Fermi Paradox Predicting Humankind's Future? 854
An anonymous reader writes "The Fermi paradox says that if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, at least one of them should have colonized the entire galaxy by now. But since there is no evidence of this, humankind must be the only intelligent life in the galaxy. The Space Review has an article on how the Fermi paradox can be applied to human civilization. It says that, like the extraterrestrials, humans have three choices: colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct."
More likely (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure- you *might* be able to theoretically build a ship that could go further but all politics is local. Look at our politics- could we gather the will to build a 10 trillion dollar multi-generation star ship?
I think civ's do okay, never get off the planet the started on, and eventually die out from lack of resources, some kind of self destruction, or being wiped out by an external event.
Re:More likely (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's figure out how first.
Besides why would an alien race need the whole galaxy? A small section would do. Even so they could have died out millions of years ago. Or we could be the first advanced race and as we reach out amoung the stars we shall find other less advanced races.
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Not that I don't think Fermi is full of it. All the "There can be no intelligent life if they haven't already a) been found by us or b) taken over the galaxy, theories are pretty foolish. There could be intelligent life inside 10 light years from us, and we wouldn't know it now; hell, we could be living on a planet seeded with life by an advanced society and we wouldn't know it...Maybe the dinosaurs were killed off by an automated terraformer. =P
Basic probability also suggests that it is extremely unlikely that we are an isolated occurrence...You'd have to buy into Creationism to think that such as we could never have happened anywhere else.
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Extension of Murfy's Law: (Score:4, Insightful)
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Extrapolate from that to the whole universe, and say that it's probable that nowhere else in the whole universe has another species done what we have done?
I'm sur
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It comes down to how probable you think it is. If it is probable that we should have evolved the way we did...
Mmm, are you familiar with the definition of probability? Because the probability of something that has already happened, having happened, is 1. That is, the probability that we evolved in the way we did is 1. Probabilities are observer-dependent things, and change with new information or events.
What I'm saying is that the anthropic principle applies. It could have been, pre-our-evolution, that the probability of our evolution was 0.000000001. But now, post-our-evolution, the probability is 1. So we can't
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Claiming that something must have created us would only move the problem one step farther away.
Even if we where created by a "god", that isn't an answer to the question how we came to exist. It only transforms the question into how that being came to exist.
Re:More likely (Score:4, Insightful)
Sharks are very dumb and have been doing just fine.
It is perfectly possible to imagine a universe full of life and yet with very few intelligent multi-planetary technological civilizations.
We are smart because we could not outrun (our outbite) our predators. We had to evolve other way.
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Well...he's old. Come on, cut him some slack!
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Basic probability also suggests that it is extremely unlikely that we are an isolated occurrence...You'd have to buy into Creationism to think that such as we could never have happened anywhere else.
Not necessarily. It might be that such as we could have happened somewhere else, but that in fact the probabilities required for intelligent life are so mind-bogglingly bad that it is only by an extremely small chance that it ever emerged anywhere for the entire life of the universe. It could be, for example,
Re:More likely (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, if you are only looking for life. If you are looking for intelligent life, the chances are much smaller.
If they were here in the first 99% of those 10 billion years, they would have missed us. We may be marked as a "potential revisit" but the likelihood of any existing lifeforms knowing that we are here is very small. The likelihood of us knowing that THEY are around is even smaller.
If the number of potentially viable planets is of any meaningful size, we could be one of a billion planets out there that they plan to eventually come back to.
There is nothing as unusual... (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with that argument is that nothing is as rare as an unused resource around life.
If they had been here the last few hundred millions years, there would probably be lots of obvious signs of industrial work visible in any telescope.
(Of course, there might be "hunter" aliens and wars, so a low profile is important. If so, the relativistic antimatter rockets s
Re:There is nothing as unusual... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There is nothing as unusual... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know why that surprises me...
Seriously, SciFi has so many holes in it that become quite obvious even as the story plays out, we shouldn't be extending out fiction to the universe.
If there is extra terrestrial life capable of FTL travel, wouldn't it stand to reason that it would put out colonies? Wouldn't it become successful by gathering resources when and where it can? Wouldn't we be able to spot either that or pick up their communications by now if it had ever happened within a reasonable distance of us? I can think of no reason why advanced ETs would bother to try to shield us younger species, it just doesn't make sense, unless you're looking for a plot device for a long running TV series.
The whole elder younger races thing, is even sillier, if there had been hundreds or thousands of apex species maybe we wouldn't know everything about all of them, but wouldn't it make sense that if there are multiple species in contact with each other eventually younger species will figure out the tech of the older ones, build on it and they will advance together? It seems unlikely to me that any species will have passed its prime keeping its technology secret, to the point that a younger race would be unable to reverse engineer it, so that the elder race is viewed as mystical.
Finally, I think that far-flung colonies forgetting about technology and regressing is possibly the most plausible, doesn't it also stand to reason that if we are such a colony we know enough about our planet that we'd be able to detect and "advanced tech" from our distant past?
I think the possibility that another poster mentioned, that we're just not in a sweet spot of galactic geography makes sense. If the c speed limit holds, any real colonization is likely to happen somewhat closer to the galactic center where interstellar distances are more manageable.
OTOH if the c speed limit doesn't hold, then I agree with Fermi, we really should have seen some ET life by now.
