2) Improved understanding of planet formation, composition and the presence of habitable zones, (3) The discovery of extrasolar planets, (4) Confirmation of the rapid origination of life on Earth (5) Growing legitimacy of panspermia theories" and more ... So, where is everyone?"
So, where is everyone? (Score:5, Funny)
o Far away in time
o Far away in space and time
o Hollywood
Re:So, where is everyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's an interesting theory, but it is just one possible explanation. James Annis' paper [slashdot.org] describes it well.
Re:So, where is everyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Stephen Baxter's novel Space uses this idea.
PS, your link is malformed. Should be An Astrophysical Explanation for the Great Silence [fnal.gov], very interesting despite being a PS file with the ugly bitmapped TeX font.
Re:So, where is everyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
So does that mean that we may end up being the advanced civilizations that other aliens dream of discovering?
First Contact reversal we land on their planet after they finally discover warp drive.
Re:So, where is everyone? (Score:3, Funny)
Christ, I hope not. Once the alien civilizations "grow up" we'd quickly become the idiot savants of the galaxy. Sure we will have split the atom, manipulated our genes, and developed FTL travel, but we will probably still entertain ourselves with reruns of Bret Michael's Rock of Love, burn down our cities when sports teams win championships, and get our "news" from Bill O'Reilly IV.
Re:So, where is everyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
As we see life here on earth, life is a constant battle - an individual's death provides the nutrients for another to live, and so on in the food chain. Life means growth, which means competition for resources, which boils down to war. The idea of evolution is built on the very foundation of death of the weaker and survival of the fittest (weak and fit defined as by competition). War and violence is a necessary corollary of this process.
I perhaps don't really have enough imagination to dream up a world that followed a non-violent path to sentience and civilasation, but I would be glad to hear your ideas.
Re:So, where is everyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason the Fermi Paradox is interesting is that "recent" in astronomical terms is a long, long time in even geological terms. Even if what you say were true, there would have been many times the incubation period for intelligent life to develop between then and now, and we still should have seen something by now.
We're right here (Score:5, Interesting)
An important idea in the panspermia theory is that when a star goes nova, the biomass is not totally eliminated. Some fragments remain. When new stars and planets coalesce around the remnant masses those become the seeds for a new generation of life.
So according to that theory, we are the alien life forms we're looking for, in a certain sense.
If mankind is to persist another thousand years we'll have to solve a number of important puzzles. To survive a hundred thousand we'll have to solve many more. By then the pointlessness of immortality as a species may be self evident.
Any civilization sufficiently advanced to come here in force from another star has solved the energy, food and mortality puzzles, which leaves conquest unlikely as a goal I should think. Why take the trouble to scrap it up with a pestilent life form at the bottom of a steep gravity well when mass and energy are abundant in the oort cloud and asteroid belt free for the taking? Why travel all the way to another star just for that since those things are doubtless abundant where you came from?
I think what's left is tourism. Intelligence and curiosity are sufficiently linked that a life form evolved enough to solve the necessary problems would want to watch us develop if they could. Perhaps they're here now, secretly recording our ridiculous antics for their own version of reality tv.
Re:We're right here (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We're right here (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We're right here (Score:3, Informative)
Re:We're right here (Score:4, Insightful)
Or at the risk of being "Richard Rank" from Contact, maybe they've solved those problems and yet they still like killing other civilizations just for the sheer joy of it. Vikings were filthy rich at one point in history, and had everything they could possibly want (or could get it just by making threats), and yet that didn't stop them from slaughtering others and themselves on a regular basis. Who even knows? It's so hypothetical, we can't even speculate.
Why take the trouble to scrap it up with a pestilent life form at the bottom of a steep gravity well when mass and energy are abundant in the oort cloud and asteroid belt free for the taking?
1) Because you're fighting for some reason other than lack of resources. As another example, look at the planet Krikket in the last couple books in the Hitchhiker's Guide. They seemed to have everything they wanted, and yet they still engaged in a campaign to destroy everybody else just so they could be alone in the universe. True, it's a comedy, but you're making a lot of assumptions about the nature of conflict here that don't necessarily hold true.
I do agree with you that the V scenario, where the aliens come to steal food and water, is pretty stupid.
2) There's energy in the Oort Cloud? I thought it was just a bit of dust flying around.
Why travel all the way to another star just for that since those things are doubtless abundant where you came from?
Because the resource "people to kill" may not be abundant where they come from.
The real point is that we simply don't know the answer to any of this. ETs could be so different from us that we don't even recognize them (maybe we've already had contact, but they move so slow that we didn't notice.) They could have motivations entirely different than any that apply to us.
Re:We're right here (Score:3, Insightful)
Should be lots of deuterium there.
Re:We're right here (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because we can't do D+D fusion doesn't mean an advanced civilization can't. Any civilization that expands into its Oort cloud is obviously more advanced than we are.
And since the density of the Oort cloud is roughly, let's say, zero, it should be incredibly energy inefficient to collect the deuterium.
The Oort cloud consists of trillions of comets, which are basically balls of dirty water ice. The average density of the cloud is basically zero, but I can assure you that a comet's density is far greater than zero. And these comets should be easy enough to find, since water reflects radar extremely well. The net energy gain from harvesting deuterium -- when you remember the almost complete lack of gravity out there -- will be huge.
Free range humans (Score:3, Interesting)
This is one angle I hadn't considered in my post. I'll concede this point. Although farming creatures to kill are a renewable resource, new and different wild game is a sport some individuals in an advanced civilization might enjoy. Extensions of this concept apply, and alien angles beyond what I imagined. Another poster mentioned backups, but I doubt the occupied -> vacant ratio of livable planets is so high that eradication of us as pests is an efficient solution to this problem.
Not to be pedantic, but mass is energy. That the Oort cloud is rich in hydrogen for fusion and known to have scattered mountain sized collections of frozen hydrocarbons is just bonus. To get manned craft beyond Saturn we would need fusion power at least, or some other as-yet undiscovered fount of energy. Even for unmanned craft that we send that far we use fission.
As another poster pointed out, yes, this brings us back to the question of where are they? Perhaps in the coming decades we will come to see that we've already seen them, we just didn't know how to read the signs. Perhaps the noisy phase of social development is brief enough that no culture passed through it close enough for us to see it, in the brief span we've been looking. Perhaps we are alone for now. If we take the obvious step and expand our sphere everywhere we can, we won't always be. Eventually the lines will diverge enough that "we" will be "them". Space is vast, and after Saturn the landmarks are far apart.
It bothers me that we can't see ion drives in the distance. That must mean the technology is short lived, soon to be surpassed by more efficient means. Otherwise potential alien intelligences would be shifting lunar sized masses with it, and we could see that from a galaxy away.
