Why are we getting dissed by the larger inter-galactic community?

Great Debates
81

Just to bring up one more hurdle, I’m not so sure they would be aware of us if they’re out there (something I don’t think is true since I’ve seen nothing except predictions). We’ve tried some simple things like beaming messages and mathmetical formulas into space, but who knows if anybody would interpret them as a message. Earth would have the same problem if it was on the receiving end of those messages.

This IS a pretty starry-eyed article, no pun intended. I find the above statement pretty ridiculous, both because of the ‘give UFOs a chance’ attitude (echoed elsewhere in the piece) and because I’m not sure how anything in physics could predict that we should be experiencing visits. Predicting that they’re out there? Maybe. Predicting that they’re out there and have come by here? What model would do that?

82

Perhaps this planet was seeded at some point, millions of years ago. We may well be the product of an alien civilization, who have (generously) shared their DNA with us. perhaps out mythologies about God and Goddesses are the faintly-remembered legends of contact with these people. If so, these superior beings are waiting for us to grow out of our racial adolescence. Hopefully, at some point they will take us inhand, and teach us a few things?
To them, we are probably the same as our dogs are to us…basically dumb. but capable of being trained.
Another hypothesis: we are an interstellar “beef ranch”…and the round up is coming!

83

The problem that I have with the idea of a local galactic civilization that is deliberately spurning communicating with us is simple: would you be willing to blinker the whole electro-magnetic spectrum with black-out rules to keep from giving a bunch of “warmongering primitives” a hint that your civilization is there?

AIUI, the Earth is putting out enough radio and TV waves to rival a small star in its own right, and nothing we’ve seen indicates that we’re going to be reducing that output in the future. On the contrary the output is still going up by leaps and bounds. Granted, we’re still extrapolating from a series of one, so there’s no guarantee my reasoning actually reflects reality - but until someone can show me a reason for an existing civilization to reduce its EM output other than security reasons, I’m not going to accept the idea of an advanced civilization out there.

84

I think you have extrapolated Fermi beyond logic. By your assumption, you must change your claim to “there must be at least one functionally immortal, far ranging civilization” to accomplish your saturation of the universe/history. The estimate I made counted on ten thousand year average age to maturity and death for space faring civilizations. It still leaves the ET’s so far apart that they don’t even encounter each other all that often. Hundred thousand year civilization lifetimes change the numbers a lot, although it still end up being thousands of light years to the nearest frontier of civilizations. (Given an average universe population of a trillion such civs.)

Time is an important variable, when talking about contact over the vastness of space. We can see a lot of the physical limits of the universe, but we have seen a slice of eternity only a few hundreds of years long. A trivially small sample, and the majority of it antique, even by Universe standards. The Great League of Thinking Beings might have broken up into squabbling stellar kingdoms only seventy million years ago, after a billion years of peace and prosperity, but it’s as good as non-extant to us, even if the dinosaurs were a provisional candidate species. They aren’t here. The number of them that aren’t here is a meaningless concept. All of them are not here.

We cannot be certain that all of them have never been here. We can be certain that we could be easily missed by a whole lot of “possible” types of civilization, unless they happened to have passed within a hundred light years, more likely within a few light years and have done so within the last hundred years. We don’t make all that much noise, and haven’t made any noise at all until recently.

I personally think that intelligent life and Civilization are a whole lot more unlikely than everyone else seems to think. Even here, where it does exist, it has only existed for a trivially small portion of Earth’s history, and we cannot be sure that our species will continue for longer than the average life span for species. That means that half a million years from now, only .001 percent of the time is there intelligent life on Earth. On the average.

Tris

“Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.” ~ Erwin Schrodinger

85

Well, first of all, some of the examples I gave suggest that they might be trying to make contact, but have not yet done so due to a possible number of difficulties. This notion that it only takes one civilization (that should have made contact already, dammit) doesn’t seem to take into account that it might take billions of attempts before a success. This is especially true should the number of sentient species be low.

Fermi assumes they have been around a lot longer than us, which is a huge assumption. Besides, there may be an entire universe worth of reasons, some that we may not fathom, as to why they may not care to meet us, or may not want to make the contact a two way street. Fermi also assumes to an extent, as noted elsewhere, life as we know it.

86

If all life is carbon based life, then the chances are good that this planet would have appeared “interesting” to an advanced life form for much longer than that. Here I am assuming that they are looking for “stuff”, be that habitable planets, resources, or other life in general, meaning they’ll be scanning or probing systems like ours, checking the atmosphere, etc.

