Well, that's what happens when you use a **** phone.
What I attempted to say was - No, you don't need to explain Fermi. Have a plausible and effective method of ftl travel in your story and it brings the galaxy together, much like Star Trek.
Do You Need to Explain the Fermi Paradox?
- Thread starter Blackrook
- Start date
Well, that's what happens when you use a **** phone.
What I attempted to say was - No, you don't need to explain Fermi. Have a plausible and effective method of ftl travel in your story and it brings the galaxy together, much like Star Trek.
J Riff
The Ants are my friends..
Aliens come here, way out here in the sticks? Gawrsh.
The only scenario that makes real sense is not a pretty one.
Creatures bred or grown to sit in a spacecraft for decades at a time.
Creatures who can withstand huge G forces.
Intelligence at the level of a monkey would be sufficient to run the largely-automated ship.
They would be shopping for something, and lifeforms would be it.
There is a lot of radiation, gamma and otherwise, back towards galactic central, and that's where teeming life will be found.
All this logic is fine - but life is not logical. It will find a way, even if it takes a million years, and it will evolve to the next step and the next.
It can't NOT do this, to the limits of its environment.
Whatever happened to the silicon-based lifeforms? They were quite popular a while back.
The only scenario that makes real sense is not a pretty one.
Creatures bred or grown to sit in a spacecraft for decades at a time.
Creatures who can withstand huge G forces.
Intelligence at the level of a monkey would be sufficient to run the largely-automated ship.
They would be shopping for something, and lifeforms would be it.
There is a lot of radiation, gamma and otherwise, back towards galactic central, and that's where teeming life will be found.
All this logic is fine - but life is not logical. It will find a way, even if it takes a million years, and it will evolve to the next step and the next.
It can't NOT do this, to the limits of its environment.
Whatever happened to the silicon-based lifeforms? They were quite popular a while back.
I have a particular universe view which provides a background for a number of SF stories I've written/WIP's. Basically, we develop FTL travel, humanity goes to the stars and finds....bugger all. Yes, 'M' class worlds, alien flora and fauna, but no intelligent life nor any signs of a civilization been and gone.
There is a big initial burst of colonisation, based on the lure of the new and unknown, but as it becomes apparent we exist in splendid isolation, a 'why bother?' attitude begins to take hold. This leads to tension between those advocating further exploration/colonisation, and those who would rather see resources used to develop what we already have.
I take the position that passive detection of an alien civilization would be almost impossible, unless they are camped right on our doorstep, galactically speaking. If you went out 50, a 100, light-years from Earth and found nothing, would you continue to look? Even an automated (FTL probe-based) search would be expensive, and increasingly hard to justify.
There is a big initial burst of colonisation, based on the lure of the new and unknown, but as it becomes apparent we exist in splendid isolation, a 'why bother?' attitude begins to take hold. This leads to tension between those advocating further exploration/colonisation, and those who would rather see resources used to develop what we already have.
I take the position that passive detection of an alien civilization would be almost impossible, unless they are camped right on our doorstep, galactically speaking. If you went out 50, a 100, light-years from Earth and found nothing, would you continue to look? Even an automated (FTL probe-based) search would be expensive, and increasingly hard to justify.
No, you don't need to explain it, or even mention it. I couldn't even begin to count the number of SF books I have read that didn't mention Fermi at all, and it never once occurred to me to ask why.
I think it's safe to say that there are probably other worlds out there with lifeforms doing essentially the same thing that we are doing -- living life on a planet, visiting its satellite(s), planning longer trips, but never getting anywhere near anything that would lead them to discover little old us, out in the backwaters of a far-off galaxy. It's a big universe. Even if (when) we get around to being able to go humongous distances in space, there are still an awful lot of directions to try. Where is everybody? That's probably what they're saying about us.
And since I am capable of holding many conflicting points of view simultaneously, I would also say that I'm not convinced that some of those people out there haven't already been here.
I think it's safe to say that there are probably other worlds out there with lifeforms doing essentially the same thing that we are doing -- living life on a planet, visiting its satellite(s), planning longer trips, but never getting anywhere near anything that would lead them to discover little old us, out in the backwaters of a far-off galaxy. It's a big universe. Even if (when) we get around to being able to go humongous distances in space, there are still an awful lot of directions to try. Where is everybody? That's probably what they're saying about us.
