That does not follow at all.
Hell, I don’t even listen to radio any more; too many commercials and talk shows.
I’m not sure how much we can possibly infer from observing signals from other star systems. We couldn’t observe our own terrestrial transmissions from as far away as Alpha Centuari (with the exception of intentionally directed transmissions) and we can only directly observe stars within the neighborhood of a few hundred light years, so about 0.0000005 % of stars in our galaxy. There could be intelligence species flitting about all over the place using some kind of transportion technology or physical principles we cannot even conceive of, and they may care no more about taking to us than we would to a colony of ants. We can only speculate on thek possible occurrence of life, and intelligent life, by the availability of life-supporting conditions (with a generous allowance for how life could vary and adapt) and the presumption that selective pressures and conditions may produce a similar distribution of strategies for evollutionary success. But we lack data, either affirmative or verifiably negative, to draw any firm conclusions about the prevalence of life.
Stranger
People say this, but it doesn’t seem to be based on evidence. Humans expand when it’s economically viable but don’t just try to move into empty space if there’s no direct benefit. You see a lot of ghost towns in the Western US, for example, that people don’t bother to populate because there’s no profit, even though the land sustained significant habitats at some point. You don’t see people in developed countries using technology to support more people living in formerly uninhabited areas, instead you see people moving around near existing cities and population numbers leveling off or even declining.
Expansion for the sake of expansion just isn’t done by the only intelligent species we have encountered once it has developed even rudimentary technology, but for some reason certain writers think it will drive a huge expenditure of resources and major direction of lives. Even if near-magical technology like cheap .5c drives and increasing intelligence 1000 fold exist, it’s quite consistent with what we’ve seen of humans today that people will have goals other than ‘fill all of space with humans’.
You think a large state machine that mimics what is in the machine you are using to read this is magical? You think 0.5**%** C is a magically high speed to reach. Note the % sign, I mean 1/200th of the speed of light. You can get there with fusion exhaust and like 30% of your starship is fuel.
Just intelligent life, the paradox itself says nothing about unintelligent life.
I meant to add - the 3-billion+ year history of life on this planet shows that the argument that life strongly implies intelligent life doesn’t hold. There could be billions of planets only as advanced as their “Cretaceous”, teeming with all manner of complex life, none of it able to communicate with us, and the probabilities would still gel with what we see here.
We haven’t been able to create a machine that is 1 fold as intelligent as humans, so the ability to create one that is 1000 fold as intelligent is quite a stretch. You need numerous advances in computing and other technologies (how are you going to scan a brain to mimic it’s state, for example), and not all of them are just simple ‘do what we do now a little bit faster’. Further, we don’t have any evidence of what super brains 1000x as smart as humans are like - would they really have any interest in trying to spread like bacteria?
I misread the speed - I saw .5c, not .5% c since I’m not used to seeing it written that way. .005c doesn’t enter the realm of magic tech. Colonizing the galaxy with .005c drives does require a strong desire to colonize for the sake of colonizing, which our sole example of intelligent life hasn’t done.
Pantastic, we haven’t been able to do a lot of things that we are pretty certain can be done. I’m just saying, a more compelling argument would be to say “well, none of our artificial neural networks exhibit intelligent behavior competitive with humans” or “we could never build a computer big enough”. Except, of course, neither is true - we’re getting excellent results with simple systems that mimic human capabilities and we already have very large scale computer systems, although we do need even bigger ones with optimized chips meant for this.
Yes, numerous advances are needed, but it’s nothing like ‘antigravity’, where current science knows of no way to even do it at all, and it may just be impossible. We have clear examples of working brains, so many brains we don’t know what to do with em all.
The reason we know that super smart brains would try to spread like bacteria is the evolutionary forces they would be under encourage this. As long as there are a variety of these brains, some of whom want to spread more than others. Some time in the future, the ones that want to spread more have spread more, and created variants of themselves, some of whom want to spread even more…
Fastforward, and the whole galaxy is chock full of these things. For similar reasoning as the simple spreading argument, you would expect every scrap of available solid matter to be utilized to collect more energy, run more computers, build more robots, etc.
