Fermi's Paradox

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I pasted the last part of mining asteroids as a new thread about fermi's paradox> I pasted a bit too much,but it has application, as what we can possibly do is what the ET may do and conversely. Neil

Believe me, I'm an admirer of human advancement as well, and I believe we'll accomplish amazing things in the centuries to come, but there are certain things which we are not currently making much progress with, and stretching the bounds of acceleration is one of them.

We know how to push things, but we don't know how to make it cost effective in all cases.

And the light speed barrier is truely a barrier to us at this point. We don't have a clue yet how to get around it. We don't even have a hint of a methodology within physics for doing it, even on the drawing board.

Brandon9000

rosborne979 wrote:
...And the light speed barrier is truely a barrier to us at this point. We don't have a clue yet how to get around it. We don't even have a hint of a methodology within physics for doing it, even on the drawing board.

Forget the light barrier. We can't even get near a tenth of a percent of light speed.

Brandon9000 wrote:
Forget the light barrier. We can't even get near a tenth of a percent of it.

Well, I don't want to forget about it, it may be the most interesting and meaningful problem ever faced in human history. The ability to solve this problem would change the nature of reality for us.

Right now the Universe appears empty (of other technically intelligent life), but the Fermi Paradox tells us that's unlikely. So the other possibility is that it's full of technical intelligence, and that we don't see it for some reason. And that reason may be that there is another threshold of knowledge with is reached quickly in the technological realm whereby the manipulation of space and energy are not done the way we do it any more. (just speculation of course).

Why do you say that the Universe appears empty of "other" technically intelligent life? I would say that we have little information on the subject. First of all, regarding the word, "other," bear in mind that we're not visiting them, because we can't even put a man on the planets within our own solar system, much less someone else's. If you base this statement on the fact that we haven't been visited within reliably recorded history, you'd probably need to postulate a certain density of starfaring civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy, and then use that density to calculate the mean time between visits to a particular solar system, assuming a random uniform distribution.

rosborne979

Brandon9000 wrote:
If you base this statement on the fact that we haven't been visited within reliably recorded history, you'd probably need to postulate a certain density of starfaring civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy, and then use that density to calculate the mean time between visits to a particular solar system, assuming a random uniform distribution.

Yes, this has been done. Please allow me to introduce you to Fermi's Paradox: http://seti.astrobio.net/news/article105.html

I think you'll like it. It's a doozy

Check it out and let me know what you think. I did a thread on it back on afuzz a couple of years ago. Maybe we should start another one here on A2K.

Here is Fermi's Paradox in a mathematic form: http://xray.sai.msu.ru/%7Elipunov/text/ashkl/node3.html

Brandon9000

Brandon9000 wrote:
If you base this statement on the fact that we haven't been visited within reliably recorded history, you'd probably need to postulate a certain density of starfaring civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy, and then use that density to calculate the mean time between visits to a particular solar system, assuming a random uniform distribution.

Yes, this has been done. Please allow me to introduce you to Fermi's Paradox: http://seti.astrobio.net/news/article105.html

I think you'll like it. It's a doozy

Check it out and let me know what you think. I did a thread on it back on afuzz a couple of years ago. Maybe we should start another one here on A2K.

I'd like to see some of the technical papers that this gave rise to. I seem to recall that there are about 200 billion stars in this galaxy, and that about 2/3 of the planets (take that with a grain of salt, because I read it 35 years ago) are thought to have planets. Even given enough time to colonize a hundred billion worlds, would a society? This paradox could be answered by assuming, for instance, that there are 197 starfaring civilizations in the galaxy, and that none of them has yet reached a state of technology that makes colonization of more than a thousand worlds practical and desirable, even over millions of years. Maybe no society has retained the required level of technology for longer than 10 million years. It seems to me that there is a tremendous amount that could be said about Fermi's idea.

