Basically the jist is that the long-standing belief that there are likely to be many other forms of intelligent life, or life at all, in our galaxy or even the universe as a whole is overblown. The actual odds of life existing elsewhere is much lower.
I’ve long been fascinated with the Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation. My personal hunch has been that we’re among the first, or even the very first, intelligent life to evolve. Seem unlikely? This is my reasoning:
The universe is estimated to be approximately 14.5 billion years old
It took about 10 billion years for enough supernovas of aging big stars to scatter the heavy elements that complex life forms require (at least, according to Neil DeGrasse Tyson on the Cosmos reboot).
Earth is approx. 4.5 billion y.o., and life began about as soon as conditions on Earth could support it.
So, doing the math, it would be difficult for another intelligent, technologically advanced life form to evolve much sooner than us, though of course I’m sure there could be a couple eons of wiggle room either way.
I know there’ve been plenty of other posts on this topic, but I thought the Cornell study warranted a new one. Thoughts?
I think there’s a magnitude scale that you may be missing.
Intelligent life didn’t come to Earth until, let’s say, 250,000 years ago (to be very generous).
If another species had even a million years’ head-start (note that this is one-THOUSANDTH of a billion) they could have fit four of those 250,000 year periods in there.
And let’s also acknowledge that for 249,940 of those years, we were planet-bound. Hell, we didn’t even start radiating radio waves until 249,880ish years of intelligent life went by. So while there was intelligent life here, the rest of the universe had no way of knowing we existed until, at best, Guglielmo Marconi got busy around 1900, a mere 118 years ago. There are ten thousand hundred-year periods in a million. Look at the progress we’ve made since then, and assume that some other species is behind us by a thousand years, or ahead of us by a thousand years. We wouldn’t yet have any damn clue.
This study still weighs heavy on B[sub]6[/sub].
And speaking of bullshit:
is pure bullshit. That means that there wasn’t enough heavy elements to form rocky planets until 700 million years after the Earth formed. There were rocky planets more than 11 billion years ago. Supernovas result from large stars that burn through their fuel in as little as tens of millions of years–there were vast numbers of supernovas in the first few billion years of the universe.
Yep! That means we have an obligation to travel the stars, meddle with primitive species, and leave monoliths. Lots and lots of monoliths. *Eldritch *monoliths, preferably.
Anders Sandberg explains some of the reasoning behind his paper here. http://aleph.se/andart2/space/seti/dissolving-the-fermi-paradox/#1
The paper is just a metanalysis of published estimates, and he admits it is armchair astrobiology (truth be told, most astrobiology is performed in armchairs).
So obviously there is a very wide range of possibilities; but one of the most significant possibilities is the one that says we are alone in the galaxy, and this one is consistent with observation.
The real problem with the Fermi paradox (or more accurately the Drake equation) is
It uses big numbers to fool you. – We know that humans have really, really hard times dealing with very large numbers. We tend to oversimplify or just not conceive of their magnitude. When we use Drake’s equation, we aren’t really able to make educated guesses at what values should go in there. We don’t really have a lot to go on, so we randomly pick a big number and say ‘There we go.’ It’s like if all you had access to was a single refrigerator and from that you had to guess the probability of things in everyone’s refrigerator. Well, in mine right now I have a fillet from a longnose gar. If this refrigerator is all that I’ve known, I might say that fillets of longnose gar must be relatively common, after all I observed it in my refrigerator. Knowing what I do of the world at large though, in reality I might be one of only a dozen people in the country with a gar fillet since it’s not considered a food fish by most people. Using a Drake equation like thing though, my fictional 1-refrigerator counterpart might conclude that there were millions of gar fillets in refrigerators around the US, so should expect to run into them on a normal basis.
It suffers from wish-fulfillment bias. People WANT there to be other forms of life and they WANT them to be quite common because it points to very uncomfortable conclusions otherwise. If we’re an infinitely rare thing (and if we’re the only ones, we are indeed infinitely rare.) then that lends credence to transcendental claims rather than purely physicalist ones (though certainly not anything approaching conclusive, it’s still very uncomfortable.) If you’re a physicalist, you really, really want there to be other life because that makes the argument that life is just a physical process more convincing. When you really want something, there is a tendency to shade numbers in your direction or find evidence where none exists and this corrupts the probability equations.
Bricker, I did acknowledge there could be, as I put it, “an eon or two of wiggle room”. Looking up eon, apparently an eon is actually considered around a billion years- I thought it was much less than that- maybe a million.
Garrison, yes, the Drake Equation is more thought experiment than hard science. I don’t know that that equates to bullshit, much as I enjoy xkcd. And as for the 10 billion year timeline for heavy elements to be distributed, yeah, could be BS. Blame Mr. Tyson for that one, then.
