"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.
Related Stories
[An] upcoming study in The Astronomical Journal, which we learned about from MIT Technology Review, suggests humanity has barely sampled the skies, and thus has no grounds to be cynical. According to the paper, all searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, have examined barely a swimming pool's worth of water from a figurative ocean of signal space. "We haven't really looked much," Shubham Kanodia, a graduate student in astronomy who co-wrote the study, said during a NASA "technosignatures" workshop in Houston, Texas on September 26.
[...] In their study, Kanodia and his colleagues built a mathematical model of what they consider a reasonably sized cosmic haystack.
Their haystack is a sphere of space nearly 33,000 light-years in diameter, centered around Earth. This region captures the Milky Way's bustling core, as well as many giant globular clusters of stars above and below our home galaxy.They also picked eight dimensions of a search for aliens — factors like signal transmission frequency, bandwidth, power, location, repetition, polarization, and modulation (i.e. complexity) — and defined reasonable limits for each one. "This leads to a total 8D haystack volume of 6.4 × 10116m5Hz2s/W," the authors wrote. That is 6.4 followed by 115 zeros — as MIT Technology review described it, "a space of truly gargantuan proportions."
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday June 06 2018, @11:25AM (41 children)
I suggest people to go through the linked arxiv preprint, as the paper is quite small and an easy read. I thought it was very neat in solving Fermi Paradox, without commenting on whether alien life exists or not.
(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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(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?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(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.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(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.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(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.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(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).
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:32PM (3 children)
That's not a new answer, it's one of the classic ones.
FWIW, I don't believe it, as I feel that any lifeform that aggressive would get into fights with itself and if it were interstellar capable, they would generate visible signs. (Asimov even used that as a hidden sub-theme to justify having only human civilizations, but he blamed it on the actions of the 3-laws. So that makes things a bit more plausible.)
OTOH, if you have interstellar capability, wiping out any non-spacefaring life would be easy. Just hit their planet with a high speed (automated?) ship. At, say, 0.1C even a small ship would carry enough energy to wipe out any conceivable planet-based civilization. Steering it to the target might be a bit tricky, though.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Wednesday June 06 2018, @07:40PM
Classic SF also included the concept of races so xenophobic and/or expansionist that they wiped out anything intelligent to take over their livable planet. Cordwainer Smith had one, Doc Smith's "Lensmen" series had another. There have also been ideas about more subtle attacks, like an advanced race offering "medical assistance" that turns out to be sterilization (can't remember the classic SF story, also used in Stargate SG-1 episode "2010").
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Thursday June 07 2018, @08:30AM (1 child)
But the paper is clear that the lifeform doesn't have to be aggressive. The whole hypothesis is that the altruistic, friendly life that also "grows" and needs to grow is basically at an ultimate unstable equilibrium, and that equilibrium will get tilted by 1 mistake. And as that life form grows, the number of mistakes needed don't - it remains one, and hence it becomes more and more probable that the mistake will be made.
The hypothesis presented in the paper is very clear that it's definition of what constitutes an alien encounter is very specific, and the number of variables to determine that are also very low.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday June 07 2018, @06:36PM
Well, there is the argument for "paper clip maximizers", but I don't really believe such is possible, except locally. If you get multiple maximizing entities, they will start trying to convert each other into paper-clips.
Note that "paper clip" here stands for any simple goal, and light-speed will necessitate divergent evolution of the maximizers. Even Saberhagen's "Berserker machines" weren't really believable, and he worked at it, and allowed such things as FTL to increase plausibility. (Fewer generations of separation gives less time for divergent evolution.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Fnord666 on Wednesday June 06 2018, @11:43AM (2 children)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:13PM (1 child)
It's all about the invisible quotation marks:
Fox "News" posts a "Science" story about a non-answer to Fermi's Paradox.
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:38PM
LOL. The snark is strong with this one eh?
Not disagreeing though hehe.
*sips coffee*
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @11:47AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:36PM
The Fake News @NBCNews [twitter.com], @BBCNews [twitter.com], @ABC [twitter.com], @CBS [twitter.com], @CNN [twitter.com], @Univision [twitter.com], #AmazonWashingtonPost [twitter.com] and Crooked Failing @nytimes [twitter.com] are very overrated, believe me. They have so many fake stories about me, I don't have time to watch or read them. But @FoxNews [twitter.com] is so nice. Without Bloody Megyn Kelly it's very nice.
