I would think that if we can go full immersive VR, we can also go the other way, and have full autonomous control over your body as well. While you are playing Donkey Kong, your body is going about its daily activities of maintaining hygiene and fitness. While you are pigging out on cake and icecream in the virtual world, your body is consuming nutritious paste.
At least you can take comfort in the fact that you won’t be alone for long, you will meet a new friend that seems very similar every time you turn the game console back on. Hell, if your wife decides to get a game in, then you can be reunited, and now it’s just tow strangers schtooping eachother in your bed.
Here’s the thing. There’s a big difference between “there are one billion choices and the odds of any one of those happening is a billion to one, but 100% certain that one of those will happen.” and “there’s a billion to one chance this one thing can happen, and it happened to me, and it’s explained by the fact that if it didn’t happen I wouldn’t be around to appreciate it.”
The principle that we’re probably average is pretty firm here. The odds that we’re the first, or only, are extremely small unless there’s intelligent design, either a god or a simulation.
Another answer to the ‘we are alone’ variant of the Fermi Paradox is the possibility that we find something better to do, instead of colonising the Universe. What that ‘something else’ is, I can’t guess, and I don’t need to, except for the fact it is undetectable by 21st century telescopes. Perhaps it involves dark matter somehow.
But whatever it is, it must be so attractive that every advanced alien civilisation unfailingly chooses it, no matter how different they are from humanity. And I would expect alien civilisations to come in a very wide range of types.
Probably just upload their minds into various simulations and don’t actually ever “go” anywhere or communicate with anyone. Probably wouldn’t even need their bodies anymore.
??? How does the notion that we’re simply the lucky ones, the “lottery winners” fall into the category of “if it didn’t happen I wouldn’t be around to appreciate it?” I see it falling much more into the “the odds are small but it certainly happens to someone.”
Sure, the odds that we’re merely in the first eight billion of a species that will grow to quadrillions are damn small. But, like the lottery, someone has to win it. Why not us? It doesn’t “explain” anything…but it doesn’t have to. There are people who win big jackpots at Las Vegas, too…
(Looking at climate change, I’m leaning toward the “suicide” theory…)
We may find evidence for that postulate soon enough.
Intelligent life if very rare, and we are the first.
We don’t know that we are alone, but we know that there are no galactic scale megaprojects going on. We know that there are no galactic empires.
You don’t need to make such postulates. You think that the chances of us being the first are small, what if intelligent life is much smaller.
If the chances of intelligent life are a septillion to one, then if you picked any random part of the universe, you would almost certainly not find intelligent life within the observable radius.
In the case of intelligent life being that rare, you would expect that the only place to find intelligent life is in the places where those who are able to look already are.
For the purposes of this discussion, I use intelligent life to mean spacefairing life. Are Whales or Dolphins intelligent? Maybe, but they aren’t ever going to space. If we lived on a planet with 5 times the gravity that we currently endure, we would not be going to space.
And not just every civiliazation, but the entirty of the civilization.
If 99.9999% of humanity says that they will never leave the planet, that still leaves hundreds who will.
I pick up a five dollar bill on the sidewalk. Cool.
I might reason: this tells me something about the population density of the area. It must be below a certain threshold value, or else someone else would have come along before I did and would have picked up the money.
This is not invalid. But it leaves out another possibility: no matter how high the population density, it just might have been the guy immediately ahead of me on the sidewalk who dropped the bill, and I’m the first one who could have picked it up. The population density is not relevant in this case.
I respect the argument from the first viewpoint. It is not invalid. But it cannot rule out the second viewpoint, and thus is not right. It may be valid, but it may also be incorrect.
Only because someone has to. If no one had to, if the odds were set at google/1, then it would actually be quite astonishing if someone won. I once asked, “If I’m only alive because my mom met my dad and one sperm and one egg combined, and any other combination wouldn’t produce me, then that would mean there was only a trillion to one chance that I’d ever be alive” and argued that makes no sense. The response was, “Well if you hadn’t won that lottery you wouldn’t be around to comment on it.” Which is true, but still leaves me having to believe that I benefitted from such an infinitesmal thing happening. What is more likely is that my existence was an inevitability, either because:
a) there are infinite universes and I’m going to exist in one of them
b) I was intentionally created by another intelligence
c) although my actual form coming out the way it did was a trillion to one bet, my consciousness was definitely going to exist in some form no matter what
d) some other possibility that doesn’t require me to roll ten million straight 6s.