And since I am capable of holding many conflicting points of view simultaneously, I would also say that I'm not convinced that some of those people out there haven't already been here.
J Riff
The Ants are my friends..
There's a SF story, called, I think, The Void - which is similar to Reiver's concept. Mankind explores the entire Milky Way, and other galaxies, and finds nothing.
The only option left is to cross 'The Void', which is thousands of times further than they have travelled before.
It will take all the resources left to Man to cross the Void, and people argue and fight until finally it is decided to not bother, and put the energy into fixing up the Earth instead.
I think, hope we will find that life exists in the galactic core, and the aliems sent ships out every which way starting millions of years ago.
Also... the building blocks of life itself could have been seeded, deliberately spread to many planets, aeons ago, which may help explain the 'irreducible complexity' part of the evolution argument.
Still, the strongest argument for Aliens, to my mind, is the word-of-mouth stories passed down, and the drawings and carvings.
I don't think ancient folks had the imagination to make all that stuff up. Snake heads, giants, people from the sky, etc.- in widely-separated locations, spanning centuries. They saw something.
The only option left is to cross 'The Void', which is thousands of times further than they have travelled before.
It will take all the resources left to Man to cross the Void, and people argue and fight until finally it is decided to not bother, and put the energy into fixing up the Earth instead.
I think, hope we will find that life exists in the galactic core, and the aliems sent ships out every which way starting millions of years ago.
Also... the building blocks of life itself could have been seeded, deliberately spread to many planets, aeons ago, which may help explain the 'irreducible complexity' part of the evolution argument.
Still, the strongest argument for Aliens, to my mind, is the word-of-mouth stories passed down, and the drawings and carvings.
I don't think ancient folks had the imagination to make all that stuff up. Snake heads, giants, people from the sky, etc.- in widely-separated locations, spanning centuries. They saw something.
Interference
Destroyer of Words
One artist with an imagination every couple of hundred years, several thousand miles apart. Is that really so difficult to believe?
Lucky_Lola
Hopeless Dreamer
Jung's Collective Unconscious.
We survive and evolve thanks to pattern recognition (among many, many other things), and certain commonalities continually crop up over and over again. Take for example the archetype of the Trickster God in ancient mythology... Hermes, Coyote, Maui of the New Zealand Maori. Seemingly unconnected peoples telling stories with more than a few common features.
But I'm going off on a tangent. Great thread, and a really interesting discussion
J Riff
The Ants are my friends..
You can argue that you'd have to impress a primitive person very deeply in order to get him to record any event at all. Art was not even a concept. The ancient stone cities had no markings on them.
Sitting around in one of these huge structures thousands of years ago, drawing weird pictures or making carvings of something that didn't exist, is actually harder to believe than: Somebody saw someting like this.
Artifacts can be faked, texts, history books, any of it. People are downright weird, so history is about as reliable as the Fermi paradox.
|Still, the more astronomers figure out what's what out there re: planets, the more accurate the Fermi Guess will become.
Sitting around in one of these huge structures thousands of years ago, drawing weird pictures or making carvings of something that didn't exist, is actually harder to believe than: Somebody saw someting like this.
Artifacts can be faked, texts, history books, any of it. People are downright weird, so history is about as reliable as the Fermi paradox.
|Still, the more astronomers figure out what's what out there re: planets, the more accurate the Fermi Guess will become.
But "saw" doesn't have to mean it existed in reality. If you had a mindset that believed everything possessed a spirit, it would be quite possible to "see" human/animal compound entities under the influence of psychotropic substances, which were probably used a fair bit.
Though that wouldn't explain the Sirius-B Dogon mystery.
That's exactly why the galactic core will not be teeming with life. The scientific community is pretty much in agreement that any kind of life would struggle to survive in those levels of radiation and gravitional forces (orbits would be massively erratic creating much much higher chances of meteor and comet collisions). Which is why they talk about a Galactic Habitable Zone.
http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/news/expandnews.cfm?id=831
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/139/galactic-habitable-zones
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/G/galactic_habitable_zone.html
Whatever happened to the silicon-based lifeforms? They were quite popular a while back.
I am extremely dubious of silicon life forms. There are none on earth and yet we have loads of silicon. Why would that be?