Why would they bother? (Score:3, Interesting)
Reasons to Visit Earth:
- Humans make fun pets. ("Look, dear! Talking monkeys!")
- Curious as to what humans taste like.
- Anal probes are the equivalent of interstellar cow tipping.
- Human horn is an aphodesiac.
Reasons Not to Visit Earth:
- Same reason a level 70 in World of Warcraft avoids starter areas. There's no point.
- Stupid humans keep wanting the ET's to just solve their problems for them.
- The last guy that got stranded in Roswell was carved up like a turkey.
- Same reason why humans don't bother to explain how microwaves work to dolphins. Sure they can talk, but they don't understand a damn word we say.
Re:...or the opposite (Score:4, Insightful)
And how can you make sweeping statements about as of yet imagined beings and their society, and be condescending to everyone who isn't partaking of the same fiction?
Re:We're right here (Score:3, Insightful)
I was using them as an example of a civilization of people whose basic needs were all met, and yet were still extremely violent to combat the parent's claim that the only possible reason for violence was to obtain resources.
Re:We're right here (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:We're right here (Score:5, Funny)
we are the alien life forms we're looking for...
I'm not the droid I'm looking for.
Re:We're right here (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that conquest is unlikely. But how about backup?
Even stars have a limited life, and stability is not guaranteed within that lifespan. A major stellar flare would be a very bad day for even a strong civilization. And supernovas -- and the resulting sterilization of entire stellar neighborhoods -- are rather common on the cosmological timescale. In other words, huddling forever around one star is a bad idea.
Therefore, civilizations that really want to endure would want to back themsevles up, preferably thousands of light years away, beyond the sterilization radius of any local supernova. Of course, the backup is a huge civilization in its own right and would want its own backup, and so on.
So again we have exponential expansion into space, and we are back to Fermi's question: where are they?
Re:We're right here (Score:3, Interesting)
Heck, in a Rube Goldberg sort of way I could imagine the following:
Large ship of large mass wants to capture angular momentum from small asteroid:
Capture rock in net on long string
as string unwinds it spins a flywheel
at end of string release rock
wheel string back with flywheel
use remaining spin on flywheel (energy imparted by (string + rock) - energy used to wind back (string !rock)) to run generator.
The only way I know of to burn water either uses pressure and heat we can not create, or requires more energy to be imparted to the reaction than is received back.
-nB
Please don't mod parent down (Score:3, Interesting)
Creationism is an important aspect of this discussion and shoud not be modded off topic.
For myself though, I try to see the world as closely as it appears to be, rather than through the interpretations of men. We discuss here things on a cosmic scale perhaps beyond human imagining and I am comfortable with that. I am not comfortable with speculating on the whims and motives of beings divine as I am certain that is beyond my ken.
Of this I am comfortable though: to describe a thing as being something other than what it clearly is can almost always be considered a slight to its creator. It is beyond me to speculate about why a creator would make the world appear to be one thing and then require his adherents to insist it was another. That sounds to me like a cruel game and even less likely than intelligence as random happenstance.
Re:So, where is everyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
1. The cosmologist Brandon Carter has produced a calculation based on Bayes theorem that the life span of technological civilizations is less than 10^4 yr. So civilizations don't last long enough to develop instellar travel and the outlook for us is not so good.
2. That though life may be comparatively widespread in the universe. the evolution of organisms capable of producing a technological civilization is very, very rare. We may be the only one.
3. They are already here, hiding out in the asteroid belt and on the dark side of the moon observing us. The alien civilization is so advanced an benevolent it does not want to make contact until they think we are sufficiently advanced not to have our civilization damaged by contact. This idea was put forward a few years ago by a group on the internet called the Group of 50 who were fifty signatories to a statement calling for the aliens to contact them by email. They reckoned as internet traffic was channeled through communication satellites that the aliens were monitoring it. No they weren't total nuts, the group was founded by an emeritus U. of Toronto astronomy prof. and consisted faculty, grad students and other interested people mostly from around North America. I don't know if they got an email from them yet (I haven't looked at their site in years, don't know if it still exists), but they had a neat scheme to check out if an email was genuine, not from some nut or hoaxer, they would ask the aliens to set of a small but visible flash on the surface of the moon at some prearranged time.
Some serious academics to the idea of aliens already here seriously enough to do an infra-red search study of the asteroids. If there was an alien colony on an asteroid it's energy use should cause it to be an infra-red emitter. The result was published in a peer reviewed astronomy journal. The result was negative, oh I guess there not here then.
Have some patience, we'll run across them... event (Score:5, Insightful)
In the immortal words of Douglas Adams, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-boggingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
The problem isn't that there isn't anyone else out there. With so many billions of stars and planets, the odds that there are other intelligent beings out there are astronomically large. (Pun slightly intended.) The problem is that the distances required to travel to reach them and also astronomically large, and the odds that there is life on any given planet are infinitesimally small.
I always put this thought experiment before people: If you had a spaceship that could instantly take you to anywhere in the universe, where would you go?
Sure, you'd probably drop by a few nebulae and stars and even planets, but after you've seen a few, where to then? You could travel to other planets for lifetimes and still not run across intelligent life on other planets. It's not that truly interesting things aren't out there, it's just that the universe isn't very conducive to producing life-bearing planets. Sure, with so vastly many planets, it will happen (and obviously has), but finding life out there is like finding a needle in a haystack, and we're just now starting to be able to see the haystack.
Further complicating matters is that we don't have spaceships that can instantly take us anywhere in the universe, and according to the laws of physics as we know them, it's likely that other intelligent beings don't either. Maybe they have travelled lifetimes and they just haven't run across us yet.
So be patient, my fellow humans, it may take a few million (or even billion) more years. After all, it's more than just a trip down the road to the chemist, and something that cool will probably be worth the wait.
Re:Have some patience, we'll run across them... ev (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Have some patience, we'll run across them... ev (Score:2, Funny)
I'm not sure how sending fungi into space to find alien bread to consume is going to be useful to anyone besides the fungi.
The paradox (Score:2, Insightful)
IMHO a simple way to resolve the paradox is that no species has the raw material or the scientific knowledge to ever send self reproducing probe to explore the galaxy. We might not be alone but we will never meet each other and stay in our small island of life.
Re:The paradox (Score:5, Interesting)
My girlfriend pointed out that we've been analyzing for hydrogen based signals, because it's the easiest to produce, and we've found nothing. And then it came out in the conversation that WE'RE not sending out signals because we don't want to be found because we're not advanced enough to protect ourselves from someone who could find us.
Ahem. So in 10k years, we'll be advanced enough to defend ourselves from these theoretical people who are 10k years ahead of us? Will their civilization stop advancing, and we'll catch up? How about maybe aliens aren't sending out signals either?
