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After decades of searching, we still haven't discovered a single sign of extraterrestrial intelligence. Probability tells us life should be out there, so why haven't we found it yet?
The problem is often referred to as Fermi's paradox, after the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Enrico Fermi, who once asked his colleagues this question at lunch. Many theories have been proposed over the years. It could be that we are simply alone in the universe or that there is some great filter that prevents intelligent life progressing beyond a certain stage. Maybe alien life is out there, but we are too primitive to communicate with it, or we are placed inside some cosmic zoo, observed but left alone to develop without external interference. Now, three researchers think they think they[sic] may have another potential answer to Fermi's question: Aliens do exist; they're just all asleep.
According to a new research paper accepted for publication in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, extraterrestrials are sleeping while they wait. In the paper, authors from Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, and Milan Cirkovic argue that the universe is too hot right now for advanced, digital civilizations to make the most efficient use of their resources. The solution: Sleep and wait for the universe to cool down, a process known as aestivating (like hibernation but sleeping until it's colder).
Understanding the new hypothesis first requires wrapping your head around the idea that the universe's most sophisticated life may elect to leave biology behind and live digitally. Having essentially uploaded their minds onto powerful computers, the civilizations choosing to do this could enhance their intellectual capacities or inhabit some of the harshest environments in the universe with ease.
[Related]:
The idea that life might transition toward a post-biological form of existence
Sandberg and Cirkovic elaborate in a blog post
The Dominant Life Form in the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots
Where even 3 degrees Kelvin is not cold enough, do you think that we would ever make contact with any alien ?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Whoever on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:17AM (75 children)
Faster-than-light travel is not possible.
Civilizations cannot escape their home solar system and hence die out in the space of a cosmically short time.
Advanced civilizations are fleeting affairs and so our chance of detecting them is limited by the short time they exist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:19AM (26 children)
Heavier-than-air flight wasn't possible either.
Jeff Bezos, start the 1,000 Einstein's breeding program. We need them to put their heads together to solve faster-than-light travel.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:21AM (1 child)
They said humanity couldn't destroy an entire galaxy. I say we prove them wrong!
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:25AM
Why not? There are about a trillion galaxies out there. Why not destroy one.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:27AM (19 children)
Wrong. Birds have always done it, therefore we knew quite well that it is possible in principle. There may have been doubts that humans might be able to achieve it, but that's a different question.
The light speed "barrier" is not a problem of engineering. It's a fundamental limit of physics.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:13AM (8 children)
The speed of light through space is limited, but space itself is expanding faster than the speed of light. The engineering challenge is how to warp space to make long distances shorter.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:31AM (6 children)
That would only be possible with negative energy densities. We don't know any material with negative energy density, and we don't even know whether it is possible. This is not an engineering issue. Unless we make new discoveries in fundamental physics, we simply can't go faster than light, in any way.
Also note that the ability of FTL travel necessarily implies the ability of time travel. So why didn't we see any time travelling spaceships from the future yet?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @08:01AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White%E2%80%93Juday_warp-field_interferometer#Warp-drive_research_and_potential_for_interstellar_propulsion [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:09PM (3 children)
That's assuming our existing understanding of physics is both perfectly accurate and complete. And we're fairly certain that both of those are false.
There's a long list of unexplained phenomena proving our understanding of what is made possible by physics is incomplete, and a few places where accepted physics theories are known to be incompatible - implying that one or both theories are somehow flawed.
Also, it's only the potential methods we've dreamed up so far that would require negative energy densities - there's no telling what weird twists of physics future theoreticians may conceive of that might avoid that difficulty. The problem space of "everything that could possibly be done within the existing framework of physics" is radically larger than what we've managed to dream up so far - I'm quite confident we'll be dreaming up new ways to exploit physics for millenia to come, even if by some miracle our current theories actually are complete.
