
What If We Haven’t Met Aliens yet Because They’ve Messed Up Their Planets Too? - tejohnso
https://lithub.com/what-if-we-havent-met-aliens-yet-because-theyve-messed-up-their-planets-too/
======
romaaeterna
> Think about it: Human beings are on a collision course with our own
> industrialization...

Maybe.

> We are consuming nonrenewable (or very slowly renewable) resources at an
> unsustainable pace. Coal, oil, and gas are finite resources...

It's hard to overstate just how much fossil fuel there is out there compared
to demand. Beyond that, we're becoming more efficient at an even faster pace
than we are using it.

> Even if there is a lot left, there is not an infinite amount left.

Plenty of nuclear, solar, wind, hydroelectric, etc.

> We are converting rainforests, which produce the majority of our breathable
> oxygen and consume the majority of the carbon dioxide, into land for farming
> or housing.

This is happening in the 3rd world, and will be arrested by minor effort on
the part of the 1st world if it is ever made to care enough. The idea that we
are going to run out of breathable oxygen is something that only a journalist
could believe.

> Our population is growing so fast that our ability to provide food for each
> person will be in serious doubt within a generation, despite all of our
> scorched-earth efforts to extract more and more sustenance from the planet.

Whoa, has somebody been reading population projections from the 1970s?

> Meanwhile, climate change is threatening major coastline developments, some
> ocean ecosystems are in all-out collapse, and biodiversity throughout the
> globe is plummeting.

3 separate, though major issues, but none of which threaten civilization.

> We are in the midst of a mass extinction caused almost exclusively by our
> own actions. Who knows how bad things will get before we bottom out?

In my youth these sorts of people just joined doomsday cults. (The Jehovah's
Witnesses are still in operation if anyone is looking. I'm sure that there are
others.)

Real threats to civilization exist. The Earth's biosphere has been wiped out
several times by large rocks from outer space. It seems likely enough however,
that if we can survive the next 1000 years (order of magnitude), we'll have
enough technology to create cross-planet ecosystems that are not so threatened
from a large rock wiping out any single planet.

~~~
dmead
isn't most of the breathable oxygen produced by phytoplankton in the oceans?

~~~
smegger001
and the taiga/boreal forest of the far north.

------
informatimago
Actually, most planets don't have plate tectonics, (and what is the
probability of a dinosaur extinction event?) So their population is "first
generation", and they basically don't have fossil fuels. So no industrial age,
and no powerful ergols for rockets. When we'll get there, we'll find mostly
Star Gate-like civilizations: non-technological civilisations with lots of
slaves and manual work.

~~~
api
Fossil fuels are even more accidental than that. Most of them come from the
fact that woody materials evolved long before anything evolved that could
break them down. Wood was the original plastic.

It's quite possible that we stand where we are as a result of a very long
series of very unlikely events and conditions.

But we really just don't know.

~~~
quaquaqua1
Hope we find out someday. The laws of physics are cruel-- maybe someday we can
see everything in a 100M light year radius to us is devoid of life, but theres
still the other billions of light years where trillions of dice rolls are
happening for a chance at civilization.

I am reminded of those few galaxies in Bootes Void who legitimately wouldn't
be too wrong in thinking their galaxy was the observable universe until they
could see beyond the dark.

~~~
dilyevsky
Why would Boote Void residents not see all other galaxies? It’s just a
relatively low density space nothing special about it. You’re probably
thinking of Barnard 68 - dark nebula, and it’s too small to host a galaxy.

------
BurningFrog
My favorite Fermi paradox solution:

The galaxy is populated, much like Earth. The power controlling our region has
a policy of leaving us alone. End of story.

This requires no great filters or fantastic coincidences, and assumes galactic
society is organized much like Earth.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>The galaxy is populated, much like Earth. The power controlling our region
has a policy of leaving us alone. End of story.

Or they just don't care to visit our solar system because there's nothing of
interest here. I'm sure you can imagine a 18th century European surveyor
sailing past a bunch of new islands, noting them on charts and tossing in the
description "contains no resources" and then moving on.

