Are Habitable Exoplanets Bad News For Humanity? 608
An anonymous reader writes "The discovery of Kepler-186f last week has dusted off an interesting theory regarding the fate of humanity and the link between that fate and the possibility of life on other planets. Known as the The Great Filter, this theory attempts to answer the Fermi Paradox (why we haven't found other complex life forms anywhere in our vast galaxy) by introducing the idea of an evolutionary bottleneck which would make the emergence of a life form capable of interstellar colonization statistically rare. As scientists gear up to search for life on Kepler-186f, some people are wondering if humanity has already gone through The Great Filter and miraculously survived or if it's still on our horizon and may lead to our extinction."
Maybe not extinction... (Score:5, Insightful)
But the way the human race is behaving currently, getting off this dirtball in any meaningful way seems exceedingly unlikely.
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Re:Maybe not extinction... (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest issue I see happening is, we've used up all of the "easy resources" on the planet. So if for some reason we have some kind of global conflict that significantly sets back civilization/technology, we may lose our chance of ever exploring space.
Trying to rebuild our industrial technology back up from scratch when the required resources are gone, require advanced processing, or the rest is now 5 miles deep; might make it impossible in any meaningful timeframe.
Re:Maybe not extinction... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think we have lost a fair amount of Helium though.
Selling the surplus of Helium at a discount seems to be unusually shortsighted since that's more or less what's left on earth and the alternative is to mine it from space somehow.
Re:Maybe not extinction... (Score:5, Interesting)
Helium is "manufactured" by radioactive decay underground. Also, He is unnecessary for life. You only need it if you want a funny voice, or poor lift from something less flammable than H. Aside from some uses as a coolant, we wouldn't lose much if there was no He left.
Helium has a lot more uses that you seem to understand. Particularly as a superconductor (not a coolant). Without it there would be no high field MRI scanners. As far as I know, there are not permanent magnet MRI scanners above .3T. The standard MRI in hospitals are 1.5T and 3T are becoming very common. These both require He. The 3T magnets use a lot of it. Particle accelerators need He, as do mag-Lev trains, rail-guns, etc. Obviously these aren't things that mankind can't live without. But unless we can find a suitable replacement to use as a superconductor, it will set back a lot of science and other advances.
Re:Maybe not extinction... (Score:5, Informative)
liquid helium is used as a coolant in MRI not a superconductor.
It cools the target superconducting material enough so that it becomes superconducting, can carry lots more current and thus create the high magnetic field without losing its superconductivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
If we run out of helium we will alternative methods of supercooling. Possibly stuff like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Helium has a lot more uses that you seem to understand. Particularly as a superconductor (not a coolant).
Cold superconductors are often just at the boiling temperature of He, so liquid He is the best way to regulate temperature for "old" cold superconductors. It is not a superconductor, but is currently is used for many (nearly all?) commercial superconducting equipment.
I fully understand the uses and needs for it, as I explicitly said "coolant" just because I figured someone would come up with the complaint you had, though I didn't expect them (you) to correct so incorrectly. Someone else already pointed o
Re:Maybe not extinction... (Score:5, Interesting)
It should be noted that as recently as WW2, Italy was "mining" the slag heaps from Roman-era iron mines. It had more iron in it than any remaining, easily accessible ore bodies in Italy.
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The problem is that getting those elements back requires energy in most cases. The exact elements that the grand parent was referring to are the ones that allow us to get started producing energy with which to do useful things. Sure, all the elements for oil still exist, but the actual oil doesn't, and to get the oil, we need energy.
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Seems pretty obvious. Fire was the first means of harnessing solar panel, why have you forgotten it? Mills using water and wind have been around for 2000+ years. We still have hydro and wind, just generating electrical power, rather than being used directly for mechanical advantage.
We have lots of "usable" energy all around. I don't understand how
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Citation needed.
I'm a geologist, and it's pretty likely that I've visited more metal mines (active and closed) than you, collected more minerals, and have a better chance of recognising thorium minerals than you.
In my mineral chest, I've got two (probable) grains of thorium minerals. Total of a few milligrams.
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That's considerably more debatable than you make it sound. I was reading an article a couple of years ago in my trade journal ("GeoScientist [geolsoc.org.uk]" ; there's a hint there), which suggested that we're already something like half way through our exploitable reserves of coal.
Just one quotation from the article (here [geolsoc.org.uk]).
