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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 mcgrew on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:03PM (2 children)
It's almost a mathematical certainty that life exists on our level or greater somewhere in the universe.
Key word there: almost. There's always a first, it's possible we're simply the first. But unless we actually find life, the only two possible answers are "yes" and "maybe", because if there is no other life it would be impossible to know that facet.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:39PM (1 child)
>It's possible we're simply the first
Yep. But you'd have to *really* tilt the scales of probability to bet on it. After all our sun wasn't formed until about midway through the period in the universes history when sunlike stars would form. Assuming the distribution of planets we've found in our local corner of the galaxy is anything remotely typical, then there are millions of Earthlike worlds around Sunlike stars in our galaxy that are billions of years older than our own.
It's not impossible that ours was the first to evolve life, though the fact that life appears to have been present here almost from the planet's conception would seem to suggest that spawning life is not actually as difficult as we might imagine. And even if the handful of large evolutionary leaps (photosynthesis, multicellularism, high-density neurons, probably a few others in between) towards intelligent civilization are extremely unlikely, millions of planets times billions of years gives a LOT of opportunities for extremely unlikely events to occur.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:25PM
But it may well be that our sun was a member of the first generation to have enough "metals" to yield planets viable for a civilization. And "first" just means "first within our light cone".
OTOH, that's still not the way to bet. It's just the odds of our being "first" are a lot better than you are estimating. I'd still put it considerably less than 1%. But the problem might be with "detectable". Anybody who isn't really trying to be detected isn't likely to be detected by astronomers at a civilization anywhere near as low as ours. Not even if they lived in the Alpha Centauri system. And visitors would probably find our environment too inhospitable to bother with. Probably the best way to detect prior visitors is to search the Solar System for abandoned mining sites...but what would they look like? What tools would a civilization advanced enough to send interstellar vessels use to mine with? Robots? Lasers? Mirrors? Something else? If they just smash a couple of asteroids together and pick up the useful fragments the mines might be quite difficult to detect.
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