Where is Everybody? Fifty solutions to the Fermi Paradox, by Stephen Webb

[Urlik]

Skeptical, when I said that a planet could be too stable for the evolution of higher life, I meant that if it didn't have plate tectonics and vulcanism and extreme climate variation (which Earth does have) then there wouldn't be the impetus (and possibly the mechanism) for evolution to progress beyond the start of life or it would be slowed down dramatically and even though a system could be 2 billion years older than ours, life on the habitable planet is evolving at a much slower rate than here and some fish are only just starting to flop about on mud flats to avoid predators.

if we look at evolution on Earth, since the last major change in climate evolution has settled down (although it hasn't stopped, even in humans. records of teeth show that modern humans have smaller teeth and some adults have no wisdom teeth at all, as we eat processed food and as our jaws get smaller, there is no need for large teeth or room for wisdom teeth) but if we look in areas where the environment is rapidly changing we get lots of organisms evolving.
we have antibiotics but we constantly hear about new bacteria that are resistant to treatment. the popular news calls these mutations** but in reality they have evolved to live within the new environment that we have created for them.


**this could be because Creationists will accept that a bacteria can mutate but won't accept that it can evolve, so it is easier to say mutate and get newspaper sales rather than say evolve and get nasty letters. mutate is also a good scare word which looks good in headlines, which also helps sales

 

[Ursa major]

but a small minority have the capacity to ... ruin it for the rest of us....

Exactly.

And a few aliens of this sort with quintillion tech (to borrow the term MTF used) might think nothing of making all our lives into a living hell and would have the capability to "achieve" it.

 

[zachariah]

Maybe they have already.

 

[Urlik]

Ask any honest scientist and you will learn that what we know about the universe is so far eclipsed by what we don't know that if you divided what we do know by what we don't you get ZERO.

that is a false argument.
we don't actually know how much we don't know. if we knew how much, then we'd know what we were missing and have a pretty good idea what most of it was (the basic shape at least even if we didn't know the details)

Alien technology of 500 years advanced is (given the median estimate of two-fold increase in technological ability every 10 years) a 1,125,899,906,842,624 (that's 1 quadrillion for ease of reading) fold increase in technological ability. A difference of that magnitude is completely incomprehensible to us. Anyone who seriously thinks that ET's technology is going to be anything other than magic to us is so arrogant and human-centric as to be living in a state of complete ignorance.

that is assuming that technology has the potential to progress infinitely.
we know for a fact that technology increased at a much slower rate for tens of thousands of years in our history. right now we are having a growth spurt, but we don't know for sure that it will continue.
in some areas it isn't progressing at that rate and in others it has virtually stopped.
for all we know, technology might reach a plateau in the next century and there will be no more advancements.

TEIN hit the nail on the head: gods is what they would appear to us to be; as our level of technology does to some remote primitive civilization on some backwater portion of the planet. The problem you seem to be having is that right here, right now we are the backwater portion of the universe and that remote primitive civilization is us...

Clarke's 3rd law again, but taken with my above point about the possibility that technological advancement is a finite process along with the fact that our solar system lies within one of the best regions of the galaxy for supporting life, we may find that we are among the more technologically advanced intelligences in the galaxy rather than the primitive (although this doesn't mean that we have never been visited in our past but the tech level of those visitors may have already reached the plateau that we are approaching)

ET certainly will be "limited" by the laws of physics just as we are. The problem here is their "limitations" and ours are not even close to being the same thing. ET can't do anything which is logically contradictory, and that's about the best we can say. So ET cannot use gravity and not use it simultaneously, but there is no reason to think that ET with quadrillions times better tech and scientific understanding couldn't simply ignore gravity when they choose. What exactly does gravity do for someone who traverses the 29th lateral concommitant dimensional plane (no idea what that is; totally making it up, but for sake of argument magic and quintillion tech is the same thing)? I have no clue what-so-ever, and I don't pretend to know.

true assuming that technological advancement is infinite and continues to double every decade (which might not be the case)

 

[Parson]

Sceptical:
Alien technology of 500 years advanced is (given the median estimate of two-fold increase in technological ability every 10 years) a 1,125,899,906,842,624 (that's 1 quadrillion for ease of reading) fold increase in technological ability. A difference of that magnitude is completely incomprehensible to us. Anyone who seriously thinks that ET's technology is going to be anything other than magic to us is so arrogant and human-centric as to be living in a state of complete ignorance.