Re: Maybe not extinction... (Score:3)
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All of it highly radioactive. Yummy.
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Re: Maybe not extinction... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you want to call Alcatraz Island a continent, yeah. Otherwise, no.
Facts for you nuke hysteria types: So far, over two *thousand* nukes have been set off. On the ground. Over 500 in the atmosphere alone. In space. Under water. On the water. Underground. And, newsflash: No continents were lost. Many of these nukes were of considerable size; the Soviets had the record at 50 megatons in one shot, but that's not to say others weren't trying. Total nukage set off so far, about 600 megatons (conservatively.)
Face it: Nukes surely do make big bangs compared to conventional explosives, and blown open power plants tend to make good sized parks as everyone runs screaming (although note the wildlife seems to do ok, all things considered), but in reality, nothing much significant happens consequent to a single actual nuke or power plant failure. Certainly not in proportion to civilization in general. And certainly not at the scale of continents.
Another fact: There's more crap in the air you should be worried about from burning coal than there is from all man made nuclear activity, ever.
We now return you to your regular channel, "The Hysteria Show"
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I agree with all your points, but you completely fail to address the parent's concern.
Yes, under normal operation nuclear plant vents far less radioactive material than a comparable coal plant. But they also pretty much all have at least several years worth of spent fuel lying around "cooling" enough to be safe to transport to long-term storage facilities, often within the same building as the reactor. Hit that building with a nuclear weapon and you vaporize all waste, plus the fuel still in the reactor -
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The biggest issue I see happening is, we've used up all of the "easy resources" on the planet.
Except for those that conservative groups don't want you to use. ;-)
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Agreed. Just look at the progression of so called civilization. The US's economy is becoming more and more of a service economy. Entertainment is becoming a larger and larger fraction of the GDP. I don't see how a species can hope to survive the next catastrophe when people are more interested in living hedonistic lives. As soon as people start to really feel the pressure of finite resources, war and eventual nuclear holocaust seem inevitable. It wouldn't take very many H-bombs to screw up the global climat
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Yep, them's the breaks. A friend of mine says that Ice Ages are God's way of saying "Next!" - wipe the slate, bring in somebody new. :) I completely disagree with the guilt-reasoning of many environmentalists. That's a matter of values, which imply a belief system. To stick strictly with the pure evolutionary model, you can not say whether what humans do is "good" or "bad" for the Earth, only whether it's successful by some practical measure. IOW, if we "destroy the Earth", by which is generally meant,
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Re:Maybe not extinction... (Score:5, Interesting)
In a mere couple of thousand years we've managed to move from "indoor plumbing lolwut" for most of the planet to space flight and fast cheap intercontinental travel. I'd say we're doing pretty well.
As for the great filter, one need only look at the number of mass extinctions that have occurred naturally. Even should the conditions for life as we know it be relatively common (as in life capable of interstellar exploration, not just subsisting under fifty kilometers of ice), the odds of intelligent life arising might be a tiny fraction of that. There could be an enormous array of variables in play, maybe local galactic conditions have only recently matured sufficiently to allow life to exist. Maybe we could simply be freak occurrences. Maybe nobody has managed to figure out FTL travel and they'll get round to us in a few millennia. Maybe nobody's got listening posts within the couple of light years it takes for our radio noise to peter out.
Am I saying the Drake Equation is almost certainly full of shit? Why yes I am.
Re:Maybe not extinction... (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I saying the Drake Equation is almost certainly full of shit? Why yes I am.
Oh, the Drake equation is just fine. It's anyone who thinks they know any of the values to plug into it that's probably full of it.
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Given the nature of evolution, it's unlikely that any organism with any significant level of advancement is not going to be relatively violent.
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1. Eating food.
2. Reproducing
3. Killing other humans
It's more like:
1. Eating food.
2. Reproducing
3. Fighting in one way or another to different degrees over the resources to enable (1) and (2)
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There seems to be more overall effort into the obstruction of further progress, than to encourage it.
If we don't get off the planet, there will be an extinction eventually; either an asteroid or a "terrible mistake".
Either way, dispersal is really the only option in the long run.
If it weren't for the politicians, we would have had more moon missions, and the Shuttle wouldn't have turned out to be the clusterfuck it turned out to be.
(If you were along for the ride, the shuttle program was supposed to be comp
Re: Maybe not extinction... (Score:3, Insightful)
Capitalism didn't create the internet or WWW that you're currently talking shit on. In fact we learned today that the FCC is going to allow capitalists to fuck the internet up at least in the US.
