Sure, we’re the most any trait of all technological species that we know of.
It’s not normally a bullet most are willing to bite though. That other intelligent species may have appeared around the galaxy but all have been considerably more warlike and tribal than Homo sapiens.
Even though compared to most other primates, indeed most other social species, on this planet, we appear to be on the violent end of the spectrum.
Why do you feel you must keep telling me the point I’m trying to make? This thread isn’t just about our technological potential.
Not true, of course. I have my opinions as to why we don’t see the galaxy flooded with aliens and I’ll make that point as I wish.
I get it, we disagree. You feel our civilization will last millions of years and take over the galaxy with SR probes and colonizers. I don’t agree for several reasons. I’m happy to agree to disagree.
However if your galactic view is correct, I suspect that we would see evidence of that by now.
Not directed at you personally, but I feel the main reason people believe there is a (Fermi’s) paradox is because they choose to ignore the practicalities and the obvious.
For instance, I’ve listened to probably a hundred podcasts on the FP and so far I’ve only found one that debunked the idea of Dyson Spheres, it’s this one. Dyson Spheres are wildly impractical. And equally improbable. But everyone just accepts them as a given. It’s bullshit. No one wants to do the actual math. I don’t think humans will ever have the technical capability to build one. But I also don’t think we will ever need one. I believe tech will go a different direction. Our energy needs will probably change.
Same thing for self-replicating probes. No one will do the math. I don’t think it’s feasible. I also don’t think as a society we will ever devote the resources to it. There just won’t be the drive in the future to colonize the galaxy - not as a society (as there isn’t now - it’s really just us nerds). When was the last time you heard of a senator, congressman or president talking seriously about galactic colonization?
Also, there are several very smart scientist that make an excellent case for us being alone (see my link upthread) (or very nearly). But hardly anyone talks about because it’s not fun. I point to this thread as proof - I posted that link and no one has commented on it.
No one knows for sure, but in my mind, there is no paradox.
3rd body problem on Netflix addresses the travel time lag issue, to transport a being takes so long (at least in the way we think of it) that there may be others aware of us and may be in transit, but the amount of time involved to cover the distance is so vast. On the other hand I hear about 2 different “bodies” recently moving through/past us that were inconsistent with previous objects traveling in space. The first was different , but it was the 2nd one that appeared to change course and detour around us that struck me. More advanced species may not wish to interact with us. I think we are an experiment that was forgotten or ignored, the results of which are yet determined. Sorry if my response is stupidly simple , I haven’t given this topic much consideration.
Well, you are largely correct, and it is true that we haven’t seen one. But the idea that they are ‘wildly impractical’ needs some qualification. Are we talking about a solid shell, or a swarm of independently orbiting solar collectors? In some respects we have already started to construct one. There are thousands of solar collectors in orbit around the Earth already, and dozens of solar collectors in other locations dotted around the solar system (admittedly, most of these are defunct).
Unless our civilisation collapses, or abandons the idea of space travel altogether, the swarm of solar power collectors around the Sun will gradually increase over time, until at some point in the future they will become a Dyson Swarm with a significant density; eventually this swarm may become dense and ubiquitous enough to be detectable from other nearby stars. That is what Dyson expected to happen over time, and earlier writers such as Olaf Stapledon who described this sort of tech never envisaged a solid sphere.
It is a matter of definition - at what point does a swarm of collectors around a star become a Dyson Swarm? At what point does a pile of sand become a heap?
Even a Dyson swarm requires a lot of material mass. Some estimates put the amount of matter required to build a complete Dyson swarm around a star is potentially on the order of 1020 to 1024 kg, which is a significant portion of the mass of smaller inner planets or even half of Mercury. The total mass depends heavily on the specific design, such as the orbit radius, the thickness of the collectors, and the materials used.
Freeman Dyson originally suggested disassembling planets like Jupiter to build his swarm. In his 1960 paper, he proposed that a civilization would need to dismantle a planet the size of Jupiter to have enough raw material for a Dyson swarm. He conveniently didn’t explain how that could happen.
There are currently no solar panels in orbit around the earth that beam power back to earth. The International Space Station, for example, is a prime example of a solar-powered system in orbit, but its energy is used locally. It uses massive solar arrays to power its operations on-site, not to send energy to Earth.
One of the big issues with collecting solar power and beaming it back to earth is loss in the transmission. Significant power is lost in the process of collecting solar energy in orbit and beaming it to Earth, with current estimates suggesting 85% to 90% in total loss. This is from earth orbit. I assume sending it in from, say, Mercury’s orbit there is going to bigger loss.
To get off into the weeds a bit, Energy loss in space-based solar power transmission is significant, with total system efficiency potentially ranging from 10% to 50%. The largest losses occur during the initial conversion of sunlight to electricity in the solar panels (around 80-85% loss), followed by the conversion of electricity to microwaves and back, and potential losses from beam dispersion and atmospheric interference. The overall goal is to make the total losses less than 85-90% to be economically viable.