~~~
narag
Travel might be terribly expensive and slow even for advanced species, so the
concept of "resources" would be meaningless.

Or maybe they've come, but only in very small numbers. They radio home and
leave for the next system to explore.

------
LorenPechtel
We have managed to at least ballpark numbers for many of the terms in the
Drake equation.

Planets are common.

Given the speed with which life evolved on Earth it's also probably common.

That leaves four barriers:

1) Multi-cellular life. Looking at Earth that took billions of years--it's
likely a hard barrier to cross.

2) Intelligence. It took hundreds of millions of years but there were a lot of
steps, this doesn't seem like evidence that it's all that hard.

3) A term not in the Drake equation--effective lifespan of the biosphere. This
is the main argument of the Rare Earths hypothesis. Most planets do not remain
stable enough for intelligence for long enough for it to arise. Looking at our
own world we can see that we have already used up 99% of that time, we barely
eeked under the line. (We have only about 50 million years before solar
warming can be countered by lowered CO2, after that we have several hundred
million more habitable years but they won't be friendly to big, slow-evolving
animals of the sort needed for intelligence.) This very well might be a
substantial barrier.

4) Intelligence is destructive, species that can communicate do not remain in
that state for long. Note, also, that a species that can communicate probably
can in an eyeblink of galactic time do interstellar colonization. Even by
slowboat they should spread across the galaxy in at most a few tens of
millions of years. Also, once a species has reached this point it would be
almost impossible to destroy--thus we can conclude no species in the history
of the galaxy reached this point.

The product of these terms must be infinitesimal. Either we have been
__extremely __lucky so far, or we are facing an almost insurmountable barrier
to survival in the near future.

------
TomMckenny
What if we can't detect them because we don't know what an intelligent
advanced species looks like because we aren't one?

~~~
human20190310
I suspect the Fermi Paradox has something to do with important things that our
brains _can 't_ know, or even suspect, save for meta-speculation like this.

------
geekpowa
Carl Sagan rationalized the Fermi paradox in terms of nuclear annihilation in
one of his Cosmos episodes, which was created during endgame of the cold war.
The same episode introduced the Drake equation too.

This article framing the paradox in context of climate change is simply doing
the same thing, framing it in context of our most pressing existential threats
of the day. Also, like Sagan, implicitly overstating the impacts of those
threats to us as a species.

Its a useless exercise and brings no new information to understanding the
Fermi paradox and doesn't bring us anywhere closer to resolving it.

Edit and clarification, since I think some people take issue with what I wrote
above:

========

Existential threats I mentioned, nuclear and climate change, are in their
worst possible realizations will be planetary wide catastrophes which have the
power to cause us, as a species, enormous harm.

But they do not measure up as the existential threats implied by Sagan or
author of this article : so they are not answers to the Fermi paradox.

I am looking at these two things strictly from POV of the paradox, not as
pressing policy issues.

------
harshreality
That passage is something of an afterthought, from the epilogue of his book,
but it's still disappointing he doesn't credit Robin Hanson for coming up with
the Great Filter concept[1], or mention the x-risk[2] community which
contemplates this stuff.

[1]
[http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.html](http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.html)

[2]
[https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html](https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html)
/
[https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Existential_risk](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Existential_risk)

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I was going to say the same thing. This post just reads like a knock off Great
Filter concept with less analysis put into it. For example, environmental
devastation is only one of many possible causes of Great Filter-like
phenomena.

------
powerbroker
It is entirely possible that there are tons of intelligent alien planets for
whom the predominant way of life is the way of the Amish. They simply choose
not to use radio-telescopes just like the Amish choose not to use mechanical
milking machines. The link has an interesting list of barred technologies. Do
the meek inherit Vulcan?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subgroups_of_Amish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subgroups_of_Amish)

