I do not see a restrictive view of how intelligences could develop. I recognize that there may be many form of life and intelligent life that we would not recognize as such, and it may not recognize us as such either.
What I would speculate though, is not that every life is vaguely similar to us, but that there are some, out of the many ways that life can develop, that would develop along the same paths biologically enough for us to recognize each other as living beings, and some environmentally and even culturally similar enough to have commonalities that can be recognized.
I find it less likely that intelligent life is abundant and diverse, but that we are unique in our form of development, than that intelligent life is very rare, and we are we are unique for that reason.
I would think that thousands would be a massive underestimation. With the vastness of scale of the galaxy, and the sheer number of potential places for life to arise and exist, I find any reasonably countable number other than one to be unlikely.
One makes sense, if it is so unlikely that it only pops up because of the law of infinities, that anything that can happen will happen in a infinite or near enough to infinite set, then one is the number you would expect to find in any region of the universe where you count yourself as that one.
Any number greater than one implies that it is much more likely than that, and any method of getting anything other than literally astronomical numbers requires fine tuning that would reinvoke the drake equation, but this time, asking not why there are no civilizations, but why so few?
It is not that they would build vast macro structures. It is that there will be many, many smaller structures, though probably still pretty big compared to most human endeavours.
You are correct that a structure like a solid dyson sphere makes no sense, and wan’t even what dyson proposed. A swarm of satellites collecting power for use on the home planet, or for use in space industries, or for use for themselves will block out more and more of the sun over time, something observable from over a thousand light years away.
If we establish human presence in space, then that will grow. Whether they stay “loyal” to the home system, or even to being human, isn’t important. You may not be looking at a cohesive civilization, but rather many individual colonies that have grown to be their own nations. The earth isn’t even a single civilization, we have many political divisions that have poele of vastly differing cultures on different sides. I would imagine that such cultures would drift further apart, rather than maintaining one single society.
But thousands or even millions of small civilizations, each having laid claim to their own patch of resources and slowly expanding outward would not be the result or a directed society, but by essential capitalist ventures, doing what capitalism does best, exploiting an infinite resource. They would have no need of maintaining communications with home. There may be messages that are sent out as one colony or another discovers something useful or interesting, and decides to share it with the rest of humanity, but as far as communication as a form of collaboration or organization, there would be no need, which is fortunate, as there would be no way either.
This is a philosophical difference of opinion, I agree, but I do believe that every human has at least one unique and useful thought or concept that humanity will be better off for having, and I am optimistic enough to also say that most have much more than that to offer. Given the complexities of DNA and the way those instructions develop, we will never have an identical copy. And then there is humanity for humanity’s sake. Why do we perpetuate the species at all, if we have no will or desire to grow? People don’t have kids because they are expecting their kid to be the one to push boundaries, they have kids because they see it as a good thin in and of itself. There are some who do not feel that they need to grow the species, but given the resources to do so, the ones who do want to grow the species will quickly outnumber those who don’t.
If we have limited resources, and the inability to deal with such a growing population, then choices need to be made, and those who want to grow the population are going to have to mitigate their desire to live within their means. OTOH, if resources are not so limited, if we choose to take access of the vast wealth of materials available to us floating around in space, then there is no reason to force them to limit their numbers.
But, in 1943, it only took hundreds of physicists using only thousands of human computers to develop the atomic bomb, because it was easy to do, compared to current subjects, that even with the massive power of supercomputers, still have thousands of physicists working on them.
Our tools may be getting better, but the problems are getting harder.
Once again, I must point out that while I agree that it would make little sense to expect all or even much of alien intelligences to be something recognizable or relatable, I do expect that, if there are multitudes of examples of alien intelligence, some of them would resemble ours enough to communicate.
The topic of asteroid mining is very related to the fermi paradox, in that asteroid mining would be one of the things we could see across vast distances of space. If we started down the road of setting up technology to exploit the resources in the asteroids, it would start looking like “tabby’s star” from a distance in a couple hundred (or thousand, if you are pessimistic) years. The difference is, when they take a closer look at the odd light dimming, the may be able to see evidence of manufactured objects, rather than signatures that look like dust.
It would be a bad idea to return all of the materials from an asteroid mining operation. Returning some to supply earth based needs without having to mine them from the crust would be worthwhile, but that would only be diverting a small fraction of the production back to earth. Those materials do have uses other than being pretty metals that are worth money because they are rare, they also have useful industrial applications that will be as valuable in space manufacturing as it is on earth. I see more material being used for building satellites serving earth’s population, as well as furthering space mining and manufacturing capabilities, with les being used for creating and maintaining human habitation, with that being reserved to tourists and technicians for the nearer future. Only once there actually are a decent number of permanent inhabitants of space who have gone there because that is where they want to live will there be a greater need for life supporting consumables, by which time, a pretty decent stockpile should be built up, along with the technologies to recycle it very efficiently.
