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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 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).