Maybe the Prime Directive isn’t just some nice thing Roddenberry thought up?
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That’s sort of close to something I considered. Perhaps there’s a rule or consensus the sentinels follow that amounts to not snuffing out life in the crib. But really, in the end any speculation about alien motives is pointless other than the fact that they must obey the laws of physics and they must have some kind of survival motive/instinct or they wouldn’t be there.
If it’s as easy or nearly as easy to snuff out a planet with a civ as one with microbes, then maybe they don’t see any point in expending the energy necessary for the level of monitoring required to find self-replicating chemistry on every speck of dust, and instead just wait for something bigger that means Strong AI has been achieved. Personally though, I find the sentinel explanation for the Fermi paradox, though unsettling, unsatisfying. But not because Earth isn’t sterile but because Earth is still here. If they’re out there, then why haven’t they long since replicated through the accessible matter in the galaxy?
Yeah, let’s talk about space aliens. Just let’s not mention Super PACs, corruption, and everything else that bothers American citizens. Yeah, let’s elect Hillary Clinton, she will reveal what’s in the “X Files”.
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And I believe he delivered on it since there’s nothing that needs revealing.
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So just tell us then…
Well? BillyBob Clinton knows all. Tell him to speak the fuck up.
Wow, you guys live in a terrifying galaxy!
Maybe there’s no reason to get dramatic and every aspect of the whole life-on-other-worlds-that-is-detectable-by-us thing requires technology that we should assume doesn’t exist. And then they have to behave in manners that we never have as a bonus.
We’ve never
- Maintained a stable civilization on THIS planet without direct local influence.
- Did what somebody who doesn’t have direct local influence tells us to do if we didn’t want to.
- Broadcast a signal that can be detected by any but the nearest few dozen stars.
- Been able to reproduce or grow without nearly constant gravity.
- Made machines that can compete with biology on any but the shortest term (biology IS molecular machines!)
- Agreed on anything involving inhabiting space, which is WAY more hostile than Earth
- Identified a likely way for us to wipe ALL of us out (not most, most results in a bunch of little high-resource Utopias, unlike what The Walking Dead says)
It could really easily be that the galaxy is teeming with life but we stick at the planetary and eventually system level and it’s really hard to see anyone else. It doesn’t make for Sci-fi that’s as fun, but what’s wrong with reality? It’s still awesome, right?
Why assume doom and gloom because of a thought experiment that happened when we had NO clue how hostile the gulf of space was, and by people who didn’t even a basic historical analysis on what we actually do?
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In the short term (tens of millennia), I think the trapped at home thing is probably on point, and that the baseline species probably never leave their home systems. But given time, if even one civ lasts, and it’s at all possible to send out self-replicating machines, then it’s just a question of something somewhere evolving to fill that niche. And it seems kind of unlikely that self-replicating probes are impossible, so it seems likely that they’re either out there or we’re currently alone in the galaxy. I lean towards the latter, but who knows.
Not assuming, just speculating on some of the possibilities. The difficulty of galactic colonization isn’t really pertinent; just if it’s possible and anything lives long enough to spawn something that can accomplish it. Our history is largely irrelevant too, since we have no reason to believe other tool-designers or their civilizations follow the same patterns of behavior.
Or, as Vernor Vinge says, we may simply be flatworms attending the opera, incapable of appreciating what we observe.
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And I’m pointing out that the doom and gloom scenarios, taken individually, are invariably one step further down that road into pure speculation.
Or
Observed Examples > Reasonable Theorizing > Wild Speculation
See! See! That right there!
It means that super-advanced-very-specific-made-up-science-FICTION isn’t amazingly close in our tiny-fraction-of-detectable-space in the outskirts-of-our-galaxy and isn’t wasting a ton of resources trying interact with us yet.
The galaxy could have life vaguely analogous to ours at a huge range of plausible life cycles, ages, and dynamics without us beginning to have a reason to expect we should have detected it yet or ever will.
That doesn’t mean ‘it can’t exist’, ‘everybody dies’, ‘we’re only one per galaxy’, ‘we’re early in our life cycle (the galaxy is young)’, ‘we’re millions per galaxy but inconveniently separated by time and space’, ‘most people head to the core’, ‘most people head to red dwarves’, ‘we haven’t been interesting long enough to focus on’, and ‘everybody has tons of fun when they meet but there’s a vague primal-directive’, ‘nobody bothers when they’re learning so fast’, and ‘they just haven’t gotten to us yet’
There’s a huge analog scale between super lucky space neighbors and interstellar deathbots, and it contains most plausible outcomes.