Re:There is nothing as unusual... (Score:4, Insightful)
You are assuming we would recognize any evidence of extra terrestrials as such. If advanced ETs exist, we do not know by what means they communicate, travel, their preferred habitats, what resources are of value to them and can only guess what indicators we should look for. If there was an exact duplicate of the present-day Earth with humans and all a mere 3 LY away we'd still have a difficult time finding each other. We give off stronger radio emissions than our star ought to, but it's hard to make sense of any of those signals at such a distance--Arecibo probably isn't sensitive enough to pick out omnidirectional TV and radio signals and with more and more of our communications going digital or over wires, we're getting quieter. We'd probably have to send a powerful, focused and deliberate signal when our counterparts are actually listening to our part of the sky to get noticed. Maybe a space telescope could catch the earth transiting the sun clearly enough to pick out the emission lines of free Oxygen in our atmosphere--a strong indicator of life, but even that's exceedingly difficult and no guarantee. Basically, we're pretty deaf & blind and have little clue what we're supposed to be looking for anyway.
Our galaxy might be teeming with life, it may have even attempted to communicate with us many many times, but with our present ability to observe the universe around us, we very likely wouldn't have noticed.
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Jesus H. Vishnu! Do I have to do all the thinking?
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I believe the correct term is "Mostly Harmless"
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Mostly harmless? Is a chimpanzee with a bible in one hand and a loaded gun in the other mostly harmless?... If I were an alien, I'd stay as far away from earth as possible.
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The Fermi Paradox is that if they were here any time in the last 500 million years or so, thay would have colonised the place. Even if they subsequently went extinct here, it's hard to imagine a high-tech civilisation would not have left relics. Perhaps not every race feels the urge to do so, but Darwinism indicates that many will, and those will more than make up for any with qualms about pre-empting local intelligenc
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Presumes:
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Fermi's argument was statistical. True, much is based on a single data point, us, but most of your quibbles would imply a species that wasn't interested in exploration at all.
Your points:
Earth wasn't colonized, and dolphins (or something else, maybe cats or fleas) are the remains of it Earth wasn't colonized, and they died out due to lack of vigor Earth wasn't colonized, and they di
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Actually, if they are living (or have automated monitors) within a radius of roughly 80 light years, they know we're here. We've been broadcasting our presence via radio waves for about that long now, and our broadcasts are unmistakably "intelligently designed".
Of course, it just might be that the speed of light is a hard upper bound that can't be violated in our universe. In that case, we might still have some time before visitors come calling.
Our best bet is to continue scanning the skies for possible incoming messages (which might or might not be addressed to us).
And hope it's not just spam
Re:More likely (Score:5, Funny)
My name is Blorgflog Fleeberblox from the Indurian colony of Aran. After current civil war between Xzixi faction and Xlfrixi government, my father, General Zobb escaped with a 10,000 trillion credit box...
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In which case, there may be a big sign on the back side of Pluto saying QUARANTINED -- DO NOT ENTER.
rj
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Quite possibly. However, radar seems likely to be around for a long time. Incredibly powerful signals, very easy to detect.
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The same can be said for radio. You could find, for example, that one small planet is emitting high powered
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To answer the question why extraterrestrial civilizations haven't colonized the whole galaxy you just need to answer the question why hasn't terrestrial civilization done it.
Or are we assuming too m
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Colonization is likely only if the civilization visiting considers it desirable.
If you are a nearly immortal living spaceship (or an alien who was born in space - maybe bred to live in space) why would you want to settle down on a warm planet with a semi-corrosive atmosphere populated with semi-intelligent, self-replicating bags of jelly? It's not likely you would consider green grass under a blue sky something worth exploring.
To
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(1) Teeming with constrantly mutating alien bacteria
(2) Lifeless and ready for terraforming
I know which one I would choose. Seriously, why risk alien disease when there are so many "clean" places to choose from? If you were looking for a cave to sleep in, would you choose the empty one or the one with animals already in it? Unless space travel is instant, I really don't see a race ever expanding fast enough to need to use every planet. Besides, it is selfish to think alien life is "as we know it" and would even care about our planet; If they aren't water-based our planet could seem like the same kind of hell that Venus seems to us.
Re:More likely (Score:4, Informative)
Fermi specifically did not refer to colonisation at all (at least in the original formulation of his remarks), he also never explicitly stated the theorem he is so famous for. He merely pointed out the obvious which is that if the theory of space colonisation and the numbers being associated with it were true, then the hypothetical aliens "... should be here by now."
While the Fermi paradox has been used over and over as a means to prove that alien civilisations don't exist (because they are not here already), Fermi was actually more interested in pointing out the faulty data than he was interested in using this so-called paradox as proof of the concept that we are alone in the universe. While that may have been the agenda of many that followed, there is no indication that Fermi himself had a strong opinion one way or the other.
It's not so much a paradox as an attempt to point out that either something must be wrong with the numbers, or with our powers of observation. There are just as many solutions to the paradox that involve us being alone as there are ones that do not.
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Who is to say that we have the contextual skills needed to show intelligence to other visitors? Perhaps we're passed by as not intelligent enough to bother with yet.
Or maybe they're just watching us until we develop and successfully test warp drive.
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The point is, unless they set up an "Alien Burger" on the moon with a sign forty miles on a side, we'd never know they were around. Omni-directional radio of terrestrial origin has very little chance of ever being received in another solar system.
There is also the whole "What are the odds of intelligent live evolving at all?" question. It may be that, despite the age of the universe, the conditions for intelligent life took a long time to come together. Or that the process of evolution tends to take a while to produce a space faring civilization.
There are way too many variables to just automatically say, "If it were going to happen, it would already have happened."
Re:More likely (Score:5, Informative)
Not nearly correct. Google for "Eavesdropping The Radio Signature of the Earth", the title of an article by W.T. Sullivan and C Wetherill in the Jan 27, 1978 issue of Science. You'll get links to a number of cached copies of it online, and also some discussions.
