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"Alexander Berezin, a theoretical physicist at the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Russia, has proposed a new answer to Fermi's paradox — but he doesn't think you're going to like it. Because, if Berezin's hypothesis is correct, it could mean a future for humanity that's 'even worse than extinction.'
'What if,' Berezin wrote in a new paper posted March 27 to the preprint journal arxiv.org, 'the first life that reaches interstellar travel capability necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion?'" foxnews.com/science/2018/06/04/aliens-are-real-but-humans-will-probably-kill-them-all-new-paper-says.html
In other words, could humanity's quest to discover intelligent life be directly responsible for obliterating that life outright? What if we are, unwittingly, the universe's bad guys?
And if you are not sure what the Fermi paradox is then the link should help, and there is a long explanation of that one in the article.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:23PM (36 children)
Just from the summary it sounds like it "solves" the paradox by ignoring it completely.
Okay, yes, maybe the first interstellar race wipes out all the others - in which case, why are we still here? The whole point of Fermi's paradox is that we are INCREDIBLY unlikely to be the first intelligent life to evolve, even given very conservative estimates of the odds of intelligent life developing developing. Earthlike planets were almost certainly forming all over the galaxy a billion of years before Earth did, with that sort of head start the first species to go interstellar has had plenty of time to colonize the whole galaxy.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:49PM (15 children)
Well, there's also that "great filter" theory. Perhaps all those other species wiped themselves out with nuclear war, so whichever species manages to avoid that grim fate will be the one to take over the galaxy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @02:29PM (5 children)
Sure, along with countless other proposed solutions to the paradox. All of which have NOTHING to do with THIS proposed solution. Which isn't actually any kind of solution at all.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 06 2018, @04:17PM (4 children)
Well, the simple solution to the paradox is that we're just living in a simulation, and the aliens haven't been simulated.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @04:55PM (3 children)
What about that orange and yellow guy in the White House?
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:19PM
Glitch in the matrix.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Fluffeh on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:14PM (1 child)
Look, clearly no simulation will be perfect first time round. Please fill out this incident form and out IT support staff will look into this urgently.
We apologise for the inconvenience and wish to assure you that this will be treated with the appropriate level of urgency.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @11:26PM
That object is corrupting the operating system. If it's not corrected, the entire Milky Way simulation may end up corrupted beyond repair, and we'll have to delete that galaxy instance and focus on the Zarxians instead.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @03:56PM (8 children)
We're pretty close to becoming interplanetary, which could prevent us from getting wiped out easily. Basically, we have survived the Atomic Age/Cold War this long, developed everything we need to at least land humans and equipment on the Moon and Mars, and started optimizing the relevant technologies to make everything easier (reusable rockets, better solar, computers, robots, etc.). So it would make sense that other alien civilizations could reach a similar level of development.
Further considerations:
That's all I can think of right now.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @07:15PM (7 children)
Some good points, but I have a few disagreements:
* The moon, and especially Mars, would likely be very difficult to successfully attack, for the simple reason that they're very far away and have a clear line of sight to Earth - they'll see any missile coming days or months away and have ample time to intercept it. Not to mention that the war would likely be over before long before the missile reached them. The art of nuclear war has generally been to take out your opponent's strategic assets before they can take out yours. Mars simply isn't a strategic asset. The Moon might be, if the war were protracted. Throwing rocks from orbit is a lot cheaper and cleaner than lobbing nukes.
* I'm not sure going interstellar is actually as difficult as you portray. Doing it *quickly* perhaps, but once we have self-sustaining orbital habitats of sufficient size it's simply a matter of accelerating them to solar escape velocity, and packing enough nuclear fuel to power them on a few thousand year road trip.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:11PM (6 children)
Let's imagine that we put up a lunar colony in the 2020s or 2030s. Will that colony be able to intercept a missile? No, unless they did something totally crazy like fire their BFS return vehicle at it, and somehow correctly intercept it. And that's just for one missile. It could take another decade or three before they have the ability to manufacture anything beyond regolith bricks from local materials. So they remain vulnerable, and those are extra decades during which shit could hit the fan on Earth, leaving perhaps 5-10 people off-world with almost no chance of building a sustainable colony capable of supporting thousands, and eventually returning people to Earth after the dust settles.
