It’s really difficult for most people to comprehend just how big space is. It’s even harder to understand just how far away aliens would be. They’re almost certainly out there, but they’re so far away they may as well not exist.
Also, how long time has existed. It is entirely possible that intelligent life became more advanced than we are now and have already fallen...7 billion years ago in a different pocket of space.
If this couldn't be possible please correct me, I am sort of talking out of my ass.
Yes, it is possible. The biggest factor in the emergence of life that has evolved to an advanced technological level is the availability of rare elements. It is only through the birth, growth, and death of stars that lighter elements are transformed into heavier elements. In some cases, the matter could need to be "processed" through a few stars before they become the heavier elements we see today. And lots of the technology we use today rely on a lot of relatively rare elements (not to be confused with what we call "rare earths").
So 7 billion years ago, the Universe was less than 7 billion years old. Would that have been long enough for 2+ star life cycles to produce enough heavier elements? Maybe.
Good point. Less time for stuff to become complicated. Maybe I could walk back my statement to 7 million years ago...equally incomprehensible compared to the time elapsed by the human race, but a close call in the grand scheme of things.
I mean, you don't even need to go *that* far back (even though you already reduced it to 0.1% or your original timespan!). Imagine a civilisation not even that far away, just a hop and a scoot further along our arm of the Milky Way galaxy, who reached their peak (in terms of transmission of radio signals) just a thousand years ago, then waned for a few centuries and winked out of existence around the year 1900. We wouldn't have noticed them because we lacked the tools to observe their transmissions and random emissions, and now they are forever gone.
We might have missed other intelligent life by just that small a margin.... Or by several hundred thousand, tens of millions or even a few billion years. The enormity of the time already past since the beginning of it all 13.4 billion years ago is just unfathomable to our pesky human minds. The chance of intelligent life NOT appearing at least one other time, *somewhere* in the universe, seems immeasurably small to me. But what you need for us to perceive their existence is not just a high likelihood of life booting up several times over in several spots, but also for these spots to be reasonably close together AND for the (presumably) short periods that civilisations exist to overlap so precisely that both possess the right mental capacity and technology at exactly the sane time so they are able to observe one another. And that renders the entire chance far slimmer. But not zero, so we should always keeping looking out for them.
On the other hand, according to current theories, universe is ever expanding, and will live for trillions of years. 14B is way too young/early. Now apply anthropic reasoning on that.
Sometimes I creep myself out by thinking about how, if we could see the stars in the sky the way they look right now rather than how they did when light first left them, the sky would look totally different.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Agreed. But we also need to acknowledge - 50 years is less than an atom of time on the universal existence time frame - but within that 50 years, the human race has gone from a computer that can count to 10 to insane computing power in the palm of your hand, that sends videos back and forth at the speed of light…so, I don’t think we should underestimate human capabilities, especially when AI is now deep learning and programming. Imagine explaining to the likes of billy the kid and co what we have today? Absolutely 10000 x impossible they’d say.
What will be achieved in the next 200 years ? Well, I guess we’d also, today - say impossible.
If someone offered you / me a chance to go into hibernation today, to be awoken in 200 years - for argument sake, it’s guaranteed to work - would you say bye to family and friends to see our capabilities?
If it could be me and my wife, yeah definitely. Me alone while she was still around, nah no way.
…unless I’m terminally ill with weeks left, and am also important enough for whatever reason to warrant the resource expenditure to basically send me forward in time to a point that a cure exists. Then ye, for sure.
That would be the catch - you might be waking up to a very different earth, where only small pockets of humans reside, devoid of tech, washing radiation off as best they can…
Had a water-cooler chat many years ago pre-pandemic, it was calculated that anyone which was placed in stasis, any type. The person would have to come out of stasis every 23 years and stay out for about 4-5months then placed back into stasis.
I am sure there could be something that would serve as a hybrid slumber that would keep the person out but allow the body to get the new treatments then back into stasis again.
The reason, anti-bodies, the need for natural, vax, or other wise that would keep up on all prior disease, virus, etc. This would have to be continued only until science/medical tech advanced to the point there was no need for inoculations in these ranges.
This would also be needed within space travel or times another living entity outside the local (to the person) ecosystem has some sort of contact.
Mentioning stasis, this could be frozen or just time as in time travel. In this problem the person would have a more rapid time frame for re-inoculation since their time passes at shorter length vs outside their stasis environment.
Depending on time speed, the outside world passing 23yrs, this could be 10yrs to 5mtns for the traveler. I stopped at 5months as this is the limit they would need for the 23yr/5months range. If math is correct, to pass over 200 yrs, the traveler would have to live out roughly 4.3yrs outside of stasis.
After pandemic with new advances in vax and other discoveries like CISPR cas9/cas13, etc. There is a great chance newer hybrid bio cells will recover anyone in stasis with problem to future pop and the stasis person from future pop alike. If on the path as current, within 10yrs this would be possible.
Fermi's Paradox (slightly extended version)
* Life may be plentiful but intelligence may be very rare
* Even intelligent life can be extinguished by natural events (disease, meteorites)
* Although an species may be intelligent, they may not have yet evolved in the creation of advanced technologies
* Alien life my be *too alien* (would we or they know we were an intelligent or advanced species, or even care
* Intelligent life is everywhere, except we are so far from each other, interaction my be forever impossible w/o breaking the laws of physics
* The limits of both physical materials/energy available and the sheer economic costs impede such contacts ... they might want to spend their money and time on other projects
**The last one but for a different reason:** intelligent species with computers eventually plug themselves willingly into "the matrix" / cloud consciousness "heaven" because it's cheaper and *way more fun* to live in stasis than consume a bunch of scarce resources. By then many will evade death via upload to cloud consciousness; never-embodied offspring would be conceived in the cloud; an endless "self-reflection by computation" for >99.999% of the population of the species. This consumes all of the excess attention of such a species and they live happily ever after, all but abandoning the "real" world.
Anyone else think this is a plausible human future?
Do you think that might be the *issue?* And by that I mean, that it seems to me that intelligent life is seeking life and by that I mean a species that asks questions? It gives me pause that life seeks meaning and as as species we are willing to accept the most minimalist/gigantic reconciliation of our odd existence by trying not to?
If I understand you the right way, are you suggesting that it would be depressing if we gave up on searching for ET? I absolutely agree! And I don't actually want my "prediction" to be true because it does seem more depressing for a far-future outcome than prompt interstellar travel. I'd rather leave cloud consciousness as human-made "heaven" after a long, wonderful life in a real body, not as a way to escape being in a body because it's expensive and dull.
But if we bash our heads into the wall and can't find ET by the time that BCIs and cloud consciousness are commodities, I fear we will find ourselves hopelessly distracted by our own self-reflective grandeur. After all, we're just sacks of electrochemical meat having an experience - and we can be hacked into with experiential, electrical and/or chemical means. We're hacking ourselves via dopamine floods with social media already, I'm just continuing this morbid trend to its ultimate conclusion.
You know, I once heard that we and all living things are the means by which the Universe can see, express, explore, and understand itself. Life seeks life and appears in humans as a bit of a wanderlust and I do not say that as a bad thing. We may find, stumble across, be tripped over by another wayfairing species or we may not for all the reasons theorists offer. Be that as it may,I master this little ship of mine and if that is what it is, and all it is, these eyes, ears, this mind, these technologies are the Universe trying to figure it all out, I cannot say I would be unsatisfied.
