That’s soooo 2014 thinking…
ETA: Though I agree FTL travel is almost entirely improbable.
I dunno. Once upon a time the idea of mass producing millions of refrigerators, TVs, smart phones and jet airplanes would probably have gotten you scoffed at, but here we are. We regularly transport well over a billion people a year all over the world. Why? Why fly between New York and Tokyo? Beats me, but we do. We already flew the Space Shuttle for years. We’re working on a variety of next gen space taxis now and it’s not theoretical. It’s real. Someday we’ll be flying billions of people per year to and from space, and between and among increasingly distant space colonies around the solar system. With regular advances in computer intelligence, automation, 3D manufacturing, the idea of mass producing millions of advanced space probes isn’t very far-fetched. The average distance between stars in our galaxy, and pretty much most galaxies, is 2-4 lys. Sure, it’ll take awhile for our most distance probes 500 lys away to relay their information back, but we’ll have millions of probes out in all directions constantly relaying back information and I don’t see the big deal about waiting a long time for the most distant information to make its way back. We’ll have plenty of information streaming back to us to keep our scientists busy. Searching for life is just one aspect of probes, but we’ll want to know everything we can about each star system we visit.
Forgive me for thinking that the potential for profit may play a small part in all of that.
I think that Malthus and Leffan raise very good points.
An interstellar probe would probably be pretty enormous, if it’s going to do much and send back messages. It would probably be ginormous if it can also self replicate (foundries and fabricators, etc).
A space ship containing a small crew and “frozen” breeding population would be pretty ginormous (even if most of the breeders are sperm and ova). Even more ginormous if a generation ship.
The velocities would be slow, the distances vast, the opportunities and costs for failure large. The costs would be literally astronomical. In any human-like society, there would have to be a huge spur to rally the political will to undertake this project, which would make the pyramids look like peanuts.
Even if we expect that bacterial life may be common in the galaxy, we don’t know how likely multicellular life would be- it’s a relatively recent invention here. Sapient life even more so.
As others have pointed out, sapient life may not be technological (because of biology/habitat/inclination). We also know that life like ours can wipe itself out through any number of scenarios. Nowadays, we only infrequently consider the risk of extinction through nuclear war, but that risk was very real recently, and remains quite real today. Really, do we have great odds of even surviving las a technological society long enough to colonize the solar system, given the synergistic threats of global warfare, ecologic collapse, and resource depletion.
I still have trouble accepting that the theoretical existence of Von Neumann probes is enough to establish the Fermi paradox.
Or tourism, or simple foreign relations. Lots of reasons, and it’s pretty routine. Anti-whaling activists can fly to Tokyo just to protest and get arrested. Lots of reasons, but it’s routine and affordable for many. Once upon a time it would have been inconceivable and we’d have been hard pressed to figure out what kind of profit would justify such an incredible feat.
Well, yeah. Someone also has to win the lottery. That doesn’t mean that when you buy your ticket, you should expect that someone to be you.
We’re supposed to think horses, not zebras. “We’re alone” is about as stripey a zebra as you can get. “We’ll be the first interstellar civilization” is a zonkey at best. Unfortunately, to my mind at least, that means that “interstellar travel is so freaking impractical that no one is doing it, and we won’t either” is starting to look a lot like a horse.
I dunno… This is still an assumption that sentient, tech-savvy life is a very common thing in our galaxy (I’m ruling out intergalactic for now).
We don’t know that the odds of achieving our intelligence and technical acumen are anywhere near the same odds of a state lottery. What if it’s rare, on the order of 1:100 odds? Spread that out over a 50,000 LY radius and we could certainly be a very stripped zebra in the neighborhood to use your analogy.
So the paradox is basically that if a civilization sort of like humanity developed 100 million years ago and sent out probes then the galaxy, including our solar system, would have probes in it. So? Who says it isn’t already? The outskirts of our solar system are two light years away. There are millions and billions of objects out there and some are the size of a bus, some are the size of Los Angeles, some are the size of Texas, some are the size of a continent or a moon or a planet. We can’t see any of them. The assumption is we’d have found something by now but I don’t see why. The other assumption is they’d have contacted us by now but again I don’t see why. There are plenty of good reasons why alien probes wouldn’t contact us. Doesn’t mean they aren’t out there already. Our current technology isn’t even close to ruling out their existence.
David Brin has written a few short stories exploring explanations for Fermi’s paradox.
In one, he imagines lots of self replicating probes are out there, including Bererker TM types that wipe out young “noisy” civilizations. Everyone else is *very *quiet.
That may or may not be proper…but you must also beware of the counterpart fallacy: “Anything is possible.” Time travel? Sure: of course. To deny it is to “set a cap on the progress of human ingenuity.”
There are certainly some implementations that can never be accomplished. Dyson Spheres, for instance, or moving Galaxies around. I feel kind of comfortable saying that human civilizations will never move galaxies.
Yep, I believe it’s called “More’s Law”: as machines become more advanced they double in size. That’s why my mobile/cell phone weighs 500kg and has to be carried by donkey.
Moore
Whosh.
Ah! :smack:
Introspection into the nature of life and sentience, and eventually a possible realization that the entire Universe is an organic, sentient whole. A core teaching of Hindu/Buddhist philosophies is that from the highest standpoint, the entire Universe is a living, breathing, sentient organism, and to compartmentalize “sentient life” into cages of flesh is an act of ignorance.
There’s a good chance that what we do, is die. If there’s no life out there, then it’s quite likely that the reason is that life always goes extinct before it can spread or communicate. As said it’s a long standing principle in science with a history of being accurate that we aren’t special - and a lifeless universe demonstrates that the usual fate of life is to not exist.
It’s worth clearing up a little bit of confusion at this point. The OP assumes that we have already developed interstallar travel and are exploring the galaxy with FTL probes. Posts pointing out that we’re not special, mine included (I’m the one who brought it up) are really fighting the hypothetical, because in the OP’s scenario we’re already special.
In which case, what we should all do is to pinch ourselves, because we’re all dreaming. Either that, or something really freaky is going on.
Basically, the point is that if we’re going out there, there will be someone else there too. If there’s no one else there, we probably won’t be going there either.
Doesn’t mean we’ll go extinct any time soon. Civilizations could be spending billions of years each sitting on their own rocks, too far apart to communicate.
I think some people are treating the Mediocrity Principle like some sort of scientific theory and assuming that it is making absolute statements about the universe.
The first thing to say is that it’s debatable whether the principle works when applied to the possibility of life. Sure, if I had a computer that could show me a random planet from anywhere in the universe, and the first planet it shows has sentient life, then we can say there’s a good chance that (sentient) life is common.
But in our situation it’s in conflict with the Anthropic Principle. We haven’t selected earth at random, we can only look out from a planet that has sentient life.
The second thing to say is of course “So what”? Even if we had reason to think it’s unlikely we’re the first sentient life, it doesn’t mean we need to conclude “something really freaky is going on” if we find that actually that seems to be the case. It would just be a probabilistic statement.
As old as the universe is, it seems that life does need at least a 2nd generation star, maybe a third generation star. And there are certain chance events that happened along the way on earth that we have no idea how likely they are. Maybe we are first out the block.
Not necessarily; it could just be that after the FTL stage is when civilizations tend to annihilate themselves.
+1 or “This” or ^ or whatever.