The only "alternative" life that we have found as far as I'm aware is one single bacteria that uses arsenic instead of Phosphorus (http://gizmodo.com/5704158/nasa-finds-new-life). However it is still a carbon based life.
In fact if we start looking at different types of life I tend to become even less optimistic about finding other life out there. All life on Earth shares such an incredibly similar common base (DNA etc.). So similar that we can splice DNA from any plant or animal into any other plant or animal (never mind the ethics for now
). Scientists now believe that all life on Earth is descended from a single cell (not sure where the above mentioned bacteria comes in that one): http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100513-science-evolution-darwin-single-ancestor/This would suggest that there has only been a single "creation" event and that all life followed that. There is no evidence of any other kind of life existing on Earth. No evidence of any "battle for supremecy" between competing different forms of life. If this is truly the case then I think it reduces the chance of finding other life out there quite significantly.
I still don't rule it out and I would love to be proved wrong but I'm not optimistic.
Sapheron
Making no sense.
- Joined
- Nov 9, 2006
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- 850
Actually, currently a lot of evolutionary scientists believe there may have been several events in which life began. The idea is a great source of contention in the academic field.
Your mentioned bacteria (which incidentally is therefore not a bacteria, or it would be related to all the other bacteria, and thus, us) is currently thought to be a second life origin. All life finds arsenic poisonous, besides that one, suggesting it is a different source.
In the same way, the lack of silicon based life here is completeley plausible through evolutionary concepts. In the early days of life (a time spanning a couple of billion years or so), competition between microbial life forms which leave no real fossil evidence could have wiped them out, leaving nothing for us to find to know about them. Alternatively, by the chances of life coming about, they just might not have happened here.
You say there is no evidence of a 'battle for supremacy', but in the scale of the history of life we only have reasonable quantities of evidence for the last small part of it. Cambrian organisms, for a long time believed to be the first, are now believed merely to be the earliest preserved due to rising abundance and the expansion of hard parts as a common feature. The Cambrian was only 500 million years ago. Who knows what happened in the two billion before that?
Of course, I don't claim silicate lifeforms are likely to have been around, but they may have been, and I see little reason to rule them out as a potential thing to find elsewhere.
Nor, in fact, do I see any reason to believe that forms of life or sentience which we have not considered can't be out there. For a long time the greatest scientists in the world believed that organisms could not survive in the deepest oceans, but we have found extension communities around black smoker vents. In a similar way, no one expected to find life clinging to cracks in the rock five kilometres down in the Earth's crust, but find them we did in the deepest mines we have ever dug.
Almost the point and purpose of life is to expand, to innovate, and to spread into other environments which are yet uninhabited. From single marine cells Earth now has a population that can fly as high as a jet aircraft and burrow as deep down as humans can mine. That's all done without a shred of sentience. Humans have managed to get to the moon, and soon hope to have dug down to the mantle. If all this can happen in the few billion years of our own Earth's existence, then I find myself sceptical of any theory that proposes that the galaxy is otherwise void of life.
Your mentioned bacteria (which incidentally is therefore not a bacteria, or it would be related to all the other bacteria, and thus, us) is currently thought to be a second life origin. All life finds arsenic poisonous, besides that one, suggesting it is a different source.
In the same way, the lack of silicon based life here is completeley plausible through evolutionary concepts. In the early days of life (a time spanning a couple of billion years or so), competition between microbial life forms which leave no real fossil evidence could have wiped them out, leaving nothing for us to find to know about them. Alternatively, by the chances of life coming about, they just might not have happened here.
You say there is no evidence of a 'battle for supremacy', but in the scale of the history of life we only have reasonable quantities of evidence for the last small part of it. Cambrian organisms, for a long time believed to be the first, are now believed merely to be the earliest preserved due to rising abundance and the expansion of hard parts as a common feature. The Cambrian was only 500 million years ago. Who knows what happened in the two billion before that?
Of course, I don't claim silicate lifeforms are likely to have been around, but they may have been, and I see little reason to rule them out as a potential thing to find elsewhere.
Nor, in fact, do I see any reason to believe that forms of life or sentience which we have not considered can't be out there. For a long time the greatest scientists in the world believed that organisms could not survive in the deepest oceans, but we have found extension communities around black smoker vents. In a similar way, no one expected to find life clinging to cracks in the rock five kilometres down in the Earth's crust, but find them we did in the deepest mines we have ever dug.
