

The Billion-Year Technology Gap: Could One Exist? - soundsop
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/11/the-billionyear-technology-gap-could-one-exist-the-weekend-feature.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond+%28The+Daily+Galaxy%3A+News+from+Planet+Earth+%26+Beyond%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

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dgallagher
I like to theorize that there is some sort of undiscovered transmission method
used by alien civilizations to communicate, one which we can't detect yet.
Billions of neutrinos pass through your body every second, and trillions upon
trillions through the Earth; a possible transmission medium which may be less
susceptible to planetary interference than, say, radio waves.

The speed of light appears to be an unbreakable barrier given our incomplete
understanding of the universe. If it does indeed hold up, getting from one
galaxy to another may take eons. Perhaps this is keeping the aliens at bay...

It also makes more sense for our society to evolve into robotic intelligent
life for space travel. Human bodies are poorly built to leave the Earth. We
need to bring oxygen, air, food, etc... Atrophy of the muscles and bones occur
during prolonged space flight. We're high maintenance, and not nearly as
efficient as, say, a future robotic being specifically built for space travel.
It may only needs sunlight for energy, or rely on nuclear fusion.

If we ever meet one, an alien may simply be the evolutionary product of their
own technology, looking nothing like the species which initially built it. Do
you imagine humans will look like they do today 500 years from now, or
completely different?

~~~
dmix
> Human bodies are poorly built to leave the Earth.

Indeed this is a very limiting factor. Space is a very hostile place.

If we travel just 20 miles into the sky, without technology, our blood will
boil and there is no chance for survival.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VdSeDqU3EY>

~~~
ars
Your blood will not boil, that's a myth - it's not true.

You might not be able to breath though, but that's why we have space suits.

~~~
paulbaumgart
(a) source for that:
[http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.h...](http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.html)

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ellyagg
We do not know the rate at which technology-producing species come about,
period. A couple months ago there was a post about how people will come up
with a business idea and falsely extrapolate how much money they can make by
assuming a seemingly tiny fraction of their imagined potential customer base:

<http://sivers.org/1pct>

This is precisely the same principle. Remember, there is no designer. The
universe was not created as a petri dish for technology-producing species.
There is no evidence we are not the only one.

This article tries to cloak the discussion in "logic", but the data is so
horridly poor that any discussion about it will serve only to identify each
respondent's personal biases about human nature and etc. Your opinion on this
topic is all assumptions and no data.

~~~
RevRal
Exactly.

One billion years really is not _that_ long, and we're still living in a young
universe. I accept that as time goes on, the possible amount of intelligent
life that exists/existed increases.

Though speculation is fun, it is not meaningful until we have have another
data point to connect.

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qw
There could be a fourth option: An advanced civilization has control over our
region of the galaxy. Perhaps the reason why we don't detect other
civilizations is because the dominant civilization neutralizes others when
they get too advanced? If they have a billion years head start, it's hard for
other civilizations to put up much of a fight.

The reason why we haven't detected the dominant civilization is because they
don't want to be detected :)

As an alternative, there could also be one or more civilizations out there
that studies us and shields us from outside signals.

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joecode
Perhaps they just don't use anything so retro as radio anymore, and are so
much more intelligent that they have no interest in communicating with us.

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sown
On the plus side, if aliens like these ever do show up it's because they
genuinely have our interest at heart or they want something but not something
they can just take -- leverage on our part -- which for them, would be easy.
Also good, they can eliminate us in a heart beat so don't have to worry about
waging war with them. :D

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yosho
why can't the answer simply be that we have not received any signs of ET life
because the signals simply have not reached us yet?

Assuming that the speed of light is still the fastest possible thing in the
universe, we can infer from the vastness of space that the time required for a
signal to reach Earth could be in the millions of years.

Furthermore, just because a civilization is advanced, still doesn't mean it is
capable of conquering the vastness of space. I think we've been watching too
many Startrek and Starwar movies. Space is not something that an advanced
civilization can just wonder through.

These two points combined probably explain why we haven't encountered any real
proof of ET life. Not to mention our time in the universe is merely but a spec
in the grand scheme of things. Hardly a blip on anyone's radar.

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ojbyrne
"The odds of there being only one single planet that evolved life among all
that unfathomable vastness seems so incredible that it is all but completely
irrational to believe."