One of the hits is to a NASA article [nasa.gov] on the same topic with updated info and some pretty graphs. It also contains the comment "On a cosmically infinitesimal time scale, Earth has indeed become a very bright planet, outshining the Sun by orders of magnitude in certain narrow frequency ranges."
The general idea is that, first, our radio/TV/radar broadcasts aren't omni-directional; from the start our broadcasts have used antennas that broadcast most of their energy horizontally. The resulting 2-dimensional dispersion pattern reaches much farther than an omni-directional signal of the same energy would. Over time, each broadcast station does send in all directions, but from any one direction, the station appears to fade in and then fade out some minutes later, twice a day. The frequency is doppler-shifted due to the Earth's rotation, and also varies over a year due to our orbit around the sun.
And, second, with our own technology, we could detect the most powerful our own broadcasts from anywhere within the sphere that they've reached. This was the basic question in the Science article. But they also addressed a more interesting question: Assuming our own technology, and the ability to measure the signal's spectrum but not decipher program content, what could be deduced about the senders? The results were quite impressive.
Figuring out which star system the signals come from was trivial (to an astronomer). After a year or so of data collection, the planet's orbit would be known, as would the planet's size. The presence of a large satellite (including its orbit and approximate mass) would also be known. It would be clear that the senders are primarily active during the daytime and early evening.
Further study would generate a rough map of all the broadcast stations. They would be concentrated in narrow bands separating two different sorts of terrain. From the planet's orbit and the sun's brightness, the conclusion would be that the planet is roughly 3/4 water and 1/4 land, and we live on land, primarily along the coasts.
Even more study would determine from spectrum details that there were several different kinds of technology in use to generate the broadcasts, and each kind of equipment was distributed across patches of land that we might call "nations", with some kinds of hardware used by nations not close to each other, implying long-distance technological sharing among coalitions of nations.
It was interesting reading 30 years ago. (But I do remember thinking that it might be a good thing if the actual program content couldn't be decoded.
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They've had 10 billion years to visit us.
We've also had 10 billion years to visit them. Since we haven't done so yet, does that imply that we don't exist?
Even if there are a million advanced civilizations in this galaxy, that doesn't mean that we'd know about them. We've been listening for radio transmissions for a small number of decades; the fact that we haven't detected any alien transmissions just means that no transmissions which are strong enough for us to detect and are modulated in a way that w
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The argument requires the mediocrity principle [wikipedia.org] which implies that if there are many other intelligent civilizations many of them would be far more advanced then we are. Given that it doesn't matter that we've had 10 billion years to visit them-we are the less advanced civilization.
"Even if there are a million advanced civilizations in this galaxy, that doesn't mean that we'd know about th
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That's the Fermi paradox. If space travel is possible, then the time and scale of the universe is so huge that it would have been done millions of times by now. Hence, space travel is impossible or no aliens exist but us.
Another possibility: aliens have visited us but have not revealed themselves to us. If their technology is s
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Consider how far we've come in the last few hundred years. Consider how far along we'll be in a thousand years.
Now consider the few thousand years _preceding_ the last few hundred.
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Yes. I take it personally when my belief system is used as a synonym for stupid, ignorant or "intellectually backwards". Just as, say a Muslim would takes it personally when Islam is equated to terrorism, or sci-fi fan is equated with "Trekker" (or Trekki, if forget which). I can usually take someone hitting a nerve in stride, but that nerve has been rubbed raw.
The reason I say you'd have to buy into Creationism, is because in Creationism, God created man, and no other species. That would be the only explanation for how an intelligent species could exist without there being the possibility for other intelligent species.
Well, there is nothing that says we are not the first intelligent species in the universe. I agree that it is HIGHLY unlikely, but someone has to be the first. Also don't assume that everyone who believes that God created man believes that God stopped there.
It's not that Creationists lack common sense. It's that they are so rabid about anything that might possibly in some world conceivably be a challenge to their beliefs, that they refuse to accept anything outside their little book. If they were open-minded at all, they wouldn't be pure Creationists. Just that simple.
There are "jihadis" that are even more rabid in their beliefs, but to say that all Muslims are equally closed minded is just as offensive as your argument. Don't get me wrong, I don't think you mean any disrespect, but stereotyping religions is no different using stereotypes as a basis for racism.
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Don't get me wrong, I don't think you mean any disrespect, but stereotyping religions is no different using stereotypes as a basis for racism.
To be honest stereotyping based on religion is actually far different from stereotyping based on race. Race tells you nothing about a person but how they look, it is set in stone before they are born and they have no choice in it. Religion OTOH is something that everyone chooses for themselves and it changes with the person throughout their life. As such, religious belief does say quite a lot about a person.
That said, no one here knows enough about your religious belief to make a judgment about you. But i
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This is so ridiculous and illogical: you posit that something as complex as the universe needs a creator, you posit a creator that must be more complex than its creation, and then you say that creator itself is not created by somethign else. Please try to see how insane this sounds to those of us who have not been infected by your mental virus.
There is no responsibility that comes from being in a created universe. Just because somethin gcreated you does not put that thing in a superior position over you. It is in no position to dictate responsibility to you, to say that it is is another of those completely illogical things religion would have you believe.
There is no lack of responsibility that comes from being without a creator. All real responsibility is a form of enlightened self interest. I don't need a creator to tell me to be responsible. If being responsible makes sense, I am perfectly capable of figuring that out on my own. Turns out it does make sense, creator or no.