~~~
pixl97
Still not a good answer for the fermi paradox, it only takes one to light up a
galaxy.

~~~
powerbroker
Yes, but imagine you are a civilization, that is smart enough to develop the
idea of a Fermi paradox. If you are the first such civilization, you believe
yourself to be one among thousands in your galaxy -- but yet, you get no radio
signatures (or other signatures) of intelligent life. You might conclude, that
the very act of obtaining technology predisposes your civilization (and the
others who disappeared before you) to a shortened lifespan. Accordingly, you
assume (wrongly) that to transmit or seek out radio signals, is going to 'f'
you up down the road. You, and the 2d civilization after you, and the third,
etc., internally agree to go the Amish way... and you have an infinite loop
that repeats.

~~~
ramblerman
Think what you are suggesting. In all the possibilities where life grows it
evolves exactly in one sociological way as you suggested.

Yet the one sample we have, us, doesn't fit the pattern

~~~
powerbroker
We don't have a pattern, until we drive our population down to 1 million, or
we find evidence of an existing or extinguished alien civilization. At the
rate we are going, none of these three are going to happen in our lifetime. If
only the Vulcan Amish could turn on a radio station... just once every 100
years, in celebration of their Vulcan Amishness... Maybe a pirate Vulcan Amish
radio station. You can only hope.

------
shawnb576
This seems like the Occam’s razor solution to Fermi’s paradox:

1\. Civilizations have a short “technological” shelf life eg when they can
send and receive signals, say 200y

2\. They are spread apart by space and time by natural distribution

3\. The chances of two of them overlapping (eg civ a is transmitting during a
time civ b will hear it) is very small

So nobody ever hears each other. Maybe If we were around for 5000 years we’d
catch one.

But we won’t be.

------
ChuckMcM
In one of the many debates on this topic I've participated in, one of my
favorite (because it is optimistic) scenario is that we are not alone and the
other civilizations are waiting to see if we kill ourselves or not before they
stop by to chat.

That line of reasoning started with, "If we knew then, what we know now, would
we have claimed the new world for conquest?" There are examples that we would
not, for example protecting Brazilian indigenous peoples who have not
contacted the outside world from being visited by people. Would "modern"
western Europeans wait for the native Americans to sail east and meet them?
One could hope they would. With a careful understanding of infectious diseases
and respecting their traditions and culture.

It is arguably the case that we have lost much in terms of culture, ideas, and
diversity through genocidal colonialism. Would a more enlightened civilization
decide not to go there? I would like to think so.

~~~
anon4242
> are waiting to see if we kill ourselves or not before they stop by to chat

Waiting? For how long? How can they tell that we've passed the threshold of
being in the group of species that won't off ourselves?

I'm more inclined to think that we may not be all that interesting to more
advanced species or as the author writes that our time-span simply does not
overlap with the time-span of any intelligent life close enough to signal us.

~~~
lostmsu
I'd wait for a self-sustained off-homeworld base.

------
mrhappyunhappy
I still believe that the sheer scale of space time is the reason we’ll never
run into intelligent life outside of our planet. People seem to assume there
is no technological barrier to super fast travel, but perhaps there is a
limit? This limit could be far from the type of speed and time required to
visit worlds that may harbor intelligent life.

~~~
krapp
There is a universal limit in the speed of light. It could be considered a
technological limit as well, in that no technology can likely actually be
built to overcome it.

Even though there are plenty of vague handwavy theories about warp drives with
exotic requirements like negative mass, the Fermi Paradox seems to suggest
that no solution for FTL is practically feasible.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
I’m talking about a realistic limit much closer that the speed of light. My
point being, that perhaps there is an even closer limit that it hard if not
impossible to overcome for an intelligent life that’s contained in a
biological vessel. Given how things in space are measured in light years,
perhaps the time it takes to traverse these spaces far exceeds any biological
lifespan. Put it bluntly - everyone could be moving at each other, but given
the distance apart they would still die off before meeting one another,
because of the time differences involved.