How about maybe, just maybe, the way we developed science is not very efficient afterall in the grand scheme of things?
I love it when people argue the existence or non-existence of super-advanced beings based on our assumptions about how right we are about everything.
Re:The paradox (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, the problem with the 'everyone's listening' argument is that it requires everyone to be listening. Even if only 1% were actively transmitting, we'd expect a lot more signals than we've found.
Re:The paradox (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The paradox (Score:3, Interesting)
One hit.
Re:The paradox (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
I was talking about this with a coworker a few weeks back and realized something. Back when radio was first discovered they used *huge* transmitters to transmit a small amount of data a short distance because their receivers were so crude. Later receivers were vastly improved and you could use much lower power to send much more data. Soon we had over the air TV that had a phenomenal amount of data flowing through the air, but, to not encroach on competing channels in adjacent areas, the signal strength was reduced again.
Skip forward to today and we are using cable (very little "signal" escapes) and fiber-optics (no signal escapes) to send even more data back and forth. So, in a few years time we've gone from a very noisy planet with out much to say, to a much less noisy planet with much more to say.
I think it is inevitable, simply from an efficiency perspective, that we will be using more and more "tight-band" communication methods in the future (quantum entanglement?). It seems intuitive that the more advanced a civilization gets the more efficient it will strive to be. The more efficient it is, the less noise will be wasted into space (especially compared to the natural noises of the planet, like lightning, aurora, etc.)
Look how much more efficient we've become in just a hundred years. If this is indicative of other civilizations, then the window of opportunity for eavesdropping on them is extremely small. And that's assuming that they are remotely like us and not building their civilization at the bottom of their ocean or are just so different from us that we wouldn't even recognize them as life.
As far as colonizing the stars goes, barring some way of FTL (or instant) travel and communication, I think we will never move beyond our own solar system in our current physical form. I think we will have figured out how to lose our bodies and move our consciousness into "the machine" before then. Once that happens, there will be no need for maintaining the human race in a biological form at all since "reproduction" can occur in solid-state. Once we've reached that stage, being effectively immortal, we might be willing to entertain the thought of physically traveling to other stars, but there will be no need to colonize them, they can be virtualized. But then again, we could virtualize the whole trip anyway.
Either way, that step in technology would almost guarantee a very efficient system that would need to produce almost no waste products. With no need for maintaining and supporting physical bodies, all of the energy required to sustain physical life will not be needed. No more growing and shipping crops. No more energy wasted in physical travel. In fact, very little need for ever physically moving anything, from then on. This would make most of our civilization a "static" construct. At that point, unless we were purposely broadcasting for neighbors, who'd ever hear us?
Re:The paradox (Score:3, Interesting)
How about: we don't hear giant drums in the forest, so there's no one there? or: none of the smoke clouds we see are arranged into signals, so they are only forest fires?
One of the things that irks me about so many wannabe futurists, xenophiles, and run-of-the-mill SF is a failure of technological vision. Why would one assume that sending radio signals between the stars makes any sense whatsoever for an advanced civilization, unless we assume that our science has reached a galactic pinnacle?
Fermi's paradox, to me, ignores:
Re:The paradox (Score:4, Insightful)
Even more irksome is when people make sweeping statements about things supposedly missing from science fiction that has in fact been extremelyv thoroughly explored over the decades.
(And trying to be slippery by qualifying with "run-of-the-mill" doesn't help, since that amounts to a circular reference -- if a story does address non-radio-signal communication, then it doesn't count???)
Even in the earliest "space opera" stories (e.g. E. E. "Doc" Smith and his cohorts) in the 1930's outright assumed that advanced civilizations would use telepathy, tachyonic communication, etc., and it was not rare even then to suggest that they had more or less forgotten about ordinary radio waves as hopelessly antiquated.
Decades ago there was one particularly amusing story (author and title forgotten, alas) with a series of vignettes, each suggesting a different and clever explanation for the Fermi Paradox e.g. one civilization was trying hard to communicate with Earth in particular, but they kept assuming that their data rate of e.g. one bit per year was too fast, so they kept slowing the rate down.
A very funny story (which I think is actually available online, these days) talks about the incomprehensibility, to members of a far-flung multi-species galactic civilization, of Earth having beings that "thought with meat", as opposed to every other galactically-known species that had brains of plasma or electronic etc. nature than were otherwise known. (This was not directly about SETI issues, but such are strongly implied.)
The ultimate problem is not a lack of imagination -- many, many exotic notions of ET communication have been considered -- but rather that the exotic modes are not pragmatic. If ET's communicate with tachyons, well, alas, we don't even know for sure whether tachyons exist or not, let alone how to try to receive them from ET's.
Interesting recent example: in quite recent years, it turns out that there is a previously-unnoticed theoretical prediction from quite orthodox physics, that photons can carry, not just their intrinsic spin of 1, but also an arbitrary number of additional units of angular momentum. This seems to be little-known, so far, and no one knows how to either produce or to detect that additional angular momentum in photons.
Nonetheless, many people immediately speculated about 2 things: whether cosmological events may produce such photons, and whether ET's might produce such photons.
Failure of imagination is not the problem. The problem is the pragmatics of turning imagination into a realizable experiment.
You complain about the failure of the imagination of SF writers, futurists, etc, but what that says to me is that you are unaware of the rich imagination long ago represented by such people.
Perhaps the problem is merely that you read only "run of the mill" or mediocre fiction and futurism, hmm?
Fermi's Paradox = Fermi's Blunder (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of the most likely reasons we've not "seen" anything as yet. As far as we know, interstellar travel is annoyingly slow and energy intensive; that alone could account for no visitors, no matter how well populated the universe is with intelligent beings. That leaves communications; but our experience here indicates that catching the communications of others is very unlikely. Why? Well, we've been hanging about for 50,000 years or so in the form we like to consider actually "us." Of that 50,000 years, we've been using radio and television for about 100 years now. But in the last 25 years, more and more of our radio and television signals have been finding their way into satellite to ground signals, which do not radiate away from the planet and are very, very low power; other signals are now traveling inside cables instead of the through the air; and finally, newer communications are moving to optical methods, and we're talking optical in cables for the most part, meaning again, less and less high powered "accidental" signal radiation (effectively zero in terms of interstellar distances.) The reasons are higher bandwidth, vastly more communications channels, more energy efficient, better control over where the signal goes - and doesn't go. These are reasons that transcend our civilization; there is every reason to think that other beings would find the same benefits.
