New Paper Offers Additional Reasoning for Fermi's Paradox 774
KentuckyFC writes "If the universe is teeming with advanced civilizations capable of communicating over interstellar distances, then surely we ought to have seen them by now. That's the gist of a paradoxical line of reasoning put forward by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. The so-called Fermi Paradox has haunted SETI researchers ever since. Not least because if the number of intelligent civilizations capable of communication in our galaxy is greater than 1, then we should eventually hear from them. Now one astrophysicist says this thinking fails to take into account the limit to how far a signal from ET can travel before it becomes too faint to hear. Factor that in and everything changes. Assuming the average communicating civilization has a lifetime of 1,000 years, ten times longer than Earth has been broadcasting, and has a signal horizon of 1,000 light-years, you need a minimum of over 300 communicating civilizations in the Milky Way to ensure that you'll see one of them. Any less than that and the chances are that they'll live out their days entirely ignorant of each other's existence. Paradox solved, right?"
Solved? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Paradox solved, right?"
No. Some planets suitable for life have almost certainly existed in this galaxy for billions of years longer than the Earth. By now, one would expect there to have been civilisations that spread throughout the galaxy and therefore brought Earth within detection range of their signals...
300 isnt teeming with life (Score:2, Insightful)
If the universe is teeming with life then there would be a whole lot more than 300 civilizations out there who can transmit on this level. I think the paradox still stands.
The First Ones (Score:5, Insightful)
My solution (Score:2, Insightful)
But if that's right... (Score:5, Insightful)
God I hate Fermi's Paradox. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is hardly a new idea. It's so not new that I think I remember saying something similar about two years ago [slashdot.org], and I'm not exactly an expert.
Analog signals degrade quickly, and digital signals are worse, in their way, because they don't tolerate degrading as well. Couple that with broadcast limitations imposed by local governments to keep signal strength down, and I can't see how our signal could be reliably detected more than a few light years away without a HUGE radio antenna array.
Is the author even familiar with the Fermi Paradox (Score:3, Insightful)
The scope of the Fermi Paradox deals with the length of time it would take an intelligent civilization to explore and colonize the galaxy, and given Fermi's estimates we should have observed spacecraft and/or probes. SETI's signal hunting doesn't even scratch the surface of the paradox.
Re:The First Ones (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe a zillion races have achieved the capability at roughly the same time, and are just more than 100 light years away from us.
What are the odds of anyone picking up our broadcast noise anyhow? It's not like we're aiming high wattage transmissions directly at likely stars, and with the transition to digital, our signal becomes even more ellusive (smaller spectrum footprint).
It's just as likely that other races only went through a brief period of wideband, and then switched to wired or line of sight optical or quantum bits or some crap we haven't even thought of yet.
The whole paradox is the height of hubris: aliens have to be like us, they have to advance along the same technological track, and they have to be broadcasting on a scale that we can easily pick up...We haven't cataloged every star yet, and that's an order of magnitude over any artificial broadcast we can understand.
Communcations (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe there are (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe there are advanced aliens looking for intelligent life.
If they found earth they'd keep right on looking.
As a species we're violent, irrational, deluded, greedy and self interested.
The occasional deviations from this norm in no way redeem us.
If I had a choice not to be involved with this disgusting species then I wouldn't either.
Lots of other reasons, too... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless it's been vastly misrepresented in mainstream presentation (like TFS), Fermi's Paradox sounds pretty ridiculously simplistic.
Other bad assumptions it makes, just off the top of my head:
1. Other intelligent civilizations want to engage communications with aliens who, for all they know, might try to blow them up or eat them.
2. Those civilizations are willing to spend resources to beam electromagnetic radiation out into space in the vague hope of someone noticing.
3. Other intelligent civilizations "capable" of "communication" will follow the same technological arc as us and develop electromagnetic communications rather than, say, quantum communications or something we haven't even thought of yet.
4. Those aliens will assume that WE (or some unknown aliens) will be listening carefully for extrasolar broadcasts.
5. Those aliens even have a concept of "communication" and aren't just some hive-mind that never needed to evolve social skills.
6. They didn't cut their Alien-SETI funding to pay for medical research or an Alien-Wall-Street bailout package or something. (I mean, what do you think the chances are that WE will broadcast for a thousand years?)
And so on.
