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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @03:34PM (2 children)
It is very likely that an interstellar civilization is impossible, or an impractical waste of resources with no return whatsoever (impossibility of economy or any meaningful exchange on multiple generations time scale).
Perhaps no life form can survive without some minimal Noah's Ark set of interdependent species from its origin world, and that very much puts high price on efforts of relocation/colonization.
Maybe Fermi's paradox tells us what physics already told us: that interstellar travel is impossible or impractical. There will be no practical Alcubierre drive, there will be no practical reactionless propulsion, ... and conditions for long-standing advanced technical civilization are so rarely met and perhaps inherently unsustainable (will we peak and than wither away or fall back on lower technology after we run out of resources?) that we have none to communicate with, even at speed of light, in our immediate vicinity and in overlapping time windows.
Of course, this is just one possibility. The other is that there is an advanced alien civilization who is searching for the likes of us, but haven't found us yet. Will it be in our best interest to be found or not, is another unknown. Once again, there are two possibilities ...
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:42PM
It's very likely we'll eventually expand into our own solar system, colonizing the asteroid belt and other planets. There is certainly a "Noah's Ark" of minimally long-term sustainable ecosystems - but we already know shorter-term ecosystems are easily feasible - it's been possible to buy sealed "biosphere globes" for decades, containing various simple ecosystems that are capable of surviving for decades on nothing but sunlight. With time and experience the complexity and stability of such artificial ecosystems will only improve.
Meanwhile, interstellar travel is reasonably easy once you have mastered stable closed-system ecosystems: all you need is engines and a flight plan to push you to solar escape velocity (as was done with Voyager 1 & 2 - it's not especially difficult), and enough nuclear fuel to power your ecosystem and civilization for the trip. And the patience to wait many generations to reach your destination. Or just enough of a myopic vision of freedom from "Earthgov" to decide you'll take your chances. After all - once you're living in a sustainable space habitat, the only difference between being in orbit or on an interstellar voyage is how close your neighbors are.
You really want to bet that if our species survives for another million years, that in all that time not one group will set off for another star, if only just to get away from whatever central authority is in power here?
And if it takes a million years to send out 10 such groups, and a million years for each of them to send out another 10... well then, in a billion years you could colonize 10^1,000 stars - except for the fact that there's only 10^11 stars in the Milky Way. Which is why we have Fermi's Paradox - there are almost certainly countless Earthlike planets in our galaxy a billion years older than Earth - if interstellar life arose on even one of them, then it has had plenty of time to have already colonized the entire galaxy. And once you've colonized even one other star system no single catastrophe is likely to wipe out your species, unless the seeds of such a catastrophe are an inseparable part of your nature.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:38PM
Impossible, no. An impractical waste of resources, probably. But that wouldn't stop even all human civilizations.
There are other reasons why this is implausible, that that isn't one of them.
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