Astrophysicist Believes Technologically-Advanced Species Extinguish Themselves (sciencedaily.com) 435
Why haven't we heard from intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? wisebabo writes:
In the Science Daily article "Where is everybody? The Implications of Cosmic Silence," the retired astrophysicist Daniel Whitmire explains that using the principle of mediocracy (a statistical notion that says, in the absence of more data, that your one data point is likely to be "average"), that not only are we the first intelligent life on earth but that we will likely be the only (and thus the last) intelligent life on this planet... Unfortunately that isn't the worst of it.
Coupled with the "Great Silence", it implies that the reason we haven't heard from anyone is that intelligent life, when it happens anywhere else in the universe, doesn't last and when it does it flames out quickly and takes the biosphere with it (preventing any other intelligent life from reappearing. Sorry dolphins!). While this is depressing in a very deep sense both cosmically (no Star Trek/Wars/Valerian universes filled with alien civilizations) and locally (we're going to wipe ourselves out, and soon) it is perhaps understandable given our current progress towards reproducing the conditions of the greatest extinction event in earth's history.
That last link (reprinting a New York Times opinion piece) cites the "Great Dying" of 90% of all land-based life in 252 million B.C., which is believed to have been triggered by "gigantic emissions of carbon dioxide from volcanoes that erupted across a vast swath of Siberia." But if we're not headed to the same inexorable doom, that raises an inevitable follow-up question.
If intelligence-driven extinction doesn't explain this great cosmic silence, then what does? Why hasn't our species heard from other intelligent civilizations elsewhere in the universe?
Coupled with the "Great Silence", it implies that the reason we haven't heard from anyone is that intelligent life, when it happens anywhere else in the universe, doesn't last and when it does it flames out quickly and takes the biosphere with it (preventing any other intelligent life from reappearing. Sorry dolphins!). While this is depressing in a very deep sense both cosmically (no Star Trek/Wars/Valerian universes filled with alien civilizations) and locally (we're going to wipe ourselves out, and soon) it is perhaps understandable given our current progress towards reproducing the conditions of the greatest extinction event in earth's history.
That last link (reprinting a New York Times opinion piece) cites the "Great Dying" of 90% of all land-based life in 252 million B.C., which is believed to have been triggered by "gigantic emissions of carbon dioxide from volcanoes that erupted across a vast swath of Siberia." But if we're not headed to the same inexorable doom, that raises an inevitable follow-up question.
If intelligence-driven extinction doesn't explain this great cosmic silence, then what does? Why hasn't our species heard from other intelligent civilizations elsewhere in the universe?
time and distance scaling (Score:5, Interesting)
As has already been demonstrated by the permian extinction event, the biosphere can take a hell of a hit, and life will go on.
I think that you really have to understand timescales here. A 100 million years is a long time, just like space is big, really big. So that's a long damn time, and life will go on. intelligent life, maybe not so much.
as for why we haven't heard from anyone, why isn't the simple answer not the best ?
Remember how space is really big ?
if there's no FTL travel, and it's likely there is not, then HOW would we hear from someone ?
It would be an exceedingly difficult thing for the intelligent civilization in the Andromeda galaxy to talk us, and us to them.
First of all, there's the 2,000,000 year latency, and then the amount of power you would need to transmit that signal, etc...
I'm not worried. There's intelligent life elsewhere in the verse. I'm pretty sure we're not going to hear from them any time soon, if ever.
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Also,the Sentient Quotien [wikipedia.org]
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More likely they destroyed themselves. I look at the insanity on this planet and I'm pretty sure that nuclear war is inevitable. When it was 3 nations it was controllable. Now we have nations like Pakistan, North Korea and Iran. How long before Syria, Venezuela, Somalia. Once building a nuke was a challenge requiring SuperPower status. Now it just requires maniacal determination.
Re:time and distance scaling (Score:4, Insightful)
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Maybe not. But it's possible that it will. I'm sure life will go on but humanity may not.
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It's probable radionucides released into biomes from our experiments and accidents from nuclear power will alter the genome of humanity and increase the prevalence of transgenic disease over time, along with pregnancies that fail to come to term.
