The problem with this explanation is that you are explaining “typical” aliens.
However, you have to explain why there are no aliens that would follow the path that we seem to be on.
All it takes is one. Even in your hypothesized society where they are happy with replacement population, you are assuming that the entire population is happy with that. All it takes is one offshoot, one faction, that is not happy with the concept of replacement population, and off they go.
In order for a species to become the dominate species, it has to be aggressively expansionistic.
The resources of the solar system are immense, but they are not infinite.
In your first contact scenario, are we contacting them, or they contacting us? If the latter, then the question becomes, why has it taken so long? If it is the former, then we are the ones with the superior technology that will blow their arthropod minds to oblivion.
The universe only seems old because compared to human lifetimes or anything we can imagine, it is. However, it is not old in the sense of where it is in its life. It’s got another couple hundred billion years before things really change all that much, before stars stop forming, and even more hundreds of billions of years before those stars star burning out.
Compared to the ultimate age of stars alone, the universe is barely out of its infancy. Your “typical” intelligent life is more likely to come along around 100 billion years.
Well, sure, atypical aliens are hard to come by. Judging by the fact that we’ve found no aliens whatsoever, I’d say typical aliens are hard to come by, too.
There may be millions of aliens following a path we seem to be on , but maybe there’s only a dozen in our galaxy. Of that dozen, perhaps half are less advanced than we are and half are more advanced. Of the half dozen alien civilizations more advanced than us, maybe only half have achieved cost-effective interstellar travel or communication. Of the 3 alien civilizations that have achieved cost-effective interstellar travel or communication, pehaps 1 went extinct a million years ago, 1 is so far advanced, they realized Milky Way is a boring galaxy and decided to go “Intergalactic” eons ago. And the final 1 was just about to make first contact with us in March, 2020 and high-tailed it away because of the Covid-19 pandemic. IOW…we just don’t know. We may never know for sure.
Yes. And I would go much further than k9bfriender
In terms of the Fermi paradox, just littering up the galaxy with things like self-replicating probes would be sufficient.
And, given that such technology seems feasible even to us puny earthlings within mere centuries, it’s plausible that for a species, say, 100k years ahead, that a small group, or even individual, could launch such a project. It’s not a mega project, even if the potential ripple effects are huge.
This is why psychological solutions to the Fermi paradox are generally not favored among philosophers / scientists. If intelligent life is common, and by common we can say 1 for every 10 million stars, then that’s 10,000 intelligent species in our galaxy. So meaning trillions or quintillions of individuals evolving down 10,000 different evolutionary pathways. Plus whatever artificial lifeforms they may create. And they all have to fall on the anti-exploration side of the coin, for billions of years, for this to work as a primary filter.
Does it, though? The jury may still be out on that. DNA-based aggressive-style evolution may be a quirk. It’s unlikely any alien genetic code is DNA-based. Perhaps typical alien genetic evolution mandates, “survival through cooperation” as opposed to “kill or be killed/survival of the fittest.” Mutualistic or communalistic symbiosis may be the universal norm. Wouldn’t you rather live in a world where you co-habitat peacefully with others rather than eat them?
It’s difficult to envision alternate evolutionary pathways because virtually all life that we’re familiar with is DNA based and survival of the fittest rules. Maybe it’s a prerequisite for all alpha species in the universe, but maybe not. I’d like to live in a world of technologically advanced bunny rabbit people who don’t have to compete for food because there’s an overabundance of carrots on the planet.
Our biosphere’s DNA is nothing to brag about. It’s a dirty, messy affair filled with detritus and long antiquated crap (a good genetic code should delete the crap with every update…like Windows
All life on Earth is based on DNA/RNA. Alien life is surely based on something alien to us. You’ll probably have more in common with a blade of grass than with Mr. Alien. I wouldn’t expect him to speak English, shake hands, engage in furry sex or adhere to anything similar to human-like social norms.
I’m guessing any super-intelligent species we’re likely to bump into will have a more pristine, uncluttered genetic makeup than us. Mabe they were born that way, or maybe when intelligent species approach super-intelligence they snip all the bad stuff out of their genes. Heck, we’re barely at toddler level and are close to destroying our biosphere. I’m embarrassed to identify as human. I kind of wish cats evolved to be Earths apex species. I think they’re more deserving of the title. Mice may not agree.
All it takes is one, in relatively close proximity to us. That narrows the field considerably.
There may be countless rogues in other galaxies, but there is no way we will ever be aware of them. It’s doubtful we’d be aware of any advanced civilization expansion on the other side of our own galaxy.
Self-replicating probes are mentioned a lot. Do they exist? If they exist will they be noticed by us? Seems to me, if your going to launch self-replicating probes, you’ll cloak them.
