Radio telescopes look further and further into the universe and beyond, hoping to find planets like ours. Planets on which beings like us could live. Radio waves are sent from Earth to everywhere in hopes of a reply. There is no reply; the silence of space is maddening.
Astronomers and astrophysicists find more and more planets where life can exist, but there is no evidence that intelligent life does exist. It’s the Fermi Paradox, which briefly stated is: Where is everybody?
They must be there. The Drake Equation tries to quantify the number of advanced civilizations just in our own galaxy. To simplify, it's the number of stars in the galaxy....
- multiplied by the fraction that form planets...
- multiplied by the average number of planets in the habitable zone...
- multiplied by the fraction of these that give birth to life in some form......
- multiplied by these that develop intelligence......
- multiplied by the fraction of these that produce interstellar communications...
- multiplied by the fraction of the planet's lifetime during which such civilizations survive.
Scientists (notably Carl Sagan among others) think the answer is in the final variable: The high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves. In other words, the silence of communication from other civilizations may tell a tragic story about our destination as a people. Given enough intelligence and discovery, advanced civilizations kill themselves.
Homo sapiens originated in Africa, where it reached anatomical modernity about 200,000 years ago and began to exhibit full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago. It took from that time to the 20th century to discover and harness atomic power, and then just 17 years later for the two most powerful nations on earth (the U.S and the U.S.S.R.) to come within hours of mutual annihilation.
We grow rightly weary of our politicians and their endlessly petty machinations. For all their grubbiness, they stand between civilization and the end of civilization. A frightening thought, isn't it? They will by their actions determine whether this civilization will live long enough to be heard by whatever is out there, in the galaxy and beyond.
An enduring civilization requires that citizens hold politicians feet to the fire. We rightly expect that politicians move us away from self-destruction, and not nearer its end. And if they cannot or will not, they must be replaced by others who can and will.
The agreement with Iran does not improve our species' chances of survival, nor that of our civilization.
82 comments:
They're heeeereeeee!
I think it more likely that no other planet has reached our level of civilization.
Even if you believe in evolutionary theory, there's no reason us human beings to exist or for us to have the intelligence we have. Once we got past the Chimps, we had become the 'fittest'. There's no evolutionary reason for us to be able to do math or read.
So all those other planets are just full of Democrat voters, too stupid/ignorant to build radio's or space ships.
Or the planets could be full of John McCains - which would make the self-destruction theory plausible.
Or imagine planets full of Crack Mc's or Inga or the people who invented the New Coke - yeah that self-destruction theory seems more plausible the more I think about it.
A bit melancholic tonight, rc, huh?
Planet of the Ingas sounds like good name for a B movie. Planet of the Cracks sounds like a different kind of movie.
JAL - No, I never been addicted to Melon wine.
"Planet of the Cracks" sounds dangerous and a planet needing a lot of handy men.
Is this the thread with the donuts?
We must also keep in perspective that we've only been around for a million years or so. That's literally a fraction of the time that the universe has existed. But to show how much smaller we really are, we are part of one solar system out of millions in a galaxy. And there are millions to billions of galaxies in the universe.
It's probable that some sort of life existed a billion years ago or is currently in the making to exist in a billion years. The potential of life being out there somewhere is extraordinarily high. We just need to explore and conquer the great expanses of the universe.
I don't believe that most civilizations kill themselves off but rather a cosmological event. Our fate is sealed unless we can get off this cursed planet and conquer the universe.
Americascivilwar.blogspot.com
Also, do you think some sort of advance civilization would have technology to listen our mediocre radio waves? It's foolish to believe that they would get ours or we'd get their high tech radio waves.
Did everyone see that Jodie Foster movie "contact"? I really enjoyed that movie when it came out. The movie sort of fell apart at the end w/ the typical Hollywood storyline.
oh and - defect.
It would be amazing to discover another planet with life. Esp proof of a civilization that wiped itself out.
They're here already coming and going at will, slipping in and out of our dimension. They travel by folding space, not really, it seem like like to us because their 4th dimension is at right angles to ours and out of our sight, out of our experience, so they seem so distant here in three dimensions, yet due to their mathematic points of their 4th dimension, they are right next to us.
