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A University of Arkansas mathematician argues that species, such as ours, go extinct soon after attaining high levels of technology.
"I taught astronomy for 37 years," said Whitmire. "I used to tell my students that by statistics, we have to be the dumbest guys in the galaxy. After all we have only been technological for about 100 years while other civilizations could be more technologically advanced than us by millions or billions of years."
Recently, however, he's changed his mind. By applying a statistical concept called the principle of mediocrity – the idea that in the absence of any evidence to the contrary we should consider ourselves typical, rather than atypical – Whitmire has concluded that instead of lagging behind, our species may be average. That's not good news.
[...] The argument is based on two observations: We are the first technological species to evolve on Earth, and we are early in our technological development.
[...] By Whitmire's definition we became "technological" after the industrial revolution and the invention of radio, or roughly 100 years ago. According to the principle of mediocrity, a bell curve of the ages of all extant technological civilizations in the universe would put us in the middle 95 percent. In other words, technological civilizations that last millions of years, or longer, would be highly atypical. Since we are first, other typical technological civilizations should also be first. The principle of mediocrity allows no second acts. The implication is that once species become technological, they flame out and take the biosphere with them.
Source: The Implications of Cosmic Silence
For background, see: Fermi's Paradox and the Drake equation.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday August 14 2017, @12:43AM (3 children)
On a universal time scale, the last 20,000 years of human history is basically nothing, and the last 1000, even more nothing. If you take a finite planet, it takes only a blink of universal time for someone to explore the whole thing and once that is done, technology on that planet distributes. Even Afghanistan has radio.
I get what you are saying, that on a planetary scale some may advance more quickly than others, but what kind of time frame are we talking about? If it is millions of years, that would give radio signals the time necessary to travel vast differences and we should hear echoes of other civilizations -- unless they were just short lived and the signal has already passed us by. On the other hand, if technology was springing up around the galaxy in the same time frame from planet to planet, we shouldn't be looking more than 100 years away because the signals will not have had enough time to travel sufficient distances.
Anyway, there are lots of possibilities including that we are first, but also that we have missed it because it passed us when we couldn't hear or weren't listening, or that sentient life is too new and not enough time has passed for their noise to reach us, or any number of other possibilities. It is all conjecture though in the end.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jelizondo on Monday August 14 2017, @01:42AM
Thank you for your reply. What I mean is more in line with what happened to Islam at around the year 1600, it simply imploded and has never recovered its inlfuence over the civilized world.
They brought numbers (i.e. [0..9]) from India and gunpowder from China, basically giving Europe two of its most potent weapons to conquer almost every other nation and begin the so-called Age of Discovery.
About two-thirds of named stars have an Arabic name.
The zealots and fundamentalists we see today don’t hold a candle to their ancestors, neither scientifically nor militarily. So, what happened to the Islamic Civilization?
You see, a single man was influential enough to get the entire Islamic world to turn their backs on science, education and technology.
We see evidence today in the U.S. of such a stance, from ‘Creationism’ being taught along side Evolution to Flat Earthers to people denying the landing on the Moon to Mennonites. If such people held power, where would the U.S. be in 20 or 50 years? I’ll tell you, it would stop being a super-power and be more like Afghanistan or Tajikistan.
Imagine if the Muslims hadn't been defeated by Charles Martel [wikipedia.org] and had taken over the entire European continent: when they imploded they would have taken the entire Western world with them. There would not have been a Reinasancce and neither an 'Age of Discovery'. Would the Chinese have conquered the world instead? Your take is as good as mine but we can be sure the world would be less developed and quite different from what we know today.
A long read [thenewatlantis.com], but worth it. All quotes from article linked.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday August 14 2017, @05:52AM (1 child)
Uhhh doesn't the heliopause trash most signals so unless they are dedicating time to send a boosted signal (like we did with the Arecibo message) we won't be getting squat? Or they may have simply went with different technology (imagine if we invented the telegraph and then just stayed on that line with phones, cable, fiber and so on and never bothered with wireless) that doesn't blast signals into space...hell there are a bazillion possibilities that would still leave tons of intelligent life out there so trying to base everything on ourselves? Is just DUMB, heck we don't even know if we are the only life in our own system as we haven't explored the oceans of Europa or under the Martian poles, yet we think we can answer the question of how life is gonna evolve live and die in other systems tens or thousands of light years away? Yeah right.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @06:12PM
Fuck you hairy-nigger. Wash your filthy black ass-feet.