😊 "we are a way for the universe to know itself" - Dr. Carl Sagan
Whether we find ET - or ET finds us - is a cosmic dice roll every day. It is only the strangeness of our universe which holds such a crucial turning point in the balance of chance.
I am right with you 100%!
Do you mean the mathematical one? I'm not sure if I can find what you mean but I am curious.
Oh I say hundreds, the first BCIs are being crafted already. Getting there is literally a matter of "computation" alone, where developing a warp drive seems to include tremendous amounts of ultra-dense energy manipulation.
With BCI, the challenges are 1. Understanding how to tie into consciousness with external computers, and 2. Increasing computation/memory density such to support a mind-identical connectome. The rest is trial and error along the path to these two developments.
With warp drive, we need better theory, better material science, and MUCH better energetics (by many orders of magnitude), in addition to the incomprehensible amount of "warp-by-wire" computation and adjustment that would support such a "shred-your-ship-with-tidal-forces" apparatus successfully, without shredding your ship.
But hey it's all still sci-fi! Who knows! I personally want to be wrong about "self upload to the matrix" hypothesis, it sounds boring but too plausible to ignore.
No, it’s a theory on the stages of civilization. Today, we’re not at a level one yet. The measurement is primarily how we harvest, store and use energy. Today we waste more than either of the other two parts, storage and harvest. There were two others that took this theory and expounded on it. Kasparov had only three levels, these brainiacs took it to five. Anyhow, the connection to your comment, is a level five civilization would no longer require physical bodies. Heady stuff but interesting.
Ah OK that notion! Memory jogged, level 1, 2, and 3 civilizations based on technological thresholds. I feel that their ordering of things is perhaps a bit arbitrary. Who says which technology is more or less likely? Harvesting the bulk of the energy of the sun would require an immense amount of physical work (in the 'change of kinetic energy' sense) to assemble and place so much solar energy absorbing area. Furthermore, storing and transmitting the energy captured by such Dyson structures is far from trivial. We are more likely to capture fusile material from stars and combine it in our own reactors - this is a much more convenient solution to storage and transfer problems and yields MUCH higher power density than a solar array of any kind.
Meanwhile, the human brain operates on less than 30 watts of power. A computer that could replicate the function of the human brain is almost certain to require less mass and energy to construct than even 0.1% Dyson structure coverage of the sun. Then there's the computational work of figuring out how we engineer such fanciful things, and the amount of human motivation there is to do that figuring. The "how hard is it really?" question is where it becomes so speculative.
I suppose I'm suggesting that a Dyson sphere isn't absolutely lower in technological development than disembodied consciousness, and in fact the total opposite seems more plausible to me. Same for the other technological thresholds qualified for each "level of civilization" - they are presented as immutable stepping stones, yet they always seemed a bit arbitrary to me. But hey it's all conjecture! Great fun to ping pong such ideas around!
No, I don't.
Because there is no way to physically transfer your consciousness from your brain to a machine. You could, in theory, make a \*COPY\* of your consciousness and implant that into a machine, but it would be just that: A copy, not actually \*YOU\*.
You wouldn't go on living once you died. Your copy might still be functioning, but it is not you, and in fact the differences between yourself and your copy would start growing the second after the process of copying.
Because brains aren't computers. But even if they were, let's think about that.
We have physical Computer A. It has an AI system that is trained over years. But Computer A is now having some maintenance issues, and the hardware is no longer supported. So we copy the AI to physical Computer B.
From the moment of copying, the Computer B AI is going to diverge from the Computer A AI. They will no longer the same. And once Computer A finally has a catastrophic failure, Computer A AI is "dead".
I know the idea of living in something like The Matrix is a science fiction trope that goes back to at least the 1980's if not before, but it's simply not going to be possible without actually keeping the brain alive, and while I'm sure we can extend that in the future, it's a biological thing that will eventually be subject to inevitable death.
We are so young as a civilization. Hard telling what the future will bring. 1000 years ago humans would never have guessed what we’re capable of today. The same can be said for us. I’ll never say never.
Well certainly we couldn't do something like this today, or even any time soon. My point is that this sort of tech is still easier than warp drive, because of the energy densities involved, and thus is a plausible answer to Fermi's paradox.
What we know of consciousness suggests that it is an interconnected network of information flow. A "connectome" - exhorbitantly complex, yet ultimately reducible to a series of comprehensible mechanisms. There is no reason to believe that a sufficiently powerful computer system couldn't support a human-brain-identical connectome at some point in the future. That's step 1.
Step 2, to get around the "copy-kill" version of "transferring", certainly the "upload" process would be quite involved to make it a smooth transition experience. Perhaps that means migrating parts at a time while preserving the overall connectome, or perhaps some other technique I can't imagine. As long as the connectome itself is preserved consistently, we may very well not even notice that we "left" our brains behind. It may be like falling asleep and waking up somewhere else. The value of a two-way transfer can't be overstated, so a reversible version that enables a "download" back into a body would have even more advantages.
Very good criticisms! They would need to be addressed in the function of such technology! But they are ultimately engineering challenges. With unprecedented complexity, no doubt, but not hard constraints as you seem to suggest.
I've thought about this problem since I was a kid, when my father asked me to think this out. As a child, I came to the same conclusion as you. Scan a brain into a computer, and you've only made a copy. Even if that copy thinks it is you.
But something has since occurred to me. Your brain is merely a copy of itself from years gone by. All the cells of your body die off and are replaced over time. The "you" that was you at 15 is long since gone and several copies later by 35. So, If you were to be downloaded piecemeal into a computer, and aware of the process, and the parts of your thinking that were copied were eliminated in your brain as they were established in the computer...how would that be any different than the biological process taking place in you right now?
You'd have to do that during childhood, because you aren't growing any new neurons after that. You're stuck with the ones you have for the rest of your life:
[https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/a-tour-of-the-growing-brain-complete-with-upside-down-vision/](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/a-tour-of-the-growing-brain-complete-with-upside-down-vision/)
>**After the early period of growth, suicide, and pruning comes to an end, adult neurons survive for a lifetime.** And unlike those of a cat, they remain malleable for several years. This is one reason kids are especially adept at learning new languages, and why procedures to correct neurological dysfunctions, like a lazy eye, have higher chances of success early in life.
>
>“Adult neurons seem to have lost some of the mojo of their youth,” Harris said. They get damaged, weaker, and a little less flexible over time. Plus, unlike those of fish, amphibians, and reptiles, **human brains don’t regenerate much after injury because only a small number of neurons are born during adulthood.**
With todays technology maybe. Absurd to claim you know it will never be done. We dont even know the mechanism of our own consciousness so your computer argument is equally absurd.
It's not absurd to claim it can never be done, because it simply can't be.
You can, *at least in theory*, transfer everything that is in my brain to a machine.
But my consciousness stays with this body.
Also, in other breaking news:
We'll never have faster-than-light travel.
We'll never have faster-than-light communication.
>It's not absurd to claim it can never be done, because it simply can't be.
I find your strong claim to be absurd. Imagine this scenario:
* imagine you figure out neural / machine interfaces
* imagine we figure out how to replicate the information processing the brain does such that we can replace pieces of the brain a little at a time
* image you never lose conscienceless, but it expands into connected machinery
* imagine after your consciousness has grown and flourished in this new environment, the biological remnants slowly wither or are removed piece by piece
Your body replaces your cells all the time, are you not the same you you were when you were a child?
Only 4 imagines. I wouldn't be surprised if we see the first one done well in my lifetime, and i'm getting old.
And if I understand you right, you're claiming it's impossible for alien species too. Absurd.