And along the way, maybe we discover a Oort-cloud object made of negativeonium and can build those current warp drives designs after all - no new physics needed.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 18 2017, @08:24PM (2 children)
No. Expanding our knowledge of physics is a research problem, not an engineering problem. The engineers' turn is after we figured out all the necessary physics.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 18 2017, @10:05PM (1 child)
What exactly are you objecting to? Even negative-energy based warp drives are still very much in the realm of theoreticians and researchers - engineers have no place in this conversation, I would think that obvious.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 19 2017, @04:46AM
Read the thread again, carefully. I don't like to repeat myself.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 20 2017, @05:39AM
> Unless we make new discoveries in fundamental physics
Indeed, this is the key; many things are not yet conclusively shown impossible by all of observed physics, and this frontier alone might break the rules as we so far know them.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:11PM
IIUC, no time machine is able to carry you back before it was first built. I'm not real sure of the math, but Forward was, and he seemed to imply this several times.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @09:20AM (8 children)
Just because `c` is a limit, doesn't mean there is no way around this problem. Since space is finite, you can "travel" as fast as you'd like for sufficiently short periods of time.
And remember this thing about physics - these fundamental limits are just what we know. We don't even know what we don't know. Heck, just the known unknowns is already a large task -- how to manipulate gravity? Isolate the gravidic charge? Heck, 150 years ago it was proclaimed that all of physics was discovered and that with sufficient computation you can figure out anything in the universe. And the sun was a lump of burning coal, of couse, that couldn't be more than few million years old. Then we had these small things happen. You know, like nuclear physics and quantum physics. And with that now we know that geologists were right and the earth is at least 3-4 billion years old. And now we have things like computers and laser pointers - things that are unimaginable to someone with physics only 150 years old.
And finally we come to stupid people thinking about things beyond their comprehension. Like, why hasn't alien intelligence contacted us? I wonder if an ant on an anthill thinks the same thing - why haven't those humans contacted us? Maybe they are not intelligent!
When difference in technological progress are measured not in hundreds of years, but in MILLIONS OF YEARS, then WTF? The universe is not like Star Trek. It's not like Star Wars. It's like Flinstones meet Jetsons meet Timelords -- maybe we have less in common with aliens than we have in common in our lab rats?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:06AM (4 children)
But the fact that we haven't found a way around this limit is a strong indication that we won't find such a way. We aren't as ignorant as we were before we found "c".
And yet intelligence is still restricted by the laws of physics which we appear to have nailed down. It's also a peculiar argument to make that an extremely intelligence species can't understand a dumber one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:49PM (1 child)
I'd say that it's a strong indication that we don't know shit, not that we won't. We already know what it would take to breach the barrier, and that is a start. It means we would know it if we saw it. But most likely the way to do it will be something we haven't even imagined possible.
I would argue otherwise. But it may not be as "limited" as you think, because the way to solve complex things usually depends on translating the problem into one that is trivial to solve, hence you bypass the need to solve the complex problem and the limits of doing that. And we have hardly nailed down the laws of physics that govern intelligence, if we had we could make AI systems that operate better than Humans at most tasks. We did it for some tasks, and we kinda have an idea how it will work for others, we are just not there yet.
The perception filter is a key to intelligence which we haven't fully cracked. Our brains are hard-wired to our eyes, and the eyes (or rather the part that of the brain that processes visual input) filter objects based on how our body can interact with them. This is a key component that makes our existence in physical world computational trivial. Without this "hack" we would take hours to make simple decisions about simple actions, as is the case with many current AI implementations.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 18 2017, @08:14PM
Evidence distinguishes between hypotheses. This doesn't distinguish between ignorance and FTL travel being impossible.
I'll note here here that the limits I mentioned are many orders of magnitude above the performance of either human brains or computers at present.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:51PM (1 child)
This explains so much about your stubborn refusal to even entertain different viewpoints. You really believe humanity has mastered the universe, and thus your own learning has convinced you that you have learned all the objectively true answers.
This is laughable. Ha ha, I laugh at you sir, with your blind overconfidence. Just your last statement: "peculiar argument to make that an extremely intelligence species can't understand a dumber one" shows your basic level of intelligence. We still have humans trying to figure out the behavior of animals, so yes, it is entirely possible that an extremely intelligent species could have major problems understanding "dumb humans". Perhaps they have no cultural or biological context for some of our activities, or their method of communication is so different from ours that they can't just hook up their universal translator to understand our monkey noises.
