I once read a short story based on this idea. Without FTL, in a remote future, humanity has slowly colonized a large part of the galaxy. Life has very rarely been found, and intelligent life never. So, it’s taken as granted that we’re alone in the galaxy if not the universe. So when an exploration starship finally meets an alien spaceship in deep space, they’re extremely excited. Communication is difficult with this alien specie but they eventually manage. It turns out of course that the “aliens” are also the remote descendants of humans who started the galactic expansion going in the opposite direction, and that the protagonists themselves in fact bear only a remote similarity with humans as we know them.
Read the very next sentence from the one you quoted:
The idea that we could translate all past languages, even where we have very few actual examples, is certainly not a claim I, or frankly anyone, would make.
And anyway, bear at mind how different this is to the subject at hand, since with aliens trying to communicate with humans they can 1) interact with us 2) potentially have access to trillions of gigabytes of examples. They are not scratching around looking at a disintegrating scrap of parchment.
Dolphins and whales have a sophisticated language, and despite decades of recorded sounds and close work with dolphins and orcas in controlled areas, we have no clue what they are saying.
Stranger on a Train is right. It is entirely possible that a different species will experience the universe in such a fundamentally different way that we simply can’t communicate - or even recognize what it’s doing as communication, for that matter.
But honestly, we don’t know. There are several possible ‘outs’ that could make other life forms much more similar to us than we think, and that comes out of complexity theory and panspermia.
if panspermia is correct (and I think evidence for it has only gotten stronger in recent years), then most planets with life on them may be starting from the same original feed stock, or perhaps one of several strains if life has evolved elsewhere in the galaxy.
From complexity theory we may find that things like bilateral symmetry may be strange attractors and evolutionary systems are generally driven towards them. There may be other attractors in evolution that tend to drive similar development of other features. Until we find another complex species we know to have evolved completely independent from us, we probably won’t know. Or perhaps we will by studying our own biology in more depth.
But unless the rules of biological complexity are governed this way, we really have no idea at all how alien species might communicate. Hell, maybe the most common form of intelligent life is a hive-like mind or an ultra-complex slime mold, and we’re the real outliers. (-:
Some of the examples we actually have quite a bit of, we just don’t have any clue how to decipher it. Anyway, it seems extremely unlikely that our first encounter with a communicative alien species will be “interactive” in any meaningful way since we can send signals at speeds several orders of magnitude faster than we can send ourselves, and unless FTL travel is simpler than anyone actually believes that is likely to be a universal problem. So I find it far more plausible that we might one day pick up a non-random signal from dozens or hundreds of lightyears away than that alien visitors will suddenly pop up in our skies, or vice versa.
@Stranger On A Train
Let’s take a step back, because we can keep going back and forth like this for a long time, and I think it’s best at this point to just explain where I am coming from on this.
One reason I object to the idea of sentient species being unable to communicate, is because it has become a popular meme. And it’s usually delivered something like “We can’t even communicate with dolphins, what hope do we have to talk with aliens?” so it’s one of the family of memes of “Humans think they’re smart, but they’re not”.
hese memes can be quite pernicious because it’s a poisoned well, and arguing against them is implied to be hubris.
But the logic of “We can’t communicate with dolphins, therefore…” is flawed in a number of ways, and it is not taking an arrogant line to suggest communication with a sentient, technological species will likely be possible.
You have offered some reasons why you think communication may be difficult – I acknowledge those. You’re right. But hopefully you can also agree that there are reasons to think communication may be easy, namely:
- Trillions of gigabytes of data available (and if they have a problem with speech specifically, we have written language, sign language, braille etc).
- The fact that a space-faring species must be very good at solving abstract problems wholly unlike those in their evolutionary habitat
- Language is structured, so if you can understand A, you have a leg up understanding B, and from there it’s much easier understanding C, D, E.
