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The Fermi Paradox is Back

2007-08-06 10:46:06

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday August 05, @11:19AM

Space Science

nettxzl writes ""Sentient Developments revisits the Fermi Paradox which is "the

contradictory and counter-intuitive observation that we have yet to see any

evidence for the existence of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI) although the

size and age of the Universe suggests that many technologically advanced ETI's

ought to exist." Sentient Development's blog post on the Fermi Paradox states

that "a number of inter-disciplinary breakthroughs and insights have

contributed to the Fermi Paradox gaining credence as an unsolved scientific

problem" Amongst these are "(1)Improved quantification and conceptualization of

our cosmological environment, (2) Improved understanding of planet formation,

composition and the presence of habitable zones, (3) The discovery of

extrasolar planets, (4) Confirmation of the rapid origination of life on Earth

(5) Growing legitimacy of panspermia theories" and more ... So, where is

everyone?"

Have some patience, we'll run across them... event

(Score:5, Insightful)

by KingSkippus (799657) * on Sunday August 05, @11:20AM (#20121571)

(http://skippus.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday June 19, @08:25AM)

In the immortal words of Douglas Adams, "Space is big. You just won't believe

how vastly, hugely, mind-boggingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long

way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

The problem isn't that there isn't anyone else out there. With so many billions

of stars and planets, the odds that there are other intelligent beings out

there are astronomically large. (Pun slightly intended.)

>That's the Sagan argument. Unfortunately, the fact that we exist tells us

absolutely nothing about how probably intelligent life is or isn't (see:

anthropic principle). Sagan's argument doesn't address the fundamental Fermi

problem.

The problem is that the distances required to travel to reach them and also

astronomically large, and the odds that there is life on any given planet are

infinitesimally small.

>True, but the amount of time that's passed until us showing up is also

astronomically large. It only takes one race with an expansion desire to fill

up the galaxy at sublight speeds around 1 to 10 million years (via geometric

expansion). Even if it took 100 million years, that's still a blip in the life

of the galaxy. At the very least, someone should have sent out self replicating

probes by now.

>>>Maybe other life forms have sent out self replicating probes. Why would we

have necessarily noticed?

I always put this thought experiment before people: If you had a spaceship that

could instantly take you to anywhere in the universe, where would you go?

Sure, you'd probably drop by a few nebulae and stars and even planets, but

after you've seen a few, where to then? You could travel to other planets for

lifetimes and still not run across intelligent life on other planets. It's not

that truly interesting things aren't out there, it's just that the universe

isn't very conducive to producing life-bearing planets. Sure, with so vastly

many planets, it will happen (and obviously has), but finding life out there is

like finding a needle in a haystack, and we're just now starting to be able to

see the haystack.

Further complicating matters is that we don't have spaceships that can

instantly take us anywhere in the universe, and according to the laws of

physics as we know them, it's likely that other intelligent beings don't

either. Maybe they have travelled lifetimes and they just haven't run across us

yet.

So be patient, my fellow humans, it may take a few million (or even billion)

more years. After all, it's more than just a trip down the road to the chemist,

and something that cool will probably be worth the wait.

>>The paradox is that if they have a few thousand or hundred of thousand year

ahead of us, then they should have at least by probe or similarly conquered or

explored this galaxy, or send a lot of radio signal. But we see nothing.

I was talking about this with a coworker a few weeks back and realized

something. Back when radio was first discovered they used *huge* transmitters

to transmit a small amount of data a short distance because their receivers

were so crude. Later receivers were vastly improved and you could use much

lower power to send much more data. Soon we had over the air TV that had a

phenomenal amount of data flowing through the air, but, to not encroach on

competing channels in adjacent areas, the signal strength was reduced again.

Skip forward to today and we are using cable (very little "signal" escapes) and

fiber-optics (no signal escapes) to send even more data back and forth. So, in

a few years time we've gone from a very noisy planet with out much to say, to a

much less noisy planet with much more to say.

I think it is inevitable, simply from an efficiency perspective, that we will

be using more and more "tight-band" communication methods in the future

(quantum entanglement?). It seems intuitive that the more advanced a

civilization gets the more efficient it will strive to be. The more efficient

it is, the less noise will be wasted into space (especially compared to the

natural noises of the planet, like lightning, aurora, etc.)

Look how much more efficient we've become in just a hundred years. If this is

indicative of other civilizations, then the window of opportunity for

eavesdropping on them is extremely small. And that's assuming that they are

remotely like us and not building their civilization at the bottom of their

ocean or are just so different from us that we wouldn't even recognize them as

life.

As far as colonizing the stars goes, barring some way of FTL (or instant)

travel and communication, I think we will never move beyond our own solar

system in our current physical form. I think we will have figured out how to

lose our bodies and move our consciousness into "the machine" before then. Once

that happens, there will be no need for maintaining the human race in a

biological form at all since "reproduction" can occur in solid-state. Once

we've reached that stage, being effectively immortal, we might be willing to

entertain the thought of physically traveling to other stars, but there will be

no need to colonize them, they can be virtualized. But then again, we could

virtualize the whole trip anyway.

