I’m in agreement that if there is life out there, there is going to be carbon based life. I’m just saying that there could well be other forms of life we would not recognize, but I’m also saying that they don’t contribute to the Fermi Paradox one way or another.
I saw you do the edit and add the hyperlink, but I assure you good sir, I do know my guide.
Yep, for the last two billion years, the Earth has been sitting here with a very distinct atmospheric signature, that anyone within a hundred lightyears and a JWST would be able to detect. Is oxygen a sure sign of life? Maybe not, but it’s reasonable that it’s worth a closer look.
They won’t have to travel far to find asteroids and planets to dismantle. That’s not the cause of the massive interstellar effort you describe. They must want rarer resources, or to contact other intelligent life. They aren’t trying to live out in the nothingness between stars because there’s nothing there and they don’t want to be far away from all their resources. And finally, as I stated initially, they haven’t had the time to get here unless they were considerably more technologically advanced than we are, and they aren’t because we haven’t met them yet.
If you really break it down, life is a pattern of chemical reactions that manage to propagate themselves. Everything else is an emergent behavior of this fact.
With that in mind, all that’s really required is an energy gradient and a substrate for the reactions to propagate on.
We used to think that the energy gradient had to come from the sun (and so life must have originated in shallow tidal pools where chemicals and sunlight interacted, it was thought). We now know thay here on Earth, there are not only phototrophs but also chemotrophs and even radiotrophs. We even think that life may have begun with chemotrophs in deep sea vents. Life could exist at the bottom of the underwater sea of a frozen iceball orbiting a gas giant, feeding off chemical reactions or heat from the depth. But life could also exist in the ring of a gas giant, feeding on radiation the same way photosynthetic life feeds on light.
The only substrate we know of is a host of mostly carbon-based chemical reactions that all require a solvent, water. But other substrates are possible. Chemical reactions that don’t use carbon or water; electric impulses; things I’m really not up to imagining, much less describing - but that doesn’t mean they aren’t possible, perhaps even more common than our form of life.
Of COURSE it is. That’s like a hunter-gatherer looking at a herd of bison and saying “humans will never have to go far to find something to hunt. There are so many of them, we can never make a dent.” Then modern hunters appear and wipe out the bison in a few years.
Eventually all those rocks will be turned into habitats or other constructions, and by the time a civilization uses up the rocks at the edge of its oort cloud, it’s halfway to the next star.
And if these rocks are being used to make self-replicating machines, then you get exponential growth and all the raw materials disappear staggeringly fast.
Is it possible that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that we are the first intelligent life in the galaxy (or near enough)?
I know, it does not seem likely but, as many have noted in this thread, the universe is really young. We are at the beginning. Maybe we are the super smart precursor aliens of science-fiction.
How did so many aliens needing such vast resources survive until they began to harvest the universe thousands and thousands of years in the future? They didn’t. They wouldn’t start a process that would eventually turn everything into the universe into self replicating machines and habitats for their alien population that didn’t exist and might never exist. Humans wouldn’t look at a buffalo herd and say “someone might wipe out this herd of buffalo some day so let’s consume everything on the entire planet as fast as possible for no reason”.
I do not think this is necessarily true. Certainly an unknown, possibly large fraction of all life is certainly carbon based, as we know from experience on Earth; but there may be life-like processes which use other fluids, and which use other elements extensively as well as carbon (it seems likely that carbon is too useful to get rid of altogether, but it need not be the only element involved).
For instance it may be true that the most common, or only, process of abiogenesis that occurs in our universe is the emergence of carbon-based lifeforms in water, but it is also possible that carbon-based lifeforms such as ourselves are only an intermediate stage, leading to wholly artificial self-replicating devices incorporating a much wider range of processed materials. Artificial life could be, and in some scenarios almost certainly is, the most common form of life in the universe, and this sort of life would be correspondingly more difficult to pin down.