Whether or not there is a creator is a question that is completely seperate from the question of whether religion is a form of insanity. If there is a creator, it sure has done a piss-poor job of communicating its intentions in unambiguous ways to it's creations. Until said creator makes itself and its intentions known to me in a way that can't be faked by mentally damaged humans, the question of whether or not there is a creator is utterly meaningless.
The question of the impact of religious insanity on human well being, however, is an important one that can be answered.
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Agreed, it was. However, you overlooked one factor: Slashdot moderators rarely display intelligence. Slashdot moderation is completely broken.
Treating your sally seriously, I think that religion is just a successful subset of general superstition; and when you broaden the question to why would superstition be successful within an intelligent civilization, the answer is that before science is understood by the entire population, beings will look in the wrong
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If you somehow made it a religious requirement to get to the mars and enough people bought it, they would get it done. A comparable number of independent thinkers would not be able to align themselves in a single direction to get it done. Religion does have a marvelous capacity to align the behavior of huge numbers of individuals.
Example: More katrina repair work has been done by religious organizations even tho the have less g
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I have a two-bedroom, one-bathroom post-war rambler, about 900 square foot foundation. The family that built this house raised six children in it in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, I am constantly asked when I will buy a bigger house because I have one child.
Could a "typical" family have six to ten children today? Certainly. Would they all have DVD players, attend summer soccer camp, college funds, and the latest fashions? No.
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But it seems like it is a very real possibility that the kind of spacetravel required to visit other species might just be impossible. I don't think one could take it as proof that other intelligent life doesn't exist
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Anyway, amongst the nearest alien species this is called the "Brakloo'tj Paradox".
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The Fermi Paradox assumes the light-speed limit.
There are an awful lot of hidden assumptions in your bald statement that the speed of light automatically limits travel to a range of 4 or 5 ly. Why not 3, or 6, or 10? It doesn't take much to allow for hops from one star to the next, and if you've got the tech to build starships, you've got the tech to colonize a star system that doesn't have Earthlike planets. (Ie space colonies, not terraforming - although the latter may also be possible.)
I think civ's do okay, never get off the planet the started on, and eventually die out from lack of resources,
Quite likely a civilization that never gets off its home planet will eventually run out of resources. But there are resources aplenty for those that take that first step. That's why people talk about He3 mining, solar powersats, mining asteroids, etc. Remember O'Neill's question: "Is the surface of a planet the right place for an expanding industrial civilization?" The answer is "no".
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If you want to discuss and explore my assertion then hit the meat of my point-
Regardless of how advanced ANY civilization gets, it will be limited by POLITICS and the SPEED of LIGHT from ever colonizing outside it's native star system.
I picked 4 or 5 LY because we have exactly one star system in that range and last I heard, it is probably not habitable.
I was attacking two underlying assumption:
That
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Welcome to the Internet. Here is your dictionary. [reference.com]
(In case the misunderstanding was intentional, I do apologize for the unnecessary pedantry.)
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Damn, why is this "cvs update" taking so long? Oh yeah, the project is hosted in Alpha Centauri.
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An insertion here about relativity: if the ship were traveling fast enough, you mightn't need several generations just for 4-5 years. Because of relativistic time dilation, the astronauts in the spaceship would feel considerably less time elapse, while the journey would seem to take decades to everyone on earth. The question then becomes whether people would be willing to spend trillions of dollars on something only their children and grandchildren would see.
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4.3 ly nearest star 3.6 years
27 ly Vega 6.6 years
30,000 ly Center of our galaxy 20 years
2,000,000 ly Andromeda galaxy 28 years
Re:More likely (Score:4, Interesting)
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/
According to the calculations in that article, using 1g acceleration someone from Andromeda (2 million light years) could reach us with only 28 years passing on board their ship. Sounds nice. Outside the ship, however, millions of years would have passed, which means that the visiting aliens would have had to leave their home planet before there was any human life on earth in order to arrive today.
Also, the fuel requirement, assuming 100% efficiency, is 4000 tons of fuel for every 1 kilogram of ship weight. And that's only if the visiting aliens want to go sailing past us. If they want to stop and visit, they have to start slowing down at the half-way point of the journey, which means:
1. They have to know exactly where they are going so that they know when to start slowing down. Coming from Andromeda, how would they even know that earth would be a desirable destination?
2. It greatly increases the fuel requirement -- 4 thousand million tons of fuel per kilogram of ship weight.
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Larry Niven did a lot of hard sci-fi; that is he actually took into account things like elementary physics and economics. The book that sticks out in my mind here is "The Mote in God's Eye", where an alien civilization builds a slower-than-light probe with a light sail and launch it to a nearby star
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The idea that you can "run out" of resources is ridiculous. Silicon, the most plentiful element in the crust of our planet, can be used to harness solar power and convert it into electricity. This electricity can be used to harvest other raw materials or recycle those that have already been utilized. It can also be used to crack water and create rocket fuel. This rocket can then be used to harvest other materials from the inner solar system.
Through effective recycling and fusion power the solar system can
Simulation and Imagination Argument (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the answer to the Fermi paradox is this:
Once a civilization has derived the laws of physics and chemistry to sufficient precision and certainty, there is no longer any pressing need to pursue direct observation of extraterrestrial intelligence. You can simply assume that it exists, based on your local knowledge.
We are reaching this same point with our knowledge of biology; everywhere we look on Earth, we find life. Simply confirming the existence of microbial life on Mars would make it a bit less urgent to get all the way to Europa and verify that it's there too. If we did make it to Europa to confirm that life has evolved there as well, I'd be reasonably comfortable making the prediction that life exists pretty much everywhere else in the galaxy.