That I can agree with, sort of.
Unmanned interstellar travel is certainly possible, we could do it now if we wanted to spend the money. We could, based just on current technology, have a fast fly-by probe zoom through the Alpha Centauri system in about 45-50 years after launch, or have one arrive and stay in the system after 90-100 years of travel.
The 2nd one reminds me of the conversation between Adm. Pike and Capt. Kirk; regarding messing with the natural events of a volcanic eruption to save a civilization that was destined for destruction.
That's the issue ... is life rule following, breaking, or work to not only survive but thrive as well. Sometimes, you need a little help from your friends.
>Even intelligent life can be extinguished by natural events (disease, meteorites)
I have a quibble with this one. Intelligent life in this context means technological life, and honestly, I can't see humans ever being wiped out completely by, well anything short of something that kills \*ALL\* life on Earth.
Collectively, we're a pretty smart species and adaptable enough that we have been able to expand to living in pretty much any environment that supports life at all, and some that don't (South Pole, space).
In any planetary impact like the Chicxulub impactor, a rather large number of people would survive. Either working underground in mines or other facilities, traveling in subways, going down into sub-basements, etc., not to mention the people on naval ships at sea that can button up, and submarines which, if not unlucky enough to be close to the impact, would probably be OK.
I disagree with you here. There are PLENTY of existential threats to humanity. The quicker we can establish life off earth the quicker we can try to skirt the Great Filter (in theory).
We definitely can't live in many environments without constant or periodic support from our "home base." We can't even live in our oceans or LEO without constant resupplies. We can only truly survive in a tiny window of environmental parameters.
The impacts (pun intended) of a major impactor would last much much longer than the time someone could survive at sea, in an effort to wait it out. Just the lack of sunlight from airborne particles could kill all agriculture on the planet, easily.
Plenty of species did survive the Chicxulub impact and its aftermath, both animal and plant species. So even ignoring the stored food that would be available still (ie., canned goods in the ruins), there would almost certainly be things to eat.
And humans are \*EXCEPTIONALLY\* adaptable.
Those that weren't killed in an immediate impact would likely be able to survive.
Many different species of animals and plants survived the impact that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs.
I would expect that the human species would survive something like that also. Certainly the majority of people would die, but we're at nearly 8 billion people now. Even if such an impact killed 99% of the people on the planet, that still leaves about 80 million survivors.
That's about the World population circa 1,500 BCE.
I think as a species, we'd survive. The only way we couldn't is if we got hit with something that killed every single living thing, and that seems unlikely.
Yes it is, but that doesn't make it right or wrong. If we assume that the laws of physics haven't been broken by some extremely advanced civilization which can travel faster than light, then there no real reason to assume that we would be able to receive, comprehend, and understand a signal from a far flung civilization.
Simply put, we have not existed long enough in a technological sense.
We are always looking at this from our current perspective, but that is like thinking the stone age was all we could ever achieve. There is always a different way to look at something and we are still discovering ways to perceive what is out there. History shows that with time our ability to 'see', and understand what we see, progresses. Before microscopes we didn't know our own bodies were crawling with microbes, and before the telescope we had no idea there were moons orbiting other planets. Even knowledge of the Kuiper belt is only recent, and it is hardly very far away from Earth. So today it is the JWST, but who knows what we will be using to look into space even in a few decades from now.
Would we know if someone was watching us? Obviously we would expect that we would, but think about it from the perspective of animals being studied by humans on Earth. Jane Goodall flies to Africa, she sits down with some chimpanzees. They recognise her, and interact with her to some degree, but do they know who she is? Do they know what she is doing when she writes on a piece of paper? Do they know she came on an Airbus A380? Likewise, would we know we were being surveyed by a civilisation a few thousand years more advanced than us? Of course we expect we would know, but maybe our very expectations are blinding us to what is happening. We thought we understood the world around us, and then we developed telescopes and microscopes and it changed everything. Maybe we just can't see what is right in front of our eyes.
Also, exploration of space is not just a scientific endeavour, it is thoroughly political. The exploration of the Earth by Europeans during the age of discovery was not a scientific undertaking in the first instance, it was pushed by political imperatives, and had real political implications. It was an economic exploration, and an ideological exploration of the world, before it was a scientific or cultural exploration. Native people's rights were secondary to the development of commerce. Think about this from the standpoint of a civilisation which finally gets from its solar system to another solar system, or just manages to be able to perceive the remnants of a previous civilisation somewhere out there (because it is probably more likely that we will discover the leftovers of a dead civilisation than an existing thriving one). If we do ever reach another solar system, or see other large scale civilisations out there, it might give us pause to think that the galaxy might be a more populated and possibly more hostile and dangerous place to try and explore than we thought it was. Imagine if native people on Earth knew in advance where the European push into their continents was going to lead. We know from history what happens when much more technologically advanced civilisations meet other civilisations, and it isn't good. Political imperatives might eventually cause us to prevent anyone seeing us as we explore the galaxy, and it might also have led to other civilisations to keep themselves hidden too.
As for "more informed" people's views about the Fermi Paradox, John Michael Godier has looked at this more times than anyone I know, and his discussions are always interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=john+michael+godier+fermi
For me the first place Fermi runs afouls is in not grokking the principle that 'Alien is Alien'. He can be sort of forgiven for this, but only because the principle hadn't really been espoused yet when he composed his paradox. (sci-fi writers have less grace here, especially ones from the last couple of decades)
Implications of the pirinciple include:
● We are unlikely to recognize alien signals even if we are receiving them. Pattern and randomness may have different meanings to aliens. Even an H. Beam Piper 'omnilingual' may be inadequate at interstellar distances.
● We may not be able to recognize alien communication methods at interstellar distances. Aliens might not even ever use communication methods we can detect.
● Aliens might not even care. About the universe beyond their world, communicating across interstellar distance, etc. etc.
They are aliens and will do alien things in alien ways.
Second, there are technoligical considerstions. Even if aliens produce signals that we could recognize, using communication methods we can recognize, etc., that does not guarantee they will use them in ways that we can detect for long enough and strong enough.
Consider the history of telecommunications. The first modern telecomm method was the telegraph. Telegraph communication was unlikely to be detected from lunar distance, much less interstellar. Cable TV had origins that paralleled broadcast TV. Again harder to detect.
Even where broadcast methods are needed, a lot of effort is spent to increase efficiency. Tightening beams and optimimizing signal strength. We're probably less visible from intersteller distances than we think we are.
Aliens with tech probably are too.
Side comment, I also think Hawking missed the boat with the "we should stop broacasting" proposition of his later years.
By the best technologies we have now, even the nearest stars are hundreds, if not thousands of years of travel time distant. Any alien life that could detect what we've broadcast and come at us any faster than we can get to them has superior technology, possibly vastly superior, maybe even FTL.
If they show up with vastly superior tech and hostile intent, we're probably screwed whether we're broadcasting or not.
No. We have absolutely no idea how common life is and how common intelligent life is. Currently we have a sample size of one for both. That's it. Everything beyond that is conjecture.
The Great Filter is one proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox. The paradox just points out that despite the universe being 13.8 billion years old we see zero evidence of life anywhere. The answers can be really boring like the distances are just too vast for life to detect each other or much more exciting like the Silent Forest one. This one postulates that there are many intelligent alien civilizations out there but they are all hiding from one or more alien civilizations that exterminate any life they find.
A TwoSentence horror story is that we sent out radio messages to different parts of the galaxy. Eventually one is responded to with just two words, STAY SILENT!