Two things here; firstly, we may be underestimating the sheer variety of life-types that exist in the universe. Sure, we know that life on Earth produces biogenic oxygen and methane, so we are on the lookout for them; but biospheres on other worlds might produce nitrous oxides, or chlorine, or dioxins, or ammonia, or a wide range of signature chemicals that are completely unexpected. So it pays to keep an open mind.
But far worse is the possibility of false positives. Both methane and oxygen can be produced by abiotic processes, and it is entirely possible - indeed likely - that the vast majority of planets with free oxygen are entirely life-free. That doesn’t mean that they are hospitable by the way - there are many ways to die on a planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Methane is even worse. So don’t imagine that detecting life will ever be easy.
How did our planet support 7 billion hunter-gatherers? Right - it did not. When a mommy alien and a daddy alien love each other very much… Same story here. Alien civilizations numbering in the trillions didn’t start out that way, but once you’re in space with unlimited resources available to you, exponential growth can begin.
Well just for the record (since you say we’re in agreement), I don’t share that belief.
I suspect that “slimeball worlds” are common, and beyond that I don’t feel I can even guess. But the silence we observe across the universe, and lack of any bric a brac, gives us reason to lean away from propositions involving multiple advanced ETs.
Well I would say a statement of things which are known unknowns.
Perhaps the Drake equation is a less contentious way to highlight the problem.
I have issues with the Drake equation, but at least nobody takes it as making a positive statement, or believes that throwing out any plausible hypothesis for why we don’t see ETs “solves” it.
(This is not directed at you, I’m just venting about the Fermi paradox thing in general).
Ok, but the original reason this came up was I was talking about detecting any EM radiation of an advanced species. By this I didn’t mean passively detecting TV signals.
7 billion humans is a planet full. Please explain how they got trillions in population without traveling the stars in the first place. It’s all great sci-fi to talk about self replicating machines and trillions of aliens exploiting the universe but it takes more than imaginative leaps and bounds to get there.
What good does it do for a self-replicating space probe finding resources too far away to reach and use with faster than light travel?
99.9999% of them wouldn’t live on a planet (inefficient waste of matter that it is) but on rotating space habitats, where there is no inconvenient gravity well. That’s like asking how someone will grow 6 feet tall while sleeping in a crib.
What do you think they’re harvesting all the material in their own solar system for? Space habitats to live on, grow food on, etc.
That’s wht it doesn’t really matter if that next planet has habitable worlds or not.
So you are just assuming aliens far more technologically advanced than we are. So why haven’t we met them yet? Either they don’t exist, are hiding, or haven’t had time to reach us yet. And it’s actually the first option that seems unlikely, the other two don’t create a paradox. But based on the idea that there are or will be other intelligent species in the universe it still takes some kind of explanation for the out of control population growth that requires the single minded effort to harvest the entire universe for living habitats that will leave them exposed to other intelligent species who might ending up consuming them.
Is this a typo?
None of those options create a paradox, they are all potential explanations for the (lack of) observations we’ve made.
And, in terms of likelihood, I’d say “no advanced ETs” is the frontrunner out of those 3 options.
Because “they’re hiding” requires every individual of every civilization of every species to always choose to hide, for millions of years. It could happen, but it’s a stretch given the diverse behaviors we’ve seen exhibited by the one sentient species that we know of.
I know I’m repeating myself on this point, but it seems I need to.
And “not enough time to get here” is unlikely because even a species with tech than can only go, say 2% the speed of light can radiate out to every star system in the Galaxy in mere millions of years.
So no technological species for 13.7 billion years and then 2+ springing up in mere millions of years. Could be the case…it would imply our universe is well suited to the creation of sentient life but only from this exact point in time onwards. It would be like a race, where humans arrived at the “a” in “bang” and the other species arrived at the “b”.
The mediocrity principle gives us reason to doubt that we are at such a special time, but we can’t rule it out of course.
