Not really. The people who sent these probes are going to get results within their lifetimes, answers to questions they’re asking. Sending a probe that only your great-great-great-grandkids are going to be able to hear is a different kind of crazy. It’s not everyday we send a Voyager out.
Excellent point.
needle scratching record but… why ? We only know one kind of intelligence, which is our own (there may or may not be some more on our planet that we haven’t or can’t grok, like whales, insect colonies…). It’s quite a jump to extrapolate from one of our traits to a universal one. Especially considering it’s not *really *one of our traits. Yes, some of us are driven by an insatiable need to figure out how everything works or where we come from. The overwhelming majority just want to eat, fuck and maybe get another beer before watching the game. Which is why SETI is such a fringe side-show
I would also add that it’s one thing to send probes to poke at the fiddly bits of the Universe ; and another to actually sustain thousands of years of ongoing semi-aggressive galactic colonization. Science-fiction is full of stories of space colonists completely forgetting why they were sent out and where from, either during their trip or during the time-frame it would take for a seed of a few hundred folks to the kind of thriving planetary economy and population it would take for these colonists to build another outer-space colonization expedition. And for the home civilization, considering the time lag in such colonization, it’s essentially a big money & resource drain for little benefit.
It’s not even that huge of a stretch of the imagination. Most people can’t read things that have been written a mere thousand years ago in their own language, the language itself having evolved too much since then. There are other human languages and writing systems that are simply opaque to even experts on them. A human Ark, trying to make a trip from here to wherever and hoping the descendants of the descendants (etc…) of the hopeful few who signed up are going to begin again in the Off-World Colonies (hi, Deckard !) is hardly likely to have *anything *left of their homeworld by the time they make it to Planet X - no commonality of culture or experience or language, nevermind politics or shared goals. Possibly not even basic biology, depending on the length of the trip.
Given that, why assume that there’s a species out there for which this is not only not true, but not true enough that they’d keep on doing it over and over without a hitch ? Fermi’s paradox sort of handwaves this away, assuming that it doesn’t matter how long the interplanetary trip is, at some point the colony will itself send seeds further into space, and on and on. But that’s hardly a given. Hell, it’s hardly a given we are ever getting off the blue dot.
Kobal2 I generally agree with your points, but I’d like to make a few counter-counter-arguments.
Sure, this is a factor for humans as we know them, and a generation starship.
Humans in stasis, or self-repairing AI, or some kind of super, GE human not so much.
Plus it’s not really a solution to the paradox. If the Flobbians get here and can’t remember why they came, so what?
I think this is backwards. It’s not that we’re assuming all species would have curiosity.
It’s that we’d need to assume no species (other than us) has it to solve the paradox. And that’s one hell of a leap.
It doesn’t make such an assumption. One species slowly making their way around the galaxy is just one scenario, and is just mentioned as one somewhat plausible way that ETs could make it to earth. And note that even in the single “magellan” species scenario, we don’t have to say they get everywhere without a hitch or always want to move on immediately. We could say that only N% of communities eventually decide to explore the stars and K% of those successfully get to another planet after spending J years at one planet. Even conservative values of N, K and J would lead to in many cases a lot of exploration for one species relative to the age of the universe.
And once again, fermi’s paradox asserts nothing about the existence or non-existence of life. It asks the question why do we not see evidence of ET life yet?
So why launch the expedition in the first place ? If it’s not cost-efficient, if there’s no point beyond “because we can”, it the home planet gets nothing whatsoever out of the deal, why spend the money on some silly Ark project instead of a cure for space-cancer or (more likely) a brand new three-dimensional jetpack football sphere ? You could posit a “get off before it’s too late” scenario where the last remnants of a proud race jet off into the unknown seconds before Krypton’s sun flickers out, but that adds quite a bit of time to the equation.
Not necessarily *no *species. But if, say, only 50% of sentient civilizations ever get curious enough and driven enough and so on enough to make with the spacefaring, that cuts down mightily on the odds of one making it to precisely *this *boring corner of the Universe. It’s perfectly imaginable for a species, even a smart and savvy species, or millions upon millions of them to never get off their rock. For us to hear about one that did would require that A) said species exists and has the drive B) their planet has enough resources and energy to tap for them to reach the tech stage needed for outer-world explorations, C) they do so within the *tiny *corner of the Universe we can watch and have been watching for a hundred years at best. And not even that closely, either.
To my mind, the Fermi paradox is “solved” by realizing that the Universe is really, really, really big and we have been here for a really, really, really short time.