Brandon9000

rosborne979 wrote:
Here is Fermi's Paradox in a mathematic form: http://xray.sai.msu.ru/%7Elipunov/text/ashkl/node3.html

I don't understand how this is derived.

An interesting discussion from some of the experts in the field: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article242.html

rosborne979

There is. And it has been said. And still the paradox remains.

Before I confuse my thinking with facts from your link, let me say, Fermi perhaps did not imply that there are no advanced technical civilizations within a few light years: He challenged us to consider why we don't know about them. Consider the movie "Men in black" In this hypothesis the ET of a hundred different races are sharing our cities and culture but few humans are aware, as a skillful government agency is hiding the evidence and erasing our memories. Admittedly not highly probable, but dozens of other hypothesis are possible to explain away the Fermi paradox. Neil

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I don't think I can write an equasion/ mathematical model; but suppose the first star faring civilization arose in our galaxy d years ago. If d = 10 billion, they might have sent out s = 100 deep space generation ships, before they lost their advanced technology, e =7 of these establihed colonys that sent out one or more deep space generation ships a total of y = 40 Most of them comunicated so the technology avanced for some. At the end of one million years, there had been 1000 advanced colonys, half of which had sent out one or more generation ships or would some time in the next billion years, u =3 planets sent out 6200 just from the three of them; perhaps 7000 total for the first billion years.
By the present a trillion advanced colonys might have been estblished on ten billion planets including Earth. That is 100 advanced civilizations, average, per planet which seems strange, unless you realize the high tech civilization only lasts about 10,000 years on the average. That means for the planets that had one or more high tech civilizations, they had them for 0.1 % of the time. There may be a thousand times that many planets that did not get one advanced civilization in ten billion years. Many of them just fell though the cracks, had bad luck, did not choose the high tech option= live the simple life.
You can stick in different numbers make different assumptions, consider some different senarios such as solar systems that merge briefly would permit colonization over millions of miles instead of trillions of miles. In many of these I think you will find it is not surprising that we don't know about other high tech civilizations, in fact the present existance of 200,000 of them is quite low probability, even if there have been a trillion high tech civillizations in our galalaxy and 100 trillion low tech civilizations that did not make it to high tech again after they stepped off their space craft. Neil

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Give it around 40 more years then ask how far we have got.

Basically movement and distance and time are all bound up in how we see reality. For physicists its thru the eyes of Einstein's Relativity and / or Quantum Theory and / or String or M-Theory.

But get a break thru and our understanding of reality could be re-written in a heart beat. Hard and fast constants could be turned into parametres with a more advanced physics. Tap into the quantum world and you could discover miracles. So Einstein's physics prevents us from neatly going warp speed, until some new framework shows us doors to different realities with different or more flexible rules maybe...

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g__day wrote:

But get a break thru and our understanding of reality could be re-written in a heart beat. Hard and fast constants could be turned into parametres with a more advanced physics. Tap into the quantum world and you could discover miracles.

Yes, and this could be one answer to the paradox. It's possible that sufficiently advanced technologies choose to travel somewhere else, other than out into the stars of a relativistic desert. They may instead choose to travel down, into the sub-atomic, or "elsewhere".

But Fermi's Paradox is still strong, because all it would take is a single civilization, out of the thousands which are possible, to completely overun a whole galaxy in a tiny fraction of the time the galaxy has existed.

Even we are on the verge of being able to build Von Neumann self replicating machines (also called Universal Constructors), and we're just getting started. Since these are such an obvious candidate for infection of a Galaxy, it's a real mystery as to why our solar system isn't swarming with extraterrestrial Universal Constructors already. The fact that we don't see Universal Constructors is a large contributing factor to the Fermi Paradox.

