Exactly. This is why I have no problem with no contact.
Why would an evolved sentient species choose to devolve? Sharks didn’t evolve sentience because they achieved survival without it, and so hit a kind of evolutionary brick wall.
As for all that expensive processing tissue involved in abstract thought, there may be a better way to deal with that. It may be that advanced species would regard biological life as ridiculously primitive with all its frailties, diseases, inconveniences, and limited lifespan, not to mention our biologically driven competitive struggles for survival and supremacy with the consequent ongoing risk of blowing ourselves up. Perhaps they have engineered artificial and far superior, immortal housings for their highly developed sentience.
Such beings would have many advantages besides immortality. Interstellar travel that is thousands of years in duration would effectively be just a day trip. Moreover, since the physical existence of any individual is at this point essentially just information-- information that can be transferred from one manifestation to another – they would be able to teleport themselves between planetary outposts that they’d already colonized as a beam of information at light speed. Sounds more appealing to me than devolving into a crocodile!
The answer is obvious. Only the dumbest of the super-intelligent civilizations scattered throughout the universe would attempt non-local intergalactic travel at this point in time. Why waste gas chasing something that’s receding away from you at the speed of ~C +/- 10 mpg?
All the not-so-dumb super-intelligent civilizations are biding their time, waiting till the tail end of the Big Crunch, a billion or so years before we drain back into [del]the Big Suck[/del]…[del]the Big Vagina[/del]…the Big Singularity, when all the galaxies are hot-roddin’ toward us and extraterrestrial contact will be like taking a leisurely Sunday afternoon drive in the country.
It simply makes more sense to wait a few trillion years before we start our inter-galactic meet & greet.
Can you think of Paris Hilton and say that again with a straight face?
IMHO I would say that indeed we are not going to choose to devolve, Many that see Paris Hilton see her as not an example to follow. But as lesson for all to what to avoid.
As for the issue at hand my theory is that we are in reality in the “backwoods” of the Galaxy, most of the concentration of energy and systems would be closer to the center of the galaxy, I do not think we would be an attractive area to visit as most of the intelligent life would assume that if there is life over here that we are “cannibals” due to the (from their perspective) lack of energy and matter present in our “neck of the woods”.
A good book on the subject is Stephen Webb’s Where Is Everybody?
He treats the Fermi “paradox” as a jumping off point to propose fifty different solutions/essays.
My guess for where the “great filter” lies is the development of technology. Various animals have been observed using or even making tools, but humans are the only species that are dependent on tool use. Without knives, without clothes, without fire, humans couldn’t survive. Thus humanity is somewhat perverse: it’s natural for humans to be unnatural.
The reason this is a filter is that for a tool-obligate species to arise, it must first be well-adapted enough to its environment to survive, but ill-adapted enough to need tools- a rather narrow bottleneck. The premise of Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey was that the Monolith’s creators originally found themselves the lone sentient species in the galaxy, having only arisen through a fantastically unlikely confluence of circumstances. So they went around giving gentle pushes to various species on the cusp of both intelligence and extinction to encourage tool using.
Besides Paris Hilton, sometimes thinking about extraterrestrials keeps me up at night.
To answer the Fermi Paradox properly, I think it’s important to analyse and expand upon the Drake Equation:
N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L
• N = The number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable.
• R* =The rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life.
• fp = The fraction of those stars with planetary systems.
• ne = The number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life.
• fl = The fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears.
• fi = The fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges.
• fc = The fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
• L = The length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space
I’m sure we can agree that civilizations capable of interstellar space travel have also mastered electromagnetic communication or something similar that is detectable.
I also believe we can agree on the complexity involved with the R* , fp , ne , fl and L parameters and how they reduce the odds of extraterrestrial contact quite significantly, correct?
However, I think more analysis is needed with regard to fi (The fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges) and fc (The fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space). These two parameters make me particularly pessimistic with regard to making contact. I think the Goldilocks Zone is narrower than most imagine.
What types of planets can be in the Goldilocks zone? I believe ne knocks virtually all liquidless planets right out of the water. But, what about gaseous planets? I can charitably award them the potential to reach somewhere between fl and fi . Maybe they can float around philosophizing with each other. But, technology? What, are they going to build their telecommunication systems and space ships out of…gas? That notion is full of hot air!
