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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: 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