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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.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @08:35PM
Consider an alien race, let's just make it one of silicon based machine intelligence, because the resource thing is hardly a problem for them (organics would just see them as a bonus).
If there's one race, maybe there's two. If there's at least two then maybe they had a war already -- or if just one, then maybe they had a civil war amongst themselves to change the direction of their race.
Having realized that other sentient creatures can potentially become a threat to their survival it behooves them to get out ahead of the problem and suppress the advancement of technology in other burgeoning races. This is easily done via lobbing a few rocks at M-class planets as a preemptive measure. In our galaxy this may have been going on for quite some time, and there are many layers of rock strata including ash and micro-diamonds (indicative of impact events).
The Freemasons hold that we are the survivors of such events, which cause great fire and flood; They see themselves as protectors of knowledge and preservers of wisdom who's ancestors also strove to persevere in the face of great disaster. Their two pillars are representative of the great fire and great flood, and these events bookend the Christian Bible and other religious works. Between the two civilization is rebuilt and thrives, or so they recount.
It could be this world has already been at war with aliens for millions of years, with us unable to fight back, and that some mass extinction events are part of the suppression campaign. Perhaps due to cost not every potential life supporting planet is visited and energy is not spent to destroy the entire planet, just bombard them with a rock or two sufficient to wipe out a civilization if it exists. If such suppression has been going on throughout our Galaxy, then it would explain why our neighbors are so scarce.