By “habitable”, I mean:
Given those conditions, it’s reasonable to assume life will arise. We’ve demonstrated in lab conditions that it’s pretty inevitable once those conditions are met.
That was such a great trilogy. Hugo award well deserved.
Fashionably late, imho.
The Rare Earth theory still convinces me. I think we’re it for complex, intelligent life. It takes too long to get where we are, and the forest is dark and dangerous. We got lucky.
humans have been pretty stable evolutionary speaking and hominids aren’t well known for war. war seems to be something specifically about us. ( well, and maybe ants. )
keep in mind darwin didn’t originally use the phrase “survival of the fittest” that was another guy, and iirc it only eventually wound up in origin’s introduction.
there’s a lot of ways selection pressure works - cooperation is at least as important for social species as competition.
Chimps can get violent as well. Interestingly, our closest relatives, bonobos, have never been seen to be violent. They solve conflicts with sex. Give that a thought for a moment…
In truth, any civilization that is capable of travel between stars would have nothing to fear from us. But they also I don’t think would need to be particularly visible unless they filled the galaxy or cared to visit, because believe it or not, we can’t make out things very well. We just noticed the star closest to ours has a planet four years ago, and somehow we know how alive or dead the rest of space is?
Unfortunately this always feels very relevant to these too:
These are all probabilistic arguments based on very poorly known priors. I’m not going to say it’s not the best guess, but I think anyone who tracks the error bars along with the numbers is not going to be impressed.
My “warring factions” comment was geared more towards a visual of proterozoic warfare than later hominid style war. Think organelles capturing one another to out-compete other archaea. That kind of thing. We can talk hominids, if you want, but that’s not what I originally meant with my comments.
The drake equation doesn’t distinguish between, “Clever enough to be interesring to humans” and “possessing the wisdom to not annihilate themselves”.
In the same way, it assumes that all such contact is “lucid” contact. Humans won’t mistake alien intelligence for angels, demons,fairies,or weather balloons.
And when contact is made, everyone from Neil DeGrasse Tyson to Donald Trump (“take me to your leader”?) are going to be aware of what’s going on… and aware in exactly the same way.
If humans have such a hard time detecting sentience in other human beings, that doesn’t speak well of our abilities to find it off-planet.
I’d doubt that fear is involved; more like,
“Don’t touch that filth, you don’t know where it’s been.”
Y’know, the way we look at mold.
Excellent point, that.
Also, I just got a caseload; so I’m tapping out, now that real work beckons.
Really, the longer we go without contact the better, assuming we continue some kind of drift towards higher technology.
There are plenty of indigenous peoples all around the world who have direct experience what happens when an alien civilization shows up and doesn’t even recognize you as anything more than a resource to be tapped.
Also radio has been around a little more than a hundred years, the galaxy is about a thousand times that in diameter, and volume scales with cubes. Even if you could detect the most microscopic of signals, or even if everything we put out were intentional transmissions, we are still completely invisible unless you happen to be right here.
what if? has a nice answer to what alien astronomers might see looking at us. If they had good equipment, algae, the same as has been here for the last two billion years. I’m not sure that’s a good reason for them to beam messages at us either.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from a non-existent one.
I, a simple evolved human and totally not a rival Von Neumann probe hiding in the asteroid belt, would be interested in seeing a selfie, preferably with stars in the background to triangulate… er, appreciate your cool digs.
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(checks 2020 bingo card)
Damn.
There’s still time to add that to the 2021 bingo card.
Nope. Space is just too big. And too full of nothing, so to speak. And too old, all the civilizations that are (or were) would not only be separated by inconceivable large distances, but also by a lot of time.
Everything that is, or was, or will be simply gets lost in the background noise.
Someone needs to get a 2020-themed expansion pack for the Settlers of Catan game if only because it’s just the kind of long-range thinking and realism I feel it is currently lacking.
Also, I sense the 2021 bingo card set is going to contain a lot of what the 2020 bingo cards have had, and I honestly don’t even want to contemplate what that means.
Perhaps as an add-on, we could include the 2021 bingo card paper bag suitable for putting on one’s face and breathing into, for the more delicate sensibility folks likely to hyperventilate. I include myself here.
Make paper bag in pretty colors, like some of the more bespoke face masks I see these days. Think: sequins.
Unsaid there was “within our light cone.” Obviously, if they are millions of years ahead of us, then the evidence of IR-radiating stars could encompass millions of lightyears around them. If they are only a few centuries ahead, then the volume shrinks commensurately. So, yeah, huge and old and very possible that we wont see them due to that. However, I think my point holds.