If we all knew aliens were arriving next year, I would happily wager my savings that detailed communication would be possible (if they actually want to communicate) within a year (and probably much, much sooner). But I don’t claim 100% certainty, and I guess in the absence of such a visit it’s an “agree to disagree”.
It’s also possible that they may be of the War of the World’s variety, where their only interest is in our destruction. No time for small talk.
Could be, can’t rule it out.
But I would peg that scenario at only a shade more likely than the 50s comics idea of aliens coming to take (hawt) human women.
Oh, another idea I have been beaten to. The story of my life. You don’t remember the title or the author by any chance?
I think you are missing the essential point of the issue; that regardless of the degree of structure of a language or other communication method, if there is no fundamental basis for having a common comprehension of an abstraction, the ability to engage in any meaningful communication is extremely limited. It is certainly true that with an arbitrarily large amount of data we could decode an unknown language into comprehensible units that could be translated provided that there are some analogues in ideas and grammatical constructions between the languages.
As a concrete if facile example, if you were to describe to me a turtle, you could do so by explaining the carapace, retractile legs and head, et cetera, and even if I’ve never seen a turtle I could get some essential notion. I might imagine that it looks like a dog with a big shell on its torso, but we could at least share some level of common understanding. However, if I don’t understand what legs, or a carapace, or a head is, you don’t even have a basis to start describing it to me, and it doesn’t matter how many symbols we can exchange, without a sufficiently common point of reference there just isn’t going to be any useful amount of exchange.
You mention here (and if memory serves me, in previous threads) how it is “a popular meme” that alien species are unable to communicate with humans or vice versa, but in fact it is far more common that such communication is treated as trivially easy, often facilitated by some kind of “universal translator”, the function of which is almost never addressed to the point that Douglas Adams parodied the ridiculousness of it in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as the Babel Fish (a product of evolution that is so remarkably convenient it is proof of the non-existence of God, but that is another discussion entirely). In general, aliens in fiction are shown as having very similar senses and form but even essentially human-like traits and lifestyles. This is convenient not only in television and cinematic portrayals, but also because it makes aliens more relatable as characters but is manifestly unlikely in reality. The portrayals of aliens that are actually “alien” and un-human-like is pretty rare; in cinema it is mostly limited to the obelisk-makers of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the planetary intelligence of Solaris, (the work of speculative fiction pioneers Arthur C. Clarke and Stanislaw Lem, respectively) and largely imitators thereof, or else because they are some kind of instinctive insectoid-like predator.
In reality, despite having developed some presumably comparable ability to travel through or send transmissions across interstellar space, without some close analogs in perception, evolutionary development, and cognitive structures of communication, there may be little basis for an exchange of ideas and certainly regarding anything that is not heavily grounded in essential physical mechanisms, and even that may be ambiguous if the aliens perceive the world in a very different way or in a different timescale than we do.
It’s even worse than that; a highly advanced alien species might think our technological and societal developments so inconsequential that they destroy us out of hand without even thinking of the consequences, just as we might spray a wasp nest or poison an anthill. Humanity tends to think pretty highly of itself just because it has managed to build large physical structures and go to our closest large celestial body a handful of times, but we can only actively control one of the (presumably four) fundamental forces of nature to any degree beyond the equivalent of smashing rocks together, we cannot help but waste resources fighting constantly with one another, and we are still at the whims of nature and evolution when it comes to chronic illness and programmed death. An alien species might look at the Earth and decide it isn’t worth preserving if it is in any way inconvenient, or worse yet, not even recognize the accomplishments of humanity as evidencing any genuine intellectual capability that isn’t already available by uncountable multitudes of intelligent species come before us.
