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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: 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.