Really, Fermi's Paradox sounds like me saying that if I sit on a lonely beach for a week and don't find a bottle with a message in it in proper English, there are no other intelligent beings in the world.
Re:Solved? (Score:3, Insightful)
"other alien races are as leery of sending out giant seedships that they themselves can't ride in"
But for this argument to work, you have to believe that every alien race declines to send out automated self-replicators.
Re:Solved? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Paradox solved, right?"
No. Some planets suitable for life have almost certainly existed in this galaxy for billions of years longer than the Earth. By now, one would expect there to have been civilisations that spread throughout the galaxy and therefore brought Earth within detection range of their signals...
But they would have to be within earth's range in the last 100 years or so for them to detect us. "Billions of years" means they could have existed on Venus before humanity ever showed up, for all we know. If they were that close, the signals would have long since passed us by at the point we were discovering fire.
Or they could have been reasonably nearby, but too far for the signal to reach us without fading out completely.
Or they could be using a different form of communication than we are able to perceive.
So, honestly, "expecting" anything is a little silly and assumes far too much.
Where is everybody? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Solved? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Maybe aliens are everywhere, aware of us, and simply choosing not to communicate."
I think this is most likely.
To reach space you have lots of self-control so that you don't..uh..risk wiping out your civilization.
Once you reach that point of sophistication, you would feel that we humans are so damn annoying, unpredictable and of little use that you would want to avoid us at all cost.
That or we are an experiment they have been running for billion+ years and don't want to contaminate it. kinda like what we earthlings do when we send out space probes.
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The First Ones (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not like we're aiming high wattage transmissions directly at likely stars [....]
Actually, we have:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message [wikipedia.org]
It was a one-time occurrence, and the stars it was aimed at won't even be there when the message arrives.
However, Arecibo has also been used for Radar Astronomy [wikipedia.org], to map nearby planets. Those transmissions were probably powerful enough to detect outside our solar system.
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh, it's terribly fascinating!
If other civilizations do show up, then it's because God wants us to preach salvation to them.
However, the article is pretty bad. From TFA
> Assuming the average communicating civilization has a lifetime of 1,000 years...
Well, there they decimate the entire strength of the argument. It's about longevity of civilizations (and a probable galactic or universal one)and sheer numbers.
Re:Solved? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not at all. Think how many they'd have to send out. Think about the transit time, think about the number that would be lost. You can't really assume a straight geometric progression for something so incredibly fraught.
For a civilization to be able to keep up that level of commitment for as long as it would take would be inconceivable. This isn't to say that it couldn't happen, but it is to say that it's damn unlikely, even by the standards of the universe.
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:1, Insightful)
He uses philosophy throughout and though short, it has some pretty dense ideas.
I've found that most Christian writing, both Protestant and Catholic, is largely dependent on some pretty dense ideas.
No FTL (Score:4, Insightful)
>Maybe there really is no FTL, and other alien races are as leery of sending out giant
>seedships that they themselves can't ride in as we are, and are thus still hanging out in their home starsystem.
I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but I just had to say. If there really is no FTL, it is probably one of the most depressing aspects of existence.
Re:Solved? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is you don't need to have a population that is astoundingly wedded to the idea of spreading out across the stars. You need a tiny, tiny fraction of the population to be wedded to the idea - just a handful of pioneering types who are okay with being placed in stasis for a few centuries, or raising their children and grandchildren inside a giant hollow cylinder. If you can find 500 people every few years who are willing to do something like the above, you will eventually become a pan-galactic civilization.
I always thought SETI was a fools errand (Score:3, Insightful)
From a layman's perspective, I don't see how they could reasonably hope to see anything, especially if the aliens are like us and tend to direct their transmitted energy rather tightly to avoid wasting too much of it.
Lets say for instance that we can pick up a signal from Geosync Earth orbit using little more than a crappy whip antenna (See: Satellite radio) for a system with maybe 200dB gain in total. Now lets say we're looking for ET with a magical system that has a million dB worth of gain. The distance from the Earth to a Geo satellite is 26,200 miles. The distance from the Earth to Alpha Centauri is 2.57 Ã-- 10^13 miles. Just comparing the square of the distances (6.86 x 10^6 to 6.5536 Ã-- 10^26), you can see that a gain of 10^9 is just not going to cut it, not by a long shot.
