The Foundation series is my main imagination pump here (it gets me thinking about this stuff):
This is one of the most interesting empirical questions, if there is life or not outside of us, but it seems like there must be.
And if there is extra terrestrial life, there are probably large clusters of it because of confounding reasons, like stable stars making it easier for multiple planets in system to be habitable, somewhere out there.
We probably know we are not close to a ‘large cluster’, because we’d know by now by the local nature of clusters.
So I think we can/should be in the headspace of the Foundation series. There are almost assuredly large clusters of power, and we are not part of it. The clusters know this state of affairs and so do all the outlier planets like us.
I’m not saying we should remain hidden or anything. I’m not even sure what the consequences are in this headspace. But I think we can and possibly should start realizing we’d be in contact by a cluster rapidly, if there were any in our Galaxy.
That dynamic just seems so inevitable and Asimov was able to capture it. The clusters will heavily cluster and remove most outliers by absorbing them. And the real outliers are very far between.
The Foundation Series doesn't have any aliens because the humans created a bunch of robots that then decided to kill _EVERYTHING_ELSE_ in the galaxy to protect the humans.
Which novel is that from? It's been some years since I read any of Asimov's books, but the way I remember it is this:
In the Robot novels, the overwhelming majority of humans live on Earth in mega cities (caves of steel) with relatively few robots, and a small minority of humans live on a few dozen (50 or so) other worlds in highly roboticized societies. These humans call themselves Spacers and have very xenophobic inward cultures. In the extreme cases, exemplified by Solaris, they shun contact even with other Spacers from their own planet and surround themselves entirely with robots.
Eventually the human majority leaves Earth, because a robot following the Zeroth Law decides to irradiate Earth to force humanity to spread out in the galaxy. The humans from Earth don't take many if any robots with them and rapidly overtake robot-centric Spacer culture, which is all but forgotten (as are robots). The massive galactic human population of the Empire novels are the descendants of the humans that left Earth later, not the Spacers.
I don't recall that. I do recall some ominous foreshadowing regarding aliens in the final book*, but nothing definitive.
* Maybe D. should have thought about that possibility before embarking on a scheme that required hindering humanity's technical development for an indefinite period?
If you use Foundation as your pump you may enjoy John C. Wright's Count to the Escaton sequence. It's Foundation with aliens, logic, ethics, love, and scales of time and intelligence beyond anything else I have ever read.
N. B. It most closely resembles the part of Foundation where the Mule shows up.
I sometimes wonder if the simplest answer for this is that nature / evolution obeys some principle of simultaneous discovery[0][1] and convergence. In which case all advanced civilization may simply be on roughly the same timescales.
In another words, it’s possible that all intelligent life is more or less at the same level of development, and this creates a situation where we only discover each other at the same time
That feels incredibly unlikely. The universe is billions of years old. There was nothing preventing an intelligence from developing on Earth a billion years earlier.
That being said, our civilization got an enormous boon coming later in the history of the planet. Fossil fuels and the abundant energy economy would not be available without the right biologic circumstances (eg lignin metabolism developing late) and timing.
Calling it the Fermi "paradox" really seems like begging the question to me. You've got a theory ("this math says life should be common") which conflicts with observed reality ("we don't see shit!"). Is that a paradox? It seems more like an invalidation of the theory to me. The resolution to the "paradox" is realizing that something in your theory is wrong.
What is the common refrain? If the facts don't fit the theory, then the theory is wrong! Isn't that the core essence of science? Empiricism is a repudiation of Platonic a priori reasoning. Beautiful and elegant theories that don't fit the facts are simply wrong.
He is using logic which is from our current planets situation , technology situation , culture situation which could be completely different from a different species deciding if trying to contact another civilization makes sense. Also, even if this is most likely, the amount of time we have to observe visitors is very limited relative to millions/billions of years of existence, plus, there are trillions of planets that may have life that may or may not interest these guys. All in all it only proves how unlikely we will be visited but doesn’t say anything about if life is out there or not.