And my Karma wasn't PERFECTO, that's so true. Because of bad, or sick, down (Dem) moderators. And maybe they're bots. In my journal I wrote about our midterm primary election. To remind folks it was time to vote Republican. And after the election, results start coming in, right? So I tweeted about the early results. And the down modder says, Offtopic. And possibly you were able to tweet as Anonymous because of the very positive IP Karma from this story. Because of me.
But, very very important story. Because our magnificent planet may be in danger. Our beautiful buildings, our golf courses, our resorts, our investments. And our lives may be in danger. Even if we're on an island in the middle of the ocean (USVI & PR) or on a huge yacht, a superyacht. Maybe we need to go talk to our Generals about protecting our planet in some way. And maybe when I talk to Kim Jong-un I'll ask him to build more nuclear, to seriously upgrade his nuclear arsenal. Maybe that's something we'll be helping him with. And Iran too. Saudi Arabia and many more. To save our precious planet!!!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday June 06 2018, @11:48AM (33 children)
So we should have either discovered life or have been eliminated. Both things didn't happen. Just checking the sky to make s
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:46PM (30 children)
Both things didn't happen YET.
These things take time. And must be done in order . . .
First the superior alien race that has already killed off all competitors must become aware of our existence.
Then they send an eradication / harvesting force to Earth.
Tired from their long journey, they order drive through take out Chinese.
Then they order drive through Mexican.
Then they order drive through Italian.
Then drive through American.
Etc, until there is no human infestation remaining on the planet.
Then harvest all of the other biologically useful plants and any animals that produce useful chemicals.
Harvest all useful materials. Humans will have conveniently already mined and refined these. For example, the rubble of a skyscraper will be rich in various metals.
Either ship these directly home, or stat building automated factories with robots that build more robots and factories to strip mine the planet. Maybe factories that build finished products for shipment back home. That is probably the most efficient.
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:51PM (17 children)
The problem with this idea is that you're assuming that various metals are actually rare and valuable. On Earth, they are. In asteroids and elsewhere throughout the solar system, not so much.
Any alien race that just wants mineral resources can easily find it in their home systems and in countless unoccupied systems, in countless asteroids in those systems or even roaming the galaxy like the one that just went through our system.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @02:42PM (16 children)
True, but there's just isn't very much "stuff" in asteroids, etc. The entire asteroid belt is estimated to have a combined mass of only about 5% of our moon, which has a mass of a little over 1.2% of Earth. So if more than 0.06% of Earth is as resource rich as the asteroids, we're the richer target. There is the small problem of those resources being down in gravity well, but it's probably a safe get that any species capable of interstellar conquest could easily build efficient space elevators. Heck, we've designed several different styles that could be made with existing technology - there's just not enough demand for it to justify the expense. But realistically that expense is nothing compared to the global economy, and would vanish as a rounding error in the face of strip-mining a planet.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 06 2018, @04:14PM (15 children)
Sorry, no. The Earth has lots of mass, sure, but the crust is mostly just worthless silicates. All those nice minerals we use for interesting stuff came from asteroid strikes over the eons, which were recent enough that they haven't had enough time to migrate towards the core. The core is mostly iron, but accessing that isn't exactly easy. We still can't even drilled past the crust, though we've tried.
If you want valuable stuff like platinum, iridium, etc., and you're a space-faring civilization, your best bet is to look for asteroids that are composed of it, rather than looking for it on planets that have tectonic activity.
As for space elevators, we haven't worked out the technical challenges to make one on Earth. We haven't really synthesized and manufactured (in large quantity) materials capable of the tensile strength needed for that, plus there's other issues (like weather). Now if we wanted to make one on the Moon, that's entirely doable with conventional materials. Even easier on some dwarf planet or large asteroid like Ceres or Vesta. Even Mars is probably doable.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:18PM (9 children)
The crust... you mean the eggshell-thin layer of solidified "froth" around the outside of our mostly-molten planet? The Earth is made from the same stuff as the asteroids - because it was made *from* asteroids. It's just been subjected to billions of years of fluid dynamics based separation, such that most of the interesting stuff isn't on the surface - you have to go deeper.
