So all the civilizations are drawing an incorrect conclusion. They think that they had better not reveal their location, because it makes sense for an advanced species to only proactively kill, but not proactively search for life?
Heck, this is the nicest compliment I’ve ever received: You think that I was able to figure out something that all the universe’s advanced species could not
Agreed. The one example of a sentient species we have, suggests at the least that the logic of hiding is not immediately self-evident to all species. So it doesn’t look like a good solution to Fermi.
That assumes whoever we are hiding from isn’t already watching out planet. If they ARE, and as stated earlier if they exist it is likely they’ve been watching us for millions of years - then getting everyone on board massive generation ships and burning with enough energy to go to another star will both highlight our location and confirm that we are both intelligent and spacefaring and so must be wiped out.
Not sure that follows. The whole point of hiding is to hide well enough not to be found while the opposition is actively searching. Hiding from passive chance discovery may be better than nothing, but won’t work if there’s a motivated Big Bad out there. The practical costs to hide from active search may be prohibitive, causing civs to settle for passive hiding even as they recognize it’s a slender reed.
It seems to me that if we posit oxygen-based life is common and at least sometimes advances enough to be a threat, any civ’s opportunity to hide from the Big Bad is pretty well lost during the multi-million year timespan their planet is oxygenating and they’re not yet galactically spacefaring.
It may not yet be too late for humanity to get serious about hiding. But IMO the risk isn’t METI, Yoyager, or our generic radar emissions of the last 100-ish years exposing us to potential detection within a ~100 LY radius bubble. It’s the ~1 billion years since the
and the 1 Billion LY radius bubble that event is potentially detectable within.
And of course every other planet with oxygen, proto-life, primitive life, multi-cellular life, sentient life, or spacefaring life has the same concerns.
Just for some perspective, the Milky Way isn’t even 100,000 light years across, much less 1 billion. Neighboring galaxies are less than a billion light years away. So any civilization not just in our galaxy but in our supercluster would have seen signs of life on Earth by now.
And sure, spotting Earth’s oxygen rich atmosphere from thousands of light years away is incredibly hard. But it’s many, many, many, MANY times easier than traveling thousands of light years to wipe our enemy civilizations. Any civ capable of the latter is also capable of monitoring all the planets in our supercluster for oxygen.
Yeah. That was sorta the point. Our oxygen signature is already detectable across a volume that so far exceeds the region that could practically harbor a civ that would be dangerous to us that all efforts at hiding are waaay moot.
Heck, if we want to take the Big Bad theory to its (il?)logical conclusion, as soon as they finish sterilizing their own galaxy they ought to get to work on galaxy-destroying tech and begin just plinking them off starting with the closest.
To be fair, the hiding hypothesis is rather low on my speculation of likely solutions to the Fermi paradox. It relies on a trait being universal to all growing civs.
That’s not to say that it’s wrong, we really don’t know, it’s all speculation here.
That’s assuming that we feel the need to take everyone with us. This is less about evacuating everyone, and more about leaving a legacy behind if we are exterminated.
Uploading minds into a probe, and launching that out, even if it takes a few hundred thousand years, would preserve something of us and our civilization. And there’s no reason why we just do one. We could build and launch millions of these out, to increase the chances of survival. It wouldn’t be nearly as obvious as just one generation ship.
The reason that this works within the Fermi Paradox is that anyone doing this wouldn’t be sending them to stars like ours, but rather, to small red dwarfs.
You don’t actually have to go there yourself. You can just launch relativistic kill missiles, or if you don’t mind being a bit showy about it, you can turn a star into a laser that can sterilize a planet a hundred thousand light years away.
I don’t think that psychology-based explanations are implausible, because it’s not individuals we’re worried about, but groups, and probably hierarchical groups. I would posit that forming hierarchical groups is a fundamentally-necessary trait for a civilization to develop advanced technology (i.e., advanced enough for spaceflight). Individuals who might want to go against their societal norms, don’t, because they fear the repercussions from other members of their society. Groups who would otherwise go against the laws, still comply with larger groups. Ultimately, you’ll have some sort of political structures at all levels, enforcing certain behaviors.
But the question is, is that universal to all civilizations? They don’t have contact with eachother, they are not forming groups.
Yet they are all coming to the same conclusion and behaving in exactly the same way(in a way that some of us here feel isn’t entirely rational). That’s the part that I don’t find compelling.
Don’t forget that not every alien we meet must be an evolved creature. Evolution is definitely universal to biological life, mind you, but by the time we run into them they are intelligent and spacefaring. The original species may have genetically engineered itself into something (or many somethings) entirely new. It may have created artificial intelligence or artificial life which replaced it.
