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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, Interesting) by jelizondo on Monday August 14 2017, @01:42AM
Thank you for your reply. What I mean is more in line with what happened to Islam at around the year 1600, it simply imploded and has never recovered its inlfuence over the civilized world.
They brought numbers (i.e. [0..9]) from India and gunpowder from China, basically giving Europe two of its most potent weapons to conquer almost every other nation and begin the so-called Age of Discovery.
About two-thirds of named stars have an Arabic name.
The zealots and fundamentalists we see today don’t hold a candle to their ancestors, neither scientifically nor militarily. So, what happened to the Islamic Civilization?
You see, a single man was influential enough to get the entire Islamic world to turn their backs on science, education and technology.
We see evidence today in the U.S. of such a stance, from ‘Creationism’ being taught along side Evolution to Flat Earthers to people denying the landing on the Moon to Mennonites. If such people held power, where would the U.S. be in 20 or 50 years? I’ll tell you, it would stop being a super-power and be more like Afghanistan or Tajikistan.
Imagine if the Muslims hadn't been defeated by Charles Martel [wikipedia.org] and had taken over the entire European continent: when they imploded they would have taken the entire Western world with them. There would not have been a Reinasancce and neither an 'Age of Discovery'. Would the Chinese have conquered the world instead? Your take is as good as mine but we can be sure the world would be less developed and quite different from what we know today.
A long read [thenewatlantis.com], but worth it. All quotes from article linked.