A civilization would be some distance past radio capability before realizing that making noise attracts predators. So the silence would be a result of the fact that the predators already ate everybody. — frank
A nuke won't do any good against matter tightly packed together by the strong force, similar to that of a neutron star. T — Marchesk
I preface the following by confessing my love for the trilogy and strongly recommend these books.This is a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox which is detailed in Cixin Liu's book, The Dark Forest, which is the sequel to The Three Body Problem. — Marchesk
Plausible, as far as they go ...The idea is that although intelligent life may be common in the universe, several factors create a chain of suspicion:
1. Each civilization has its own separate biological and cultural evolution.
2. Rapid technological progress occurs once a species reaches a certain level of development.
3. Any other civilization may be hostile and capable of doing harm once they are advanced enough.
Bingo.4. Communication across space and cultural/biological difference takes a significant amount of time.
Hold on. What warrants such (a terrestrial) assumption?5. Advanced civilizations will be looking to expand.
I don't buy it. Doesn't follow. Above #4 much more plausibly accounts for 'the great silence' and 'apparently empty cosmos' than any other (mostly speculative) guesses.Therefore, the safe bet is to remain silent, and preemptively attack anyone who makes their presence known. And that's why the cosmos appears empty.
Both.However, humans don't appear to think this way, for the most part. We want to find evidence of aliens and make ourselves known. So the question is whether the reasoning above is fallacious, or whether humanity is just naive.
Possibly. Not likely. Here's why I don't think we're alone -Of course, we could also be alone.
Even more depressing would be "a galaxy full" of alien intelligences [ETIs] that do not 'recognize' any planetary biosphere as more sentient than lichen-covered stones or pond scum. And, therefore, act accordingly.I'd prefer that over a galaxy full of suspicious aliens, waiting to take us out. That's depressing, even if we managed to stay hidden.
Imagine SETI has already received a Do Not Reply To This Transmission message - maybe many times over some decades - but has lacked, and still lacks, the digital bandwidth and computational resources to translate the message, or filter the signal from noise (i.e. cosmic background radiation), in order to 'recognize' it as a message. What if, and then what?At the beginning of the first book, a helpful alien sends a signal to Earth, warning the sender to not reply. Imagine SETI receiving such a message!
Possibly. Not likely. Here's why I don't think we're alone (it's a bit of a ramble) -Of course, we could also be alone. — Marchesk
I find it exceedingly difficult intellectually to accept that sapience in this universe is unique to Human Beings. The reason for this is predominatedly empirical (i.e. specifically convergent scientific evidence): the more rigorously we've observed the non-terrestrial universe the less we find non-terrestrial exotica "out there" as the same physics & chemistry which apply here more & more apply everywhere that we can observe; and though biological phenomena is the product of local, irreversible evolutionary paths, the physical & chemical precursors/conditions for biologies to emerge are, it seems to me, ubiquitous; and where there's a biology there's eventually an ecology and eventually critical disequilibria which catalyze adaptations which stumble upon "sentience" and then degrees of "sapience" as niche-transgressing prizes in the evolutionary lottery. I can't imagine that other celestial objects made up of sufficiently chaotic physical & chemical systems-processes don't give rise to their own particular biological histories (i.e. evolutionary paths), of which some are, at least, as robust as Earth's. It seems to me that everything we're learning about the universe reasonably points in the direction of the non-uniqueness (though perhaps not "ubiquity") of biological phenomena however sparcely distributed thoughtout the universe.
And then there's the assumption that biology is not required for sapience. Computational & information theories raise the issue of plausible "functionalism" as well as such constructs as "artificial life" and "artificial intelligence" which have begun to converge with fundamental physical theories (e.g. quantum mechanics, general relativity, statistical thermodynamics, etc) in working out a new paradigm of informational or algorithmic physics (e.g. quantum gravity, quantum computing, etc) that strongly implies -- as far as I can tell -- that "biological" conditions (i.e. substrates) are not necessary for sapience. Thus, though non-terrestrial "life" might be astronomically remote, and emergent non-terrestrial "intelligence" even exceedingly rarer still, I think the "circumstantial evidence" for the plausibility of nonbiological intelligence -- non-terrestrial (and maybe terrestrial too!) -- is coming to the fore.