Societies need energy and the fact that some materials are fissionable as a source of energy raises the possibility that other species in the galaxy may go through this phase as well. If we consider that fissionable materials have the capacity to alter DNA in a rea
Re:time and distance scaling (Score:5, Interesting)
More likely they destroyed themselves. I look at the insanity on this planet and I'm pretty sure that nuclear war is inevitable. When it was 3 nations it was controllable. Now we have nations like Pakistan, North Korea and Iran. How long before Syria, Venezuela, Somalia. Once building a nuke was a challenge requiring SuperPower status. Now it just requires maniacal determination.
If we fired off every single nuclear weapon ever built - every nuke in all of the world's arsenals - we couldn't come vaguely close.
At most, with perfect targeting of population centers and no evacuation before hand, we might lose as many as a billion people. Which is a lot, but that would leave about six billion people to pick up the pieces. And yes, that includes ALL weapon effects, from the initial blast to fires to fallout.
Even assuming that another billion would die from starvation and other indirect effects (a massive overassumption), you're still looking at a surviving population greater than the Earth's population in the early 1990s.
The ultra-silly gloom-and-doom scenarios like "Nuclear Winter" have long since been disproved (their catastrophic models were too simple, and made some crazy assumptions).
I know it's fun to pretend that "if you don't listen to us, everyone's GONNA DIE," but it's just not happening. We're not anywhere near powerful enough to manage it.
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If we fired off every single nuclear weapon ever built - every nuke in all of the world's arsenals - we couldn't come vaguely close.
Exactly. There have already been thousands of nuclear detonations on the planet. Someone will reply with the "all at once" argument, but while a nuclear winter will suck, we've got clothing and canned foods. Some humans will absolutely survive.
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Most people in the technologically advanced nations, that is.
About 90% of the planet would do just fine.
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well said, this is the right answer plain and simple
intelligent life is rare and the universe is big...asked and answered...next question please!
Re:time and distance scaling (Score:5, Interesting)
First, a complete lack of evidence on a large scale of anything we'd expect to see. We have some pretty concrete ideas about construction of megastructures, such as Dyson spheres, the more plausible Dyson swarms, stellar engines (where the Class A version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine#Class_A_.28Shkadov_thruster.29 [wikipedia.org] is essentially doable if one has enough material and doesn't require any exotically strong materials or the like), and many more. But we don't see any signs of any of those. And most of those will *last* for very long times once constructed. And we have searched for them both here http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm [fnal.gov] and in other galaxies. In a similar context, we've looked for signs of K3 civilizations in about 100,000 galaxies and found essentially no signs of them https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.03418 [arxiv.org].
The second problem is that if a species does survive even a relatively small amount of time, it should be able to spread throughout a galaxy. Yes, galaxies are really big, but the space is not as big as the time available. For example the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across. That means that if a species starts on one end and travels spreading throughout planets at around 1% of light speed (which certainly looks doable) then it takes around a 10 million years for them to spread throughout. That's a tiny amount of time. But we don't see any signs of anything like that.
So there really does seem to be some sort of Great Filter or series of Filters, and the question is whether it is early (e.g. life is hard to arise or intelligence arises rarely) or late (civilizations wipe themselves out). And if it is the second, then we need to figure out what is going on since we don't get a do-over.
Re:time and distance scaling (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, maybe those mega-structures aren't really feasible -- and if they are, they aren't practical or economical. Maybe most life evolves around brown dwarf stars that won't burn out 'til near the end of the universe, and so the life on planets around those stars sees no reason to ever leave the nest. They have everything they need and decide to keep to themselves.
Maybe there's life everywhere, but their communications are point-to-point lasers or some other method we just can't detect.
Spreading life from one star system to another at sub-light speeds would mean generational ships, cryostasis, robots, and/or artificial wombs for incubating frozen zygotes. Maybe it's just not worth it for other civilizations to even bother -- at least until their sun is about to go nova... and even then, it's a huge, possibly enormously expensive risk, and politically... who gets to get on that life boat exactly? Maybe their philosophy, politics, or religion would prevent them from abandoning their dying world.