Almost the point and purpose of life is to expand, to innovate, and to spread into other environments which are yet uninhabited. From single marine cells Earth now has a population that can fly as high as a jet aircraft and burrow as deep down as humans can mine. That's all done without a shred of sentience. Humans have managed to get to the moon, and soon hope to have dug down to the mantle. If all this can happen in the few billion years of our own Earth's existence, then I find myself sceptical of any theory that proposes that the galaxy is otherwise void of life.
I would certainly not claim any expertise in this field at all but I would be interested to know how they reconcile complete compatability between the DNA of all existing life with the notion that it stems from several different creation events. It would seem to be staggeringly unlikely for a second life creation event to create a mechanism completely compatible with any other life.
And as I say I don't rule anything out, you are correct of course that much of the history of life on Earth is completely lost with no record. However, supposing there had been, sometime in the distant past, a totally different lifeform based on say silicon then I would be extremely surprised to hear that it had been completely elliminated by carbon based life, leaving no strands existing in any niches anywhere in the environment. I can accept that it might have happened, I just consider it far far more likely that there never was anything other than carbon based life. And, supposing that there had been other life forms that did get totally elliminated then it would suggest that carbon based life is so far superior that it is had to imagine it losing such a battle anywhere else. As I understand it (and again I'm no expert) but since silicon is a heavier element than carbon you would be extremely unlikely to find a planet rich in silicon and poor in carbon in fact the reverse is probably much more likely.
And as I say I don't rule anything out, you are correct of course that much of the history of life on Earth is completely lost with no record. However, supposing there had been, sometime in the distant past, a totally different lifeform based on say silicon then I would be extremely surprised to hear that it had been completely elliminated by carbon based life, leaving no strands existing in any niches anywhere in the environment. I can accept that it might have happened, I just consider it far far more likely that there never was anything other than carbon based life. And, supposing that there had been other life forms that did get totally elliminated then it would suggest that carbon based life is so far superior that it is had to imagine it losing such a battle anywhere else. As I understand it (and again I'm no expert) but since silicon is a heavier element than carbon you would be extremely unlikely to find a planet rich in silicon and poor in carbon in fact the reverse is probably much more likely.
People could design wheels with a number of different shapes. After a while, the ones being used (as opposed to being examples of "art"), would generally be circular. If the way the DNA system works is superior to that of other types, then where the DNA system has emerged, it would predominate. (And after four billion years, would be all that was left.) Now it may be that there's an even more superior system out there, one that never emerged on Earth. That would dominate, to the point of being the only system in us, wherever it arose.
And yes, I know that this is a bit of a circular argument (), because my definition of the DNA's superiority is that it's able to outperform (no pun intended) other systems to the extent that it enables organisms using it to better adapt to whatever environments become available, damning the users of other genetic systems to extinction.
And yes, I know that this is a bit of a circular argument (
), because my definition of the DNA's superiority is that it's able to outperform (no pun intended) other systems to the extent that it enables organisms using it to better adapt to whatever environments become available, damning the users of other genetic systems to extinction.
Yes I can accept that Ursa, but if there is another system that is far superior to carbon based and if life is abundant out there (which after all is what this discussion seems focused on at the moment) then the chances of it not appearing here and "defeating" carbon based life seems again extremely unlikely. OK so maybe it is only far superior in a totally different environment. I don't think available elements would be a valid argument for the lack of such life, as I gather that in galactic terms we are pretty lucky on Earth with the abundance of almost all elements from light to heavy). We have also examined extremes of environment both on Earth, Mars, Venus and Titan; OK not in any great depth but our probes were not exactly overrun by the local life. And sure, here on Earth we have found life hanging on in some pretty extreme environments but whenever the environment gets that extreme we have never found any really complex life or abundance of it.
Now who's to say that might not be the case elsewhere in the universe? Well certainly not me; how could I know? It's just that everything we do know seems to me to indicate the the probabilities are becoming increasingly small.
You saying that? Can I mark that in my diary
Now who's to say that might not be the case elsewhere in the universe? Well certainly not me; how could I know? It's just that everything we do know seems to me to indicate the the probabilities are becoming increasingly small.
