I was thinking in terms of population density, you see, with NYC as my go-to personal reference. It’s how I’m programmed.
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Even if a world of ETs were using early 20th century style radio broadcasts, those signals would weaken to indeciperability within just a few dozen light years. Realistically speaking, the only way that SETI is ever going to succeed is if a world of ETs decides to build a giant transmitter for the purpose of shouting “we are here” to the universe.
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This tangent is echoed in a thing I just read. Most of the other animals we consider intelligent are vertebrates—apes, dolphins, corvids—pretty close to us as far as life on earth is concerned, the brains kinda look and act similar. But octopus (octopi, octipodes—I don’t think we really have a “correct” plural in English, speaking prescriptively) are basically like ETs here on earth. They’re a mollusk. The common ancestor between every other intelligent species and them is back in the primordial soup days. Brains are completely different.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n17/amia-srinivasan/the-sucker-the-sucker
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Well put. I keep thinking modulated coherent light would be the most efficient method of long distance communication (baring non-linear methods) and detecting that would be a matter of it being pointed directly at you.
I think that all gets aggregated into the calculus that produces the values for ne and fl. As with pretty much every variable beyond fp, though, we just have no idea which inputs are actually important, and so the final outputs for those variables can be wildly inconsistent.
Yep, that was Adams.
Ultimately I think the Fermi Paradox isn’t much of anything to get worked up over. Our emphasis on looking for errant radio communications when that seems to be more of a blip than a technological end-point is a big part of it. But the other part is that even our Sun – to say nothing of our original broadcasts of I Love Lucy – isn’t visible beyond a few hundred light years away. As far as the vast majority of the galaxy is concerned, we just don’t exist. There doesn’t need to be a galactic quarantine on our planet to explain why nobody is talking to us. Civilizations at our scale are just almost impossible to notice even if you know exactly what you’re looking for, and ones beyond our scale would likely be capable of and interested in things we could scarcely imagine.
That said, even if it’s just bioluminescent rad-fish on Europa or rafts of weird cryobiological algae on Titan, I do hope there’s more out there than just us.
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Ah, more Great Filter stuff. Here’s the thing: for the uncounted aeons while we evolved, the average person possessed only enough power to kill one person at a time. Sticks, rocks, rocks on sticks: if someone went on a killing spree for whatever reason, they could only kill a few. With the arrow and long-bladed hand tools, that number went up, but still, one bad apple could only spoil so many others. Then came the gun, and that number went up to dozens, hundreds even, potentially thousands, but still quite limited. Then we got creative: chemical weapons created a force multiplier that could, and did, result in thousands of casualties; biological weapons that could kill a significant portion of the human population, atomic weapons that could wreak vast devastation, all tightly controlled and in the hands of leaders who had at least been briefed as to the consequences, even if they didn’t listen or believe it. That has been the case since the 1940s, more or less, but the force multipliers didn’t stop. Now, a grad student could (almost did) destroy all agriculture by releasing a soil bacteria that created enough alcohol to kill just about any plant. A nuclear physics professor, every few years for the last couple of decades, has his grad students make nuclear bombs, everything but the core, from items available at the local hardware stores – none have failed. Thew new gene splicing techniques puts the ability to recreate smallpox, only deadlier and ignoring current immunizations, in the hands of anyone who can read a technical paper and afford an admittedly expensive set of lab equipment. I talked with a nanotech researcher once who commented that a problem they were having was that several of the experimental products of their lab ripped apart DNA or denatured proteins, fortunately we’re not yet at the self-replication level yet, but we will be. Soon, in geological terms at least, one person will be able to eradicate the species, quite possibly by accident, and that person could be anyone with half a brain and a bit of capital who just happened to have a really bad day. There there’s the whole AI field: an economic AI may decide humans are superfluous, and military AI may decide humans are the enemy, a manufacturing AI may think everything should be paperclips: we have enough issues with slow AIs (corporations) causing wanton misery and destruction in the quest for profits, and that’s only going to get more extreme. Some think the worst of the great filters are behind us, but its pretty clear there are several, perhaps the most difficult to survive, ahead of us as well, and the reason for the Great Silence is because no species has survived long enough to escape their home world before destroying themselves.
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Human what?
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Good - get off my galaxy.
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Based on a sample size of one (Earth), but from everything we know and guess about how life formed here:
Probability that there’s life on other worlds in this galaxy - almost certain.