How about water-worlds—planets covered with liquid, but no land to inhabit? Could aquatic creatures build space ships and interstellar communication? Even if they could, would they? Maybe very shallow water-worlds with ocean beds filled with lots of metals and minerals could and would, but what if the vast majority of water-worlds have mile or more deep oceans of liquid with nothing but mucky ocean beds? Would they even evolve appendages that could build things in such an environment? Mucky sand castles perhaps? I can charitably award them the potential to pass the fi stage, but on the lower end of the IQ scale, the end that has no advanced technology and just swims about socializing with each other and thinks of ways to hunt prey together, like orca (though recall cetaceans spent considerable time on land before returning to the water; maybe they needed the land stage to gain intelligence). Octopuses are pretty smart, but I don’t envision one of them ever floating to the ocean surface and think, “someday I will fly up to one of those white dots up there.”
Likewise, I don’t believe all liquid, or liquid/land planets covered with thick ice have much of a chance to break through and contemplate interstellar travel of communication.
This leaves us with the probably miniscule minority of planets that have both a land and water environment that is both habitable and exploitable to the planet’s apex species to have even a chance to develop high intelligence, advanced technology and a possible incentive to reach out to the stars. Multiply that with the other Drake Equation parameters and the Milky Way doesn’t look so ripe for alien contact after all, IMHO. And, with the distant galaxies expanding away from us, I’m not waiting by the phone.
It would be interesting to hear other Drake Equation analyses that you have considered (for or against contact). Care to share?
“If the cosmic phone rings… don’t answer.” -Prof. Simon Conway Morris
so after watching a Star Trek TNG rerun in which Scotty crashes into a “Dyson Sphere” (a metal eggshell that covers a star…the Death Star on steroids), I wonder if the ‘optimal’ solution for an advanced civilization is not to waste time trying to run around the galaxy/universe, but to build a Dyson Sphere (from the local solar system’s resources) and hang out there.
Your civilization is in ‘stealth mode,’ has plenty of resources, space, energy and chugs along for a long time. …until Skynet starts armageddon or a neighboring star goes supernova and irradiates your solar system with some nasty radiation.
That’s a version of one of the proposed explanations for the Fermi Paradox: civilizations evolve to the point that they convert planets or even stars into computing machines (“computronium”) and have virtual realities with more complexity than the rest of the non-sentient universe.
In the science fiction world, the ability to fully extract and harness all the available resources from a system has typically been a hallmark of a Kardashev Type II civilization, with the transition from I to II being marked by full terraforming, ringworlds, and Dyson spheres.
Certainly a sphere is the optimal use of a star’s output purely in terms of energy use…but whether pulling up stakes and hiding in a (really, really, mind-bogglingly huge) bunker is “optimal” for a given civilization is up to that civilization to decide. I’m not a fan of putting all my eggs in one basket, even a basket with the surface area of 550 million Earths.
Dyson spheres would be one of the most easily detected forms of space megastructure, simply because they are so big; one suggestion is that we should look for anomalous transits, or heat signatures from the sort of components that might make up this sort of structure.
Here’s one example of such a search
http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/infrared_astronomy_master.html
I think that SETI is doomed to failure. Not because there are no civilizations out there but because interstellar communication is so difficult. We generally transmit only enough power to be heard above the noise and for the most part that is communicating over a few thousand miles. I do not believe that we could detect our transmissions using SETI’s methods if we were a few light years away. More modern communication methods are harder to detect using SETI’s method.
I also do not think that we currently have the technology to launch and land a probe on any planets a few light years away. Current technology would mean probes that need to last thousands maybe millions of years. We don’t have the ability to make anything technologically complicated that lasts that long.
[QUOTE=Tibby or Not Tibby]
…
Likewise, I don’t believe all liquid, or liquid/land planets covered with thick ice have much of a chance to break through and contemplate interstellar travel of communication.
This leaves us with the probably miniscule minority of planets that have both a land and water environment that is both habitable and exploitable to the planet’s apex species …
[/QUOTE]
Was going to post exactly this, my thinking exactly! A “waterworld” or a “dryworld” seems far more likely than a semi-water world such as we have - this may have to be the small coefficient in the Drake Equation. Seems plausible based on what we can see in our own solar system.