The fact is -- we really don't know what we're looking for and haven't been listening for long enough to have any idea of what we may have missed. Surely civilizations rise and fall without us ever knowing. We've only been broadcasting ourselves for the past couple centuries out of the 4-5 billion years life has been on our planet. There's always the possibility that we are the first civilization in our corner of our galaxy (someone had to be first!). But there's billions of galaxies... and we can barely detect things in a small radius from our location in our own galaxy.
We really don't have any data to work with. It'd be nice if we'd start sending probes to nearby star systems so that in a few thousand years, we'd know if any of them harbored life of some sort.
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And there are lots of things that one wants to do that just require a lot of energy, including some megastructures such as large-scale computing systems. And it requires that every single species out there decides not to. Every single one making t
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Because life, at least from the baseline we have on our planet, tends to expand exponentially. It's the only way for a species to grow and safe-guard its numbers. If two parents have exactly two children, never more and never less, that's stagnation and it only takes one OOPS! before the numbers drop.
As life expands, space requirements increase. Therefore you inevitably end up having to build bigger. YOU try fitting the world's population across the globe in huts, one per person or family, and still have ro
Re:time and distance scaling (Score:4, Interesting)
Because life, at least from the baseline we have on our planet, tends to expand exponentially.
Using our own planet, it appears that once a culture reaches a certain level of advancement, it may not continue to expand. Look at Japan. The US would likely be stagnant if it wasn't for immigrants. The EU is similar. What happens when and entire planet gets to the level of first world nations, or more advanced? Once the cultural pressures of getting married and having children subside, will the population continue at these rates?
Look at how diverse life is on our planet. It's probably more so else where. Ant and bees have extremely different societies from humans. Or coral colonies. Just think if a species breed only by division. What if the offspring retain all of the memories of their parents? What if their lifespan was only 5 years? How much different it would be if a species lived 10 or 100 times as long as we do. Perhaps most species that evolved off of this planet aren't as curious as we are, or aren't as aggressive as humans. Hell, our ancestors could have evolved on another planet with several other intelligent species and they decided that we were too damn aggressive and banished us here. Who knows.
WTF happened in the Ceti Alpha system?! (Score:3)
I guess it's time to bring this up. I have been waiting a many years, but I think the day has arrived.
Ceti Alpha Six exploded?! And everyone just glosses over that and accepts it?! WTF. Planets don't just explode. But this one did? Uh huh. Why? How? What happened?
"The shock shifted the orbits?" WTF. I'm supposed to believe that not only did a planet explode (how?!) but there was a shockwave through the medium of space .. ? .. and it travelled across interplanetary distances losing energy at inverse-square
A Civs End Game (Score:2)
I don't see any end game for an advanced sentient species outside of a matrix like existence. Why keep living in this imperfect universe and spend the vast amounts of resources providing luxuries to people, colonizing planets and the like when everyone can just be plugged into a computer and live in the world they want with very few resources used? Exponential growth after that is not at all the type of growth that would be noticeable by us.
Re:time and distance scaling (Score:5, Interesting)
Not necessarily. It's a matter of economics. Sometimes it's cheaper to waste energy than spend resources on efficiency. If fuel is relatively cheap, then efficiency may not be worth the added cost.
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Just within our own galaxy, it's the height of arrogance to assume that any planet in the Milky Way would be able to detect our signals and decide to send a response in the time that we have been capable of detecting signals. Maybe they decided that we weren't actively trying to communicate, and ignored us. Maybe they detected us as a WOW! signal and haven't gotten around to deciphering the origin.
That we would be a first priority for anyone remotely close, to decipher and send a response, is a stupid ass
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Not only that, but the inverse square law means that if we get so few photons arriving from something as massive as a star, we won't be getting much from something as puny as a planet...
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And if they did arrive they'd probably be encrypted and look like background radiation.
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And if they did arrive they'd probably be encrypted and look like background radiation.
Compressed data also looks random.
Re:time and distance scaling (Score:5, Interesting)
if there's no FTL travel, and it's likely there is not, then HOW would we hear from someone ?
You say that, but that totally invalidates what you said prior to that.