If there's no reason to doubt life elsewhere in the galaxy, there's probably intelligent life too. So why worry about going there and confirming something by direct observation, when there's a 99.999% probability that it's true? It makes more sense to stick around here for now and simulate what they're like instead of going there and seeing it directly.
Once we have learned how to just simulate the biochemistry of Europa with high enough fidelity, there's no longer any pressing need to go there, is there? If we make it that far and our simulations and models indicate the presence of life on extrasolar planets, that's good enough for me.
In other words, the reason the aliens haven't bothered to travel here, land, and say "take me to your leader" is because they know what would happen already. It doesn't matter what we are actually like. It doesn't matter what they're actually like either, because we can imagine them now and we will be able to simulate them soon enough.
The reason we don't run into aliens is because we can imagine and simulate them and they can imagine and simulate us and there's no point in actually confronting each other expensively IRL.
Re:More likely (Score:5, Insightful)
The speed of light is a real and unbreakable rule as a result nothing more than 4 or 5 light years away is reachable.
There are at least two major issues with extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Let's assume that they evolved independently of us. It is often said that- by the sheer number of star systems- that there are likely to be a very large number of potentially life-supporting planets elsewhere in the universe. Let's assume that this is correct, and further that life may have evolved on a proportion of them.
Thus, the reasonable conclusion is that there is life "out there". Fair enough. Now; consider the timescale of the evolution of intelligent life on Earth. Very simple bacterial/single-cell type stuff for a large portion of that time. Moderately-intelligent creatures (dinosaurs, birds, etc...) evolving at slow speed for a very long time. Then- on the cliched "24-hour-evolutionary-scale"- mankind, the only organism likely to get anywhere near space-travel- appears at "five-to-midnight".
Furthermore, although Homo Sapiens in their modern form have been around for 200,000 years, most of the progress made towards space travel hasn't been even; it's been very skewed towards the present day. Technological sophistication has been growing ever-faster, on a pretty-much-exponential scale; how much modern technology has been developed in the past 100 years (a lot)- how fast has computer technology developed in the past *30* years (an incredible amount- by many orders of magnitude(*).
It doesn't take a genius to see where this is going. Around 10 years ago, I figured out by myself (**) that the next 1000 (if not closer to 100) years are likely to see more significant and fundamental changes in the nature of the human race than those since the dawn of human-like-intelligence.
My point being this:- Yes, there may be many planets/systems out there capable of evolving and supporting life, and possibly many with life as we speak. However, if we assume that the evolution of life (and technology) follows broadly the same pattern elsewhere as it does on Earth, (very slow for a very long time, then an incredibly sudden surge in intelligence/development), then...
Unless intelligent evolution (and its inevitable offshoot, technology) has independently reached the same "explosive" stage on one of those other worlds at *exactly* at the same time it has on earth (i.e. around the present day), they'll either be way behind us (at best.. primitive man? monkeys? horses?) or so far ahead of us that it's unlikely we can even speculate on where they'll have reached.
Remember; our recent technological evolution has been very sudden relative to the timescale of mankind's evolution. In turn, mankind's evolution has been a sudden event relative to the history of life on the planet.
So, the chances of independently-evolved life elsewhere having reached a comparable stage to us is similar to the chances of two independently-set 24-hour clocks purely coincidentally reading the same time to within a small fraction of a second. If they're more than a few seconds behind, they're nowhere near achieving space travel.... if they're more than a few seconds ahead, they're likely gods, as far as we're likely to be able to comprehend them.
That's assuming they haven't made a fatal mistake as they progress on their exponential evolutionary/technological curve. As with mankind, by the time they've developed space travel, it's likely that they'll be developing sciences and technologies that have the ability (if not used carefully and responsibly), to wipe them out completely. If they're anything like us, their technological evolution will not be matched by social evolution, and there will be great danger that around the time of (shortly before or after) developing space travel, that they'll put a foot wrong and wipe themselves out.
Back to the parent comment; if the alien intelligence has survived, and is more
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They "live" long enough, can eventually be repaired easier, they are likely to remain sane, and they can be safel shut off/stored so centuries of travel passes in an instant to them. They could probably travel to stars at
I almost think if we are going to send humans, a first step would be breeding for 2' tall humans (there's no reason humans have t
Only two choices. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not so much a matter of "if" but of "when". Ask the dinosaurs.
Re:Only two choices. (Score:4, Interesting)
The best way to survive a Chicxulub-style impact is the Dr. Strangelove model. Get an underground complex to ride out the initial fallout of red-hot debris, have a nuclear reactor for power, some parkas for ventures outside into the cold, food to survive for 10-100 years, a force to defend it from looters, and store up the machinery needed to start reestablishing an industrial civilization when things have recovered. It wouldn't even have to be a terribly large population, since you could have a bank full of ten thousand frozen embryos to maintain adequate genetic diversity.
Concievably there are threats where a space program is the logical answer- say, the sun goes supernova- but an asteroid impact just isn't one of them.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is why they're not around any more.
Most likely, an asteroid the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs won't hit us for a million years or more.
And you base that estimate on what, exactly? Besides, even if you're correct on the odds, it's still a probability calculation -- one could hit us next week, we haven't tracked any but a fraction of a percent of the big rocks out there. But big rocks hitting the Earth aren't the only problem: a nearby gamma ray burs
The fermi paradox is wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The paradox with the paradox (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, it has taken primates some-odd half a million years to evolve into humans capable of inventing devices that can decipher energy waves from space. It has taken the Earth some 200 million years (from early life to humans) to evolve life on this scale. Assuming other planets have roughly the same time scale, we can only assume those planets inside a 200 (give or take a 100) million lightyear radius contains no life.