Missed this earlier. Anyway obviously any argument about a hypothetical advanced alien species is speculative but let’s try to think about why humanity faces existential threats today. A large part of the answer is that our instincts evolved in a completely different world than that which our technology has created. We evolved in small packs of hunter-gatherers and today we have to deal with nuclear weapons that can destroy the world. Secondly and closely related, the sheer scale of our industrial civilization threatens the natural environment on which we depend. Again we find it difficult to deal with this because it’s so different from the problems which our hunter-gatherer ancestors faced.
I suspect these are general problems for a wide range of potential alien species. Remember in the context of the Fermi paradox we are talking about species which have the capacity to travel and communicate through space. No species would start off with this technology. Like us they would probably have evolved in primitive environments and only much later developed advanced technology. Like us, their “natures” shaped by evolution would struggle to cope with that advanced technology.
One assumption that people often make when considering the expansion of a civilised species in the Galaxy is that each colony acts in isolation, sending out new colonisation craft at random. This is the basis of Geoffrey Landis’ influential ‘Percolation Hypothesis’ http://www.geoffreylandis.com/percolation.htp
If each colony acts as an independent unit, deciding whether or not to continue expansion independently, then the colonisation becomes patch and partial, with large areas and individual stars remaining uncolonised even if colonisation spreads widely across the galaxy.
This model may explain why certain colonisation models do not cover every star, but it doesn’t explain why other, different colonisation models could not be more efficient. In particular it seems to assume that all the colonies never speak to one another - if all, or many, of the colonies regularly contact each other, then the expansive ones can maintain a catalog of uncolonised stars and target them deliberately.
This is a very real possibility. However nuclear weapons are at the bottom end of the sort of weapons an interstellar species might possess. To get from star to star needs very powerful spacecraft, capable of travelling at significant fractions of the speed of light; whatever powers those spacecraft would be comparable to nuclear weapons, be it controlled fusion or antimatter annihilation. An interstellar spacecraft firing its motors above a city would be very destructive. Even worse, such spacecraft would make very good kinetic weapons.
Another possibility is that the spacecraft are propelled passively by laser beam or particle beam (such methods are attractively efficient); any civilisation equipped with very large beam guns could use these in warfare. These are existential threats very few people have considered, except maybe SF nuts and gamers, but they may be a significant contributory factor to our quiet skies.
Space to us still seems extraordinarily costly, but then we’re very new to this. There are plenty of people alive that can remember the first space flights.
Very soon space may start to become profitable, as asteroids are immensely rich in precious metals for example. And beyond that just about every raw resource in scales that would dwarf the earth. Why would a species capable of space travel necessarily stick to the grain of dust they started out on?
Throwing in a 50% does little to change the scale of the numbers. We’re talking hundreds of billions of galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars. Now maybe there are great filters that mean basically no species become interstellar.
But just saying “Maybe half aren’t curious enough” is an irrelevance.
But remember we’re not talking about ET visiting earth for a long weekend or something. If they put a probe around our world then that’s evidence that would hang around for millions or billions of years and how brief our civilization has been doesn’t matter.
Or any evidence of any large-scale project that would affect the light we receive from stars. We would see this in any nearby galaxy and would likely persist indefinitely.
But that’s my issue with Fermi’s assertion that it would only require time for a campaign of deliberate conquest to succeed ; with the travel times involved being a mere delay. Except *that *presumes a level of socio-political stability that’s hard to imagine. It also presumes that once a planet is “flipped” by this putative conquering empire, it stays flipped for ever, for thousands if not tens of thousands of years, all or most of the planets working together in happy harmony with a singular goal of expansion into the empty.
Considering the fate of our empires, that seems difficult to support however. Especially if the conquering species is especially warlike or resource-hungry - sure, that would give it the drive to go out and flip planets. But thenthe people or robots on *those *planets would also get the drive to try and conquer the known Imperial space right back (it’s much faster that way, all the infrastructure is already built and all the population already born), slowing down any further expansion. Ask the Romans, they know. Logistics and personal ambitions get in the way of getting anything done :).
Again, we haven’t been watching all that long nor all that closely. Maybe there’s a silent, long-dead alien probe the like of Voyager hanging around the asteroid belt - would we really know ? Similarly, if the light of a star was affected by something that’s been there as long as we’ve been watching, would we notice at all ? Wouldn’t we just assume there’s something wonky in the way, or put it down to dark matter, or assume it’s closer/farther than it really is just because that’s how it looks etc… ?
