Fermi Paradox and Advanced Civilizations.

I also object to the association of ``primitive'' with ``warlike''.

The conclusions of the article linked to are more sophisticated than a simple multiplying together of probabilities. I'm sure even Drake would admit that.

 

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I have to say, I think the Fermi Paradox is an idiotic statement made by a brilliant man. Can you imagine the brightest person in North or South America making that statement 4,000 years ago? These people had no idea that not only were there other people on the other side of the large bodies of water, but they were advanced.

It was a bit over 50 years after the death of Fermi that the first planet outside our solar system was found. Many have been found since, mainly the "Hot Jupiter" I believe and that conflicted with what we thought we knew about planetary formations. We couldn't even find planets back then and he makes a statement like that.

The lack of Dyson spheres and such is just nonsense. I wish youtube had the film from the 30s about what OUR future society would be like. After the great success of the airplane as a weapons platform in World War I, eminent scientists & futurists envisioned the end of all violence on the planet. Why? The second a hot spot arose, the second violence somewhere on Earth broke out, a crack team of super genius men would hop on a propeller driven aircraft, fly over the troubled area, parachute in and use their superior intellect to defuse the situation. The film was hilarious! The men (and yes all men..women couldn't be smart enough) all looked like your stereotypical grandfather: tall, lanky, & gray haired and dressed in an all black superman type costume (minus the cape) with a globe & lightning bolt logo.

And if you want to apply scifi technology to the equation, who says the more advanced civilizations haven't found the Star Trek's "sub space" and utilize that for communications vs our primitive radio wave technology.

And the idea that "more advanced" equals "more peaceful" is laughable. Where are the Clovis,Aztecs, Mayans and other indigenous Americans today?

I wish I could recall the name of the comic to give him proper credit but he said, paraphrased:
The best evidence of intelligent life in the universe is the fact that we have never been contacted. This planet, this solar system, and even this section of the galaxy has to be the (whatever geographic region you feel you'd be raped & murdered if you visited) part of the universe.

 

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Oddly enough, in one of those spooky coincidences that woo woos would be drooling over, only yesterday I found my copy of Krauss' Beyond Star Trek, (explaining science using Trek as examples of good and bad/ possible and not possible: the sequel) and he has a lengthy discussion on the Drake Equation and a chat he personally had with Drake about it.
He suggests that rather than compare absolute probabilities it might be better to look at it from the perspective of comparing chances of... versus chances of not...
E.g. although something may have only a 1/1000 chance of happening the possible combinations could result in there being 1/10000 of it not happening: in other words it's 10 times more likely to eventuate than not.
I'll see if I can scan the relevant section if you're interested.

 

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Two remarkable papers on this subject here;
G. David Brin's 1983 paper, a long list of possible explanations
http://www.brin-l.com/downloads/silence.pdf

and Milan Cirkovic's recent paper
http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.3432
which includes all of Brin's explanations, plus some more recent ones.

We can't hope to get an answer to this, unless we do eventually make contact of some sort; but we can make exhaustive lists of possible reasons. This may or may not be a worthwhile pursuit; I think it is, but that's just me.

Moderator inputs: Changed the pdf reference to the abstract. Cites such as arXiv prefer links to the abstract HTML rather than the pdf paper, and so do users. Less time is wasted by the user and by arXiv if the abstract doesn't grab the user.
Edit: Thanks for that.

 

I might have good news for you!! We won't need Drake's or Fermi equations to figure out how much life are out there...
To be more accurate, it will be much more easier for us to find advance form of life than simple one (that should in theory be more numerous if we follow the probabilities).
Its hard to resume here on a forum, but our kind of "intelligent" life is more special than it appears, and because of this, answers will come much faster than you think!
I will resume very fast here:
Humans are a trade based lifeform as since the beginning, we have learn to trade or share knowledge, resources and skills in order to adapt to our environmental and ecosystem constraints. Without this trade among early humans, we wouldn't have make it so far, and we would surely not have reach our actual level of technology.
So if we figure out how we have survive, by trading, then finding other trade based lifeforms will be much easier, because of their need to trade in order to survive their hostile environment (which is beyond geographic location when societies becomes global and therefore reach planetary ecosystem). So if they need to trade, they need to be visible to others that have access to the same ecosystem as them (the universe in place of only their planet). So we need to find the signs they have left for us to see, but to do that, we do need to find one or two more technologies...
All in all, its a matter of years if not months before we find more than one of them at the same time.
I have more details about that theory, but I prefer not to talk about it here, but its definitely something I am excited about!!

