Fermis Paradox,putting it mildly was and is a feed of shit.
He was postulating from the position that any alien intelligence was going to share all of the characteristics that coincidentally shared those of 1950s United States of America.
I wonder why?
He might as well have said that any alien intelligence would wear a quiff,love Rock and Roll and hate commies.
The old chestnut that we could watch,or aliens could watch our T.V. broadcasts from so many light years out is a myth,after a distance the signals scatter and are indistinguishinle from “Noise”.
>I suspect that the inhibiting step is multi-celled life and stable planetary systems. If we ever get out there we will probably only find wonky planetary systems and bacteria.
I doubt we’ll ever get out there. Its pretty obvious all the tools evolution has given us only help us in the short-term, thus we all suffer from short-term thinking. I think its most likely that advanced societies just burn out too quickly. I dont assume humanity will be around for another 100k years or anything. Most likely we’ll burn out before we can do Star Trek-level things.
The television and data transmission system used on Apollo bears about as much resemblance your standard t.v. broadcast and reception system as a Bygatti Veyron does to a Ford Model T. Significant effort went into development of the system, called the Apollo Unified S-Band System (AUSBS), which is incompatible with NTSC format signals, in order to maximize data throughput for bandwidth. The previous Mercury and Gemini space programs used C-band transmitters (as did the early unmanned Apollo C-D-E class missions) but for transmission at lunar distance a new system had to be devised, especially due to the strong desire for color video capability. Using the higher frequency signals allowed for a more tightly focused beam, and therefore lower energy requirements and higher throughput per available bandwidth.The AUSBS system is described in NASA TM X-55492 (warning: PDF). On the ground side this included 30 and 85 foot diameter Cassegrain feed parabolic antennas with gains of 43 dB and 52 dB, and beam widths of 1.0° and 0.35°, respectively. The larger, tighter beam antenna was required for video reception, although the 35’ dishes could be used for telemetry and emergency voice reception at Lunar distance. On the spacecraft side two sets of antenna were used; one is an omnidirectional antenna used for Near Earth operations out to Lunar injection, and a high gain (28dB max gain) directional antenna. Here is an article that describes in depth the television systems used during the Apollo program. Systems used for deep space probes are even more restrictive in terms of bandwith in order to maximize the effectiveness of low power transmitters on those probes, which is why we get patchy, grainy imagery.
In comparison, about the maximum straight-line distance that one could receive standard NTSC television signal from a full power (effective radiated power of 100kW) television station using a high gain omnidirectional antenna is about 150 miles, which isn’t even sustainable low Earth orbit. You could increase this distance by using a larger focused receiver, but there is still a limit on how far you can effectively receive broadcast signals; certainly not at interstellar distances (where the signal would be lost in the background) and it would be very difficult at even interplanetary distances.
Here is a discussion from the Bad Astronomy forums on the differences between television broadcast transmission and the systems used for the Apollo spacecraft. Start with Post #5.
But we’re on the brink of getting cheap and effective genetic re-wiring techniques. So what happens a generation or ten down the road, when you can build the tools of your choice into a kid?
Earth without fossil fuels-- how do you get to a high level of technology from woodburning (assuming there’s even wood)?
Earth without rare metals-- how do you manufacture advance technologies without rare and exotic metals?
Earth with nothing but water-- how do you make technology without fire?
I happen to hold the opinion that life is commonplace; I can’t imagine we’re all that special. And it may be the case that life evolved more quickly on other worlds-- Earth took its sweet, sweet time with single-celled organisms, nobody knows why it took so damn long for more complex life to arise.
Also, intelligence is relative. It’s obviously the most useful evolutionary adaptation, but as many have said, it could be self-defeating (we are our only enemies at this point). Even so, it’s not a necessary or inevitable adaptation; dinosaurs got along just fine without it for hundreds of millions of years, and the roaches are still around without it.
The real limitation that is the speed of light. Considering we have nothing that suggests that we can actually get over this limitation, only wild-eyed conjecture, perhaps a lot of civilizations look at the cost of expansion (mining planet for fuel, monetary cost, life risk, opportunity cost, etc) and dont believe its worth it.
Not to mention the genetic imperative to explore and reproduce could be easily removed and no one would think twice about it. I could see a more “barbaric” people trying for some kind of space empire while the more enlightened people find ways of improving home or are just happy with their own solar system.