I believe simple life may be relatively common throughout the Universe; multi-cellular life an order of magnitude less common; intelligent life an order of magnitude less than that and super-intelligent life capable of interstellar travel or intergalactic communication an order of magnitude less than that.
Given an infinite or near-infinite universe one could say the universe is *teaming *with super-intelligent life, yet average only one or a couple examples every galactic cluster or so. If that’s the case, what are the odds that we will ever be visited by, or even detect the presence of their existence? Fair to middling at best is my guess.
I think we have to accept the premise that the vast majority of the Universe for any civilization, no matter how advanced, is forever closed off to us/them with regard to exploration or communication. I believe there are absolute limits to how far any life-form can reach, even by signal. If most of the Universe is expanding away from us faster than the speed of light and no matter or signal can exceed the speed of light, then most of the Universe is essentially dead to us and them.
At best, I believe we have only the Milky Way’s local galaxy cluster (~54 galaxies) in which we have *any *chance of detecting intelligent life (galaxy clusters within Super-clusters aren’t bound by gravity and are expanding away from each other due to Hubble Flow). However, there’s a lot of stars in our local cluster, so I support SETI-type exploration. But, if we don’t find extra-terrestrial intelligent life, it doesn’t mean it’s not out there…somewhere.
That’s not the best FP article I’ve ever read. From the link:
I don’t see any kind of empire lasting long enough or being in any way able to convince its colonizers to stay in the empire. Sure, people may spread out and eventually colonize a lot of systems, but as part of a huge empire? No way. How could an empire ever convince its colonies 100s of lys away to remain loyal and share its imperial goals?
I can imagine a time 50 million years from now two space faring species encountering each other for the first time on the far side of the galaxy and having no memory of where they came from or that the two species may have had a common ancestor, or where that common ancestor may have come from. Might make a fun sci fi story.
There’s something akin to that in the fluff of the Galactic Civilizations series of video games. After going into space and meeting a number of freakishly weird alien species, the Terran Federation (i.e. us) encounter the Altarians : an alien species that is incredibly similar to humans - one head, two arms, two legs etc… and is even 100% compatible with humans wrt reproduction.
Neither species know why and both are very freaked out by this, especially since the Altarians had a small space empire going long before humanity ever evolved but they have no records of ever having gone anywhere *near *Earth. There may or may not be time travel fuckery involved, or possibly intelligent design, or both - the games do not provide any actual explanation, only cryptic hints.
Can we agree that natural selection is going to be a universal feature of life? It applies to any self-replicating system in which there is competition for resources. Random mutation and natural selection produce a lot of weird combinations but every viable combination must have the ability to compete for resources and reproduce.
From there, we have to just observe trends on earth. The smartest species are mobile, social and curious, and that’s true even when they’re as different from each other as an octopus, a raven and a chimpanzee. Intelligence follows certain convergent pathways just like eyes do. Applying this to non-Earth life is no guarantee, but if we’re plugging assumptions into the Drake equation, my money says interstellar explorers are mobile, social and curious.
And despite your example of how humans aren’t curious about other star systems, the fact remains that we’re still very curious critters. Is that edible? Can I fuck her? Should buy those shoes? Will Trump win the election?
If you blow on a dandelion, the seeds spread out and they make more dandelions. Is this is a sustained plan of continental domination, or is it just how a self-replicating device functions?
I make no assumptions about galactic domination. I make no assumption that aliens themselves travel anywhere. All I assume is that the aliens look at space and say “I wonder what’s going on up there? Let’s shoot off a probe to tell us.” I’m not even presuming that the probe has any more intelligence than is required to reproduce itself and send signals back home.
Humans have already launched a probe into interstellar space. In 10,000 years, we went from the discovery of agriculture to the start of interstellar travel.
Now, it may well be that no flesh and blood homo sapiens ever visits another star system. It might even be that Skynet takes over and we die off. Even so, we are already on a path that will litter our corner of the galaxy with probes by the end of the next 10,000 years, and if any self-replicating devices are sent into the galaxy, trying to stop all of them will be like keeping the dandelions off your lawn.
I cited SETI because they are Fermi’s natural adversaries, and if they take him seriously then others should too.
I doubt Fermi stipulated that any alien contacts need be part of an empire. Indeed, the distances involved would mitigate against any galactic central organization. I expect the sited SETI author threw out the image of an “empire” off-the-cuff and non-seriously, maybe just as a sort of literary flourish.
Certainly aliens advanced enough to show up in our space would have to be advanced enough to be independent of authority and support many light years distant.