87

That’s still not likely because even if an alien civilization sent a probe to our system, any message it sent back to its home base would take decades (at the minimum) and would be meaningless by the time the information arrived.

88

What if the way the spacefarers do it is that they’ll show up right on time 10,000 years from now. And that may be millions of years from the last time they were here. That’s not very long if you’re a ship surveying a region with a dozen suns, right? What if that’s the best anyone can do? Is it unconceivable or simply annoying?

If they find communicating sentients, especially toolmakers, there we go - contact made. If not, they simply leave no trace of themselves as to not skew the natural environment. Perhaps they’ve saved us from a killer asteroid long ago that we did not know about. Perhaps they delivered the object before early Earth had cooled that gave us this sized planet with a large moon.

But they only show up every 3 million years at a time, with sensors in place should any thing of interest occurred. They may be making an unplanned left turn as we speak.

Also, why is our space funding going backwards? I have heard that there were times when every dollar put into NASA came back into the economy as much as seven or more. Much of it was in spin-offs, everything from new materials to freeze-dried foods. If you figure in the benefits of their influence on modern computing, we’re still riding on their dime. Russia also carries on, yet again not at capacity. Other than political bickering there’s not much good reason why we aren’t further ahead on this relatively inexpensive agency considering its results.

We’ve stopped going to the moon yet we have so much more science we could do there. Possibly nuclear fusion using its readily available Helium 3 as fuel, low gravity manufacturing, space telescopes, preps for Mars and onwards. We do good science, still we pull ourselves back from the void. The space station hasn’t been up to capacity. We’ve downsized our space programs after a period of great success and growth. Other than loss of life, there’s been less downside than upside. And the number of lost lives is surprisingly low.

Is this how it goes for other species over longer stretches of time? Who says the universe is rational? I gave a number of reasons why they aren’t here (yet?), but little’s been done in way of shooting them down. C’mon have some fun and tell me why not.

On the other hand, have you all heard about the space elevator? It could be in our lifetime and possibly surprisingly safe if predictions are right. If that worked, we could cheaply be into space in a huge way, especially using variations on the material needed for the elevator’s cable. That would provide me a better proof of Fermi’s paradox. There may be successive psychological barriers of moving into the void that slows the process down for sentients.

Thus as an additional issue, might we only meet their creations, never the creators or their progeny?

89

Unless other planets have figured out faster than light travel, I can’t imagine they’d be much worried about security. Space is BIG. With sublight travel, it would take a fleet of ships with a crew of descendents of the original crew to launch a battle at a planet on a distant star. And this planet better damn well be less technologically sophisticated than the attackers. Otherwise given they have the home turf advantage they’d kick the asses of the attackers.

And let’s assume that aliens from a distant star launch a fleet at Earth, and the descendents radio back “we kicked their asses; we now control the third rock away from Sol.” I sort of doubt that warriors from other stars would want to rule hairless apes on Earth that much. This planet wouldn’t be worth their effort.

90

Thank you. I find the rational cogency that you exhibit a thing encountered so seemingly rarely in GD that your praise is almost embarassingly flattering. Yes, my understanding of the depressingly incontrovertable power of Fermi’s paradox is that one must posit an almost infinite number of implausible rationalizations that effectively prohibit an otherwise perfectly capable species from contacting us to explain the fact that a single colonizing species needs only a few million years head-start on us to infest the entire galaxy. Given that the “zone of habitability” in the Milky Way allows for intelligent species of a kind we could conceive of to have arisen a good billion years before ours, at least, there’s been way more than plenty of time for it to have happened by now. Intelligent life must be exceedingly rare; so rare that we may very well be it. Evolutionary biology lends further crushing depression to ET-lovers everywhere when we consider how superfluous intelligence really is to survival. Bacteria get along just fine without it. They say cockroaches will rule the world after the nuclear holocaust, and they ain’t exactly Poet Laureates. What I find frightening about Fermis paradox is the implication for the survivability of intelligence. But that’s a whole other topic.

91

I’m inclined to agree. I didn’t mean that I felt security would be a rational concern, but only that it is the sole reason for the silence we’ve seen around us - if one assumes ET civilizations.

92

Actually, it’s likely we will be greatly reducing our EM output through fiber-optic networks and whatnot replacing inefficient broadcasting, and greater energy efficiency generally. The kinds of signals we’re producing that might be picked up by aliens are the waste noise of primitive technology. I figure we’ll have a 100- to 150-year window in which our EM will be detectable to some alien equivalent of the SETI project, after which the levels will drop. Barring the huge EM pulse of a mass nuclear exchange (after which the issue may be moot, as far as we’re concerned) the only way to advertise our prescence may be the deliberate broadcasting of mathematically-coded messages designed for that purpose, as described in Sagan’s Cosmos.

