I think it’s a bit backwards to see the Fermi paradox as making a positive claim. That’s not a criticism of you; this is absolutely the most common interpretation of what the paradox means.
The problem is, if we say the Fermi paradox is asserting that there should be life, based on various assumptions, then we can just question those assumptions, as you have, and we’re done. Paradox solved.
But what have we solved? What greater understanding have we arrived at?
I think it’s better phrased as:
Based on our scientific understanding today, the number of ETIs that we should be able to trivially see when we look at the night sky could be as high as a billion in our galaxy alone. Nothing in our current understanding makes that impossible. Yet currently, we see zero. We don’t know why that is. It could be that there are billions of “slime worlds” but multicellular life is incredibly rare. Or maybe there’s a whole galactic empire but it never builds anything that influences EM radiation in a way that we could detect. So it’s a whole set, a vast set, of open questions. That’s a better framing IMO.
Again, it’s interesting that people generally prefer psychological explanations to the paradox – they don’t want to do X.
Most SETI researchers don’t find this very convincing as a great filter though. Because such explanations need all factions of all civilizations of all species to always come to the same conclusion. Yet the only sentient species that we know of would already constitute a counter-example – humans have varied factions with varied motivations, and we’ve already attempted to announce ourselves to other species.
Sure there is. “Paradox” in the scientific setting is a pretty soft term. It doesn’t mean that there’s a logical contradiction. There are countless “paradoxes” in physics, some relate to something seemingly difficult to reconcile with known physics, others are just pointing out an arbitrary thing. Fermi paradox is not unusual in this context.
But of course, we can throw it out. There’s no reason to frame this all in the context of the paradox, we can just talk about the possibility of ETIs in general (as the OP does).
I’m just saying, it’s not that useful to say, essentially, “who says we should see aliens?”. I don’t know that we should see aliens, but I would also like to know why we don’t see any.
There is probably a natural cause to this. Which leads me to wonder: How far away can we detect a dyson sphere today? Might be our best tool to establish some additional boundaries. Perhaps rule out a galaxy teaming with L2 habitats in the kardashev scale.
Just resurrecting this zombie as there was a really interesting study which proposes that an advanced civilisation might want to live in what it calls a “red frame environment”: an area with heavy time dilation which would therefore allow it to explore outwards in a way that synchronises the rate of passing time. They could position objects in and out of different reference frames to exploit time dilation to build resources or advance their technology very quickly. And it gives them time to advance compared to anybody outside the red frame and especially compared to an attacking fleet of ships flying towards them through interstellar space. A very interesting study indeed.
Interesting article, thanks! Reading it seems the red shifted Civs would be living in slow-motion, and have less time to react to outside intelligence explosions, not more?
Admittedly i’m having a hard time wrapping my head around all the relativism.
What has become the compelling question for me is not the existence of intelligent life elsewhere. It is, “Once it gets intelligent enough to destroy itself and its environment, can it also become mature enough not to do it?”
Yeah, time dilation means things move much more slowly on the inside. I didn’t read the article but what would happen is the exact opposite of what the summary implies.
ETA and now I’ve skimmed the article, and you are misinterpreting it. It says that since interstellar probes are very, very slow, you could make yourself very, very slow too, so that the probes are faster for you. It is watching the universe on fast-forward. (Seems to me that living close enough to a black hole to make relativistic effects meaningful would be…problematic.)
Precisely. A civilisation located in close orbit around the galactic supermassive black hole would experience time more slowly than us; for every decade we experience, they might only see a single year. I’m not sure why an advanced civilisation might want to do that, but if you want to travel into the deep future quickly, time dilation would do the trick.
Of course there would be no way back.
Difficult on a practical level, but there are some advantages. A supermassive black hole would be a good heat sink, for example.
Yes I didn’t quite get my head around it properly, although the implication I think is that the civilisation can do its science further out from their home worlds and bring that technology home - so that is how they might capitalise on the different reference frames locally. Of course that would still be slower than the rest of the outside universe.
Again, I may not have grasped it properly as these concepts are indeed complex.
Not really that complex. You send out a probe that needs 1,000 years to send back results. You duck into a black hole orbit with a 1,000:1 time dilation and you only have to wait one year. You want a megastructure that needs 50,000 years to build. Make a swarm of self-replicating, self-reparing construct-o-bots, go into a black hole with a 50,000:1 dilation and have your megastructure ready in 1 year. I think the chance that something like that is actually happening somewhere is vanishingly small, but the concept isn’t that hard, or that original.
I would say the act of searching, even in the most remote sense. I believe that natural selection sorts out the mutations as needed, which are supplied from a deeper source, namely, the amino acids left over from the breakdown of neurotransmitters. The developing sperm cells are influenced by the presence of amino acids that are unique to the creature experiencing them. Just theory on my part.
There’s a Fred Saberhagen “Berserker” short story involving a ship in orbit around a supermassive black hole, and the various interesting effects it has on the people and the killer robots involved. “Face Of The Deep,” I think it’s called.
In the David Brin short story Crystal Spheres, it turned out that multiple advanced civilizations were using black hole time dilation to reach the future where there’d be more advanced civilizations. None of them wanted to be the burned-out, jaded “ancient precursors”.
I see. To me it sounds like a defeat to have to resort to the equivalent of napping 99% of the time while my project finishes. Better to figure out a way to improve my building efficiency 50,000-fold instead.
The universe has a finite time of burning stars before all the candles go out, so wasting any of it hanging out with black holes seems like a waste of precious starlight I am not getting back.
Then again, cats nap like 16 hours a day so clearly the nap strategy can work!
I don’t want to re-read this whole long thread, so apologies if any of these points have been touched on before.
First, the insistence of some people that Earth and only Earth has intelligent life just reeks of human egotism and exceptionalism. It’s basically claiming that we are the Special Chosen Ones of the Universe. It’s not really about probability, but psychology; we want to be special and superior. We are biased to believe that we are the special center of the universe. And claims like that have a history of being wrong. It’s best to lean in the opposite direction to correct for our bias.
And second, given the sheer size of the universe there’s not really any contradiction between there being “massive amounts of intelligent life”, and us not seeing any. There could be hundreds of billions of civilizations out there that we don’t see, for one reason for another, without them being common. Or even an infinite number if the universe itself is infinite. A Star Trek style universe filled with intelligent civilizations every other star system is highly unlikely, but there could easily be a dozen in our galaxy alone without us ever seeing them.
Especially if interstellar expansion is rare. Sure it would only take one to fill the galaxy; but if there’s only a handful, there might well have not been one. It’s basically the opposite of the argument for intelligent races existing in the first place. There’s so many stars it just seems highly unlikely we are the only ones to evolve, but if there aren’t many in any particular galaxy then it’s quite possible that none have been interested and able to expand. Hundreds of billions of possibilities make a even tiny chance near certain to happen, but a dozen chances don’t.
Yes. But there’s all sorts of possible reasons why a culture that technically could might simply not want to; and if the number of technological civilizations in our galaxy is low enough it could easily be that all of them happen to fall on the “not interested” side of the line by simple chance.
This has probably been mentioned but I’d add the countless thousands of credible UFO sightings that don’t have mundane explanations and cases where people actually encountered beings from elsewhere.