Sure, but these are suppositions. Having to add on to the model tacitly concedes that this solution does not, in itself, work. AFAWK, a species a little more advanced than us should be able to make replicating probes and we have no reason to assume they would all be cloaked.
Indeed, the same retort can be used again: for the cloaking supposition to explain why we don’t see such probes, we need every individual of every civilization, including artificial life, to all decide, for billions of years, to only ever make cloaked probes.
That’s my thought too, that there are no intelligent aliens out there, at least within our cluster of galaxies.
A billion or two light years away, maybe. But I see the chances that they are not within a few million, vs just a few billion to be, well, low odds.
If there are others out there, I’d say probably hundreds of billions of light years away, or further. Where they would never be able to make contact with us.
Sure. Why not?
As soon as someone builds a self sustaining asteroid colony, they have the wherewithal and resources to embark on colonizing the entire galaxy.
And that’s where things break down. What are the chances that they are only a bit ahead of us? If they are out there, then there is no reason that they are not several million years ahead, and that’s all it takes to colonize the entire galaxy, even at a very leisurely pace.
I don’t think that there will ever be cost effective interstellar travel. However, you don’t need that for expansion. You just keep expanding.
Communication is a different matter, but it would likely be tight beamed between colonies, with little chance of being intercepted, much less recognized by us.
Why would they go to another boring place? I’m sure that they would go intergalactic once they had filled up this galaxy, but until then, they would just be growing and expanding.
This falls into the trap of thinking that it would just be small groups of beings yachting about in the galaxy, rather than a spread of civilization and colonization.
Maybe. But without competition, we’d just still be a swarming mass of microbial life flitting about the ocean. Which is what I suspect we will find all over the universe, under every rock that we turn over.
Why is this? That it is based exactly like ours, coding for the same proteins is unlikely. But that there is some sort of chemical instruction set for the growth of a life form seems pretty likely to me.
And if everyone just gets along and goes along, then they will not have any pressure to evolve.
All it would take would be one species to stop being cooperative, and start being competitive, and they take over.
I don’t either. But if they have developed any form of space travel, then I expect them to understand cause and effect, have some form of communication, understand math and science.
Yeah, we will probably end up doing that ourselves, if we make it that far.
Every species grows to fill all the niches it can fill. If cats were intelligent, they’d do the same thing. The question is if they realize it in time to prevent destruction of their biosphere.
Right, anywhere in the galaxy, or Andromeda or any of the other galaxies in our cluster.
Probably not, if they are a few billion light years or further away.
Except that in just a few million years, they will have expanded to fill the entire galaxy.
Sure, I’m living in one right now. Life is self replicating.
We have tools to build factories to build tools to build factories right now. There is a fair amount of labor currently involved in that supply chain, but automation is reducing that substantially, and may pretty much eliminate it.
If a factory can pop out an Iphone where there was never a human involved in the process, from mining to you opening the box, then you have all the technology you need to make fully self replicating factories. We aren’t far from that, and a bit of miniaturization and practice with using resources exploited from space, and Bob’s your uncle.
If they are gobbling up solar systems, building dyson spheres, and even removing material from the stars themselves, then yes, we would.
Why? That defeats the whole point. We are not talking about little probes to investigate and explore, we are talking flying strip miners, tearing apart rocks and planets for their resources.
And how? There is no stealth in space. There is no such thing as cloaking technology.
Basically, the Fermi Paradox asks the question as to where are the aliens? and the answers are pretty existential.
Either we are, for some reason, the first to make it to the point where we are taking our first steps into space, and envisioning going much further, or we are one of many who has gotten this far, and something will prevent us from fulfilling our vision.
It’s not science, technology, or physics. Those are all well understood and can be developed into what we need to colonize the galaxy ourselves. It’s a relatively straightforward path.
So, if we are not going to do that, then something is going to stop us, and that is most likely us somehow or other wiping ourselves out.
I’m optimistic, in that I would rather think that we are the first, than to think that we are simply the latest in a long line of species that gained intelligence, looked to the stars, and then killed themselves off.
The most terrifying thing that I could imagine, from a species survival standpoint, would be that we get really good at listening, and we start picking up radio broadcasts from a bunch of worlds across the galaxy, all in a relatively close technological development. And we look at these messages, watch as they develop space programs, and then go dark, for one reason or another.
Of all possible reasons for a negative Fermi result, I find this argument the least compelling (i.e. intelligent civilizations self destruct before they get advanced enough to colonize, or pepper the galaxy with self replicating probes). By the “it should only take one” reasoning, it should only take one super-advanced civilization not stupid enough to self-destruct for us to become aware of their existence. Unless, of course all the stupid super-intelligent civilizations live in our galaxy and the not-so-stupid super-intelligent civilizations lived long ago in a galaxy far, far away live on distant galaxies.