I think suicide theory has a lot of merit, but it won’t be from a collective action like climate change. Climate change isn’t projected to destroy us, just kill a lot of us and make life harder. What will actually kill us, and we’re seeing the early signs of it right now, is the ability of an individual to do great damage all by himself. Today, nuclear weapons are something only nations possess. Tomorrow, individuals may possess planet destroying power, and it only takes one having a bad day to use it. Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot worried about the ability to alter the course of asteroids, something we are working on for our self preservation, but could very easily be used for destruction.
I’ve had big work projects, and the baby is both teething and has infections in both ears, so… not a lot of sleep lately. I haven’t had time to read this stuff with care. I’ll bump it later if I do.
Australian scientists think that the material available for the formation of new planets is different from the one that was available when Earth appeared. With fewer Earth-like planets, the chances for new extraterrestrial life will decrease. (source)
I’ve been looking at this possibility. The changes in composition for Earth-like planets are just one consideration; also important is the bolometric temperature, mass, rotation rate, distance from the local star, flaring, ultra violet and infra-red flux, tidal warming and many other effects.
Some planets which are habitable might become non-habitable because of changes in composition, while others might become habitable which were not so before.
Even if there were a million planets with intelligent life in your galaxy, is it possible that they would be so far apart that they are undetectable to each other?
Longer answer: It’s possible that intelligent life is spread throughout the galaxy, despite the lack of evidence, but it would require one of two things to be true:
An extremely improbable set of events. For instance, if all the intelligent life is at or below the level of development of Earth, or only emerged within the last few thousand years, we wouldn’t be able to detect them yet. But this requires us to be in a special position of being roughly tied for most advanced species in the galaxy among millions, and this particular stretch in time to be special versus the billions of years in which civilizations could have reached (then exceeded) human level.
If we’re merely average, and there are more advanced species, then they would probably have had time and opportunity to fill the galaxy with bric-a-brac by now.
Something we just don’t know yet. e.g. maybe there’s a hyper advanced species that prefers emerging species to believe they are starting from a blank slate, so hides all evidence of other species in our vanilla spacetime. As soon as we discover hyperspace we get to join the party. Or maybe the truth is something we can’t even conceive of yet. Obviously we can’t rule such speculation out.
Bear in mind, while the distances between stars is a ridiculous, frighteningly huge value, it’s at least a known quantity. We can do the sums and find that, in fact, there has been time for a species to spread around, even if life can only start around population I stars.
One fairly plausible and optimistic version of option 2 in your list is the possibility of an ‘Interstellar Internet’; all the intelligent alien species in the galaxy are in contact with each other, maybe using something as simple as encrypted broadcasts. No alien species ever travels between star systems (too much effort) but they all share data and technology over the airwaves, allowing the emergence of a complex and advanced shared civilisation without the need for gigantic rockets,
This could be part of the answer, but is unlikely to be the answer in itself.
Because, for a species not much more advanced than us, sending self-replicating probes around the galaxy would likely be child’s play. It’s not that you need a whole civilization to be focused on sending out probes the old-fashioned way; you just need one small group, or even individual within a society to decide to do so.
So, while we can speculate that aliens will have better ways of exploring the galaxy and communicating than we can currently envision (and I would be happy to bet money that that is likely to be the case), it still wouldn’t answer why we don’t see old-fashioned solar sails and the like whipping round.
That’s why I included the ultra-advanced species manually keeping the skies clear. Without that, we’d otherwise expect to see something.
I think that while many people have an idea of the distances involved—at least, in so far as to characterize them as ‘beyond unimaginably huge’—it’s often not clear that the vast timescales over which events unfold more than make up for it. The size (diameter) of our galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years; so, anybody with a head start of a billion years, which doesn’t seem unreasonable, would’ve needed an average velocity of about 30km/s to span the whole distance.
That’s fast, of course, but not unreasonably so—in fact, we’re all moving at roughly that speed, as it’s about the orbital velocity of the Earth around the sun. And we’re already quite capable of achieving this speed, as it’s about half the velocity of the Helios-B probe (the fastest human-made object to date).
And civilizations like ours could easily have been around a billion years ago. In fact, rocky planets with enough carbon on them were probably around as early as 1-1.5 billion years after the big bang; so if life there developed at the same pace as here, you’d get an estimate of 5-6 billion years for when the first civilization conceivably could’ve arisen—meaning around 7 billion years ago. (That’s not to say that it’s likely for life to have been around, back then—that, we simply don’t know; but given what we do know, it should’ve been at least possible.)
Having said that, the above uses a figure of roughly four billion years for life to arise. That may not be accurate—if you take a measure of the genetic complexity of organisms, and extrapolate its increase backwards, you arrive at zero roughly ten billion years ago—which would imply that life may have originated much earlier, and not here on Earth, but must’ve arrived here e. g. via panspermia. This leaves a much smaller margin, of just around a billion years ago or so, that complex life like ours might have first sprung up.