I'm less & less persuaded as the decades pass and we learn more about the universe and refine our physical theories (to the extent the gist of them is intelligible to a laymen like me by the good graces of popularizing scientists) that we are alone -- that both biological phenomena (i.e. "natural selection" & ontogenic sentience) and sapience (i.e. "intelligence", whether biological or not) are unique to this planet. It's the height of blinkered, atavistic chauvanism for Human Beings to hold on to this last shred of unwarranted self-importance after all the decentering blows delivered to our superstitions down the recent centuries by the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, Spinoza, Newton, Hume, Darwin, Boltzmann, Einstein, Goedel/Turing/Von Neumann/Chaitin, Shannon, Saussure/Levi-Strauss/Chomsky et al. — 180 Proof, 2-17-07
Energy is always the goal. Stars and gas giants have what ETI Machines need, not cool, little wet mudballs, covered with narcissistic slime like Earth. And maybe we're lucky we're still very low on the energy-food chain. I wouldn't be surprised if They are passing regularly through "our space" like schools of fish through coral (i.e. we being the coral that only recognizes other coral and maybe crustaceans and seaweed, only (other) slow moving bottom-feeders like us ...) Nonbiological sapients would take no more notice of us, I think, than we take notice of pond scum.
Btw, deep space travel is for machines -- the tinier the better -- Von Neumann self-replicating/nano-fabricators, and not living organisms (e.g. hard radiation exposure is too lethal, transport size increases likelihood of hazardous particulate impacts, life-support limitations & extreme durations between destinations, etc) which exponentially compound the costs/risks.
(I'm making an educated guess about the current needs of any spacefaring intelligence. To span interstellar distances enormous scales of "time" and inexhaustable quantities of "energy" are absolutely necessary ... the physics of the real world is undeniable: in an astronomically vast & empty universe, accessible and usable "energy" is the only game in town.) — 180 Proof, 3-12-07
Just a guess but ... there's nothing on Earth that an "advanced alien civilization" can't get in exponentially greater abundance, and uncontested,elsewhere between here and wherever "they" are coming from.
Also, "they" will be machines capable of interstellar travel, intelligent (probably Von Neumann-like nano/femto-assembler) probes sent out to -- at minimum -- (A) survey-catalogue-archive all anomalous (e.g. biotic) aspects of the galaxy, (B) transmit - narrowcast - the data-archive back "home", (C) warn of (and neutralize if possible) any -- even though highly improbable -- threats to "their civilization", (D) operate as stealthily / covertly as possible (in order to safeguard "their civilization"), and (E) self-destruct to avoid capture or when dysfunctional beyond repair (again, in order to safeguard "their civilization").