This is maths to understand dimensions, as points in space.
You can be one point moving around all over the place in one dimension and not understanding anything about your environment, until, gulp, an amoeba eats you.
Or you can exist in two dimensions as if living on a sheet of paper. That would be your number squared. Because now your number is an actual square! And still not understand anything about your environment until you bump into it. You can regard its width, turn away, but that is it.
Or you can exist in three dimensions and go up and down and regard life in Flatlandia from above and report all the wonderful things you see up there, "Hey, I can see my house!" in a whole new light. And that is called "cubed" because now your number is an actual cube!
We want to know what the aliens are up to. How do they get here?
Maths!
How can we understand their alien ways? How can we approach their 4th dimension through maths?
I don't know. What do I look like, a mathematician over here?
But I do know when you make a cube mathematically. You draw a square, then another exact square, then connect the lines. But that is only a drawing, a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional object. It is a drawing of the shadow cast by a glass cube. Every child I ever met draws this rather mathematic cube. Actually I made that up, I'm not in the habit of asking children to draw a cube. But I do see a lot of these cubes.
That is the shadow of a glass cube. It shows the edges and the points.
You got to this cube by adding points at right angles, and that is what you have to do to locate the points for the next dimension, they will be at right angles, but there is not place to put them in three dimensional space, where we abide.
The aliens do not abide. But we are stuck. Damnit! Bastards! However, just as we can see the shadow cast onto two dimensional space by three dimensional glass cube, so too can we observe the three-dimensional shadow that is cast by cube taken to the fourth dimension by extrapolating their points that must be at right angles. squared, cubed, 4th power, And the shadow of that cube extrapolated up were it made of glass so its points and edges show, looks like this.
Those are what the creatures are up to that inhabit or use 4th dimensional space, that appears like folding space to us.
So. Just as when you set your finger onto a piece of paper, it shocks the inhabitants of Flatlandia because a creature moving through three dimensions intruded like that, wreaked havoc then disappeared, so too do the aliens slip in and out of our dimensions and it appears to us as if they suddenly materialized and dematerialized when they were nearby all along.
Chip-----decaf.
*Mother's voice: "Don't listen to him, Honey, you just speak right up." *
They were getting ready to contact us and then they read some youtube comments, and they decided to stay un-found.
They may just not share our addiction to change. I mean, they could have gotten to the Roman orgie phase, and their Caligula was a pretty cool dude who made killer Mojitos. Boom! Evolution is complete.
Chip-
Thanks for the maths, I think I understand most of it.
Now, what about probing? How does one get added to the list?
We are not alone... that's my gut feeling.
Nah, Lone Wolf has it.
Most of the "Where are they?" crap assumes that they're using a technology comparable to ours, and that they care to be seen.
Iran has nothing to do with planetary survival. If they launched every nuke they could conceivably make and were wiped off the planet in turn, humanity would survive just fine.
In any event, the Drake equation just tells us what percentage of planets have intelligent life, not what percentage of planets have intelligent life using technology our instruments could plausibly detect.
Even if you believe in evolutionary theory, there's no reason us human beings to exist or for us to have the intelligence we have. Once we got past the Chimps, we had become the 'fittest'. There's no evolutionary reason for us to be able to do math or read.
First of all we aren't descended from chimps.
Secondly, you don't understand what the word "fittest" means.
There is no Platonic ideal of a species that is ideally fit for life in general. Fitness is measured relative to the organism's environment -- circumstances, ecosystem, other species, other members of its own species, etc. All of those things are constantly changeable, which is why species can thrive for millions of years and then go extinct when their environment changes.
Human-level intelligence is, so far as we can tell, a first for life on Earth. It is *absolutely* an evolutionary advantage, for the simple reason that it allows us to dictate what our environment *is*. Humans aren't ideally suited to life in the tropics or life on the tundra -- but so what? We work around that by altering the tropics and the tundra to suit our needs.
Simply put, we solve the problem of fitness by eliminating that which we don't fit with.
Simply put, we solve the problem of fitness by eliminating that which we don't fit with.
And when Nation X does not believe it "fits" with Nation Y over on the other side of the globe and sends nukes in that direction....end of civilization.