Every spacecraft has machines aboard that can fail within years, maybe decades or a century if lucky. It doesn't matter whether it's a generation ship, suspended animation, DNA samples to grow humans later, or uploaded minds. It has to not fail catastrophically en route. It is also sustaining particle damage, especially when traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Adding shielding or encasing it in an asteroid increases mass and travel time, which means more years in which electronics and moving parts can fail, replacement parts can run out, or things could just combust.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:02PM (4 children)
You make it sound like hitting targets traveling at thousands of meters per second isn't exactly what the BFS is designed to do (aka orbital docking). But why bother - lets take a load of those regolith bricks and release them as a cloud of flak in front of the missile as we approach it. Easier to hit, and you don't waste the rocket.
Meanwhile, if we have only 5-10 people on the moon it's not a colony, just a novelty outpost, and is irrelevant to the survival of our species. When you have thousands, maybe millions of colonists fully capable of supporting themselves indefinitely without any help from Earth - *then* you have a colony that's relevant to the conversation. So long as there's the chance of help from Earth, the colony isn't needed to preserve the species.
As for machine failures - absolutely, but as all of human history shows we're pretty good at fixing*things faster than they break. Meanwhile any colony ship is going to have to provide a fully complete industrial base to jump-start a whole new planetary civilization - self-repair by the inhabitants should be trivial. All the destination is likely to offer is raw materials and solar power - and repair in a closed system consumes no raw materials except energy.
There's also no particular reason to assume they'd be traveling at any significant fraction of light speed - even 10% would require astronomical power. It seems to me that given the extremely low probability of any payoff for the home system, that the most likely motive for traveling to another star is not to get *to* something, but to get *away* from what you're leaving, and your "ship" is likely to be a self-sufficient "city-state" scale orbital habitat that grew tired enough of outside interference that they decided to remove themselves from it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:15PM (3 children)
5-10 people is all we can hope for from our current poorly defined lunar plans. The orbiting LOP-G could delay significant long-term activity on the surface by the U.S. and Russia. The ESA Moon Village [soylentnews.org] would initially be up to 10 people, scaling to 100 later. Initial missions to Mars will include very few people, even if SpaceX is calling the shots. So we probably have another 50 years to stew on Earth before a full scale colonization effort begins in earnest, and longer for these efforts to set up local industrial capabilities. Can we make it to 2100?
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:47PM (2 children)
Can we make it to 2100? As a species I'm fairly confident - we're almost as hard to kill as cockroaches. Anything short of a grey-goo scenario or incredibly ever-engineered superplague is unlikely to wipe us out. As a civilization capable of supporting offworld colonies? I'm much less optimistic. We'll shortly have much more immediate problems to deal with. Which is why any offworld colony would have to work hard to reach the point that they could support themselves. On the bright side, if civilization collapses on Earth, but an offworld colony manages to reach the point of producing advanced technology (computers, solar panels, etc) they'll likely have trade goods to offer in exchange for ecological materials and methane for their rockets to get back to the colony.
My point was really just that a colony of 5-10 people doesn't matter in a survival scenario except symbolically. If they got nuked in a war, so what? Just means they don't have to watch their only hope of survival dying above them. Even a colony of a thousand people with a self-sufficient industrial and ecological base is likely to collapse without ongoing support and population infusions from Earth. Though maybe not - our species has been down to those sorts of numbers before, and with sufficient automation civilization might be maintained long enough for the population to grow to something less fragile.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:02PM (1 child)
Propellants can be produced on Mars. They don't need to trade to get methane.
I've addressed the rest in other comments.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:09PM
Yeah, but they probably can't take off from Earth using propellant made on Mars - they'll need a local supply at least to get from Earth's surface to orbit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 07 2018, @04:12AM
Humanity on Earth has plenty of machines that can fail with years or decades. It doesn't stop us from making more. And we move through space at roughly 0.001 C. It's not particularly efficient, but it works.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @03:36PM (19 children)
Not if the likely pattern is that the first is the final (F-is-F). For instance, if F-is-F is true, and run you 1000 simulations (assuming you hack into God's server), then in most of those universes there will only be one dominant species. If we were NOT the first, we wouldn't be around wondering why were are not the first because the first would likely have already bulldozed us over. Dead species don't ponder why they are dead.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @03:54PM
But even if first-is-final, why are we just on ONE planet so far? An average sample of "intelligent ponderers" would put such a ponderer in a fully populated universe, or at least a big corner of it. Oneness violates the Copernican Principle which assumes we are not in a unique or special position/condition. But this actual "edge case" suggests there is another kind of filter in play. Maybe AI bots are the likely future incarnation of an intelligent species (or works), and expanding bots are not likely to be philosophical ponderers, but rather purpose-built.