Given our longer history, not just the last century, the rate of increase might be so much less that in 500 years the tech will be only 2 or 3 times better. I remember reading of an Egyptian boat that could not be very accurately dated because the design of Egyptian boats did not change for 1000 years!

Sorry Urlik, I responded before reading to the end of the posts.

 

[skeptical]

To mantimeforgot

Arthur C. Clarke suggested that : "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

However, that does not give us carte blanche to assume magical powers to an advanced civilisation. No matter how advanced, they will still be limited. They will, no doubt, be able to carry out short range teleportation (that is theoretically possible, but beyond current human technology), use nuclear fusion, manufacture anti-matter in appreciable amounts and store it safely,, build cyborg components into their own bodies, use those components to create a kind of 'telepathy' by radio waves, tapping their brains directly into super-internets and many other accomplishments.

However, that does not mean they will be able to wave a hypothetical magic wand and skip lightly across umpteen dimensions, or colonise a planet and leave no material traces. We are, of course, fully entitled to speculate about advanced alien civilisations, but let us stick to what might be possible, at least in theory, and not assume magic.

 

[ManTimeForgot]

Gentlemen:

Yes, ET can and will wave magic wands. It might be some form of string manipulation, but far more likely is that it will utilize some aspect of science here-to-for unrecognized to us.

How much we "really" know about the universe and greater reality isn't really relevant since any number divided by infinity is zero. Any honest scientist when confronting issues of scope is forced to this conclusion. That's why Douglas Adams' put forward that a good sense of perspective lead to a "total perspective vortex" (forced to weigh the value of whatever it is that you are or know against all that is results in nothing). Edward Teller went on record stating that if you take what we don't know about the universe and divide it by what we do know you get a very large number possibly even infinity (perks of having a dad who worked with the man for many years).


It is a valid critique to state that technological progression is not a constant. But Renaissance is just as likely as Dark Age, and so I was working under the assumption (over a totality of history) that those two things will balance out/counteract. This is why doubling every 10 years was what I termed a median. Perhaps technological progress accelerates in the future; quantum computing and planet sized computers (all possible at some point in the future) might very well accelerate the rate of technological progress beyond 2 every 10. Perhaps dark ages set back a civilization hundreds of years like what happened with China in the 15th and 16th century.

But that isn't really the important thing. What is important is that our assumptions about what technology will look like for ET are almost undoubtedly all completely wrong. What we think of a "cyborg" to be is not going to share much if anything in common with what ET would do. Technology progresses along racial and cultural lines. So when a race shares almost no common features with humanity and its culture shares nothing in common with our cultures, then there can be almost no presumed form relationship. Functions will approach similarity as technological capability approaches "maximum" (there are only so many ways to build a water wheel argument).

Every time people have assumed that no further technological or scientific progress would occur they have been astoundingly wrong. Our imaginations are limited by what we are able to conceive of. So we are fundamentally unable to deduce what kinds of things ET will be able to do, and to claim that there must be some kind of limit to what ET could do is hubris at best.



Where is ET? At this very moment some form of ET is closer to the molecules of your body than your clothing; the eleventh dimension (and whatever else is beyond that) is closer to your molecules than anything you "touch" (electro-static repulsion). Now don't misunderstand me here; I'm not saying that ET is specifically in the eleventh dimension (or any other). The problem with arguments made in ignorance is that you cannot verify their veracity. But what you all don't seem to realize is that we haven't the faintest idea what is really out there. ET might be in the 11th dimension, but then again ET might have decided that the 11th parallel concommitant plane of foldingness was much cooler than the plain old 11th dimension.


Accepting your own ignorance is a bitter pill to swallow, but its one everyone who wants to learn has to swallow sooner or later.

MTF

 

[Urlik]

How much we "really" know about the universe and greater reality isn't really relevant since any number divided by infinity is zero.

true if the Universe is inifinite (which it isn't)

Accepting your own ignorance is a bitter pill to swallow, but its one everyone who wants to learn has to swallow sooner or later.

oh the irony

 

[ManTimeForgot]

Still not getting it.


The universe is finite. That doesn't matter. Reality may or may not be infinite, and is such a huge prospect that even speculating on it is guesswork at best (hubris at worst).