------
rs23296008n1
Plot twist: we're the aliens.

~~~
evv
Plot twist: aliens have already come to visit us on earth, but sadly humanity
seems to forget, or struggles to distinguish between evidence and hoax.

------
jkmcf
I really enjoyed The Light of the Stars by Adam Frank, a professor in the
University of Rochester’s Physics and Astronomy department.

Most of the book is a summary of life beginning on Earth, followed by a re-
thinking of the Fermi Paradox taking into account our own anthropocene, and
finishing with some numerical experimentation.

[https://www.amazon.com/Light-Stars-Alien-Worlds-
Earth/dp/039...](https://www.amazon.com/Light-Stars-Alien-Worlds-
Earth/dp/0393609014)

------
bena
What if we haven't met aliens yet because no matter how you slice it,
interstellar travel and communication just isn't worth it.

~~~
DoreenMichele
What if we have met them, but anyone who admits to it is dismissed as crazy?

What if we have met them, but they routinely sedate their subjects and
administer a memory block?

What if we have met them, but only as random test subjects because they have
no respect for us whatsoever, so they see no point in trying to establish
diplomatic contact?

Besides, it's not like we have a world government yet. "Stupid primitives."

~~~
bena
Light takes 4 years to reach the next closest star.

And yes, someone _in_ a vessel traveling near-light speeds won't age all 4 of
those years. But _we_ do. It will be, for us, 8 years before someone hops to
the next closest star and back.

Same with information from an unmanned probe. Even if we can beam it back at
light speed, it will take years to get back here. And we're talking about
going somewhere we know about.

In terms of exploration, forget it. Space is kind of infinite. Not knowing if
there would be something when you get there is going to be a waste of _years_
back here on Earth.

~~~
Merrill
The times involved are too great for biological beings like us. But for our AI
successors, who's personality can be uploaded anew to new versions of IT
substrates, a million years would be nothing.

Interstellar travel, if it is happening, is being done by robots.

~~~
bena
That follows another presumption I'm not comfortable granting.

That AI is possible. We don't understand intelligence. We don't. To presume we
could recreate it is, at this point, wishful thinking.

And even giving you AI, they would have to decide that it's worth it.

Let me just straight up ask, what's the practical use? We're interested in
interstellar travel because it's a way for us to expand our species. A
completely artificial life form with an effectively eternal lifespan has no
such concern.

------
narrator
When an E.T race becomes capable of utilizing the amount of energy it would
take to do interstellar travel in a reasonable amount of time, they can
probably, accidently, or on purpose, use that energy to cause a lot of damage
to a planet.

For example, an interstellar traffic accident at near light speed of a
sufficiently massive object would cause a lot of damage to a planet.

~~~
Svoka
Destroying a planet doesn’t seem like a big deal for space fairing
civilization. Honestly there’s much more room and resources outside surfaces
of planets

------
proctor
reminds me of the "Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell" youtube video "Why Alien Life
Would be our Doom - The Great Filter"[0] that discusses many of the same
ideas!

[0][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM)

------
rictic
The solution to the Fermi paradox can't be be something that most
civilizations fail, it has to be a challenge that's impossible to pass.

The Fermi paradox posits that there should have been huge numbers of
spacefaring civilizations for millions of years before mankind evolved. If you
postulate a candidate great filter that lies ahead of humanity then it must
have filtered out every single expansionist civilization in our galaxy up till
now.

The solution that makes most sense to me is simply that we did the stats wrong
when combining estimates of the factors of the equation, and our best guesses
predict very few other civilizations:
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/03/ssc-journal-club-
disso...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/03/ssc-journal-club-dissolving-
the-fermi-paradox/)

------
pier25
What if aliens do not use radio waves to communicate but something else like
dark energy or something in the quantum realm?