I am interested to know from people who subscribe to the self-destruction hypothesis, what is it exactly that causes them to self destruct and why can’t species much smarter than us figure out how not to allow it to happen? “Oops, looks like our Dyson sphere’s about to blow! Told you we shouldn’t have built it out of nitroglycerin."
My own feeling is that there are few to no super-intelligent species in our galaxy and the reason we’re not aware of the possible few is for one of the mundane reasons listed above.
I think we can all agree that the overwhelming majority of the universe is forever blacked out to us with regard to making contact, unless some super-duper-intelligent species billions of light years away figured out how to overcome the Big Bang accelerating expansion and developed propulsion, say, 10X the speed of light.
Maybe I’m a Debby Downer, but I don’t believe even local inter-galactic travel is probable. Inter galactic distances are 5 orders of magnitude greater than inter-stellar distances. We haven’t even mastered local inter-stellar travel. With no proof at hand, I think the concept of inter-galactic travel ought to remain the realm of science fiction.
So, for all practical purposes, that leaves us with the Milky Way. 250 billion ± 150 billion stars is indeed a large number (give me that number in dollars and I could live pretty high on the hog—maybe get me a house with a cement pond!)…but, it’s not that big a number—not when figuring the odds of evolving super-intelligent civilizations.
If I was a galactic bookie, I may set the following odds: simple life: 1:100 (star systems); multi-cellular life: 1:10,000; lifeforms with a brain: 1:100,000; lifeforms with conscious brains 1:1,000,000; self-aware lifeforms that use tools: 1:100,000,000; lifeforms with high-tech: 1:1,000,000,000; lifeforms with super-high-tech: 1-3:250,000,000± 150 billion.
This last one is a stretch. Humans only industrialized a couple centuries ago, and are right now contemplating an instellar mission (starshot).
It’s one thing to speculate about some of the things we don’t know; we have no other choice.
It’s another for us to also have to explain away some things we do see; like the only example of intelligent life implying the gap between high tech and fermi-breaking being the blink of an eye.
I agree with you on the self-annihilation solution to the paradox though.
The normal way it’s formulated is that there must be some technology that every intelligent species discovers and is totally deadly in all cases. Nuclear bombs is insufficient for this (unless their detonation causes some ripple effect that right now we are unaware of), as is climate change.
So yeah, I wouldn’t rule it out, but this hypothesis both stretches credulity and requires a bunch of other ad hoc stuff.
Which is why I spent about 80% of my post explaining why I thought that we are the first, and pointing out that the only other explanation is the less likely one where everyone wipes themselves out.
As I said, if we started picking up radio signals of peoples at about our level of technology, then that would be pretty good evidence of that hypothesis. Absent that evidence, I prefer to think that we are not on that path.
Once again, this is not my preferred hypothesis, but to answer your question anyway:
Well, look at the world. We are on the verge of climate collapse. We have been on the cusp of nuclear annihilation for a while(which may not wipe out all life, or even all of humanity, but may set us back so that we never get back to industrialization, much less ready for space travel). It would not be that hard for someone to develop a Super Covid and wipe everyone out. I am optimistic that we figure out shit out, but it is not a given that we will. But, as I said, it is not the hypothesis that I subscribe to, it is, however, the only viable alternative hypothesis to us being first.
Even just getting off the world isn’t quite enough. Any asteroid colony is a threat to Earth. If you have the ability to mine and move asteroids, you have the ability to start pointing them in Earth’s direction, and asteroid colonies are not safe from a retaliation or preemptive attack from Earth either.
Agreed, except I lean heavily toward the “no” part of that spectrum.
Sure. But that leaves at least our supercluster of galaxies. Andromeda is doing the work for us. We just wait a few billion years, and it’ll be on our doorstep. Eventually, most of the supercluster will be just one big galaxy. That’s the space of our playground, absent FTL. And I am extremely doubtful on FTL.
It’s not like the space between galaxies is empty. It’s just more sparse. Rural areas to the galaxy’s urban environment. Expansion would continue just as it does in the galaxy, just with further hops between stars. Until in a couple hundred million years, the hops start getting shorter and you start entering another galaxy.
Though it would probably require some form of FTL to get outside of our supercluster.
And some of these are things that we may know within the next few years or decades. Personally, I think that life is going to be extremely common. We have found evidence that at least hints at life on Mars, Venus, and some of Jupiter’s moons. It will take more science and exploration to determine if those are just hints, or if they are real, but my money is on them being real.
As it took quite a while on Earth, I do think that the jump from simple single celled prokaryotic to eukaryotic is an immense filter. The jump to multicellular life is another pretty good filter.
After that, evolution to more advanced life is fairly straightforward, but as to whether that includes intelligence is a different matter. Hard to say what the odds are on that, as it is not a given that intelligence is actually a beneficial trait in the Darwinian survival game.