Another theory re: the Fermi Paradox & Drake Equation I’ve always felt was likely is that though the formation of life might be relatively common, intelligent life, and especially technologically savvy intelligent life, may be vanishingly rare. There’s nothing inherent in the evolutionary process that guarantees intelligent life will evolve, just life most suited to its environment.
I have to go along with Darren in taking issue with your point #2.
The first stars are believed to have formed only around 100 million years after the Big Bang. They would have been extremely massive – maybe 300 to as much as 1000 solar masses – and therefore short-lived, exploding as supernovas in just a few million years. So the heavy elements necessary for life would have formed very early on in the history of the universe. Theoretical musings aside, the carbon emission line has been seen in a radio galaxy 12.5 billion light-years away, evidence that life could have formed elsewhere many billions of years before the solar system even existed.
No “convincing” is necessary. If life isn’t a physical process, it must be a magical process.
Or more accurately a non-physical process. I guess you could use the term magical though I think that carries a connotation that we don’t need to leap to, but you could also use transcendent, immaterial or non-measurable. One could argue that consciousness is non-physical, but not magical.
I haven’t read the study, but what of the hypothesis that up until about 5 billion years ago, gamma rays were so common that life couldn’t develop anywhere because it just kept getting wiped out.
I also read that life more complex than microbes isn’t possible in about 90% of galaxies due to gamma ray bursts.
Are gamma ray bursts as a possible reason for the fermi paradox discussed?
I’ve always figured that the solution to the Fermi paradox was that by the time you could travel to another solar system, there was no reason to do so. Head out to the Oort cloud, instead - plenty of room and material, and no pesky gravity wells to deal with.
I’d say that GRBs are not really adequate as an answer. The same Anders Sandberg (from Oxford, incidentally, not Cornell) has analysed the chances of being hit by a GRB in the early universe, and the odds are that a significant number of early biospheres could have survived, especially those located a discreet distance from the Galactic Hub. http://aleph.se/andart2/space/galactic-duck-and-cover/
I don’t have that much faith in us. I think we are more likely to do what Douglas Adams described in the “Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as “teasers”.
I don’t believe in magic. Intelligence and consciousness are just properties of a particular type of physical system, not necessarily even a biological one.
The most obvious reason to do it is the same reason that we’ve sent probes to all the planets: scientific curiosity. Admittedly, both the motivation of scientific curiosity and that of colonization assume parallels to ourselves, which may very well not be valid for alien life, or may only be valid for a limited period of evolution, even in ourselves.
Even so, there remains the problem of why no signs of alien intelligence have been detected through observation. It’s not just the absence of any apparent radio communication, but the absence of any phenomena that might be evidence of alien activity. For which there are plausible explanations, but the fact remains that for all intents and purposes there appears to be nothing out there, no matter how hard we look. Nor do we have a solid theory, beyond various speculative hypotheses, for how life began here on earth.
Well, this depends on your definition of “much sooner”. Dinosaurs existed hundreds of millions of years before we did. While they didn’t evolve intelligence, there’s no reason to think that the alien equivalent of dinosaurs would have missed this as well. If they missed out on an extinction level event or two, they could be well ahead of us.
And that’s assuming we started at the same time, an assumption that is unwarranted, as discussed by others above.
I think we also have to ask whether intelligence really is selected for. In our case it worked out, but most of the other hyper-intelligent species aren’t doing too great. Dolphins manage ok, but I can’t think of any great apes that are doing particularly well and some are well on their way to extinction. The most successful animals are probably insects and they aren’t exactly known for their cunning. Rats do well, but it’s more their breeding strategy than their smarts that account for their success. All of our other big-brained hominid ancestors and cousins now have found their way to extinction. There were at least three times when homo sapiens teetered dangerously close to extinction ourselves. We were down to 600 individuals in South Africa during the Big Chill and if we hadn’t stumbled onto Pinnacle Point, there’s a good chance we wouldn’t be here having this debate. It wasn’t our brains or tool use that saved us, it was just dumb luck that the climate there happened to be exceptionally good and isolated from what was happening everywhere else. The Toba explosion possibly knocked our numbers into the thousands as well. The bottom line is that maybe we’re not really supposed to be here and the cosmic dice just happened to roll a billion 1s in a row and no one else got those dice rolls.
You also have to consider that if an extinction event didn’t come around and kill the dinosaurs, then mammals may have never raised themselves up, and dinosaurs may never have developed higher intelligence.
The regular extinction events that mean that life has to stay adaptable may have lead to our development in a way that more hospitable conditions may not have.