Is Anyone Out There?

Terry wrote:

farmerman, what are the chances that dolphins will ever stumble across electromagnetic energy, or learn to build radios?

What are the chances that Dolphins will stay Dolphins forever.

What were the chances that Homo Habilis would discover radio. It didn't. But we did.

When we observe the difficulty any non-technological intelligence has with discovering radio, we're really begging the question, 'what are the chances they will become toolmakers'.

0 Replies

farmerman wrote:

Once life develops, a technology based endpoint is inevitable.

I agree. Except that I would add, 'assuming the environment has large periods of relative stability, of around 100million years at a shot'.

If the Earth got blasted back to algae every 1million years, then I don't think technological intelligence would be likely. Also, if there were no disasters or disturbances, I think the pace of evolution would be very different that we have seen here.

0 Replies

Of course, we are seeing things from our own very limited perspectives. It's possible that radio frequencies are a very poor form of communication as they are only suitable for those with hearing as a primary sense. If a creature is more visual or has some other sense we are not privy to then radio communication would not be likely.

0 Replies

Setanta wrote:

Fermi and company ignore the "human" factor in this question.

I think I see what you're getting at. You're not saying they Couldn't be here (as Fermi expected), but that they Wouldn't be here due to cultural and social priorities which exceed the benefit of spreading through space.

It's a good point, but the assumption you are making is that other cultures and societies would have similar interests and limits to ours, and that's another jump beyond simply assuming they acquire the technology to travel the distance.

0 Replies

rosborne979 wrote:

Setanta wrote:
Fermi and company ignore the "human" factor in this question.

I think I see what you're getting at. You're not saying they Couldn't be here (as Fermi expected), but that they Wouldn't be here due to cultural and social priorities which exceed the benefit of spreading through space.

It's a good point, but the assumption you are making is that other cultures and societies would have similar interests and limits to ours, and that's another jump beyond simply assuming they acquire the technology to travel the distance.

I'm not necessarily making that assumption, i'm pointing out the thesis fails to take the possibility into account when it makes an assumption about technological civilizations spreading through space. It also assumes planet-wide unitary culture. I'm objecting to a set of implicit assumptions about what technological civilizations will or won't do, or will or will not be able to do.

0 Replies

This discussion is very similar to what I imagine a Church Council would have been like in the earliest centuries of Christianity.

Fine abstruse, we hope anyway, those of us who think that 10000 light years is gulping tackle never mind a lot of real estate, theological points in a fairly obscure corner of the religion of Atheism. The God being The Great Silence.

The social consequences of the triumph of this religion is what matters.

There's nothing out there and even if there is they won't be bothering about us I shouldn't think. I wouldn't if I was their Big Chief.

"As the white line on the highway sails under your wheels,
I've gazed from the trailer window laughing.
Oh, our clothes they was torn but the colors they was bright.
Following them dusty old fairgrounds a-calling."

Bob Dylan.

0 Replies

rosborne979 wrote:

I think I see what you're getting at. You're not saying they Couldn't be here (as Fermi expected), but that they Wouldn't be here due to cultural and social priorities which exceed the benefit of spreading through space.

By the way, i was also pointing out that there might necessarily be (and i would say, probably be) a limited utility to spreading through space. If establishing a colony solves your overpopulation and resource deprivation problems, what impetus is there to continue to pursue an energy and resource intensive program, especially in the face of the highly probable desire of intelligent individuals to "do their own thing?"

0 Replies

Setanta wrote:

I'm not necessarily making that assumption, i'm pointing out the thesis fails to take the possibility into account when it makes an assumption about technological civilizations spreading through space. It also assumes planet-wide unitary culture. I'm objecting to a set of implicit assumptions about what technological civilizations will or won't do, or will or will not be able to do.

I will have to review the logical steps in the original argument again. That's the real question in my mind, were the first set of logical assumptions posed by Fermi accurate or probable. I'll have to go back and check.

You mentioned something else a few posts back with I also though was relevant (but I can't remember being addressed in the original paradox), and that was the difference between being able to cross a galaxy (approx 100k light years), and being able to actually stop and visit actual planets along the way. The analogy would be flying from poing A to B (which might be relatively quick), versus having to stop at 10 places between A and B.

The other thing we have to factor in here is the likelihood of technological intelligence ultimately constructing self replicating machines. Another event which I feel is almost inevitible as technology advances.

Machines are much more likely to be space colonizers, even in our near future. And self replicators with access to raw materials like asteroid belts could spread with little to no impact to the culture or economy of whatever spawned them.