You really plumb the depths of stupid ignorance by testing the kiddie pool for an entry into the Marianna Trench.
I've said this before, I welcome skepticism and critical analysis but self-assured faith rationale is not welcome no matter how well based in current physics.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 18 2017, @08:08PM
Let me introduce you to Isaac Asimov [tufts.edu]:
Our old knowledge of the universe doesn't evaporate just because we learn something new. The false certainty that we will eventually figure a way past the speed of light is based on a double error. First, that what we're learned so far will turn out as wrong as assuming that heavier than air flight is impossible (an analogy which was used in this very thread). This is equivalent to the above assertion by "John" that the Earth is flat and the Earth is round are equally wrong. Second, it ignores that we've searched extensively for faster than light phenomena in the past few decades. A few million more years of science won't reverse the science that has already been done. We have already discovered constraints on motion which don't go away just because you feel they should.
Hard != impossible. Notice I said "can't" not "could have major problems".
(Score: 5, Interesting) by quacking duck on Tuesday July 18 2017, @04:05PM (1 child)
That recalls what was for me one of the most profound exchanges I've heard in sci-fi, that closed a first season episode of Babylon 5. After years of Star Trek where humans and the Federation were top dogs and fantastical things were explained away by the end of an episode, this sent chills up my spine and I got goosebumps.
Catherine Sakai: While I was out there, I saw something. What was it?
G'Kar: [pointing to a nearby flower] What is this? [upon closer inspection, an insect is visible]
Catherine: An ant.
G'Kar: "Ant"!
Catherine: So much gets shipped up from Earth on commercial transports, it's hard to keep them out.
[As Catherine is talking, G'Kar carefully picks up the ant.]
G'Kar: I have just picked it up on the tip of my glove. If I put it down again [replacing the ant on the flower] and it asks another ant, "What was that?" …how would it explain? There are things in the universe billions of years older than either of our races. They are vast, timeless. And if they are aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants…and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us. We know. We've tried. And we've learned we can either stay out from underfoot, or be stepped on.
Catherine: That's it? That's all you know?
G'Kar: Yes. They are a mystery. And I am both terrified and reassured to know that there are still wonders in the universe…that we have not yet explained everything. Whatever they are, Ms. Sakai, they walk near Sigma 957. And they must walk there... alone.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Wednesday July 19 2017, @12:34AM
Then there is that bit in MiB where our entire galaxy is actually inside one of the marbles that an alien child is playing with.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:36PM
> maybe we have less in common with aliens than we have in common in our lab rats?
Considering what we know about evolution, I'd replace that "maybe" with a "clearly", until given solid proof to the contrary.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Wednesday July 19 2017, @03:57AM
I've always thought that FTL is the wrong objective - it should instead be wormholes / teleportation.
We've already achieved teleportation of atoms (admittedly across very small distances), so in theory this is possible. I don't know if there's been any serious research into wormholes (apart from a few seasons of Stargate SG1), but this could get us there, even if we have to drag a gate to the destination under relativistic speeds.
BTW, Iain Banks wrote a great novel based on this idea - it's called 'Matter'.
(Score: 4, Touché) by dry on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:31AM
Of course heavier then air flight is possible, lots of examples such as birds, bats and various insects. Simple engineering was all that was needed, in particular a compact power plant. Faster then light travel seems to be prevented by the nature of the Universe, be nice if wrong but so far we have no examples.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:13AM
Yeah except for birds, which were totally unknown before the 1900s.
(Score: 1) by Paradise Pete on Tuesday July 18 2017, @01:41PM (1 child)
Are you sure you're on the right site? How did you get here? Who do you think ever thought heavier than air flight was impossible? It's observable everywhere. Considering that you actually seem to believe what you wrote, I won't even bother addressing the flaw in your logic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:55PM
I'll gladly point out the flaw in your historical knowledge. Humanity commonly thought flight was impossible for humans, everyone predicted the Wright brothers would fail. Also, people used to think the Earth was flat even with all the evidence of heavenly bodies being round.