Probability that at least some of those worlds have multicellular life and creatures more interesting to us than microbes - reasonably good.
Probability that any of those worlds have life that we could hold a conversation with - pretty low.
Likelihood that we will learn of the existence of any of that life - given the way exoplanet research is progressing, I’d say it’s almost certain we’re going to detect a world with all the stigmata of life around another star in the next 50-ish years. Knowing anything more than “these exoplanets very likely have biospheres” will take far, far longer.
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It’s the dust. The inhabitants of planet Krikkit led insular lives and never realised the existence of the Universe at large because of the dust. And when the dust blew over, their answer was to try to destroy the universe. That’s all.
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The Drake equation is the worst example of garbage in garbage out. You multiply a bunch of wild guesses together and the result is that you don’t know a damn thing more than what you started.
Personally, I’m a believer in the idea that by the time you have the technology to travel to distant star systems you no longer have a reason to do so. If you can build a habitat that can survive a trip between the stars then you can build effectively unlimited space habitats in your own solar system. You already have unlimited living space and resources, why bother with the incredible difficulty and expense of sending people on semi-suicidal one way trips that won’t be completed for hundreds or thousands of years?
I also think that life is fairly common in the universe (life finds a way), but intelligence is hampered by the annoying tendency for genetic systems to get hung up on local maxima. I mean our own planet wasted millions of years on Dinosaurs that never developed a space program.
Still, I would expect there to be many many thousand intelligent species in our galaxy. Too bad they’re probably never leaving their solar system for the above stated reason. Our sphere of detection is still so damn small in galactic terms.
Probably the most depressing aspect of this is it strongly suggests that FTL travel is impossible, or it is at least tremendously impractical. Without FTL travel or reactionless drives the rocket equation is a harsh mistress and we’ll probably never leave our solar system. If you do the math it becomes stupendously expensive to send a modestly sized spacecraft to even a nearby solar system quick enough that your radioactive fuel has not degraded to the point of uselessness during the trip.
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Safely ignored or ignored at your own peril!
I can personally declare this article false by the number of times I’ve been probed in the middle of the night,
Is that Mick Jagger in drag?
Eh, FTL is almost certainly impossible anyway. It throws huge spanners into the workings of physics as we understand it; basically, any method of FTL travel or communication enables you to cause paradoxes that fuck causality sideways with a rake.
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A good way to look at it is to look at where we are now technologically. We are going to have people on a different planet within 10 years. We’ll have laser propelled solar-sail probes arriving at alpha centauri in 20 years. This will happen in our lifetime. (There is literally someone still alive that was born before the Wright brothers ‘invented’ powered flight)
Now, project that into the future. We make some sci-fi generational ship that can make it to a habitable planet (we are discovering that there are tons of those), the from there they build ships and keep heading out (all the while we keep building better ones). We would also be communicating to all these ships as best as we can, effectively screaming out the newest technology to ensure human knowledge is spread as far as we go. Even if it took 1000 years to arrive at a new world, we would be freaking everywhere within 10,000 years. 10,000 years ago we started growing crops, creating cites, recording history. It’s really no time at all.
So, given our capabilities, if some other life out there was as advanced as us, and just a little bit earlier, 10k years? A million? They would be everywhere, it’s just math. And they would be loud!
But sadly, our galaxy is silent.
But, cheer up. I’m certain there is life out there, just not particularly intelligent. And we have the technology to go, we just need to boldly do it. And think, there might be aliens out there looking to the stars to find us.
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“Oh… oh god.”
“What is it?”
“Fuuuuuuuuck. Oh this is so bad.”
“What?! You’re freaking me out!”
“It’s the humans.”
“What about them?”
“You know how our attempts to induce standard oral translinguistic telepathic communication with them haven’t been working?”
“Yeah, it’s weird for a technological species not to have latent OTTC capabilities, but not unheard of.”
“Well, it works better if you put the transducing probe in their oral cavity.”
“We did! Like, we literally shoved that probe into like a million human mouths! All we learned was that they were telepathically mute and had very bad breath.”
“Not their mouths.”
“What?”
“We weren’t putting the probe in their mouths.”
“Then where–ohhh fuck me.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, I am cringing so hard right now.”
“We can never go back.”
“We can never go back!”
“So awkward!”
“No, fuck it, we’re leaving today and we’re putting them on the communications embargo list.”
“Ugh. Sorry humans.”
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