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The Implications of Cosmic Silence

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

MrPlow writes:

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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1) by GDX on Monday August 14 2017, @03:15AM (6 children)

    by GDX (1950) on Monday August 14 2017, @03:15AM (#553450)

    The cosmic silence can be simply noise masking the transmissions and the windows to detect the radio transmission of a civilizations is really small, 100 years for the hearth, after such period the radio transmissions tend to look more like random noise making it more difficult. Wee need some radio telescope on mars or beyond to observe the earth to try to identify how the radio transmission of a civilization look from space, also it have to simulate numeric aperture of our telescopes to scale to how the heart can be seen from the deeps of space in a radio telescope.

    The size of a space civilization is not limited by the speed of their ships but by the speed of their communications, basically the size of a civilizations is limited by how fast the information travel in their interplanetary networks, basically even if they have FTL ships if they can not transmit information faster than light them they have to make the communications travel in the ships like simple mail, this limits their size to days and most weeks of ship travel. This don't mean that they can't make multiyear expeditions, but this expeditions are going to be pretty aware of not doing communications with local primitive civilizations, the most that they are going to do is observe while trying to not be observed and possibly take some samples if they can.

  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday August 14 2017, @03:38AM (5 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Monday August 14 2017, @03:38AM (#553458) Journal

    Your ointment has flies.

    Why do you hand waive FTL travel into existence but still balk at FTL communications?

    http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/science/ct-quantum-entanglement-science-space-20170617-story.html [chicagotribune.com]

    I submit you've got it backwards.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.

    • (Score: 1) by GDX on Monday August 14 2017, @04:08AM (4 children)

      by GDX (1950) on Monday August 14 2017, @04:08AM (#553476)

      But quantum entanglement don't guarantee FTL communications. I don't really balk at the possibility of FTL communications, but I think that FTL travel is going to happen before FTL communications, those are very different problems and also think that FTL travel is the easier one.