It is maddening to see supposedly intelligent people tear others apart over tiny nuances like this that have little bearing on the actual point.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:20AM (25 children)
Flipper Inferiority [soylentnews.org]
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:29AM (3 children)
Aliens are made of dark matter.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:35AM
Nigger whales are made of darkie matter.
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:36AM (1 child)
You are Stephen Baxter, and I claim my five pounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photino_birds [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:45AM
Dark matter nebulae are full of Jem'Hadar.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:50AM (20 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:06AM (16 children)
The problem is that water and electricity don't mix. And gliders are a lot easier to develop when you start with a cliff rather than having to catapult them into the sky.
Electricity is nearly certain to not be developed on a water world, same goes for anything involving chemistry as those are two things that are nearly impossible to do under water. So, while it is possible that inhabitants of a water world would be able to develop the technology to leave the planet or communicate off world, the path is many orders of magnitude harder than what humans faced in getting there. We were pretty much given electricity in the form of lightning and flight in terms of birds. We also had a much easier time studying the stars and the moon as we could set up our instruments on dry land and look at them from a predictable vantage point.
Not to mention the issues of life under water and it's impact on the evolution of the brain. Even aquatic mammals have had to evolve some rather strange things like dolphins sleeping one hemisphere at a time in order to not drown. This sort of thing makes is less likely for a highly evolved brain to develop as the brain needs some form of restful sleep in order to drain the toxins. Without that, you'd have to see a different path taken to develop the same brain power that you see in higher mammals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:24AM (7 children)
Electricity might be more difficult but I don't think it's a showstopper given there's stuff like electric eels.
Developing fire and associated tech-paths is probably an issue. Harder to smelt stuff without stuff like fire.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:30AM (5 children)
As soon as coral grows high enough to breach the surface of the water, land animals can evolve on top of coral, and eventually fire can be invented.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:02AM (4 children)
The idea is that these ocean planets have extremely deep oceans. Can coral grow to become 100+ km tall? And even if some sort of coral land plateau magically forms, there won't be any metal production up there. Your stone tools will actually be made of coral and will be used to scrape lichen off the coral (until you starve).
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:20AM (3 children)
100 km coral reef? lol is that the major obstacle.
Yes, we developed the eye, the nervous system, immune system, but 100 km coral...pfft are you nute?
A lot "just happens" in 3-4 billion years.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:29AM (2 children)
If it "just happens", why don't we have undersea mountains of dead coral poking out of the deepest parts of the oceans? Maybe because it's physically impossible.
Everest is about 9 km high and 100 km is the shallow water level on some ocean planets.
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(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @09:27AM
Because ocean floor gets completely replaced every few million years?????
Right... please, point me to some ocean planets that don't exist just in your (or someone else's) imagination. Unless someone goes there and measures things, all we have is imagination. Like imagination about internal structure of Jupiter or our Sun. Heck, we never even drilled into the mantle of Earth! All we have is indirect measurements (which is sooo much better than about any other planet, never mind plants outside our Solar System).
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:19PM
Where are you getting this number from? The deepest point in Earth's oceans is just shy of 11 km.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:05AM
Volcanicity might be used to provide the required heat.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:26AM
Hah. I'll give you a point there.
"And gliders are a lot easier to develop when you start with a cliff rather than having to catapult them into the sky."
Easy come easy go.
No, actually, flight is MUCH easier underwater.
And there's no obvious reason why adapting underwater flight to atmospheric should be any more difficult than converting from walking or crawling in the dirt to flying.
"Electricity is nearly certain to not be developed on a water world"
Well electricity wasn't *developed* you know, it's a fact of the natural world. It's not unknown underwater either - electric eels are quite familiar with it, as are any creatures that deal with them.
It might be more difficult to develop some of the specific technologies of the sort that we are accustomed to but it might yet be possible to produce broadly similar technologies nonetheless. We really don't know, and certainly can't rule it out.