You saying that? Can I mark that in my diary
I wasn't talking about carbon- versus non-carbon-based life, only that the observation that the DNA system is universal (in our limited experience) doesn't mean that life emerged only once on Earth. It may have emerged more than once, but those emergences not based on the DNA system could have died out before they could leave a trace that we could find today. The DNA-system-based ones could (and may) have survived, and the fact that they all use the DNA-system is no reason to believe that they all had a common ancestor. (On top of that, I'm sure the DNA system would be as subject to convergent evolution as anything else using DNA.)
But DNA is so complex (it goes way beyond just the simple double helix generally portrayed) that surely the chances of two DNA like systems emerging independently and being able to "exchange components" is less likely than all the atoms of my body jumping two feet to the left at exactly the same instant.
. But not significantly.
On the defeated life form idea. Fine I have no problem with it being another carbon based lifeform that might have been "defeated" but my original argument still holds; if there are no remaining strands of that other life form in any niche anywhere in our environment then again it suggests total superiority of the life form we have. Consequently it is difficult (though maybe not impossible) to come up with another environment where that other approach dominates.
I am just talking about probabilities and we can only base that on what we know so far. In all the enviroments that we have so far examined we have only found this one form of carbon based DNA life. Period. Absolutely no trace of anything else... at all (even the asenic one was still carbon based - the arsenic just replaced phosphorus). And whilst we obviously haven't managed to examine anything outside our solar system so far, we have had a look at some pretty extreme environments which as I say have turned up some small amounts of not very complex life. So if no other better suited life form has taken hold in those places then I have to say I think the probabilities diminish of finding anything other than carbon based life out there.
OK maybe that's a little more likely than my suggestion
. But not significantly.On the defeated life form idea. Fine I have no problem with it being another carbon based lifeform that might have been "defeated" but my original argument still holds; if there are no remaining strands of that other life form in any niche anywhere in our environment then again it suggests total superiority of the life form we have. Consequently it is difficult (though maybe not impossible) to come up with another environment where that other approach dominates.
I am just talking about probabilities and we can only base that on what we know so far. In all the enviroments that we have so far examined we have only found this one form of carbon based DNA life. Period. Absolutely no trace of anything else... at all (even the asenic one was still carbon based - the arsenic just replaced phosphorus). And whilst we obviously haven't managed to examine anything outside our solar system so far, we have had a look at some pretty extreme environments which as I say have turned up some small amounts of not very complex life. So if no other better suited life form has taken hold in those places then I have to say I think the probabilities diminish of finding anything other than carbon based life out there.
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Interference
Destroyer of Words
Wouldn't that just be called "jumping to the left"?
jojajihisc
vast and cool
- Joined
- Oct 30, 2008
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- 745
That's how I think of it too. "Fermi's query," or "Fermi's reservation," or even "Fermi's question-in-regards-to-observable-life-in-our-universe-as-we-know it." I never have understood how lack of evidence of extra-terrestrial life is taken to mean evidence for their non-existence. The truth is we exist in an empirical neutral ground without the ability to say definitively either one is the case. We do have the Earth though which seems to imply that if life can exist here why not elsewhere?
I agree with you on that 100% J. However the problem I have is that the frequent response seems to be that as there is no proof there is no other life out there, there must be, just because it's such a big universe. Well to a certain degree I actually agree with that as well, but... my argument is that I suspect that the conditions required for life to thrive and produce complex, even intelligent, life might just be an awful lot rarer than we might hope. And the lack of any evidence to the contrary whilst not proving that assertion does seem to support it.
I wondered if someone would come up with that!
I wondered if someone would come up with that!
MstrTal
Valeyard
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2011
- Messages
- 622
UG this is making my head hurt.
Mostly because Now I NEED to watch the Rocky Horror Picture Show again! You have gone and gotten the Timewarp stuck in my head.
The debate about life on Mars aside I would say if you feel your work is better off with it than throw it in. If your work is better off without it than leave it by the wayside.
Now I must go and dig out my copy of RHPS and put on a Floor Show.
Mostly because Now I NEED to watch the Rocky Horror Picture Show again! You have gone and gotten the Timewarp stuck in my head.
The debate about life on Mars aside I would say if you feel your work is better off with it than throw it in. If your work is better off without it than leave it by the wayside.
Now I must go and dig out my copy of RHPS and put on a Floor Show.
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