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posted by mrpg on Sunday August 13 2017, @11:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-are-doomed dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

A University of Arkansas mathematician argues that species, such as ours, go extinct soon after attaining high levels of technology.

"I taught astronomy for 37 years," said Whitmire. "I used to tell my students that by statistics, we have to be the dumbest guys in the galaxy. After all we have only been technological for about 100 years while other civilizations could be more technologically advanced than us by millions or billions of years."

Recently, however, he's changed his mind. By applying a statistical concept called the principle of mediocrity – the idea that in the absence of any evidence to the contrary we should consider ourselves typical, rather than atypical – Whitmire has concluded that instead of lagging behind, our species may be average. That's not good news.

[...] The argument is based on two observations: We are the first technological species to evolve on Earth, and we are early in our technological development.

[...] By Whitmire's definition we became "technological" after the industrial revolution and the invention of radio, or roughly 100 years ago. According to the principle of mediocrity, a bell curve of the ages of all extant technological civilizations in the universe would put us in the middle 95 percent. In other words, technological civilizations that last millions of years, or longer, would be highly atypical. Since we are first, other typical technological civilizations should also be first. The principle of mediocrity allows no second acts. The implication is that once species become technological, they flame out and take the biosphere with them.

Source: The Implications of Cosmic Silence

For background, see: Fermi's Paradox and the Drake equation.


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  • (Score: 2) by jelizondo on Sunday August 13 2017, @11:50PM (4 children)

    by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 13 2017, @11:50PM (#553399) Journal

    Sample size might one and conclusions statistically irrelevant but common sense supports the idea that after a civilization garners enough technology, it destroy itself.

    In evolutionary terms, our competitive and aggressive drives are healthy but mix in nuclear bombs, scarce resources and population growth and those same drives mean trouble. Mix ideology and religion and we are doomed.

    A couple of examples are the dick-size contest with North Korea and the pissing contest with Iran; one is irrational and would rather go in flames, the other is acting rationally but we keep pissing in their tea.

    Sooner or later, nukes will be launched and then everyone gets involved: U.S., China, Russia, U.K. and Israel. I wish we had John F. Kennedy handling this; the world could have ended in 1962 but he kept his cool and won us a few years more.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday August 14 2017, @01:18AM (2 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 14 2017, @01:18AM (#553413) Journal

    This is replying to the parent more than to the article, but it actually replies to both:

    High tech war is one of a few plausible reasons for "the great silence". Another is introversion. One way this has been suggested to work is that after a certain point nobody is willing to put up with a long lag time in communicating. Another is finding virtual reality more interesting than external reality. (Of course, those aren't contradictory.) Then there's lousing up the development of AI. AI is incredibly dangerous...the only thing more dangerous is having evolved politicians in charge of high tech weapons.

    Additionally, it may turn out that most evolved life isn't capable of surviving in space even with good tech support. This isn't implausible, and many extant life forms have a hard time surviving even 200 miles from where they are native. Most species aren't invasive.

    My hoped for answer is that once you spend a few centuries as high tech wanderers, the idea of devoting effort to living on a planet seems appallingly unpleasant. Certainly most planets that support life will develop atmospheres quite different from a uninhabited planet, and inhabited planets (similar to Earth) will tend to have proteins endemic which are quite different in structure than ours...probably sufficiently so to set off violent allergy attacks. So planets won't be very interesting. This doesn't mean they won't communicate with each other, but none of the communications will be directed at us. And I suspect that the ultimate strength of materials puts a limit on the size of structures that it's reasonable to build. IOW no RingWorld, no traditional Dyson Sphere, etc. (Dyson's original idea seems to really have involved lots of independent things in various orbits inclined to each other. This has lots of engineering problems, but could be done. I'm not sure if it would be reasonable, but you could approach it with a variation on Topopolis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topopolis [wikipedia.org] . There are lots of variations plausible on Topopolis, and it actually seems like the most reasonable advanced form of space habitat. You could even build part(s) of it into a magnetic catapult designed to send capsules to other stars at any reasonable speed, using electricity from areas closer to the sun to power a 1 G acceleration for as long as you cared to build out.

    N.B.: A topopolis would be a space CITY. the only open spaces would be intentional parks, and calling them "open spaces" would merely mean that they had "natural appearing lighting" and high ceilings. And artificial weather. But each local piece would be relatively separate from the others. A global catastrophe would be essentially impossible short of a nova. For lesser disturbances it would have a magnetic atmosphere designed to take power from solar winds and coronal ejections. (Hopefully enough power to support the magnetic atmosphere, but even if not, it would be needed to prevent untoward radiation. Still, magnetic atmospheres should take quite little power to maintain. The natural ones seem to run on quite small amounts of power, if any.)