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Government is the problem, not Capitalism. The moment government gets involved, people get paid off to fuck with the system in such a way that it because a good old boys club. Unrestrained Capitalism has its own problems as well, but those are solved simply by time in most cases. It is patience that is lacking because government only reacts to the "We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it" tyranny. Nobody stops long enough to ask "why" we must do something.
It is at this point, that p
Re: Maybe not extinction... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not really government per se that is the problem, it's concentration of power. Concentration of power pretty much always leads to bad outcomes, be it in the public sphere or private. So as it turns out the conservatives are right, big government is bad, but it also turns out the liberals are right, big corporations are bad. Sadly, they're both too busy arguing to figure out that they agree on the underlying principle.
Re: Maybe not extinction... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, if you count deaths from malnutrition (overweight and starvation), lack of access to clean water and medication, etc. that balance tips in the other direction, and significantly so.
Re: Maybe not extinction... (Score:5, Funny)
Big corps are about 0.1% of the problem big governments are. Based on megadeaths in the 20th century.
Wait, are you suggesting that big government is responsible for 80's heavy metal?
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Without predatory capitalistic corporations which -literally- feed their children on the human misery that is receiving healthcare in the us, america would have universal healthcare. Lobbyists. One of the reasons that the parent comment is right and that all the ills of governement are indeed caused by corporations! (paraphrasing what im sure he meant :P)
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Really? Let's take social security. It would be okay if Grandma came and lived with you, right? Her meds are a bit on the expensive side but as you say, time will solve the problem...one way or another.
How about clean air and water? It took the EPA cracking the whip before the U.S. made an attempt to fix the problem. Of course capitalism and time would have solved the problem....eventually...maybe when no life could survive any longer.
Maybe we should let the FDA get out of the way and allow Joe's Bait and
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Re: Maybe not extinction... (Score:4, Informative)
I think I'll beg to differ, at least on the first sentence, at least on a matter of scale and influence. The second one is what I would term an 'issue in progress' - we won't really know the outcome for another five or ten years. Recognize that both sides of that question are corporate, so the sparring will continue for a long time.
I first used the Internet in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as I worked at companies that had DoD or research connections. At that time it was essentially email and file transfer, and it's quite possible that without commercial creativity, it might still be stuck there. Sorry this is long and digressional, but I enjoyed writing it, so there. :)
I acquired my first domain name in 1991, before the WorldWideWeb program - the program by Tim Berners-Lee, which ran on and was inspired by the NextStep system. Every program on the NeXT was capable of incorporating any form of media, including email with video and voice snippets, etc. WorldWideWeb fit right into the other similar programs on the NeXT - his real achievement was conceiving of the HTML language, which allowed (in theory) other computer systems to support similar capabilities. NeXT itself was inspired by SmallTalk, the Xerox Alto, and lessons learned in the Macintosh. Almost all of the above was done in commercial and academic research settings. Lee's own work was somewhat outside CERN's "real" purpose, and was allowed rather than driven by CERN - the closest thing to a government that I've mentioned. So nearly all of this was work being done for mostly commercial reasons (just as IBM Labs, Xerox PARC, and ATT Labs were commercial projects), but lived on top of the fairly mundane (from our point of view, today) vision funded by DARPA to ease data transfer between big mainframes at research facilities in support of rather vague defense related goals.
IMHO, without the commercial creativity and openness to finding new ways to get an advantage by improving the Internet, SendMail would be a lot simpler because it would still only support the two or three earliest mail protocols - it's possible that not even SMTP would have been invented, to clean up the email protocol problem. Government, in the form of DARPA, took the essential step of deciding to connect things together - this is a classic infrastructure initiative. And Al Gore, bless his little heart, did sponsor the bill to allow commercial use of the Internet. Before that, from my own experience, using the net was not easy, and having an actual presence on the net was hard and expensive. Getting a connection through some other company (see the history of UseNet) took weeks, and probably money - a 56Kbit line cost IIRC over $100/month in 1981 and a T-1 (1Mbit/s) was about $1500/month unless my memory fails me, plus you had to pay whoever you were connecting to. Getting a domain name took weeks after that, and depended on one guy, Jon Postel (RIP), to update his manually maintained list.