The paradox with the paradox is as follows: Earth contains intelligent life. Earth has not colonized the galaxy. Earth's evidence in space only reaches back into the 1930s when the very first signals were sent into space.
Re:The paradox with the paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
You're forgetting the age of the earth and the age of the universe. The universe was already over 10 billion years old before earth came into existence. Even if every other earth-like planet really needs at least 4.5 billion years too evolve an advanced civilisation, I still don't see why such a planet couldn't have formed one or two billion years before earth has.
The odds are really simple: if the evolution of intelligent civilisations is likely, then some of those must have a multi-million year headstart on us. Why aren't they here? The possibilities are limited:
Could be there's a few other options, but basically they all boil down to: we're incredibly lucky, or we're doomed.
"The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?" (Score:5, Interesting)
This stuff is a big deal, and the Great Filter paper actually manages to draw some useful concrete conclusions from the question, or at least useful concrete questions.
Also related, albeit a little more tangentially, is "Are You Living In A Computer Simulation? [simulation-argument.com]". "We're in a simulation and there are no extraterrestrials in the simulation" must be considered one of the leading possible answers. (I'm not advocating it either way, I don't have an answer. Nor do I consider this post anywhere near a complete list, just some relevant pointers.)
Intelligence is Improbable (Score:4, Insightful)
Fermi's Paradox isn't really a paradox, it's a question: "Where are they?" One possible answer is, "They don't exist." It seems probable that as we explore the galaxy we will find life everywhere, and intelligence nowhere.
The evidence for this is very strong. For one, there is the fact that we see no evidence for them at all. For two, life on Earth shows us that the kind of intelligence that builds spacecraft is extremely unlikely to evolve.
Evolution routinely produces some complicated solutions to common problems over and over again. The eye has (probably) evolved many, many times. Wings have certainly done so, as have fins. Everything we know about natural history on Earth tells us that evolution by variation and natural selection will produce the same solution to the same problem with very high reliability. This is even true of things like extra vertebra in the necks of some Central American lizard: there are a couple of species that have this feature, and previously they were thought to have a recent common ancestor. Gene sequencing shows this is not the case--it is merely a result of common evolutionary pressures on similar forms having similar results.
Human intelligence, on the other hand, seems to be something of an evolutionary fluke. Our ancestors were a marginal species of mediocre tool users for hundreds of thousands of years before we suddenly started on our current course about fifty thousand years ago, with the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. If intelligence was even just ten times harder to evolve than eyes and wings, it would have occurred more than once in the entire history of the Earth.
Until someone comes up with a compelling account as to why human-style (i.e. machine-building, empire-building, world-colonizing) intelligence should be anything other than incredibly rare, there really isn't any other reasonable answer to Fermi's Question.
More too it than intellect (Score:3, Interesting)
It's our Manifest Destiny! (Score:5, Funny)
We should terraform any planets that are not already Earthlike, use the energy of however many stars it takes to achieve our goals, and find some black hole into which to pitch any planets that become inconveniently polluted.
Any semi-intelligent life we encounter along the way will obviously be inferior, since it has not colonized the universe first. If it gets in our way (or even if it doesn't) we should trample it under our jackboots, but only if necessary. Whenever possible we should altruistically force them to accept the inestimable benefits of the English language, democracy, and McDonald's hamburgers.
Science Fiction answers the Paradox (Score:4, Interesting)
2) "Berserker" by Fred Saberhagen: There are civs out there, but they're really, really quite to avoid being noticed by fleets of robotic intelligences sworn on eliminating all biological intelligences
3) "Quaarantine" by Greg Egan: We're cut off from the rest of the galaxy until we prove ourselves. What we're seeing of the sky is cleverly only showing what they want us to see.
I'm a bit of a fan of the "We're living in a computer simulation" theory too: since in the future there will be enough computing power to simulate a huge number of realities, the odds are greater that this is a simulation than that it isn't. It would also explain why socks disappear from the dryer, my car keys aren't where I left them, voting irregularities, etc.: Microsoft has got its hand in the kernel somewhere.
A factor of time... (Score:3, Interesting)
All of this stuff in us, excluding the H in our H2O, came out of stars. It took several generations of stars being born and dying to get to the raw materials out there for us. I once read, though I can't quote where, that we are relatively early onto the scene, as far as this galaxy goes. Relatively may be a fuzzy term, but I would interpret it to mean that there won't be intelligent life billions of years older than us.
Just like there's a roughly defined habitable zone around the sun, there's also likely a habitable zone in the galaxy. Too far in and the radiation is too great, too far out and there haven't been enough stellar generations, enough scattering of heavy material, to produce complex life.
IMHO, the Drake Equation is optimistic, and doesn't properly address time.
The Fermi growth assumes uncontrolled growth (Score:5, Interesting)
So a simple possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that this is an inherent biological mechanism and that in any population that grows to fill its biological niche, birth rates will sooner or later drop until an equilibrium is reached, and this is likely to happen before there is significant pressure to colonize the nearby solar system or stars. While that would leave visits to other planets still reasonably likely, and perhaps even small "local" colonies, without an expanding population and diminishing resources driving prices up, pure economics would dramatically slow down the tempo of any colonization effort to what private individuals could afford and would want to try.
