

Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens (2006) - blitzo
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/why_we_havent_met_any_aliens/

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maximilian
What of this possibility: Aliens and intelligent life-forms do exist at many
levels of development, but no-one has discovered a way to travel the
unimaginable distances of the universe. Even at near light speed travel, we
can barely visit our own neighborhood in practical times.

~~~
stcredzero
Visiting stars in "practical" times is one thing. Colonizing a galaxy is
another. The latter can be done through hops of just several light years in a
matter of decades, using technology we can already envision. Laser sails and
fusion drives let a civilization like ours colonize a galaxy in the space of a
few million years. Fermi's paradox stands.

~~~
albertcardona
A million years ago, humanity's genome looked rather different. Is there any
point in colonizing another galaxy with an alien species (i.e. ourselves,
evolved)?

~~~
stcredzero
Is there ever any point in a world subject to the laws of Thermodynamics?

Is there a point to leaving the world intact for your grandchildren?

The problem with your question, is that the consequences are far off in the
future. So the likelihood of affecting policy decisions is just about nil.

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wheels
What a silly thesis. I always find theories based on deep assumptions about
extraterrestrial psychology bunk.

The beginnings of social rather than biological evolution on earth are
fantastically recent on a geological scale. 10,000 years, give or take. And
it's only been in the last 100 that anything that we've had anything that
would be detectable from space.

On the sorts of timescale that the universe functions on, we simply have a
tiny, tiny sample of what a technological society looks like in the one
instance that we are aware of. It's such a recent thing that we can scarcely
predict what it will look like in 1000 years, much less 100,000 or 1,000,000
and even 100,000 years would be a small sample to start generalizing upon.

In other words, we have no idea what we're looking for when we're looking for
extraterrestrial intelligence. The odds of finding another society that is
_exactly_ in this first 100 year sliver we're at are vanishingly small.

~~~
drunkpotato
In the middle of reading it I wanted to reply by saying that the framing in
terms of extraterrestrials was just a device to get across the real warning of
obsession with virtual realities, but then I got the end and the essay
dissolved into incoherence.

I see no evidence that Christian and Muslim children are less prone to
addiction. The high-minded Puritan work ethic attracts some, sure, but "the
family values of the religious right" are in reality just a thinly-veiled
excuse to be the mean, hateful, narcissistic, exclusive bastards they already
are (why yes, I do have issues from my upbringing, thanks for asking, but it's
still true).

In any case, the essay says that we haven't met aliens because they wiped
themselves out in an evolutionary dead-end, but then the religious assholes'
descendants (sorry, the super-duper-moral humans) will be the future of
humanity meeting other such dipshits. Which is it?

In any case, to sum up, there's no there there. If you haven't read the
article yet, it's really not worth it; if it's too late, I'm sorry.

------
CraigBuchek
Another possible explanation is that interstellar travel is impossible.
Perhaps there's too much debris between star systems, and it's not possible to
create materials strong enough to make a spaceship that can withstand a
collision with the debris at the speeds required.

This doesn't quite explain the lack of communication signals. But if nobody
can colonize the galaxy, then there would be less sources of signals.

BTW, the Wikipedia article on the Fermi Paradox
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox>) does a very good job of
detailing all the possible explanations.

~~~
akkartik
In a world where interstellar travel is impossible, civilizations can't strike
out too far for resources; they must make do with what is nearby. So as they
get more and more efficient with their energy usage they'll emit less and
less. Compare our solar system with a dyson sphere the size of the solar
system, for example.

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TNO
"So evolving intelligence seems likely, given a propitious _habitat..."_

I would argue the opposite. Human level intelligence isn't necessary for
survival, so why should one assume that it's bound to be common when its not
even the case on Earth now or in it's history? What percentage of life that
has ever existed on earth could you consider to have an intelligence on par or
better than ours? Obviously less that a hundredth of 1%. If evolution is the
law of life, then I doubt that intelligent life in the universe is as common
as is assumed

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rm-rf
"Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time
and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children. They eventually
die out when the game behind all games—the Game of Life—says “Game Over; you
are out of lives and you forgot to reproduce.”"

It's not hard to imagine that happening - or more likely, the fraction of
civilization that is capable of advancing society fails to reproduce, and the
part that does reproduce isn't able to advance society.

~~~
stcredzero
_It's not hard to imagine that happening - or more likely, the fraction of
civilization that is capable of advancing society fails to reproduce, and the
part that does reproduce isn't able to advance society._

Once we are able to create viable new societies, societies themselves can
evolve out of this trap. We may need space colonization before this can
happen, however.

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DanielBMarkham
It's Sunday-morning, and this topic is near and dear to me (
[http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is_h.php)
) -- so time for a rant

It's interesting that we generally suppose either we'll achieve some super-
greatness as a species or die out in some horrible cataclysm.

How species-centric.

As the author notes, a long, slow, fizzle into nothingness seems much more
highly probable than some dramatic ending.

As an exercise, what do the democracies and the people in them spend their
money on? Not space exploration. Not even war -- the last "real" earth-shaking
war was well over 50 years ago. Lately it's all been bush wars. We spend more
and more energy and money on _ourselves_. It's not the species, it's the
comfort of each individual.

What do people value and celebrate? Adventure and discovery by moving out into
the Solar System? Heck, there's already a serious movement among scientists to
eliminate or seriously limit human exploration. You see, we could contaminate
the places we visit.