There is the frequent assumption which underlies the Fermi paradox that if we don’t see evidence of alien species (radio communications, cosmic megastructures, visitation by alien overlords) we must either be rare or totally alone, but all of that assumes the same kind of conquistador-like motivation and the same practical limitations that we have. In fact, we could be very late to the party, with the bulk of alien civilizations having arising, progressed through the primitive “building things” part of their development, and moved onto far bigger things in abstruse dimensions unavailable to our primitive understanding of physics. Or perhaps they’ve decided that building big and exploring wide isn’t as important as looking inward, and have elected to spend their energies understanding the hidden underbelly of physics rather than spending eons sending explorers far and wide. Or there could even be such explorations but by proxy, with probes flying all around us but too small and dark for us to observe.
We can’t really make any assumptions about what an alien intelligence might look like, what physical basis it could take, how it might evolve (or change its own form for greater resilience), and especially what its motivations might be except that they will not be based upon the evolutionary pressures and motivations that have formed our particularly type of intelligence. We can’t even be assured that we would recognize and interpret an alien intelligence if it was in front of us, and certainly not that we’d be able to communicate with it as a Pole might speak with a Malaysian. The Fermi paradox is really nothing more than expression of our ignorance of the world and why our expectation–that intelligent alien life should be common–is not borne out in the sparse amount of evidence available to us in our tiny local pocket of a universe so vast it is literally beyond imagination.
Stranger
A generation ship is science fiction thought experiment and will never be built, any more than we would try to go to the Moon using gunpowder fueled rockets. Both generation ships and gunpowder fueled rockets have been studied on paper, they are equally absurd.
No, the hard reality is that the vast energies required for interstellar travel - not to mention the exotically high end machinery that is most likely patterned down to the nanoscale, most likely nanoscale self replicating machinery, etc - is harder a problem to solve than mere human senescence and aging. Whether it be biological immortality or just scrapping the human body completely and emulating the minds of the crew in computers (probably a more conservative and easier to accomplish option), the crew who leave Earth will be the same crew who arrive at the destination, however many thousands of years that it takes.
No, like I say, I absolutely get what you’re saying, you are not listening to what I am saying.
It’s good you have picked a noun as an example as it illustrates I think the big problem with your reasoning.
Take communication out of the picture for a minute.
Imagine aliens come to Earth and humans are not there. They encounter a turtle.
Now, we might say a turtle is sooo different from anything on their home world they will never form an understanding of what a turtle is.
But I would be dubious of that; these space-faring aliens have had to acquire deep knowledge of many, many phenomena nothing like their home environment in order to become an interstellar species. They are extremely good at studying novel phenomena. It would be a bizarre blind spot if lifeforms are incomprehensible to them.
So now let’s bring communication back. I have every means at my disposal to communicate “turtle” except access to an actual turtle. That means pictures, video, audio, whatever sense it appears the aliens use, physical models of turtles, whatever you like. What’s the difference now? Where is the dividing line that now prevents any understanding being possible?
And if there is no such dividing line, then brilliant; they can crack open our languages from there. Once they see that the scribbling “turtle” maps to that lifeform, it’s going to unravel from there. What else maps to what?
Yes, in fiction we can usually communicate with aliens, largely because it’s easier to write stories that way. It’s just like if I awaken the ghost of a Trojan warrior in a movie, he’s gonna speak English, probably with a British accent.
But in common discourse, the factoid that we would be *unable *to communicate, rules. Any thread on communicating with aliens is going to feature a “We can’t even talk to dolphins!”
Or insects. And there’s far more of them than any other creatures on this planet. Perhaps insects are the real earthlings and we’re the sideshow.
The bottom line here is that our galaxy has been populated by sun like stars for at LEAST 5 billion years, the life of the solar system, and ET is a no show. At suggested and completely plausible rates of expansion of intelligent beings through the galaxy, Fermi’s question deserves a serious answer. Furthermore, there should be huge amounts of radio chatter just arriving at Earth. How is it possible that there has been an advanced civilization in the galaxy for AT LEAST as long as life has existed on Earth, and there is not enormous amounts of data of all kinds crisscrossing the galaxy.