Asteroids promise to be a rich deposit of valuable ores precisely because we lack the technology to mine the mantle and core of our planet (and because the "waste" ores like iron and water would themselves be valuable for space-based infrastructure) Assuming the same limits apply to a hypothetical species capable of crossing interstellar space to harvest the resources of another star is recklessly close-minded.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:36PM (6 children)
Maybe, but the point is, there's tons and tons of asteroids and planets and moons out there in other star systems, as well as tons of uninhabited rocks right here in ours. What are the chances that the aliens are going to skip over all the stuff in all the neighboring systems, and come straight for Earth? Once you have the ability to traverse star systems and harvest materials from various bodies, raw materials shouldn't be a big problem, because there's rocks all over the place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:14PM
Why mine Earth when there's tons of unoccupied worlds?
Because ore tastes better with Human Butter™ on it.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:32PM (4 children)
Yep, there's rocks all over the place - and we're living on one of the big ones. Maybe it makes sense to start with the little, easily digested ones (asteroids). But if you traveled interstellar distances to collect rocks, how does it make any sense to depart for a new star before you've harvested even 1% of the easily accessible rocky mass of the system you're in? It's not like getting that mass out of its gravity well is that hard - escape velocity from Earth is only 11.2m/s, or 17kWh/kg (half a gallon of gas) - our current difficulties are simply because we haven't invested in any systems to do so efficiently.
Heck, if you're building something planet-sized out of the materials there's not even necessarily any benefit to doing so - just transform them in place. Or you could do something comparatively easy, like crashing Venus into Earth at high speed then collecting the resulting debris cloud.
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:48PM (1 child)
I don't know about y'all but if I was a space faring race with seemingly unlimited technology and the ability to consume entire planets of materials without so much as a burp... I would be consuming the ones that are on MUCH more distant orbits. Like in the Kuiper Belt or the Oort cloud. Why have all the hassle of all that molten metal when you can have perfectly solid metals ready to go and without needing to worry about how to dissipate heat off from your own mining ships.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @11:38PM
Current estimates of the total Oort cloud mass is about 5x that of Earth, scattered across a volume of about 10 cubic light years. Does that really sound appealing to you?
Besides the basic thing about metal - one of the basic first things you do with it, for basically any purpose, is to melt it and cast it into a convenient starting shape.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @11:25AM (1 child)
Off by 3 orders of magnitude. It's 11.2 km/s, actually.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday June 07 2018, @12:49PM
Nice catch - but on double checking my calculations were correct (17kWh/kg), I simply left out the "k" while typing.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 08 2018, @01:40PM (1 child)
And because even if we wanted to get at the core, it would be environmentally destructive. #JeffBezos
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @02:08PM
Not necessarily - a borehole, or even volcano-diving mining rig could get down to the mantle relatively non-destructively, and then remove material that's probably pretty devoid of life. Extracting material fast enough near the surface it might cause unusual tectonic activity - but I bet if we went down a thousand miles first, the effects would be spread out across a wide enough area to be lost in the noise of normal mantle turbulence.
I mean yeah, if we strip-mined the core of magnetics and radioactives it'd probably set us on a pretty grim path - but the quantities are so insanely beyond anything we've ever had access to, that I'm not sure how realistic that would be . You can only encase the entire surface of the Earth in so many miles of iron before mining more becomes a bit redundant.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:27PM (4 children)
Mostly just worthless to us... I'll note that the most recently evolved proto-life on Earth is based on silicon substrates.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @02:10PM (3 children)
Is it really proto-life if it's incapable of self-replication? (Software can replicate, even evolve, but that's logic-based, not silicon - that its current environment is silicon based is completely incidental)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 08 2018, @04:38PM (2 children)
Thus: proto-life. When it is self-sufficiently reproducing, from mining operations through to production of all machinery required in the supply chain, then it is life. For now, it somewhat resembles a virus.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @06:07PM (1 child)
Even proto-life needs to replicate, otherwise it's just a complex system. Imperfect replication is what allows it to evolve and maybe become life. Viruses are something else entirely, but they still actively reproduce, even if theydo so by hijacking the replication systems of other organisms.
All we have right now is a collection of tools. Maybe some day we'll be able to assemble them into something resembling independent proto-life, but for now even basic von-Neuman self-replicating machines are beyond our reach. Once we manage those then maybe we've got proto-life - let them replicate imperfectly, while competing for limited resources, and perhaps they'd eventually become life. For now we've just got incredibly crude machines, not even on par with a strand of self-replicating RNA.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 08 2018, @06:20PM
By that definition, pet rocks in boxes were proto-life. They were some, and they convinced symbiotic creatures around them to make more, reproducing in the millions.