Also, there might be eusocial species that gain intelligence (not in some psychic hivemind sense, but like our own anthills or beehives, with a problem solving emergent behavior). Or fully networked hive minds of artificial origin, like a networked AI.
And there could even be alien life that didn’t evolve in conditions anything like ours. Maybe they are herbivores and their entire mindset is different because of it. Maybe they photosynthesize or eat inorganic material and don’t think about resource acquisition the same way we do AT ALL. Or maybe they didn’t evolve on an earthlike rocky planet, or on a planet at all (say an ecosystem based around radiotrophic life living in the ring system of a gas giant which is naturally spacefaring, perhaps even without real intelligence).
The truth is, we have no idea how common life actually is in the universe yet. And we have no idea how rare intelligence is relative to life in general. Without that info, assuming that aliens will build hierarchical societies whose psychology matches ours is a bit of a stretch for me at least.
Of course it is. Maybe the first ET we encounter will have the mission of painting every green object orange. We have no idea; all we can do is reason from what we know, and give arguments for why certain events seem more probable to us.
I didn’t particularly have any dog in this fight; apart from generally disfavoring behavioural solutions to Fermi, I thought that the hiding hypothesis overall made sense.
But the more I think about it, the more I think it doesn’t stand up.
Firstly, I’d dispute that, since for the purpose of Fermi’s paradox we’re even just talking about signals beamed into space, which one day may well be cheap enough for an individual to finance. Heck, it already is for humans, it’s just that our ability to signal out is pretty primitive so far.
But secondly, even if we are talking about “groups”, how big of a group? In the case of humans, we have hierarchical groups, but it would be nonsense to imply that we all toe the same line: We have many governments, corporations, NGOs etc that can and do come to different conclusions about SETI and space exploration.
Our one example of sentient life is a counter-example to your argument.
Finally of course, even if all species were to behave like a hive mind or whatever, there’s no reason to imagine every species behaving like the same hive mind.
Maybe that collective decides the best course of action is to hide, but this collective decides that reaching out is in their best interest.
I don’t read much SF, from where I’m guessing this idea came, but please explain further. Wouldn’t we literally see this coming, and have thousands of years to figure out a defense or escape plan before the beam hit us?
But, it’s more than just mirrors. The charged photosphere of a star can act as a lasing material, being pumped by the heat and electromagnetic fields of the star. Then you use the mirrors to bounce the light around, getting amped and made coherent in the process. Called a Stellaser, though I don’t know it that’s just his word for it, or if it’s more widespread in concept or name.
If we were watching all the stars very closely, maybe we see them doing this and have a little bit of warning, but the beam itself would travel at the speed of light.
Some behavioral solutions make a bit of sense. You can state that it requires certain types of psychology in order to have a species with the capability and desire to expand into space. You may be wrong on that, and there may be other mental states that allow it, but at least it can follow from a logical perspective.
For instance, I think that anything that is capable and desirous of spaceflight would have to understand math and logic, as well as be competitive in reproduction. That may not be correct, but it also may be. It’s at least somewhere to start. At the very least, while not everyone is like that, it is reasonable to assume that we are not the only ones who are.
Same here. I don’t think that we will end up hiding, so I don’t see why everyone else is hiding as well.
And as far as an actual threat to be hiding from, if there is someone out there wiping out civs, I think that, even with our current limited observational capabilities, we would have some evidence of this. The ultimate evidence of course being getting wiped out ourselves.
Though we haven’t seen everything. Maybe James Webb comes online next year, and we see evidence of stars being used to shoot up planets around the galaxy, then maybe we decide to get really, really quiet.
To planets within say, 100ly. Of which I think there are only a small few that we consider habitable, maybe a couple dozen. And sure, maybe a good number of them have some sort of life. However there are no " Superhabitable" planets within even 1000 ly.
But what you are talking about is advanced intelligent life. The chance for that is quite slim, and thus it is likely that no planets within 100 ly have developed such.
Now, I concur with many that there is intelligent life somewhere in the Universe, even far more advanced than us. But it is likely 1000’s of LY away.
While commercial radio broadcasts began around 100 years ago, these early transmissions used frequencies that were either mopped up by the atmosphere or drowned out by radio emission from the Sun.
In contrast, military radar transmissions set up during the Cold War to detect incoming ballistic missiles have the power and frequency characteristics to be detected over hundreds of light-years – and have already broadcast our existence to any aliens within around 60 light-years of the Earth.
But that’s an expanding sphere. My point was that we’ve already sent these signals out, we can’t hide them now.
I also pointed out that the presence of life on this planet has been announced for far, far longer, and is much easier to detect.
As far as your second post goes, I actually don’t know if you are trying to agree or disagree with me, since all you did was post a link and a few lines from it without any commentary, but I specifically mentioned radar as being the form of radio broadcast that is most likely to be seen, if there is anyone to see it.