I’m getting more than a little tired at your insistence that I’m not following what you are saying or too dense to understand your points when I have very explicitly and repeatedly addressed your arguments. I understand that you believe communication should be trivial because there is a lot of data and an advanced intelligence should be easily capable of parsing data and finding structures, all of which may be true but misses the essential point that merely being able to find the structure and grammar of a language does not guarantee that it can be used to actually communicate ideas without a common reference frame, and just the essential differences in perception and cognition may prohibit actually being able to convey abstract ideas at any level, perhaps even at the most fundamental level of describing mathematics and basic physics if an alien intelligence has some very different concept of mathematics, e.g. instead of seeing the world as discrete items and using integer counting systems views the world as a continuum and uses some kind of fractal-based mathematics.
It is possible that an alien “brain” (or whatever analogue it has) and senses could be similar enough to ours that we could have a roughly common notion of how to interpret the world, but it is more likely that coming from a completely different evolutionary base and path that there would be virtually no commonality on any level, perhaps not even at the rate at which events are perceived or the distinctions we make in our senses, and we almost certainly wouldn’t share any affective responses or instincts that underlie our supposed rational cognition. And without any commonality in how we think, communication at any level becomes essentially meaningless, or at best reduced to the level of point-and-grunt.
To reiterate points stated previously:
[ol]
[li]We’ve been looking/listening on the radio frequency spectrum for just about a century out of the five or more billion years that solid, Earth-like planets and other suitable planet-like solid bodies have been in existence; [/li][li]We can only observe signals in the very near neighborhood and our own most powerful signals (from early warning launch detection systems, to boot), even if directed at a star, could only reach a few hundred light years before their strength would be so far below the ambient noise floor that they could not conceivably be distinguished;[/li][li]We have no particular reason to believe that any advanced species would still be transmitting broadly on electromagnetic spectra (as we ourselves are reducing our radiant footprint as we shift to narrow bandwidth and optical fiber communications), and may well not be using the radio spectrum to communicate at all;[/li][li]Countless civilizations may have developed, arising to our level of technology, and either collapsed or moved beyond the limitations of physics as we know it, leaving behind no evidence that is observable from our pale blue dot in the hinterlands of our galaxy;[/li][li]Although it is assumed that a civilization would develop to expand indefinitely into interstellar space, this is merely a reflection of human civilization in an “Age of Sail” context and may not represent the goals and desires of an advanced species which might prefer to explore the depths of physical interactions rather than endlessly cataloguing stars and planets, and it may be physically prohibitive to actually travel to other stars without fundamental advances in physics or propulsion science;[/li][li]And for that matter the galaxy could be liberally populated with tens of thousands of civilizations at our level or beyond but spaced so widely apart among the several hundred billion stars in a galactic disk exceeded 100 klyr across that we would never be able to detect them even if they did travel to other local stars at plausible speeds.[/li][/ol]
Taking the extremely limited observations we have over a virtual blink of the eye on the cosmic timeframe from our singular position at a remote location of our galaxy which is just one of countless trillions and asserting that there must not be any other life is like going to Paris, ordering a meal from room service, and judging the entirety of French cuisine based upon the one shitty microwaved meal you got. We not only do not have enough data to draw any conclusions about the supposed Fermi paradox, we can’t even begin to make valid inferences about why we don’t or whether we ought to actually observe anything. We are infants in a crib, helplessly waving our tiny limbs trying to just roll from side to side.
Stranger
This is a double-ironic sentence given that:
- *You *just accused *me *of not following your argument in your previous post. And this is all after I tried to steer the debate back on track by saying I agreed with your points and that you are right (up to the point where you think these arguments refute what I am saying).
- Once again your response does not actually address the point that was just put to you. It was explaining why a common reference frame is not necessary for at least communicating physical nouns. You have not addressed that now or previously.
Can you respond to my points about your “turtle” example? Because it was meant to address exactly this point.