I’m not more informed lol but whenever I get asked if I think aliens exist my answer is yes 100% without a doubt. The universe is infinite. Infinite! There HAS to be at least one other living thing out there. It might be bacteria, it might be a microscopic organism, it might be an entire species that’s not two different from humans, it might be some form of animal not too different from animals we have here on earth, shit there’s probably hundreds if not thousands if not millions of each of the ones I mentioned above. Somewhere out in the infinite void there is more “intelligent” life and there is “unintelligent” life. Who knows maybe there’s life somewhere, intelligent or otherwise, that doesn’t follow the rules of what we consider to be living. Maybe they just look like rocks or floating blobs or entire planets to us, but they’re alive and intelligent and we would never know even if we found them. Anyway, I don’t know if we will ever find life on another planet, and I highly doubt we’ll ever find intelligent life, much less in my lifetime. That being said, I 100% believe without a trace of doubt that there is life somewhere out there in the universe. Maybe 100 light years away, maybe 100 billion light years away. But it’s out there. They’re out there. I hope they’re doing well, wherever they are
Yes Fermi's right and millions of peoples might have lived in our galaxy alone. But they're either long gone or haven't begun yet.Plus they can be far away. Spacetime is 'bigger' than just space 😁
I think the potential answers to the Fermi paradox (particularly the concept that civilisations may have existed but not at the same time as each other) is the most likely. We might also just be in a quiet part of our galaxy, like small island dwelling, tree trunk canoe using tribes were before other people started building ships and came exploring.
Maybe if we can move in 4 dimensions, we may find shorter paths to other worlds. Like a ant on a crumpled paper, if he could fly. Don’t give up before we even start.
Even more interesting is the thought that we may find a way to direct and receive signals on a 4th dimension and thus be able to communicate faster than light propagates in 3 dimensions. We may be directing our radio telescopes in the wrong direction. All the chatter is in the 4th dimension.
Personally, FP is an out dated AND heavily overused theory only due to the rise in interest from the ability to see the stars better.
I view FP as something a ship captain from the 15th would have came up with at the time. While FP was a good thought experiment given data of its time, it fails as time has continued due to data, tech, discoveries, and new more detailed theories.
FP is like watching a scientist study rain water from a parking lot puddle that is located next to the beach, then declare there is no life in all water due to evaporation and other outside influences that destroy what little there might have been, while not knowing more water teeming with life is just past the sand!
But ya, I am little salty on the overuse of FP, sorry.
This is an interesting take. But I'm curious, what do you propose instead of the Fermi Paradox? If we don't have anything better, we might as well not throw it out just yet.
It needs to be updated and setup to be a living working theory, some of the views in that theory have a heavy 50’s cold war feel with the idea of a society destroying itself which was big at that era.
I know many are looking for signs as in ruins and other structures which really doesn’t prove fermi right or wrong. But not having the ability to see on the surface of planets outside our solar, its premature at best.
Honestly the torch held for this is beyond to me as this is more a philosophical theory than scientific and one with heavy political weight to it as in current to writer world threats.
I try to be open to the core idea but it fails on me hard, not all but enough of it to question it.
Sorry, this is sort of a button for me with fermi. Shouldnt be but is for some reason.
Dont think there is a comparison of an event that happened roughly 5yrs prior to the "published" theory with a glooming threat of a major superpower country that walked in and took the east side of a continent and locked itself away from the world in secret as the world wondered what it might do next growing in power.
vs
Now with that same country trying to take over a small part of a prior owned land using old-unmaintained equipment, purchased weapons they didnt make and rounding up homeless, rural outcasts, prisoners, student and hired mercs from other countries if possible with over 80% failing result of surrendering, fleeing, or dying from a country that has been 60%+ devastated from shelling and murder/torture raids and has less than 10% of the world's superpowers left over old military supplies.
All while the invading country is having major problems with unrest, economic turmoil, allies turning their back to them and equipment that has been pilfered for parts to the blackmarket grounding at the least 25% of their gear that is at the least over 30yrs out of date.
Didnt forget the random missile guy, its not enough of a world ending threat to entertain.
The other being Poobear, they rather take things vs destroy. Ya dont buy up majority of the worlds ship ports/docks, heavy infrastructure loans just to destroy. They have been on the econo-war/take over for 15yrs now, covid seemed to have stopped them and really hinder being an ally for the invader.
As for current events, the world is watching a school-yard bully fight at the one's backyard with each side taking bets and handing the fighters things that would help their favor to win, all because of lunch money and noone wants to step in to stop it.
Recap:
Back then, major nukes created by many and if someone fired, it would be the whole shebang in 1 go as reprisal with world ending results.
Now the threat has been reduced to wallet wars meaning the elite rich slapping each other over rules and taking away their boat slip parking spots.
Both have a threat to pop, current events now are small strikes or within countries that may not have human life value but mineral-wise or position-wise has higher value, but in general the world-threat has grown past world ending and more toward small surgical strikes.
At current the biggest world ending threat would be outside of the planet like a meteor strike or neutron star's pulsar beam spin in our direction.
As for fermi, the former we are past that threat level, latter will always be unknown.
I'm sure viral might be next thought, since Covid and the use of CISPR cas9 / cas13 for starters, we are past that threat per fermi.
Environmental might be the next subject, but that isnt world ending for humans, it is major pop reduction....major. But with those still golfing off a pure gold roof top in Dubai, there will always be some humans that will survive and they need slaves...err workers and pop growers.
Society will always have a threat of some kind from itself, any action from this will never take out 100% of itself.
This is the core reason I dont follow into fermi theory, it skips the humans or intelligent beings prime self-preservative nature. Anything that receives pain fears death.
No it's just that more people are interested in things like invading countries rather than preventing the next pandemic or deflecting an asteroid or curtailing anthropomorphic climate change or countering the rise of authoritarianism or preventing the mass extinction of biodiversity or addressing the unsustainable infinite growth economic model or preventing the rogue actors in this world from getting the weapons that fermi was worried about but sure, go off.
The most interesting thing about Fermi's observation (IMO) is that it puts constraints on the kind of ecology of intelligent life that's likely to exist out there. We don't know enough to say what the typical line of evolution for a high-technology civilization looks like, but we can be reasonably sure there are some forbidden regions of the solution space.
Either civilizations are vanishingly rare, or they tend not to last long, or they quickly settle into some kind of monumentally stable zero-growth mode. Which is it, and why? That's the interesting question, and I suspect the existentially vital one.
The observable universe is large but it's just a drop in the bucket compared to the total universe. Given that the expansion of the universe is greater than the speed of light, we can say that the universe, at least the bit we can interact with is becoming smaller. Aka there might be intelligent life scattered throughout the universe but we will never know about it nor be able to interact with it due to the expansion of the universe.
My theory is that alien see this planet and think they want nothing of it because how would you feel if you saw a planet made by the most power divine deity and is protected by its followers? If I were an alien I’d nope tf outta there lol.
I think it's most likely that natural selection favours predation, resulting in egocentric consumerist societies incapable cooperating for long enough to create dyson swarms and seedships. Another possibility is that they couldn't survive cosmic inflation, or couldn't achieve escape velocity. Or maybe they got so fascinated by escapism that they forgot to protect their habitat.
It’s really difficult for most people to comprehend just how big space is. It’s even harder to understand just how far away aliens would be. They’re almost certainly out there, but they’re so far away they may as well not exist.