It seems to me that the only way SETI could possibly work is if ET was narrow beaming an extremely powerful signal directly at Earth 24/7 for centuries, or if they were hanging out in orbit chatting away over CB radios in stealth spaceships. The most plausible reason why SETI has not found anything is that any signals that are out there are well below are detection threshold, and this is even before we begin to think about a civilization that moves beyond RF transmissions in favor of something more exotic (entangled photon radios?).
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahh wikipedia. Nothing like seeing an article refute itself mid-paragraph.
Keep in mind (Score:3, Insightful)
Note the following:
1) Author is an MBA. The "Bouchet-Franklin Institute" is his private lab.
2) The place of publication, arXiv, while very useful in certain fields of physics, is not peer-reviewed. It's basically the same as posting this paper on your blog.
3) The arXivblog, not run by any people actually associated with arXiv (as far as I can tell) regularly posts completely inaccurate summaries.
4) The published paper is laughably simplistic. As others have pointed out, these are obvious considerations, and the paper is mostly argument and simple geometry. While it's nice to see some back-of-the-envelope calculations on a minimum civilization density for a given detection cutoff, that's exactly what this is -- back-of-the-envelope calculations.
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, how about this? 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29. That's 7 days, inclusive, and given the GP's statement, the 23rd would be the first day. So you failed twice. First, 23 + 7 is 30, not 31. Second, you forgot the inclusion note.
Don't worry, you're not the first person I've met who fancied himself a nerd and couldn't do date math properly.
...
I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere about nerds not getting dates...now it all makes sense.
Re:Solved? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if you take the creation story 100% literally, nothing would preclude the existence of life elsewhere. (Although the Fermi paradox would not work at all, as it's easily to imagine that any aliens are roughly the same, or lower, level of tech we are, with a 6000 year old universe.)
I mean, the Bible doesn't document everything God has done, and even the most literal reading of it wouldn't support that.
Not to mention the small problem of where all the other people besides Adam and Eve came from. Obviously, if that story is literally true, God made a bunch of other people he (or, rather, his documenter) didn't bother to mention making, so it's hard to see why he'd mention making life hundreds of lightyears away.
Re:Alternate solution: High-efficiency communicati (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Insightful)
Fermi's paradox is paradoxically absent any real facts. We know not nearly enough to know if it's even relevant.
For example, one prime assumption is that alien life would communicate on the EM spectrum someplace using technology similar enough to ours to be in a form that we would understand or recognize. Yet dolphins are quite intelligent, and we have no idea what they are saying. If we can't decipher communication in a biological form that's based on the same exact biology as ourselves, that is 99% identical at the cellular level, how can we justify our arrogance in believing that we'd know truly alien communication if we saw it?
Obviously, if we did come across some communication on the EM spectrum that we were to show wasn't some mere physical process, we'd have proof of alien communication or related phenomena. But there's no evidence at all that they would. In fact, it's rather unlikely that we will ourselves, in just a few years: take a look at spread spectrum transmission [wikipedia.org] for a method that we already use today in many uses that would be virtually undetectable by SETI.
Fermi's paradox is based on a large number of assumptions of scale that are, quite frankly pulled from Fermi's backside, and aren't even well supported by technological developments since its inception. They are the best assumptions available, but they demonstrate nothing other than a weak foundation for conjecture.
And if some of those assumptions are already demonstrated irrelevant with applicable technology HERE, TODAY, how can we give Fermi's paradox any more than the time of day?
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:3, Insightful)
The real problem is that logic and reason have very little to due with fundamentalist beliefs for any religion.
(Emphasis here on fundamentalist beliefs.)
Re:I like choice B (Score:4, Insightful)
Send me $1,000. I guarantee you there is a 0.000000000001% chance that I will send you back $1,000,000. Of course, if you don't send me the money, the odds of me paying you are zero. So you should definitely send me the money.
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:4, Insightful)
(In case anyone was wondering, Earth is a Libra.)
Not to nitpick or anything, but the Earth cannot have a zodiac sign, since the latter is usually defined as the constellation in the ecliptic that the Sun was present in. Which presumes that the observer was located on the Earth. Ergo ...
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:3, Insightful)
For most believers, God himself could come down from on high and bitchslap them with the truth about the universe and what he/she/it really intended for them, and the'd _still_ keep believing what they are told to believe on Sunday.
Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Building a generation ship will easily be one of the most expensive and large-scale projects that our species has ever undertaken. A couple of willing colonists can't afford this alone. They need the entire population behind them.
Re:Solved? (Score:3, Insightful)
500 people...With the resources to produce a Rama [wikipedia.org] like ship. Even a relatively modest ship, say the size of a couple of aircraft carriers stuck together...Can you even conceive of the cost?
I don't foresee a time when slower-than-light arc ships are anything but a project formed with the backing of a massive political/financial entity. That would require the resources of a large group of people, most of whom will not be traveling on the ship.
Keeping up that effort for a long period of time, putting forth enough effort to send off a ship every few years...I don't see it. People aren't that altruistic. I mean, they're spending this huge amount of money to send this handful of people off into space. People bitch about the nasa budget. We're talking Nasa, plus National Defense, plus Social Security, and once the money is invested, you send it off, never to return.
The progress would be so slow as well. If you built one, it'd probably take it 30 years to leave the solar system, and god help you if there were awake people on board. They'd have their first war in about 20 years, and by year 30 it'd be Lord of the Flies in there.
Re:Why aren't they here? (Score:3, Insightful)
A planet that's right in the mid-range of liquid water. Venus is too hot for liquid water, Mars is too cold.
Then why water, why not another solvent? Because water and carbon compounds allow a much larger number of complex molecules than any other combination. All the experiments performed in laboratories, all the measurements done in astronomic observations have failed to reveal any sort of chemistry even remotely resembling water+carbon chemistry in complexity.
Re:Solved? (Score:3, Insightful)
Receiver now monitors his entangled particle
But at that point, you've messed with the sender's particle, again via quantum entanglement.
As Professor Farnsworth noted, "No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!"
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Insightful)
Nature holds no distinction between "can" and "should". Morality is a product of idealism and virtue, both properties primarily ascribed to sentient beings: we have chosen a way to live that we consider "right" (whatever that is) and we are willing to restrict our behavior to accommodate this ideal.
It's one of the noblest things about us, and I hope that sentient extraterrestrial life would also possess a sense of morality. But don't think for a second that nature itself is moral. Nature is completely impartial and completely absolute. How good or evil someone is does not factor into how quickly he falls if he walks off of a cliff.
If that sentient life poses a threat to us, we can attempt to resist to the limits of our power. Should our capacity prove inadequate, we will be destroyed no matter how much morality we possess or how much morality that alien civilization lacks. Is it "ok"? No, it's awful! But that is how reality works. Species go extinct, volcanoes erupt, and people starve despite our best efforts. We can't shape reality by our whims alone; we can only try to change things by working within its rules.
This is true irrespective of religion. Unless you believe God is going to save us from the aliens... in which case maybe He already is, by keeping them from contacting us. Now there's an interesting solution to the Fermi paradox.
Re:Solved? (Score:5, Insightful)
The 1,000 year thing seems like the weak point of this theory.
Actually, the estimate of the probability of the kind of intelligence that makes complex machines is a bigger problem, and a plausible solution to the paradox.
We have ample evidence that if a thing is possible at all, evolution will reproduce it many times. Wings, fins, eyes... all of these optima have been found many times, across genera and families and whatnot. By one estimate the eye has evolved independently a couple of dozen times, based on the proteins used in the retinal structure.
There was an article here on /. a while back pointing out that two birds previously believed to be related were the result of convergent evolution. Evolution finds the same optima over and over again.
The kind of intelligence that makes complex machines has evolved on Earth exactly once, and that is the only kind that is of interest in Fermi's Paradox.
Furthermore, the current best guess at the evolutionary driver of kind of intelligence that makes complex machines is that it's a peacock's tail, and extravagant sexual display that had relatively little utility outside of attracting a mate or two. Therefore the whole "making complex machines" aspect of our intelligence is more-or-less an accident, not the result of direct selective pressure at all.
Men are very slightly better at some spacial reasoning than women because we hunted more, maybe, but that very slight difference is a measure of how little practical, non-sexual, selective pressure their actually was.
So based on what we know at the moment about the kind of intelligence that makes complex machines it seems likely that the resolution to Fermi's Paradox is that it is unbelievably rare. We may well be the only species to have such an intelligence in our galaxy, although even I have a hard time believing we're the only one in the universe. It could be, though.