    Now any life living in a Topopolis would be quite introverted. You'd need to make an effort to look outside. So they'd be unlikely to go looking even for their restless kin that were shot off towards the nearby stars. There'd be a few experts who would know, even with well automated maintenance (hmmm--a new failure mode), but they'd have only a quite small chunk of the budget.

    If a Topopolis based civilization is headed this way, we'd probably never hear about them before they arrived...and they might well just decide to give us a pass as too much bother for no real gain.

    But while the home system of space-based races would probably evolve into some variant of Topopolis, the more mobile parts would likely form generation ships that never intend to land. Why should they? All they need to do is keep moving slightly faster than the local drift and glom onto any useful matter they overtake. When they encounter something rich, then they build a second ship and split the colony, heading off in slightly different directions. Again, these folk would probably talk to each other, and to the folks back home, but after the first or second encounter with an alien species they'd probably give the rest a skip as "boring, and too much bother".

    So again, you get a great silence.

    As a further consideration, generation one stars probably can't support life on any planets as they are too poor in a variety of elements. The same MAY be true of generation two stars. If so, our generation of star may be the first that can support life. That's a bit speculative, but not totally silly.

    So there are lots of possibilities besides technological civilizations all killing themselves off. I'd be quite surprised if they all did.

    --
    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 Monday August 14 2017, @06:30AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @06:30AM (#553528)

      I think you're giving insufficient consideration to the fact that curiosity is arguably one of the most important drives in bringing us to what and where we are. Renaissance aristocracy, which includes all the scientists we now know from that era, had in most cases everything they could ever possibly want. Instead of sitting around indulging themselves to no end, they sought to dedicate their lives to exploration and research into the unknown. The same would have likely happened during the feudal era once political stability emerged, but the centuries spent killing each other occupied most of society. Fortunately today warfare is something that need only occupy a minuscule fraction of society.

      A life sitting around in a so-called utopia sounds like hell to me. Discovery, creation, and the exploration of what we do not know is what makes life worth living.

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 15 2017, @04:47PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 15 2017, @04:47PM (#554316) Journal

        How many people become anthropologists? Yeah, there are a few, but not many, and they don't have much budget. And the Topopolis civilization folk studying primitives won't even be able to claim they's studying relatives. Besides, after 10 years of "I Love Lucy" how interesting would you think earth-folk would be? "Victory at Sea", etc. would just make giving this place a skip even more attractive. Receiving signals is relatively cheap, and is safe, why bother getting closer? Now they probably would make contact with a couple of groups of aliens, but after that the novelty is largely gone.

        And THAT's assuming they are even in the neighborhood. If they came by a couple of centuries ago nobody would know, unless they left mining scars on some of the asteroids or minor moons...and even then we wouldn't know yet.

        As for curiosity, I imagine they would be great astronomers, and have an extremely well developed skill at celestial navigation (possibly using plusars as signposts). They could probably do an accurate animation of the expansion of the universe to as much detail as they felt like. (They'd be able to synchronize their observations sufficiently to have a radiotelescope, and possibly even an optical one, light years in diameter, and with 3-d resolution. Yes, they'd have curiosity, and considerably developed science, but they wouldn't necessarily expend that curiosity in a way that would suit you. If they were interested in people at all they'd probably be satisfied with a couple of samples to sequence, and possibly a couple of monkeys and a couple of lizards, some fish, and a bunch of bacteria. Remember, we aren't *their* ecosystem. And they'd have biology to an extent that we can't imagine. That wouldn't be enough to let them reconstruct how we developed, but why would they care? We're just a passing encounter...and one unpleasant to most of the citizenry. Most *HUMANS* aren't even aware that over 90% of human genetic variation resides in Africa. Many of the ones that hear it find the news unpleasant enough that they just deny it. Curiosity isn't that major a drive.

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Monday August 14 2017, @03:07AM

    by Arik (4543) on Monday August 14 2017, @03:07AM (#553445) Journal
    This is not a new idea at all, it's a conversation that's been going on for many decades at least.

    If we assume our civilization is somewhere near the middle of the bell curve, then we expect to see tons of radio wave evidence from civilizations that were at our level of development earlier.

    We do not see such evidence.

    There are several possible explanations.

    1. We're not actually near the middle of the bell curve, we're way up front. Unlikely, but without evidence who knows?
    2. Civilizations like ours inevitably destroy themselves with nukes or whatever shortly after they start transmitting.
    3. Civilizations like ours inevitably discover something much better and stop using radio waves for communication shortly after they start transmitting. (For bonus points, maybe they don't normally transmit RF at all, even for a short time, but for some strange reason this better alternative everyone else goes to isn't so easy for us to find.)

    Obviously there are lots of slightly different possiblities but most if not all seem to fall into one of those categories.

    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?