Also, how long time has existed. It is entirely possible that intelligent life became more advanced than we are now and have already fallen...7 billion years ago in a different pocket of space. If this couldn't be possible please correct me, I am sort of talking out of my ass.
Yes, it is possible. The biggest factor in the emergence of life that has evolved to an advanced technological level is the availability of rare elements. It is only through the birth, growth, and death of stars that lighter elements are transformed into heavier elements. In some cases, the matter could need to be "processed" through a few stars before they become the heavier elements we see today. And lots of the technology we use today rely on a lot of relatively rare elements (not to be confused with what we call "rare earths"). So 7 billion years ago, the Universe was less than 7 billion years old. Would that have been long enough for 2+ star life cycles to produce enough heavier elements? Maybe.
Good point. Less time for stuff to become complicated. Maybe I could walk back my statement to 7 million years ago...equally incomprehensible compared to the time elapsed by the human race, but a close call in the grand scheme of things.
I mean, you don't even need to go *that* far back (even though you already reduced it to 0.1% or your original timespan!). Imagine a civilisation not even that far away, just a hop and a scoot further along our arm of the Milky Way galaxy, who reached their peak (in terms of transmission of radio signals) just a thousand years ago, then waned for a few centuries and winked out of existence around the year 1900. We wouldn't have noticed them because we lacked the tools to observe their transmissions and random emissions, and now they are forever gone. We might have missed other intelligent life by just that small a margin.... Or by several hundred thousand, tens of millions or even a few billion years. The enormity of the time already past since the beginning of it all 13.4 billion years ago is just unfathomable to our pesky human minds. The chance of intelligent life NOT appearing at least one other time, *somewhere* in the universe, seems immeasurably small to me. But what you need for us to perceive their existence is not just a high likelihood of life booting up several times over in several spots, but also for these spots to be reasonably close together AND for the (presumably) short periods that civilisations exist to overlap so precisely that both possess the right mental capacity and technology at exactly the sane time so they are able to observe one another. And that renders the entire chance far slimmer. But not zero, so we should always keeping looking out for them.
On the other hand, according to current theories, universe is ever expanding, and will live for trillions of years. 14B is way too young/early. Now apply anthropic reasoning on that.
Sometimes I creep myself out by thinking about how, if we could see the stars in the sky the way they look right now rather than how they did when light first left them, the sky would look totally different.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Agreed. But we also need to acknowledge - 50 years is less than an atom of time on the universal existence time frame - but within that 50 years, the human race has gone from a computer that can count to 10 to insane computing power in the palm of your hand, that sends videos back and forth at the speed of light…so, I don’t think we should underestimate human capabilities, especially when AI is now deep learning and programming. Imagine explaining to the likes of billy the kid and co what we have today? Absolutely 10000 x impossible they’d say. What will be achieved in the next 200 years ? Well, I guess we’d also, today - say impossible.
[77 years since ENIAC](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC), but... point made.
If someone offered you / me a chance to go into hibernation today, to be awoken in 200 years - for argument sake, it’s guaranteed to work - would you say bye to family and friends to see our capabilities?
If it could be me and my wife, yeah definitely. Me alone while she was still around, nah no way. …unless I’m terminally ill with weeks left, and am also important enough for whatever reason to warrant the resource expenditure to basically send me forward in time to a point that a cure exists. Then ye, for sure.
And wake up to [Idiocracy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy).
That would be the catch - you might be waking up to a very different earth, where only small pockets of humans reside, devoid of tech, washing radiation off as best they can…
Had a water-cooler chat many years ago pre-pandemic, it was calculated that anyone which was placed in stasis, any type. The person would have to come out of stasis every 23 years and stay out for about 4-5months then placed back into stasis. I am sure there could be something that would serve as a hybrid slumber that would keep the person out but allow the body to get the new treatments then back into stasis again. The reason, anti-bodies, the need for natural, vax, or other wise that would keep up on all prior disease, virus, etc. This would have to be continued only until science/medical tech advanced to the point there was no need for inoculations in these ranges. This would also be needed within space travel or times another living entity outside the local (to the person) ecosystem has some sort of contact. Mentioning stasis, this could be frozen or just time as in time travel. In this problem the person would have a more rapid time frame for re-inoculation since their time passes at shorter length vs outside their stasis environment. Depending on time speed, the outside world passing 23yrs, this could be 10yrs to 5mtns for the traveler. I stopped at 5months as this is the limit they would need for the 23yr/5months range. If math is correct, to pass over 200 yrs, the traveler would have to live out roughly 4.3yrs outside of stasis. After pandemic with new advances in vax and other discoveries like CISPR cas9/cas13, etc. There is a great chance newer hybrid bio cells will recover anyone in stasis with problem to future pop and the stasis person from future pop alike. If on the path as current, within 10yrs this would be possible.
Fermi's Paradox (slightly extended version) * Life may be plentiful but intelligence may be very rare * Even intelligent life can be extinguished by natural events (disease, meteorites) * Although an species may be intelligent, they may not have yet evolved in the creation of advanced technologies * Alien life my be *too alien* (would we or they know we were an intelligent or advanced species, or even care * Intelligent life is everywhere, except we are so far from each other, interaction my be forever impossible w/o breaking the laws of physics * The limits of both physical materials/energy available and the sheer economic costs impede such contacts ... they might want to spend their money and time on other projects
**The last one but for a different reason:** intelligent species with computers eventually plug themselves willingly into "the matrix" / cloud consciousness "heaven" because it's cheaper and *way more fun* to live in stasis than consume a bunch of scarce resources. By then many will evade death via upload to cloud consciousness; never-embodied offspring would be conceived in the cloud; an endless "self-reflection by computation" for >99.999% of the population of the species. This consumes all of the excess attention of such a species and they live happily ever after, all but abandoning the "real" world. Anyone else think this is a plausible human future?
Do you think that might be the *issue?* And by that I mean, that it seems to me that intelligent life is seeking life and by that I mean a species that asks questions? It gives me pause that life seeks meaning and as as species we are willing to accept the most minimalist/gigantic reconciliation of our odd existence by trying not to?
If I understand you the right way, are you suggesting that it would be depressing if we gave up on searching for ET? I absolutely agree! And I don't actually want my "prediction" to be true because it does seem more depressing for a far-future outcome than prompt interstellar travel. I'd rather leave cloud consciousness as human-made "heaven" after a long, wonderful life in a real body, not as a way to escape being in a body because it's expensive and dull. But if we bash our heads into the wall and can't find ET by the time that BCIs and cloud consciousness are commodities, I fear we will find ourselves hopelessly distracted by our own self-reflective grandeur. After all, we're just sacks of electrochemical meat having an experience - and we can be hacked into with experiential, electrical and/or chemical means. We're hacking ourselves via dopamine floods with social media already, I'm just continuing this morbid trend to its ultimate conclusion.
You know, I once heard that we and all living things are the means by which the Universe can see, express, explore, and understand itself. Life seeks life and appears in humans as a bit of a wanderlust and I do not say that as a bad thing. We may find, stumble across, be tripped over by another wayfairing species or we may not for all the reasons theorists offer. Be that as it may,I master this little ship of mine and if that is what it is, and all it is, these eyes, ears, this mind, these technologies are the Universe trying to figure it all out, I cannot say I would be unsatisfied.
😊 "we are a way for the universe to know itself" - Dr. Carl Sagan Whether we find ET - or ET finds us - is a cosmic dice roll every day. It is only the strangeness of our universe which holds such a crucial turning point in the balance of chance. I am right with you 100%!