It would not be a civilization itself dedicating to building such massive single structures. It would be small colonies of people slowly expanding and growing. Some remaining as human as conditions allow, some modifying themselves to better adapt to their environment, and some giving up humanity altogether, going fully cyborg (brain in a box style), or even digitally uploading, if that technology becomes possible.
Let me go find a nutcracker.
I do want to say, really quick, that my intent here is to have an enjoyable discussion about speculative ideas, my rebuttals are not meant to tear down the conclusions that you have validly come to given the information we have at our disposal. I only try to point out different perspectives, that I feel are also valid extrapolations of what we know. I am enjoying the discussion, and I hope that you are as well, even though we disagree on finer points of philosophical abstraction.
No, that’s an interesting find and a different take on the same idea, but that isn’t the picture I was thinking of. I once made a determined effort to Google for it but came up empty (I no longer know where the book is, if I have it at all).
I didn’t have the numbers but that’s what the picture looks like. For purposes of assumption we should consider that we are in the middle of the spectrum of technological development, but considering the time frame that doesn’t mean some civilization at the high end of the scale is so much further along that they are producing enough ‘noise’ for us to notice them, or for them to find us because we’d also have to assume they are half a universe away. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the possibilities for what kind of advanced technological civilization would consist of that we haven’t imagined because we just don’t know what it is that we don’t know. Even my assumption that all the other intelligence out there is wondering if they are alone in the universe wouldn’t have to hold for all of them because some of them may exist and just not care. Their view of reality and the universe may be incredibly different from ours. But i still find it likely that some type intelligence, similar enough to ours, is out there debating this same issue right now.
Paul Moller has a reputation as a good engineer, but he’s kind of a crank when it comes to his Skycar, which has been ready to fly ‘in a few months’ for about 20 years now. The Skycar is hopelessly complex, uncertifiable, inefficient, and his numbers for range and velocity are not to be believed. He’s never achieved anything other than a hover with any of his vehicles that I know of (maybe some short translations side to side or something). You will never be able to buy an M400 Skycar as anything other than a homebuilt aircraft, and probably even not that way since I’m not even sure it’s viable as an aircraft at all, compared to alternatives.
Flying cars are a pipedream, whether it’s a ‘roadable airplane’ or a glorified quadcopter. there are fundamental reasons why flying will never be more than a fringe activity, and it has nothing to do with technology.
The real problem is physics. The air over your head is made up of multiple air masses, moving at different speeds, with turbulence that causes aircraft to bounce around like a cork. This, and the speeds at which airplanes can close with each other, is why we maintain 1000’ vertical separation and even/odd altitudes for aircraft going in opposite directions. Aircraft also need large amounts of separation horizontally, except when they are taking off and landing.
This means you could never achieve any sort of traffic density over a city. And if you need to land in the city in a dense place, so would many other commuters. An air traffic control pattern to land 5,000 vehicles in a city core at rush hour would be insane, and you’d be in the air for hours waiting your turn. Every day would be like the zoo that is Oshkosh once per year. Now try it with 10 times that many.
Then there’s weather. Light aircraft are not reliable modes of transportation. Even big jets get grounded by weather. I once flew a Maule M5 to the Abbotsford airshow - it took me about 5 hours to get there, and a week to get back because of weather.
One of the most common causes of light aircraft fatalities is attempting to fly in bad weather. You fly your Cessna somewhere for the weekend, and you have to be at work Monday morning. Sunday evening you plan your flight, and find out that rain and high winds are forecast. So you turn and tell your passengers who also need to be at work the next day that the weather is iffy and you may have to delay a day. But not being pilots, they start whining and complaining, and you wanted to prove how cool it is to fly places instead of driving, so you look at the weather again, and suddenly you convince yourself it’s not so bad, and anyway you could turn around if you hit something bad. So off you go - and none of you ever make it home.
Just imagine 50,000 people at quitting time looking out the window at storm clouds coming in, and saying, “I can make it home” only to get caught in a thunderstorm. It would be raining metal. Or, if they don’t do that, imagine if every flying car in a city was grounded every time there was a storm advisory, or high winds, or freezing rain, or poor visibility, or… It would be a complete disaster. Cities would be shut down every time the wind blew or a thunderstorm cruised through. In the midwest in summer, that’s pretty much every day.