Look at how long Europeans had the capability to reach America before the wave of colonization started, for example. This was a set of cultures that were aggressive and expansionist. Assume the drive to start colonization gets successively less likely as the cost of doing so goes up and the immediate benefit of doing so drops. Once it takes more than a lifetime for economic value to be derived from a colony due to travel time even at light speed, the motivation for pushing for it dramatically reduces for most individuals (look at how hard it is getting people to even sacrifice spending today vs. getting a good pension until they're getting to a certain age, not to consider getting people to sacrifice now for the benefit of their children).
Even with dramatic population growth, a colony would either have to bring economic value (in the form of resources) OR cost little enough in terms of resources to initiate and transfer colonists to than leaving the people the colony would have been made up of in place for a long enough amount of time to make giving up those resources seem prudent. If improvements in how we exploit various resources keep improving, that in itself might put a significant damper on any colonization efforts.
That leaves us with possibly the odd colony here and there or the odd probe. Small colonies would face high odds of dying off, and would be unlikely to be established far away - presumably nearby stars would be targeted. Unless these colonies then enter an aggressive expansionist phase, and either had the technology to pull it off (provide resources for itself) or had the fortune of finding a location that provides abundant resources, it would take a lot of time before such a colony could produce offshoots further away. Chances are they'd grow to fill their new solar system first, and run into the same hypothetical growth reductions as we're currently seeing with developed countries on earth.
That leaves radio. Why haven't we heard radio chatter? Stephen Baxter suggested a simple solution in the novel "Space": IF there are aliens out there, we might not want to make a big fuss about our existence, and also, a civilization may simply grow past broadcasting (That book does also, btw. pose an alternative explanation for the Fermi paradox, but stating it here would be a huge spoiler - it's a good read). We might already be nearing the time where we'll "go silent", as technological advance continues. Given the number of possible stars, how short time we've been listening, and how short periods potential civilizations may broadcast, it's very possible that there just aren't enough civilizations at the right stage of development that their radio chatter happened to intersect with the time periods we are currently monitoring. We may for that
Simple solution to this paradox (Score:4, Interesting)
2) Organization requires competition. The better the competition, the better the organization
3) Competition promotes conflict - either between species or within competing factions of a species
4) As the ability to colonize space develops, so does the ability to destroy the whole species
5) Since colonizing a new area is the essential goal of all species (survival requires species to spread as far as possible) reaching this "ultimate" goal will require overcoming the competition at all costs including destroying the original habitat and all members of the species.
6) All species capable of colonizing space must enevitably destroy themselves.
Colonization is not possible. Cooperation will NOT lead to galactic colonization as it will ony lead to cooperative use of existing resources.
At least that's my two cents.
They're already here. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. .
Okay then. Many people have pointed out the numerous and embarrassing flaws in this logic, but I really don't think Fermi was being stupid or ignorant at the time he posited his question. It was the 50's, after all, and people trusted their government. People did not yet grasp how the world worked with regard to government secrecy and population thought control. From our stance today, we have a great deal of available insight into this; we know about Joseph Goebbels [wikipedia.org], we know that advertising is incredibly effective, we know that the strobe effect of Television puts the human brain into a highly suggestive state [cognitiveliberty.org]. We know that what you teach kids at a young age shapes them for life. And if we dig deeper, we know that the human brain is easily manipulated in far more disgusting ways; (Greebaum) [cassiopaea.org].
It is easy to control people's beliefs. Churches have done it for centuries. For those who reject religious dogma, the media picks up the ball; ie, replace 'religion' with 'cult of science'. Real scientists don't care about embarrassment or being laughed at; they can't afford to because at some point every new and important idea posited by a scientist is going to be ridiculed and attacked by the layperson. So those who fear to talk about UFO's in an open manner, without any trace of fear or bias or mocking doubt in their tones, are not really scientists. They are just another brand of dogmatist.
As I've said, it is easy to control people's beliefs, --and by extension, their perceived realities.
So continuing Fermi's logic. . , If logic implies that the Milky Way is teeming with life, then perhaps it IS, and perhaps there is another reason we have not heard from that life.
Consider: There are UFO's constantly buzzing our skies. We have seen hundreds and hundreds of crop circles. We have countless reports from people who claim abduction experiences.
How can any rational person live in the same world as all of this and insist that there is no evidence? That's kind of strange. Crop circles are the perfect example; they are there in a manner which is available to anybody, (One recalls the old complaint of the sceptic, "I'll believe it when there is some evidence layed at my feet!"), they cannot be rationalized away; (the Ropes and Planks explanation falls hopelessly short when you get close enough to actually look at the details of the problem.) And yet, the world carries on as though nothing were happening.
It reminds me of a Douglas Adams creation; a system of invisibility where rather than bend light, you bend minds. --So that people ignore like crazy that which is right in front of them.
Aliens are already here, and they have been for centuries. The logic, if expanded to include this, might want to ask this little question...
How much effort do humans make to communicate with the cattle they raise? (As above, so below.)
Well, we've got the crop circle side of the equation. But we also have the abduction side. There are two different approaches to anyt
Fermi Paradox is bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
It's laughable.
First of all, "civilization" is a meaningless term derived strictly from human behavior. It might be possible to imagine a collection of technologically advanced entities who do not exist in anything we would term a "civilization" or "society". In fact, I suspect truly advanced entities do not operate in "societies" at all, but are more like the fictional representation of "dragons" in fantasy literature - more or less independent entities who only interact with others of their kind for specific reasons.
Second, "colonization" might be utterly irrelevant to an advanced intelligence for any number of reasons, especially reasons we haven't thought of based on the nature of that intelligence.