"Not to mention the issues of life under water and it's impact on the evolution of the brain. Even aquatic mammals have had to evolve some rather strange things like dolphins sleeping one hemisphere at a time in order to not drown. This sort of thing makes is less likely for a highly evolved brain to develop as the brain needs some form of restful sleep in order to drain the toxins. Without that, you'd have to see a different path taken to develop the same brain power that you see in higher mammals."
Err... that makes no sense at all, considering that many of the 'higher' mammals are aquatic. Porpoises, whales, that sort of thing.
I mean, in my day, we'd at least say 'cause no hands.'
:P
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 18 2017, @01:21PM (4 children)
You do realize that the vast majority of our chemistry is fluid-based?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @02:38PM (3 children)
Yes and you do realize that the majority of our chemistry evolved by accident right? Furthermore the means by which our chemicals are produced rely heavily on specific enzymes working on specific molecules one at a time.
This is nothing at all like what a species just starting out with chemistry would be able to do. We still haven't managed that in an effective and efficient manner.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:32PM (2 children)
Accidents of chemistry can happen underwater as well.
Which just isn't relevant. It just means it would be different.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @03:09AM (1 child)
That's an incredibly ridiculous insinuation there. There was a rather long period where people were screwing around with chemicals not really knowing what they were doing. But, eventually, there were enough experiments to have a basis for alchemy and later chemistry. You're not going to manage that underwater by accident. It's roughly equivalent to monkeys randomly typing out the works of Shakespeare. It wouldn't work because the monkeys have preferences for certain letters and in terms of underwater chemistry, you're going to have an incredibly hard time isolating any of the elements needed to do the experiments as there's a huge number of substances that are either water soluble or that float in water. Whereas only a relatively few number of molecules will float in the air.
Or to put it another way, the chain of events necessary for non-terrestrial lifeforms to even get the idea to work on chemistry is sufficient to rule it out. Even with being on land, having two hands and a generally well developed brain it took many thousands of years to get past the most rudimentary chemistry.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 19 2017, @04:56AM
No, it's not. First, we're speaking of intelligent beings with equivalent ability to manipulate their environment to humans. Second, unlike monkeys that don't know what they're doing, accidental chemical results can be discovered and replicated because intelligent beings do that sort of thing.
So contrary to your assertion that it is "ridiculous" we see here plenty of opportunity for chemistry discoveries. There would be a huge variety of normal chemistry-related conditions in the environment such as the water/air surface, toxins and such, variety of weird chemicals and dyes emitted by organisms, differences in salinity (including the forming of salt through evaporation of sea water), even existence of pure metals (which can form in a strongly reducing environment on Earth or fall from the sky as a meteorite). Fire is still possible in the atmosphere as well due to methane seeps and lightning.
Which, let us recall was irrelevant to chemistry since most of it was done with fluids, not air.
Aquatic lifeforms would have that time to develop chemistry as well. Not seeing the point.
Really, your post is completely unimaginative. Chemistry developed underwater would be different (not have a strong fire-based component at first), but it would exist. There would be all sorts of mysteries and unexplained phenomena to study.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Taibhsear on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:40PM (1 child)
Why is electricity necessary? We didn't start with it. I can easily see an underwater technology advancement as such:
Organisms near thermal or volcanic vents notice certain rocks can be melted into more pure metals that can be worked with stone or natural tools (like mantis shrimp mallet hands). Then said metals can be fashioned into other tools or containers to generate steam power via similar volcanism or chemical reactions to generate mechanical power for propulsion or gears/pulleys/etc. Not to mention some organisms can migrate between water and air with no problems so once on land can create any necessary electrical technology or protective containers to isolate the electrical components from the ocean. Even without electricity there's still the possibility of creating photonic circuitry (much farther down the line technologically speaking). Even some aquatic organisms have "figured out" (evolved) air flight. Flying fish for example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @03:14AM
It's necessary for the simple reason that it's not just one component or another, it's involved in pretty much every component necessary for creating, building and flying space craft. The inability to communicate without electricity alone is sufficient to warrant the assumption. Not to mention that without electricity, your capacity for developing engines is greatly reduced and building computational equipment based on fluidonic computation requires a great deal of space.