Then there are the issues of noise. Do you know how much noise a quadcopter makes if it’s big enough to carry a human? And how much dirt and crap its rotors will blow all over? Do you want a dozen of these things coming and going in your neighborhood every day?
Energy efficiency goes to hell, because you need energy to take off and land in addition to the energy required to get to where you are going. And if you are waiting in line to land somewhere, you are burning energy doing nothing.
And where are these things supposed to land? We can only fit cars into the city because we stack them like cordwood above and below ground, and park them inches from each other. Are you going to rebuild entire cities to make room for these things to land? Or convert every parking garage into some sort of elevator - plane stacking system like those luxury garages you sometimes see? Given that a flying car will almost certainly take up at least twice as much space as a regular car, even that doesn’t seem do-able. Our downtown parking spot costs $300/mo. I’m guessing if you had to build an infrastructure for landing and storing flying cars, it would have to be at least triple that cost.
If you want a ‘flying car’ today, you can buy a used Cessna for maybe $30,000-$50,000. Other airplanes can be had for even less money - I bought mine for $9,000, and sold it for $13,000 ten years later. I basically flew for nearly free, as the profit paid for the maintenance and some of the gas and oil.
Buy a beater car to get you to and from the airport at each end of your route. There you go - you can now fly the long distance between two places, and you have a car waiting at either end. I guarantee you this would be a cheaper solution than buying any kind of new ‘flying car’.
I would be willing to bet that barring some revolutionary breakthrough we don’t know about yet, 100 years from now 99% of people will still get where they are going on a daily basis through some combination of ground transportation. Daily flying to work will only happen for those people in very unique circumstances, and will never be more than a tiny percentage of our transportation network.
I can give you an example of where it makes sense. I leased my airplane out to a guy who lived in my city near the airport, but who worked in the oil patch. There was a runway right near his job site used for flying in equipment and supplies. Normally, gettting there takes long enough that most people would just drive up and stay in a camp for weeks on end, coming home when their shift got 5 days off or whatever. But with the airplane, he could come and go as he pleased, which meant he would fly home on weekends to be with his family.
If airplanes get cheaper and more idiot-proof, we might see more expansion like this. Hell, maybe one day remote job sites will set up their own quadcopter pad, and workers will be ferried in daily from the nearest town. So maybe you’d see this kind of flying go up a bit. You might see these human quadcopters show up at airshows or be used to get around in the backcountry or by farmers and ranchers to get around better on their property.
But you will never see cities full of flying cars. Ever.
One other major problem, aside from all of those listed above, never seems to occur to enthusiasts despite how obvious it is: the noise pollution from thousands of “flying cars” is a dense locality would be unbearable. Most science fiction vehicles deal with this by using some kind of technomagical anti-gravity or some other handwaving explanation, but the truth is that any propulsion technology which functions by moving enough working fluid (e.g. air) with sufficient impulse to propel a several hundred kilogram vehicle is going to make noise even if you could completely silence the acoustic noise from a propeller or turbine, and vehicles flying around all day and night would produce a constant background noise that would be like living a mile uprange of a commercial airport, notwithstanding the potential for catastrophe of even a rare mechanical failure or deliberate sabotage.
A flying car in the form of a vehicle that you can pull out of you garage and take off in your driveway is not ever going to be workable without essentially magical technology. No amount of engineering ingenuity is going to get around the noise and potential hazards. We may see emergency rescue and law enforcement use of such vehicles for critical emergency use (likely piloted by autonomous systems rather than human pilots) but as a casual mode of transportation it makes no sense on multiple fronts.
As I mentioned before, we currently have no way of detecting a civilization putting out even 10 times as much radio energy than we do if it was farther than 4 light years away. Even if a civilization harnessed the entire output of their star, if they beamed it omnidirectionally we still wouldn’t know about it past 100 LY or so, and even then we’d have to be pointing a large dish right at them. So the fact that we haven’t heard anything so far means very little.
So aside from the closest 500 stars or so, It’s unlikely that we would see or hear another civilization ever, unless it undertook engineering projects on a solar scale. And we have just started looking for evidence of such things.
But the Fermi Paradox is actually about self-replicating space probes. The theory is that even if just one civilization got to the point where it could launch self-replicating interstellar probes, then so long as they got there a few million years ago, those probes should basically have saturated the galaxy. And since we seem to be fairly close to the level of tech where WE could do it, why hasn’t someone already done it?
We don’t know the answer to that, but not knowing the answer does not mean that civilization elsewhere does not exist. The question is not, “Where are they?”, but “Where are their probes?” If you think about it that way, the question isn’t just about life, but about the feasibility and probability of someone making and sending out such probes. There are a lot of potential answers to that which still allow for the existence of other civilizations.