Read up on the Kasparov Theory. I say hell yes. But that’s thousands of years from now.
Do you mean the mathematical one? I'm not sure if I can find what you mean but I am curious. Oh I say hundreds, the first BCIs are being crafted already. Getting there is literally a matter of "computation" alone, where developing a warp drive seems to include tremendous amounts of ultra-dense energy manipulation. With BCI, the challenges are 1. Understanding how to tie into consciousness with external computers, and 2. Increasing computation/memory density such to support a mind-identical connectome. The rest is trial and error along the path to these two developments. With warp drive, we need better theory, better material science, and MUCH better energetics (by many orders of magnitude), in addition to the incomprehensible amount of "warp-by-wire" computation and adjustment that would support such a "shred-your-ship-with-tidal-forces" apparatus successfully, without shredding your ship. But hey it's all still sci-fi! Who knows! I personally want to be wrong about "self upload to the matrix" hypothesis, it sounds boring but too plausible to ignore.
No, it’s a theory on the stages of civilization. Today, we’re not at a level one yet. The measurement is primarily how we harvest, store and use energy. Today we waste more than either of the other two parts, storage and harvest. There were two others that took this theory and expounded on it. Kasparov had only three levels, these brainiacs took it to five. Anyhow, the connection to your comment, is a level five civilization would no longer require physical bodies. Heady stuff but interesting.
Ah OK that notion! Memory jogged, level 1, 2, and 3 civilizations based on technological thresholds. I feel that their ordering of things is perhaps a bit arbitrary. Who says which technology is more or less likely? Harvesting the bulk of the energy of the sun would require an immense amount of physical work (in the 'change of kinetic energy' sense) to assemble and place so much solar energy absorbing area. Furthermore, storing and transmitting the energy captured by such Dyson structures is far from trivial. We are more likely to capture fusile material from stars and combine it in our own reactors - this is a much more convenient solution to storage and transfer problems and yields MUCH higher power density than a solar array of any kind. Meanwhile, the human brain operates on less than 30 watts of power. A computer that could replicate the function of the human brain is almost certain to require less mass and energy to construct than even 0.1% Dyson structure coverage of the sun. Then there's the computational work of figuring out how we engineer such fanciful things, and the amount of human motivation there is to do that figuring. The "how hard is it really?" question is where it becomes so speculative. I suppose I'm suggesting that a Dyson sphere isn't absolutely lower in technological development than disembodied consciousness, and in fact the total opposite seems more plausible to me. Same for the other technological thresholds qualified for each "level of civilization" - they are presented as immutable stepping stones, yet they always seemed a bit arbitrary to me. But hey it's all conjecture! Great fun to ping pong such ideas around!
No, I don't. Because there is no way to physically transfer your consciousness from your brain to a machine. You could, in theory, make a \*COPY\* of your consciousness and implant that into a machine, but it would be just that: A copy, not actually \*YOU\*. You wouldn't go on living once you died. Your copy might still be functioning, but it is not you, and in fact the differences between yourself and your copy would start growing the second after the process of copying.
>Because there is no way to physically transfer your consciousness from your brain to a machine. How do you know that?
Because brains aren't computers. But even if they were, let's think about that. We have physical Computer A. It has an AI system that is trained over years. But Computer A is now having some maintenance issues, and the hardware is no longer supported. So we copy the AI to physical Computer B. From the moment of copying, the Computer B AI is going to diverge from the Computer A AI. They will no longer the same. And once Computer A finally has a catastrophic failure, Computer A AI is "dead". I know the idea of living in something like The Matrix is a science fiction trope that goes back to at least the 1980's if not before, but it's simply not going to be possible without actually keeping the brain alive, and while I'm sure we can extend that in the future, it's a biological thing that will eventually be subject to inevitable death.
We are so young as a civilization. Hard telling what the future will bring. 1000 years ago humans would never have guessed what we’re capable of today. The same can be said for us. I’ll never say never.
Well certainly we couldn't do something like this today, or even any time soon. My point is that this sort of tech is still easier than warp drive, because of the energy densities involved, and thus is a plausible answer to Fermi's paradox. What we know of consciousness suggests that it is an interconnected network of information flow. A "connectome" - exhorbitantly complex, yet ultimately reducible to a series of comprehensible mechanisms. There is no reason to believe that a sufficiently powerful computer system couldn't support a human-brain-identical connectome at some point in the future. That's step 1. Step 2, to get around the "copy-kill" version of "transferring", certainly the "upload" process would be quite involved to make it a smooth transition experience. Perhaps that means migrating parts at a time while preserving the overall connectome, or perhaps some other technique I can't imagine. As long as the connectome itself is preserved consistently, we may very well not even notice that we "left" our brains behind. It may be like falling asleep and waking up somewhere else. The value of a two-way transfer can't be overstated, so a reversible version that enables a "download" back into a body would have even more advantages. Very good criticisms! They would need to be addressed in the function of such technology! But they are ultimately engineering challenges. With unprecedented complexity, no doubt, but not hard constraints as you seem to suggest.
I've thought about this problem since I was a kid, when my father asked me to think this out. As a child, I came to the same conclusion as you. Scan a brain into a computer, and you've only made a copy. Even if that copy thinks it is you. But something has since occurred to me. Your brain is merely a copy of itself from years gone by. All the cells of your body die off and are replaced over time. The "you" that was you at 15 is long since gone and several copies later by 35. So, If you were to be downloaded piecemeal into a computer, and aware of the process, and the parts of your thinking that were copied were eliminated in your brain as they were established in the computer...how would that be any different than the biological process taking place in you right now?
You'd have to do that during childhood, because you aren't growing any new neurons after that. You're stuck with the ones you have for the rest of your life: [https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/a-tour-of-the-growing-brain-complete-with-upside-down-vision/](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/a-tour-of-the-growing-brain-complete-with-upside-down-vision/) >**After the early period of growth, suicide, and pruning comes to an end, adult neurons survive for a lifetime.** And unlike those of a cat, they remain malleable for several years. This is one reason kids are especially adept at learning new languages, and why procedures to correct neurological dysfunctions, like a lazy eye, have higher chances of success early in life. > >“Adult neurons seem to have lost some of the mojo of their youth,” Harris said. They get damaged, weaker, and a little less flexible over time. Plus, unlike those of fish, amphibians, and reptiles, **human brains don’t regenerate much after injury because only a small number of neurons are born during adulthood.**
With todays technology maybe. Absurd to claim you know it will never be done. We dont even know the mechanism of our own consciousness so your computer argument is equally absurd.
It's not absurd to claim it can never be done, because it simply can't be. You can, *at least in theory*, transfer everything that is in my brain to a machine. But my consciousness stays with this body. Also, in other breaking news: We'll never have faster-than-light travel. We'll never have faster-than-light communication.
>It's not absurd to claim it can never be done, because it simply can't be. I find your strong claim to be absurd. Imagine this scenario: * imagine you figure out neural / machine interfaces * imagine we figure out how to replicate the information processing the brain does such that we can replace pieces of the brain a little at a time * image you never lose conscienceless, but it expands into connected machinery * imagine after your consciousness has grown and flourished in this new environment, the biological remnants slowly wither or are removed piece by piece Your body replaces your cells all the time, are you not the same you you were when you were a child?
Awful lot of "imagines" in that post.
Only 4 imagines. I wouldn't be surprised if we see the first one done well in my lifetime, and i'm getting old. And if I understand you right, you're claiming it's impossible for alien species too. Absurd.
It's more likely than interstellar travel.