Even if you don't find that to be compelling, there's also the issue of chemistry. Developing sophisticated chemistry requires a lab environment where the chemicals don't juts float away. Between chemical reactions and electricity, it's hard to devise a method of transport that doesn't rely on either those things or biological processes to move things. To date, no living things of any meaningful size has been put into space and survived without a space craft.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:57AM (1 child)
It's just fucked. It sounds cool. Like we could have Aquaman and Atlantis and the Gungans of Naboo and all these technological civilizations forming in the water on ocean planets. In practice, I think we'll find that metallurgy, the printing press, explosives, radio, transistors, lasers, nuclear reactors, particle accelerators, spacecraft, and other important technologies won't be invented underwater. Meaning that even if something intelligent is down there, it won't be sending electromagnetic signals we can pick up or buzzing us with UFOs. Even if we can identify ocean planets using next-gen space telescopes, it would be nearly impossible to find evidence of intelligent life (big brains, but with no significant technological development due to being permanently submerged). We can infer the existence of intelligent life on other exoplanets by looking for unnatural compounds in the atmosphere, traces of industrial activity.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 20 2017, @05:48AM
You lack creativity. And I know why; you've played too much Civilization the game, and you think that surface-dwelling tech progression has specific gates.
Let me give a counterexample.
Electricity is used by the nerves; why wouldn't biologists, instead of chemists, be the first to the electrical frontier? Or even still chemists, for many ionic experiments exist, which is fundamentally electric. Or through physics, through force measurements of charged bodies or such?
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday July 18 2017, @08:44AM
In one of the Iain M. Banks books, spacefaring natives of a water world referred to species that evolved on land-rich planets as 'squanderers' - people who had achieved space flight only because they'd been handed abundant easily exploitable resources by nature, which didn't count as a real achievement.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:48AM (3 children)
But what if RF isn't actually such a common method of communication? What if there's a much better way we haven't discovered yet? What if we're unusual in having used RF for this long? Well then the lack of recognizable alien signals would be expected and mean nothing.
Aliens don't necessarily look like us, think like us, or use the same technology we use. And they don't necessarily want us to know they are out there. We probably don't have anything they need, and they might just consider us primitive and dangerous.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:06AM (1 child)
I know I do!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:59AM
We're too primitive to be dangerous.
"What was that?" [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 20 2017, @05:53AM
Or maybe RF is too slow, the whole c thing. Maybe the spooky action at a distance channel is one we haven't tuned into yet.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:40AM (6 children)
The speed of light does not prevent you from leaving your home system, a sufficiently advanced civilization could just do it the hard way.
With out grand total of 1 samples, we have absolutely no clue what is typical of advanced civilizations. For all we know, the standard could be aquatic trees or nebula-dwelling space cows.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:18AM (5 children)
Well, I suspect you didn't want to write "without", but your typo is actually quite apt: We don't know even a single advanced civilization. There's certainly none on Earth: We barely manage to maintain a basic level of civilization.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:24AM
No no, don't you see? The absence of any means we can go hog wild postulating whatever we want.
Ignore us, because we're earth-bound forever. Forever. Forever. End of story. Forever. But imagine all the other possibilities!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:29AM (1 child)
True there are too many people starving to death at this very moment to call the Earth civilized.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:32AM
FTFY.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:30AM (1 child)
Many of us don't have toilets. Others spend many lifetimes worth of labor casually to incenerate people they have never met. Most often ones that barely have toilets.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday July 18 2017, @08:50PM
Many of us don't have toilets.
AIs don't need toilets - ergo AI are not civilized.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Tuesday July 18 2017, @10:40AM
The trouble with that is that we already have, or very soon will have, the capability to send out probes to other star systems. It it mostly a cost thing, and the willingness to go nuclear. In the not too-distant future such probes could be self-replicating. Such probes could travel to most of the galaxy in a (cosmological) short time, even after we have blown ourselves us.