A 100 million years is a long time
The Andromeda galaxy is only 780 kpc from us. At 99% the speed of light, that's only 2.5 million years. On a scale of 100 million years, that's totally doable multiple times over. That's the huge mystery of the Fermi paradox. Given medium time scales like G-type main sequence stars lifetimes, alien life has had enough time to hop between the big three galaxies in our local group and do a fly-by of the main stars in all three as well.
if there's no FTL travel, and it's likely there is not
Yeah, it's insanely likely that FTL is just sci-fi forever. I personally think anything higher than 90% c is just non-doable. So look back at the last paragraph in my comment. Say we slow everyone down to just 10% c. At 10% c, you can hop from one side of the Milky Way to the other in just a million years. Get to Andromeda in just 25 million years. That's still really short time spans. You could fly to Andromeda, send a message back and the sun still wouldn't have entered it's next phase, one billion years from now compared to 27 million years for what I just described.
First of all, there's the 2,000,000 year latency, and then the amount of power you would need to transmit that signal, etc...
All of those are insanely small scale issues, they're big things to us because we lack the ability to even fly to another planet, but if you're the type of society that can fly at 10% c, those are pretty simple tasks that might take 10k years to build a generator, 15k years to build the transmitter, etc. They just seems like big deals because we're nowhere near that kind of specie.
So millions of years is not a huge amount of time. But more importantly, becoming a traveler of the stars means you don't hold on to where you came from. You travel to Andromeda, that's who you are now. You don't have strong ties to Earth anymore, you're a seed of life, not an explorer. Humanity still clings to this notion that once we start, if we start, traveling the stars that we'll for some reason still treat Earth as this special place that we need to come back to or at the very least report back to. We might send a message, but after that, those humans are now their own thing. The idea of sending people to other planets isn't to save Earth, it isn't even to save our species because more than likely after a few thousand years on a different planet your DNA is going to change vastly. It's to save intellect, to keep the thinking/feeling part of the Universe going. As far as we know we're the first/only part of the universe that's got the thinking attribute and maybe just like how supernovae spread heavier elements, we need to get our butts in gear to start spreading this attribute across the galaxies (just the local group, the idea that we'll ever make it out of the local group is not even real with any kind of advancement). But that's just my take.
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So you think there is a possibility that a technologic advanced civilization can build a machine that runs for 25 million years
Yeah. Seeing how a proton can be stable for trillions upon trillions of years, I think that it is indeed possible to build atomic scaled machines that can last for a millionth of that scale. Especially in places of the universe where the dominating thing you'd be running into would be dark energy and photons, with the random hydrogen/helium nuclei every twenty to fifty thousand years.
Additionally, the machine wouldn't really need to run for 99% of the trip. Additionally, you could use radioactive half-li
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The Sun is getting hotter, there is nothing to say that this big extinction event won't be the last. Sooner or later Earth will end up like Mars or Venus, looks like it could actually be sooner since we don't have enough self control not to over reproduce and we seem to be hellbent on digging every bit of fossil fuel out of the ground and burning it. And that's not the worst of it, a slight temperature increase will lead to massive methane releases. Scientists are failing to tell us how much shit we're in.
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4. No species that gratuitously advertises its own existence is an intelligent species. The galaxy is probably full of species that, being aware of the possibility of other intelligent species out there, are trying to keep their heads - oops, I mean their sensory-organ-leading-edges down.
Obvious answer (Score:3, Insightful)
The universe is just too big to hear anyone else.
Standing on the shore in Spain you couldn't hear anyone shouting from Hispaniola, yet when Columbus landed there he found loads of people. Space is a hell of a lot bigger than the Atlantic Ocean and relatively any radio signal we can send is quieter than the man screaming on the beach in our example. So quit it with the all life will destroy itself pessimism.
Re:Obvious answer (Score:5, Insightful)
The universe is just too big to hear anyone else.
Standing on the shore in Spain you couldn't hear anyone shouting from Hispaniola, yet when Columbus landed there he found loads of people. Space is a hell of a lot bigger than the Atlantic Ocean and relatively any radio signal we can send is quieter than the man screaming on the beach in our example.
This.
