Exactly. Heck, if scientists announced proof of even 10,000 advanced civilizations, my reaction would probably be, “OMG, that’s huge…oh, wait, it’s almost nothing.”
The claim that “this may be evidence of extraterrestrial civilization” has indeed so far always turned out to be some natural phenomenon. But the claim that “this may be evidence of extraterrestrial civilization” can also be a precursor to confirmation of such.
My prediction is that at some point in the possibly distant future, it will turn out that we were naive and arrogant about what we thought were our abilities to detect intelligent extraterrestrial life. It was all out there, we just didn’t have sufficiently sensitive instruments to see it, or just didn’t know what to look for. The JWST isn’t going to resolve this issue, but it might provide some tantalizing clues.
This thread restarted today after a fourteen month break.
'A lot of effort went into detection of advanced intelligent civilizations during those fourteen months. And once again, nothing really found. Whatever the kookyness of thinking we are alone in the Milky Way was fourteen months ago, it is less kooky now. And if a couple years from now no hints of alien radio broadcasts have been found, thinking us to be alone will then be even less kooky.
Ours is perhaps an unusual galaxy in terms of the rarity of intelligent life. There’s no way to know. But in the Milky Way, planets with astronomers, and astronauts, and discussion boards like this, are tremendously rare.
I’m thinking there is lots of extraordinary non-intelligent life elsewhere in the Milky Way.
Wow, this is very interesting. Thanks for posting.
It is speculative. But hopefully, we learn more about our galaxy, regardless of whether these are Dyson swarms or not.
Sure. I’m just suggesting an appropriate level of skepticism. There have been a lot of things that were touted as possible evidence of extraterrestrial life; the papers are usually tentative, as this one is, but the media and public get their hopes up disproportionately.
Let’s put it this way: if I could bet my life savings, double or nothing, that the result of this will be a slight tweak to our models of M dwarf stars, I would. That’s how confident I am that we will be able to explain this phenomenon within a few years, and it won’t be ETIs.
But as I say, it would be great if it were evidence of advanced alien tech.
And I disagree for the reasons given in this thread. There are things ETIs could have done that prehistoric humans would have noticed in the sky.
Now we’re at the stage of being able to see across billions of light years and still see no evidence of anyone blocking, emitting or refracting any wavelength of EM radiation on a large scale, just things that turned out to be false alarms.
There could be thousands of ETIs, sure, but we can say the repeated lack of evidence of such is reducing our confidence in such a hypothesis. There’s nothing “arrogant” or “naive” about that.
Not only that, but ‘prehistoric humans’ would have been members of the Great Galactic Civilisation already. That is the key question in the Fermi Paradox; not ‘if they exist, why can’t we see them’, but ‘if they exist, why aren’t they here?’. There are lots of possible answers to that question, and we don’t know which ones are correct.
But if at least one of these Dyson Sphere candidates actually is a megastructure created by an alien civilisation, that data may favour the answer ‘once a civilisation builds a Dyson Swarm, it doesn’t need to explore and exploit the galaxy any more’. Dyson Swarms are so big and potentially complex, they could hold a population equivalent to an entire galaxy with a billion populated planets. Why explore the galaxy, when you could do all that in one system?
Yes. It’s clear that interstellar travel is very slow, very difficult and very expensive; so it’s not hard to imagine that civilizations usually decide to just not do it. And while no doubt a few will anyway, if there’s only a sapient species in every dozen galaxies then none of those expanding cultures may well exist in our particular one.
With so little data it’s easy to come up with numerous explanations as to why aliens haven’t shown up.
I’m skeptical that these are actually Dyson Swarms. We’ll need to explore the question more. But if they are, and this means that advanced civilizations are hunkering down around their own stars, that’s good for us. If an advanced civilization is advanced enough to travel and arrives here, they’d likely be advanced enough to easily kill all of us. Also, it would give us a model that we could emulate in the future for our own purposes.
And I would say you would be absolutely right. SETI has depended upon RADIO searching for organized signals that would be indicative of intelligent life. Radio?! Seriously?! Any race that has achieved the high level of technology necessary for interstellar space travel would never use radio because it is so incredibly slow that it would be useless for communication. It would take years to send messages back and forth.
Let’s say I came up with the theory that there was intelligent life west of the Pacific Coast Ranges. To prove it, I send a team up to the highest location available and have them incessantly send up smoke signals in an effort to communicate with that intelligent life. After five years of never receiving any smoke signals back, I conclude that there is no intelligent life west of the Pacific Coast Ranges. To me, that’s SETI in a nutshell.
If Dyson Swarms are possible and there are civilizations advanced enough to build them, then they’re probably advanced enough to cloak them too. Why would they go to the trouble of cloaking them? Certainly not because they are scared of us, a measly Type 0 civilization. We pose as much threat to a Type 2 civilization as a hamster poses to a space shuttle. But perhaps, for ethical reasons, they don’t want to violate the Star Trek Prime Directive.
However, they might very well be worried about Type 2 and above civilizations posing a security risk or trying to siphon off their resources. Imagine advanced aliens trying to fuel up from your stellar gas station! They’d want to prevent their gas station from becoming the Milky Way’s free Slurpee machine for any alien passerby with an empty tank. While they’re out there playing galactic peek-a-boo, we’re down here trying to figure out how to get our cellphones to last through the day. It’s all about priorities.