Next, look at our development: We're paranoid. We have been prey for a lot of living things ranging from other people to lions to snakes to spiders to bacteria, consequently we're not of the mind that the universe is likely to be a friendly playground. You can find reactions to that notion everywhere from science fiction to the unwillingness of today's moms to let their kids play outdoors unsupervised. Looking at our SETI program, the first thing you probably notice is that we're listening (poorly), which seems prudent; but we are not intentionally transmitting a signal to the stars, which has been a political decision. That leaves the accidental radiation, the strongest of which has been radar transmissions, which are mostly information free... but even if they're enough to get us noticed, we've only been at this for a 100 years, so our signals are only 100 light-years out so far. That severely reduces the number of potential listeners, and of course it presumes they, like us, are listening for anything, not just signals modulated with complex information.
Also, as an earlier poster observed with a quote from Douglas Adams, the universe is gi-flipping-normous.
All of this contributes to why Fermi's Paradox should be considered Fermi's Blunder by anyone who really thinks this through.
I see no reason to doubt there are plenty of other life-bearing planets out there, and that a fairly significant number of those in turn have intelligent life of one form or another. The fact that we've not "heard" any of them doesn't surprise me one little bit, Fermi's naive reasoning aside. In another 100 years, the odds of us radiating anything at all from our little corner of the universe are probably very low indeed. If that's typical (and it may be longer than typical), then in order to "catch" someone else transmitting by accident, we'll have to be listening at the same time + distance in light years that they go through the RF development process, and we'll have to have sensitive enough equipment to hear them. That last point is interesting, because although technically speaking, we are listening for "them", we're presuming they're sending at the low-noise point of the spectrum with the intent of us hearing them. If it was accidental radiation like radio and TV we were looking for, we couldn't hear that with our current gear at all. In order to get to that level of sensitivity, we'll need outer space "ears", and pretty big ones. Nothing like that is even on the drawing boards. So again, the odds of us hearing anyo
1.8026175 × 10^12 furlongs per fortnight (Score:2)
Re:Have some patience, we'll run across them... ev (Score:2)
There are several other possibilities. We could find ETIs by:
For observing their effects on the galaxy, perhaps the ETIs make changes which are too small to detect on the scales we can currently resolve. Or maybe they don't need to make such changes to advance their society.
For observing their communications, perhaps their communications are too weak to reach us above the background noise, or they used broadcast communications only briefly in such power (and the time to detect those is past), and now use methods which are much less detectable (think quantum communications.)
For observing them directly, perhaps they are just too far away, or they don't travel beyond their own (possibly terraformed) starsystems.
Perhaps that the period of time in which we had to detect them was small because they made it to some singularity and no longer concern themselves with the same things we do. Maybe they have a massive machine mind now, and everyone 'lives' in that, working on more important problems. Maybe they don't need to consume vast quantites of resources now and so their effects can no longer be observed, and the limited window in which to observe them has passed.
And there are undoubtedly a lot of socio-political factors which we would have to consider - colonization of space is expensive, xenophobia, planet doesn't have the resources to support colonization. Perhaps terraforming as we have imagined it is largely impractical or maybe even impossible (at least for some species) and therefore they are stuck within a single solar system on life support. Maybe they don't have the will to do generation ships, or their biology is unsuited to the trip.
I can thing of TONS of reasons why we have not yet observed ETIs, even if the Universe is swarming with them. I'd very much like to believe we'll meet some someday, but I certainly don't see it happening in my lifetime, and I could easily see humans transcending into some form where such things are no longer of interest to them.
Re:Have some patience, we'll run across them... ev (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, think of it in a new way. Suppose you were a civilization that just developed space travel, much like where we are now. You have a galaxy around you with 400 billion stars, and that's a lot. It takes you 100,000 years at light speed to cross the galaxy, and that's a long time. However, you have 2 billion years to explore. I have no good grasp on where humans will be 2 billion years from now, but I am sure we will be pretty advanced. Now add to the mix that there are maybe 1000 or 10,000 or 100,000 other advanced civilizations alongside with you, and you can see why we are wondering where everyone is. Oh, and there are a trillion or so other galaxies out there, so if you start to consider the possibility of intergalactice travel, you can even go futher with this.
Really the best answer to the Fermi paradox is that Earth-like conditions are rare. However, I think we just discovered a planet 20 light years away that has 0-40 degreee celsius temperature, water, and is a rocky planet, so maybe that is not the answer either.
Old? Can we truly define old for the universe? (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, just because WE don't usually quite make one hundred years of consciousness, we assume all things told, that six BILLION is old, and Thirteen Billion is even older.
One thing no one has pointed out yet. What if that is YOUNG? Vaunted as he was, Fermi didn't include that as a possibility. He either didn't see it, or discounted it. What if we're the FIRST major civilization to grow? Or, let's use our own development as a yardstick. It took us, what seventy five years? to begin putting the broadcast entertainment onto cable, and stop actually advertising our existence. It won't be much longer, and our planet will be nearly invisible.
Now, if technology develops the same, no matter WHEN, but THAT, it would have taken a hundred years, roughly, for the civ to develop broadcasting, use it, and then, as we are doing, turn it inwards, and not waste power in exo-broadcasting.
So, any star roughly a hundred light years out would be able to pick up our signals, but if their civ had gotten a start a thousand years before ours, well, then, we missed their shows by a millennium. Talk about the need for TIVO.
My point is simple. We assume any civ out there is attempting to get our attention. If they developed like ours, even starting the same day, we won't see them at all, UNLESS they are at the right distance. Otherwise, we won't see their signals, as it already passed us by, or the leading edge hasn't hit us yet.
We won't even go into the many different and varied methods we ourselves use to communicate that never beak the atmosphere, thus making them exo-undetectable. Fermi's assumption is a classic illustration of of assuming... You know, making an @ss out of you and me?
Re:Have some patience, we'll run across them... ev (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow. No serious scientist has proposed life starting by a cell miraculously springing into existence with no prior evolution involved.
Most of the pre-biotic soup theories involve dilute mixtures of animo aids, peptides, sugars, polymers, etc, that replicate as a group. No DNA or similar is involved, there are no cell walls, little or no respiratory capabilities. These features all evolve incrementally and independantly over time. As Darwin noted, the "first life" might have been a salty, slightly greasy, tidal pool.
Re:Have some patience, we'll run across them... ev (Score:3, Interesting)
DNA is an advanced replicator. The sort of DNA found in eubacteria is more advanced (in that it has some additional error correction mechanisms, meaning it does a more reliable job of copying itself. DNA in multicelular organisms is more advanced still - in fact it can be argued that sexual reproduction, putting the reproductive organs deep inside a parent so they are protected from some chemicals and radiation, and many other evolutionary advanced are all about improving copying fidelity.