Also, let’s be clear what this debate actually is: while I have said that I think communication will be relatively easy, that’s me just emphasizing “Not only do I think communication will be possible, I suspect it will be easy”.
The actual debate is whether communication is possible at all, because I am arguing against the dolphin line and your initial post. So if, let’s say, it takes a year to convey the sentence “The vehicle’s engine is damaged” (I think it’s propostrous to think a species so good at understanding novel phenomena would find it this difficult, but let’s go with it): that would be communication.
In this debate it doesn’t matter that it’s hard.
I think a point many of you are missing is the time scales involved. Also – the rocket equation only applies to rockets (IE – devices that carry both their propellant and engine with them, burning off mass to gain velocity). It’s true that if you’re gonna carry all of your mass with you, you’ll have very diminishing returns when adding more fuel mass. But there are two ways around it. First, we can stage our rockets. If we burn all the fuel in a tank to get up to speed, then drop the empty tank before starting to burn the fuel in a second tank, then we gain a LOT more delta-V. At this point in time, it is impossible for any known, working engines to get a rocket up to space in one stage. Two stages are very doable. Three make it easy. An interstellar ship that relied on any sort of chemical rocket could very well make use of staging.
But odds are, that’s not how we’ll travel to another star, not unless we gain some wonderful new propulsion technology first. What seems most likely is that we’ll use some sort of solar sail design. You don’t need to rely on photons from the sun, either – a “solar” sail is really a PHOTON sail, and we can produce the photons ourselves using powerful lasers. Yes, accelerating even a medium-sized colony ship all the way to Alpha Centauri would take a monumental amount of energy, but space isn’t empty, and there’s plenty of ways we could power these lasers. Near the sun, we could use solar panels – and I highly doubt we’re going to be going interstellar before we have massive orbital solar collectors that would make getting this energy trivial. Further out, we’d need fusion power to run these lasers. If we never develop fusion, there are other methods to do this – but I doubt that fusion is truly impossible. It might not be 5 or even 20 years out, like people tend to say; but in a hundred years? A thousand?
And it’s not like we need to find a habitable planet on the other end. Like someone else mentioned in this thread – the most likely way that we’ll get into interstellar space is by settling the oort cloud with rotating habitats, which we would already be living on for centuries. Give one of those habitats a push, and a few centuries later, it arrives in orbit of another star. We don’t land on a planet in that new solar system – instead, we land on small rocky moons, or more likely, just grab asteroids and comets in order to get new materials.
No, we couldn’t send a colony fleet to Alpha Centauri today*, but the Fermi Paradox asks us to consider. If human civilization doesn’t kill itself off, where will we be in 100 years? 10,000? 10 million? The universe is pretty early in its lifecycle, but it’s been friendly enough for life to evolve here on Earth billions of years ago-- and there are stars much, much older than our sun. There should have been plenty of time for ancient, multi-million-year-old civilizations to evolve from microbes, reach space, and – no matter how slowly they went about it – spread out into the universe.
You might say – most of human history saw gradual development, and even periods of decline. Only in the last 100 years has technology been increasing exponentially. And you’d be right, but there are two factors to consider. First – technology is developing exponentially because of the benefits that technology itself grants when trying to develop new technology. Technology allows denser populations, which allow faster research, which allows faster development of new populations. Is this guaranteed to continue forever? No, absolutely not. But it took us thousands of years to go from naked stone-banging primitives to the beginnings of industry. Even if an alien species that evolved a few hundred million years** didn’t** slingshot further down the path of technology – if their industrial revolution had been followed by slow development, just like the last few thousand years – then in the time that the universe has been around, they’d have time to conquer the galaxy anyways.
*(Although we’ve probably had the capacity to send a probe there for at least 20-30 years. Hopefully we’re not wasting too much time by waiting – Breakthrough Starshot claims to be able to do it in about 20 years, so if we launch soon, that’s probably sooner than if we launched in the 90s. But I doubt we’re gonna see much more in terms of getting that period down, at least in the near future)
Stages don’t get you around the ideal rocket law, as almost everyone chooses to ignore the structure required to hold the fuel.