People just really don't understand the enormity of the universe. There could be lots of life out there but all of it is simply too far away. Even if they have invented some sort of Star Trek-style faster-than-light technology, it would take them hundreds or thousands of years to reach us. Which is unlikely since they don't even know that we exist. Any radio signals that we have sent won't reach them for a few thousand more years.
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Space is big,
Space is dark,
It's hard to find
a place to park.
(D, Adans)
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That would be D. AdaMs - my eyes are getting tired.
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> Standing on the shore in Spain you couldn't hear anyone shouting from Hispaniola, yet when Columbus landed there he found loads of people.
excellent analogy
Space is big. (Score:3)
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
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In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
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Your phone doesn't get anywhere without another phone at the other end and a whole lot of infrastructure in between.
Radio signals only travel so far before they're too weak for us to differentiate from the background noise, especially when we don't know what we're looking for.
TIME is V A S T (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only is space incomprehensibly vast, but so is time. 16 billion years sounds easy to say, but if an intelligent species only broadcasts "clear", identifiable uncompressed unencrypted radio for ~100 years, then we have only 1 in 160 million chances of finding them with something like SETI.
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It's even worse than that, the signal has to be in some form of format that differentiates it from background noise, on a frequency that we are monitoring, and strong enough to hear. So it's not just about the narrow time frame it has to have been sent in to reach us, and for us to have received it, there's also the exact method of sending, and a signal strength that raises it above the noise floor.
Unfortunately I agree that there's a high risk that any intelligent species would wipe themselves out. We kno
Umm, okay then (Score:3)
So by these principles of mediocrity is all civilised life also bipedal, with two eyes, two arms, and five digits on each extremity?
Civilizations, I'd understand. (Score:4, Interesting)
Across several million years, yeah the bulk of large civilizations may just fall to entropy of some crucial resource they can't build past. ...but with sufficient civilization, you'd create artificial intelligences and artificial life.
Those would scale far better over time, and would be far less vulnerable, and across millions of years would be nigh-innevitable.
Even if they're just existing as spores that hop from star-orbit-to-asteroid-to-star-orbit, they'd build up to an enormous mass over time, and be able to try an enormous number of strategies for continuing existence through networking.
The artifacts and legacy of civilization should stand a much greater chance of returning communication over time than just civilization alone.
But perhaps to those creatures, we're the common noise that they have learned to ignore.
Ryan Fenton
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>>Why do you always include your name in your posts? (Just curious ...)
What's the point of an automatic signature?
That's like an artist using a stamp instead of writing their name/initials. Not that I'm an artist - but I like a little personal touch if I'm going to bother doing anything.
I also like to remind folks there's a real person there.
Nothing huge - just a little earnestness in an ocean of anonymity. I won't be here forever, and earnestly seems a better way to live life.
Ryan Fenton
50 years ago, the speculation was the same. (Score:5, Informative)
Do you still use AOL Instant Messenger? (Score:5, Interesting)
We're using AIM and we assume if people have internet connection then they must also use AIM. If we see no one on AIM then there must be no one else with an internet connection.
I'm with the theory that we're just at the beginning of life in this part of the universe. 13.7 billion years from the Big Bang. Multiple generations of star formation and death before getting to our Sun. Then another 4 billion years before complex life. Sounds like it takes awhile for intelligent life to get started.
Re:Do you still use AOL Instant Messenger? (Score:4, Insightful)
But we don't really understand why WE developed intelligent life.
Why didn't the dinosaurs? There could have been intelligent life (in the sense of tool use, construction etc.) a quarter billion years ago, but as far as we can tell there wasn't. There was only semi-intelligent life (in the sense of mobility, family structures etc. compared to plant and microbe life, ie. animals).
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Why didn't the dinosaurs? There could have been intelligent life (in the sense of tool use, construction etc.) a quarter billion years ago, but as far as we can tell there wasn't.
Was there much evolutionary pressure on the dinosaurs to develop intelligence? Perhaps sharp teeth, impressive sizes, and/or thick skin was sufficient to keep them reproducing (up until their extinction, anyway). Evolution doesn't seem to care much about optimizing any further than "good enough to reproduce".
They are out there..... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:They are out there..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Survival is tough and ugly. Violence didn't start with humans, not by a long shot. Species have been killing each other since the beginning of life on earth.