See the following link on Universal Constructors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_machine
See the following link on Fermi Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

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Perhaps the plants, animals, even people of Earth are some advanced civilizations versions of universal constructors = Van Neumann self replicating machines? Neil

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neil wrote:

Perhaps the plants, animals, even people of Earth are some advanced civilizations versions of universal constructors = Van Neumann self replicating machines? Neil

A biological infestation of extraterrestrial origins? Possibly, but we can see where life on this planet has led; to us. And we are rapidly learning to build machines which will be used to explore other planets and out past the solar system. If we learn to build self replicating machines, and I believe we will, and if they get loose into an asteroid field with all those raw materials and if they have a bit of programming which tells them to expand their horizons, then there will be nothing to stop them from spreading through our galaxy. They will be relentless, and in only a few hundred million years our galaxy will be swarming with them. And each and every technologically inclined race in this galaxy would have had the same potential, many many millions of years ago. So why aren't we *already* swarming with them? Unless our situation is unique, or exceedingly rare, we should be.

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It is not very difficult to cloak if you are unscupulus and moderately cleaver and powerful. You collect the hard evidence that might expose your presence, substitute with less convincing fake artifacts, generate lots of far out disinformation = propaganda = fiction = lies. If you get caught red handed, you deny and claim you were framed and destroy the credibility of any effective witnesses that would be believed by the intelegencia. You have henchmen make thinly vailed threats and break the knees (or equivalent) of grandchildren to get the rare truth speakers to stop talking and recant. If necessary you kill to silence.
Some claim Bill and Hilary Clinton caused the death of 40 or so, more or less innocent people to reach a position of power, and cover numerous less than brilliant other cover ups. The conspiracy theorists are your friend as they make firm statements based on evidence they have not personally checked. This kind of certainty is obviously flawed in the minds of most of the intelegencia. The bottom line is we can be sure of very little and we are conceited to think we have sure knowledge on most subjects and most details. Neil

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How big is a Van Neumann machine as you picture them? One cubic centimeter, one cubic meter or one cubic kilometer? Suppose we have an average of ten on ten small asteroids in the asteroid belt. In each case they they have stopped replicating as they have exhausted the asteroid of some essenutal material and all practical substitutes. They can make a mostly new replica occasionally by cannibalizing one of their clones that are beyond ecconomical repair. Perhaps they can wait patiently for a million years, before atrophy destroys the ability of the last one to replicate? How versatile are these machines? Can they calculate the future position of a few billion asteroids in the asteroid belt so they can develop the ability to accelerate at one g or more for a few hundred kilometers when another asteroid passes that close at about one century intervals? Can they survive the even rarer collision with another large enough asteroid, and ride off on two or more pieces of sufficient size to resume replicating? IF they are on the planet Mercury, can they climb out of that deep gravity well to get anywhere else, unless one can stowaway on a human probe that will return to Earth? Are they smart enough to figure out that the human probe will go somewhere other than drift in space until the stowaway dies of atrophy? Can they survive the large temperature drop if they go somewhere far from Mercury? Neil

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But a more advanced physics might see distance and time as almost illusory. Bend the rules enough and you bypass all current restrictions.

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I would like to say that I - known as Wolf - was suddenly prevented from participating in this forum. This scandalously censuring was absolutely disgusting.

My account was deleted, password unaccepted, username taken, the works.

I was very critical of the Bush 'administration' in the politics forum, and I presented credible links and information on extraterrestrial visitations in the science forum.

The fact that I was censored is significant. And it shows to what extent information control has seeped into the internet.

To my censorers: shame on you.

Angrily,

very angrily,

Wolf

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I find that hard to believe, Wolf. I have seen very extreme positions on both sides stated in the Politics forum. I ought to know because some of them were mine. If there were censorship, I would have thought it would certainly have been triggered in that place before now. Were you given an explanation? Why don't you PM Craven and ask? Even though your opinions sound diametrically opposite to mine, you certainly have the right to say them. I have to believe that there was some other factor.

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Welcome back to able2 know, wolf: I rarely check out links, but a summary of the ET visitations, I will find interesting. Neil

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Fermi's Paradox

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