
The Joy of Cosmic Mediocrity - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/79/catalysts/the-joy-of-cosmic-mediocrity
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credit_guy
I have a very boring solution to Fermi's paradox: interstellar travel is
simply very hard. Beyond the reach of any civilization, no matter how
technologically advanced. Or maybe, just within the reach, so that advanced
civilizations will occasionally travel to neighboring stars, but this results
in a very small minority of all the stars in the galaxy being populated, and
we are not close to any of these.

Oh, as for intergalactic travel, I'm close to 100% certain it is way beyond
the capability of any civilization. It's very hard to imagine intelligent
beings with an attention span of millions of years.

~~~
crazygringo
And not just hard, but without any clear payoff.

We're evolutionarily fine-tuned to live on Earth. We love a blue sky, room
temperature, certain levels of gases in the atmosphere, and so on. It takes
very little work to live here, relatively speaking.

Living long-term in outer space and other planets means either forgoing most
of the things that make people happy, or else attempting to recreate them in
incredibly _incredibly_ expensive ways that ultimately aren't as good.

It's cool to dream about living under glass domes on other planets... but the
reality is that after the novelty wears off after a couple of weeks, I think
you'd realize you'd just rather go back to Earth. It's way nicer.

"What about if we ruin Earth?" plenty of people counter. Well _don 't_. It's a
_helluva_ lot easier to apply our intelligence to normal prosaic things here
like taking care of the environment, than to building interstellar spaceships
that can colonize other planets.

~~~
hoorayimhelping
> _And not just hard, but without any clear payoff._

The clear payoff is: as far as we've seen, life only exists on one place in
the universe, so it makes sense to spread it out. Not putting all your eggs in
one basket. If you can't see how that's an inherently good idea, I'm not
really sure I'll be able to convince you.

Your post is thinking on timescales of millennia, at the longest. We know the
sun will burn out in a few billion years. We know another 'ice age' is coming
in a few thousand years - the entirety of human civilization cropped up in the
10,000 years since the last major ice sheet retreated. We know earth will have
some kind of natural disaster, whether it's tectonics or bombardment, and we
may not be powerful enough to manage it when it happens. This knowledge alone
is enough to justify the cost of trying to get off this planet.

> _It 's a helluva lot easier to apply our intelligence to normal prosaic
> things here like taking care of the environment, than to building
> interstellar spaceships that can colonize other planets._

"We should fix all the problems here on earth." Every time the idea of
building in space comes up. As if we're capable of fixing all our problems on
earth linearly and in order before moving on to space, and as if there are
only enough resources for fixing the things you think are important. This is
the classic, "this solution won't fix the problems we're currently not fixing,
so we shouldn't do _anything_ until those problems get fixed."

~~~
StuffedParrot
> The clear payoff is: as far as we've seen, life only exists on one place in
> the universe, so it makes sense to spread it out.

Sure, if the short term concerns don’t do us in first. You’re talking about an
extremely long tail concern in terms of likelihood of human destruction
compared to the threats that will come with developing the technology we need
for material independence from earth. If history is any guide, colonization
does not lead to spontaneous harmony or collectivized thinking.

I think the idea is “why are we playing with technology we aren’t responsible
enough to use yet when the benefits aren’t clear”. Take the story recently
about SpaceX launching satellites that are so reflective they obscure the sky:
for a company with supposedly with noble intent, they clearly have their own
interests which they will advance above our own. In the BEST case, they admit
their own blasé ignorance as to the collectivized effects of their actions,
and it’s not like they make any secret about serving militaries.

If there is a model for “space” research in the public interest, the US and
comparable nations have barely invested a tiny drop in the bucket of military
investments. I have no faith we’re going to start any time soon.

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mellosouls
The article deals with The Principle of Mediocrity as applied to extra
terrestrial life in an optimistic way, essentially saying we've been here
before, many times, convinced of our special place and we've always been
corrected by some new perspective.

So, while not actually countering current challenges - eg. The Fermi Paradox -
head on, the reminder was reassuring for those of us sceptical about life
elsewhere, but longing to be proved wrong.

~~~
pfdietz
The Principle of Mediocrity has also been applied to hilariously wrong
results.

If you go back to the early scientific age, you will find a widespread belief
that the other planets in our solar system were inhabited! After all, why
should the Earth be special? It was only after this was shown to be nonsense
that SETI moved out to planets around other stars.

What all this does, of course, is ignore anthropic selection. If life is
extremely rare, then Earth will be special just by the fact we are here to be
making observations. In the end, a PoM argument for intelligent life being
common is just circular reasoning.

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K0SM0S
IMHO,

Science is prodigy but not magic, so when we try to explain things that are
way too complex or out-of-scale (whether big or small) relatively to us, the
solution space is so incredibly vast that we might as well be guessing —
science lets us rule out 1% of the 'whys' and we're almost none the wiser.

Consider this:

\- galaxies may generally follow cycles, patterns, notably depending on the
activity of their supermassive blackhole (or quasar, etc); life may be peaking
during a "sweet spot" in the cycle, and plummeting at other times. What may be
critical is thus not only age but 'state' of the galaxy, and we might find
ourselves in the beginning of such a cycle (we sure accumulate enough
particularities in the topology of our local spacetime, being both rich yet
calm enough, to warrant the assumption that we're currently 'privileged' on
average).