Death is a mere adaptation.
I understand my limitations, but I can't imagine a life form becoming "intelligent" as we understand it, and not producing transmissions that we could identify as nonrandom. It would have to be a common energy form, and we can probably now identify most of those. No matter how advanced a civilization becomes, it likely has to go through a stage similar to ours.
Although it may be possible that one could be so different that it would appear totally invisible or random to us, the number of likely civilizations is so high that certainly some would follow a path similar to ours, which without alternative evidence is the most likely path it would take.
There should be a multitude of civilizations at all different levels of development with many going through our phase of development and transmitting at a million different dates in time from a million different distances, which should provide a continuous shower of new ones coming into view all the time.
We should be seeing them, and I find it very mysterious that we are not. Probably the most important and fascinating question of all...now that we all know who shot J.R..
The only explanation for me is an unlikely one mathematically, and that is that we are the first, or at least relatively near the lead so that the others are rare at this point in time, but that seems highly unlikely too.
And when Nation X does not believe it "fits" with Nation Y over on the other side of the globe and sends nukes in that direction....end of civilization.
Um, no.
The United States and the USSR could, possibly, have wiped out all of human civilization if both of us had fired off everything. Even that's iffy. Species have survived worse. Our ancestors survived worse, although admittedly they were just small rodents when the meteor hit.
If every other nuke-possessing nation on Earth shot off its nuclear wad all at once? We'd pull through fine. Hell, if they shot them all off AT THE UNITED STATES the United States would survive it. We wouldn't enjoy the experience, but we'd live.
I can't imagine a life form becoming "intelligent" as we understand it, and not producing transmissions that we could identify as nonrandom.
Our radio telescopes could only detect radio of the type we're currently emitting from a few hundred light-years away. Phrased differently: 99.98% of the stars in the Milky Way are too far away for us to pick up their weather radar and I Love Intergalactic Lucy episodes, even if they were being broadcast in a manner we could recognize.
That aside, RF usage of the kind we can pick up is enormously wasteful. Relying on the EM spectrum for transmitting data doesn't scale well, and it is unlikely that any species would rely on it long-term. A mix of tight-beam transmission between satellites and low-power, short-range transmission on the ground (think cell phones) would barely be detectable from the edges of our OWN solar system, let alone the next one over.
So, basically, we should only expect to hear something if one of that 0.02% of the nearby galaxy is within a century or two of us, technologically speaking. Doesn't surprise me that we aren't hearing anything.
"So, basically, we should only expect to hear something if one of that 0.02% of the nearby galaxy is within a century or two of us, technologically speaking. Doesn't surprise me that we aren't hearing anything."
But the transmissions don't need to be anything like what we do. They only need to be nonrandom, and they could be far more powerful, and or efficient, including intentional intergalactic transmissions, and they could have been sent anytime over billions of years, and likely would have been sent millions of times from a wide variety of directions and distances and times.
The numbers are so large that no matter how unlikely any one scenario might be, the large numbers and extremely long time frames make the impossible nearly unavoidable. This is what makes the unlikely reality of our own evolution possible. Very unlikely combinations and outcomes given enough opportunities over enough time become inevitable, like a royal straight flush if you play enough hands. There are a lot of gambling halls in the universe, and they have been pulling one hell of a long all-nighter.
Drake was afraid of explicit denominators?
You need to subtle and demure if you want to be a bottom.
Despite the the large numbers and billions of years, I still can't believe the Kardashians really happened.
But the transmissions don't need to be anything like what we do.
Yes, they do, because "signals like what we do" are what we're listening for.
An explanation for our seemingly being alone in the universe may be found in a work by two Univ of Washington scientists--one an astronomer and one a paleontologist--entitled "Rare Earth." Sadly only the 2004 paperback is avail at Amazon, the original 1999 hard-cover is out of print. Be sure to read ALL the reviews--both positive and negative as the scientific community has weighed in heavily here and one can learn almost as much from the reviews (pro & con) as one can from reading this thought-provoking book.
Somebody's got to be first. Maybe it's us.
"Yes, they do, because "signals like what we do" are what we're listening for."