By the time computers/robots are doing everything from mining through building their own factories and power plants, I imagine they're going to have not only production mistakes, but also adaptive algorithms throughout the process. They're not spreading like fire right now, they're reproducing and evolving with assistance from us, and they've worked their way into our ecosystem to the point that we will suffer quite a bit if they leave - you might say we have self-inflicted our dependency upon them.
Yes, and no... they are crude in their size and dependency upon specific environments/energy sources. An individual embedded processor may not be on par with a strand of self-replicating RNA by some measures, but a system fully loaded with power source, I/O, actuators and software to drive itself would seem to be more impressive on any scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE3fmFTtP9g [youtube.com]
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday June 06 2018, @02:24PM (10 children)
On a more serious note, these War-of-the-World scenarios simply do not make any sense whatsoever. How would there be a "home"? Space travel disconnects life-lines, there could not be any tribal sense of home. At best many competing entities which would aggressively spread and maybe fight each other and would be detectable more so. Why should there be any need to eliminate competitors? Being technologically far advanced enough to do space travel you have no need to exploit foreign worlds. Minerals: plenty on asteroids. Water: comets. Energy: fusion, fission, sun. Biological material: of no use as can be produced in the lab easily, also those space travelers would not be based on biological processes. So what to come for?
The best explanation I have read to explain the Fermi-paradox (cannot recall where) is that space traveling entities would be miniaturized to an extend to be undetectable by us. This would be required for quick enough space travel and also energy-wise. There would be no need for interaction as they could not tell us anything we could or should understand and we have nothing to tell them that they would be interested in.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @02:49PM (2 children)
"Home is where the heart is"
So long as wandering groups maintained a cohesive sense of culture, home is wherever they go, with maybe a legendary quality to their original homeworld. Or not-so-legendary if they have some form of FTL travel - in which case actually shipping loot home might be viable.
But really, what does "home" have to do with anything? Doesn't make any difference to the late human race if the invaders are looking to strip mine the planet to ship it "home", or strip mine it to expand their interstellar scavenging fleet or orbital habitat ring, or even use it as a base of operations.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:48PM (1 child)
Foolishness. Eliminating potential competitors is plausible. Strip mining the planet is not. You've got to pull the stuff up out of a gravity well. You sure can't use it in place unless you live in a sealed life support bubble. Native life would give you violent allergies. And the air is probably wrong anyway.
But why bother? Just strip mine the lighter moons and the useful asteroids of the system and the inhabitants won't be able to build a competing civilization. They sure can't stop you, or even bother you. They probably won't even notice you are there.
P.S.: Despite that argument, I don't believe it. Civilizations adapted to space will not be short on resources, except perhaps volatiles, and those they can easily get from the Oort clouds. The only way this wouldn't be true is if controlled fusion is impossible, in which case they might also need fissionables. If those are concentrated by ecological processes (as seems likely) they may be too dilute in space to be practical. Even so, it would almost certainly be more efficient to coerce local habitants to mine it for them than to do it themselves ... but I don't believe either part of that supposition, so I rate their combination as extremely unlikely.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:21PM
Because all the moons and asteroids combined are less massive than Earth alone? The entire asteroid belt is estimated to mass only about 0.012% of Earth - its comparative richness is due to the much greater surface-to-volume ratio and comparative ease of mining solid materials rather than the mantle and core with our current technology .
Meanwhile, getting stuff out of our gravity well is only expensive because we use phenomenally inefficient methods to do so (i.e. rocketry). Escape velocity is only 11.2km/s - or about 17kWh/kg: roughly half a gallon of gas per kg. That's all the energy that would be needed by any of a large number of efficient space elevator designs to lift material beyond orbit. Meanwhile the Earth is being hit by roughly 1.5*10^18kWh of solar energy every year, enough to lift 10^17 kg of material completely out of its gravity well. Granted, that's only 1/1000th the mass of the asteroid belt per year - but it's also only using a solar array the size of the Earth - no reason the material from Earth couldn't be used to rapidly build a much larger solar array.
Basically - if you're visiting a star system for it's resources, why *wouldn't* you strip mine the planets as well? What's the down side? Mild inconvenience for your automated mining robots?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday June 06 2018, @02:55PM (1 child)
Home is whoever invested in building automated interstellar probes to find and harvest other life bearing planets.
Perhaps more valuable then metals is the biosphere of Earth. New plants, animals, and thus new drugs and chemicals that might be useful.
Complex long hydrocarbon chains are probably useful anywhere in the galaxy. Either as food or fuel.