Maybe, or maybe not. The universe may have figured out alternate pathways. The case for selection is strong, but I don’t think it necessarily has to depend on competition for limited resources—at least not Earth-type aggressive competition, pitting one life-form against another.
Earth’s particular pathway to intelligence could be exceedingly rare in our universe. Let’s face it, our genetic code is not exactly the most elegant means for evolving into complex lifeforms. DNA-based evolution is rather haphazard and dirty, dependent on mutations, a tremendously branching tree of life, aggressive competition for limited resources and eating one another.
Surely, the universe can allow more elegant pathways toward organic complexity resulting in high intelligence. Less branching speciation and a more homeostatic relationship with the environment may be the norm. Chemosynthesis as a “food” source, on a planet rich in the necessary inorganic chemicals should evolve less competitive (and less aggressive) species. What would drive life toward intelligence on such a planet? Perhaps the answer is simply that more complex, intelligent organisms obtain more chemosynthetic nourishment and have more offspring. Some type of mutation process needs to take place, I’m sure, but there should be more efficient methods than that which our DNA uses (lot’s of non-vital detritus hanging around). Population could be in homeostatic balance with their environment and they could be happy with that arrangement, with no desire to kill less advanced species or spread their seed outward into space. They would be very nice and content aliens—the kind I’d like to befriend.
I do believe curiosity is an important requisite for intelligent life, but alien curiosity could be fully focused inward toward their own environment and not out toward other star systems. Maybe entirely aquatic planets harboring life are the norm in the universe. Put, let’s say, octopuses on a fully aquatic planet and give them millions of years to evolve super-intelligence. They’d no doubt learn to build complex technology to master their environment, but I doubt they’d have the resources to develop rocketry or any other means of leaving their planet. With no means for space travel, it’s doubtful they’d expend resources even signaling into outer space. *“We’re here, if you like octopus sushi, come and get us.”
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Maybe planets harboring life living under a mile of ice are most common. They could be quite intelligent, yet ignorant that outer space even exists.
Life on Earth came about via a very specific and circuitous set of unlikely circumstances (from carbon dioxide-rich to oxygen-rich, part land/part water, tidal forces, etc.). Our pathway to intelligent life may be so rare as to be virtually non-existent elsewhere in our part of the universe. Our local cluster of galaxies could be peppered with intelligent life evolved via very different pathways, but we could be the only ones with the means and/or inclination to reach out to the stars.
Alternately, perhaps there are other civilizations within the Milky Way that have mastered inter-stellar travel and focused signaling, but choose to do so between a group of stars in close proximity to them (beyond our earshot). I mean, how much space and how many planets does any civilization need to be satisfied (assuming they’re not greedy, war-mongering bastards)? Surely, even a super-intelligent species would weigh risk/benefit and the further they travel, the more risk and cost is involved. They could populate enough planets and space-station colonies within a sphere of limited light-years to suit their needs for billions of years. Why go further than you have to? If I want a Big Mac, I’m going to drive to the McDonald’s closest to home.
If not for empire-building expansion, what else would motivate a civilization to explore ultra-far reaches? Curiosity? What could they possibly expect to discover on the opposite side of the galaxy that they can’t find on their own side? I believe there’s enough homogeneity built into the universe to preclude them from finding anything new and exciting thousands of light years away.
Anyway, the Perseus-Pisces Super-cluster is where the action is. I’ve heard the guys in that party-cluster are zipping around all over the place, getting into all sorts of sordid trouble.
By definition, it can’t really. Life *is *an energy store. If you aren’t storing energy, you aren’t alive. As such it’s impossible for anything alive to be in a " homeostatic relationship with the environment ".
I can’t see how that would make any difference at all. You’ve just described life on Earth as it is now, but without any ability to use light as an energy source. If anything that would competition even more fierce.
But that *is *competition. The organism producing more offspring is out competing the less intelligent lifeforms. That’s exactly what happens here on Earth, only with a more fierce competition for energy sources.
Either all organisms are in homeostatic balance with their environment, or some are obtaining more chemosynthetic nourishment and having more offspring. Those two conditions are mutually exclusive.
The *first *thing that any complex technology requires is a means to directly harness chemical energy. How that is done is unimportant, it may be through exothermic chemical reactions as on Earth, or through bio-engineering to harness enzyme systems, but without that ability to directly harness chemical energy, technology can’t advance beyond horse and cart or wind power. So, if our octopods have an advanced technology then they have the resources to develop rocketry. Whether they choose to do so is another question, but they must have the resources in order to be an advanced technology.