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Maybe this is an attempt to steal some of Trump’s base. As a former First Lady she may already know there aren’t aliens at Area 51, and Roswell really was just a weather balloon, but her campaign chair can offer voters to trade their Trump vote for “whatever is behind door number 2.”
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No, but possibly one of her domain’s hackers was, indeed, a Lazar:
Okay, but what is the stable situation? If things evolve, then evolving neighbors are prospective eventual threats. So eventually, in a teeming galaxy, one will seek to dominate. It only takes one voracious replicator to take over. So where are the planet eaters?
We really don’t have much of an ability to speculate. Our technology is ramping up quickly, especially when it comes to our understanding of our own genome…at which point if we’re completely honest with ourselves all speculation goes out the window.
Why? How? That’s a lot of energy to get what exactly from another star system? How does the energy equation for this work? Interaction with other systems out here in the boondocks is so expensive and difficult that by the time we can survive the journey we’ll have hacked our own genome…then we possibly open up journeys to the core, but why head further out? And why do we have to engineer imaginary future children to be warlike again?
That’s a made up sci-fi scenario, not something we’ve seen, created, or verified is possible. There’s zero reason to assume they exist.
Or, to throw in other options (of the ZILLIONS of non-emo ones)
Something capable of actually surviving the gulf of space and time would have to be amazingly good at repairing itself, and far more sophisticated than ourselves. A ‘dumb’ replicator would be at a disadvantage to a smart one, and if they can self-enhance then the only thing they’d need from other worlds would be knowledge, ideas, and useful bits of genetic code to make new molecular machines out of.
Nonexistent most likely. Why hasn’t somebody created a super-virus yet or killed millions in a biological or chemical attack, when one person can grow enough of many chemicals to kill cities? People who are that self destructive self-select out of the gene pool, and if we don’t do it this time around then the next time somebody gets all our knowledge and far more resources per capita.
If not nonexistent, there’s only non-mindless ones exist because mindless ones can get pointed back at you accidentally, and smart ones choose not to waste all their energy and life that way once they’re sentient, or they tend to break down between the gulf between the stars. Or there’s only smart ones, and they eat/absorb their makers but then send probes to beam data back but never destroy anything, because we might have new genes to steal or ideas to acquire later.
We’re alive now and we haven’t killed ourselves just yet (and I lived through the 80s, they were scary). Our default assumption should never be something we haven’t done, and another thing we haven’t done is wipe ourselves out…despite being pretty darn reckless.
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Why do you assume that they would? Turning the galaxy into star-powered computronium for a giant science project/uploaded paradise/whatever is certainly something that a galactic civilization might do, but their society and values would be so alien to ours that there’s no way to make predictions about what they would do.
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I doubt anything sent would be like us. Probably far more solid state molecular machines running inside a simulation or put in sleep mode for the journey. It would be far more energy efficient to send a seed than colonists.
The same can be said of any sort of aliens. Yet it remains one of the wild speculations, which is all we have regarding what alien life might be like. Whatever we imagine, we’re more likely to be at least partially wrong given our lack of experience.
True, but it only has to happen once, one rogue being able to make an indiscriminate replicator that spreads before it can be stopped. Nukes are hard; weapons grade uranium and plutonium are difficult to refine. Viruses are a little easier, but still would have to overcome immune systems and quarantine procedures. Still, I suspect there will be bioterrorism attacks this century if there haven’t been already, and smallpox retention is hugely controversial for this very reason and the risk of accidental outbreaks. I’m actually fairly amazed no terrorists have poisoned an urban water supplies yet, but they tend not to be the brightest or most imaginative lot.
I don’t think we can safely make any assumptions about aliens. Our sample size for tool-designers is precisely one: ourselves. All we can do is speculate on the limits of possibility and make fairly unimformed guesses about what would or would not evolve (naturally or otherwise) elsewhere in the galaxy. I never said I thought a voracious replicator was likely. I only maintain that we can’t rule it out and thus it could be one answer to the Fermi paradox. Another could be that some other civ has released a kind of immune system to look for and stop interstellar travel specifically to prevent the emergence of a single replicator strain taking over.
I don’t. It was only a speculative question.
I agree completely.
Carl Sagan in 1966: of course there are aliens, but you didn’t see one.
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