No. I am assuming that there was plenty of time for life, including intelligence, to evolve before us. Even if we posit Earth was in the first generatipn of life bearing planets, life could have settled on intelligence in the Mesozoic instead of now, and even though the Mesozoic ended just a blink of an eye ago on a stellar scale, it’s an eternity on the civilization scale. So a civilization that arose when we were in the Mesozoic would have had time to conquer the whole observable universe.
Since we haven’t see that happen, it is safe to assume that advanced civilizations aren’t out there. The question is, why not?
Of course, the mediocrity principle would apply to the first alien race no matter when they evolved, so they would always conclude they are unlikely to be the first.
Also, if life and intelligent life WOULD be common, but for unknown reasons we ARE the first, and we therefore colonize the whole galaxy before other intelligences can evolve - well, that’s a solution for the mediocrity principle. We ARE the first, but this isn’t as unlikely as it would seem, because by virtue of being first we become ONLY.
It doesn’t require any such “single minded effort” any more than it was a “single minded effort” that mined all that iron out of the ground that is now in buildings, or the oil that you put in your car. Individuals and groups of individuals working to exploit resources is the entire history of the human race, and I would say the entire history of life itself.
I would say that it would require some kind of explanation as to why no advanced species would ever decide that it doesn’t have enough resources at home. Not why some might not, or why even most might not, but why not a single one possibly ever would.
You keep coming back to the idea that there is some sort of single directive control going on here that chooses a particular path, and there’s no reason to make that assumption. There will be lots of paths chosen by lots of individuals, groups, and even species.
This part just doesn’t make sense. Are you somehow trying to imply that gathering resources will somehow leave them exposed? How does that even follow?
And if you look down and look at the lottery ticket in your hand, you would conclude that it’s unlikely to be a winner. But someone does win, unlikely as it is. If you are holding a ticket that matches the numbers on the lottery website, you can still conclude that it’s unlikely that you are a winner, but also see the evidence that you are.
That’s my perspective. It seems unlikely that we are first, but the evidence that has so far been collected seems to indicate that’s the case.
Also, keep in mind that the Fermi Paradox has two solutions. The first is to find out why we don’t see any signs of alien civilization, and the second is to actually see them. If we discover unambiguous signs of alien civilization, whether that be discovering a stellar sized megastructure thousands of light years away or a flying saucer landing on the National Mall, that solves the Fermi Paradox just fine. (It does open up a whole lot of other questions, but it at least puts that one to bed.)
And if we are being pragmatic about it, part of the reason for harvesting the resources of everything within our reach is to prevent competition from arising. The prime directive in that case is to prioritize habitable worlds for destruction. (I’m not sure which side I fall on this, to be honest, it’s a complicated ethical question.)
Assuming that if there are aliens, at least some of them are no more benevolent than your average Oil CEO, we can demonstrate that they don’t exist by virtue of us being here at all.
In that case we’re in disagreement on a number of basic issues. One is over the existence of intelligent alien life (I won’t use the term “sentient” as there are lots of sentient creatures on this planet besides ourselves, but I mean “intelligent” in human terms or greater). There are an estimated 100 billion to as many as 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and from what we’ve seen so far the majority of them probably have planets. If only a fraction of those are in the habitable zone for life as we know it, and only a fraction of that fraction evolved life, and only a smaller fraction still evolved intelligence, that still leaves the potential for millions of technologically advanced civilizations out there.
We’ve already discussed many potential reasons why we’re not seeing evidence of them. And I find the claim that at least a few such civilizations would engage in the sequential colonization behaviour you describe – either by successively propagating colonies across many star systems or doing so with self-replicating robots – to be quite unpersuasive. It’s oddly specific behaviour that I continue to maintain does require a commensurately specific motivation.
You apparently hold the seemingly contradictory views that there are probably no other technologically advanced civilizations in the galaxy, but that if there were, there would be so many of them that at least a few would be engaged in large-scale galactic colonization. It seems quite plausible to me that, instead, although intelligent life may be common in the galaxy, the number of civilizations capable of such interstellar colonization may be quite small, and that each of them independently concluded that such a venture would not be worth the expenditure of resources that could be put to much better use.