Nearly everything you know about the modern net, every protocol commonly used, every feature you depend on, is the result of capitalist innovation, not government projects. And I think this is a good example of how government and business - and not least academia and creative individuals (often with $ in their eyes) can each do what they do best. Some folks disagree but I think government is generally pretty good at building and maintaining highways, and providing the regulatory infrastructure that allows businesses to compete evenly without a race to the unsafe and dastardly bottom. And businesses, if not _too_ large, both benefits from that and provides the creative fluidity that makes things better. (From my view of systems theory, IMHO any market where any business has control of over about 20% of the market, and all but one have less than 12% or so, is essentially frozen and non-competitive. But that's another topic.) Neither is perfect, but over time I think we continue to converge toward a better situation - and whining about the problems is one of the most important factors in pushing that progress.
Re: Maybe not extinction... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh Yeah? Well in the 1970's and 80's I was using BBSs. Without any government or corporations we organized an email system called Fidonet because the design by committee ARPANET was taking too damn long. We used "best effort" packet routing too, store and forward via overlapping local calling areas.
I won't go into details because some things may or may not have been kosher with the FCC, but a country-wide free anonymous wireless mesh network based on the same community design is also possible. It's too bad that Shortwave radios require licenses, because we have channel hopping and spread spectrum tech now, and can drop the gain to match data rate to allow channel reuse. A real shame the government won't give the public at least a deregulated section of each class of signal to use -- Spectrum is a public resource. Using a similar system for routing that ARPANET and Fidonet used and incrementing "hop counters" we could have the network self organize better routes, and heal. Store and forward means you pull from peers, get free collocation, no centralized bottle necks. Free anonymous wireless mesh would certainly fall afoul of the FCC regulations and Pentagon anti-activism spying initiatives) which expressly forbid store and forward use over wireless. It would be another 10 years before Distributed Hash Tables would be invented largely to facilitate Software Piracy, much as piracy was a significant component of the BBS boom, and was directly responsible for the Demoscene and countless contributions to SIGGraph and their graphical tricks made their way from impressive "cracked by" scrollers to the video game Industry. [theguardian.com]
Now NASA has finally gotten on board and is working on protocols for the Space Internet: Delay Tolerant Networking -- Store and Forward. For the past 25 years we have had the technology to never have service fees for our online wireless data, but it is prevented because commercial interests would rather charge $1,638.00 per megabyte of text messages. You could buy your transceiver, and join the mesh. Bigger cache and antenna, faster connection. Point to point links could be organized by community ran non-profits just like Fidonet was (and still is ran in 3rd world countries, because your "commercial" and "government" interests don't give a damn about brown people). The more people downloading a resource? The MORE AVAILABLE it is -- No congestion issues. No "Slashdot Effect".
The Internet is a nice design but it wasn't the only game in town. Were it not for long distance fees and government oppression of wireless spectrum the Internet might never have come to be, and no one would be paying hundreds of dollars a month and getting bandwidth capped and overage charges and increased fees, AND content-provider protection racketed (see Netflix v Comcast "fast lane" BS). Bits are actually getting cheaper now than ever before, and the price they charge is increasing. The Web of Data Silohs is fucking moronic, and the folks who designed the centralized web were far from geniuses. [youtube.com] I have a whole garage full of innovative equipment that can revolutionize the way we use data: A Distributed File System (originally designed for the wireless mesh) and cross platform OS made from scratch to utilize the decentralized Internet / mesh to its fullest. Guess what? I'm scared to even show anyone because the corporate anti-competitive patent trolls.
The Internet's days are numbered. Store and forward means no spying on your browsing. The idea that a piece of "data" resides at a "URL" on a "Server" is fucking stupid. "Files" are just human readable names linked to a hash-code, on ZFS and BTRFS as it art in Bittorrent. The info hash can prevent link rot. "Websites" are unnecessary bottlenecks. Sign your content with your PGP key and let everyone have it, we never needed a centralized server system. The w
Re: Maybe not extinction... (Score:4, Informative)
In fact we learned today that the FCC is going to allow capitalists to fuck the internet up at least in the US.
Considering all the nice things I've heard about American ISPs, you already seem more buttfucked than the goatse guy. But I guess from now on you'll pay extra for lube.
Re:Maybe not extinction... (Score:5, Interesting)
One, they got to the moon even faster with Communism! Nobody ever invented fire for the first time in 200 years. That's a ridiculous argument.
Two, I don't know on what basis you claim capitalism started 200 years ago. In what sense was the Roman empire not capitalistic? Or the "barbarians" that opposed the Roman Empire? The Phoenicians are infamous ancient traders.