Or the biosphere is useful to setup "native" species from the homeworld onto the planet being harvested.
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @09:26AM
Aye, lad. And when we get to yon stars belike there be whales in their oceans, and we'll all get richer than Croesus by harvestin' ambergris and whalebone.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:22PM
Matt Damon to the rescue again, see: Downsizing.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Wednesday June 06 2018, @07:43PM (3 children)
Nomadic groups of humans traveled areas hunting and gathering as they went. Why is it hard to imagine people in ships doing the same?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:04PM (2 children)
When you return home, everyone else is dead. Your "home" is where you are and your tribe is whom you are with. Space travel is incompatible with a biological makeup.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:09PM
Hunter/gatherers didn't necessarily have a "home". The tribe mostly moved together.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 08 2018, @01:42PM
This is only true if anti-aging isn't perfected by that time.
I have a feeling we will conquer our biology before routinely traveling to other star systems.
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(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Wednesday June 06 2018, @04:50PM
> Both things didn't happen YET.
The plans have been available for inspection for over 50 years now at Alpha Centauri and it is too late to lodge an official complaint.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:29PM (1 child)
Sort of the anthropic principle answer: totally obvious, but entirely useless.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:54PM
The answer to the Fermi Paradox is not guaranteed to be useful. Most of the answers aren't. Resolving the paradox merely requires explaining why we haven't seen evidence of anyone else. That "they kill anyone who sees them" is a valid answer. The problem is that there are lots of valid answers, and no evidential reason to choose between most of them. This is one of the earlier answers. A more recent answer is that members of technically advanced civilizations aren't willing to put up with the lag time that results from getting far from home. (I don't find that one convincing either, but it's a valid answer. And possibly true for some civilizations.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday June 06 2018, @12:03PM (1 child)
Original sin rears its ugly head again. We haven't even had a chance to become the universe's bad guys and already this journalist is speaking of us in the past tense.
The actual science of this paper is merely the assertion that humanity is among the first. That's it. The speculation about the first colonizers of space necessarily stamping out all other intelligent life is a complete fiction. Yes, I read that book [wikipedia.org]. For an example of where assuming this fiction leads us:
This begs the question. If you assume the existence of such a force, then of course, you will get such a force.
(Score: 5, Funny) by deadstick on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:15PM
Quarter past seven in the morning and I've seen someone use "begging the question" correctly. Maybe today is looking up.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @12:32PM (1 child)
this person has also published a number of papers on cosmology and gravitation stuff.
my preliminary conclusion: if you don't work with complex systems, you don't have any problem "publishing" works on complex systems.
by the way: a galactic civilization is the complex system I am referring to. It's complex in the sense that there are many components, to the point where one cannot easily write down evolution equations for it.
unfortunately, I understand a bit about complex systems, enough not to "publish" the content of 5 mins worth of conversation over a beer with fellow physicists.
there is no argument in this paper.
there is the observation "we are alone".
there is the question "what if whoever's first kills everyone else?".
and then the conclusion "obviously since we are first (because we are still alive) we are going to kill everyone else".
well... what you have there is speculation , because there is absolutely no proof given to the statement that "whoever's first kills everyone else".
it would be physics (or math, whatever) if you used game theory and/or statistlcal physics to show that this statement has a large probability.
not just anecdotal evidence (the author says we kill ants because we destroy anthills when we build houses, which is actually not true, since ants thrive in human cities).
anyway. If I was this person's boss, there would be some yelling.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:50PM
Seek simplicity, not complexity.
Once you have a 2nd data point:
1. jump up and down
2. plot both points on a graph and draw a straight line through it
3. loudly proclaim "we now understand EVERYTHING about this phenomena!"
No need to make things overly complex.
Don't over engineer. Don't gold plate.
The simplest solution tends to be the most economically profitable one.
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Revek on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:27PM (2 children)
Written by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter. Why come up with something new when you can rip off the guy who thought up the communications satellite.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:37PM (1 child)
NewOld Solution to the Fermi Paradox"Better?
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:16PM
"Experts say Russian physicist HACKED into solution server and allegedly interfered with the answer to the Fermi Paradox"
My personal favorite.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:44PM (1 child)
Fermi's paradox includes this from the link in TFS (emphasis mine):
So maybe these advanced intelligent forms of life visited our solar system before the Earth had formed? Or before life had taken hold on Earth? Or when the dinosaurs (or their predecessors) where stomping around?