I think there are inevitable outcomes we can predict early on which are not sensitive to these considerations. You might think I’m doing a ton of guessing and hindsight reasoning, but I do want to at least say one of the principle characters in Foundation is someone thinking sociologically/cosmologically on 30,000 year scales. He wants minimize the future inevitable cluster collapse of the galaxy. He knows it’s unavoidable in the future, that space is subject to certain governing processes which will drive all starting points to the same collapse. At best he can minimize. By a magnitude of 1 or 2.
The Fermi paradox can be outmoded or not really relevant at these scales.
I avoided raising any particular outcomes other than the one thing which seems inevitable, the cluster-outlier dynamic. It’s weird this reasoning exists, or it was at least interesting to Asmiov imo. I think he found most interesting that a few distant inevitabilities can be known, and space-wise those relate to the cluster/very very few outliers.
And I’m pretty sure there were aliens (The M**). Asimov was both relying on human sociology and history AND taking that to the largest backdrop. Like only needing a slice (statistics, modeling, or selective deep-thinking even) of something deep gain to gain immense wisdom about the future. That was the most interesting thing about the character who set the whole story in motion at least imo. Even the initiating character, The M**, and counter forces could not disrupt the course…No planet perpetually hidden, no stopping perpetual clustering…(sorry for spoilers)
I know this is not really your argument, but I think it's related:
I don't buy that the problem is that we just don't know what to look for. There must be some observable characteristics that indicate its presence. It seems implausible that intelligent life forms would not leave any visible traces and that their planets would be indistinguishable from uninhabited ones.
They aren't... from nearby. Cosmic distances are vast and the telltale signs are small. I'm not sure we would have detected an abundance of sealife deep in Titan's oceans or fliers deep in Saturn's clouds.
I once looked into the reach of the Arecibo message; I can't quite remember the numbers but the main point stands: it's indecipherable but detectably artificial after a short distance (guess: 60-100 lightyears), and no longer distinguishable from natural radiation after about 5× that (guess: 250ish-600 lightyears).
The point is that even an intentional message quickly (in cosmic terms) becomes gibberish and, fairly soon after, too faded to even recognise as being a signal. On top of that, the receivers would have to be looking.
Basically, I doubt we would recognise artificial signals intentionally sent to us from further than 15 lightyears out except with much, much luck. That explains why we didn't find any clear non-intentional signals yet.
An interesting take on this is to flip the question: from how far away would we, with our current approaches, be able to unambiguously, definitively detect life on Earth? And intelligent life?
I'm not sure we're able to do even the former from Pluto, let alone from the interstellar medium.
> I'm not sure we're able to do even the former from Pluto
We can communicate with Voyager 1 beyond the limits of the Solar System, so I am not sure if earth's constantly emitted signals would not be detectable from Jupiter.
The ability to communicate with Voyager is a function of the transmission and reception system. We have to send an incredibly focused transmission to Voyager for it to pick up our signal and listen with very sensitive instruments on a long temporal baseline to detect Voyager's signals.
The inverse square law tells you that the flux of a signal decreases at a square of the distance. A receiver 2 miles away from a transmitter will receive a signal at a quarter of the strength of a receiver only a mile away. Our broadband omnidirectional broadcasts don't actually reach very far out into the solar system let alone the galaxy. Only very powerful narrowband signals reach very far and those are very directional.
If you were Montezuma, would you prefer to advertise your presence so that it would be visible from Spain, or would rather try to conceal your presence?
This is one of the most interesting empirical questions, if there is life or not outside of us, but it seems like there must be.
And if there is extra terrestrial life, there are probably large clusters of it because of confounding reasons, like stable stars making it easier for multiple planets in system to be habitable, somewhere out there.
We probably know we are not close to a ‘large cluster’, because we’d know by now by the local nature of clusters.
So I think we can/should be in the headspace of the Foundation series. There are almost assuredly large clusters of power, and we are not part of it. The clusters know this state of affairs and so do all the outlier planets like us.
I’m not saying we should remain hidden or anything. I’m not even sure what the consequences are in this headspace. But I think we can and possibly should start realizing we’d be in contact by a cluster rapidly, if there were any in our Galaxy.
That dynamic just seems so inevitable and Asimov was able to capture it. The clusters will heavily cluster and remove most outliers by absorbing them. And the real outliers are very far between.