This implies independent ponderers are rare and get replaced by alternative powers either way.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:03PM (7 children)
Our experience, on a world where travel is not only possible but regularly happens, accidentally or intentionally, is that various species always dominated various areas, and evolved as they traveled to new ones. When we show up and start dominating everywhere, we are still not exterminating and populating everything, because we don't like everywhere or want to spend the energy obliterating everything.
Considering that we are the most stupidly destructive species around, why are people assuming that FTL spacefarers from a galaxy-spanning civilization would be actually worse than us at just wiping out every ant in their path?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:39PM (6 children)
If we are typical, that means that there must be both species that are better than us, and species that are worse than us. Guess which of them would start dominating everyone else.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday June 07 2018, @05:07PM (5 children)
I witness no evidence that we are typical, unless in this galaxy typical is defined as "mindbogglingly destructive, evil, and self-destructive, amounting to aggressively collectively suicidal through unquenchable greed".
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday June 07 2018, @06:23PM (3 children)
That's not how it works. We have no indication that we are not typical, therefore we must assume that we are.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday June 07 2018, @06:34PM (2 children)
We have strong evidence that we are not typical, in the Earth context.
Are all the other Earth creatures atypical weaklings, or are we atypically destructive ?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday June 07 2018, @06:48PM
In the Earth context, we are the only technological species. Therefore we are by definition typical for technological species on Earth.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @12:41AM
>Are all the other Earth creatures atypical weaklings
No, we developed technology, which made us atypically powerful. But if you look at the ratio of how destructive we are compared to how destructive it is within our ability to be? I'm not sure we're anything special. Maybe even one of the more moderate species. Technology - it's an amplifier.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 08 2018, @01:19PM
All life forms almost certainly evolve from a place of eating each other, rather than being little photosynthetic hippie microbes, and later fishies, from the start. And when they evolve to cooperate in same-species groups, tribalism could set in.
Violence could be the most unfortunate result of universal convergent evolution.
But I have to use "almost certainly" and "could" because the sample size is too damn low.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @07:23PM (9 children)
Speculating about the future changes nothing with regards to the past.
The proposition is functionally identical to answering Fermi Paradox with "We must just be the first" - an answer already widely dismissed as extremely unlikely. Our star is a relative latecomer in the population of 3rd-generation metal rich stars - it's very unlikely we'd be the first interstellar-capable species to evolve.
Unless you're proposing that we somehow retroactively exterminated all the others a billion years before our planet even formed?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:38PM (8 children)
It's a statistical conclusion, not cause and effect. Whether statistics allows us to "see" into the future and/or parallel universes is an interesting question. But domination theory does seem to require at least two Great Filters because if we are the (future) dominant species, then we should be all over the universe already, per Copernican Principle. At least one factor prevents mass quantities of independent intelligent ponderers. Being that it's far easier for bots to spread than us biological meat-bags, I suspect AI.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:08PM (7 children)
No, it's a proposal for why we don't see anyone out there - that utterly fails to explain why we don't see anyone out there.
"We're not the first" is practically the entire basis of the Fermi Paradox, because all the statistical evidence suggests that someone else should have beaten us to the punch by a billion years or so, building civilizations before we had even evolved complex life. The proposition that "the first wipes out everyone else" is thus almost certainly false - because we're not the first, and we haven't been wiped out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @11:55PM
Well, okay, but I can see it as an indirect conclusion. Something is "statistically" wiping out independent intelligent ponderers (IIPs), otherwise we should either be surrounded by lots of galaxies with humans (dominance theory) or by lots of other species (Trek model).
So what's wiping out IIPs?