Without enough liquid of some sort (doesn’t have to be H2O) and therefore reaction sites it’s hard to get the building blocks of life together, but with too much there is no fire (travel technology needs this) or even radio waves (communication technology needs this) and therefore no contact.
Moreover, the aliens are likely to be far too alien. Timescales of life, either much faster or shorter. Or maybe like cicadas they only come out of pods every zillion years to mate and then snooze again. They could lack a language, have hive minds, be focused on their weird religion or a planetwide war, and so on.
We seem barely able to communicate or interact meaningfully with other intelligent species (apes, dolphins, some birds) on our own planet with our “home team advantage,” I would expect that actual aliens would be weird enough that we might not recognize them as life.
I’m thinking the intelligent ocean of “Solaris” or the bizarre radio signal of “His Master’s Voice” (both incredible novels by the way) are as close as we could get, given an eternity of yearning and searching…
Given the incredible distances and the energy limitations (noted in the other threads on this topic), even if we do find a civilization like ours we’re more likely to be “radio penpals” only.
Unfortunately, the Kepler data casts some doubt on this. Kepler has found rocky planets around the kinds of low-metallicity stars that could have formed as much as 8-10 billion years ago. That would give other civilizations a 4-6 billion year head start on us. Given the apparent rate of growth of science and technology once a civlization reaches a certain threshold, you’d think even beating us to the technological age by a few thousands years should result in a huge gap in capability, and just a few million years would be enough time to completely saturate the galaxy with self-replicating probes.
I do agree with the general thrust of what you said - that civilization may be exceedingly rare - at least in the reasonably-detectable distances from Earth.
As for The Great Filter, Stephen Hawking may have a new candidate:
Professor Stephen Hawking says the Higgs boson could destroy the universe
This strikes me as an interesting variant on the Anthropic Principle: There’s no one else in our universe because when technology advances to a certain stage, the universe is destroyed by something like this. We’re the first because in all the universes where someone else beat us in the evolutionary race, we never existed because the universe was wiped out first.
That would mean The Great Filter is somewhere ahead of us, in the future no more distant than the time it takes us to build self-replicating probe technology or some other means to exponential expansion. Then we’re going to trip on a mine.
But what we see in our solar system isn’t representative. Mercury, Venus and the gas giants and their moons are all outside the habitable zone. Mars, OTOH, arguably on the edge of the zone, looks like it may have had at least water flowing over dry land just like earth even if it didn’t have oceans. It lost most of its atmosphere and water because of its low mass and, whatever it was in the past, became a dead planet.
I’m a tremendous admirer of Hawking but sometimes he seems intentionally provocative, as if it amuses him. Like that quote, or this controversial paper about the black hole information paradox. Hawking has been wrong about various important things – IIRC, some years ago he had bet someone that the Higgs didn’t exist at all.
I’ve never understood the assumption that, just because a species has ample time and technology to colonize the galaxy, it would do so.
Let’s say we can travel at almost the speed of light. Why would we want colonize places hundreds of light-years away? It would probably be a horrible experience for those attempting to do so, and the advantages would seem to be minimal.
Maybe a forward-looking species might foresee a shortage of a certain substance that could be mined a few ly away and transported back in large quantities, but the further away you go, the less opportunity for any kind of useful interaction remains.
The assumption is based on that unless technological species are vanishingly rare, you’d imagine at least some of them would be interested in space colonization- we would if we could. And the colonization would be exponential: the founding world colonizes the three or four nearest systems, each of those colonize the nearest unclaimed systems, etc., until you have a frontier expanding through uncharted space. At even the modest rate of say, five light-years a millennium, that would colonize the galaxy in twenty million years- a small fraction of our galaxy’s age. Add in self-reproducing machines whose job it is to beam back info and begin ecoforming suitable worlds, and the idea that our galaxy ought to be full already is compelling.
Perhaps the very concept of “colonization” is… well, colonial. Planets in other star systems might either be outside the habitable zone or else inhabited – one or the other – a fact that might be known to advanced civilizations who might have a different view of colonization than more primitive societies.
As Dave Barry once put it in describing colonial North America, our hardly settlers found vast new lands that weren’t inhabited by anyone, unless you counted the Indians, which our hardy settlers did not. 
ETA: Having seen your latest edit, of course ecoforming is a different matter.
(removed garbage characters posted accidentally from Tapatalk on my phone)