Fermi paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
answer: Space is really big.
A race could have populate half the galaxy's out there and we still wouldn't know.
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why would it last forever? Why would it be within our solar system?
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answer: Space is really big.
A race could have populate half the galaxy's out there and we still wouldn't know.
Space is big but time is also vast. A civilization that build Von Neumann machines could occupy the entire galaxy is half a million years, even with travel at rather slow speeds. [io9.com]
And such a civilization could have arisen any time in last billion years.
Re:Fermi paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they aren't possible? becasue they have populated the other half of the galaxy? becasue they don't need to grow that fast? becasue they have all been wiped out be a variety of event. Specifically wiped out faster then they can be built?
It's like getting a thimble of water from the ocean and asking "where are all the fish?"
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one tenth lightspeed is not slow at all, and in fact more likely to get a vessel destroyed as contact with the smallest pebble would be disaster. And Von Neumon starships have even more obstacles to their existence than life itself; it's one thing to have a creature with muscles and digestive system, another for a machine with a fusion motor in its butt needing tons of helium-3 or deuterium
Life itself is a Von Neumann machine... (Score:5, Interesting)
Life itself is the 'original' Von Neumann machines...
My theory on it is a bit different: If you posit that travel is indeed restricted to 'slow' speeds, IE 1-2% of light speed, and that habitable planets are rare enough that they're quite far apart, you run into that travel between solar systems with habitable planets can take sufficient time for significant amounts of evolution to take place.
Summary: By the time the generation ship manages to reach the new system, it's significantly likely to have evolved to be more suited to live in space, not a planet. At which point it concentrates on colonizing the asteroid belt and such, not bothering with the planet that so interested their ancestors.
Alternatively: We're becoming more and more concerned with conservation today. If this is a common function of intelligent life, our system could have been identified as a potential life-evolving one millions and millions of years ago and declared a nature preserve or something, in the hope that something like us would evolve.
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I agree with your logic as far as the nature of star populations goes, but there's been advanced land-based life on Earth for close to a billion* years. Dinosaurs kept mammals down for more than a third of a billion before we got a chance. Unless you're also arguing that intelligent life will necessarily require the same sort of treatment on any other planet, it seems like there's easily hundreds of millions of years where some intelligent variation of dinosaur could have evolved instead. Even if one of the
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What happened on Earth is telling for being the only known success story thus far, but it's a given that it has to take that long.
It's NOT a given. Whoops.
Mod parent up. (Score:2)
From TFA:
EVERYTHING that does not get off the planet it is currently occupying goes extinct. Planets die. Suns die.
Getting off the planet (and out of the solar system) is difficult because space is so HUGE.
The "paradox" depends upon a the assumption that a race COULD successfully colonize another solar system before they died / their planet died / their sun died.
Maybe that is possible. B
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They don't even have to do it before their planet/sun dies, so long as they leave before their planet/sun dies.
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Our one example hasn't really been around for very long though, all estimates of the Sun's life cycle indicates Earth should remain habitable for another billion years or more. Where were we even a thousand years ago? It doesn't matter if the technology isn't ready until 3014, it's still a blink of an eye on the time scales we're talking here. And there's already semi-realistic craft designs like Project Orion that'll take hundreds of years to reach the next star, not tens of thousands. Unless the world goe
Re: Fermi paradox (Score:2)
Exactly. We can barely detect planets never mind any kind of starship or technological civilization.
Maybe it's just us (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the inhabitants of those other planets aren't ravening imperialist douchebags. In that case, I'm liking our odds.
Consider Jack Handey's observation:
--Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts
First? (Score:2)
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Maybe we're just the first to develop?
Unlikely. As stellar evolution goes, ours is one of the later stars.
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Maybe we're just the first to develop?
Unlikely. As stellar evolution goes, ours is one of the later stars.
Yes but many of those earlier stars and solar systems didn't have the same complexity of elements
which may be necessary for life. It's possible only 3rd or 4th generation stars, etc... support life.
I also read recently that someone calculated the age of our dna based on a certain metric
and their number came out older than earth's age. If this is true then it gives credibility to the
panspermia theory. Another interesting observation based on the big bang is that the universe went
thru a brief period of tim
Re:First? (Score:4, Insightful)
Author doesn't understand Fermi's Paradox (Score:5, Interesting)
If Kepler-186f is teeming with intelligent life, then that would be really bad news for humanity because it would push back the Great Filter’s position further into the technological stages of a civilization’s development. This would imply that catastrophe awaits both us and our extraterrestrial companions.
