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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: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:13PM (4 children)
Maybe they just aren't interested in saying hello? You don't see me flying to France to talk to the canine population over there.
People used to think man could never fly. Maybe Einstein missed some things.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:44PM (2 children)
Well... it makes fairly dull science fiction to not imagine huge advances in technology / physical theory, and I don't doubt that we will find new and unimaginable things in the future, Einstein doubtlessly missed some things - but, if you posit that we are not alone, Fermi's paradox seems to back Einstein on the major point of "faster than light travel doesn't happen for big things."
It was buried in the general flash and dazzle, but the Altered Carbon proposition of "needlecasting" to other worlds (also presented as "Transfer Transit" in Dark Matter, and various other places) seems at the moment to be as likely a way to travel the stars as any, slow ship to establish endpoints, then FTL transfer of information. Certainly, once the light speed barrier is broken, it should be easier to transmit information than the whole Starship Enterprise and crew - but the great novelists of the past (thinking Joseph Conrad at the moment) did a lot with the limited space and cast of characters onboard a ship at sea, so it's not surprising that we get a lot of movies doing the same.
On a similar tack, unless you go in for the conspiracy theory plots where the master manipulators operate deftly behind the scenes with nearly the whole world oblivious to their presence, time travel would seem to be similarly "proven" impossible at least from the future back to our time, simply by the lack of observable evidence of time travelers. Lots of fiction written around big secrets hidden from the world at large, in the last 50 years I have not yet been impressed that such a thing is possible, based on the secrets that have been revealed. But, of course, if they are really good at keeping their secrets, then we wouldn't know, would we?
Same goes for the aliens - most wouldn't bother to stop and talk with dogs in France while they were there, but neither would they ALL bother to keep their presence a secret from the dogs while in town, would they? And, as for whether they would go to France in the first place, if we're anything to judge by, we've set foot on every scrap of dry land on this rock by now, most of it just about as soon as we were able to do so. If water-carbon based aliens had highly capable vehicles to travel in, surely they'd at least drop by a goldilocks world to have a look?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday June 06 2018, @07:37PM (1 child)
Suffice to say I'm not holding my breath.
I liked how they explained it in Jack McDevitt's [wikipedia.org] Academy series: there's a series of nanotech "clouds" traveling in waves through the galaxy killing off civilizations they run across every 4000 years. Without wishing to spoil, the why of the situation ends up rather blackly humorous.
The series also posits some other explanations, like how less-technological civilizations may be more resilient to catastrophes. If we got hit by one of those massive solar flares and 90% of the electronics on Earth got fried, that would make for some interesting times. Or how until we learned to split the atom, it was a lot harder to generally stomp life on earth.
And the whole thing is a bit "out there" because we basically know zero of the terms of the Drake Equation with any certainty, right?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday June 06 2018, @07:39PM
Admittedly this sounds like a really juvenile plot, but that's partly because I'm summarizing it so much. The obvious questions are whether they're natural or artificial, if the latter who's sending them and why, if they're being sent are they actually intended to wipe out intelligent life, etc.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:50PM
Einstein may well have missed some things, but it's quite plausible that the speed of light is a limit. But biology is a science, too, and extended lives are quite possible. And sociology could be developed into a science, which would allow stable civilizations with very long lifetimes.
There are lots of approaches that don't require FTL. It's my guess that anything much over 0.1C would be too dangerous to consider reasonable... but this doesn't rule out space-adapted civilizations. There's a big question, though, as to whether they would be very interested in us. We'd probably be an uncertain mixture of dangerous and boring. And if they were interested, they'd probably use nano-, or at least micro-, probes and "experience" us via virtual reality. That way you don't need to worry about offending native customs, foreign proteins that you are allergic to, etc.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.