Not at all true, until we find a second. Because you can't really use
statistics until that point.

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lionhearted
> The US government, for example, spends on “Defense” (including “preemptive”
> warfare) and Homeland Security, 8 times what it spends on educating the next
> generation.

You know, whenever I heard numbers like those, it always seemed like it was
missing some very subtle point, but I never could quite put my finger on it. I
think I just figured it out:

Myself, American citizen, I've gotten, I don't know, maybe 1/10th of my
knowledge and education from U.S. government related things? Something like
that? Maybe I'm being charitable here, I've learned a heck of a lot more from
books, primary and secondary research, my own experiences, and acquaintances
with expert domain knowledge than I ever learned in school. I dropped out of
two high schools, and I would've left the education system earlier if I was a
little more self assured and independent when I was younger.

So maybe 1/10th of my education has come from the U.S. government, maybe. How
much of my defense against foreign warfare has? 90%? 99%? The rest being my
utterly trivial-in-comparison training in martial arts, marksmanship, and
other survival and combat skills? I guess you could count the time time I've
traveled as under the protection of the English government, or French
government, or whatever else.

But the basic point is - various government-run military has provided almost
all of my defense against foreign warfare, and very little of my education. If
you cut military spending by 7/8ths without implementing mandatory service,
conscription, or a draft, we'd be a hell of a lot less safe. Multiplying
educational spending in the current American public education system by 8
times wouldn't make us a lot more educated.

~~~
lionhearted
Curious about the downvote here - is my reasoning off? I'll elaborate on my
position a little bit -

It seems to me like top-down centralized education has historically done a
somewhat poor job of teaching, and extra top-down education funding probably
wouldn't make us more educated. Whereas top-down military seems to be the best
way to defend against aggressive foreign powers.

Considering that there's always been aggressive military powers in known
history - the Khanate Mongols, Alexander's Greeks, Shaka's Africa, Imperial
Japan, Fascist Germany, Soviet Russia, the Khmer Rouge, North Korea today,
etc, etc - defense against these types of places becomes an unfortunate
necessity. And it seems like top-down, state-run military/defense works better
than individual militias, individual defense and military, or whatever the
alternative solution should be.

I think governments have done a relatively poor job as educators and education
typically works well in an individual, decentralized way. Military? I don't
think you want that as decentralized, but maybe you do. So when you see that
the U.S. government has a much larger defense than education budget, that's
because there's lots of quality private education happening, but not so much
quality private defense happening. Agree? Disagree?

~~~
gloob
_It seems to me like top-down centralized education has historically done a
somewhat poor job of teaching, and extra top-down education funding probably
wouldn't make us more educated. Whereas top-down military seems to be the best
way to defend against aggressive foreign powers._

I'm not entirely certain of my history, so here's as good a place to ask as
any: when was the last time the United States was under threat of invasion
from aggressive foreign powers?

Not that the general thrust of your argument is incorrect or anything; it just
seems a little bit like Russia being worried about unreliable oil imports.

~~~
Xichekolas
Not to put too fine a point on it, but unreliable oil imports are exactly the
kind of thing our military does worry about for us.

There are several ways to strike a serious blow to America besides outright
invading it. We have always been blessed by geography and our good
relationships with our immediate neighbors to lessen that particular risk.
However, since the 1970s we have become increasing dependent on resources
found outside our borders (oil isn't the only one, but it is the elephant in
the room). In the same period, our allies have become increasingly dependent
on us to assist in providing their defense as well.

Aside from all that, this whole discussion is born out of the idea that more
money will automatically improve education. I'd argue against that. Sure,
there are lots of way money would help in a lot of places, but every extra
dollar doesn't translate into an extra well-adjusted knowledge worker. Also, a
stable society that doesn't have to concern itself with wars and violence has
a lot more time to spend learning, rather than surviving, so military spending
indirectly benefits education.

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richcollins
A friend suggested the possibility that advanced life might lose the desire to
explore or engage in behaviors that would leak EMF (a sort of technical
nirvana).

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joshu
Or maybe bandwidth just gets too at any distance and nobody wants to be that
far from home...

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baguasquirrel
It appears that no one believes that c is impossible to circumvent.

~~~
gojomo
There is still the mystery of not seeing radio waves or Von Neumann probes.

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DanielBMarkham
Since it's a weekend, I believe the board is open to rampant speculation, and
this is a good topic as any for it.