No it wouldn't, because then Fermi's Paradox is solved - Fermi's Paradox exists because we Earthicans are, by all appearances thus far, the only life that exists, intelligent or otherwise. If the first exoplanet we manage to check harbors intelligent life, then it would suggest that there is a lot of intelligent life out there, and it is just effing hard to communicate and travel over interstellar distances.
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It wouldn't change the paradox at all. It would just strengthen the idea of the "great filter" or whatever, that basically states the *reason* for the paradox isn't because we are unique. Instead, the reason is because something filters out practically every species before they are able to colonize past their planet. So if Kepler-186f were to be "teeming with intelligent life" then we'd most likely be observing them before they have been filtered out (killed off) by something.
The link to the great filter
The Skynet Hypothesis (Score:2)
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I think we are capable of that without the assistance of artificial intelligence.
But are we willing to take that risk?
Hard to detect (Score:2)
A civilization would be quite hard to detect. The best chance is probably radio emissions, but even that has a fairly short practical limit. And it's noteworthy that our emissions are dropping today, as we increasinly use the spectrum for low-power digital systems rather than analogue "scream at the top of your lungs" broadcasts. It wouldn't be too far-fetched to imagine that we'd be effectively silent in another couple of generations, as we push toward more effective transmission technologies.
We could prob
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"but even that has a fairly short practical limit."
nope. Any signal that has ever broadcast anywhere and has had time to get here can be picked up, you just need a big enough antenna.
I did some research, and in order to pick up a TV level signal 100 light years away, we could built an antenna the size of Rhode Island in space.
That sound big, but if you could it out of small piece you can send and it can attach itself, we could do it for not much money every year. The great thing is we could just keep adding
I prefer "The Time Machine" view (Score:2)
I think we'll evolve into either Eloi or Morlocks. You're either the cattle or the meat eater.
Not Intelligent (Score:3)
The idea that Homo Sapiens is a form of intelligent life is ludicrous.
The proof that the Universe is inhabited by intelligent life is that it has not contacted us.
--Calvin
There are many filters (Score:2)
Most of our energy right now comes from old stores of energy which we have been extremely lucky to find, and which will either run out, or become too dangerous to use due to resource exhaustion.
Our behaviour can not cope without scarcity. Look at Australian aboriginal people. Placed in an environment with relatively low scarcity, their culture collapsed. In the next hundred years automation will push large parts of our populations out of work. There will still be food and shelter for them, but will those pe
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Our behaviour can not cope without scarcity.
Nonsense. People often become nonviolent in societies that one, have adequate amounts of food, two, have adequate amounts of water, and three perceive themselves as isolated from attack. For example, the Tahitian men, the Minoan men on Crete, and the Central Malaysian Semai were nonviolent during the period in their history when all three of these conditions prevailed.
The flaw in the Fermi Paradox (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: The flaw in the Fermi Paradox (Score:2)
Not to mention that even if they were in the solar system they wouldn't necessarily be in a form we'd recognise as life. The premise of the Fermi Paradox seems very simplistic to me, as if aliens would just turn up in flying saucers and be humanoids. You only need to look at how diverse life is on one single planet to imagine how utterly different an alien could be to us.
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It's not about communicating with other civilizations, or even about directly observing them. Life could very well be different from us, but unless it thrives in dark matter, we should be able to observe the side effects of any civilization that has had enough time to explore the galaxy. Stuff like dyson spheres, etc.. More importantly, any such civilization would have eventually come to our little neighborhood and done things like harvest out planets.
The reason that's even on the table is because the ti
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Maybe technological civilization doesn't last long (Score:4, Insightful)
There's about 5,000 years of recorded human history. But there's only about 200 years of industrial civilization. It's been just about 200 years since the first time a paying customer got on a train and went someplace. Think of that as the beginning of large-scale deployment of powered technology.
It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that human activities started making a big dent in planetary resources. By now, we've extracted and used most of the easy-to-get resources. There's argument over how long it will take to run through what's left, but it's not centuries, and certainly not millennia. More difficult and sparser resources can be extracted, but that's a diminishing-returns thing.