That's just not true. We are scanning a wide range of energy types, and not just by specific government agencies. The planet is covered with receivers of all types. A flashing light or pulse of anything would be noticed if it was a pattern. We aren't just looking for Morse code on the AM dial.
It is true, if signals like we do includes the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
What if they communicate by sending gravitons instead of photons? How about quantum entanglement? Carrier pigeons in little space suits? Subspace communications?
Personally, I'd guess electromagnetic, with very low power for local broadcast, combined with highly focused point to point for longer range. The former is not detectable at interstellar distances, the latter is not detectable if you are not between the source and the target.
For that matter, setting aside signals we have sent out for the purpose of announcing our presence to the galaxy, from how far away could our current technology detect our day-to-day electromagnetic chatter?
As Mr. Rumsfeld might say, there are "unknown unknowns".
Just because we've found a way to look at something, we figure anyone has to be using that thing. It's arrogance, really.
It's like a Amerind saying "There's no life anywhere else. Look, no smoke signals."
I suspect we will not go extinct from a major catastrophe but eventually from boredom.
I am of course referring to you humans. Cows can always find satisfaction chewing their cud.
The planet is covered with receivers of all types. A flashing light or pulse of anything would be noticed if it was a pattern. We aren't just looking for Morse code on the AM dial.
You are wrong in so many ways I'm not sure where to start.
1. Virtually all receivers on Earth are designed to filter out unexpected signals. So no, they aren't listening for weird broadcasts from space; if they were, we would be unable to use them for communication.
2. Signals don't stop and wait around when they reach Earth. They keep going. You claim about being able to pick up signals from "billions of years ago" is weirdly wrong. In fact, given that the furthest point in the galaxy is only around 80,000 light years away, any and all signals sent by anyone in the galaxy more than 80,000 years ago are long gone.
3. Signal strength decreases with the square of distance. We have difficulty detecting *stars* that are further away than a few tens of thousands of light-years. The most powerful broadcast we've ever made would be utterly undetectable by any technology we're using from more than a few dozen light-years away.
4. Virtually all non-random signals *appear* random if you don't know what to look for in the signal.
That's all I have time for now.
Or maybe God created only one planet in His universe that can sustain human life, And then He put our ancestors here.
There isn't a hint of proof otherwise.
I hear you Rev, and that's a great point, about the distances and it may be the explanation, but they don't just send out one signal and stop, and 80,000 years is a lot of signals from a lot of places.
BTW, what happened to all the energy signals that were produced over 80,000 years ago? Where are they now?
As to our receivers and noise suppression, again a good point, but I'm not talking about common devices alone. Many receivers are open to a wide range of signals and have been for many years.
Of course you have the easier point to argue since we have found no signals, but accepting one explanation for that and giving up on the possibility is just not how I roll. If you think the math makes it inevitable that they are there, which I do, then you have to keep asking the questions.
Michael Haz said...
There isn't a hint of proof otherwise.
And there never could be, because once you accept the miraculous creation of the entire universe, including ourselves, it's pretty trivial to accept the miraculous creation of all those bits of information that otherwise look like evidence of evolution.
I'm not arguing that creation is incorrect, just that it is unfalsifiable.
Alien invasion would falsify it pretty fast.
No it wouldn't. A god that could create us could create aliens too.
Or maybe God created only one planet in His universe that can sustain human life, And then He put our ancestors here. There isn't a hint of proof otherwise.
There are an infinite number of hypotheses with no evidence for or against them. But yes, that is one of them.
Maybe God created the other guys and WE'RE the aliens! It would explain that ugly dog.
IiB--
Haz's premise was that there was only one planet with life on it. That's quite falsifiable, not that God couldn't create aliens, but that He hadn't.
His statement was God created only one planet in His universe that can sustain human life.
The aliens would not be human. Even if they had matching DNA, they are called something else.
And if you found another planet that could sustain human life, it could be that that planet was created by satan just to mislead the wicked such as yourself.
Many receivers are open to a wide range of signals and have been for many years.
Sigh.
All that matters is signal strength and receiver sensitivity. The number of receivers and the spectrum they cover matter little.