I suspect that if there is life elsewhere, survival is just as hard for those life forms, leading to just as much violence.
It's rare and the universe is big (Score:5, Insightful)
They just aren't there! Why can't people of science accept this?
It's sometimes called the Rare Earth Hypothesis [wikipedia.org] but KS Robinson really explains it well in his Mars Trilogy books.
Basically the theory goes that lower level life may or may not be 'common' in the universe, but intelligent life is so rare that given distances and the speed of light and whatnot we just probably won't ever encounter each other.
It's elegant and explains everything and should be the accepted theory in exobiology (if it isn't already) until evidence proves otherwise.
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The funny thing is that by the end of the series, humans were becoming interstellar.
They had "the treatment" that gave humans lifespans of at least 300 years (and based on the trends in the book concerning Sach's memory treatment) it might stretch to double or triple that.
They had mastered fusion energy in a portable format, giving them the ability to put it in spacecraft.
And Jackie had joined a group traveling to a nearby star system in a hollowed out asteroid to a human-habitable planet.
If humans managed
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I *think* the author touched on this in the text (maybe in one of the 'in universe' scientific papers in the index?).
I think the jump to a new star is huge, but the jump to another galaxy is just sort of beyond anything we can rationally predict given the advances in tech to do such a thing. We'd have to have some kind of 'time ship' like in ST:Voyager to visit another galaxy and report anyt
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Even in Star Trek, crossing the entire galaxy is a big deal and other galaxies aren't even really possible.
Re:It's rare and the universe is big (Score:4, Informative)
They just aren't there! Why can't people of science accept this?
They don't accept it because it's just a hypothesis, and although it is reasonable, it is just one of many hypotheses that explain the current evidence.
In the absence of further evidence, there will be no way to tell which of the hypotheses is correct, and choosing one prematurely isn't helpful.
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Good feedback.
In response I'd say let's compare to Physics theories that are "just a hypothesis" that have weaker evidence yet treated as fact. I think that *comparatively* we have more reason to think "they aren't t
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Our primitive, brutish nature is probably the reason we got to space in the first place. There could be lots of intelligent life out there, and they could be too intelligent for their own good. You can see a similar trend on Earth with the tree huggers/etc. L
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I don't see any evidence that humanity progresses faster through war.
Just because some technology was advanced by war necessity doesn't mean it's the only or best way at all.
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As for why scientists can't accept the idea of "they simply aren't there," i imagine a great deal of it is the incredibly small probability of us being the only one considering not only how incredibly vast the universe is, but what's shaping up to be how many planets are out the
The Great Silence (Score:2)
Actually, we're red-zoned because we alone of all the intelligent species in the galaxy got the definitions of "male" and "female" backwards, and they're afraid we'll have a massive cognitive meltdown when we find out.
neanderthals (Score:3)
Galactic internet vs crystal radios (Score:5, Insightful)
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"...and to all you others out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together!"
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Silly (Score:5, Interesting)
If intelligence-driven extinction doesn't explain this great cosmic silence, then what does? Why hasn't our species heard from other intelligent civilizations elsewhere in the universe?
Distance. Distance in space, which renders actually finding another civilization impossible. And distance in time. Any number of civilizations might have already risen and fallen, or will after we are gone. The universe is very very big, and very very old. To expect everything to happen in the instant we are around and aware is quite short-sighted.
Our one data point (Score:3)
It seems a bit early to write off humanity as extinguishing itself. Yeah, so we've heated up the planet, and we put trash where it doesn't belong. But excesses do tend to undo themselves, as we can see with even China and India starting to curb emissions. Survival is a powerful instinct, and it hasn't been exhausted just yet.
We could prevent the Great Dying (Score:5, Insightful)
Our technology is to the point where we could prevent a recurrence of the Great Dying. All you have to do is unshackle your mind from the popular notion that the only solution to CO2 emissions is passive (reducing emissions via renewable energy sources).