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Insightful)
Religion and science are fundamentally opposed on the issue of epistemology. In science, everything has to be compatible with observations or it can't be properly claimed to be true. In religion, truth is established by authority: the preacher or the bible or (fill in the blank) says it's true, therefor it's true.
This explains why some people are so enthusiastic about finding errors in religion. Logically, once the flaw is found, the authority is dethroned, and the whole religion should collapse. Alas, religious people can be remarkably immune to logic. So although it is worthwhile to point out religion's inconsistencies (both internal and external), it won't change the mind of most people who want to believe.
As an illustration of the division between religion and reality-based belief systems, consider what happens when something in religion is found to be in incontrovertible agreement with observations. If it's an old event, then the item ceases to be religion and becomes history. If it's some principle of behavior, then it ceases to be religion and becomes part of the soft sciences like psychology or political science, or (worst case) part of the humanities such as ethics. When something is proven, it's no longer religion.
Re:Do we want to be found? (Score:5, Insightful)
...Why are we soooo certain that we *want* to be found?...
Anybody intelligent enough to be able to travel throughout this galaxy or beyond, or even just communicate, would certainly study us for awhile. They would have learned by now that we humans are a warlike race that cannot get along with one another even on our own world. Even in our fictionalized scenarios, with imagined technology, such as Star Trek or Star Wars, there is nothing but war and death, such as the destruction of entire planets by some of our imagined technology. Human history provides an absolute guarantee, that if we would meet such an advanced civilization, we would use their technology against them and one another.
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:4, Insightful)
Most Christians? I take issue with that, so here is the obligatory [Citation Needed].
As long as we're talking bullshit, I'd say that most Christians do not take the creation story literally.
Again, either you're not an American, have never been to America, or if you are American, you've spent your entire life in San Francisco. How exactly do you think GW Bush was elected twice? Have you never heard of the "evangelicals", a huge and fast-growing religious/political group? They're not quite big enough to win national elections all by themselves (that's why Obama won this time, since Bush did such a horrible job and the economy's in the toilet), but they're a very large and powerful force. And if you didn't realize it before, "evangelical" equals "fundamentalist".
If you want citations, just google for "evangelical christians in America".
Re:Solved? (Score:3, Insightful)
well, the way I see it, any civilization that does spread out, finds a habitable planet, lands, sets up shop, within a few generations the original purpose gets lost, replacement parts run out, communication with the homeworld is terminated, some stay in the colony, others move out into the wilderness to learn how to survive in the wilds of this alien world, move into caves, build crude shelters, meanwhile the ones who stay in the colony lose their technology, and eventually die out. now the new civilization starts anew, political structures fade as they're no longer as necessary, technology is forgotten, the colony falls into disrepair and over the next thousand years is scavenged for raw materials, and ceases to exist. another thousand years or so pass, and the descendants of those initial settlers start to form cohesive civilizations, start to grow crops, start to build permanent structures, facts of the old world become legend take on fancier terms and become stories. a few more thousand years pass, technology is developed, the industrial revolution begins, and cities form, industry takes hold, technology is developed. another thousand years pass, the develop space travel, and look to the stars as their future, people begin to disregard those old legends and stories. another thousand years pass and they are able to develop an interstellar craft, and set out to find new life elsewhere in the galaxy. they find the possibilty of habitable planets, send sleeper ships out, repeat.
my point being that there could literally be thousands of civilizations out there, in various stages of evolution. the window for detection being very slim. The assumption that other civilizations are the same technology level as us or above, is a disservice to the whole seti program. and is what I consider to be the most serious flaw in the SETI program. I feel we will most likely find (if we find intelligence at all) a civilization around the level of Neanderthals. if there are advanced civilizations out there, and they find us, they'd look at us the way we'd look at Neanderthals, as "cavemen" worthy of study but no contact is necessary as they wouldn't understand half of what was going on.