It's quite possible that high-power technological civilization only has a lifespan of a few hundred years before the planet is used up. We might be saved by the Next Big Thing in high-power technology, but there hasn't been a major new energy source in 50 years. Nobody can get fusion to work, and fission is riskier than expected.
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Another theory (Score:2)
What if by the time a race has evolved sufficiently that they have mastered all technology, they simply enter another dimension to escape being destroyed by their star's death?
Physics seems to be saying there could be as many as 11 dimensions, possibly more.
Maybe you only need to exist at right-angles to this one to escape any devastation coming and maybe then energy/resource needs become a non-issue.
No need to exit the solar system then and you're effectively undetectable...
The universe is probably teeming with life, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
We've seen fossils of simple (prokaryotic, bacterial) life that are at least 3.8 billion years old. Basically the instant it became possible for single-cell life to exist, it did. That suggests that simple life is *easy*.
It took evolution roughly a billion years to produce eukaryotic life, suggesting that step is hard. It also took 2 billion more years to produce a eukaryotic lifeform capable of space flight, suggesting that step is also hard.
The sun is predicted to make life on earth impossible in roughly ~1 billion years. An oops anywhere earlier in the process, and evolution wouldn't have had time to recover. We're lucky to exist.
So my suspicion is that the universe is relatively teeming with simple life anywhere it is possible (there are tentative signs that there *might* be life on Mars and possibly Titan too) but complex life is much rarer, rare enough that it's not surprised we haven't found any yet.
Also, wanting to communicate and explore is inherently a human desire, and whatever neo-human-cyber-whatever descendants emerge from the Singularity might not have the same desires. And I can predict their desires much more accurately than I could an aliens.
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We've seen fossils of simple (prokaryotic, bacterial) life that are at least 3.8 billion years old. Basically the instant it became possible for single-cell life to exist, it did. That suggests that simple life is *easy*.
It took evolution roughly a billion years to produce eukaryotic life, suggesting that step is hard. It also took 2 billion more years to produce a eukaryotic lifeform capable of space flight, suggesting that step is also hard.
Since we only have one data point, all of this is basically a guess though. Maybe it doesn't take a billion years to produce eukaryotic life - maybe it's really quite fast, but the conditions just weren't right for a long time and that held it back. Get another planet with more suitable conditions and you might be talking millions instead of billions of years. My point is that we just don't know because we don't have enough data to tell the difference between low probability and high probability events.
The Nature of the Fermi Paradox (Score:5, Informative)
The core of the Fermi Paradox is that there does not appear to be any basic physical limitation that would prevent an intelligent civilization from colonizing the entire galaxy in much less than a 100 million years - yet there is no case that can yet be made that Earth is anything like a boundary case of the "earliest possible biosphere". It is not a solution to the Fermi Paradox to postulate reasons why one intelligent species or another might fail to do so, it has to apply to every one of them since one outlier would go on to colonize the galaxy.
I think part of the resolution of the paradox is the implicit notion common to us humans that our form of tool-using symbolic-communicating intelligence is some sense "inevitable" and will arise given enough time. Yet observing the evolution of the large animals on Earth does not give any reason for thinking this is some sort of normal progression. The Great Apes, very similar to hominids, have not shown any trend toward evolving larger brains since the hominid-ape split 7 million years ago. No general trend toward developing human style intelligence is evident anywhere. The emerging story of hominid development is that a long series of lucky accidents seems to have been necessary to bring it about.
Human-style intelligence may be extremely unlikely to evolve at all.
How great is your filter? (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if the "Great Filter" exists; even if it were 99.999% effective at wiping out civilizations, that would still mean there have been billions of years, for billions of civilizations to arise, and of those billions, perhaps tens of thousands survived to colonize space.
This is why I believe in the Zoo Hypothesis.
Re:How great is your filter? (Score:4, Informative)
If you read about the "great filter" then you'd find out that the big question isn't what that filter is, but WHERE it takes place. Is it the step from single-cell to multi-cell organism? Is it the rise of special intelligence? Part of the warning with the great filter idea, is that since there seems to be no observable evidence (directly or indirectly) of any other species progressing past the point we are at, it stands to reason that the "filter" could in fact be very close at hand, either through some social thing like nuclear war, or something else like a nearby exploding supernova.
So either we have already passed the filter in one of the many earlier stages in our history, or it is yet to come. If it's yet to come, that's something we should be concerned about.