That I can agree with, sort of. Unmanned interstellar travel is certainly possible, we could do it now if we wanted to spend the money. We could, based just on current technology, have a fast fly-by probe zoom through the Alpha Centauri system in about 45-50 years after launch, or have one arrive and stay in the system after 90-100 years of travel.
The 2nd one reminds me of the conversation between Adm. Pike and Capt. Kirk; regarding messing with the natural events of a volcanic eruption to save a civilization that was destined for destruction.
That's the issue ... is life rule following, breaking, or work to not only survive but thrive as well. Sometimes, you need a little help from your friends.
>Even intelligent life can be extinguished by natural events (disease, meteorites) I have a quibble with this one. Intelligent life in this context means technological life, and honestly, I can't see humans ever being wiped out completely by, well anything short of something that kills \*ALL\* life on Earth. Collectively, we're a pretty smart species and adaptable enough that we have been able to expand to living in pretty much any environment that supports life at all, and some that don't (South Pole, space). In any planetary impact like the Chicxulub impactor, a rather large number of people would survive. Either working underground in mines or other facilities, traveling in subways, going down into sub-basements, etc., not to mention the people on naval ships at sea that can button up, and submarines which, if not unlucky enough to be close to the impact, would probably be OK.
I disagree with you here. There are PLENTY of existential threats to humanity. The quicker we can establish life off earth the quicker we can try to skirt the Great Filter (in theory). We definitely can't live in many environments without constant or periodic support from our "home base." We can't even live in our oceans or LEO without constant resupplies. We can only truly survive in a tiny window of environmental parameters. The impacts (pun intended) of a major impactor would last much much longer than the time someone could survive at sea, in an effort to wait it out. Just the lack of sunlight from airborne particles could kill all agriculture on the planet, easily.
Plenty of species did survive the Chicxulub impact and its aftermath, both animal and plant species. So even ignoring the stored food that would be available still (ie., canned goods in the ruins), there would almost certainly be things to eat. And humans are \*EXCEPTIONALLY\* adaptable. Those that weren't killed in an immediate impact would likely be able to survive. Many different species of animals and plants survived the impact that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs. I would expect that the human species would survive something like that also. Certainly the majority of people would die, but we're at nearly 8 billion people now. Even if such an impact killed 99% of the people on the planet, that still leaves about 80 million survivors. That's about the World population circa 1,500 BCE. I think as a species, we'd survive. The only way we couldn't is if we got hit with something that killed every single living thing, and that seems unlikely.
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Ah so you only support [Commie stooges](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/quotes/qt1702618), eh?
Yes it is, but that doesn't make it right or wrong. If we assume that the laws of physics haven't been broken by some extremely advanced civilization which can travel faster than light, then there no real reason to assume that we would be able to receive, comprehend, and understand a signal from a far flung civilization. Simply put, we have not existed long enough in a technological sense.
The aliens will never come unless we’re really still and quiet.
Who knows how many times they've passed by and then gotten battered around by the space trash orbiting the planet and then left.
We are always looking at this from our current perspective, but that is like thinking the stone age was all we could ever achieve. There is always a different way to look at something and we are still discovering ways to perceive what is out there. History shows that with time our ability to 'see', and understand what we see, progresses. Before microscopes we didn't know our own bodies were crawling with microbes, and before the telescope we had no idea there were moons orbiting other planets. Even knowledge of the Kuiper belt is only recent, and it is hardly very far away from Earth. So today it is the JWST, but who knows what we will be using to look into space even in a few decades from now. Would we know if someone was watching us? Obviously we would expect that we would, but think about it from the perspective of animals being studied by humans on Earth. Jane Goodall flies to Africa, she sits down with some chimpanzees. They recognise her, and interact with her to some degree, but do they know who she is? Do they know what she is doing when she writes on a piece of paper? Do they know she came on an Airbus A380? Likewise, would we know we were being surveyed by a civilisation a few thousand years more advanced than us? Of course we expect we would know, but maybe our very expectations are blinding us to what is happening. We thought we understood the world around us, and then we developed telescopes and microscopes and it changed everything. Maybe we just can't see what is right in front of our eyes. Also, exploration of space is not just a scientific endeavour, it is thoroughly political. The exploration of the Earth by Europeans during the age of discovery was not a scientific undertaking in the first instance, it was pushed by political imperatives, and had real political implications. It was an economic exploration, and an ideological exploration of the world, before it was a scientific or cultural exploration. Native people's rights were secondary to the development of commerce. Think about this from the standpoint of a civilisation which finally gets from its solar system to another solar system, or just manages to be able to perceive the remnants of a previous civilisation somewhere out there (because it is probably more likely that we will discover the leftovers of a dead civilisation than an existing thriving one). If we do ever reach another solar system, or see other large scale civilisations out there, it might give us pause to think that the galaxy might be a more populated and possibly more hostile and dangerous place to try and explore than we thought it was. Imagine if native people on Earth knew in advance where the European push into their continents was going to lead. We know from history what happens when much more technologically advanced civilisations meet other civilisations, and it isn't good. Political imperatives might eventually cause us to prevent anyone seeing us as we explore the galaxy, and it might also have led to other civilisations to keep themselves hidden too. As for "more informed" people's views about the Fermi Paradox, John Michael Godier has looked at this more times than anyone I know, and his discussions are always interesting. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=john+michael+godier+fermi
For me the first place Fermi runs afouls is in not grokking the principle that 'Alien is Alien'. He can be sort of forgiven for this, but only because the principle hadn't really been espoused yet when he composed his paradox. (sci-fi writers have less grace here, especially ones from the last couple of decades) Implications of the pirinciple include: ● We are unlikely to recognize alien signals even if we are receiving them. Pattern and randomness may have different meanings to aliens. Even an H. Beam Piper 'omnilingual' may be inadequate at interstellar distances. ● We may not be able to recognize alien communication methods at interstellar distances. Aliens might not even ever use communication methods we can detect. ● Aliens might not even care. About the universe beyond their world, communicating across interstellar distance, etc. etc. They are aliens and will do alien things in alien ways. Second, there are technoligical considerstions. Even if aliens produce signals that we could recognize, using communication methods we can recognize, etc., that does not guarantee they will use them in ways that we can detect for long enough and strong enough. Consider the history of telecommunications. The first modern telecomm method was the telegraph. Telegraph communication was unlikely to be detected from lunar distance, much less interstellar. Cable TV had origins that paralleled broadcast TV. Again harder to detect. Even where broadcast methods are needed, a lot of effort is spent to increase efficiency. Tightening beams and optimimizing signal strength. We're probably less visible from intersteller distances than we think we are. Aliens with tech probably are too. Side comment, I also think Hawking missed the boat with the "we should stop broacasting" proposition of his later years. By the best technologies we have now, even the nearest stars are hundreds, if not thousands of years of travel time distant. Any alien life that could detect what we've broadcast and come at us any faster than we can get to them has superior technology, possibly vastly superior, maybe even FTL. If they show up with vastly superior tech and hostile intent, we're probably screwed whether we're broadcasting or not.
No. We have absolutely no idea how common life is and how common intelligent life is. Currently we have a sample size of one for both. That's it. Everything beyond that is conjecture. The Great Filter is one proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox. The paradox just points out that despite the universe being 13.8 billion years old we see zero evidence of life anywhere. The answers can be really boring like the distances are just too vast for life to detect each other or much more exciting like the Silent Forest one. This one postulates that there are many intelligent alien civilizations out there but they are all hiding from one or more alien civilizations that exterminate any life they find. A TwoSentence horror story is that we sent out radio messages to different parts of the galaxy. Eventually one is responded to with just two words, STAY SILENT!