I heard an interesting argument a while ago about why we should hope that there is no other intelligent life out there. Starting from the Fermi paradox, the speaker argued that there’s at least one great bottleneck between abiogenesis and galaxy-spanning empires. If we were to take a magical census and find out that the universe is teeming with intelligent life sort of like ours, that would suggest that the great bottleneck still lies ahead of us, in which case we’re almost certainly doomed. But if we were to look around and find, say, nothing more complicated than bacteria, then we could conclude that we had already managed to pass through that bottleneck, and therefore our future is unconstrained. Interesting idea.
But he isn’t wrong. Though it’s given the tarted-up name of “Fermi’s Paradox” there’s nothing really paradoxical about it (as there is with, say, Grelling’s Paradox). Rather, it merely presents an anomaly: the size of the universe suggests that there should be many life-hosting planets, but we have no evidence for any but our own. Such an observation requiring an accounting, to be sure, and many different accounts for the anomaly have been presented, and to the extent we can, we ought to test these accounts.
But to treat Fermi’s “Paradox” as some sort of law of science and to say things like:
grossly misapprehends the epistemological nature of Fermi’s thesis. It identified an anomaly; it does not allow us to deduce anything further about the world. In Kantian terms, it has no synthetic power, it is merely the end result of an analytic train of reasoning.
This is what I was getting at upthread: a lot of these questions yield idle speculations which sound plausible, sure, and might even sound sciencey. But that’s all it does: sound fucking great–it isn’t really science at all.
The point that I intended to convey was that while Fermi was a great Physicist his paradox was a triumph of anthromorphism.
He assumed that potential alien civilisations would have cultures following a very similar course to human civilisation and basically think and act in the same way because biologically though alien they’d be transplanted animals like those here on Earth.
Leastways thats the only way that I can explain his blinkered so called “Paradox”.
Alien means just that.not ourselves away on holiday.
A physics genius is not necessarily someone who has a great ability to think "outside of the box"in other disciplines.
I don’t know; really all that he was assuming about the aliens was that they be capable of using technology, and that they have a drive towards expansion. The ability to use technology is already one of the terms in the Drake equation, and even with the lowest estimates you still generally get multiple tool-using species in the Galaxy. And the drive towards expansion is a common trait of life in general: Nothing’s going to evolve to the point of tool-using without having at least some expansionist drive, or they’ll be overrun by other species on their planet.
IMO the biggest error in the Fermi Paradox is the timing issue. It assumes that they just happend to visit “right now”, which is highly improbably, or hang around (what for?) or leave some big ass monolith that as proof of their visit.
The galaxy could be teaming with many interstellar intelligent species and it would be rare, or at least uncommon, day that they would happen to be in the same star system at the same time. Or in our case, just happen to drop by in the past few thousand years to now.
that is an assumption suitable for 1950’s America, (or in general, most Western cultures of the 20th century.) It was logical then, but not now.
We now know , not as an assumption, but as a proven fact, that tool-using cultures cease expansion as soon as they leave the 1950’s and reach a 1990’s lifestyle. Virtually every western nation now has negative growth…(i.e not enough babies born to replace the elderly).
So a scientist who wants to ,well, do science (based on observable facts) instead of pure speculation, must conclude that an advanced alien civilization will NOT need to expand and colonize the whole galaxy. That takes an enormous amount of work—why bother, when you could live on a world with a perfectly balanced ecology that provides everything you need, and you don’t even have enough babies to maintain your population on your home planet ?
or as Lust4Life said it:
That’s not true. We know that population growth stops; we don’t know if it starts again, because nobody has reached stage six of the population growth model.
It’s reasonable to believe that it won’t, given that we now have the technology to reliably limit our reproduction, but it’s not reasonable to assume it won’t, since any number of things could kick our fuckin’ or at least birthin’ levels up a notch - negative economic consequences of lowered birthrates inducing governments to offer incentives to reproduce, for example, or a series of epidemics, or colonization of space, or something.
Expansion, not population growth. Sure, the net population is stabilized or shrinking in the developed world, but if you built a generation starship to colonize another planet, do you really think you’d have any difficulty at all getting enough volunteers to fill it to capacity? And then, once those colonists (or rather, their descendants) reached a new, empty world, do you really think they’d have trouble filling it?