If intelligent life in space is found, it would immediately become one of the Top-5 governmental budget priorities in the world. You’d see NASA’s funding, a vast array of scientific organizations, get vastly more funding. DoD/Pentagon would get involved; not necessarily because it’s a threat as it is that they have the cool tech.
Oh, well, that seems a bit harsh.
How about e^(Pi i) - 1 = 0? People aren’t trying to solve that. But it’s a wonderful equation, encompassing arguably the five most important numbers, multiplication/division, addition/subtraction, and exponentiation, all in a few characters. Equations are statements. Some of the most powerful equations are as much thought provoking as anything else. Even an equation with highly uncertain factors still establishes, for example, limits like “greater than zero” for the number of intelligent civilizations in a galaxy.
Besides, Wikipedia gives “Drake equation” its own nice page. Numbers, history, theory, loads of stuff in there.
And it DOES have an answer. We are slowly making the answer more accurate, as the decades roll by.
The error bars on the Drake formula are very, very large. Some folks have trouble with the idea that “equations” must yield precise answers and therefore must be fed precise numbers and are useless otherwise. IMO relabeling it a 'formula" gets away from that failure of imagination.
You’re correct that Drake’s work by any name provides a semi-useful framework to consider all the stuff required to go right to end with intelligent spacefaring life. Even though in some putative Star Trek / Star Wars-like future where spacefaring life is commonplace, we still may struggle to tie down the Drake coefficients with any precision.
Like what? What numbers you got that are making the answer more accurate?
We do NOT know that. We don’t know how difficult interstellar space is to cross, we don’t know if self-replicating probes are even possible, and we don’t know what it takes for a civilization to get to the point where it can start expanding through the universe.
We also don’t know how many civilizations there might be. Maybe there are a million of them, but it’s a one-in-ten-million feat to get to another star and all of them are sitting in their home systems wondering the same thing we are.
We know nothing. We are babes in the woods, trying to figure out things that exist in a sea of unknown unknowns. There may be a thousand reasons why civilizations have not spread through the universe that we have yet to discover.
It’s fine to speculate, and to try to figure out reasons why we don’t see anyone. But every attempt should be qualified with the disclaimer, “But we know so little about th how life forms and the limits of interstellar travel and all the rest that everything we think about aliens could be complete nonsense.”
We have a serious case of recency bias. We think what we’ve learned in the past 100 years is bringing us close to understanding what’s going on. Of course, they thought that 100 years ago, and 100 years before that.
I’m guessing that astronomers 100 years from now will look back at us as quaint and relatively ignorant, just as we look at astronomers 150 years ago, who weren’t even sure if there was anything outside of the Milky Way.
Well, it’s a math equation, but you are right that it gets misused by people. It’s best to think of the Drake equation as a schema or method for organizing our thoughts around how to tackle the problem of extraterrestrial life. The terms in it are arbitrary, and any one of them can be broken down into many, many different terms. It’s basically a top-level working model for facilitating discussion, and that’s about it.
We have been able to put some constraints on some of the terms. We know a lot more about how many planets are out there, for example. We’re learning more about stars which tell us which percentage might be able to have planets with life. And so on.
But if you take a term like, “Number of planets capable of harboring life:”, you can break that down into a million more questions that need to be answered. Do red dwarfs count? How about tidally locked planets? Do you need a Jupiter in your system to sweep debris away? What about planets in regions that have been swept by Gamma Ray Bursts or Supernovae? What other things don’t we know about expoplanets that may affect this?
Only if it’s motivated to do so. At best, “should” in the above statement should read “might”. There’s no reason to believe intelligent aliens would have the same motivations for colonization that we do, any more than there is to believe they’d have the same motivations for power, domination, and violence.
Well, sci-fi is littered with ancient races that made mistakes and wiped themselves out. It seems reasonable that we might be that kind of elder race. After all, we haven’t seen any older space faring race than us, so far.
Let’s go, then! Push those weaklings out of the way!
Open invitation to visit my GD thread, SETI Research: What Can We Rule Out?.
Of course self-replicating probes are possible. If we built the first spaceship, we can build more. Put some of us in the spaceship. When we get to our first destination, we do the same things we did to make the first one, again.
Or we make other self-replicating machines instead of us, if that turns out to be more practical. Again, we know that self-replicating machines are possible, because we’re examples of such.
And sure, we don’t have the technology to do that right now. But if we have the technology in a thousand years from now, or ten thousand, that’s good enough.
Sounds correct.
So the end game for SETI is more SETI. That’s not the intended end game, but it’s the end game as a practical matter. Because of the distance, we will spend lots and lots of money to learn little compared to what historians and anthropologists can find out about other civilizations on earth.
I’m already pretty sure that there are alien civilizations in other galaxies (but maybe not in the Milky Way). SETI finding some unambiguous signature of extraterrestial intelligence, such as artificial heat or light, or even the finding on earth of some tiny and likely heavily damaged probe, is not going to have an effect on us eathlings more profound than the tremendous SETI budget increase.
Of course, the follow-up to a discovery would also depend on the nature of the discovery. At our current tech level, we’re probably only going to detect aliens if the aliens are making a deliberate effort to contact us. Well, what are the aliens saying? Maybe it’s just “We exist”, and that’s all there is to it. But maybe (for instance) they’re contacting us because they value helping out other nascent intelligences, and they’re giving us instructions for all sorts of new technologies that they think we’ll have a hard time developing on our own. If that’s the case, then surely we’ll spend a significant amount of effort investigating those new technologies (cautiously, I hope, because there’s also the possibility that they’re xenophobic and just send out instructions that will lead to alien races destroying themselves, because that’s the easiest way to kill us off).