 

Interesting idea, but what commodities could possibly be worth trading over interstellar distances? Not gold, because the price of transport between stars would be too high. Not food, unless you like food which has been frozen for decades or centuries. Not water, iron, oxygen, or even uranium would be valuable enough to cover the cost of interstellar shipment. What then?

 

In space, you need technologies or knowledge's in order to survive. And the thing that is the most difficult to do in space is traveling from one place to an unknown place because references are lacking, so in a 4d environment without horizon (or the equivalent), it is almost impossible to find a destination without getting lost because of gravitational bending of light and dark matter...
So knowledge of our surroundings and points of references could already be worth of trades. But again there is so many things that we do not know, it is why we need some more tech to reach our goals!!
But the main thing that will be worth trading is information's (solutions) because shipping information's doesn't cost much more than the message or the telescopes to spy on them

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... Then after we will trade transformed resources when we will have figured out how to contact them (its not as complicated as it sound). As for the cost to travel in space, an advance space ready civilization would have reach an energy optimization so much greater than what we can achieve so far, that for them, it won't necessarily cost too much traveling here, considering the fact that trade based intelligence is the rarest resource (by the solutions and creativity we produces) in our Universe (therefore the most valuable) I am pretty darn sure that it won't be a difficulty trading with them!

 

You are assuming that advanced life is widespread. What if it isn't?

 

That may be true on intergalactic scales, but on interstellar scales gravitational bending is negligible. No-one is going to get lost going from Sol to Alpha Centauri.

I do agree with this. Quite what information we may have that is valuable I'm not sure, but there may be something of worth amongst all the information on our planet.

 

But still no one has explained why a advanced life form capable of interstellar travel would necessarily be a peaceful civilization, survival is the imperative of all life forms, and that is not a peaceful pursuit.

One of the reason that we may have developed for so long with out interstellar interference is be cause we are located in a out of the way arm of the galaxy, and haven't been noticed.

Now we are acting like the little Bird who fledge and flew out of the nest, and chirping our head off because we are so proud of our achievement, and didn't realize all He was doing was giving the Cat a exact location for His next lunch date.

 

I have a thought on the subject that will seem fantasiful to most but none the less I'm going to share it with you anyway.

I'm pretty sure that we hold the answer to if alien civilizations exist and even where they would be in the universe, but my reasoning is down to the decision tha we will have to make about our own universe. I guess you could say that I have a hypothesis that mankind could reach a point where it branches one of two directions, One direction is to add to the creation of the universe (Which would incidentally be becoming apart of creating a Singularity with some parallel universes) or we fob off the idea as being too star trek, ignore the possibilities that we could govern our own existance and be reduced to living out a "flat system" tangent.

Now you are probably wondering where this above hypothesis fits in with knowing if Alien Civilizations exist or where they are. Well thats down to the decisions we'd have to make if we are to truly play a role in the creation of our universe. I mean we could bring an alien race up to speed and bring them into the creation of the universe, this would secure their existance and make them equals with us, Or we could go with the absense of any aliens, making an entire universe devoid of life apart from this little blue-green planet we call home, or further still we could place "chaos" into the framework, a random potential for life to exist elsewhere in the universe. (This of course would be like playing a Sid Meiers game on "Deity", afterall would we assume an Alien to be equal, would we fall to the foul stench of earths history in regards to slavery, would we assume to be their superiors or indeed would they assume to be ours?)

There is also the prospect that if we build our universe, it's governed by our own observations. Physics itself is applied to the universe because of these observations. This means if there was an Alien Civilisation that build a universe too, they wouldn't necessarily build the same universe in which we exist, in fact their physics could follow completely different rules. (Mathematics could be somewhat different in another universe)

Of course I'm pretty sure most of you will see this as a flight of fantasy, and that is fair enough. Afterall we are dealing with a subject that currently has no definative answer, just alot of speculations. In short I just tried to explain why I think it's up to us to decide if there is life elsewhere in the universe, if of course we play a part in defining how this universe works.

 

Because it's not necessarily true.

Hawking has said of the SETI program: we'd do best to keep our mouths shut, because the history of more advanced life civilizations finding primitive civilizations doesn't tend to work out in favor of the primitive civilizations.

