I read Leo’s referenced paper. All 33 pages. Most of their scenarios end badly for humanity. Very badly.
If he is the ETI, we’re screwed. Maybe we can make nice.
Umm, err, LISTEN UP FOLKS! … I for one welcome our new Leo Overlords. [sub]I hope he believes me.[/sub]
Greeting.
That sounds like Stephen Baxter’s “The Time Ships.”
And, as others have noticed, only a dozen years too late at that. 
Did Szilard ever make the joke in the context of the Fermi Paradox? I’m not sure he did. Though I’m willing to be corrected.
Because, at this remove, I don’t think that’s the specific joke I was making. No, the point is that there was the spectacular early-20th century generation of Hungarian mathematicians and physicists: Szilard, Tellar, Von Neumann and Wigner. Together with the fact that Hungarian doesn’t fit within the Indo-European languages, the traditional joke - and, without checking, I can well believe that Szilard furthered it - was that the Hungarians were “Martians”. As in The Martians of Science - which I haven’t read.
Evidence to the contrary, I’d be fairly sure that the joke that Hungarians are extraterrestrials is otherwise traditionally independent of the Fermi Paradox.
But still. Just saying … Twelve years on.
Teller you used to say he spoke 12 languages, all in Hungarian.
In the late 1970s I heard him (Teller) in person giving an emeritus lecture at my university. He would have been 70 +/- 1 years old.
He totally *was *speaking English. But definitely doing it in Hungarian.
Interesting. I’ve long known that C programmers can write C code in any language, and Fortran programmers can write Fortran code in any language. But this is the first I’ve heard that Hungarian speakers can give a Hungarian talk in other languages.
My only cite for this is my father, who met him somewhere at some Hungarian award ceremony.
ETA: FTR, A légpárnás hajóm tele van angolnákkal is the correct responsewhen asking for directions at a street corner.
Bumped.
An interesting article on SETI, with a shout-out, naturally, to Fermi. It’s never aliens… until, perhaps, it is: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-never-aliens-until-it-is/
Spreading through the galaxy might not entail having much contact with habitable planets. Assuming that FTL is impossible and relativistic speeds are impractical (as current physics would indicate), interstellar travel necessarily requires the ability to create long-term space habitats. Given that, planets would be objects of scientific study but probably not colonization – carving up a few asteroids to replenish the ship and perhaps build another one would be both more efficient and more desirable to travelers acclimated to starship life.
If you imagine a mechanism where successful universes spawn daughter universes and unsuccessful universes don’t, then evolution would apply to universes and the tendency would be towards successful ones. IMHO, producing no life at all is a hallmark of an unsuccessful universe. The same would go for a universe which created so much intelligent life that they ended up massacring each other on a massive scale. The Goldilocks answer is a universe that produces intelligent life about once per galaxy (on average) that way, there’s billions of planets with intelligent life but none of them are close enough to each other to ever make radio contact, let alone actually fight a turf war.* I strongly suspect this is the type of universe we find ourselves in. I bet we are the only planet with intelligent life in this galaxy. Even if universes don’t evolve, it’s still possible but if universes do evolve I’d call it probable.
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I’ve seen people playing with this idea, sometimes with the idea that physics that allow for stars that evolve into black holes (and thus daughter universes) correlate with physics that allow for life, sometimes with a more direct approach - intelligent life is very prone to creating black holes and daughter universes (off hand, I’ve seen Ken MacLeod, David Brin and Stephen Baxter use that idea).
As has been said before, there is a very real possibility that we have already met up with them. And they left signs saying “Stay away from the insane asylum on the third planet!”
Unfortunately, your opinion matters not at all to the Universe, and that’s not the way that evolution works. We humans may have a variety of definitions of “successful”, but the only definition of “successful” that matters to evolution is “produces lots of offspring”. And in this model you’re describing, we’re not the offspring of the universe: Other universes are. So whether we exist or not has no bearing on whether the universe is successful at producing baby universes.
Now, stars (which can eventually collapse into black holes), assuming that black holes are relevant for cosmological reproduction, those might matter. But that doesn’t tell us anything new. We already know that we live in a universe that has stars.
I’m going for very hard to do. Without cool FTL Starships which are nicer than my home, I 'm finding the prospects dim.
Also, I’m no expert, but I’m questioning the range estimates for detection of radio that have been offered. Could we really pick up Arecibo from opposite side of the galaxy? Same for the ranges for commercial radio and military radio. The numbers seem way high relative to comments I’ve seen in other threads.
I find it hard to envision we people of Earth getting our act together enough for the massive (mega-pyramid) effort of building even sufficient probes until our existence is threatened, at which time it will be too late (far better to fight off the rest of you for scraps, rather than send our resources away for the benefit of others).
I’m going for civilizations going boom or going bust or turning inward or turning to live in space.