Basically you're arguing that because sound travels and there are hundreds of millions of people in America, the fact that none of us can hear people talking in China proves nobody's talking in China. :)
Haz's premise was that there was only one planet with life on it. That's quite falsifiable
For a sufficiently generous definition of "quite". There are 10 sextillion solar systems in the universe, exactly one of which we are able to examine for signs of intelligent life. :)
"All that matters is signal strength and receiver sensitivity"
Sigh. Again, the strength nor the efficiency, is not limited to what we have managed ourselves. Radiation is much more easily taken to the level making interstellar communication possible than is sound to a global. In fact, we still can't do it. If the Chinese could be any possible level of sophistication, and we consider for instance boat travel rather than sound, then clearly they could have made themselves known anywhere on the globe regardless of our level of advancement.
In the past, the Europeans were the aliens of the global scale. Their ability to project overcame the receivers' inability to anticipate them.
I get your point, I just don't buy the scale assumption.
If you have time, do that calculation you did before in a previous thread about number of possibilities where you showed a low probability for getting a signal here. I don't remember where it was, but it did make sense to me then.
...multiplied by these that develop intelligence...
Modern data applied to the Drake Equation says the number should be very high.
I don't see how anyone can say this. While life showed up soon ( in geologic terms ) after there was water, it took another 2.25 billion years for multi-cellular life to evolve. Since we only have one example of this happening, we don't know if this step happened in an average amount of time, or if it happened surprisingly fast or surprisingly slow.
What if earth is the beta test?
Some of the theories here can be reduced to
"There is no proof that another civilization on another planet exists, therefore a civilization on another planet must exist".
Contrasted with
"There is no proof that God created the universe, therefore God did not create the universe".
Michael Haz said...
Some of the theories here can be reduced to
"There is no proof that another civilization on another planet exists, therefore a civilization on another planet must exist".
Which theories here can be reduced to that?
I think a better restatement would be:
1) We think we know how life came to exist on earth, and to reach the point where it could create signals that would be detectable from other planets.
2) We think there are a lot of other planets that have the same potential as earth had.
Therefore we think there should be lots of civilizations whose signals we could detect.
Check: Are we detecting those signals? No. Therefore we need to rethink some of our earlier assumptions.
It is this check-and-rethink that differentiates science from superstition.
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
rcocean said...
So all those other planets are just full of Democrat voters, too stupid/ignorant to build radio's or space ships.
"rc" for teh thread winnah! :)
Radiation is much more easily taken to the level making interstellar communication possible than is sound to a global.
No, making a noise that will carry thousands of miles is much easier than interstellar communication.
If we somehow channeled the *total* energy output of the human race into a radio broadcast -- abandoning everything else we do for the sake of desperately trying to signal the universe that we exist -- by the time that signal reached the nearest star you would need a radio telescope thousands of kilometers across to detect it.
The only way to achieve distance is to narrow the beam -- which in turn narrows the number of potential listeners. The only way we'd hear signals from outside our immediate stellar neighborhood is if the aliens there singled *our* star out for special attention, dedicated awesome energy resources to the broadcast, and happened to do it at the same time we were listening. What rational basis is there for such an action?
"There is no proof that God created the universe, therefore God did not create the universe".
A more accurate way of putting it would be: the belief that God really exists and created the universe is exactly as well-supported as the belief that Rainbow Dash from 'My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic' really exists and created the universe".
Which is to say that I don't feel a need to "prove" it isn't true.
In contrast, we know life can evolve on Earth-like worlds because it already happened once. If something can happen once, and one has no reason to believe it can ONLY happen once, one must entertain the possibility that it has happened more than once.
Faith is a matter of faith.
God created evolution. Everyone knows that.
No, making a noise that will carry thousands of miles is much easier than interstellar communication
How can that be? Doesn't sound cavitate somewhere around 170dB?
Rev., Are you saying we cannot send a signal to another solar system, but we can make a sound heard around the the planet?
"First of all we aren't descended from chimps."
Who said we were? No one. You just can't read.
"Secondly, you don't understand what the word "fittest" means."
Yes, thanks for the blah, blah, talk-in-circles "explanation". I know all about the Darwinian "Survival of the fittest" although your odd interpretation is new to me.