 

The thing is still, the assumption that the SETI program is operation under is a pigheaded dogmatic, and canonical Utopian Idea that advanced life form capable of interstellar travel would necessarily be a peaceful civilization,

I don't disagree one little bit with Hawking but just like Him,

I want those Utopians to Explain why they are so pigheaded dogmatic, and canonical on the point that advanced life form's will necessarily be a peaceful civilizations and life forms.

 

I do not claim that it is widespread, I say, if they are there they will leave a signature for others to see... Then when you get one you can easily get the others trading with the first and then on and on...

But so far, I believe that there might be over a thousand trade based intelligent lifeforms in our Universe (at least from the data we could collect in so far). Now the most difficult thing is to find the closest to us inside a "cloud" of neighboring Habstars (out of the 20000 that are habitable closest to our solar system).

And to answer your question, I will find that it is the greatest lost of space EVER, and found that god was a poor and cheap beggar...
But it is very unlikely because from what we already know, physics and chemical laws applies to the rest of the Universe (matter at least). Then knowing that life follows a curve of molecular complexity (the simplest the more abundant and the more complex the least abundant (at least until mankind)), then if basic life do exist, it is about certain that she will have tried to "complexify" itself and followed this complexity curve tendency (because it is a basic entropy principle present everywhere in the universe since the Big-bang)...

So do not worry, if they are there we will find them soon!!

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So I am pretty much certain that we can't be alone!!

 

Simply because their civilization will have learned something we are trying to learn the hard way... To survive ourselves without blowing us up!!
Actually, humanity creative potential has always been equivalent to its destructive potential. Now we are creative enough to blow our planet up (therefore creativity is a form of energy that can transform matter and it is up to us to decide at which rate we wish to transform matter (instantly will cause a destruction and smoothly, into a Ferrari).

So knowing that any space ready civilization, needs to build ships out of matter to travel in space, we can assume that their creative power is much more efficient than us! So it will also means that if we can already blow up our planet and can go far into space, and that those can travel almost anywhere, it might means that they have the creative potential to blow up several suns and even solar systems!!
So if they were such space ready life forms out there, they would have harness their creative powers in order to build spaceships and travel across the Universe in a fashion that is still escaping us!!
Because such creative potential is useless when used in a destructive way and since energy conservation laws apply everywhere, such energetic creative potential will be most likely being used in an efficient way (that still escape us today), because otherwise, it will be energy at the level of whole sun or solar system that will be lost for nothing in return when they know that they might need all the energy they need to survive inside a perpetually changing Universe! This is without talking about the problem of the weapon range... Getting out of the way in time after blowing up a solar system pose a certain challenge that might never be overcome...

Finally, when you spend time looking at the stars everyday, you understand after a while that the rarest resource in the Universe, is not gold, oil, diamonds, water, but us, a trade based intelligence having a creative potential beyond any other life forms, capable of finding solutions to every problems! So our mere presence in this Universe might be rare enough for the others to pay us a visit just in case we do not make it by ourselves making them lose a new trading partner.
Because even we are not the brightness, we still have over 6 billions brains that can thinkered about solving problems, and this universe is filled of problems, so surviving it requires ALL the brain resources you can find!

That's basic survival economics and nothing fancy here...

 

It is what you think... Do you REALLY think that we know our space enough to venture out of our solar system? We have just begun watching our surroundings with new eyes in the range of x-rays and Gamma rays, and I can tell you that our scientific community has NEVER expected to see this around us! CoRoT will have a very difficult job to undertake. Also space/time curvature of our solar system has been found to be quite in an unexpected shape...
The fact is, the more we learn about our own solar system, the more we understand that we know nothing...

Do not under estimate Humanity (but without being arrogant). We do have over 6 billion brains, and brains to understand this Universe are surely lacking, because it happens that we live in an infinite Universe... And if we succeed finding them, it will already prove them that we are smart enough to be worthy of helping them!

 

This can't really happen, or else we will go extinct... The Universe has one fundamental law that no one can escape, it changes all the time, driven by its expansion. So who says changes, says cycle, and therefore creation and destruction, life and death... So humanity cannot remain on the same ball thinking it will live there forever without troubles! The Universe is just not made like this and won't allow us to sit on our butt doing nothing!

The Universe is very well made, has no one can dominate the entire Universe, because it behaves as an open system where he cannot be dissected and understood from the bottom to up.