Lower mutation probability seems to be something nature is heavily selecting for (which makes sense). Lower mutation probability actually increase the evolution rate (which seems counter-intuitive, but which is just what modern Biologists such as Dawkins will claim, that is lower mutation rate = increased selection rate is the orthodox version of the theory I'm presenting, not some crackpottery. I can go into why this is, but I'd rather people read Gould, Dawkins, and others for themselves and get it from the horse's mouth).
So if modern DNA evolved from more primitive DNA about 1 Billion years ago and Earliest DNA about 3 Billion years back, what happened before? RNA seems to takes us back to about 3.5 Billion years, so given the age of the earth, we have to squeeze probably at least 5 sequentially more primitive replicators, maybe many more than that, into that first 1/2 billion years that are left. Plus, each step back means sloppier copying and a slower overall evolution rate, so each step is more 'miraculous' than the next. (I'm not claiming an automatically supernatural explanation here, just saying that the probabilities seem to be getting really incredibly unlikely, reaching odds of billions to one and then zooming up into really improbable odds, on a par with all the air molecules in the room just happening to all jump to one side type events, when we talk about the first few steps from inorganic clays with various crystaline microstructures to something a little more like a true self replicating molecule).
Now this talk about the 'soup' behaving like it's gonna evolve automagically is another thing. When people run experiments with glass globes full of Methane and Ammonia and electrical arcs and UV for energy sources they very quickly get Amino Acids, usually within a few hours, which is where these 'soup' claims start. But when they first did these same experiments the researchers assumed that they would see Proteins within a few weeks or months, and that part just didn't happen. Getting from Amino Acids to self replication turns out to be Quintillions of times or more harder than these early experiments suggested. Saying that self replication might be a mysterious property distributed throughout the 'soup' as a whole is just another way of ignoring how long the actual hard data tells us those odds are.
Something is fishy as hell with the whole origin of life question, and not just with the Fermi Paradox. Darwin himself knew it - that's why he carefully titled his first book "The Origin of Species" and not "The Origin of Life". By his own writing, he thought he had explained why life, once started, divides up into species and why the fossil record shows species have changed, died out, or been replaced by new one species, but he didn't think he had solved the more ultimate origin problem as well, and in fact thought his theory might pose whole new difficulties in solving it.
Huxley's related book "On the Origin of Species, Or, The Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature", is mostly where people get the idea tha
Cellular beginnings... (Score:5, Insightful)
The earliest cell-like containers may well have been simply lipid (fatty) bubbles that presented a semi-permiable membrane that let certain chemicals thru. These types of lipid bubble could easily have formed naturally (think froth at the edge of the ocean), maybe even based on products of these chemical reactions. There's no need for the earliest "cells" to have been created/encoded by the chemicals they contained as they are today (DNA).
The earliest forms of replication also need not have been self-encoded - they would almost certainly have been due to physical processes - e.g. if you whipped up (sea-shore wave action) a bunch of large fatty bubbles, you'd get a lot of smaller fatty bubbles which would then "grow" via their semi-permiable enclosure letting in the external chemical components that "fed" the chemical reactions. Similar to how an amoeba )modern single cellular organism) "reproduces" by splitting into two.
Highly complex chemicals like DNA or RNA may have have originated as simple chemical catalysts that sped up the reaction process - i.e. guided it rather than being part of it per se.
These types of extremely simple pre-cellular origins are far from being low probabiliy events - they are alomost inevitably going to occur given a rich enouch chemical environment and suitable phyiscal conditions (water, wave action = stirring, lightening, sunlight, etc). If you're interested in the beginning of life at this extrememly early stage, try reading Stuart Kauffman's "At Home in the Universe".
Even at this early stage, evolution would necessarily have occured. Among multiple such self-sustaining reactions, those that were best adapted to the environment (those parts of it they relied upon, e.g. available chemicals) would necessarily have left more "descendents" than others that were competing for the same raw ingredients (food supply). With these types of lipid membrance cell, new chemicals in the environemnt that were not part of the chain reactions occuring in the "population" would often have been introduced, and occasionally would have modified those reactions and their products. This source of variation would then have been fodder for natural selection (the winners swamping the losers out of the environment), and so it goes...
Re:Have some patience, we'll run across them... ev (Score:5, Informative)
With so many billions of stars and planets, the odds that there are other intelligent beings out there are astronomically large. (Pun slightly intended.)
That's the Sagan argument. Unfortunately, the fact that we exist tells us absolutely nothing about how probably intelligent life is or isn't (see: anthropic principle). Sagan's argument doesn't address the fundamental Fermi problem.
The problem is that the distances required to travel to reach them and also astronomically large, and the odds that there is life on any given planet are infinitesimally small.
True, but the amount of time that's passed until us showing up is also astronomically large. It only takes one race with an expansion desire to fill up the galaxy at sublight speeds around 1 to 10 million years (via geometric expansion). Even if it took 100 million years, that's still a blip in the life of the galaxy. At the very least, someone should have sent out self replicating probes by now. By we've seen absolutely nothing.
I'm pretty much convinced that intelligent life is extremely improbable, and that we're alone in the galaxy.
Re:Have some patience, we'll run across them... ev (Score:5, Insightful)
What an extremely narrow and self-centered view of the universe.
First of all "extremely improbable" when talking about something the size of the universe means that even if life in a given star system had a 1 in 1 million chance of ever developing (I'd call that "extremely improbable"), that's still 5,000 systems in our galaxy alone that will develop life someday, or already have. For a 1 in 1 billion chance, that's still 500 star systems. And there are up to 500 billion galaxies in the universe. Even if only 1 out of every billion star systems will support life - or perhaps 1 out of every 5 billion planets - that would still mean there could be trillions of life-supporting star systems in the universe. Given that there are not one, but two planets in our system that are capable of supporting life (Earth and Mars), both of which may have actually supported life, it's certainly no stretch to think there are at least this many planets out there that could support life and that at least some of them are actually doing so.
It's all too easy to draw conclusions for the entire universe based on observations of your local area. People do it not just when thinking of extra terrestrials but even when thinking of other people and cultures on our own planet. There's a tendency to think that the way we do things is just the way that things should be done. But there are many ways life can develop, many ways life can be supported, and many, many planets that are much too far away for us to observe or for them to observe us. It's foolish to think that we are alone simply because we have not observed any other intelligent life in the few hundred years we've been looking.
Maybe other life forms have sent out self replicating probes. Why would we have necessarily noticed?
Re:Have some patience, we'll run across them... ev (Score:4, Insightful)
Provided that one model of the inevitable course which all civilizations must absolutely follow is true.
