The Fermi Paradox

its kinda hard to not be an idiot when writing nucular.
Mine Is an ultimate goal for humankind, Intergalactic v intragalactic , meh.

Let's say for the moment that someday we find a way to connect different points in the Universe through another dimension, one which doesn't require us to travel through space-time at all, and therefor isn't limited by light speeds.

How would we define different points in the Universe that we wanted to connect? The surface of the earth rotates around its axis (at a pretty good speed), the earth revolves around the sun, and sun revolves around the galactic center and the entire galaxy moves through the Universe, and everything in the Universe behaves in a similar way. In such a dynamic and flowing space-time, how could any two points in ever be defined? Maybe two "ends" to the dimensional gate would have to be created and linked, but then you would have to travel to the first destination just to drop the second gate. And the initial trip would be limited by the light speed barrier.

If such "gates" were to exist it might be more productive to simply build them in space, give them a fusion power source and then a push and send them out in the direction you wanted to explore. If the gate were always powered, then you would be able to move to and from the gate instantly carrying the raw materials for more gates and leaving a trail of gates wherever you went. Expansion would still occur at sub-light speeds, but the gate trail would dramatically change the equation for colonization.

The only reason I point all that out is that we don't yet know what is possible for extremely advanced species. All we know for sure are the laws of physics which govern our understanding of the physical Universe, and the potentials for at least one form of biology.

If we were ever invaded by aliens with a hostile purpose, I see it going down in one of two major categories. I assume that their technology is far ahead of ours if they can get here at all, since we aren't even close to being capable of interstellar travel. The first category is that they attack us in more or less conventional ways, but with technology far ahead of ours. We scramble jet planes and fire missiles at them and miss every time. We nuke them and they barely notice. The second category is worse. They attack us in a way beyond our comprehension and we're just gone.

I like your kind of imagination; science at its best when ideas turn into reality.

The other possible form of "invasion" is one in which aliens show up and simply begin giving us anything we want for free... self sufficient houses, advanced cars that don't need fuel, food replicators, superior medicine capable of curing any disease or extending life by hundreds of years... our own standard culture and economy would quickly be overwhelmed by the new "goodies" and would eventually be subsumed into the new super-culture. We would become dependent on the new things very quickly. Ideas like this were covered by Clifford D. Simak in the novel "The Visitors", and by Charles Stross in "Singularity Sky".

This is a familiar scenario which plays out whenever one culture begins to interact with another, and in which one of the two is far more stable and dominant in reach.

I don't think it's possible for any two cultures to interact without changing each other to some degree. Usually the greater degree of change is in the "weaker" technology/culture, if for no other reason than simple attrition.

If we were to encounter an extraterrestrial race with superior technology, I doubt they would have to do anything more than interact with us in order to effectively overwhelm our existing culture.

Here's something new- to me. Don't know the source they drew the story from.

If you recall the old SciFi story "The Moat of the Gods". These "nodes" through which hyper light speed could be realized, were called "Alderson Jump Spots", which connected the Universe like a crystals lattice. My only question was .
"how the hell did they get a "jump spot map" set up? The story was not developed enough so as to give us a notion.

Maybe they had GPS to the stars.

If I remember correctly the Alderson drive and the Landiss field were part of The mote in god's eye. Niven and Pournell I think. A great book.

Best we get a wriggle on with intergalactic travel before all signs of other galaxies are imperceptible.

During the Sengoku, or warring states period of Japanese hsitory, roughly 1560-1600, several warlords attempted to conquer Japan. Oda Nobunaga took over the leadership of his clan. The Oda clan were nobodies, but Oda Nobunaga was brilliant, and able to think outside of his culture. He used firearms, while denying them to anyone else in Japan. He brought down the Ashikaga shogunate, but did not try to become shogun himself (which would have united the other clans against him). The Ashikaga shogunate had relied on Buddhist monks to run the bureaucracy, so Oda Nobunaga attacked their home monastery on Mt. Hiei, and then enlisted the survivors to fight for him. They helped him to defeat the powerful Ikko-Ikki Buddhist sect, depsite the support of Mori clan.