Third, the concepts require the notion of biological reproduction. What about a sentient entity which is not based on biology? Such an entity has no need to reproduce. While it can and may reproduce, there is no evidence that it or any particular population of it would see any need to reproduce to the level of "colonization" or even "civilization" in the human sense.
If my prediction is correct that a Transhuman requires nothing but energy, materials, nanomass, computing power and knowledgebases to exist, what need does a Transhuman have to reproduce or "colonize"?
All the Fermi Paradox demonstrates is the lack of imagination on the part of so-called "scientists".
Re:Remain for how long? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Excellent. That means I don't have to sweat the deadline on that network redesign thing I've been fighting with. Thanks!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fermi paradox (Score:4, Insightful)
Think 20 million years. Or 200. Or billions, even. 10,000 years is not being dramatically ahead, that's being barely older than we are.
Consider the enormous timescale of evolution. Earth has existed for about 4.6 billion years. Compared to that, a few million years is nothing. What if the meteor that killed the dinosaurs had arrived a few million years earlier? Or later? Why did evolution take a billion years to get cells past the prokariotic stage? Could that have happened a few million years faster? Or is that step so unlikely that most planets never make it?
Furthermore, consider the age of the universe. The universe is about 3 times as old as the earth. Why couldn't an earth-like planet have appeared 5 or 6 billion years ago? There are good reasons why such a planet can't have appeared 14 billion years ago, but what about 7? That'd give any civilisation arrising on that planet an immediate 2 billion year headstart on us.
Is that enough to conquer the galaxy? If it isn't, nothing is.
Re:Fermi paradox (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, the Fermi Paradox takes all that into consideration. The time to colonize the galaxy, once a species has become space faring is minuscule in comparison to evolution. The paradox is based on the idea that the space faring civilization will colonize the galaxy before other species have a chance to evolve and the probability of two space faring civilizations existing at the same time is incredibly low.
If another civilization were to have started colonizing the galaxy, it's unlikely it would have been in the time periods you point out, 10,000, 20,000 years ago. It's more likely they would have begun tens to hundreds of millions of years ago, and yes, that is enough time to colonize the entire galaxy.
The Earth is believed to be about 4.6 billion years old. Life emerged in the first few hundred million years, probably around 4 billion years ago. Multicellular life sprung up around 1 billion years ago. Mammals have been around for about 200 million years. Homosapiens started out, probably around 200 million years ago. Now, let's say that instead of taking 3 billion years to go from single cell to multi-cell, it only took 2.5 billion years. That's a 500 million year head start. And there's no reason to think that's impossible. It's believed that the evolution of multi-cell was likely a fluke and not necessarily a forgone conclusion, largely because it took so long to show up. So that "fluke" could have probably happened any time after single-celled life began (well, any time after the first few hundred million years of it, at least).
Also, intelligence isn't necessarily a forgone conclusion of evolution. Dinosaurs had a lot more time to evolve than we have and they never developed our kind of intelligence. So let's say an animal in the dinosaur period had developed intelligence. That was over 65 million years ago. Plenty of time to colonize the galaxy.
The time to colonize the galaxy would, with only modest technological advancement from where we are now, would probably be a few million years. A very thin line on the timeline of evolution.
Re:Fermi paradox (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
0. Blow up the Earth and become extinct right now.
NOT being honest! (Score:5, Interesting)
We weren't too small minded to risk lives hiking over mountain ranges or floating in very-likely-to-sink boats across open ocean to other continents, remember? Primitive Asians floating across the Pacific to populate South America or hoofing it in across the northern straights were taking on something at least as dicey as we currently see activities in space. Villages wiped each other out, disease killed off whole tribes - all of the stuff that people say would keep us from colonizing elsewhere. Sure, some of those efforts would fail - just as they have for tens of thousands of years. But some will succeed, too.
we use our resources to make trivial things that amuse us for a short period of time (ipod, iphone, etc)
That's because we evolved from, and still are short-lived primates. Our brains were wired to deal with much more short-term issues. Planning through the coming weather change is about as far as we ever needed to go, mentally. Only some people have the wiring to do big picture stuff... and guess what: they tend to get jobs doing big picture stuff. As for trivial things like iPods: you'd rather have a society with somewhat better antibiotics, but completely absent all of the things that make life a pleasure? The iPod is just a newer take on cave painting and tribal dancing. The fact that we evolved into creatures that put handprints on walls and invent group songs to sing doesn't mean we can't also do things like invent solar cells, fly transplant organs through the air to another city where they're needed, or manage to live past 25. Being productive, inventive, and joyous are not mutually exclusive - they're interdependent.
rather than doing useful things (cure diseases, etc).
I'm sorry to hear that you died of Polio. Or was it Smallpox? Or maybe spoiled food because we haven't invented refridgeration yet. Anyway, sorry you died.
Re:NASA Called... (Score:5, Funny)
Does that imply that there exists a person on Slashdot with a sufficiently low UID to give orders to NASA?
Let's find out. (Score:5, Funny)
1. SITUATION: the Fermi Paradox compels us to populate the Galaxy or become extinct.
2. MISSION: NASA will design, test, build, staff, and deploy a fleet of interstellar colony ships for the purposes of populating the galaxy.
3. EXECUTION: This mission will take place in 6 phases:
a. Design a colony ship;
b. Test the colony ship;
c. Build a fleet of colony ships;
d. Staff and populate the colony ships with suitable colonists;
e. Deploy the fleet; and
f. Monitor the colonies and provide support as appropriate.
4. SERVICE SUPPORT
a. Funding: no change.
5. COMMAND AND SIGNALS: no change.
There! Let's see if that works.
DG
Re: This paradox is full of holes... (Score:4, Insightful)