You made one crucial mistake in the above... it doesn't take "all" civilizations, it takes only one. Only one civilization has to either want to expand throughout the galaxy, or wants to create self-replicating probes to explore the entire galaxy. Assuming intelligent life is relatively common, do you think it's reasonable that not one over the last few billion years would do it?
May we always remain slightly unsatisfied! (Score:3, Interesting)
If by "intelligent life" you mean human-like civilization with very complic... er, "rich material culture" way of life, I completely agree.
However, it is very much possible that Cosmos is full of various intelligent beings of different kinds, covering spectrum from dolphin-like intelligent, playful, social and friendly creatures, all the way to almost "Alien"-like super tough, hive-building predator killer monsters. However, what we probably won't find in high supply is any kind of beings capable or wanting to travel out of their home worlds.
Because, you see, the story of humans on Earth is story of a nerd beating all the jocks and becoming the top dog in his school, all that without giving up his nerdness and growing muscles, of course (e.g. by going to the gym and working out). While such story has certain appeal and makes a nice comedy plot, it is very unlikely to happen out of the realm of fiction, and even less likely to happen twice (or at least not very often).
We as a species broke out of the beaten path of survival because of peculiar pattern of our ancestors' position in food chain and our planet's climate history.
It is not some inevitable fate that will happen anywhere if you give it enough time, like Karl Sagan believed. It is more of a deviation from usual cycles of evolution. Besides, we still may fall back to self-indulgence (and we actually regularly do, according to history of most successful and organized societies from the past). Once we make it the way we want it and solve all our problems that worry us on this planet, we won't even wish to go out and search for some alien intelligent life, just like those hypothetic intelligent top-of-the-food-chain superbeasts I mentioned before. Absolute success is as much a showkiller as catastrophic failure.
Re:Have some patience, we'll run across them... ev (Score:3)
The Great Filter (Drake's equation) teaches us that the number of other intelligent civilizations in our Galaxy alone is expected to be anything from several to tens of thousands at any given time.
The Drake Equation starts a discussion. It wasn't meant to really calculate anything. It's simply a way of describing the probability factors, but we have absolutely zero clue what the probability factors really are, especially the probability of intelligent life arising from base life.
In any case, that was Sagan's argument, and the Fermi Paradox firmly asks, if there are so many, why the hell don't we see ANY evidence, when logically they should have spread everywhere in the vast amount of time of the galaxy?
God only made humans (Score:4, Funny)
Time to give up... (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering the state of terrestrial intelligence, maybe any ETIs have realized that broadcasting attack coordinates into space may not be such a great idea?
Re:Time to give up... (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it's been broadcast in a way that we just don't recognize yet. A mere few centuries ago, no-one would have thought to look for alien life (if they thought to at all), by looking at radio waves. Radio what? It's easily possible that there is another great leap just around the corner that is pretty obvious once you reach a certain level of technological or scientific know-how. Maybe someone will discover a sub-ether-o-matic and the whole sky will light up. It's also possible that life forms frequently move toward a smaller population base and thus give off less indicators of their presence.
Re:Time to give up... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Time to give up... (Score:2)
Gosh! Really?
Re:Time to give up... (Score:2)
So we've used a few hundred years of technology for almost a hundred years to look for signs of life in a (nearly?) infinite universe and not found anything. Must mean its not there.
The point isn't that we haven't found them, the point is that nothing has found this planet. And that should've happened a long time ago, either by a race expanding at a geometric rate (even at sublight speeds), or by a self-replicating probe. A billion years is a long time.
Re:Time to give up... (Score:4, Funny)
Just because you can observe no evidence to indicate such,
does not mean that it has not happened.
We might just be hiding our ships on another planet, observing you.
The star gate is how we get to other planets...... (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe we're better off alone (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe we should be glad if we're too insignificant to be noticed just yet. (We certainly don't have our act together, at any rate.)
Re:Maybe we're better off alone (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Maybe we're better off alone (Score:2)
Re:Maybe we're better off alone (Score:2)
Currently, our cultures and our societies are typically humans, and if one day a "superior" civilization, coming from another star, goes on Earth, what would happen?
We will try to mimic them. Currently, our research and development are going into all the directions, because we don't know where to search. If a lab can look at what an UFO looks like, what do you think they will try to do? To copy it. Or to ask for the ETs to answer the questions we are wondering since age. Our imagination and our soul will vanish - we will loose our specificities.
If I were them, I would look to the humans without trying to disturb them, in order to fully understand them, and make them proud of their discoveries - else, I could find a depressive society, with no goal.
The day we will reach a certain level (traveling to another star?) maybe they will knock to our door... or keep watching and studying us
Evolution may suggest they will not be pacifists (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would showing restraint with respect to interactions with your own species mean you would show similar restraint when interacting with other species? Wolves can show much restraint to other wolves, but little to other species.
Evolution favors a combination of aggressiveness and intelligence. Losing either quality will make you vulnerable to those who have not lost either. Consider pacifism. Pacifism only works when isolated or when there are non-pacifists who protect the pacifists. Humans are probably either unique or one of many intelligent species. Given many intelligent species, some may have become pacifist in isolation, but all will not. Those who retain some aggression will dominate in the long term. The more civilizations that have made contact, the less likely we are to meet pacifists. Given that our first contact is also likely to be one of many I'd so the odds of your optimistic scenario are not good.
mistaken notions of evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
Then how do you explain cockroaches, phytoplankton and sponges? What, you think they're "less evolved" than we are? That's nonsense! They've been evolving for just as long (longer, depending on how you measure)--they are extremely evolved! The most populous multicellular creatures on this planet (by sheer volume, not just numerically) are ants and termites. And while some of their behavior may resemble what we call "intelligence", it is clearly hard-wired, not learned. And while ants are usually fairly aggressive, termites are not so much. For a more obvious example, a little closer to home, consider the field mouse, an immensely successful species, but neither intelligent (at least for a mammal) nor aggressive. In fact, aggression is most strongly associated with apex predators [wikipedia.org] like that wolf you mentioned. And while apex predators are really cool animals in general, they also tend to be extremely fragile as species.
I might go so far as to say that the available evidence shows that Evolution (that famous anthropomorphic personification who lives in a house made of giant tortoise shells, decorated with finch feathers) disfavors aggressiveness, and seems to be fairly neutral about the whole notion of intelligence.
Of course, when it comes to intelligent, technological species, well....we're speculating based on a sample-size of one, which is not enough to form any sort of meaningful conclusions. I think it's fairly safe to say that evolution will favor intelligence when designing intelligent, technological species, but beyond that I hesitate to guess. I also think it will tend to favor hair when designing hairy species.
Evidence for intelligent life (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Evidence for intelligent life (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Evidence for intelligent life (Score:3, Insightful)
Would we bother to communicate with ants? We might observe them, kidnap a few for experiments, but we don't really bother to send signals at them.