Consider that we here on earth already theoretically had the capability for years to establish bases on the moon and on Mars years ago, had we made it a priority to do so. Instead we directed our resources to other priorities, and may continue to do so for a long time yet. The last Apollo mission to the moon was in 1972, and many still wonder in retrospect why we bothered, since it was such a dead end. It was like, now what? And there wasn’t a good answer.
My biggest problem with your position AIUI is its sheer statistical improbability. It requires us to believe that human civilization is so incredibly unique, literally so astronomically improbable, that it may be the only such example out of hundreds of billions of planetary systems. My hypothesis instead leads to the conclusion that we are in no way unique, and probably just average on the galactic scale of technological evolution. In fact, given the extremely short time since the development of the scientific method and science-based innovations, I’d say the odds are that we’re well below average among technological civilizations in the galaxy.
This suggests to me that the galaxy is full of million-year-old+ civilisations. I’m prepared to accept that, but it is difficult to explain why none of those million-year-old+ civilisations have sent out exponentiating probes.
Are they all too polite to do so? Is there an interstellar prohibition against such behaviour? Do the probes invariably turn into berserkers, turn round and destroy the civilisation that sends them out?
Mijin is correct; there are innumerable possible solutions to the FP, but we don’t know which is correct yet.
That’s the part of the Fermi Paradox that indicates that there should be alien intelligence out there.
Personally, I find the reasons given that no alien intelligence ever would embark on such endeavors to be unpersuasive. It’s no more oddly specific than opening gold mines where there is gold, or removing mountains to get at the coal underneath. Exploiting resources is what we do, and not just as humans, but as the most basic underpinnings of life.
I don’t see that as contradictory at all. I could say that, if we were in the middle of a locust swarm, we would notice the locusts, without that being at all contraindicating my lack of belief in locusts.
Quite small is not good enough, especially given the vast numbers you pointed to in the beginning of your post. Zero is the number you need to get to, not a number that is merely close to zero.
As the purpose of the venture is to get more resources, that doesn’t fly. It would be like saying that you wouldn’t open that iron mine because the resources required to do so would be better put to use elsewhere.
Yes, it was expensive, and didn’t have a whole lot of public support, so it go put on the backburner. That didn’t stop people from dreaming of it, and as the technology and capabilities were developed, to actually start doing something about it. It is not a single minded task of a singular civilization spanning entity that brought SpaceX into being. And just as our technology has moved entry into space from something that a superpower had to devote considerable resources to to one where a single company can make the same achievements, so will other things like asteroid mining become reasonable for smaller players to enter the market.
And, once we start mining asteroids, what possible reason would we have for settling for just the ones in our own solar system? Maybe they will be enough for us for a hundred years, or a thousand, but millions of years? I can’t imagine a scenario in which we stop at some arbitrary distance from the sun and decide “that’s enough, we’re good.”
That is the exact improbability that leads me to the opposite conclusion. Unless someone can point out why no member of the human species will ever try to develop resources outside our solar system, they then have to explain why humans would be the only ones who ever would.
There are two* reasons why humans would be the only ones to ever reach beyond our solar system. The first is that humans are unique, and that they are the only ones who thought of it and were capable among all the other tool using and spacefaring civilizations out there. The second is that humans are the only tool using and spacefaring civilization out there. As unlikely as the second scenario seems to be, the former is far, far unlikelier.
In that case, what kept them from developing space technologies to exploit the resources available to them?
*there is a third, which is that all civilizations encounter a great filter that wipes them out between achieving spaceflight but before becoming truly spacefaring, and we are running full steam right into it, but I generally don’t want to dwell on such a pessimistic outcome.
But we ARE undoubtedly unique on this planet. There have been a billion species of life on earth, and only 1 that evolved the intelligence we have. We are the 1 red marble in that bag of a billion white marbles. There must be another red marble, but maybe that bag needs to contain a trillion or quadrillion or more marbles.