You think that's irony? What it is is that I am comfortable stating and knowing that I know pretty much jack about the universe and greater reality. I also fully accept that mankind is cousin to the ant when it comes to our place in the universe and greater reality. I know we have no clue what's going on. And while I don't exactly like being ignorant, I accept that this is the case.

Deal with it.

MTF

 

[Urlik]

and you are also missing the point.

this thread is about ETs that we can class as "Life As We Know It".
if there are pan dimensional beings (and there could be) then they have always been pan dimensional beings and from our viewpoint they would be omnipresent, so where are they.
they have nothing to fear as far as we are concerned so why are they hiding?
with their quintillion tech they could solve all our problems and help us establish colonies on suitable planets in other systems. they could broker treaties between us and other life forms in our universe and they could enforce those treaties.
so either they don't have any interest in us or they don't, at this time, exist (which means they never existed as they would also be able to manipulate time and therefore would be here now)

and yes I do think it is irony.
you tell us to accept our ignorance and then you invent gods.

Reality may or may not be infinite, and is such a huge prospect that even speculating on it is guesswork at best (hubris at worst).

you are the only person in this thread speculating about whether reality is infinite or not.
everyone else is happy to accept that we know we don't know everything, but until better evidence comes along, we'll use the working model that has been put together from several millenia of scientific triumphs and failures and base our assumptions on what we know to be the best possible evidence at this time.

we know that our 3 dimensional universe is finite. what is outside is irrelevent. it is as likely that the outside has no means of initiating interaction with the inside as the inside has of interacting with the outside. so for this argument we can discount it and that includes pan dimensional beings in the 11th parallel concommitant plane of foldingness.

as far as "life as we know it" goes, given that we have a pretty good idea of what conditions are necessery, we can narrow down the areas to look for life and planets that can support it (even if it hasn't evolved past the single cell stage).
given that only 10% of the stars that could have suitable planets are older than the Sun we can estimate that there aren't that many ETIs that are more advanced than us and those that are are probably spread out between the arms of the galaxy at roughly the same distance from the galatic hub as we are.
this would make contact rather difficult as the arms of the galaxy are not exactly hospitable and crossing them may be a greater undertaking than crossing the Atlantic on a lilo with no means of navigation.

I agree that, to the primitive, the technologically advanced would appear as gods and that this may have happened in our distant past, but we are no longer the primitives we once were (we now have flying chariots that can unleash destruction upon the unworthy) but just because we have advanced and are continuing to advance doesn't mean that technological advancement is infinite.

 

[skeptical]

To MTF

I think you may have misunderstood my point.
Sure we are far from understanding everything there is to know about everything.

However, that is no excuse to assume that anything is possible. It is not. An advanced civilisation will be able to do things we cannot. That almost goes without saying. However, that advanced ET will still not have a magic wand. It will have to live within the laws of physics. It is very, very unlikely to drink its soma from a cup made of pure energy. The cup will be matter, and its function immediately recognisable to one such as ourselves.

Stone age man made tools out of stone. We make them out of advanced alloys. But they are still the same shape (more or less) compared to the old stone tools. Advanced aliens will still use knives with blades we can immediately recognise as such.

The whole point is, magic aint real. A fantasy world of advanced technology still does not make magic real. They will have advanced technology, but it will not be magic.

 

[mosaix]

To MTF

The whole point is, magic aint real. A fantasy world of advanced technology still does not make magic real. They will have advanced technology, but it will not be magic.

Very good skeptical.

Once society gets beyond the point of believing in magic then it has to accept what it sees is technology.

 

[mosaix]

we don't actually know how much we don't know. if we knew how much, then we'd know what we were missing and have a pretty good idea what most of it was

Donald Rumsfeld anyone?

 

[Urlik]

Donald Rumsfeld anyone?

not before breakfast thank you

 

[ManTimeForgot]

Beyond a certain point there is no need to use knives. Beyond a certain point there is no need to use a hammer. You will utilize more energy efficient methods than the use of primitive tools.


You all keep claiming we will recognize ET's tools, but that is complete hubris. You are obviously thinking ET will always have fingers, hands, legs, or whatever that is going to make it similar to humans. Our best theorists on exobiology have flat out stated that the chances of ET being even remotely similar looking to humans is astronomically small.