I could continue with examples, but it's seemed obvious to me for many years
that, as far as moving towards the conquest of space or self-destruction,
we're doing a lot of plugging in, turning on, and patting ourselves on the
back about it. But not a lot of exploration. Not only do we not live in a
culture of risk-taking exploration, we actively view our presence in the
universe as an evil and do all we can to avoid making any kind of permanent
mark at all.

I fear over the long term we will succeed at this.

~~~
ahk
The other way to look at it is, technology is delivering into the hands of
individuals the ability to do what only governments could do earlier. Thus you
have Burt Rutan and other ragtag teams able to compete in the new space race
to LEO and the moon.

Let the government take care of the weak and protect and preserve, that's what
it's mainly for in a society, and leave the adventurism to the adventurous.
Obama's steps seem consistent with this.

~~~
angstrom
I couldn't agree more. This article was filled with the kind of fluffy
juxtapose that says a lot by saying nothing at all about what's actually going
on. We stand on the verge of the next great technological expansion of
biology, information processing, energy, space exploration, and fundamental
discoveries in physics. To assume we are anymore closer to a pinnacle now than
we were 500 years ago is to be either complacent with what we've accomplished
or too farsighted to see what is left to accomplish.

------
ecommando
In any system, there has to be a "first". The first bacterial spore, the first
amoeba, the first star, the first planet.

Why is it so hard to think that we could be the first?

Also equally curious, why MUST they look different? Maybe they're already here
and they look just like us.

~~~
smanek
Probability.

Drake's equation suggests there are millions of intelligent species in the
universe (assume 1,000,000). Thus, the chances of us really being the first is
only 1 in a million. Taking into account that the Earth was a relatively late
bloomer (the universe was around for ~10 Billion years before there was any
life on Earth ...) it becomes far less likely.

Similarly, the chances of evolution creating two identical 'solutions' to very
different environments (or hell, even nearly identical environments) is
practically nil. Even if you buy panspermia (which is perfectly reasonable
...), there were still billions of years of evolution between then and now,
and we should be unrecognizable from something we 'branched' from ~4 billion
years ago.

------
CraigBuchek
I was listening to a talk on The Singularity, and it occurred to me that that
might be a good explanation of the Fermi Paradox. (Which is similar to the
author's idea, but a bit different.) Basically, our minds are likely to
"merge" with the Internet, allowing us to tap into the internet as our
personal and cultural memory storage system. But we cannot extend Internet
access into outer space, due to latency and the inability to make copies of
the entire Internet locally. So the future "us" would be tied to the planet in
order to have access to our memories, which would be very difficult for us to
live without.

~~~
ahk
If you want to follow that thought through, the future us would probably like
higher fidelity of their memories and recordings, approaching real life
quality. The limiting factor in doing this is likely the energy consumption
(and in many other ways as well). The cheapest energy source by far is the
Sun, consequently we will need to build Dyson spheres, thus pushing us off the
Earth. Once we are at that stage the only way to get more energy (to support
further fidelity or population growth) will be the other stars and similar
mass concentrations, which will eventually lead to colonization of the galaxy
and beyond to galaxy clusters/super clusters. Even the light speed barrier
can't prevent such a movement for too long.

A Singularity will likely only hasten the process (there will be nothing else
to do).

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SMrF
It seems like a big leap to me to take the problems of our generation and
extrapolate them to be a (literally) universal explanation for Fermi's
Paradox. I have the same problem with the apocalyptic explanations. Just
because humans have built enough nuclear weapons to destroy our civilization
doesn't mean all other species in the universe would have the same
inclination.

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jorgecastillo
Maybe other intelligent beings in the universe didn't learn how to live with
out fossil fuels, they overloaded the carrying capacity of their planets,
global warming destroyed their environments and intelligent people stopped
having children? The result would be that their complex civilizations crashed.

I think we have more important stuff to invest our intellects in than space
exploration. All our current technology depends almost exclusively on cheap
energy derived from fossil fuels. Human actions are damaging the complex
processes that maintain live.

If we don't fix this problems I still think hedonistic technology is a better
investment than space exploration. Well at least for the average folk it's not
like we can send every human in to space.

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jsz0
I subscribe to the theory that our own bias as humans leads us to believe that
human style intelligence is the pinacle of evolution throughout the universe.
As one of the great old sci-fi writers said human intelligence has yet to be
proven as a long term evolutionary advantage. It may be that less intelligent
but more sustainable life is more typical. Look at the dolphins for example.
They don't seem to have any interest in building radio transmitters or
spaceships yet they are very intelligent. If this theory is true we can learn
a major lesson: We have to become more sustainable creatures if we want to win
the evolutionary contest over the long term.

~~~
BigO
I would of gone with dinosaurs as an example but the point still stands

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crazydiamond
How about they just want to leave us alone ?

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stavrianos
<http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html>

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watchandwait
The real reason, as others have noted-- advance societies discover nuclear
fission and supercollider technology and destroy themselves.

~~~
stcredzero
The first mechanism you cite indicates you didn't read the article. The second
is either tongue and cheek or indicates a big misunderstanding of science.

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shadytrees
> Fermi listened patiently, then asked, simply, "So, where is everybody?"

And, shortly afterward, they stopped eating lunch with him.