Timing is everything (just ask my wife) and these proposed visitors may have already come and gone.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:52PM
Maybe they visited Earth at a point where humans were not a threat, but were recognized as having high potential to become a threat.
They put us on the schedule of planets to be harvested.
Our date on the schedule has simply not arrived yet, or it takes time for the harvesting crew to get here.
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 1) by JustNiz on Wednesday June 06 2018, @03:34PM (1 child)
maybe the real reason is that Fermi's paradox exists is that it pretty much just assumes that aliens must be communicating using something we can also listen for, such as radio waves.
What if there's a method of communication that they are all using, and we just haven't discovered yet? Possibly directly because we discovered radio, which is not an
ideal mechanism but works well enough for nearly all needs that humans currently have, so we just stopped looking for any other method.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @04:10PM
We don't necessarily need to monitor communications to find alien life. We can look at exoplanet atmospheres to look for indirect evidence of biospheres as well as intelligent life (capable of synthesizing chemicals not found in nature, or causing an unnatural imbalance in atmospheric composition).
JWST: 2020-2021?
Giant Magellan Telescope: 2023
Extremely Large Telescope: 2024
Thirty Meter Telescope: 2027?
LUVOIR/HDST/ATLAST: 2030s
Colossus Telescope: ???
Kilometer Space Telescope: ???
Fast Outgoing Cyclopean Astronomical Lens (FOCAL): ???
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(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.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pvanhoof on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:07PM (25 children)
The distance between us and the first intelligent life form is to great that the expansion of space between us and them exceeds their capability of keeping up with that rate.
No matter how fast they'd travel towards us, unless they exceed the speed of space expanding they could never reach us.
There, solved.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:31PM (20 children)
This is my favorite "solution" to Fermi's paradox. Space is big, and going faster than the speed of light just isn't practical. Blasting out high powered radio waves is a weird thing to do, and mostly pointless, so most civilizations don't do it, or don't do it for long.
That "billions of years" thing is something to reckon with: if civilizations only put out high powered radio signals for ~100 years, on a time scale of billions that's pretty rare, and Fermi would seem to be suggesting that it's on the order of rare to the fourth power that we can't detect the aliens, but we've already got rare in the goldilocks zone, rare in the stupidity of sending an "over here, free lunch" broadcast, rare in the incredibly small region of space that it's practical to travel through, rare in that travelers can go in any direction and original planetary resources will limit the number of directions they can try at once.
I don't think we're alone in the Universe, but I do think that the others that are out there are just as challenged to reach us as we are challenged to reach them. The real corker in Fermi is: we're pretty close to our full potential, there's not a lot we can discover that will open the universe to us, because if there were: the universe would already be open to others and we'd at least know about them by now.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:41PM
Don't look now, but a couple of your premises contradict each other.
(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?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(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.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @07:02PM (10 children)
You're ignoring exponential growth. If it takes us a million years (5x the age of our species, 200x longer than all of recorded history) to colonize 10 nearby stars, and another million years for each of those colonies to do the same, then in a scant 11 million years we could colonize the entire galaxy.
As for the motive to do such a thing - there may never be any benefit to Earth to colonize other stars, but there doesn't have to be - there only has to be a motive for the would-be colonists. If (probably when) self-sustaining orbital habitats become commonplace, how long do you really think it will take before one of them decides to head out for another star? Whether it be to find new frontiers, or to escape the meddling of a central authority they disagree with. After all, once you're living in a sustainable artificial ecosystem, the only real difference between being in orbit and going on an interstellar voyage is how close the neighbors are. Well, that and solar power - but nuclear is a viable alternative for a few thousand year long road trip.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:10PM (5 children)
Probably when they have a self-sustaining power source not dependent on the sun. Fusion power solves all, right?
A million years to successfully colonize 10 nearby stars might be ambitious, upon arrival it may take hundreds of thousands of years to come to terms with adequate terraforming of the planets they find - and this self-sustaining orbital habitat will need to sustain the population successfully all that time. Chances for failure are extremely high, including political failure after centuries of interstellar travel - will the colony ship population agree on whether to spend a hundred more centuries trying to terraform with the resources that one ship can muster, or go interstellar again to hope for a better place?
The question of whether it would be easier to colonize a Mars-like planet or an Earth-like alien planet is another interesting one... I assume we will eventually colonize Mars, but how long will it take to develop Mars into a self-sustaining industrial base capable of independently launching its own interstellar craft? Thousands of years is easy to imagine, and again there's the nasty problem of early colony failure - easy to try again on Mars, but a Mars-like planet 10 light years away?
