I think the only thing we can say for sure is that there is unlikely to be anything similar to us within 1000 light years. If there were, we would be hearing their radio and TV. But beyond that, its all guesswork, even when it comes from highly qualified people.
It’s even simpler. Communication requires first the intention (desire to attempt to communicate) and ability to do so (necessary technology). Non-communication requires… well… doing nothing. Non-action is the baseline.
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Bigger planes are easier to detect. Our observations thus far are likely biased.
Random mutations are what gets genetic systems out of local maximum (minimum). It just takes certain number of iterations.
The ones that do that attract the berserker probes even faster than the ones that don’t.
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This is absurd. The Milky Way has at least 250 billion stars, Andromeda has a trillion. Are there civilizations nearby to us that are contacting us in ways we can recognize and that have done so in the last 70 or so years? Prolly not. Are there other civilizations that exist in the entire freakin’ universe at this very moment? Hell yes there are.
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Let’s ask inverse question, how many other unique phenomena present on exactly one place in universe have we found?
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I agree. The universe is larger than we can comprehend. They estimated as many as 40 billion earth-like planets in what we consider habitable zones, based on our possibly very narrow definitions of the conditions for life. Consider 14 billion years and 40 billion planets. If it happened here (or maybe “when it finally happens here”), what’s to say it’s not happening all over the place, constantly? Some math ginned up in the almost total absence of data?
The underlying assumption in all of this is that the way intelligent life emerged here is THE WAY intelligent life emerges.
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You are Johnny T., and I claim my £5!
The problem is the further the next hump is from the local maxima the harder it is to get there via random mutation. Dinosaurs might still rule the land were it not for a catastrophic global disaster that basically flipped the table and finally gave mammals their chance to thrive.
Even then it took tens of millions of years to get to the point of banging rocks together.
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Alternatively: dinosaurs created selection pressure towards intelligence, then died off, leaving a niche to be filled.
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It took 65 million years for that selection pressure to manifest if true.
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Perhaps. Elon Musk is determined, but Mars is a very unforgiving place to robots, it’s going to be even more challenging for people.
That’s… really quite remarkably over-optimistic.
Assuming that civilization is not severely harmed by global warming, leading the survivors to retrench and dedicate themselves to fixing the Earth rather than shooting rockets into space (a big assumption), there’s still really nothing beyond Earth that is worth our going out there in person. Every single planet in the solar system other than this one is aggressively uninhabitable. Even Elon Musk’s billion dollar fortune is not enough to finance the amount of infrastructure that would need to be exported from Earth in order to make any kind of long term encampment on any extraterrestrial body viable. And what’s worse, there’s nothing out there that’s worth shipping home to pay for the cost of building and maintaining that encampment.
A long term robotic encampment - now that might be worth doing and actually semi-affordable.
But humans off earth? No way. Every attempt to create an economically justifiable plan for creating a permanent human presence in space (from L4 colonies making solar power sattelites to asteroid mining to pure moonshine like Helium-3 mining) has foundered on the plain fact that there’s really nothing worthwhile out there, and all of the things that are worth doing out there can be done far more easily, safely, and affordably by robots than by human beings.
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Well, as far as we know.
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I would argue that the mammals which lived 65 million years ago were well on the way to replacing brawn with brains.
edit:
We can be quite certain that nobody reached the moon before us, because the surface was very old and absolutely pristine. I would argue that the same applies to the solar system generally. There is no evidence of visitors before our time.
The article I linked to isn’t talking about visitors, but about the (highly speculative, bordering on whimsical) notion that humanity may not be the first intelligent, industrial species to evolve on Earth.
Come to think of it, there was a piece on BB about it a couple of months back:
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Yeah I know. I meant that a previous civilization probably didn’t make it into space. But certainly, we could have been at Alpha Centauri by now if the Romans had kept developing.
But the same argument applies to ETs as well I think. Everywhere we look, space is pristine, No garbage dumps or spent boosters other than our own.
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Robots are not known for adapting and evolving, for making new tools and inventing new paradigm’s to deal with their new situations. When they land they are all they’ll ever be, designed at least a decade before by humans on Earth. The signature human trait is adaptation by technology. If Neolithic lnuit could learn to survive above the Arctic Circle, I don’t think modern technical humans should have insurmountable problems on Mars.
