I would say intelligence, tool use and language evolved not once, but rather, we are the first species to do so (on Earth). I think it’s possible that we occupy a niche that always gets filled eventually.
Why isn’t the earth covered in nothing but bacteria and algae? If you have water, something will eventually learn to swim. If you have air, something will eventually learn to fly. Why wouldn’t something eventually learn to leave the planet, and live in space?
I agree though, there’s no way to know for sure what can happen, until we ourselves observe it, or do it. We really can’t be sure that humans can colonize the solar system until we’ve actually done it. That’s scary to me. If humans can’t colonize the solar system, that is, no species can colonize its solar system, them something is about to happen that will prevent us from doing it. It’s got to happen soon, because we are really close to doing it.
That’s certainly possible. But it does seem that we exist in a niche that is rather hard to fill, or a niche that is only apparent under very special circumstances. If those circumstances (and what are they?) pop up again, we may (will?) find other intelligent species, but I contend that isn’t not as simple as your first post made it out to be.
I was under the impression that the Earth IS covered in (almost) nothing but bacteria and algae. I think I’ve heard (no cite) that prokaryotes actually out mass all multi-celled life. I think Cecil had a column on something like this, but I can’t find it, maybe I’m misremembering.
Well, if you’re considering total biomass and genetic diversity, earth is inhabited almost solely by bacteria and archaebacteria, with some other random crap thrown in.
What scale are you thinking on when you say “really close?” The closest thing we’ve done to colonization is putting a few people up in a space station very close to the planet for relatively short periods of time. They can’t stay there very long and they aren’t self-sustaining. We’ve never kept anyone on the moon for a significant period of time and never sent anyone to Mars, and we lack anything even close to the technology necessary to colonize another planet. We have trouble colonizing certain parts of this planet.
Well, Gerard K O’Neil claimed we had the technology to do it decades ago. What we lack is the motivation & commitment. The Chinese have apparently committed to a moon base.
We probably could have a permanent moon base within 50 years. It will most likely be up to private industry, because I don’t think NASA is ever going to do it. It’s really hard to guess how fast private industry can move. Maybe large, permanent orbiting space colonies between 50 and 100 years. Within 200 years I’d say we could have a large colony, or colonies of humans living permanently in space. By permanently I mean, if they had to, they could survive indefinitely without needing anything from Earth. That’s the important milestone I think. Once people don’t need the Earth, then colonizing the galaxy is just a matter of time.
So, something has to happen sometime between say, now and a couple hundred years from now to either convince us not to colonize the galaxy, or prevent us from colonizing the galaxy.
Why do you expect private industry to do it? Where’s the profit? The start-up costs will be astronomical (hey, admit it, you smiled at that pun),
What financial benefits would the stockholders gain?
If a civilization has the technology to build ships that can undertake indefinite one-way missions (which is a prerequisite for interstellar travel if you don’t assume that FTL is possible), they don’t particularly need habitable planets. If anything, habitable planets would be inconvenient – all the useful stuff is at the bottom of a gravity well and under an atmosphere.
They could have harvested the Sol System for resources anytime up to the past century or so and we’d never know it unless we took close-up photos of the right asteroid.
This assumes that we’d know if our neighborhood had become “infested”. Anybody could have passed through, grabbed a few spare asteroids for resupply, and headed off to the next interesting star a few centuries ago, and no one on Earth would be the wiser.
This (given that STL starfarers are necessarily going to be adapted to live in space, not on planets) seems like a plausible solution to Fermi’s Paradox.
But why just pass through when you’ve found a planet with the amount of life the Earth has? Wouldn’t you stop and look? We’ve had some pretty amazing diversity for about 250 million years.
I would say that we are like a stone-age trbe living in an isolated valley, in the interior of New Guinea. We send out smoke signals and beat our drums, hoping that somebody “out there” will answer.
What we don’t realize: the galactic community ABANDONED radio, TV, and other electromagnetic communications eons ago…they use quantum sub-space carrier waves! (Instantaneous communication via particle-particleinteraction). We simply are not aware of the other inhabitants, because we are so primative.
We are probaly on file somewhere in the files of the Galactic Empire,under “primative civilizations to watch” list!
Stop and look, sure. That also doesn’t leave any obvious traces, presuming that it’s done by someone intelligent enough to avoid messing up the very thing he’s trying to study.
Colonize, no, because interstellar travellers are necessarily* adapted to life in deep space rather than life on planets. In this case, it’s not a matter of “just one exception” – when failure to follow a rule involves a basic logical contradiction (i.e. living in an environment for centuries without being adapted to function in that environment), you just aren’t going to get any exceptions.
*Assuming that travelling faster than light is completely impossible and travelling fast enough to significantly reduce the shipboard-measured time is effectively impossible, both of which are pretty well supported by everything we know about physics.
You know, our own society is currently running on “information overload”. Why not ET society?
Perhaps so much is going on out there, that we are “drowned out” from any awareness by their civilization.
By “drowned out”, I am not referring to radio traffic volume of signals, but rather refer to so many other vital pressing issues requiring ET attention that they have no time or intrest left for us.
What’s worse is the ET on the fleer* might only hear about us from time to time, when the nutjobs who follow paleoastronomy talk about the new TI’s found 60 LY away.
*No, I don’t know what a fleer is. It might be a street, a canal, a tree limb, a cave, or magnetic ley line. I just know they’re common.
The question remains: why NOT ONE signal? Even if there were some advanced means of communication or coding which we currently could not tell from noise, I struggle to believe that there is not one trickster or technological-history buff in the entire galaxy who might send a recognisably “deliberate” signal our way, and those civilisations could not have chased and terminated those signals emitted from back when they were being used.
This is thinking is along my lines: I would also WAG that there may be biological factors, that make them less likely to poke about every rock they see crawling with moss — reasons or even laws to isolate themselves. One Adromeda Strain from some funkadelic planet could bring the entire federation (or whatever) crashing down. One Sigourney Weaver Alien escaping it’s homeworls is a problem. There probably would be strict quarantine rules about life bearing worlds of any kind (we have 'em for Moon returns and any Mars or any probes we send to other planet/bodies are now sterilized).
Further, I would guess that space habitats built to perfect ET gravity/environment with limitless possibilities would be much preferable to star faring civilizations than a War of the War colonization style scheme – why bother with colonization when you can build Manhattan-Vegas-Kansas inside, say an asteroid, and travel the galaxy?
I can see them passing through the Sol system snapping some earth shots for the folks back home from outside the atmosphere and being on their way without landing on the White House Lawn. I can **see ** it – not saying it is anything but wild speculation.
Not one individual in the entire species or range of species out of countless billions or trillions? I would be extremely surprised if “curiosity in other species” was characteristic only of a particular kind of bipedal primate found in one of the the outer spiral arms of the galaxy, despite many other species being more technologically advanced (indeed, how did they acheive such advancement without “curiosity” in general?)