Then, considering an Earth-like alien planet with a thriving ecosystem, we become the bug-eyed pale skinned aliens attempting to get a foothold in the alien ecosystem. If the ecosystem has evolved to large animals, even if they're not intelligent they're going to be challenging to live with at first - and did we really travel 10 light years just so we could slaughter another planet full of megafauna?
Still, you're right, whether it takes one million years or 10 million years to establish 10 interstellar colonies, if we can do it at all, we can do it multiple times, and on a timescale of a billion years, 10^100 does pretty well cover the galaxy.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:22PM
Fission does the job too. But fusion is finally starting to get some investment again (the counterpoint to the "fusion is always 50 years away" joke is that funding has been steadily declining so that receiving the total funding needed by initial estimates is itself always 50 years away - progress per dollar has been roughly what was initially estimated.)
Why hold up civilization waiting to terraform planets? You've been living in a self-sustaining habitat for many generations, and now you have all the energy and resources you need to make many, many more. Meanwhile terraforming is likely to be a long-term project that makes interstellar generation ships look like a passing whim in comparison. One that would be greatly aided by having a thriving space-industrial base to provide necessary resources.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:54PM (3 children)
That's not the problem. Once your civilization has adapted to living in space, why do you expect they would want to return to living on a planet? Especially one that has evolved different proteins than they are adapted to?
To live on another planet without bubble-boy caliber life support systems they'd need to kill off all the native lifeforms down to the bacteria and then build it up from scratch. And if it doesn't have native life-forms, it won't have an oxygen atmosphere.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 07 2018, @01:28AM
Maybe.... I can picture scenarios where the alien biology is dissimilar enough that each side's tissues aren't recognized as organic by the others - different metabolic cycles even if they are still carbon-hydrogen based. And if we can't eat each other for nutrition, that might make an interesting start for co-existence.
Of course, there are also the nightmare scenarios where a virus from one side essentially decimates the other, and since the biology is so alien the virus' evolutionary restraint to not 100% wipe out their hosts would be absent. I'm not saying that such a nightmare is impossible, but I would say it is highly unlikely that a virus would find anything at all to successfully interact with, much less take over in an alien cell (if they even have cells...)
I'll give a "likely" to this one, something will need to actively "de-rust" the world - which is another nice definition of life: reversing entropy.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @12:52AM (1 child)
Considering that, on Earth, there's a fair chance that the vast majority of life (by mass or species count) may be microbes living miles underground, it might be substantially easier to terraform a dead world via GMO "primordial slime", than it would be to sterilize a living world.
Fortunately, if our solar system is at all typical dead, "easily" terraformable worlds might be far more common than living ones. Though I suppose we might yet find that both Venus and Mars are actually vibrantly living worlds, and that only their surfaces are dead.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday June 08 2018, @05:09AM
While I agree in principle, it may turn out to be difficult to find habitable planets that are free of life. In fact, that is my expectation, even for the ones with reducing atmospheres.
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(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Thursday June 07 2018, @03:19PM (3 children)
The hopping from one planet to another, even within one galaxy, must still need to beat the rate of space expanding in that area.
Differently put, if a species does not hop faster from A to B as A to B move apart from each other due to space expanding between A and B, then that species will never reach C when the distance between C and B is the distance between earth and their B planet.
For equal distances between A,B and C with C being earth. Species at a A moves to B while space between A,B and space between B,C expands. They might reach it from A to B. But if their speed at which they reached B is (plus at least one time the time they needed to develop the science to do the travel from A to B) is isn't large enough to keep up with the rate of space expansion. Then no way they would ever reach C.
By the time they learn about C, C is already out of reach. Space keeps on expanding. At a ever increasing rate between two points, too.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @02:30AM (2 children)
But it doesn't matter what happens to the distance between two points in the fabric of spacetime, only what happens to the distance between two objects you want to travel between, both of which are themselves traveling rapidly. I believe galaxies are generally thought to be gravitationally bound strongly enough that they're largely unaffected by the expansion of space - it's at intergalactic scales that things are expanding fast enough, and gravity diffused enough, that everything will eventually accelerate beyond lightspeed. An observer in the distant future will think that our galaxy is alone in the universe, but there will still be a galaxy.