93

I disagree. Yes, the percentage of our EM transmissions that are going over the open air will be going down - but that’s different than saying that the absolute magnitude of our EM emissions will be going down. For so many reasons and purposes non-directional radio remains useful, even though fibre optics offer better throughput figures.

94

If bacteria are so great, why isn’t the earth inhabited by nothing but bacteria? If survival and the perpetuation of life is important, what are bacteria going to do when the sun turns red and the earth gets fried? What are cockroaches going to do? What are birds, chimpanzees & dolphins going to do? Not survive, that’s what. The best chance that bacteria have is a large asteroid smashing into the earth and, with some luck, blasting some bacteria off the earth where they can eventually seed another planet. Not the best strategy. You can’t count on an asteroid when you need one. So life evolves alternate, and probably ever more sophisticated strategies.

I’d say the best chance that earth life has, is humans. Not only can we leave the planet, but we take our bacteria with us. Not only that, we can take a veritable Noah’s Ark-load of life with us.

If the goal of life and evolution is to survive, then humans, or in the case of other planets something like us, are inevitable.

Everything is governed by the laws of our universe. If you have a huge cloud of hydrogen gas and conditions are right, you will get a star. It can’t not happen. It’s possible that if conditions are right you can’t not get a planet. If conditions are right on the planet, you can’t not get life. If you get life and a couple few billion years of evolution, you can’t not get humans, or something close to us.

95

You’re first two statements are correct, but after that they get increasingly less correct. It’s probably correct that, under favorable conditions, you can’t not get life. But complex life? Given our own planet’s evolutionary history, it seems to be much harder to get from prokaryotic to eykaryotic cells than it is to go from no life to life. Once we get beyond that, some things seem pretty certain: eyes and wings both evolved numerous times. But complex language (what is probably the real secret to human success) has evolved once. Our level of intelligence has evolved once. There’s just no way we can say with certainty that intelligence would evolve again if we replayed the tape.

96

It’s obvious to me that no none knows we’re here yet.

The only means so far to detect us would be by our radio emissions that we’ve only been putting out for 100 years or so.

For any aliens to have contacted us yet by a means that we could recognize (radio), they would have to receive our signal and send theirs. This means that they currently would have to be within 50 light years of us for us to have received their signal. The odds of another civilization within a 50 lightyear shell of us is mighty low.

If we just have a little patience and keep watching tv for another few thousand years, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of intergalactic hello’s coming our way.

97

I personally welcome the lack of contact from our alien overlords. Everyone seems to be worrying – why haven’t they contacted us? I say a more rational way to spend the time would be to relax while being very grateful for that very fact.

It’s easy to imagine aliens as some weird glass-like silicone based life form that breathes fluorine and has a collective consciousness. It is however very unlikely that actual aliens are that cute and cuddly. Chances are they exist somewhere beyond our normal understanding of space/time in dark, far away corners of reality, in “places” that the light emitted by the stars in this universe has not reached and can never reach. There, free from the constraints of relativity, quantum physics and the burden of causality itself certain things, that can not be described as inanimate, spend their time existing. Why have they not contacted humans yet? One can only hope that it is because we present no interest to them. Why haven’t we comprehended the signs of their existence? Because they are too alien for us to associate with life, “being” or existing. That is a good thing too as all the people who tried to manipulate and train themselves to see the changes in the real world that are usually associated with alien actions have either gone mad or disappeared mysteriously or both.

For the truly curious there is a sunken city the aliens have left on earth during the terrible eons that they held interest in our planet (it was inhabited by someone else back then). A poster named HPL claims to know its location. I would advise anyone against seeking it out though.

98

You guys are all overlooking the obvious answer: we have 1920s style Death Rays.

At least that what Morbob of Xalaxia VI told me. And kittens, we have kittens. They don’t like kittens.

Tripler
But we don’t have kittens armed with 1920s style Death Rays. :confused:

99

I vote for that explanation. In fact I’ll go on record saying that life will be discovered at least once during the period of human dominance, and most of it will look like something that you wouldn’t want to get on your shoe.

100

One thing that doesn’t quite make sense (to me) in Fermi’s paradox is that it concerns “civilizations like us”, but then assumes that “civilizations like us” will eventually achieve interstellar travel or communication.

Fermi’s paradox could mean that there isn’t anyone else out there like us, but it could also mean that no civilization ever found a way to make interstellar travel or communication feasible.