In the context of this thread the Ideal Rocket Law was brought up as an example how assuming that interstellar colonization is even possible requires invoking concepts that today are pure science fiction just as time travel is. Dyson spheres or “massive orbital solar collectors” do not change that fact.
Dyson spheres and practical small scale fusion are one type of Science Fiction to allow one to move forward with this thought experiment and FTL is another way.
But even with oort cloud hopping the energy densities of either chemical rockets or fusion based solutions are problematic as are the energy requirements related to stopping even if you could use a light sail. Most likely due to the scaling needs light sails will be limited to small probes and that is if and only if we can figure out how to produce massive sails of graphene coated in reflective materials.
While it may change in the future, practical interstellar travel will require discovery of new physics. While I would never suggest people shouldn’t be optimistic that we will find them we do need to acknowledge that those hopes are in no way guaranteed. Just as Fermi himself concluded it may just be that interstellar travel is not possible.
By this logic though, anything we’re still developing is “science fiction”. Even things we’re very close to, or things that we could do today with enough money. Orbital solar panels are only “science fiction” in the sense that we don’t have them yet, but they operate on known principles that aren’t even especially tough to engineer.
What do you mean by “new physics”? Because nothing we’ve been discussing requires new physics (not even fusion – I’m not saying we’ll discover cold fusion or zero-point energy, just that we’ll refine the current engineering to the point that we can keep a sustainable fusion reaction going), just different applications of current physics. No one is suggesting we build an Alcubierre warp drive or an Bussard ramjet. Those would require new physics; but even something like a Dyson Sphere (which is far beyond what would be required to just colonize a neighboring star, and then do that again, and again, over millions of years and a whole galaxy) doesn’t require any new physics.
Law of excluded middle, many things that are possible don’t directly contradict our current understandings of the universe.
Fusion is possible, fusion at high power levels without having the reactor mass being so huge as to run into the power density problem is far harder.
Remember that due to the huge pressures in stars fusion actually happens due to the proximity of atoms, outside of stars fusion is actually much harder and requires much higher temperatures.
But I also think the availability of resources in the Oort cloud and assumptions on proximity of bodies in the Oort could are probably being a bit optimistic in your argument. Solar won’t work out there and long term habitation and energy needs are less than trivial. Also there is the problem of radiation an DNA which will need to be solved for this to happen. Protecting humans from radiation for those long term colonies to exist and even how we can get around the heath issues in low gravity need to be dealt with.
If the claim was that we could get probes to these stars someday, despite the risk that humanity may not even exist at that point it would be near term. But remember that even with thermal nuke engines which are 200% more efficient than chemical rockets we would still need more than 100 times the mass of the universe in propellant to get a toothpick to the nearest star within a century.
The energies required to reach these distances in times below 10,000 years are huge and the challenges for even colonization within our solar system are large if more likely to be reachable.
You have a fair point about fusion, although I do think you’re being a bit pessimistic as far as it’s potential. I guess I object to new PHYSICS because to me that implies that what is required is a completely new method of travel – something like wormholes or warp drives – whereas I see it as more of an engineering problem.
As far as scale goes, that’s true, and fusion drives to power big colony ships are probably more likely than minituarized fusion reactors on tiny probes.
The Oort cloud doesn’t need to be rich in resources for civilization to exist there, at some scale. If you can send a probe out to fetch a comet, and it can bring it back and extract more resources from the comet than it took to produce enough dV to match orbits and come back, then you’re gaining resources. And while it would take a lot of TIME to match orbits, it would be very dV cheap that far out. So if a colony has enough probes, there can be a constant stream of them leaving and returning with resources. There might not be many people there – or even any people there at all – but humanity will definitely be exploiting those resources.