Tools will be different for tentacle based aliens. Tools will be different for aquatic aliens. And after a certain point once you start "growing" your tools, fashioning them from paste (nano-scale construction/molecular arrangement), or utilize "self-assembling" structures (materials which "know" what arrangement they should be in and are like superconductors or magnets and strive towards that arrangement) you won't even need "tools" as such.



Just because something is a pan-dimensional being now does NOT mean it always has been. That is a patently ludicrous argument. If technology is how something achieved its transcendence out of the universe (transcending reality doesn't make sense, so you won't ever catch me stating that), then at some point it would have had to have been more mundane. Perhaps there are pan-dimensional beings that always have been (those don't necessarily have to be all that advanced just thought I would point that out) as in they are native to that state, but exactly HOW would we notice such a thing? I suppose you are claiming our supremely in depth knowledge of quantum reality would allow us to detect such a thing?


Urlik, you are making some pretty hefty assumptions about ET's psychology and general nature that just doesn't have any reasonable justification. What does ET have to fear from us? The oppositional question is why would ET care at all? Do you notice every ant that you come across or step on? And when you do notice an ant do you give the ant anything more than a passing thought? I'm guessing you are the kind of person to stop at every ant hill and try and fix all their problems? Why doesn't ET manifest and "solve all our problems?" How about: "What happens if that leads to greater disaster in the future if we aren't allowed to figure out how to solve such problems for our selves?" Perhaps something akin to the "Prime Directive" from Star Trek keeps advanced aliens from interferring with lesser species. Perhaps they don't care. Perhaps they are prevented from interferring by something greater than themselves. Perhaps it isn't worth the investment coming here for a galactic conqueror. Perhaps we don't have the first clue about it and speculating about it is about as likely to be correct as speculation on the surface temperature of a planet we haven't even discovered yet.


I'm not "inventing" anything. You take billions of galaxies and you get some race to have survived its intellectual onset a billion years before us (somewhere some species managed this, statistically speaking). That billion year science/tech advantage amounts to something truly monstrous. They almost certainly created their own private universe some time ago. Perhaps they are still here; observing, collecting stuff (whatever it is that ET's collect), researching, who knows really?

And just how exactly are we going to notice these giants of the cosmos? Our technology probably doesn't even interact with the level of reality that these aliens use? Perhaps there is some "apparently random" fluctuation in light beams or electron pathing that isn't actually random that could be used to detect such a thing (pure utter garbage level speculation), but when was the last time you heard about a single scientist (let alone the whole community) spending every waking moment studying a particle stream looking for anomolies caused by alien interaction (it really is as absurd as it sounds)? Perhaps it has been thousands or millions of years since ET entered into our sector of space. The tools/artifacts left behind might not even be in our 3 dimensional space or might have been completely organic and designed to break down/self-disassemble after a certain period of time. The Fermi Paradox is the same level of stupid hubris as the "Time Traveler Paradox." An infiltration expert from the 25th century using brain alteration, advanced cultural uptake techniques, more advanced espionage/data gathering techniques, etc is going to get noticed by us how exactly? Perhaps Time Travelers are only allowed to travel if they could not get noticed in the first place? The same thing might hold for aliens by galactic accord. You can only go some place if you wouldn't be noticed. Who knows?


I'm not suggesting I know for sure (I admit I am fairly confident, 90% confidence) that Super ET is out there (or time travelers for that matter). What I am trying to get you all to realize is that the assumption that we should know if ET is out there is monumental hubris. We aren't in a position of knowledge. We are in a position of ignorance. Exactly what are we going to compare to or contrast against in order to determine where, when, or what ET is? How do you know ET is going to interact with light or gravity anymore? You don't. How would you find ET's old tools? We haven't explored a percentage of space expressable as a fraction yet (technically it could be, but the fraction's denominator would take up more space than I have to post in). Needle in a haystack doesn't even come close. How do we even know what form the old tools will take? We don't because we don't have any clue what they will look like. What sort of tools would swarm aliens need/use and what form would they take? We don't have any idea because our planet's Bees haven't magically started building hammers!


The best we can do is try and be impartial observers and collectors of fact. Trying to make statements about something as large as our galaxy (let alone whole universe) while possessing knowledge as limited as our own (we have next to ZERO knowledge about light years worth of space in our galaxy let alone the billions of other galaxies themselves) is hubris of a level that words simply fail to describe the degree. If we someday hit the galactic lotto, then so be it. But I won't be holding my breath waiting for it.