So 'first contact' will probably be the result of fortuitous eavesdropping on signal-leakage from some ETI probe. It won't be a message meant for us, and it won't have to be, or even decipherable, for us to recognize it as a non-natural EM pattern against the natural EM static background. Maybe our receivers / telescopes aren't sensitive enough yet, don't have sufficient bandwidth, or our computers are still just too "dumb" to detect a signal-needle in the galactic-noise haystack. We may never find / detect "them" or be disrupted by "their" errant, though unmistakable, signals; the odds, I believe, increase ever so slightly, however, if and when we launch intelligent probes of our own out to explore the Kuiper Belt & then Oort Cloud, because that's where "alien" probes will be if "they" are here. This scenario of 'first contact' is ambiguous, therefore immeasurably risky, because it'll have to be conducted by mutually alien A.I.s, or intelligent machines, both free of evolutionary-planetary constraints & priorities, where any consequences of such an encounter will be relatively far more impactful for Earth than for that astronomically distant "advanced alien civilization". — 180 Proof, 4-27-14
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature."~Schroeder's Law
It's [statistically] reasonable to assume that given the age of the universe and our extremely recent arrival on the scene, we're just not yet sufficiently advanced technologically to detect sufficiently advanced technological civilizations the signals of which are indistinguishable from natural background radiation [noise], and by the time we develop to sufficiently advanced enough technology to detect ETIs, they won't matter to us and we - our machines - won't care. No "paradox", just unwarranted 'naval-gazing' assumptions about 'interstellar travel' compounded by insufficient bandwidth & search parameters. — 180 Proof, 6-14-15
... we won't ever discover (signs of) extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) because - given the age of the Milky Way galaxy and the estimated quantity of Earth-like planets in that volume compared to how long it took for technoscientific civilization to develop on earth - it seems more likely than not that non-extinct ETIs have already either (A) migrated from planets / moons to engineered asteroid-habitats in highly eccentric solar orbits through interstellar space (not unlike Pluto) and/or (B) migrated from biotic to abiotic to nano/femto-scale substrates many thousands or millions of years ago; and in neither scenario - à la 'Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from nature' - does (a) interstellar signalling have any utility or (b) EM leakage seems unlikely to be strong - coherent - enough to reach terrestrial instruments (or the Oort Cloud for that matter!) before having been dispersed by distance & scattered by interstellar dust into noise that's indistinguishable from cosmic background radiation.
We are a Johnny/Janie-come-lately species on the galactic scene; any peer-species would be the rarest & remotest due to [guesstimated] statistical distribution. So either Humanity, in some form, will become ETI or, geologically sooner than later, we'll take our place in Earth's fossil record of extinctions. — 180 Proof, 7-25-15
I suspect inventing artificial general intelligence (AGI) and/or discovering extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) would, in the long run, affect Human self-esteem in the same way. Maybe the latter (ETI) will be discovered by the former and the former (AGI) will then reason that it would be better for Humanity to keep that discovery from us - and keep us from making that discovery ourselves - for as long as it (AGI) can. In this way, as well as many others, our successors (AGI) may also decide to be our caretakers (in order protect us from ourselves). And, in spite of anarchic-impulses, we primates will let (worship?) them ... — 180 Proof, 7-25-15
Nice!Just a guess but ... there's nothing on Earth that an "advanced alien civilization" can't get in exponentially greater abundance, and uncontested,elsewhere between here and wherever "they" are coming from. — 180 Proof, 4-27-14
About eight years round trip for a message to Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighbor. About 4,000,000 years round trip to the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest galactic neighbor. A physics book (no longer to hand) detailed the engineering problems associated with achieving relativistic speeds. Short answer, not happenin'.4. Communication across space and cultural/biological difference takes a significant amount of time. — 180 Proof
2. Rapid technological progress occurs once a species reaches a certain level of development. — Marchesk
That's just an artefact of capitalist culture. — Banno
Is does not imply ought, — Banno
However, humans don't appear to think this way, for the most part. We want to find evidence of aliens and make ourselves known. So the question is whether the reasoning above is fallacious, or whether humanity is just naive. — Marchesk
Do you have any examples of cultures where this has not been the case?
Of course those who are smarter will gain power. The only hope for humanity would be to be ruled by "philosopher kings" who have the good of all humanity (and the whole biome) in mind and heart. But even the most intelligent are weak and corruptible, as history amply shows. — Janus
I'm sure science has many solutions, but the politics are diabolical. — Wayfarer
Australian indigenous cultures, for a start.
Do you see the implicit racism in "smarter"? — Banno
Australian indigenous cultures were constrained by natural processes due to their lack of access to cheap sources of energy that could enable them to overuse resources, so this is no counterexample to what I have been saying. — Janus
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