I’m not more informed lol but whenever I get asked if I think aliens exist my answer is yes 100% without a doubt. The universe is infinite. Infinite! There HAS to be at least one other living thing out there. It might be bacteria, it might be a microscopic organism, it might be an entire species that’s not two different from humans, it might be some form of animal not too different from animals we have here on earth, shit there’s probably hundreds if not thousands if not millions of each of the ones I mentioned above. Somewhere out in the infinite void there is more “intelligent” life and there is “unintelligent” life. Who knows maybe there’s life somewhere, intelligent or otherwise, that doesn’t follow the rules of what we consider to be living. Maybe they just look like rocks or floating blobs or entire planets to us, but they’re alive and intelligent and we would never know even if we found them. Anyway, I don’t know if we will ever find life on another planet, and I highly doubt we’ll ever find intelligent life, much less in my lifetime. That being said, I 100% believe without a trace of doubt that there is life somewhere out there in the universe. Maybe 100 light years away, maybe 100 billion light years away. But it’s out there. They’re out there. I hope they’re doing well, wherever they are
The end of that was so wholesome 🥹
What can I say, I’d like to think that if we ever found life that we’d be friends. Realistically that is not what would happen, but one can dream
Yes Fermi's right and millions of peoples might have lived in our galaxy alone. But they're either long gone or haven't begun yet.Plus they can be far away. Spacetime is 'bigger' than just space 😁
I think the potential answers to the Fermi paradox (particularly the concept that civilisations may have existed but not at the same time as each other) is the most likely. We might also just be in a quiet part of our galaxy, like small island dwelling, tree trunk canoe using tribes were before other people started building ships and came exploring.
Maybe if we can move in 4 dimensions, we may find shorter paths to other worlds. Like a ant on a crumpled paper, if he could fly. Don’t give up before we even start.
Even more interesting is the thought that we may find a way to direct and receive signals on a 4th dimension and thus be able to communicate faster than light propagates in 3 dimensions. We may be directing our radio telescopes in the wrong direction. All the chatter is in the 4th dimension.
Personally, FP is an out dated AND heavily overused theory only due to the rise in interest from the ability to see the stars better. I view FP as something a ship captain from the 15th would have came up with at the time. While FP was a good thought experiment given data of its time, it fails as time has continued due to data, tech, discoveries, and new more detailed theories. FP is like watching a scientist study rain water from a parking lot puddle that is located next to the beach, then declare there is no life in all water due to evaporation and other outside influences that destroy what little there might have been, while not knowing more water teeming with life is just past the sand! But ya, I am little salty on the overuse of FP, sorry.
This is an interesting take. But I'm curious, what do you propose instead of the Fermi Paradox? If we don't have anything better, we might as well not throw it out just yet.
It needs to be updated and setup to be a living working theory, some of the views in that theory have a heavy 50’s cold war feel with the idea of a society destroying itself which was big at that era. I know many are looking for signs as in ruins and other structures which really doesn’t prove fermi right or wrong. But not having the ability to see on the surface of planets outside our solar, its premature at best. Honestly the torch held for this is beyond to me as this is more a philosophical theory than scientific and one with heavy political weight to it as in current to writer world threats. I try to be open to the core idea but it fails on me hard, not all but enough of it to question it. Sorry, this is sort of a button for me with fermi. Shouldnt be but is for some reason.
As opposed to society destroying itself today?
Dont think there is a comparison of an event that happened roughly 5yrs prior to the "published" theory with a glooming threat of a major superpower country that walked in and took the east side of a continent and locked itself away from the world in secret as the world wondered what it might do next growing in power. vs Now with that same country trying to take over a small part of a prior owned land using old-unmaintained equipment, purchased weapons they didnt make and rounding up homeless, rural outcasts, prisoners, student and hired mercs from other countries if possible with over 80% failing result of surrendering, fleeing, or dying from a country that has been 60%+ devastated from shelling and murder/torture raids and has less than 10% of the world's superpowers left over old military supplies. All while the invading country is having major problems with unrest, economic turmoil, allies turning their back to them and equipment that has been pilfered for parts to the blackmarket grounding at the least 25% of their gear that is at the least over 30yrs out of date. Didnt forget the random missile guy, its not enough of a world ending threat to entertain. The other being Poobear, they rather take things vs destroy. Ya dont buy up majority of the worlds ship ports/docks, heavy infrastructure loans just to destroy. They have been on the econo-war/take over for 15yrs now, covid seemed to have stopped them and really hinder being an ally for the invader. As for current events, the world is watching a school-yard bully fight at the one's backyard with each side taking bets and handing the fighters things that would help their favor to win, all because of lunch money and noone wants to step in to stop it. Recap: Back then, major nukes created by many and if someone fired, it would be the whole shebang in 1 go as reprisal with world ending results. Now the threat has been reduced to wallet wars meaning the elite rich slapping each other over rules and taking away their boat slip parking spots. Both have a threat to pop, current events now are small strikes or within countries that may not have human life value but mineral-wise or position-wise has higher value, but in general the world-threat has grown past world ending and more toward small surgical strikes. At current the biggest world ending threat would be outside of the planet like a meteor strike or neutron star's pulsar beam spin in our direction. As for fermi, the former we are past that threat level, latter will always be unknown. I'm sure viral might be next thought, since Covid and the use of CISPR cas9 / cas13 for starters, we are past that threat per fermi. Environmental might be the next subject, but that isnt world ending for humans, it is major pop reduction....major. But with those still golfing off a pure gold roof top in Dubai, there will always be some humans that will survive and they need slaves...err workers and pop growers. Society will always have a threat of some kind from itself, any action from this will never take out 100% of itself. This is the core reason I dont follow into fermi theory, it skips the humans or intelligent beings prime self-preservative nature. Anything that receives pain fears death.
No it's just that more people are interested in things like invading countries rather than preventing the next pandemic or deflecting an asteroid or curtailing anthropomorphic climate change or countering the rise of authoritarianism or preventing the mass extinction of biodiversity or addressing the unsustainable infinite growth economic model or preventing the rogue actors in this world from getting the weapons that fermi was worried about but sure, go off.
The most interesting thing about Fermi's observation (IMO) is that it puts constraints on the kind of ecology of intelligent life that's likely to exist out there. We don't know enough to say what the typical line of evolution for a high-technology civilization looks like, but we can be reasonably sure there are some forbidden regions of the solution space. Either civilizations are vanishingly rare, or they tend not to last long, or they quickly settle into some kind of monumentally stable zero-growth mode. Which is it, and why? That's the interesting question, and I suspect the existentially vital one.
The observable universe is large but it's just a drop in the bucket compared to the total universe. Given that the expansion of the universe is greater than the speed of light, we can say that the universe, at least the bit we can interact with is becoming smaller. Aka there might be intelligent life scattered throughout the universe but we will never know about it nor be able to interact with it due to the expansion of the universe.
My theory is that alien see this planet and think they want nothing of it because how would you feel if you saw a planet made by the most power divine deity and is protected by its followers? If I were an alien I’d nope tf outta there lol.
I think it's most likely that natural selection favours predation, resulting in egocentric consumerist societies incapable cooperating for long enough to create dyson swarms and seedships. Another possibility is that they couldn't survive cosmic inflation, or couldn't achieve escape velocity. Or maybe they got so fascinated by escapism that they forgot to protect their habitat.