Sci-Fi has Asked this Question Many Times (Score:3)
In good sci-fi literature we see this come up again and again in many hypothetical scenarios. Ian Douglas answers the Fermi Paradox by positing a future where a galaxy-spanning race of hyper-darwinist xenophobes mercilessly wipe out any space faring "other" race much to humanity's horror when they stumble across ruins, relics, and artifacts left by other races.
In the Crystal Spheres by David Brin we see a future where all intelligent life is closed off from habitable worlds until they themselves become space faring, and humanity is among the first to reach the stars.
In To Outlive Eternity by Poul Anderson we see a possible scenario in which humans are first by design.
Peter F. Hamilton takes us through another possibility in the Night's Dawn Trilogy where intelligent life is fairly rare and what there is out there doesn't really have an interest in "lesser" forms.
In all, we won't know for sure for a long while yet, but I think there are some good possibilities out there. And until we actually do make contact or prove ourselves to be alone, good sci-fi keeps us company in the meantime =)
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That's just one more filter term though. How unlikely is it really, on a cosmic scale, to have a large Luna-like moon and Earth-like axial tilt?
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How unlikely is it really, on a cosmic scale, to have a large Luna-like moon and Earth-like axial tilt?
Well, if you start with a list of the list of large (say, over 1000-km diameter) planets and their moons [wikipedia.org] in our solar system, you'd expect such things to be fairly common. All the planets larger than ours have such big, round moons, and little Pluto has one with a 1200-km diameter. Uranus has an extreme axial tilt; all the rest are within 30 degrees of perpendicular to the system's plane. (Venus is a bit odd, though, since it rotates so slowly that it's usually listed as "retrograde", with the south pol
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we did 1.7 billion years of unicellular life, then 2.1 billion multicellular.....maybe even with moon and tilt the tendency is to unicellular life.
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No. They are two entirely distinct concepts.
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That's an interesting alternate God. Most conceptions of singular-God that I'm familiar with have him as a creative force, not a destructive force actively eliminating all life in the universe that does not lead to humans on Earth, like a cosmic bansai bush cultivator.
Re: Are AFRICANS capable of interstellar travel? (Score:2)
They managed to build huge fucking pyramids thousands of years before whitey managed to figure out how to make a house.
Re:Humanity is Sick and Twisted (Score:5, Insightful)
Incorrect. Evolution is sick, twisted, and blind. We deserve better. I believe we still have time to take control and become a better, post-human species.
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egomaniac much?
We deserves life, and the stars.
we crawled out of the ocean, we got out of the trees, we defeated every predator, we built towers of glass and steel, we have spanned great water ways, we have been to the moon, and we have a machine out side out solar system
We surely DO DESERVE the stars.
The stars are no place for pansies, quitters. The stars are for whom ever can grab them.
People content to live in a squalor with no motivation or goals, no curiosity, those subhumans done't deserve the stars.
"
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The stars are also fire.
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Death is what we deserve, and if we do not change, death is what should be for every man woman and child on this earth.
Don't worry, that is what every human, and every other living being, will get at some point. Even if we somehow get to the singularity and human minds can be implanted into machines (philosophically can we even be called human at that point anymore?) the heat death or collapse of the universe will destroy everything eventually anyway. And if anything ever counteracts human nature (you can't change it, but you can affect it), it would be spacetravel and contact with another intelligent civilization.
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There is some truth to this. I worry what happens when personal spacecrafts are available.
We are slowly "civilizing" the planet. Slave labor, pirates, etc.. are somewhat rare.
What happens when you can kidnap someone and create a slave camp on a random planet
millions of miles away? I hope we develop AI and other technologies first so that we can
prevent ourself from regressing once there are places to hide again.
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We deserve death.
Sure. You first.
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And if you think this is too harsh, you haven't studied our history like I have.
Through a pair of shit-tinted spectacles, apparently. It's a wonder historians aren't throwing themselves off bridges all the time, the way you paint it.
Or maybe you're just manically pessimistic.
Death is what we deserve, and if we do not change, death is what should be for every man woman and child on this earth.
So what are you doing about this apparently dire situation? Apart from posting admonishments on Slashdot?
Go play fetch with a dog in the park.
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While they would probably still be using radio waves, or at least EM radiation of some kind, for communication, they might be using them in such a way that we wouldn't be able to pick them up. For example, they might be using highly directional communications and spread spectrum signals carrying complex communications protocols that look like noise if you don't know exactly how to read them. That's not particularly far-fetched since that's what most of our telecommunications consist of now.