Far side of the moon (Score:2)
Oh, they're out there... (Score:2, Funny)
Maybe they always quickly blow themselves up? (Score:4, Insightful)
We can get humans to the moon, but not to the next planet.
The universe is vast even compared to our oceans and we lose people in our oceans all the time. Why would we think a space probe would be noticed by someone?
Now, our technology will improve and some of the above statements may change rapidly. But, the chances of our using some of those technologies to destroy ourselves seem to be accelerating as well. Perhaps the missing part of the model is that other civilizations always blow themselves up within a few hundred years of their first communication attempts or steps off their planets.
We probably will.
CSI quote (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering the current state of affairs... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm reminded of an argument put forth in Robert J. Sawyer's Calculating God: If, once we reach a certain level of technological sophistication, it takes only hundreds or thousands of years to either annihilate ourselves or transfer our consciousness into a virtual world, what are the chances that any two types of intelligent life could exist contemporaneously anywhere in the universe, provided that a sufficiently intelligent species develops science and technology only after developing for several billion years?
We're not even confident that our social experiment will last right now. We've had 120 years or so of real technology -- and there's no guarantee that resource constraints, political strife, or any number of environmental factors won't return us to subsistence farming within a few more generations. The real question is, given not only the incredibly large size of the universe, but also the almost incomprehensibly-long timelines, what are the chances that two intelligent species will be concurrently intelligent, civilized, and looking for each other ... and furthermore, what is the chance that we are one of them (and at this very moment)?
Advanced Intelligence May Just Be Embarrassed (Score:5, Funny)
Complex life on this planet has been going on for hundreds of millions of years and yet it's only in the last hundred or so that we've been able to look out with anything more than enhancements of our natural senses. This implies that the odds of a second species being at exactly the same point tiny. Most likely, if they're sending things we can read, they got there a long way before us and are quite a bit smarter.
Assuming they're quite a bit smarter, one look at the crap our radiowaves are sharing with the universe - infomercials, reality TV and our politics/wars - and I'd imagine pretty much any higher civilization would be embarrassed enough about us to screen their signature and make damn sure those idiotic hairless apes don't go and screw their part of the galaxy up too.
So, the answer to the paradox: There's most likely higher intelligence out there. And, because it's higher, it's most likely embarrassed to hell and back by us and screening itself from us. Problem solved.
Re:Advanced Intelligence May Just Be Embarrassed (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see why they would be embarrassed. When a baby craps in his pants, are you embarassed for the baby? When you see dogs marking their territories with pee, and humping human legs, are you embarrassed about the dog? Rabbits puke their partially digested food, and eats it again. Cows do the same, but unlike rabbits, the food never exits their mouth. Fleas puts their eggs in horse-shit. Are you embarrassed about that? When you see a blue-green algae in the microscope using it's flagella to swim towards the light, are you embarrassed about their primitive behaviour? That humans broadcast infomercials, reality TV, and porn, would to aliens be just as embarassing to them, as it is to us that salmons have to go up the same river as they were born, to lay their eggs.
Lets assume the aliens are one or more singularity leaps beyond us. They may not even realize the distinction in "intelligence" between us and a lobster as anything significant (just like we rarely bother to distinguish between the "intelligence" of a lobster and a tuna). Our cars and planes and computers is surely a fascinating example of an extended phenotype [wikipedia.org], but it doesn't really tell them that we are intelligent, does it? Even if they are able to observe that we have a primitive auditory and visual communication system, it will to them be as unevolved as ants exchanging pheromones to communicate. There is no way they would be able to exchange ideas with us, even if they mastered our language perfectly.
Better Off. (Score:5, Insightful)
We're technologically advanced over all the other creatures here on Earth. We eat them.
--
BMO
Re:Better Off. (Score:3, Informative)
If only vegans realized exactly how many rabbits, deer, badgers, skunks, squirrels, beatles, bugs, spiders and other critters get mauled, mutilated, impaled and torn to shreds by combines, windrowers, and similiar farm implementry. These products inevitably make it into their wholesome diet.
When I was little, and my dad farmed, one of my jobs was to pull all the rabbit carcasses I could out of the day's product. I never got them all.
Maybe they're using Messenger? (Score:3, Funny)
"hello earthling.we want to know you know about us.info is important!!!!!"
Radio waves.. (Score:5, Insightful)
My view though...
Our civilization is in its technological infancy, and even we find radio rather slow and limiting. I can't imagine us leaving much of a radio footprint in another hundred years, especially not leaking it with omnidirectional broadcasting.
Imagining the same being the case of another civilization, we're trying to listen in on broadcasts from a time window of two hundred years or so, and we've been listening for a couple of decades. In a context where being off by a million years wouldn't be too bad, the odds strike me as fairly infinitesimal even if assuming thousands of civilizations located cosmically nearby.
Doesn't hurt to try, mind. It's not like we have a lot of other options open to us currently.
I know what happened (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
to be fair... (Score:2)
Please check out the Disclosure Project (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine if you will... (Score:2)
Answer here [morgan.edu]
"They're made out of meat, Sir."
"something wrong with our thinking" (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed, as TFA notes, there is "something wrong with our thinking", or at least with that of the author.
First, interstellar colonization? Unlikely. It makes nice SF, but there's no good economic basis for it. A civilization that survives long enough to reach the technological level necessary for interstellar spaceflight will have stabilized its population and learned how to use local resources to make their home world a paradise. Why go anywhere else? The expense is enormous, the payoff non-existent. (They're working on stellar engineering, of course, so there's no worry about their sun going nova.) Childish species who still imagine faster-than-light loopholes might dream of going swashbuckling across the galaxy, but grown-up races are content to follow more mature pursuits. TFA's claims about "intelligent life's ability to overcome scarcity, and its tendency to colonize new habitats" are simply handwaving, generalizing from one species of half-bright monkeys into sweeping statements about all intelligent life.
Second, there's the question of signal detection. Contrary to popular belief, radio and TV transmissions [faqs.org] probably couldn't be detected at interstellar ranges. We've only sent a handful of signals into space that are detectable at long ranges - and mostly that's content-free radar signals. Why do we assume others are more chatty than we are? I imagine a galaxy full of listeners, each waiting for someone else to start talking. Additionally, compression and encryption make signal indistinguishable from noise.
Third, recognition of "mega-engineering". TFA claims "we see no signs of their activities in space". How would we know? We assume a "natural" explanation for phenomena - as we should - but if we assume the existence of greatly advanced tech, who knows what we think of as "natural" and take for granted out there that's actually engineered?