MTF

 

[Urlik]

we don't even know if there are any other dimensions. even the best of the superstring theories only predicts them.

the predicted extra dimensions may not be connected to each other in the same way our 3 spatial dimensions are. each one could exist in isolation to the others.
we might find the hypothesised ETs less significant than ants as they are limited to a single dimention while we have 3 to work within.

or the extra dimensions could be branes, but if that is the case there is also no movement between them (if there was, then we would be able to interact with the zero, 1 and 2 dimension branes in the same way that you suggest "higher" dimensional beings can with ours.

either way, other intelligences within these dimensions, whether they exist or not, can effectively be dismissed.

the only ETs in our galaxy that are worth considering as possible are those that inhabit our 3(+1) dimensions and are "life as we know it" that has the basic drive to reproduce itself.
if it doesn't have this basic drive it can't evolve into a self aware intelligent being and we might as well stay here and try to communicate with bacteria

 

[skeptical]

The term 'other dimensions' is a bit misleading, anyway. A dimension is only a direction. It would be more correct and more meaningful to talk of other universes. According to string theory, there may be E500 universes other than our own. Most would be utterly alien, and instantly lethal to any inter-universal traveller. However, the number that ET could survive in would still be a very large number.

However, even if advanced aliens have learned to travel between universes, and have set up home in another universe - or another quintillion universes - they still have to deal with the same laws of physics when they visit this universe. Magic still don't work!

This means that tools, no matter how esoteric, still deal with the real world, and will conform to universal properties. A lever is still a lever, even if wielded by an alien squid.

One problem I have with the idea that ET is simply too altruistic to interfere with our world, is that ET probably visited long before advanced life existed on our world. Sure, according to the 'Prime Directive', ET might be prohibited from interfering with humanity - but ET (of one species or another) should have been around way back 1 billion years ago. When the Earth was populated by no more than oxygen generating slime, why did ET not colonise? Clearly, there was no ethical dilemma at that stage.

I still see the only viable answer as being that ET's are rare.

 

[Urlik]

I still see the only viable answer as being that ET's are rare.

either that or there are other obstacles to overcome.
when you look at the cost for us just to get into orbit, even a slight increase in the mass of the Earth would have a huge impact on the the cost to do this.
then to leave the solar system you have to break free of the Sun's gravitational field.
it could be that their home planet has too high an escape velocity for them to even consider travel within their system let alone emabark on an interstellar journey, or as in our history, some pioneering work was done but the cost became prohibitive in the long term.
if their sun is more massive than ours then they may be able to travel within their system but the cost is too high to leave it.

it could be that, like us, they haven't figured out a good method for dealing with cosmic rays outside a low planetary orbit.

the chances are that there is life as we know it out there, but there are too many obstacles in the way to make contact between intelligent life forms impossible on a practical level.

 

[skeptical]

To Urlik

The obstacles you are proposing are indeed real problems to humanity in today's world. However, if we consider them against a time factor of thousands of years, and the technological progress that should occur over that time, they will cease to be problems.

The much discussed space elevator is a theoretical possibility. It requires some technical development (mainly making lots of very long cheap buckytubes), and one hell of a lot of economic investment. However, both should be possible in the next 100 years. Once it is in place, leaving the Earth's gravity will be relatively easy.

Cosmic radiation is also a major problem today. However, there are numerous organisms that can handle that radiation and much more with ease. These are organisms that have DNA repair mechanisms that are much more effective than ours. In theory, we can carry out a minor genetic modification on humans, giving ourselves the ability to repair DNA rapidly, and tolerate all the cosmic rays in space no problem, and to become more resistant to cancer as a side benefit. Simple inheritance will ensure that the whole of Homo sapiens retains this ability, for ever after.

You suggest ET may have too big a gravity field to escape, or a sun too big. That is true. In fact, there are numerous reasons why a single species may never colonise other star systems. However, if there are many species of ET, those restrictions will not apply to all of them. Remember that the time scale we are talking about covers the last 2 to 3 billion years. If the ET optimists are correct, there must have been numerous intelligent species over that time period, and some of them must not have been restricted in these ways.

Which is why I believe that ET's are very rare.

 

[Urlik]

Which is why I believe that ET's are very rare.

I'll agree that ETs that manage to leave their system and explore the galaxy are rare for one reason or another, but I also expect that there are many more in various stages of development that never have or will leave their systems