Oda Nobunaga was assassinated, and his successor proved unable to cope with the power he attempted to wield. There was a brief power vacuum. A companion of Oda Nobunaga from childhood, Matsudaira Motoyasu, who had changed his name to Tokugawa Ieyasu just before Nobunaga's death, began to quietly re-unite Nobunaga's forces, including the Sohei, the warrior monks, and he began to accumulate firearms. Like Nobunaga, he took the firearms, but outlawed christianity--he took what he wanted from western culture, and rejected what he saw as destructive of his native culture. In 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated his main rivals, and soon thereafter was asked by the emperor to take over the duties of shogun.

Tokugawa then clamped down on all western influences in Japan. Firearms were forbidden (except for an elite shogunal bodyguard, and cannons to defend Edo, now called Tokyo). Christians missionaries were either deported or killed. All trade with Europeans was restricted to Nagasaki, and the main purpose of the trade was to get Chinese silk. The Tokugawa shoguns ruled Japan until the 1870s.

Without going into the details, the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate lead to the creation of modern Japan. Also without going into the details to explain it, Japan chose the British to be their European mentors. They bought warships from British shipyards while they learned the technologies necessary to someday build their own shipyards and their own ships. They progressed rapidly enough to go to war with China in 1895, and to take the island of Formosa (now known as Taiwan). They went to war with the Russians in 1904, and all but destroyed the Russian Navy. In 1911, they invaded and occupied Korea. Taking Formosa and Korea gave them secure food supplies, and it also whetted their appetite for foreign conquest and imperial expansion.

Through it all, the wisest, most effective Japanese leaders took what they found useful from western civilization, and rejected the rest. They adapted what they found useful, and often improved upon it--in 1941, Japan had the fastest battleships, the most modern destroyers and the best torpedoes in the world. It didn't save them from defeat at the hands of the Americans, but only the massive industrial power of the United States could defeat them--no one else in the world could have done.

To this day, much of the Japanese culture which existed in 1560 is still a part of their world. They still see the world in fundamentally different ways than we do. Certainly they have many flaws--but my point is that far from being overwhelmed by a technologically superior culture, they were able to use parts of it, to reject the rest of it, and to adapt it to their own cultural imperatives. I'm not a fan of historical "laws," i don't believe we can extrapolate from the past universal themes which apply in all situations. China, a wealthy and powerful empire when the Portuguese first arrived, was overwhelmed within a few centuries, and is only now becoming wealthy and powerful from adopting and adapting western ways. The Japanese experience, that of a far smaller and weaker empire than China's was, i think, gives the lie to any notion that one culture must inevitably succumb to a technologically superior culture.



The Japanese would steal their technology and adapt it to our use, and then China would mass-produce it through sweated labor, or even slave labor. Both nations would rely on American and European universities to perfect the systems.

This would just be another "Columbian Exchange" in which technologies AND biological products were exchanged sometimes for good and often with not so good consequences.

I want the Chinese food concession with the aliens. I'll be the richest human in the cosmos!

I just had one more thought about this. One of the common explanations for the Fermi Paradox is that civilizations usually destroy themselves or are destroyed by something else - a meteor, a plague, etc. before reaching the capacity to cross interstellar distances. If something happened on Earth to cause the fall of civilization and technology, but not total destruction, it would he difficult to re-create them, because we have used up much of our easily accessible natural resources - metals, oil, etc. The primitive civilization that we had hypothetically become, might not have much capacity to obtain the resources by the less direct methods that we often have to use now. Earth is no longer in the same condition that it was when civilization originally rose here.

I don't know. The stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stone. Humans could always return to lithic industries . Id just hope, Like the Moties, that wed have store up our knowledge base so , whoever is left, doesn't have to start all over.
If we go "down a few notches on the genera scales" it would take evolution severl ages to , once again develop a pinnacle species . Who would now whether the pinnacle species would be capable of abstract thought , elf awareness, and planning skills besides just intelligence. Octupi are very intelligent but, because of their short lifespans, they havent developed these skills (except maybe self awareness and complex responses that may emulate planning skills.)