Yet we don't see any signs of automated alien silicon replicators either. Maybe they are not so inevitible?

0 Replies

Setanta wrote:

rosborne979 wrote:
I think I see what you're getting at. You're not saying they Couldn't be here (as Fermi expected), but that they Wouldn't be here due to cultural and social priorities which exceed the benefit of spreading through space.

By the way, i was also pointing out that there might necessarily be (and i would say, probably be) a limited utility to spreading through space. If establishing a colony solves your overpopulation and resource deprivation problems, what impetus is there to continue to pursue an energy and resource intensive program, especially in the face of the highly probable desire of intelligent individuals to "do their own thing?"

I understand. You've listed a series of things which seem like good challenges, but I'm having trouble keeping up with them. Also, there are interactions between several things, and I'm feeling like there are hidden assumptions which may not be valid.

As you say, just as daily life prevents me from dedicating the necessary resources to researching this, so cultures may prefer to spend their limited resources in ways other than colonization. But it's a matter of degrees... after all, Europeans colonized America, even though they were busy with plagues and other daily drudgery. Economic balances between what you gain and how much effort it takes to gain it.

0 Replies

rosborne979 wrote:

Yet we don't see any signs of automated alien silicon replicators either. Maybe they are not so inevitible?

Maybe they have been here, and have left already. Was the asteroid belt once a planet between Saturn and Mars, and if so, was it destroyed by tidal forces, or mined by self-replicating machines?

As i pointed out earlier, if mechanized exploration (or, as in this supposition, mechanized exploitation) were the method of a technologically sophisticated civilization, they might have been here already, and we'd have no way of knowing.

0 Replies

rosborne979 wrote:

What are the chances that Dolphins will stay Dolphins forever.

What were the chances that Homo Habilis would discover radio. It didn't. But we did.

When we observe the difficulty any non-technological intelligence has with discovering radio, we're really begging the question, 'what are the chances they will become toolmakers'.

I don't think that dolphins will stay dolphins forever. They could even evolve hands and return to land, although I doubt that will ever happen.

I agree that there is a good chance that any intelligent species will learn to use tools (many species on earth already do). But it is a huge leap from using basic tools to inventing radio. I don't think that it is inevitable that intelligent species will engage in scientific research or be interested in space exploration. Without some kind of conflict or environmental pressure to force change, they might be content to live their lives just as their ancestors did, stuck in the stone age forever. Especially if they have no metal ores readily available.

0 Replies

Setanta wrote:

rosborne979 wrote:
Yet we don't see any signs of automated alien silicon replicators either. Maybe they are not so inevitible?

Maybe they have been here, and have left already. Was the asteroid belt once a planet between Saturn and Mars, and if so, was it destroyed by tidal forces, or mined by self-replicating machines?

As i pointed out earlier, if mechanized exploration (or, as in this supposition, mechanize exploitation) the method of a technologically sophisticated civilization, they might have been here, and we'd have no way of knowing.

We would need to guess at the motives, or programming of the replicators. We might guess that they would say wherever they landed, waiting for something 'interesting' to happen. Or we might guess that they would simply dismantle every planetary object they landed on to glean it of raw materials for making more replicators.

The Oort cloud could be a debris field in the process of disassembly, slowly moving toward the center star.

0 Replies

I do find some things rather curious. A NASA Martian probe had discovered methane gas coming from somewhere on the Martian surface but as it got closer to where the gas was coming from the probe suddenly vanished! A second Martian probe located the wreckage of the first Martian probe but when it came around for a second look the crashed probe was no longer there! And then THAT probe ceased functioning. Perhaps there's more going on within the red planet than we know!

0 Replies

Terry wrote:

I agree that there is a good chance that any intelligent species will learn to use tools (many species on earth already do). But it is a huge leap from using basic tools to inventing radio. I don't think that it is inevitable that intelligent species will engage in scientific research or be interested in space exploration. Without some kind of conflict or environmental pressure to force change, they might be content to live their lives just as their ancestors did, stuck in the stone age forever. Especially if they have no metal ores readily available.

Maybe, but it's just a difference of opinion. I do think there is a strong evolutionary push toward expansion and growth and control which I think we will see as a very common expression in organisms, even those which didn't evolve here.

The basic physics of the Universe will be the same everywhere, and Darwinian evolution (whether it be acting against DNA or some other form of replicative structure) will be ubiquitous everywhere. I'm guessing that those foundational items will give all life everywhere some level of similarity in how they deal with energy and population expansion.

