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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 VLM on Monday August 14 2017, @12:35PM
Good start, I'll keep the analogy going. The only way the two cars can communicate is if they're both in the same technological fast food parking lot at the same time and the only way to see evidence of their existing is to see another car distantly in the parking lot. Oh wait, one already crossed the finish line before the other crossed the starting line? Well I'm sure theres thousands of cars. Oh you say they're spaced out over time such that they never overlap...
Both drivers think they're god's gift to the driving world, but they really have very little control over a very weak technological artifact, despite science fiction. Sure on Star Trek they have a trillion watt headlight but the real world car has maybe 100 watts of headlight power and the nearest car is not past the start line or already past the finish line.
Meanwhile we think our technology is greatest and thing get better but nothing changes. The reality is we're trying to drive our cars to meet in the McDonalds parking lots with species that genetically engineered efficient photosynthesis into their skins so they don't do drive-thrus and instead of industrial era cars they go cross country in genetically engineered dragons (or dolphins) or use teleporters or whatever. A classic example is broadcast radio that's astronomical compatible is dying as an industry and all that power is either not going to be used or will be used for remotely undetectable services like data centers and fiber optic power supplies. Meanwhile we've built hundreds of nuclear reactors in earth orbit producing a weird neutrino flux pattern that we can theorize and very poorly detect under the assumption no one else can detect it, but some space alien is probably earning a PHD right now off the weird neutrino emission at an earth's orbit distance from the star Sol. Observationally the "broadcast high frequency radio with simple modulation schemes" was unable to survive economically to a century, bye bye NTSC analog TV. We're not going to have the gear, tech, and most importantly the creativity to think to listen for it, relatively soon on a civilizational lifespan scale. A good car analogy is we're trying to detect automobile culture by tracking the prevalence in the archeological record of ignition points and carburetors.