No so-called evolutionist has explained why we humans have traits/abilities that were completely irrelevant and useless to our survival on an individual or group basis.
Until fairly recently, that is to say in last .00001 percent of human existence, the ability to read, write, and do higher level math has become quite useful to us. Evolution cannot explain these abilities, nor can Darwinian theory.
Come on, rc, you know evolution is a real thing. You've seen those Chimpanzees in the zoo reading Tolstoy.
If you're aiming for immortality, a carbon based life form is not the way to go. Within a thousand years, we'll all twirl around on a silicon chip and life on earth will be undetectable to primitive carbon based life forms on other planets........It's also possible that we're a one off.....Is human reason that much more remarkable than a giraffe's neck. It happened but there was no over determined reason for it to happen. Even if life exists on some other planet , there's no reason to believe that they would get all giddy about pi and radius squared and such things. Maybe there are intelligent forms of life that are bad at math, but skilled and intuitive in their personal relationships.
Who said we were? No one. You just can't read.
My apologies for thinking you had a rational reason for mentioning chimps in a conversation about the evolution of human intelligence.
I know all about the Darwinian "Survival of the fittest"
Obviously not. :)
although your odd interpretation is new to me.
My "odd interpretation" is the one that has been used by biologists for the last century and a half. Read a book sometime.
No so-called evolutionist has explained why we humans have traits/abilities that were completely irrelevant and useless to our survival on an individual or group basis.
It was explained in the 19th century, rc. Reign in your ego for a minute and embrace the idea that "you personally don't know the answer" is not the same as "nobody can explain it".
Now, I'm not sure what "irrelevant and useless" traits you are referring to, specifically. Earlier you implied that intelligence was such a trait; you were wrong, of course. But humans do possess traits with no apparent survival advantage, e.g. varying hair color, an appendix, and male nipples.
But that's what the theory of evolution predicts. Traits which are neither an advantage NOR a disadvantage aren't selected for one way or the other. Beneficial mutations are selected for, detrimental mutations are selected against, but neutral mutations just hang around indefinitely.
Rev., Are you saying we cannot send a signal to another solar system, but we can make a sound heard around the the planet?
I've run out of ways to simplify it for you.
Doesn't sound cavitate somewhere around 170dB?
Don't forget the waves travel through solids and liquids, too -- not just the atmosphere.
Earthquakes are a good example.
rcocean said...
Until fairly recently, that is to say in last .00001 percent of human existence, the ability to read, write, and do higher level math has become quite useful to us. Evolution cannot explain these abilities, nor can Darwinian theory.
That's just silly. The ability to remember, the ability to recognize patterns, and the ability to perform repetitive tasks all have survival advantages, and in general, the better you can do those things the greater the advantage. What more do you need for reading, writing, or higher level math?
Back to my original point for a moment.
Is it not reasonable to assume that soon after(in geologic time) a civilization learns how to destroy itself, that it will do so?
And given the seemingly infinite number of planets that could support life, the fact that no other civilization has contacted us, nor have we contacted them, then perhaps advanced civilizations have self-destructed.
Is it not reasonable to assume that soon after(in geologic time) a civilization learns how to destroy itself, that it will do so?
Only if one also assumes it is impossible to develop countermeasures to the weapons used and impossible to develop means of preserving a part of the species for later repopulation.
Just because we can nuke ourselves to bits *now* doesn't mean it'll always be possible. It isn't even known for certain that we could do it now; the ecological effect of widespread nuclear weapon use isn't well understood.
the fact that no other civilization has contacted us
Don't forget the speed of light. We started using high-powered radio broadcasts roughly a century ago, which means that even IF anyone else had the capacity to detect them and the inclination to respond, they would only be able to do so if they were within 50 light-years of Earth.
There are only around a hundred or so sunlike stars within 50 light-years of Earth.
Is it not reasonable to assume that soon after(in geologic time) a civilization learns how to destroy itself, that it will do so?
It's certainly reasonable propose that as a hypothesis, but I don't see any reason to assume it.
last .00001 percent of human existence
You're off by over five orders of magnitude, by the way.
Heck, we've been reading and writing for .00004 percent of the history of the universe. .00001 percent of *human* existence is a little over one week. :)
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