We should be able to see this through our telescopes. Since we don’t, well, it’s a paradox. Current knowledge says that out of the available explanations for this paradox, the most likely one is that intelligent life itself is rare. The other explanations - evolutionary forces don’t apply, technology stops advancing, physics prohibits interstellar travel - are insultingly stupid. And if intelligent life is rare, it follows that life itself may be rare, since you would expect evolutionary forces to eventually arise at some form of intelligence through hill-climbing.
At least three, actually, albeit they were very closely related to each other. H. neanderthalis and H. floriensis were both as intelligent as we are; they just didn’t survive long enough for their technology to reach radio.
We’ve already done that, long ago, and with the effect that you state. So long ago, in fact, that we take the new boosted intelligence level for granted, and assume that it’s normal. A group of humans who can read and write are far more intelligent than any individual human could ever be.
[QUOTE=Chronos]
At least three, actually, albeit they were very closely related to each other. H. neanderthalis and H. floriensis were both as intelligent as we are; they just didn’t survive long enough for their technology to reach radio.
[/QUOTE]
Right…they didn’t survive long enough. So, just one.
[QUOTE=Habeed]
No, but as Stranger points out (I’m agreeing with him for once!), life tends to expand to fill every niche. Intelligent life has the capability, if certain assumptions are right, to expand to fill every niche across an entire galaxy. Those assumptions are that (1) you can build a solution to boost intelligence thousands of times above natural levels, letting you quickly and easily engineer solutions optimized to the limits of physics and (2) interstellar travel at a non negligible rate, like 0.5% C, is possible.
If life had expanded to cover this galaxy, we should already be able to see the results of this.
[/QUOTE]
Again, no…you are simply wrong. The FP doesn’t say anything at all about live on Mars being possible or not possible. It speaks to intelligent live. Thus far, we have one example of live that is both intelligent AND lasted long enough to build technology that is used as a basis for the FP. There is zero reason to believe that all intelligent live in the universe, even assuming there is any besides us, must follow the same exact model as we did. There is zero reason to assume that if we don’t see any intelligent life in the limited areas we’ve scanned so far that this makes ALL life impossible or even improbable. You are just wrong on this point…you used the FP incorrectly, and are drawing the wrong conclusions from it, using it out of context to what it’s speaking too (and don’t seem to get that even the basic premise might have flaws wrt what it IS speaking too, i.e. technologically advanced intelligent civilization through the universe).
Well, actually, you’re neglecting evolutionary forces. That’s why I can say what I say. Yet, intelligent life could be radically different in how it thinks, etc, but if that life is composed of discrete beings, and some of those beings have a heritable tendency to expand, the ultimate outcome is the same. You can consider my reasoning incorrect if you wish, but it probably makes you incorrect, as all I am doing is evaluating the possible reasons for the Fermi Paradox in light of
- Knowledge about evolutionary forces
- Knowledge about known energy sources and reasonable engineering knowledge about “starship shaped objects” propelled by those sources
- Knowledge about the limitations of human brain tissue, and why it is far slower than an optimized system could be
- Knowledge about modern digital information storage, that makes it increasingly difficult for a global catastrophe to wipe out important knowledge, as there are more and more and more copies, stored in a way that is incredibly robust and the probability of losing information has plummeted to almost zero
I don’t think you’re using any of that knowledge, you’re repeating what people said about the FP decades ago when it was conceived. Lack of knowledge is…ignorance. Please fight it. If you can come to different conclusions than me in light of the above facts (please research them throughly), let me know.
There’s no reason evolution necessarily has to lead to sentience, and certainly not within a specific timespan. It did so in our specific case, but that doesn’t mean animals and trees haven’t simultaneously evolved, just that they’ve evolved in different ways. And since bacteria and plants share the same basic chemistry as us, any form of alien life will almost certainly be even more different than that, which makes it incredibly difficult to say anything at all about what it could possibly be like.
I’m trying to fight your ignorance, but it seems immune. Evolution doesn’t have a direction or end goal. It doesn’t automatically lead to intelligence, and certainly not to intelligence high enough to create a technological civilization capable of sending or receiving radio signals…even if one assumes all possible technological civilizations will use radio, which isn’t a given either. Life on Mars would have been very basic, and the FP doesn’t say anything at all about that. Simply, you are wrong. I can sit here and tell you over and over again that you are wrong, and you can sit there and babble what you are babbling, but until you understand what the FP IS, what it does and doesn’t say, and how it’s used, there is nothing more to discuss on this.