So the question is really: why has nobody else done this. And maybe: are we overdue on getting our extinction event?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Tuesday July 18 2017, @02:59PM (4 children)
An intelligent alien with a lifespan of thousands of years and technology capable of a 5-G acceleration could visit us from Andromeda without going faster than light. At 1-G we could get to Sirius in five years, although fifty would pass for those on Earth.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @08:00PM
Energy required for acceleration is not linear, the fast you go the more energy required to maintain acceleration. Also, unless they have energy shielding tech then they probably wouldn't survive the trip.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Wednesday July 19 2017, @12:15AM (1 child)
Humans could actually visit Andromeda, if we managed to somehow build a spaceship capable of a constant 1G acceleration for decades at a time*. A journey to Andromeda would take about 35 years, well within a human's lifetime, and there's even a possibility of living long enough to survive the return trip if someone started the journey at a young enough age. Though millions of years would have elapsed on Earth by then, so there may not be much to return to.
* Decades of ship time, that is.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 19 2017, @02:55PM
In Larry Niven's "A World Out of Time" a guy slingshots around the galaxy's central black hole and returns tens of thousands (forgot exactly, been years since I read it) of years later, as an old man.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @03:19AM
Energy increases with the square of the velocity and linearly with mass. Doubling the velocity requires quadrupling the energy even before taking into account the energy lost int he process of producing the force.
Also, 1-G force in space is incredibly hard to do. There's literally only a few atoms per cubic meter in the vacuum of space for the engines to push against. You can get some acceleration out of solar sails, but there's issues with those that haven't yet been worked out.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jcross on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:10PM (2 children)
I don't know, our means of detection are so primitive at this point: optical telescopes that can just barely see an exoplanet much less a spaceship and radio receivers that will only notice powerful, wasteful, uncompressed signals. It's like being a primitive person on an island in the middle of the Pacific and wondering "where is everybody?". All it takes is shipping lanes and flight paths being out of direct sight and you'd probably assume those distant rumbles are just noise (in the statistical sense). If nobody has a reason to visit your island, how would you know about other humans? I think our real problem is being biased to assume our little spot in space and time is somehow especially significant.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Wednesday July 19 2017, @12:36AM (1 child)
Growing up, we had never seen any evidence of any planets outside our own solar system. Then 25 years ago, we detected our first. Now we have found thousands and more every day.
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(Score: 2) by jcross on Wednesday July 19 2017, @12:27PM
Yes, and I'm not trying to minimize our progress. Every century, "where is everybody?" becomes a less and less silly question to ask. I'm just saying that currently even what to look for is somewhat speculative, and we don't yet have the tools to search without making a lot of assumptions about, for example, alien energy use and communications protocols. As a thought experiment, let's say we develop the technology to see the surface of an exoplanet in some detail, but we observe no geometric structures on it. Can we conclude there's no civilization there? What if they live underground on geothermal energy, or have a very naturalistic aesthetic so their buildings look like features of the landscape? Maybe they'd prefer to have their planet appear barren to marauders, if the universe is a cutthroat place like in the Dark Forest trilogy. We're still quite a primitive people compared to any theoretical space-colonizing civilization.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:09PM
So what? There are lots of ways of interstellar travel that don't depend on FTL. They may, however, depend on controlled fusion or matter-antimatter energy sources...so that might be the reason. OTOH, I think fission would suffice, though it would make refueling a lot more difficult.
P.S.: That wouldn't be even NEAR light speed, due to lots of flotsam being too dangerous to speed by, but 1/10th C should be safe enough, though perhaps too fast for optimal acquisition of resources while in transit. But don't expect the folk who travel to want to land when they get to the next star. By then they'll have adapted to their current environment.
N.B.: Resources are spread very thinly in space, so your ecology will need to be nearly entirely closed, and the society would need to have an essentially stable population and only reproduce when it collected a rich wandering asteroid. A good virtual reality system would probably be essential to maintain personal and social stability.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:21PM
Perhaps we cannot detect their communications because they switched to faster than light communications long [cosmically] before we had the novel idea of banging rocks together to make fire. Thus their slow and insecure radio transmissions ceased and decayed into background radiation before we even could conceive of the technology to detect it. Really, who broadcasts their culture to the universe constantly, that's the galactic equivalent to a reality TV show.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base