This is one of the reasons why I think Set's argument about cultural priorities is interesting, because even if aliens had a substantially different cultural behavior than we do, they will still have to deal with realities like survival (in the broadest sense, this is energy usage, even for mechanical and computational systems).

0 Replies

NickFun wrote:

I do find some things rather curious. A NASA Martian probe had discovered methane gas coming from somewhere on the Martian surface but as it got closer to where the gas was coming from the probe suddenly vanished! A second Martian probe located the wreckage of the first Martian probe but when it came around for a second look the crashed probe was no longer there! And then THAT probe ceased functioning. Perhaps there's more going on within the red planet than we know!

I was kidding about the Oort cloud Wink

0 Replies

everyone has got an anthropomorphic lens through which we are seeing sentient life. Ive mentioned radio because its a natural trip through the electromagnetic spectrum. Once the bei9ng has a sense of self awareness--then Millie, hold the door shut. The rest is, as ros said, a mere manner of time. I think extraterrestrial "natural" insults like bolides are a norm and account for excursions of life into other forms .

Terry, I dont lknow about dolphins today, but how about having them recolonize land if we werent here, naaah. Just think of the entire number of species that have lived (animals only, exclude all but macroscopic) The number would have to be in the tens of billions. My bet was, that as long as the environmnet was conducive to continuation of the dinosaurs, the raptors would have been the ones to develop an opposable thumb. They were already balanced for life on land and not trees.
Of course this is just playtime, but I havent heard any major arguments against the ubiquity of advanced civilizatons in the gazillions of galaxies.(Waay too much hubris involved with that) Were just waiting for the day of contact. Our problem is , we have developed a technology and its only about 150 years old and were already making demands that "why aint them aliens contacting us?" REEELAAAAX. Ill bet that when the day arrives, we will be in a state of panic and the worlds economies will be shaken until we accomodate the fact with our Hs centrist minds.

0 Replies

Setanta wrote-

Quote:

By the way, i was also pointing out that there might necessarily be (and i would say, probably be) a limited utility to spreading through space. If establishing a colony solves your overpopulation and resource deprivation problems, what impetus is there to continue to pursue an energy and resource intensive program, especially in the face of the highly probable desire of intelligent individuals to "do their own thing?"

That's pretty good. That can be construed in a number of way. But it does depend on an objective definition of "limited utility" and doesn't take into account the possibilities of satisfactory (?) management of the spreading process.

0 Replies

rosborne979 wrote:

This is one of the reasons why I think Set's argument about cultural priorities is interesting, because even if aliens had a substantially different cultural behavior than we do, they will still have to deal with realities like survival (in the broadest sense, this is energy usage, even for mechanical and computational systems).

And precisely what i am getting at is that leaving the gravitational well of the cradle planet represents a huge expenditure of energy, and consequently, of resources. My reference to the competing space programs of the Americans and Russians was to point out why long-distance space exploration implies planet-wide unitary culture. Given that enormous resources are necessary to escaping the gravitational well of the cradle planet, or only planetary colony, there is little reason to assume that this would be undertaken lightly, or constantly.

I don't think a "hive-like" civilization would reach a space-faring level of technological sophistication, simply because any level of expertise which assures reproduction is likely to enter stasis, absent any significant circumstance which undercuts that expertise. I assume, therefore, that high levels of technological sophistication go hand-in-hand with individuality, which raises two problems--the first that one would need a planet-wide unitary culture to some degree to obtain the assent necessary to undertake the resource and energy intensive project; the second that there is little reason to suppose that the individuals in the aggregate are going to want to continue space-faring continuously once the need for more living room and resources has been attained by the original effort. I suspect that the individuals would cease to act in the aggregate as long as sufficient resources were available for them to pursue their individual interests. I would suggest that they would cease attempting colonization until such time as they needed more living room and resources. There is considerable evidence (according to what i've read, and i claim no expertise) that fertility in industrialized nations had fallen sharply--as though the evolutionary process had "recognized" that many offspring are no longer necessary to assure survival. That is something to which i alluded earlier--a sufficiently sophisticated technological society might easily attain environmentally safe equipoise, and have little reason to pursue interstellar colonization.

Off to read about Mr. Fermi's "uncracked nut" again, as a refresher.

0 Replies

They're made out of meat is a rather amusing short, short story about why aliens may not want to talk to us.

0 Replies

Frank Drake, whose famous 1961 "Drake Equation" estimated the number of probable life supporting planets, decided in 2004 that he underestimated the probability.

0 Replies

Is Anyone Out There?

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know