For us to build a colony ship (without one world government), it may be helpful to come up with a model for greater participation, such as (VERY) long term storage of frozen sperm and ova, which could betaken from all participating nations. But still…
This is absolutely true, and more to the point, if a species has advanced far enough that they have the technology and the ability to command enough energy to travel between star systems, they have likely remade themselves (or their proxies) in a form that can survive indefinitely in space. It is unlikely that our planet would be appealing to any other form of life that evolved in a different environment, and by the same account improbable that we would find a planet that has the right balance of atmospheric components and ‘just so’ gravity, temperature, and rotation rate for us to be comfortable living upon it.
It is worth noting that in the history of our evolution as a species capable of making tools that can be used to communicate beyond audible range (e.g. using the electromagnetic spectrum) has been less 0.05% of our existence, and the evolution of intelligent alien life could have potentially started at least couple billion years before life on Earth in some metals-rich area of the galaxy. Even if intelligent life arising is very common (and there is no particular reason to think that it is not) both the time and distance involved may make it unlikely that we would find another intelligent alien species within hundreds or thousands of light years at any comparable stage of development to communicate with us. Just as we would have little basis to converse with humans of fifty thousand or more years ago, a species fifty thousand years advanced from us might be completely uninterested in communicating with us, and indeed, might use some form of transmission other than microwave or optical frequencies to communicate across interstellar space. There might be communications going on all around us and we’re simiply too primitive to detect them, or so late to the party that everyone else has moved on to more mature pursuits while we’re still toddering around in diapers.
The only thing Fermi’s supposed paradox and the Drake equation tell us is that we don’t really have enough information to assess whether there are other alien intelligences out there and in what form they might exist and communicate. We are just barely able to image very large planets around other stars (the JWST will improve that capability by orders of magnitude) and only detected very low frequency gravitational waves in 2015 (and was just verified this year). There is so much we do not know about our own galaxy, or even our local neighborhood, that we cannot make any definitive statements about whether and in what form life might exist elsewhere.
Speculations on hypothetical multiverses are separate (and at this point utterly unfalsifiable) and in no way establish any kind of ‘Goldilock’s principle’ that intelligent life must be infrequent. In fact, by observing how common the basic elements and compounds (amino acids) are of our form of life, and how often degrees of advanced cognition have arisen separately on our planet in entirely different taxonomic classes, it would seem that intelligent life likely arises frequently on cosmological time scales even if all of the individual steps are statistically unlikely. The biggest hurdle from an evolutionary standpoint would seem to be developing some equivalent to multicellularism and intraorganism specialization which seems necessary to provide the complexity from which cognition could emerge.
Stranger
The problems with this argument are (a) as Chronos has noted, this is a poor definition of “successful universe”, and (b) that the “once-per-galaxy” hypothesis is exceedingly implausible. There are probably about 250 billion stars in the galaxy and, by some estimates, as many as 400 billion, and it’s now believed that most of them have planets. Even if the odds of a star having a planet with the right conditions for life to form and then doing so is assessed at a staggeringly low one in a million, the galaxy would still be teeming with life. And the “massacring each other on a massive scale” argument can be dispensed with via several counterarguments; one, the unimaginably incredible separation in both space and time between these islands of life, enforced by relativistic limitations, and two, the completely different pursuits and motivations of beings advanced enough to be able to breach such gulfs.
I think these are all excellent points. One corollary to all this, in my view, is that the Fermi paradox is not really much of a paradox at all because there are so many possible answers to it. In order to be a putative paradox at all it must implicitly suppose that highly advanced forms of life perhaps hundreds of thousands of years more advanced than ourselves would essentially have the goals and motivations of 17th century European hegemonists: that they would want to colonize and build empires.
I submit that beings this advanced would neither have what we would recognize as a biological existence nor any paradigm of “civilization” that we would recognize, and their pursuits would be unfathomable to us. They would have the resources of the universe and perhaps the multiverse at their disposal, and they would have nothing at all in common with the inhabitants of a rocky planet, orbiting an average yellow star, that were still killing each other over territorial rights.
[hijack] This is supposed to have been an actual exchange between Michael Heller, Vietnam correspondent, and a Huey door gunner. It’s in his book “Dispatches.” That’s why it shows up in Full Metal Jacket, for which Heller wrote some dialogue.[/hijack]
I have heard about–but not read–a science fiction story about alien contact, and I may have heard about it on the SD MBs.
The gist of it is that an alien culture stumbles into FTL drives at a very early point in in their technological development. They show up on Earth and everyone is terrified…until the humans realize the aliens have muskets…and we have machine guns…
Yes and no…on the one hand what do high-tech cultures want with Yanomamo people, on the other hand, maybe there’s advanced medicine lurking undiscovered in their habitat–that’s a viable pursuit for our own human scientists. I can imagine that life differs across the galaxy in ways such that studying our biome might be useful to aliens.
But they sure as hell ain’t coming for mineral resources like coal. Just another letdown for West Virginia. Thanks, Obama!