Again, that’s being really quite irrationally over optimistic.
Every square inch of Earth’s surface has survivable temperatures and pressures for humans to breathe the air and drink the water. All we need is insulating clothing to protect us from extreme cold, and we can survive anywhere on the planet. All a submarine has to do is surface and it can get all the breathable air everyone on the crew needs. In space, there’s nothing like that. The hostility of the environment to life, anywhere outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, is at least an order of magnitude greater than anywhere on Earth.
We keep people alive in low Earth orbit by shipping up a staggering amount of consumables, and they have lifeboats that will get them back to a habitable environment within an hour or so if something goes horribly wrong. A similar lifeboat on Mars would need to carry a year’s worth of food and water, because it would take a year to get that lifeboat back to Earth.
Note that despite all the downsides of robots that you mention, the past 50 years of space exploration beyond low Earth orbit have been done 100% by robots. There are very good reasons for that, and not all of them have to do with saving money.
We get to be the Precursors, the Old Ones, or whoever. The legendary lost race which seeded the galaxy with life, terraformed millions of planets, and littered deep space with gigantic inexplicable artefacts.
Perhaps designed specifically to mess with the heads of younger races.
Like a cryogenic vault containing a collection of procedurally created underwear for all of the species of our imagined empire.
These articles get really, really old, and are blatantly misleading. The headline might as well come from the old World Weekly News for all the accuracy it contains.
It has to be stressed, and it’s almost insulting how often this needs to be pounded into people’s skulls, neither the Drake Equation nor The Fermi Paradox are viable modeling tools. Drake flat out said that about his equation, that it was a thought puzzle absolutely useless in any actual statistical determination and no, you can’t plug alternative data into it and get a more plausible result. So no, we’re not “likely alone,” the factually appropriate headline would read, “Another completely baseless conjecture which ignores 90% of the available data, like the simple fact that if another civilization developed parallel to ours on the other side of our galaxy, we wouldn’t get detailed information on it, based on current technology, ever. We might get information about it, at the speed of light and better tech on both sides, about 100,000 years from now.” I know it’s a little long, it’s a working title. Get off my back.
The point is that we’ve only even been able to recognize that some of those stars were other galaxies for about a century now. We’ve barely explored our night sky in any meaningful way and we’re only just in the last half century even making guesses at some of the tools that one might even use to detect other advanced life. And that’s before we factor in things like the aforementioned time lag when staring at the rest of existence. We’re hopelessly in the dark, information-wise. When you craft phrases like, “Human civilization likely alone,” based on this sad mess, it’s just…I’m really not trying to be mean here but it’s not good.
What a wonderful version! I first read “They’re made out of meat” in a book for librarians: Teaching Information Literacy through Short Stories. This story illustrates the idea of “Searching as Strategic Exploration”, with emphasis on how to work with unexpected or unwanted data.
Completely off topic, sorry, but I was delighted to watch the video and wanted to share in return.
Not necessarily. Based on n=1, there is only, like, a bubble 100 years thick. Before that; no transmissions at all. After that; transmissions are narrow band, or directed, or wired, or whatever else that isn’t omni-directional. So, if you weren’t listening during that 100 year window (out of the 13,700,000,000 years the Milky Way has been rockin’), then you’re SOL.
Humans, the Black Swan of “intelligent” life. Likely alone, likely soon gone. Chance will hit the reset button. There are “End Times” indeed just not old/new Testament versions.
Very likely loads of not terribly interesting ones. Unless someone made a mistake the private key protecting our little chat with this website is likely unique(and, if not, fails at uniqueness only because of a few nearby copies used for backup or load balancing; not because of independent discovery elsewhere); as are its numerous colleagues.
The question of more general, and definitely more interesting, ones is less clear.
Not only are we alone, it is highly UNLIKELY humanity will survive this century.
If anyone mistakes what we have as intelligence, please explain how one specie controlling 59% of the land, and being the top predator on the planet yet, outweighing our wild prey, makes us anything but extinction ready.
Nothing humans do is sustainable, ecologically.
Agreed. Absolutely no reason to star travel, even if you could (entities with 100000 year lifespans perhaps), the only thing worth collecting would be art, since that is different here, just not worth traveling to get it.
But, lets accept the premise: the bubble is 150 years thick, rather than 100. Whoopy do. Shit, increase it by an order of magnitude, so the bubble is 1,000 years thick. That’s still less than a rounding error over 14,000,000,000 years. You’ve got better odds of winning lotto than hearing those transmissions.
The referenced article makes a LOT of assumptions. Some obvious quibbles:
We have NO IDEA if other civilizations would use radio. Even if they did, there would be no guarantee that they would keep doing so, long enough for us to detect it, or that they would use the rather narrow frequency band we actually monitor for signals.
The known (visible) universe is VERY, VERY large. We haven’t surveyed even a tiny fraction of the stars, much less galaxies, that we can see. Furthermore, we cannot be certain there simply isn’t “stuff” in the way, and/or our instruments are sensitive enough, or that we’re even using the right methods at all (see 1).
Statistics alone nearly demand the existence of life and civilizations “out there,” considering how abundant planets are turning out to be.
Why don’t you go try it in the long arctic night sometime and report back how easy it is, even if we let you bring all the high tech clothing and gear you want but no food or fuel.
90% of what makes human space travel hard is the gravity well making it just super expensive right now to get mass up there. There’s a number of ideas to get mass up without carrying up the fuel too, which is an incredibly inefficient process. Plus there’s the idea of obtaining most of the mass we need up there either on the Moon or asteroids.
As for why, there’s been enough mass extinction events in our world’s history to make me and guys like Musk nervous. We could be causing one.
I started to agree with you, before realizing that we’re among 7.6 billion people. Thinking about the other creatures that probably outnumber us on this planet is probably going to keep me up at night.
The size of local maximum bump compared to immediate surroundings is what makes it hard for mutations to do their part. The distance between local maxims is traversed by incremental progress.