Another thing to consider.
In terms of Earth being habitable, we are down to the last 10 percent time wise.
So, in Earths case, the emergence of intelligent technological life is coming in under the wire.
Well, sort of. The oxygen content of the atmosphere would have only been able to support us (and most extant macroscopic terrestrial life) for about the last 400 million years, and actually reached levels that would be toxic to us 300 million years ago, and reached marginal low levels as recently as 250 million years ago. The habitability of the atmosphere of Earth is co-evolved with life itself; it is living organisms which bound up the carbon and reducing elements, and kept sufficient free oxygen to both allow mammalian respiration and the formation of a protective ozone layer.
What is surprising isn’t how long complex life, and our particular form of cognitively capable life, took to form, but why it didn’t happen sooner. There seem to have been opportunities and selective pressures for intelligence, and complex cognition has developed in diverse species in most major subclades of Animalia, but we appear to be the first to be sophisticated enough to modify our environment and ourselves with deliberate purpose (although we may just be fooling ourselves in a belief in genuine free will). In part this may be due to regular cataclysms, but those same events seem to have sparked revolutions in the diversity of species. We can’t really say what a ‘typical’ path to intelligence might look like or just how it would form except that as an evolutionary strategy it does seem to have been adopted on more than one occasion here on Earth, but never before to the extent that we have done so. It should be pointed out that our strategy has not really been vetted as successful in the long term; we’re still stuck on this planet, subject to the same threats and environmental pressures such as resources for agriculture, et cetera, and it is entirely possible that we could be extinguished as a species by some sufficiently destructive event.
Even if we assume that life is common to the universe on the basis of being a result of ordinary chemical reactions and readily available precursors, we can’t really say how likely intelligence is to form, how successful it may be over a long term, or whether it will or desires to develop to an interstellar species. The Drake equation only gives us a framework for hypothesizing, but the sparse evidence (all from a single data set) doesn’t allow us to draw any conclusions in the affirmative or negative.
Stranger
Likewise. You can babble on as well. I never said that life leads to intelligence, but there’s a bottleneck somewhere, and it seems more probable to be at the formation of life itself than at the formation of intelligence from life.
Still, we don’t know that. We know the other stuff is ridiculously unlikely, however. We don’t know the reason for the Fermi Paradox, but out of the available possible reasons we can think of, some of them are many orders of magnitude less probable than other reasons.
Where you’re babbling is radio. I never said radio. I said IR emissions from an expanding cloud of von neumann lifeforms that occupy every scrap of matter in the observable universe. And yes, evolution does make that the only probable endpoint if you get to intelligence at all.
Since no free oxygen has been found in the martian atmosphere, the probability of life is pretty low.
No, but some of the decades old FP arguments posited intelligent creatures that kill themselves with nukes or just don’t feel like expanding exponentially. I’m saying that digital storage of knowledge makes the first unlikely, and that evolutionary forces make the second unlikely. Basically, we need to update our discussion of the paradox with new information found since 1950.
Evolution is about the pressure on an organism to adapt to their environment. Nothing else. There are species that have evolved to live exclusively in cave systems and haven’t seen daylight for a million generations, and there are other species that have evolved to be able to travel thousands of miles in search of food. Both are a product of evolutionary forces.
We haven’t been able to create an artificial 1 fold copy of a human brain. Going from ‘we can’t even copy it, and aren’t quite sure how’ to ‘we can definitely improve it 1000 fold’ is just silly. “We” aren’t pretty certain that what you’re saying can be done, “we” aren’t even certain that you have a good definition of 1000 fold for this purpose and how that would work in practice.
We don’t have a single example of a species that reached spaceflight technology that seeks to expand like bacteria; humans definitely don’t. I’m not aware of any evolutionary pressures that encourage that in modern humans, the biggest constraint on breeding and surviving to breeding age is having money to support kids and buy good medical care for the kids. Wild breeding in an attempt to fill as much space as possible does not appear to be a very successful strategy, and brith rates in industrial countries have all leveled off, in some places to a level below replacement rates.