Re:"something wrong with our thinking" (Score:3, Insightful)
A civilization that survives long enough to reach the technological level necessary for interstellar spaceflight will have stabilized its population and learned how to use local resources to make their home world a paradise. Why go anywhere else? The expense is enormous, the payoff non-existent.
That statement boggles the mind. You're assuming, from a human context, that no living thing in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE would EVER want to engage in space travel. Head swollen a bit?
For that matter, you assume that all livings beings in the universe must be located on "worlds." What about a space-dwelling species that inhabits the nebula of a supernova, feeding off the remnant energy and matter? Such a being could be planetary in size, itself. Are you suggesting that such beings should never want to leave their home nebula?
Who the hell are you anyway, to tell all the species which may inhabit the universe, what to do?
But sure, I guess from a naive Star Trek sort of viewpoint where the only relevant species out there are humanoid and pretty much exactly like us, your madness makes sense.
Wrong question (Score:3, Insightful)
Why *not* go anywhere else?
First, there's a danger in keeping all your genetic eggs in one basket. Secondly, I don't know about you, but I have a strong yen to stride among the stars. I do know there are many like me. Why climb everest? Why colonize the moon? Or Mars? Why *not* travel to the far reaches of the universe?
Humans are, by and large, creatures with a great curiosity. In the face of a utopia, I'd hope that at least some would wish to explore, and perhaps settle, the great unknown.
Re:"something wrong with our thinking" (Score:3, Informative)
Well, there's the answer right there and you hand-wave it away. Unless you have an awesome supply of non-stellar hydrogen nearby or physics works differently than we know, suns burn out.
A self made Paradox (Score:4, Insightful)
Possible reason why we don't see their TV shows... (Score:4, Insightful)
At this point in time TV and radio is rapidly being usurped by interactive media, most of which currently travels along cables and would of course be undetectable from other planets. As for wireless internet, the power of a wireless LAN router is obviously far less strong than say a TV signal broadcast from a TV tower. And future wireless broadband signals would presumably also be local and low-powered, because it's more efficient that way. (Guesswork, of course).
Of course traditional high-powered TV and radio broadcasts aren't dead yet, but in say 100 years it's pretty easy to imagine that they they might be. (Or not -- I know this is all speculation)
So, IF (huge if) other civilisations follwed this path, this might be a possible reason why we don't see or hear their broadcasts -- because like us their high-powered broadcast media only existed for a short time, and were soon replaced by more efficient low-powered interactive media
All wildly speculative I know.
Oblig Monty Python Reference (Score:3, Informative)
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
and things seem hard or tough.
and people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
and you feel that you've had quite enough...
Just remember that your standing on a planet that's evolving,
and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour.
That's orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it's reckoned,
the sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
are moving at a million miles a day.
in an outer spiral-arm at forty thousand miles an hour
of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars,
it's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
but out by us it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point,
we go 'round every two hundred million years.
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions,
in this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
in all of the directions it can whiz.
As fast as it can go, that's the speed of light you know;
twelve million miles a minute, that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when your feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'cause there's bugger-all down here on earth!
We're under protection (Score:5, Interesting)
Out of all the different possibilities of why we haven't made contact, I tend to think it's not that intelligent life doesn't exist, or that they don't care about us, I think it's that they do care, and that's why they're leaving us alone. It's akin to us protecting the animals of this planet, so they can continue to exist and spread. It's quite possible we're under protection also, until we can fend for ourselves.
What the Fermi Paradox Says (Score:3, Interesting)
We're an "intelligent" species by some loose definition. We also know that our one intelligent species hasn't achieved meaningful space travel or communication. And I'm not convinced by looking at our collective milieu that we'll be colonizing the galaxy in the next billion years either.
It's all conjecture; I personally think there's life out there, even intelligent life. But we'll probably never meet -- it's just too much effort. And I don't think the Fermi Paradox (which is based on the assumption that galactic colonization is viable) says much about it.
Cheers.
Andromeda Galaxy Collision Imminent (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Andromeda Galaxy Collision Imminent (Score:3, Interesting)
Kinouchi points out that for a wide class of diffusion processes, including simple processes other than uniform diffusion (in which colonization would occur uniformly in every direction), the number of non-visited sites need not decay exponentially with time. Instead, the probability that some site remains uncolonized might follow a power law.
(He gives the probability that a site might not be visited by time t as P(t) = P_\infty + Ct^{-\theta}.)
I'll jump to the conclusion: if the colonization of space follows something like a non-uniform, persistent diffusion process, then there will be large regions of space that won't be colonized, away from the colonized areas. Since we haven't heard from extraterrestrials, we can assume we are in one of the large, unvisited regions, and so the nearby candidates for SETI searches are also unlikely to have been visited. (Kinouchi asserts that the Fermi Paradox is "locally" true.) So SETI has to look further than the immediate stellar neighborhood for likely candidates.
why should evolution produce intelligence? (Score:3, Interesting)
We like to think that intelligence produces a general sort of fitness, but the all of the primates are extremely intelligent, probably the most intelligent creatures on the planet, and with one exception they all live in highly specialized niches, and they're all likely to become extinct within a hundred years or so.
In spite of what that paper says, increasing complexity does not mean increasing fitness - orchids are among the most complex of flowering plants, but they are also highly specialized and are vulnerable to changes in their habitats.
The one data point we have is that, although life arose probably as soon as the earth cooled off enough to allow it, for most of earth's history, the highest form of life consisted of algae mats. It may be very, very hard to develop even eukaryotic life, and intelligence may require an outlandishly improbable set of events. Hard to extrapolate from one data point, of course.
Wow, another /. philosophical win! (Score:5, Interesting)
Sarcasm aside this thread has so much supposition about the intelect, ability, advancement, logic and morality of any possible alien life it's mind blowing, and not in a good way. I don't think we can presume to understand an alien intelligence even if it did show up.
I've read some comments that proposed that if an alien life form advanced enough to actually mobilize the technology to reach us that they would be so intellectually superior that they would have no interest in us, or at least no malevolence towards us because they would be so enlightened. That's a massive guess that puts a lot of faith in the development path of "intelligent" life. If you think of Humanity as a possible median point for cruelty and benevolence (as we often paint ourselves in Sci-Fi), that still leaves a lot of terrifying room for a bad encounter.
Anyway tl;dr it's a paradox. It's genuinely weird. There's no simple explanation. Space is big, but life should be plentiful if the explanation of abiogenesis holds (local chemicals spontaneously live). It should be plentiful if the explanation of exogenisis holds (space junk has space mold)? Dammit it's just weird!
Accelerando (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe it's because God made us (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wales (Score:2)
Re:Wales (Score:2)
That's because you don't understand the problem. (Score:3, Interesting)