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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @06:30AM (1 child)
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
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.