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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: 2) by frojack on Monday August 14 2017, @03:22AM (3 children)
How intelligent could they have been if they never had stone workers, never developed metal, glass, or any other durable materials that could exist for that long. 3 billion years ago we were just starting to have photosynthesis, yet even those primitive cells managed to leave a fossil record.
Seems we would have found something by now.
No, the whole concept is flawed because even on a planet conducive to life for a period long enough for an intelligent species to appear, the destruction of that intelligent life would leave a planet ripe for the next evolution of another intelligent species.
Red Dwarf stars [wikipedia.org] comprising maybe 3/4 of all stars, a type that is relatively constant for trillions of years. There should be plenty of time for life to appear on planets near such stars, several times over. Not so much on earth, which was still receiving heavy bombardment 3.5 billion years ago. No time .
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 14 2017, @04:41AM
How intelligent could they have been if they never had stone workers, never developed metal, glass, or any other durable materials that could exist for that long.
Would our buildings leave traces that last that long? I'm not aware of much we've found that's that old. The dinosaur fossils are only a few hundred million years old; relatively recent in terms of Earth's history. Everything we build is pretty hard to find traces of after a few centuries, and our longest-lived stuff is generally stacked-up rocks, or Roman concrete. I'm talking about a hypothetical civilization that was around over 2B years before the dinosaurs even evolved.
yet even those primitive cells managed to leave a fossil record.
So we got lucky with a few fossil finds. Even with the dinosaurs, there's huge gaps in the fossil record. We only find so much stuff (only so much is near the surface, because of geological processes), and most dinosaurs never became fossils, they completely biodegraded. A small number were preserved, by things like tar pits or volcanoes, so we get glimpses into prehistory from those rare events. Similarly, we got lucky with the Roman ruins at Pompeii: they were preserved by a shit-ton of volcanic ash dumped on them so fast, all the townspeople were killed instantly and their bodies preserved in action at that moment, and their buildings also preserved well by this. At most ancient sites, we're lucky if we can figure out where the main walls are by the foundations; if they made stuff out of wood, there's usually nothing left.
Seems we would have found something by now.
This seems to be the main argument. It isn't that great of one. If there was a civilization 2-3 Billion years ago, but it never got much past where our Medieval technology was (some stone buildings, but mostly wooden buildings, no durable roads, no cars or other large metal objects, certainly no skyscrapers), and never expanded that much before being wiped out by an asteroid, I think it's perfectly feasible that we wouldn't see a trace of it now. It's either all eroded away, or buried under so much earth that we haven't found it yet. Even if there were a civilization similar in tech to where we were in the 1800s, I think the story would be the same.
Not so much on earth, which was still receiving heavy bombardment 3.5 billion years ago. No time .
It seems like it's plenty of time: we've only been on this planet for 2 million years, and we only took about 10k years to build this level of civilization, with a lot of errors and setbacks (e.g. fall of Rome). If some other species evolved big brains, but didn't have our warlike and religious tendencies (e.g. no Mongol invasions, no rejection of reason in favor of religious fundamentalism), they could have done it faster. And with the heavier level of bombardment back then, they could have easily been wiped out relatively early (before they could build a space program) by an asteroid impact. Heck, even if they got to the point of building nuclear weapons and annihilated themselves that way, would we be able to detect that now, after 1-3B years? 2M years divides into 1B years 500 times: during a single 1 billion-year span (2-3B years ago), there could have been 500 separate civilizations like ours to evolve independently. There's plenty of time there for a species to evolve and a civilization to grow. The main problem is that there's just no evidence for it we've found; all evidence points to life back then being much simpler. What if we just haven't found it yet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @11:44AM (1 child)
I'm old enough (59) that I remember being frustrated by the ever changing age of the Earth back in elementary school. We were still figuring it out, or at least, the best information was still working its way into the school systems back in the early 1960s. The Earth went from a few hundred million years old to maybe a billion, to 2 billion, to 4.3 billion years between 1st grade and middle school. (Texas school system.) Same thing for the age of the universe.
My point -- We assume the age of the solar system based on the age of the oldest rocks on Earth/Moon plus a few things we think we know about the evolution of stars. We could be wrong, or at least, a little wrong. A.C. Clarke was always good at being as scientifically accurate as possible. Remember he also said, "when an old and distinguished scientist says something is possible, he's probably right, but when he says something is impossible, he is very likely wrong." (I think he was referring to Einstein).
Anyway, the age of the oldest rocks only tell us how long ago the last time the Earth was destroyed (The moon forming event, for example.) It is possible that the Earth had many billions of years to evolve before that too-- IF our understanding of stellar evolution is in any way flawed.
If a Mars-sized object crashed into the Earth, like the moon forming event, all traces of us would be obliterated beyond detection except for the radio signals racing away at C. The "Earth" would start over from scratch.
Light of Other Days is a fascinating exploration of total loss of privacy (imagine political, business, bedroom, etc. meetings being spied upon by anyone, at will.) Well worth the read. It's also a foreshadowing of what's happening right now with our teenagers and their phones. On-line all the time, like cells in a hive-mind constantly connected...
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Tuesday August 15 2017, @01:00AM
We've dated enough meteorites and other material that did not originate on the Earth (or Moon) to know that the Earth formed with the rest of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. So we are still living on the "first" Earth, so to speak.