It’s possible. We know there couldn’t be any life with the first generation of stars, since the only thing around in significant quantity was hydrogen and helium. The second generation would have had elements up to iron available. It’s my understanding that stuff heavier than that requires the collision of two neutron stars, so solar systems with a planet like Earth (needing plate tectonics that depends in part on thorium and uranium) probably won’t develop until the third generation of stars.
The end game:
We discover a message coming from an outpost of an alien race that controls our galaxy and has billions of tiny satellites which roam the galaxy sending messages that can be recognized as coming from an alien race. This alien race knows how to travel faster than light, both in its spaceships and its tiny satellites. We send the tiny satellite (that we got a message from) a message inviting them to visit us with all sorts of information about the Earth, which then passes that message faster than light to their home planet. Eventually one of their spaceships lands next to the U.S. building in New York. An alien comes out of it and goes into the building to speak to the representatives of all the nations of the world. It says that they have come to Earth to serve mankind. It drops a book on the speaker’s stand which is entirely in their language. The aliens then give us methods to greatly improve life all over Earth. They also invite many people from Earth to come to their home planet. A man who has been leading the team trying to translate the alien book decides to visit the alien’s home planet. Meanwhile, his team is able to sufficiently translate the book left in the U.N. building to say that the title is To Serve Mankind. He goes to the launch center where alien ships are bringing humans to visit their planet. Just as the man gets on the alien ship and the door to it is about to close, his assistant on the translation team runs to just outside the alien ship and shouts, “It’s a cookbook.”
I’m not sure we could learn anything. IIRC it is impossible to decipher a different language without some guidance (e.g. a Rosetta Stone).
Even if you discern some structure you still have zero idea of what is being said.
The Voyager probe tried to sort this problem with its golden record but I’m not sure how far that gets an alien civilization to understand any earth language.
I don’t believe this for a minute. I also don’t believe ideas that such a discovery would cause widespread panic (great band BTW) or a revolution in philosophical or religious thought. Hell, a majority of Americans already believe that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, so why would confirming an already-held belief cause major changes? I think the confirmation of intelligent extraterrestrial life would generate headlines for a few weeks, and then fade into the background of “interesting things we know about the universe” without making much of a ripple in how people or governments go about their business.
Aaaaahhhhh, I meant U.N.
This is overlooking the vast infrastructure in place on earth that would not be in place an another exoplanet.
Assuming you could find an exoplanet with a magnetosphere (creating one is almost certainly out of reach), you would still need to terraform it to meet earthling’s needs. Not an easy task. There have been proposals to terraform Mars, but it would probably take hundreds of years at best.
But supposing you found such a place (or terraformed one), there is still the infrastructure issue. We are talking about building a rocket and fuel from scratch - I just don’t think that’s possible in the context of which we are talking about. All of the occupants would need to basically be rocket scientists. But let’s make it a little easier, thought experiment, if we dropped 100 car designers into the middle of the Amazon, how long would it take them to build a running automobile with gasoline? I content they couldn’t do it. And if they could, it would take more than a generation, there’s no guarantee that the second generation could maintain interest.
Those machines (us) took billions of years to ‘build’. I don’t think it follows that that means we could build one. I think man-made self-replicating machines/probes are out of the question for the foreseeable future.
Well, sure, if we only send car designers, and don’t give them any tools. But why would we do that?
All of the infrastructure on Earth was made by humans, and therefore it could all be made again. It might take a while, but so what? We’ve got plenty of time.
We do not know that. A self-replicating probe not only has to make it to another star system, but it has to somehow find all the materials that go into a complex machine, build factories and smelters and figure out how to get the energy for all of it, and essentialloy re-create an entire technological supply chain. Then it has to send that next probe off with enough fuel to do the whole thing again. And it probably has to send off many probes to account for the ones that don’t make it to a system with the materials to replicate.
Could it be done in the sense that it doesn’t violate any laws of physics? Maybe. can it be done in a way that maintains exponential expansion through multiple generations of unknown trips to unknown systems? That’s a much harder question.
Build a complex, computer controlled flying machine that can be plonked down in some remote area of earth, then replicate itself. How hard do you think that would be? You are going to have to replicate everything from insulation to chip fabs to metal parts. You’re going to have your machine explore for materials and mine them. But of course it has to build the mining equipment. Which it can’t do until it has mined the resources. So you’ll have to send mining equipment along, and when the probe replicates, it has to replicate all the mining equipment as well. But you can’t build the mining equipment without the tools needed to build the mining equipment…
Self-Replicating probes could be technically possible out on the edge of feasibility, but still never be made because the efficiency math doesn’t work out. Maybe it takes so much material and energy to make a true self-replicating probe that it just doesn’t make sense, and it’s more efficient to just send probes out from the home world from time to time. If that’s the case, you don’t get the exponential expansion that makes self-replicating probes such a juicy topic for the Fermi Paradox.
And so it goes. The supply chain for something as simple as a laptop computer stretches into many millions of people and thousands of companies.
It may be that self-replicating probes are technically possible, but in practice so freaking hard and expensive to build, with such a long-range payoff (if any) that only one civilization in a million would bother to even try. So we could have 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy with none of them ever building self-replicating probes.
As of today, they are complete science fiction. We have no idea how to build them, and we don’t know if anyone else has either. To use them as a given “If there were other civilizations we’d know, because of self-replicating probes” is ridiculous.