Maybe they usually blow themselves up or create dangerous run-away bots/critters, but I find it unlikely that ALL intelligent species in a universe (or reachable sector of) would end themselves. Therefore, some singular and (statistically) inevitable event is doing it. It takes only one species to create run-away bots. (If 2 do it at almost the same time, mostly likely one will be superior.)
That still does not mean WE are the dominant species (or parents of), only that a dominant creature/bot is inevitable. It's like a virus nobody has an immunity against.
The theory still has worthy competitors though, such as intelligent life is actually rare.
One oddity though is that our galactic cluster is relatively small. Statistically we should be in a big cluster. That feature may be protecting us from something, at least for a while, giving us a statistical edge. It's a possible clue.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 07 2018, @03:32PM (5 children)
May I suggest a game of Homeworld? http://www.homeworldremastered.com/ [homeworldremastered.com]
See, we were once part of a galactic civilization. We fell afoul of the authorities and powers that ruled. The alien races, and our own treacherous bastard kin allied against us. Our so-many-great-grandparents fled for their lives, in any rustbucket or garbage scow they could beg, borrow, or steal. They eventually crash landed HERE, in the most out-of-the-way, forgotten corner of the galaxy that they could find. We, the degenerate offspring of those degenerate survivors, established what passes for civilization here on ̶A̶u̶s̶t̶r̶a̶l̶i̶a̶ Earth. But, the day will come, when we will return to the galaxy, and take back that which is rightfully OURS!
_____________________________
Actually, I've read a number of stories with that theme. And, some of those stories have offered bits and dabs of "evidence" to support the theory. And, who knows - maybe we are an alien species, not from earth? Maybe we are in hiding? There's not much of a paradox, if we are hiding, that no one comes to us. What's more, it would explain why we can't find that "missing link" that ties us to the rest of the Great Ape family.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @12:19AM (4 children)
Ah, Homeworld... Had some fun with that one.
Really though, while the idea that we're descendants of some alien race has been used repeatedly in many stories, it's one of those things that always forces me to crank the willful suspension of disbelief to 11. We can trace our ancestry back through the fossil record to long before the dinosaurs arose on this planet. Heck, long even before plants had colonized the land. And we can see our close relationship to other life in our DNA. We're natives here, at least as far back as our single-celled ancestors. About the only way we're descended from aliens we is if they were an *incredibly* genetically mutable species who stopped by for a little R&R with the natives.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday June 08 2018, @01:34AM (3 children)
I don't think it requires as much disbelief as you suggest. If life itself were seeded here from someplace where intelligent life related to us originated, you could produce all sorts of "evidence" that we originated here. Belief has to be stretched a lot, but not entirely suspended.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @02:57AM (2 children)
Except that the evidence strongly suggests that any "seeded" life was microbial in nature. We can trace our evolution pretty much all the way back to single celled organisms. Here. We can see our fossilized ancestors. We have a pretty good sense of the time scales involved. By the time humanity arose we would be far more closely related to cockroaches than to the species that seeded us.
Unless of course you presume that they either:
1) Have been actively involved with the evolution of life on Earth ever since
2) Somehow encoded all of "evolution" to this point into the original seed, including the multiple mass extinctions that sent life into wildly different directions.
3) Actually seeded the planet much more recently, and constructed the entire fossil record, right down to the isotope ratios, to intentionally deceive us.
Generally speaking, none of those scenarios are compatible with the SF story premises.
But hey, I've long since accepted that a great deal of very entertaining SF should be more rightly classified "Science Fantasy", that should be no more presumed to be occurring in this universe than does Harry Potter.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday June 08 2018, @02:30PM (1 child)
4) Earth was seeded billions of years ago, but when it became necessary to move some humans, they caused an extinction event, then reseeded with some later, more acceptable models of life. And, all of that life - the extinct, as well as the newly introduced, actually originated from the same primordial soups on Mankind's forgotten home planet.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @03:10PM
That doesn't explain the fact that basically *everything* on Earth can trace its entire evolution back through the fossil record. There were no sudden new species after extinction events - they all evolved gradually from more niche organisms expanding to the voids left by the extinction of others. If humans were seeded here, it was when our ancestors were still microbes.
So, basically you're back to (1).