Heck think back to a civilazation 2000 years ago, we find a civilization like that on Titan, close enough that we can get there within a few years, would you march into Rome asking to talk to Caesar? exposing yourself to a very aggressive, and violent people who have very deep set beliefs in how the world works? you'd be killed as a heretic. maybe they're not like the Romans, truth is you don't know, you use your own history as a judge, and see the technology levels and you would observe. Just as if there are any advanced aliens out there capable of interstellar travel would look at us. we still fight amongst ourselves, we kill our own people. if we met an alien life form, we'd try to kill it. We'd take any mis-step by them as an act of agression. it's in our nature to fear the unknown. And heck we kill each other for less.
Re:Solved? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a practical engineering problem, not a psychological problem. Having spent enormous resources to escape one gravity well, why would you want to go straight back down another one on arrival? You settle the dust cloud. Grab asteroids for metals, comets for organics and fusion fuel, restock on volatiles that might have been lost in transit, build a couple more generational starships to offload the surplus population (your own might be rather crowded by now through natural population growth) and then move on.
Planets are an evolutionary dead end. One big immobile target, and you only use the tiny fraction of it that's right on the very top. The Culture has it right: live on your ships. Much more efficient.
Re:Do we want to be found? (Score:5, Insightful)
The flip side of this argument is that a species comes to dominance over its own planet through competitive behavior, i.e. aggression. Just because they have superior technology doesn't make them morally superior.
As for what we have to offer? There are a plethora of movies that spell this out: natural resources, a habitable planet, an enslavable population. What do you think our own warlike, inferior race would do if, say, Mars were humanly inhabitable tomorrow? Crossing the ocean in the 1500s to settle the New World was a scary proposition, and yet the Europeans didn't let that stop them. It was precisely their ambition, competition with their neighbors, and their desire to claim the wealth of those new lands that drove them to do it, even with primitive technology.
Peaceful races may fail to contact us not because of their moral superiority, but because they lack the incentive to bother.
Re:It's quite clear what the reason is (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong.
Faith can be falsified quite easily. I once had faith that creationism was the truth. I read plenty of books and pamphlets to back up that idea. But then one day, it occurred to me that in order for creationism to be the truth, there had to be a vast scientific conspiracy out there, ranging from paleontologists to biologists.
So I started paying attention to science.
I now know that I was incorrect. My faith was wrong. I was blind and now I see.
Re:Solved? (Score:3, Insightful)
Who says that interstellar travel is even possible? We don't even know what the limits of technology are, and humans, or anything resembling human may never leave this star system.
And if our technology DOES continue to advance like it is now, we'll certainly find a way to destroy ourselves because any energy large enough to launch starships will be a devastating weapon.
Not every human has to be wiped out either. Scattered weak humans without their tools and unaccustomed to surviving in the wilderness, they might not do so well in a toxic waste filled future earth.
And even a moderately large space civilization might not be able to untether itself 100% from the home planet, maybe not for 1000's of years.
What nobody is commenting on either is that who says 1000 years is at the short end of the estimate we should use? Maybe its more like 106 years, in which case this one is it ;) In that case the number of civilizations that are cut off from each other is REALLY large. A few will get lucky, most won't.
Re:Do we want to be found? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anybody intelligent enough to be able to travel throughout this galaxy or beyond, or even just communicate, would certainly study us for awhile. They would have learned by now that we humans are a warlike race that cannot get along with one another even on our own world. Even in our fictionalized scenarios, with imagined technology, such as Star Trek or Star Wars, there is nothing but war and death, such as the destruction of entire planets by some of our imagined technology. Human history provides an absolute guarantee, that if we would meet such an advanced civilization, we would use their technology against them and one another.
Typical that some guilt ridden touchy feely sentiment gets modded insightful here.
The entire premise that some advanced civilization would evaluate humanity on it's ability to get along is ludicrous. Wasn't that the whole storyline of the Q in TNG?
If we are going to start asserting crap like this, then it would be equally valid to suggest that we are the equivalent of the 98 lb. freshman nerd of the universe and that we've been stuffed in our own locker. How about that instead of our galactic neighbors being worried about our 'warlike' nature we have been shunned for being a bunch of weak ass little pussies? Maybe they are just waiting for us to sort out our little squabbles so they can deal with the one with big enough balls to kick the crap out of everyone else. There is NO basis to suggest that either of these scenarios are more or less likely.
I'll buy just about ANY technological explanation before you'll convince me that we are being left alone because some advanced civilization who can hear our signal is essentially scared of dealing with us. Honestly, the suggestion itself is the height of conceit.