And finally, I suspect if we could ever develop the technology to do all of that, we could figure out how to better use the energy we already have. So I will stand by my ‘wildly impractical’.
Zigzactly. A Dyson swarm consisting only of statites (floating on the light-pressure from the Sun) would be made from a single large asteroid. One small problem with this concept is that the energy collected would quickly boil the statite swarm into vapour, so there’s that.
This is not a good application for a Dyson Swarm; if you collected all the energy from the Sun and focused it onto the Earth, you would boil the Earth away in 22 days.
Indeed, a Dyson Swarm collects so much energy that it is difficult to imagine ways to utilise all that energy. That’s why a realistic Swarm would be much smaller in collection area, in order to reduce the overheating problem.
Three possible applications for a Dyson swarm are:
…a Matrioshka Brain, a huge intelligent computer containing a single hyperadvanced intelligence, or quadrillions of simulated human-level intelligences. These hypothetical objects would have problems with the disposal of waste heat, and would be relatively easy to spot in infrared surveys.
…a starlight collimator - we could collect and focus the light, then send it out to all the innumerable cold objects in the Solar System, from Mars to Pluto and all the icy comets, Kuiper Belt objects and Oort cloud objects (which probably number in their billions). This would allow the distant parts of our own system to support trillions of real (rather than simulated) humans.
…a weapon - if we have the ability to collimate the Sun’s rays and warm the Oort cloud, we could instead collimate the same energy and use it to attack nearby stars. This concept, the Nicoll-Dyson laser, is sufficiently dangerous that the beams would be deadly hundreds of light years away (or more).
Maybe the idea of a N-D laser is so threatening that they have been declared illegal by the Galactic Council, and anyone who tries to build one is discouraged from doing so in the strongest possible terms.
This is a misunderstanding of how swarms work. Dyson wasn’t proposing putting a magnifying glass in space.
Another reason we don’t see them, maybe?
I understand very well how Dyson Spheres work, thank you; my statement stands. The energy collected by a Dyson sphere, if you beamed it all back to Earth, would be sufficient to vapourise and lift the entire mass of the Earth out of its own gravity well in 22 days, assuming perfect efficiency. This is the reason why Dyson never suggested that the energy collected would be all utilised on the surface of our planet.
Instead it would be utilised to power billions of space habitats in independent, non-intercepting orbits, which could house quadrillions of humans; and/or beamed all round the Solar System, to heat habitats in cold locations, and/or to power vast computational substrates running programs that we can barely imagine, and/or to propel innumerable interstellar spacecraft to nearby stars, where the process could start over again.
One of the demands on the power collected by a Dyson Swarm would be planetary disassembly - to create a dense swarm of habitats or orbiting computing substrates, you would need to disassemble the planets and asteroids in the inner system - first Mercury, then Venus; eventually Mars and Earth would go too, although Earth might be kept for sentimental reasons as a nature reserve.
This is probably right. If a newly-emerged alien civilisation started to build a Dyson Swarm, all its neighbours (assuming there are any) would probably complain. The threat of a Nicoll-Dyson laser is significant, and some cultures might object strongly to this Sword of Damocles hanging permanently in the sky.
The most important role of all. Gaining new knowledge, and the satisfaction that comes with that. Machines will (presumably) never experience that, especially if we’re building something focused solely on meeting its designed purpose of self replication. But even if it was sapient, how does that benefit us? It would be that machine doing the learning, not us. The whole purpose of traveling to other stars is to satisfy our curiosity and increase our knowledge of the universe. Without the flesh and blood humans to make the trip, what would be the point?
I hope you are right. I like to think that there is a way to ensure that smart machines can act in a competent way without developing desires and goals of their own. Many creatures in the animal kingdom are driven largely by instinct, and act in ways that preserve their existence and achieve their objectives without any significant signs of consciousness; swarms of ants or bees for instance are very good at what they do.
If humans can create smart machines that have ant-like competence without being conscious and self-serving, we might be able to avoid a robot revolution that would make our presence in outer space entirely redundant. But it could be a tricky needle to thread.
I apologise to @Lucas_Jackson for being snotty about a fictional piece of technology that probably will never get built by any alien civilisation anywhere. They are just a bit of an obsession of mine, as you might notice from my avatar. That’s an image I made about fifteen years ago, and has been used over and over again by pop-sci writers in articles about the subject. Which is fine by me.
Sure, but you were engaging with me on that point, and then when I’ve tried to emphasize the deep time available, there’s – what I would consider to be – a deflection, to a point about humans likely wiping themselves out within the next few centuries.
Let me put it this way: there’s whether the tech is feasible in deep time, then there’s whether a species can persist long enough to make it. I am still not clear on your position on the former.
Nope, I’ve never said this, and don’t believe that.