Sure, cloaking a Dyson Swarm would require a lot of energy, but when you can harness the total energy output of your local star, you’ll have enough juice left over for a stellar game of hide-and-seek.
Well that and as I say anything large scale happening to EM radiation, whether it be emission, blocking or refraction we would see. And countless ways we could have passively seen evidence of ETIs already.
In terms of arrogance, I am not claiming anything, nor are most skeptics. We’re just being, well, skeptical. And accepting the data that we have.
In this analogy, we have a clear view across the pacific coast ranges and we see absolutely no evidence of anything non-natural. Not any smoke signals, nor any buildings or roads or cultivated land. We might be too primitive to understand what airplanes are, but we don’t see anything like that either.
And we don’t conclude that there’s no intelligent life, merely that the data is making us increasingly pessimistic.
As pointed out upthread, astroscientists generally disfavor psychological explanations for the Fermi paradox. This is because they require all individuals of all civilizations, for their entire history, to always come to the same conclusion. It only takes one small faction at one time to release uncloaked replicating drones.
Additionally, we’re only aware of one technological species at this time, and we’ve immediately tried to broadcast our location and made no effort to hide our ships. Of course we could be the outlier.
But we should have a bad feeling about a hypothesis that requires us to assert that all species everywhere are X, apart from the only one species that we have data on, which is not X.
How about ‘all species which survive for astrologically significant lengths of timeare not X’?
I don’t know if that’s true. But it strikes me as unnervingly possible.
Maybe it’s only ‘species which survive for astrologically significant lengths of time do so by learning not to be X’.
And just what is an astrologically significant length of time? I never paid attention to astrological/zodiacal timetables before, considering them mostly nonsense.
Humans are right on the cusp of being noisy on interstellar scales, or sending out replicating probes (mere centuries or even millenia are the blink of an eye in this).
Perhaps humans won’t survive the centuries / millenia to get there. I myself have doubts at this point.
But regardless, it will still remain the case that a species that was among the most warlike primate that this planet coughed up, that was so tribal they could handwave existential threats because their tribe told them to, came this close to fermi-level noisiness.
This doesn’t seem a good candidate for putting our fermi filter. If humans are anything to go by, I’d expect probably the majority of species that make it to the “agriculture and permanent settlements” stage to reach fermi noisiness. Let alone it being the primary filter.
It’s apparently what I type when I mean “astronomical” but am not paying enough attention.
Sorry!
Now that’s the sort of mistake I’d make these days. Thanks for the exhumation.
This argument holds up if we’re dealing with a very large number of candidates. Statistically, some civilizations would likely deviate from the norm and choose not to hide their Dyson Swarms. However, the argument loses strength if we consider smaller numbers. It would be expected for a few Type 2 civilizations to adhere to the sensible strategy of cloaking their Dyson Swarms to protect such a valuable resource from potential threats.
So, how many Type 2 civilizations are we dealing with?
Current telescopes are not capable of resolving a Dyson Swarm in another galaxy, so we can only survey the Milky Way for Type 2 civilizations. The Milky Way contains between 100 and 400 billion stars. This is a large number, fer sure.
But is it large enough in the context of the odds of a Type 2 civilization developing? Not likely. It’s reasonable to assume that Type 2 civilizations are exceedingly rare, potentially emerging as a one-in-a-hundred-billion occurrence. If only a handful exist within our galaxy, it’s reasonable to infer that all such civilizations would prioritize security measures, such as concealing their energy-harvesting structures from the broader cosmic community (Type 1+ civs). This would prevent inadvertently broadcasting their presence and the location of their energy resources, aligning with a prudent security protocol.
And, I wasn’t posing this as a Fermi Paradox solution (we see no evidence of Type 0 or 1 civilizations either), just a possible explanation for why we see no Dyson Swarms. Either there are none in our visible galaxy, or they are hidden.
Yep and this is the critical thing. To be honest, although I read “Dyson swarm” I parsed it as replicating drones and went into my normal schtick.
That is to say, I don’t think that cloaking is a good Fermi solution, but as you say, that’s not what you were going for on this point.
Regarding Dyson swarms, I would tend to agree with you; a species advanced enough to make Dyson swarms is very much in “all bets are off” territory; I would not feel confident making any claims of what, if anything, would be detectable to us, even if they are not bothering to cloak them. No harm in looking though, of course.
I think that if we are assuming that life is an emergent property of certain chemical and physical circumstances, then the number of potential planets is such that life elsewhere is a virtual certainty, unless the likelihood of those conditions being just-so is literally one in however many planets there are, i.e. we’re it. And that’s assuming we’re talking about our specific form of carbon-based life.
I personally think it’s pretty unlikely. There’s nothing I’m aware of that would be particularly unique about our planet that would indicate that we’re that level of universe-level fluke- there are more than likely billions of planets with very similar geological makeup, orbiting similar suns in similar orbits, etc…
So it’s not kooky to believe in it, but I wouldn’t say it’s kooky to NOT believe in it either. People don’t really understand the magnitude of geological time, and that’s in the low billions at most, and mere millions and tens of millions of years on the short end. Talking about trillions and billions of trillions is just unfathomable to a lot of people, and as a result, they don’t get it.
And if we’re really considering that we might be a one in however many millions of trillions of planets that actually has life, that starts edging awfully close to religion, IMO. The questions start centering around why here, why now, why are we alone, etc… +