I mostly lean towards C -- all civilizations perish. But I think we use the
word "perish" to mean some sort of cataclysmic end. That's probably not the
case at all. As I look back on the last 300 years, I see mankind evolving more
and more technologies. With each new evolution, people do less and less
physical activity, and more and more emotion is put into virtual reality. The
cataclysm won't be nuclear war -- we should be so lucky. The cataclysm will be
eon after eon of inactivity and stagnation. (I already see this in the
movement to "solve problems at home first" before space exploration and the
"what right do we have to contaminate other planets" school of
environmentalism.

I'd give B good odds as well -- good enough that there are probably thousands
or millions of civilizations that survived. Also looking at patterns in our
own evolution, I think machine-based intelligences operating at super-high
bandwidths and living for millions of years would have as much in common with
us as we do with ants. Do ants know that people exist? Probably not.

~~~
randallsquared
For your C to be the solution, you'd have to posit that _all_ technological
civilizations go this route. Maybe that'll turn out to be the case, but do you
have a reason to think that, other than that it seems to be happening here?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
None.

A combination might be at work as well. Perhaps civilizations stagnate for so
long that if they ever do evolve into a true space-faring species that they're
so removed from our reality as to effectively have transcended it.

This would explain the lack of contact, the observed trend of mankind, and the
odds-on-favorite that something more advanced _has_ to be out there somewhere.

~~~
berntb
Hmm...

First, read up on the Orion project.

Humanity could have had a technological infrastructure outside the atmosphere
in the 1970s. (They sadly lost out to NASA politically.)

An Orion exploration could generate money from extra-terrestrial mineral
sources inside a not too long time window.

Second, consider how much longer the virtual reality thing would take if we
were half as fast at speeding up computers (3 years for Moore's law, not 1
1/2). A not unrealistic assumption for a civilization with some other focus.

Third, consider if one of the small scale fusion projects (EMC, General
Fusion, etc) works. Or a future idea. Then an Oort cloud would be livable, for
a technological civilization.

From that, it seems a large fraction of technological civilizations should not
have all eggs on one planet/culture before cultural stagnation starts. And the
groups further away would be able to see the problem happening to others and
have a good chance to do things differently.

In the same way, a physics experiment with "unexpected" results would need to
destroy a whole solar system and not only a planet.

The Fermi paradox should have some other answer.

~~~
randallsquared
_And the groups further away would be able to see the problem happening to
others and have a good chance to do things differently._

Well, the initial premise that all civilizations have this happen suggests
that later groups wouldn't see it as a problem, but as a goal or path to the
goal.

There are groups here on Earth that seem to be resistant to the pull of the
virtual, but all by resisting technologies of other kinds as well, so it could
still be that any group capable of building advanced computing succumbs.
There's a depressing thought: Dune as an accurate picture of the attitude
towards computing in long-lived technological civilizations.

~~~
berntb
To be a bit cynical, most controlling ideologies are against any new way of
living. Your argument needs that all the groups of leaders/high priests fails
to control their subcultures, even far away from the central system/culture.

Note that the argument needs that most every subculture fails at controlling
its faithful in most every technological civilization...

Doesn't really sound likely -- consider a North Korea or Salafism in the Oort
cloud.

Edit: A bit clearer and more grammatical, etc.

~~~
berntb
Still wondering about this.

There really should be some analysis somewhere (just for Fermi's Paradox, if
nothing else) to answer this question:

How fast could humanity have reached viable colonies in space -- if we had
used Orions or "normal" nuclear rockets? (NERVA, or better).

NASA would hardly fund research into their total failure to reach a fraction
of what could have been. Is that the reason why this isn't well published?

Since we're still here, I think physics experiments to explain Fermi's paradox
has to be wrong (unless they destroy a whole solar system).

I think I'll email the guy which has centauri-dreams.org and ask.

Edit: A meme like virtual worlds which everyone got dependent on, disregarding
species and culture, sounds just impossible. It seems more likely that older
civilizations kill off the new ones, to be like Greta Garbo (alone).

Edit 2: My point is that the "Great Filter" (see <http://www.centauri-
dreams.org/?p=1848>) should be behind humanity, unless it is that other
civilizations kill new ones, since a large fraction of all civilizations that
are where we are in development, would have viable space colonies.