And even with intelligence, you still have some other filters to overcome. We were just about as intelligent a few hundred thousand years ago as we are now. Turning intelligence into space travel is also not a given. Dolphins and Whales might be intelligent, but if they are, they aren’t going to be developing space travel anytime soon. If Earth were 5 times as massive, then we might be doing most of all we are doing now, but space travel would be immensely harder and may never be thought of as worthwhile.
So, if I were going to book your odds, I would go with: simple life: 100:1 (star systems); multi-cellular life: 1:100,000; lifeforms with a brain: 1:10,000,000; lifeforms with conscious brains 1:100,000,000; self-aware lifeforms that use tools: 1:100,000,000,000; lifeforms with high-tech(assuming that means us): 1:1,000,000,000,000; lifeforms with super-high-tech: 0, for now.
One world government, whether brought about peacefully or by force, would be one way to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous international politics. Then you would need the leaders to be smart enough to avoid the various kinds of ecological armageddons.
Compared to all of the other filters out there, that one seems like a near-cinch.
I am not going to say that I subscribe to the self-destruction hypothesis, but it is quite compelling. At most, human civilization fits into about 1.97x10-4% of the solid phase tenure of planet Earth. It looks likely that that fraction is not going to get significantly larger, based on how effectively we have trashed the global ecosystem upon which we rely.
Our intelligence and civilization are based on our social nature – really, “civilization” demands social behavior. But there are serious flaws in our physiological social muscle, especially the whole alpha leadership tendency, which seems to be an almost inevitable aspect of naturally selective development.
So we build large social structures capable of collaboration and progress toward great goals that individuals could not realistically accomplish. Our science and knowledge is absolutely founded on our ability to communicate with each other. But there always seem to be fundamental weaknesses in our social structures.
It appears that the natural course of the development of large civilizations requires a lot of people, which leads to a lot of disorder, which is balanced by tribalism and leadership. Consequently, the civilizations tend toward forming leader-based monoculture, which leads to some degree of intellectual stagnation. In the case of modern western culture, the stagnation is a sort of tunnel vision that looks at goals while ignoring the side effects that arise from the methods: we have been pissing in our own soup for quite a long time.
The overall dynamics of advanced development, such as we know it, seem to point to an existence that is temporally paper thin, and it has not been established that the obstacles to enduring existence are realistically surmountable.
In other words, there may be millions of possible systems out there, but the likelihood that we are concurrently existing with even one of them is on the true order of one in a million or less. I am not even convinced that, given good FTL, we could find actual physical evidence of one (real evidence of our own high-level existence will not outlast us by more than one or two thousand years).
Maybe most complex life isn’t like us. We could be the outlier. Maybe, to an outside civilization, what we call technology and progress is a recursive psychosis brought on by our competitive evolutionary circumstances and a few chance mutations.
Maybe other civilizations aren’t dedicated to tearing up their planets to make stuff that they can use to make more stuff that they can then use to create elaborate structures - both physical and sociological - that will assist them in their obsessive need to make stuff and consume stuff and discard their old stuff to make room for the increasing elaborate new stuff that they are driven to make. Maybe we aren’t normal.
Maybe “progress” isn’t a given, or even typical. Maybe life on other planets takes a trajectory similar to non-human life on earth. Do you think that given enough time -and they’ve had way more time than humans- birds would evolve into a space-faring race? Or even develop technology?
Maybe we are the wild card, the exception. I think that is the most likely explanation for the silence.
The paradox does not require species to be contemporaneous. If humans are anything to go by (and see my point below on that), sentient species can go from stacking stones to building spaceships in the relative blink of eye, and for the sake of the paradox it only matters what artefacts or technology would be interstellar-detectable.
If there’s a filter between us and self-replicating probes, or just mass launches, or a megastructure of whatever kind, we don’t see it right now. We’re probably mere centuries from the first two.
Could be.
However, given the relatively little data we have to go on WRT intelligent species, I would personally be reluctant to disregard the one main data point that we have. I think something like the Copernican Principle should be applied here; we should assume we’re typical until we have good grounds to conclude otherwise.
Of course, the lack of evidence of ETs could be argued to be such grounds, but as we’ve seen in this thread and others, there are at least dozens of explanations for the Fermi paradox that don’t require our evolutionary pathway to have been exceptional.
One world government would be the most likely way to cause a civilizational collapse. What keeps us from failing is diversity. Complex systems like us and the environment thrive hy never putting all their eggs in one basket. In a one world government, the minute your leaders make a fatal mistake everyone suffers the consequences.
A stable world is one in which no one person or group of people can make decisions that effect more than their own community or country, and society being made up of many such autonomous groups.