Even if it weren't - looking backwards we can say that the galaxy in the past was not substantially larger than it is now - so anything that could be done at it's current size, could also have been done in the past.
Also, the universe appears to be expanding at a (Hubble) constant 67.15 ± 1.2 (km/s)/Mpc, where a Megaparsec ~=3.26 light years. To hop to a nearby star, say 10ly away, assuming your stars were somehow "pinned" to the fabric of space so that it's expansion mattered, the distance between them would be increasing by 205km/s, or about 6.5 million km/year, or 0.68 light years per million years (In comparison, our sun is orbiting the galactic core at a speed of 767 light years per million years). If you can cross between nearby stars in even a thousand years, you'll never notice it.
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Saturday June 09 2018, @09:32AM (1 child)
Right, agreed. But that still requires life to appear frequent enough to exist multiple times within let's say one galaxy. That might be true. However, so far we have no proof that this is the case. It might be that life is indeed quite rare and will only occasionally form. For example less than once per one galaxy or only a few times within one galaxy (with galaxy being something that is about the size of our own milky way galaxy).
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday June 09 2018, @02:05PM
And even without the expansion of space, traveling to another galaxy would be a whole different level of time and difficulty, especially for organic beings - to the point that you might want to take a star along with you.
To imagine that 250 billion stars could take billions of years to produce life even once though - when our own planet seems to have formed it almost as soon as liquid water appeared on the surface? That would suggest that there's something insanely unusual here, which is generally considered poor practice if you want a conjecture to be taken seriously. Or alternately of course that life *didn't* originate here, but came as microbes that evolved elsewhere. Which begs the question - if it only germinated here, then we know panspermia is definitely possible, and that it occurred in our corner of the galaxy, greatly increasing the probability that life exists around other nearby stars. ...Or I suppose that life first arose elsewhere in our solar system (Mars seems a likely candidate) and then colonized Earth - which doesn't fundamentally change the problem, but does allow for a much larger window between "life being possible" and "life existing" than we see in Earth's geologic record, with a corresponding reduction in its probability of occurring at all.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:44PM (2 children)
It's worth noting that the first generation stars were essentially pure hydrogen, so no planets. The second generation were low in metals (and to an astronomer, everything higher than helium is a metal). The Earth is a third or fourth generation star.
So the fact that the oldest stars are billions of years old is essentially meaningless. You need to look for the oldest third generation stars. Even then the older civilizations wouldn't have found any planets to colonize when they were young, so would have adopted a stable mode that didn't consider them.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 07 2018, @01:17AM
True, for "life like us"... maybe it's not possible to form life out of first or second generation systems, but if there is a way, somewhere in all the galaxies it has surely happened by now.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @02:38AM
My understanding is that sunlike stars, with similar "metal" content were probably forming in the Milky Way a billions of years before our own sun did. Plentys of stars many billions of years older than that too, but as you say, they're probably not relevant to life-as-we-know-it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:48PM (3 children)
That only works if there aren't any other intelligent species in our galaxy, which is not being ripped apart by expansion just yet. And these are going to be the civilizations that are easy to find anyway.
Research indicates that there are likely billions of "potentially habitable" exoplanets in our galaxy. There could be more or less depending on whether or not red dwarf stars prove to be conducive to life. Large exomoons could also be habitable. Maybe not so many since the solar system's gas giants don't have a moon as large as Mars or Earth. Not a large sample size, but we can't get our hopes up.
Microbial life may arise very quickly in Earth-like conditions. Evidence of older and older life has been found [soylentnews.org]. This suggests that there is no significant gap between a planet's formation and acquisition of water, and the rise of life. Even if panspermia is impossible, maybe 50+% of exoplanets with a dense atmosphere and liquid water on the surface have microbes.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:28PM (2 children)
Is there any reason to assume the size of a moon has any bearing on it's likelihood of supporting life? For example, if Jupiter were closer to the sun Europa would potentially be quite Earth-like. It might supporting a thriving ecosystem even as it is.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:58PM (1 child)
Less surface gravity means more atmospheric escape, especially if the object is closer to the star, as it would be if Jupiter was orbiting at 1 AU. The oceans of Europa, Enceladus, Pluto, etc. are protected by an icy crust. If Europa had surface oceans instead of subsurface oceans, these would be lost to space.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:27PM
Fair enough. Though you wouldn't want Jupiter to orbit at 1AU - Jupiter itself is a fairly potent heat source, combined with the sun it might boil away Europa's oceans long before the atmosphere could be blown away.