\- We have no way to detect life in other galaxies. They could be swarmed by
spaceships and interstellar spatian empires and we just wouldn't be able to
determine that. Thus basing the Fermi "paradox" on such a small sample (on the
order of 10⁻¹²) seems much too weak data. We simply don't know. We actually
can't properly observe ours yet, especially behind the core, generally in the
alignment of the disc. We are just now discovering that said disc is distorted
and there are remnants of jets above/below us[1]. There are hundreds of
galaxies in our local Andromeda-Triangulum region, huge gravity streams, and
we've only begun to grasp that in the last few decades... It's still very,
very early in our observations of the cosmos.

I think it's good to ponder such questions and raise apparent "paradoxes", go
science! — but to draw any conclusions based on weak data and conjecture of a
perceived (read: biased) mean is, IMHO, rather foolish, way too premature at
best. Not hubris but wishful thinking, belief, opinion. So let it be that,
humbly, defusing the anxiety.

In the grander scheme of things, we're not much better off than the Ancient
Greeks when faced with this question. Give it another thousand years, and then
I'd expect a whole other level of questioning. Not 10 or 20 or even 100, if we
are to tackle that kind of scale — we need infrastructure for this, in space,
way beyond the solar system (think telescopes, probes, not even manned
missions).

The ultimate problem with time is not evolution (of us, of science, of tech),
it's information travel: e.g. if we were to use the thickness of the Milky Way
to set up telescopes, at ~1,000 LY, it would take half that time to transmit
pictures to a central aggregator. 5 centuries for your next picture, I don't
know if we'll be able to commit to such transgenerational projects without
huge changes in our biology (lifespan, mindset, whatever but huge, enough to
make us a different species).

Until we're able to do such things, grow such infrastructure, gather such
meaningful data, we're just too small to even _look at_ the cosmos. Let alone
draw conclusions. We really just have to keep going at it, and it's gonna take
a long, long time.

[1] Contrary to the very regular spiral illustration we're acquainted to, we
are now realizing the Milky Way could actually look more like this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A)

~~~
reedwolf
Search Of 100,000 Nearby Galaxies For Waste Heat Signatures Of Large
Civilizations Finds Nothing:

[https://phys.org/news/2015-04-advanced-civilizations-
earth-o...](https://phys.org/news/2015-04-advanced-civilizations-earth-
obvious-galaxies.html)

~~~
K0SM0S
Thank you for furthering my point.

The base assumption of this study is:

> _“if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced spacefaring
> civilization, the energy produced by that civilization 's technologies would
> be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths”_

Requiring galaxy-spanning civilizations who love to advertise themselves from
afar is a bit of a narrow path to victory.

100 K galaxies is about one millionth of our observable universe (which is
possibly itself just a tiny fraction of the whole).

So while this _could_ have found something, provided all assumptions held
true, that it found nothing is hardly representative nor conclusive of
anything. It wouldn't have detected a billion thriving Kardashiev-2
civilizations and 'below', and that's ruling out _a lot_ of life (actually,
100% of what we know to exist). It also assumes that Kardashiev is a valid
representation of a civilization's advancement — in all likelihood, that
measure is quite far from the whole picture.

Again, I commend the effort and welcome more, ever more, but let's not jump to
conclusions.

------
xwdv
Our mediocre world could have been a bit more interesting if we simply had a
habitable moon with other beings, alien fauna, and even exotic diseases.

~~~
twic
We did, until the dinosaurs nuked it.

------
topmonk
This is a stupid question. Any world we discover that doesn't harbor
intelligent life we would in all surity dismiss as a world that never will.
See Mars, for instance.

OTOH, any world that _was_ inhabited by aliens would, besides within a very
narrow time frame, either have advanced to a state where their world would,
for sure, be unrecognizable by us, or have destroyed themselves to such an
extent that we would never have known they were there.

Typically human hubris, why can't we recognize the most logical explanation
for so much dark matter? The wreckage and debris of a great alien war. Face it
humanity, you're not the pinnacle of intelligence that you think, but, frankly
the figurative apes throwing stones at each other after a (galactic version
of) World War III.

~~~
fennecfoxen
I'm afraid that this comment is not the pinnacle of intelligence that you
think it is. But for people who come by and want to know why this dark matter
suggestion is fundamentally ill-informed and wrong:

Dark matter isn't merely "not bright" matter, it is matter which does not
interact with electromagnetic radiation. It is generally expected that the
vast majority is non-baryonic, for a variety of reasons.

The observed density of all matter in the universe is about 30% of the
universe's critical density, but Big Bang nucleosynthesis results readable in
the cosmic microwave background show much less helium and lithium than you
would expect if it were baryonic — it is safe to say that baryonic matter is
only 5% of the critical density. Moreover, small dense objects (black holes)
would produce gravitational micro-lensing effects which aren't present, while
more diffuse objects would affect the absorption spectra of light.

And finally, the observed distribution of dark matter in the universe just ...
sorta makes it a rather poor candidate for war debris.

~~~
topmonk
Why can't the remenants from an alien war not be baryonic?

The observed distribution is very odd, actually. In some galaxies there is
nearly none, in others quite a lot, yet it tends to be hang quite close to
matter even though the forces between them are quite weak.