There have been some very interesting takes on post-apocalyptic societies in science fiction. Herbert's Dune and its far too many sequels referred to the Butlerian jihad, when "thinking machines" were destroyed, and the entirety of humanity was under a law that "thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a man's mind." That was laughably absurd, as the first group of humans who were reasonably secure from interference would seek their advantage in making "thinking machines," and holy writ be damned. In A Canticle for Liebowitz there is a far more plausible scenario in which mobs of survivors of a thermonuclear holocaust proudly call themselves simpletons, and hunt down machines, books and people who can read them. Liebowitz was an electrical engineer for the United States military, and after the war, founds a monastic order who make it their business to collect and hide books from the mobs. Their acolytes who gathered books became "bookleggers" and they traveled far and wide to hunt down books, and safely return them their monasteries. The author develops many other interesting themes, but they are not necessarily germane here.

In her fantasy series about the planet Darkover, Marion Zimmer Bradley posits the wreck of a colonial transport on a metal-poor planet, and subsequent events which prevent the repair of the starship, stranding the would-be colonists on a worl in the grip of a seemingly permanent ice age. They scavenge the starship for its metal, and soon sink into a state of pre-feudal barbarity. Because they have so few women of reproductive age, all of them are required to bear childen if they can, but fosterage becomes widespread as many of them have no interest in raising their own children. Plural marriages also become common in an attempt to keep as varied a genetic stock as possible. There's a lot, lot more to it than that, but it is interesting in that, as with Liebowitz, but without the hostility to learning, their decline into near barbarism is both accompanied by and a product of the loss of learning and literacy. Also, as in Liebowitz, learning is preserved in a monastery, the monastery of St. Valentine of the Snows, on the edge of the northern polar ice cap, which extends to about 25 degrees north. While Canticle was published just before Zimmer Bradley's first novel (1960 and 1962, respectively), it is difficult to say if one inspired the other. Zimmer Bradley, in the preface to one book, says that her novel The Sword of Aldones was based on a short story she wrote at the age of about 15, which would have been in 1945 or 1946.

In about 1450, a Dutch whaler landed on the southwest coast of Greenland, and found the corpse of a man who may well have been, until his death, the last surviving Norse Greenlander. He had clothing which was of a good quality, and some metal artifacts, but he had a stone knife on his belt. Given his necessarily taciturn condition, the Dutch didn't get any information out of him.

Humans are control freaks. They don't like to think about events which could destroy them but which are beyond our control. A nearby star going nova could extinguish the human race just after we learned of the approaching danger. Looking at such prospects, we really should be working on projects to colonize other stars--but we are obliged to rely on politicians, which means that it is unlikely that anything useful will be done. Humanity could survive if we had enough of them living in the interior of "asteroids"--but after a few generations, they likely would be unable to "re-colonize" earth after such an event--the gravity would kill them.

Interesting subjects to muse on.

Thanks for your interesting and thoughtful response. We certainly need some colonies somewhere off Earth so that the race can survive if things go seriously wrong. The problem, of course, is that although there are people who understand that this needs to be done, to most people, the danger, having never manifested within history, is so improbable as to be unworthy of consideration. Politicians are usually the worst at long term thinking.

Im not certain that some degree of long term planning isn't going on at some level. (Id hate to think that, as a collective species we automatically "Dumb down" on our skills and abilities to see ahead). As an example, we have a Martian/ lunar lander planned for the next 3 years which will test the ability to "make oxygen" by "Bucket chemistry" on the substrate.
We do it in test labs every day . The only problem I see is upscaling . Many bucket chemistry reactions work really well only in small batches . I can see it happening fairly easily on Mars since there IS vidence of lots of oxygen in the soil and rock. The moon? Im not sure, everything we see is silicates.

Good point, but I don't see much progress on establishing self-sufficient colonies.

That's correct. Put in simpler language, the one reason there might really ever be for physical interstellar travel would be escape, i.e. your own system was about to get blown up or some such.

Again I believe there probably are better ways to get at information from other star systems than actually going there, which is the basic solution to the Fermi paradox.