My position is that humans are pretty close to making SRPs; almost certainly within a few centuries, with a millenium being an extremely pessimistic estimate. And we’re violent as hell. So even if we blow ourselves up tomorrow, the fact of the matter is we came incredibly close to SRPs despite being far from a peaceful species.
So, in the context of the Fermi paradox, I find neither “They won’t be able to make SRPs” nor “They will wipe themselves out before making them” plausible solutions
My position is that the most likely scenario is that we are alone. I hope not, but that’s the way the data is leading.
A couple of things on that:
- As the excellent astronomy channel Fraser Cain / Universe Today points out, any solar panel could arguably be considered the start of our Dyson swarm. Certainly the panels on satellites. So no, I don’t find a swarm as implausible as you do: we’ve already started.
- It’s worth bearing in mind that the concept of a Dyson swarm does not entail that that’s the only megastructure that an advanced ETI might make. For all we know, there are a billion kinds of useful megastructures, most of which would be completely mysterious to us. But we see nothing.
In this context the Dyson swarm is useful because it is one example of a megastructure that we already know would have a use. The set of potentially useful megastructures is already not empty.
“Paradox” in science often doesn’t mean the same thing as in formal logic. It often relates to just a significant set of unknowns or suprising observation. I gave a list of other phenomena misleadingly labelled as “paradoxes” upthread. Anyway, the Fermi paradox absolutely qualifies under this usage.
Cite, please.
The Fermi Paradox is predicated on several assumptions.
~ That life is common in the universe
~ That life will evolve into technological societies
~ That they will have self-replicating probes
~ So therefore colonizing the galaxy is easy and fast
If the above is true, where is everybody? (FP= We should be able to see them by now, but we don’t)
It’s only a paradox if the given assumptions are true. If they are not true there is no paradox.
It has nothing to do with other misleadingly labelled phenomena.
If, for example, we are alone, there is no paradox.
This is probably a minor misapprehension. Fermi was apparently asking why they aren’t here already; if advanced civilisations developed millions, or billions, of years ago, we shouldn’t just be seeing them in our telescopes, but they should be here on Earth. He made some back-of-the-envelope calculations and realised they should have arrived long ago.
The aliens would have got here millions of years in the past, and be already living here on this planet - if humans existed at all in such a civilised galaxy, they would know all about the galactic civilisation because they’d learn its long and complex history in our schools.
This is correct; the challenge posed by the Fermi Paradox is to find which of these assumptions are not true. This is not a straightforward question at all. For instance, if the assumption that ‘That they will have self-replicating probes’ is incorrect, that might be the answer; but it is significant that Fermi’s “back-of-the-envelope calculations” did not include SRPs. The SRP concept didn’t enter the equation until Tipler and Hart re-examined the paradox in the 1970s.
Which of the assumptions (if any) are incorrect is still uncertain, and will probably remain so for the forseeable future.
My understanding is that the Fermi Paradox really only involves the first two assumptions, which I believe are true. The last two arise not from the Fermi Paradox but from the Hart-Tipler conjecture, I think first publicized by Michael Hart and Frank Tipler circa 1975-1980.
This highly speculative and (IMHO) dubious conjecture was taken by many as evidence that the absence of Von Neumann probes throughout the galaxy shows that there’s no technologically advanced intelligent life out there. I’m extremely skeptical of any conjecture that says, “if there were advanced intelligent aliens out there, this is what they would do”.
Actually Fermi’s initial question arose from a lunchtime conversation with fellow colleagues Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York. Konopinski shared a recent cartoon depicting aliens.
The cartoon that inspired the conversation was a 1950 illustration in The New Yorker by artist Alan Dunn It offered a tongue-in-cheek explanation for two contemporary mysteries: the increase in UFO sightings and a wave of missing public trash cans in New York City.
Though each participant later remembered the event a bit differently. Emil Konopinski recalled the famous Fermi question as, “But where is everybody?”. That was in 1950. It was basically forgotten for 13 years until it was brought up again, in print, by Carl Sagan in 1963. Sagan was the first person to refer to it as the “Fermi Paradox”. He offered several opinions as to why we don’t see aliens. And, of course, as you point out later by the Hart-Tipler conjecture.
So in my mind, the FP involves any reasons one wants to put forth that reinforces the concept of a paradox.
I agree with you. But it is the Von Neumann probes concept that many cling to when explaining the paradox.
Again, I will restate that without knowing the odds of life arising, we have no way of calculating the odds of other life in the universe. People talk about how fast life arose after the conditions were right here on earth but that’s weighed against a vast timeline. Actually the conditions for life on Earth existed for about 600 million years before the oldest known fossils appeared. 600 million, life didn’t exactly rush into existence, IMHO.
And, as I indicated earlier, you absolutely cannot take ANY Terran facts, including timelines of this sort, and extrapolate them to other hypothetical planets and societies. If it instead took 3 billion years for life to develop, we wouldn’t be here at this point in time to pontificate about it.