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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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Monday August 14 2017, @12:01AM (4 children)
We haven't met E.T., we don't pick up alien TV and we don't see megastructures. Conclusion: Armageddon. Somebody seems to have jumped a few steps somewhere.
We don't know if alien civilizations hit the singularity and transcend our comprehension.
We don't know if alien civilizations simply stay home because E=MC^2 can't be worked around and space travel is pointless.
We don't know if space is filled with alien transmission that we don't yet have the tech to look for.
We don't know if we aren't currently a "preserve" to protect our developing civilization from contamination and death from culture shock.
We don't know if the universe is a lot more dangerous than we assume and life is thus a lot more rare, maybe it averages less than one per galaxy, maybe a LOT less. It is doubtful we could see an alien civilization near is, good luck seeing one in a neighboring galaxy until we are building instruments on a entirely different scale.
Those are the known unknowns, now imagine the unknown unknowns. But you can't because if you can imagine them they become known unknowns.
We don't know what we don't know. Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns are a thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @01:16AM
They probably read your comments and concluded that it was the logical thing to do.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday August 14 2017, @01:26AM (1 child)
There's even more problems with the "Why aren't E.T.'s transmitting stuff at us?", like:
- We don't know whether E.T.'s that know how to send out EM waves choose to do so. Consider that us humans are in the process of reducing how much EM is leaving our atmosphere as we switch to more communications based on sending bits down wires and fiber cables, and when we do EM transmission it's more likely to be straight lines near the surface (from cell towers to phones).
- We do know that any E.T. EM waves would be ridiculously hard for us to pick up. Only recently were we able to gather enough detail to pick out planets using EM waves, and even then we've only found 22. The reason is that most of them have any and all EM waves they might produce completely drowned out by their stars.
Some people are making the mistaken assumption that the number of known species with substantial interstellar communications capabilities is 1, when it's actually 0.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @03:02AM
Also according to compression theory. The more you compress something the more it looks like noise and becomes uncompressable. If you want to maximize your data channel it will look like white noise. Now decode it. Plus data becomes wildly artifacted as you approach a sun. Those things give off huge amounts of radiation across the whole spectrum. Our magnetosphere buffers it so we have fairly clear channels here. But fling it across the void and you will get very different results.
EM transmission it's more likely to be straight lines near the surface (from cell towers to phones).
Cell towers do not work that way. Power is limited to create the 'cell'. So the radio waves do not go much further than the cell. It is how we can scale the network across a city like new york. You can in theory have 1 cell tower that services new york city. Just do not expect too many people to be able to use it. They are usually over provisioned 200 to 1 as not everyone uses their phone at the same time. Also we have OFDM and CDMA and TDMA to slice it down. But it is still limited space. A small city will only have 2-3 towers. While some place like new york city will have thousands. They usually do not directional beam. Think of it more like a doughnut or a piece of pie shape.
Also to the article
technological civilizations that last millions of years, or longer, would be highly atypical
There is 0 evidence either way for that conclusion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @06:58AM
jmorris, covering up the whole lizard people thing, again. Suspicious? Maybe?