CO2 (and water) are popular end-products for exothermic chemical processes (e.g. burning gasoline, cellular respiration) because it sits at an extremely low energy potential [wikipedia.org]. That is, chemical processes which result in CO2 give off a lot of energy. To reverse the process, you have to put a lot of energy into the CO2 to break apart the carbon and oxygen atoms.
If you have sufficient energy, you can actively drive that reverse process. Plants do it via photosynthesis, driving it with energy from sunlight. We could do it with nuclear power - generating massive quantities of electricity (more than can reasonably be obtained from solar, wind, hydro) to decompose CO2 [acs.org]. Generating sufficient power to offset volcanic emissions of CO2 would be incredibly expensive, but given the alternative (extinction) we're technologically capable of doing it.
The same is true if this push for renewables as the only solution to global warming fails. If renewables can't be developed quickly enough to supplant fossil fuel energy sources and CO2 levels continue to rise, at some point we concede that renewables aren't arresting CO2 levels quickly enough. Then we'll be forced to switch to nuclear power to buy ourselves more time. This is why shuttering operational nuclear plants as Germany is doing is extremely short-sighted. Nuclear is our ultimate trump card. We want to keep it ready in our back pocket as a hedge in case renewable energy can't be rolled out quickly enough.
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The main problem with getting CO2 out of the atmosphere isn't energy but entropy. By far the biggest part of the atmosphere isn't CO2, but N2. O2 is also common. Together the two make up 99% of the atmosphere. So getting those CO2 molecules out means ignoring the vast bulk of molecules which aren't CO2. That's why prevention is more effective. If you prevent the formation of CO2, or you capture it after formation, you don't need to isolate it from the atmosphere.
That's why you'd want to use nuclear power to
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I don't think you've thought too much about the scale of your plan.
We're not talking about 100 nuclear-powered CO2-capture plants here. We're talking about hundreds of thousands to millions in order to do have any effect within a reasonable timeframe.
While it is likely we will actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere in the future, it's not viable to have this be the only thing we do.
Your idealism is showing (Score:2)
Maybe we haven't heard from other species because it is physically impossible to bridge the light-years gap. Maybe faster than light information transmission, let alone faster than light travel, is not possible. Maybe intelligent species appear, on-average, hundreds or even thousands of light years away from each other, and the chance of any two species being sufficiently close to overcome the distance problems is astronomically small. Physics seems to suggest that bridging such distances is virtually impos
Fastest to radio emission (Score:2)
Even if intelligent civilization extinct themselves, we should still see their TV broadcasts before their extinction.
One possible explanation is that earth-based life made it to radio-emitting civilization the fastest as possible, and no other civilization elsewhere made it sooner enough so that we could see their radio emission.
But unfortunately, that explanation is not incompatible with us extinguishing ourrselves.
Maybe civilization always grows inward (Score:2)
I think we're suffering a failure of imagination.
Perhaps our ability to modify ourselves is going to outpace our ability to get enough people off of the planet to keep our population in check (maybe 100 million per year or so?).
This will drive us to start modifying ourselves and our way of living to require less resources. Ultimately, that should end as a people with no physical bodies living in a virtual world far more fantastic than the real galaxy due to not having to follow laws of physics in its models
Why haven't we heard (Score:2)
Meat [terrybisson.com]
Don't agree with the one-per-planet notion (Score:2)
The atmosphere was different during the time of the dinosaurs. Maybe a raptor-decented intelligent race could have appeared ina few millions years if the meteor hadn't hit? I just think that it's impossible for one intelligent race to ruin a planet for other species to emerge. There could be some new species that emerges post-humans that will like the hot, CO2-rich, irradiated cinder we leave behind?
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It took a long time to get from the first cell to Aristotle. It took a lot of the planet's readily available resources to get from hunter-gatherers to the Information Age.
There likely isn't enough time left, and certainly not enough resources left, to allow for an equivalent technologically advanced intelligence to arise on this planet if we wipe ourselves out.
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Because 1/d^2, increased efficiency and time (Score:2)
We've been looking for RF transmissions. Those fall off at 1/d^2, so they're quickly going to fall to an intensity that is extremely difficult if not impossible to isolate from background noise.