That seems more plausible, though it still has problems.
That has always been the important one for me.
The amount of energy needed to propel a spacecraft to light speed is infinite. I read somewhere that it would take more time, energy and engineering to propel a New York sized spaceship 5% of the way across the galaxy than it would to move Venus into an inhabitable orbit. To me that suggests that any civilisation capable of a space empire would just terraform the planets of the closest solar systems rather than colonising huge swathes of the galaxy. If each new planet takes a billion years to terraform and lasts 10 billion years, it’s going to take a long time for anybody from the other side of the galaxy to start encroaching on us.
Why? Competition between individuals or other species may be the population homeostasis mechanism most common on Earth, but it’s not the only possibility, and it may not be the most common mechanism on alien planets. My guess is that intelligences equal to or greater than ours would willingly regulate their population to suit their environment, without having to out-compete others. Choosing comfort and stability over an overarching drive to fill (/overfill) every available niche seems the smart move to me.
Why? If a planet is populated with organisms that rely only on inorganic chemicals for food/energy and the planet has enough of those chemicals to adequately sustain the growing population, where does “more fierce” competition come in? And, a planetary population in self-regulated population balance that doesn’t require organic matter to live should negate the competitive predator/prey model, I’d think. Admittedly, that model had much to do with evolving to intelligence on Earth, but, we’re kicking around alternate methods that alien environments may employ.
We can include photosynthesis in the mix…but those pushy plants can be pretty competitive vying for sunlight.
Yes, that is exactly what happens on Earth, but I question whether it has to work that way on all alien planets given a different set of physical circumstances and alternate modes of evolution.
Again, I’m assuming a planet with enough food/energy to feed all. Larger/more complex/more intelligent species may eat more and have more offspring, but not necessarily at the expense of other species. Each species could reach it’s homeostatic population balance independent of other species, with little or no extinction taking place in the process (it would be nice to see your entire family tree, back to seedling).
A newly evolved species could have more offspring to start, to the point of comfortably filling its niche, then convert to replacement fertility level naturally, or with conscious intent. Admittedly, this is a bit far-fetched and would, at some point, require expansion beyond the confines of their home planet for the continuously speciating population. This may just be an extreme hypothetical, but something less extreme could be the norm. We see plenty of species on Earth, living in close proximity, that don’t compete against each other. Plenty of symbiotic examples of various types, too. I’m simply expanding on that model as possibilities for alien environments.
I get your point, but I don’t know if it’s an absolute. However, the thought of an octopus riding a horse and cart is amusing (maybe a seahorse).
Given the resources available in a likely aquatic environment, isn’t it possible, or even probable, our octopods could harness exothermic chemical reactions, and find the building blocks to build smart phones and whatnot, but still be unable to build and launch a rocket into outer space? I’m guessing they would first have to build a missile-launching submarine to launch the rocket and why would a race of octopus people bother to build a missile-launching submarine, if not to launch a rocket to a place they have no desire to explore? (At least I hope that’s the case…because I have no desire to meet them, they could slap us around pretty good with those 8 arms).
This brings up an interesting side question, however: could a species evolve cognitively and be considered super-intelligent, yet *not *have the ability to build advanced technology?
Imagine an Earth where man destroys himself and bottle-nosed porpoises take center-stage in the brain department. Give them millions of years to evolve, with dominating their environment via advanced predation techniques (math skills could be involved), communication, socialization, etc. being the selection filter. But, they never acquire anything beyond flippers and mouths with which to manipulate their surroundings, so they can’t build anything very complex, no less inter-planetary rocketry or communication. I’d consider them an advanced civilization (not technologically advanced, just cognitively advanced) with no chance of contacting us. Maybe those type of beings are common in the universe.
A closed environment, opaque to the universe, rich enough in resources to evolve intelligence, but not enough to drill through a mile of ice. What are the problems?
Anyway, the first few points of in my post #97 have little to do with the Fermi Paradox, they were just to offer a counter to dracoi’s first point in #95.
I believe we agree on what’s perhaps the most plausible reason we have not made contact with alien civilizations. It’s not that they’re not out there, it’s that they don’t have the need or means to get here.
Yes, and I agree with the idea, but for all the talk about aliens watching I Love Lucy we have only been broadcasting on the FM band (AM bounces off the ionosphere) since 1933 and, thanks to the inverse-square law, it’s unlikely anyone has noticed us. Give it time.
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