Some will say, that power is about control over others, some will say that it is about the size of your wealth compare to others, and others will say that it is related to every kind of dominant position in relation with others... Well I think that real power in this Universe, as nothing to do with those principles. Those principles of course have a meaning when it comes to dealing inside a close environment like our planet, but the Universe is anything but a close environment.

Humans cannot control the evolutions of virus, bacterias and even other animals, but they can alter them, and only so!

We need to experience traveling inside the Universe, to understand that things might just happen once and never occur once more, which makes it VERY difficult for a young space ready civilization to learn about the Universe without trading with others older and more knowledgeable about it.

At the start we will lack the knowledge necessary to spread far away from our little blue ball, so others will need to assist us in order for us to manage doing our first steps in this infinity. We can't just afford to be arrogant and say, that we can do it alone!! That's dreaming!!

Our Universe is not like our current science, he doesn't have much absolute truth that goes on forever! So it absolutely impossible to be confident about what we know of the Universe while traveling inside it. Star Trek call those things sub space distortion (when they can't explain the phenomenon)... I can tell you that if we were to go there for real, you will get tired of hearing this!

Yeah, surely, but our actual Universe is already big enough to entertain us a long while, but we will certainly need access to other Universe, and if their laws are different then we could surely find a way to make advantage of a difference between two different space/time dimensions... This could allows a lot of things that couldn't be done inside our own Universe.

 

This has been discussed in earlier threads on the topic. Some people believe the explanation for the "Fermi Paradox" is that civilizations reach a certain stage, then self-annihilate [along the lines of creating a destructive particle accelerator, or other lines]. I'll assume that that is not true.

If life arises relatively easily, due to the physics/chemistry being the same everywhere in the Universe, then there would/should be lots of life on other star sytems in our own Milky Way galaxy. If it evolves along similar lines to ours, then if our Sun is typical, such life would have evolved over the course of billions of years. So, one would expect that there are systems that are hundreds of millions of years less-evolved than our solar system at some 4.5 billion years, and that there are systems that are hundreds of millions of years more evolved than our solar system.

So, if life evolves on other solar systems, the likelihood that there are life-forms more advanced than ours [assuming they do not all self-destruct] would be significant. Thus, we could expect sentient life forms to be millions, or hundreds of millions of years more advanced than we are on our planet. Assuming that life evolves.

So, what would a civilization hundreds of millions more advanced than ours be capable of doing, knowing that our civilization which is a mere few tens of thousands of years old [since the first humans], has become space-faring?

Would it be possible for them to send physical probes at near light-speed to all corners of the galaxy? Seems possible. Would those physical probes likely have intelligent control? Seems possible. Would they be capable of sending physical devices that have nano-technology for re-creating life forms from computer data-bases housing their genetic code? Seems plausible.

In other words, if intelligent life exists in our Milky Way on other planets, it seems very plausible that it could reach us and investigate our planet [in much the same manner that we seek to investigate strange environments such as Mars, the Moon, the Deep Ocean, etc.]

So, the question is, how would we know? Would there be reports by human observers of strange probes? Would there be reports by human observers of strange beings? Would there be no sightings even if such sentience were visiting us?

Or would they not have even bothered to check out the Milky Way?

I'll leave it for others to speculate on these questions.

 

Ahh ha, that's the nub, because I suppose space travel/exploration is not about "competition" but simply the adventurous spirit, that occasionally is satisfied by "competition". They were competing I will admit - for nothing, and they realized that, so they got back to fighting on earth for scarcer and scarcer resources.

This is a damn good argument and I'm very, very, afraid you are right. There are several case studies, of this kind of thinking, right here on this board.

 

Nonsense, you didn't read my post, or didn't understand what I am trying to say.

We haven't had a real "war" since 1945 (ending with Atomic war). Everything has been limited and more limited since. Please don't even try to tell me these fucking expensive shitty little wars even mean anything. They mean nothing, they archive nothing, including your war - Nam, it archived fuck all nothing. We have not been tested completely yet. When the REAL problems come, and there are no more resources on this planet to exploit and "argue" over, are we going to fight (as you suppose?) or finally have that epiphany, to grow up and act civilized. We are currently barbarians.

I suppose you think, whatever "black budget" colonies out there are going to be able to survive when earth goes thermonuclear? I personally doubt it.