Second, civilizations get quieter over time (assuming we're typical). Our massive analog TV and radio transmitters have been replaced with much weaker digital transmitters. The transition from our peak noise to our now much quieter noise took about 40-50 years. That's not a lot of time to be noticed.
In addition,
Oh hell. (Score:2)
Let's Look at the One Example (Score:2)
Our ability to detect civilizations is currently based on them producing high power omnidirectional radio signals.
Our own species, after a little more than a century of use, we are already increasingly abandoning that technology in favor of things like fiber optics and low power spread spectrum radio. It could be that intelligent civilizations aren't silent, they've just stopped using telecommunications we can easil
wrong field (Score:2)
When you ask a historian about biology, you get crappy answers.
Astrophysicists are not specialists in non-human life, non-human psychology, or anything else related to this.
Wrong scientific field means you get a stupid answer.
Explanation: 2nd law of biological evolution (Score:3)
In any viable biological system, intelligence evolves without bound.
Until it invents an internet, at which point it quickly drowns in its own vice and stupidity.
Re:intelligence (Score:5, Funny)
THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you."
"So ... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat."
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the Universe."
"That's it."
"
Re:intelligence (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a short film version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
they see us, they hear us. more than enough. (Score:5, Funny)
consider an advanced race on another planet eavesdropping on the Khardasians and the news. they want no part of us. enough said.
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consider an advanced race on another planet eavesdropping on the Khardasians and the news.
They can only eavesdrop because of broadcast TV and radio. But broadcasting doesn't make much sense, and is being phased out and replaced with cable and cellular. So perhaps most other planetary civilizations never make the "mistake" of broadcasting, and start with more efficient communications from the beginning. If so, we would never see them, but they would still be "out there".
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There is a lot to be said for diminishing signal strength over the distances involved and the difficulties of picking a dispersed signal out of background noise.
Also, we are only looking at a narrow band of spectrum called the water hole. [wikipedia.org]. AND we listen there because it is relatively quiet. The supposition is that will make it easier to get signals, but it could just as easily be that we are looking in the wrong portion of the em spectrum.
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exactly...other intelligent life isn't impossible at all, it's just extremely rare...rare enough that two intelligent species in the universe will probably never contact each other
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At present, human scientists are attempting to communicate outside our species to primates and cetaceans, and in a limited way to a few other vertebrates. This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap of at most a few SQ points. The farthest we can reach in our "communication" with vegetation is when we plant, water, or fertilize it, but it is evident that messages transmitted across an SQ gap of 10 points or more cannot be very meaningful. What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?
—Robert A. Freitas Jr
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Goatse.cx and tub girl are much preferable.
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I actually read TFA and it certainly seems to jump to conclusions about extinction. It's a big leap to say that, based on one incomplete data point, intelligent life is bound to destroy both itself AND its biosphere. (The one data point is of course us, and our civilization still exists, so there is no closure that demonstrates destruction, at least not so far.)
I thought the author might have been one of those self-hating we're-all-bad, we're-all-going-to-destroy-the-world types, but to be fair that's not t
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this guy sounds like a short signed moron.
Well, that explains it. He can only see a maximum of 32,767 light years away, or years into the future. That's certainly not enough for this topic, given the galactic scales involved.
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All advances in physics to date have been based on controlled laboratory observations. With relativity, our ability to make macroscopic measurements across the full range of velocities and energies is quite limited. While we can measure gravity waves and deflection of light, and make inferences based on the behavior of relativistic particles in cyclotrons and linear accelerators, what we have not been able to do is make a macroscopic measurement of
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Even if they are out there, that doesn't necessarily mean they've developed advanced technology. Technology requires an energy source. There's no reason to believe that a planet that evolved intelligent life also has easily available energy sources like fossil fuels on earth. There was plenty of intelligent life on earth in the 18th century, but it had no way to communicate with extraterrestrial life. If we didn't have an energy source like oil, it's likely we still wouldn't.
Re:We can reverse global heating in short time if. (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the gas producing establishment is too strong to push this solution
Uh...it would also cost several trillion dollars to do it on a sufficient scale to reverse climate change before it's pretty disastrous. That just might be a factor in this approach.
You need an absurd number of carbon-capture-factories built in a couple decades. That's not cheap.