Considering not a single one has ever flown, it would indeed be difficult to find anywhere to let you fly them. The only thing he has ‘invented’ is a fiberglass model, pictures of which are photoshopped onto pictures of clouds for publication in Popular Mechanics every 10 years or so.
It’s an interesting question, to say the least. One objection is, why should we assume that aliens would have similar motivations to ourselves? And even if they did, at roughly our stage of technological evolution a successful replication/colonization program would be an enormous undertaking, and to what end? And in a much more advanced stage of evolution, they might have far more interesting things to occupy their attention.
Another objection is, how do we know they haven’t already done it? One of the proposals for probes to Alpha Centauri involves thousands of identical individual probes no more than a centimeter in size. Now imagine the kinds of probes that a civilization thousands of years ahead of us could send. How would we even know what to look for? There might be a hundred nano-engineered microscopic probes no bigger than a particle of dust floating around the earth, and we would have no idea they existed.
I remember being blown away that Drake set the variables for “fraction of those planets that can support life actually develop it” and “fraction of those planets that develop life develop intelligent life” to 1. I think that’s insanely optimistic. Sure life developed on earth soon after it could support life, but life evolved only once as far as we know, and I don’t see why intelligent life is inevitable.
The fact that life evolved only once reflects the fact that, once life evolves for the first time, it fills the available niches and consumes much of the readily available organic building blocks in the primordial soup – there isn’t any real window of opportunity for life to independently evolve a second time. Similar considerations apply to the rise of a technological civilization (though perhaps not so much to intelligence per se) – given how many species we’ve rendered extinct by overexploitation and simple carelessness, it’s hard to imagine the survival of any incipient intelligence we saw as an actual threat.
That said, the fact that it took four billion years for Earth to go from life to intelligence suggests that the latter might be something of a long shot.
Whoa- I think I’ll have to check your maths here.
The Milky Way has a radius of around 50000 ly and an average thickness of 2000ly. That makes a volume of about 16 trillion cubic light years. That’s twice your estimate- it’s worse than I thought- but wait.
16 trillion divided between 10000 civilisations is 160 billion cubic light years. If we assume that each civilisation is surrounded by a spherical volume of space (impossible in a cylinder, but carry on regardless) then the radius of these spheres would be 3368 light years, not 16 thousand.
Three-and-a-bit KLY is a very long way (almost every star in the sky that is visible to the naked eye is closer than that) but it is significantly closer than 16 KLY. I feel slightly less alone now.
Another way to look at it is that macroscopic life has only existed on Earth for around 500 million years; even with the gradual brightening of the Sun, I would expect macroscopic life to persist for another half a billion years on this world. So intelligence has emerged halfway through the history of our biosphere. We can’t say if this is typical or not- but if it is, then it is only a matter of time.
Incidentally I think this was Drake’s reasoning, and I disagree with it myself- I think the odds of intelligent life are probably thousands to one against. But this still allows for the possibility of thousands of civilisations in our galaxy.
I’m unable to guessstimate the Drake’s parameters, beyond wondering if some of the chemical coincidences were heavily odds-against (the actual 1-out-of-1 occurrence is classic sampling bias :))
… but I can still do simple arithmetic.
100 is probably just as good a guesstimate as 10,000 but using the latter I get 1.6 billion cubic ly upon division. This leads to radii of just 725 light-years.
I went through some very troubled spells circa age 20, but also feel much less lonely now.
What you are saying is technologically feasible, obviously. The flaw is that the rules of our universe appear to incentivize a more greedy approach. Why isn’t the same tech used to create far more voracious probes, that convert all the matter they see into some artifact the civilization that created them values? They could be servers for some sort of VR game or just more copies of the probes that are faster and better armed.
It’s a situation where there can be 99 nice aliens and 1 jerkface species, and since being a jerk means faster growth and greater future resources, all we will see is the effect of jerks. Or, more realistically, there might be 10 powerful “factions” within each alien species who are each individually powerful enough to act without consulting the others. And in this kind of game, there can be feedback. Faction 1 can be slightly “more jerk-like” in their probe design. Factions 2-10 will observe this and may respond in the arms race by upping the ante. This feedback would within a short period of time turn everyone into jerks.
Or if there’s 100 alien species, each with 10 factions each, the probability that any one of them decides to be jerks rises to almost 1.
Metabunk have made a good job of analysing this one; it appears to be a case of moderately advanced sensor technology badly interpreted by Earthly actors.
The Aerocar did so in the early 50’s. Not that it is practical or will ever happen…or even possible when one considers for more important needs like crash safety, but they did exist.