Either way, that step in technology would almost guarantee a very efficient

system that would need to produce almost no waste products. With no need for

maintaining and supporting physical bodies, all of the energy required to

sustain physical life will not be needed. No more growing and shipping crops.

No more energy wasted in physical travel. In fact, very little need for ever

physically moving anything, from then on. This would make most of our

civilization a "static" construct. At that point, unless we were purposely

broadcasting for neighbors, who'd ever hear us?

>>>Really the best answer to the Fermi paradox is that Earth-like conditions

are rare.

That is not true. It's not that the conditions and chemical constitution of the

environment need to be the same, it's the fact that their needs to be a very

low probability event (or set of events) occur for the first "living" cell to

result from some arbitrary water-based reaction somewhere in the planet, giving

us a cell that has at least basic reproduction and respiratory (energy

converting) capabilities. Evolution cannot aid this first cell: there are none

before it. It has to come as a result of a single "miracle moment" where the

necessary compounds for a connected cell wall, nucleus, DNA..etc all form at

the same time AND at the same small point in space, albeit at a much smaller

degree of complexity compared to living cells today.

Your GP does not understand how small the possibility of something like this

happening is, even in a vast universe. The living cell is a structure, and the

first one is not built by incremental trial&error as in evolution..you have to

have a functional formation who's constituents (DNA or similar) happen to

represent the very structure that was arbitrarily formed itself, and are able

to replicate themselves into another clone of the original (mitosis or

similar).

We are the ultimate result of a very low probability event, and we are alone.

>

Cellular beginnings...

(Score:5, Insightful)

by SpinyNorman (33776) on Sunday August 05, @03:56PM (#20124247)

No-one thinks that the earliest form of life involved DNA (or anything like

it). The simplest form of cellular metabolism would basically have been a

self-replicating chemical soup that "consumed" chemicals in the environment in

order to create more of it's own chemical constituents. This type of

self-sustaining chemical microenvironments likely occured all over the place -

before they ever became separated from the rest of the environment by any

cell-like container.

The earliest cell-like containers may well have been simply lipid (fatty)

bubbles that presented a semi-permiable membrane that let certain chemicals

thru. These types of lipid bubble could easily have formed naturally (think

froth at the edge of the ocean), maybe even based on products of these chemical

reactions. There's no need for the earliest "cells" to have been created/

encoded by the chemicals they contained as they are today (DNA).

The earliest forms of replication also need not have been self-encoded - they

would almost certainly have been due to physical processes - e.g. if you

whipped up (sea-shore wave action) a bunch of large fatty bubbles, you'd get a

lot of smaller fatty bubbles which would then "grow" via their semi-permiable

enclosure letting in the external chemical components that "fed" the chemical

reactions. Similar to how an amoeba )modern single cellular organism)

"reproduces" by splitting into two.

Highly complex chemicals like DNA or RNA may have have originated as simple

chemical catalysts that sped up the reaction process - i.e. guided it rather

than being part of it per se.

These types of extremely simple pre-cellular origins are far from being low

probabiliy events - they are alomost inevitably going to occur given a rich

enouch chemical environment and suitable phyiscal conditions (water, wave

action = stirring, lightening, sunlight, etc). If you're interested in the

beginning of life at this extrememly early stage, try reading Stuart Kauffman's

"At Home in the Universe".

Even at this early stage, evolution would necessarily have occured. Among

multiple such self-sustaining reactions, those that were best adapted to the

environment (those parts of it they relied upon, e.g. available chemicals)

would necessarily have left more "descendents" than others that were competing

for the same raw ingredients (food supply). With these types of lipid membrance

cell, new chemicals in the environemnt that were not part of the chain

reactions occuring in the "population" would often have been introduced, and

occasionally would have modified those reactions and their products. This

source of variation would then have been fodder for natural selection (the

winners swamping the losers out of the environment), and so it goes...

>>>Advanced Intelligence May Just Be Embarrassed

(Score:5, Funny)

by nick_davison (217681) on Sunday August 05, @11:43AM (#20121819)

Assuming they're smart enough to create signals that we can detect, they can

most likely detect ours too.

Complex life on this planet has been going on for hundreds of millions of years

and yet it's only in the last hundred or so that we've been able to look out

with anything more than enhancements of our natural senses. This implies that

the odds of a second species being at exactly the same point tiny. Most likely,

if they're sending things we can read, they got there a long way before us and

are quite a bit smarter.

Assuming they're quite a bit smarter, one look at the crap our radiowaves are

sharing with the universe - infomercials, reality TV and our politics/wars -

and I'd imagine pretty much any higher civilization would be embarrassed enough

about us to screen their signature and make damn sure those idiotic hairless

apes don't go and screw their part of the galaxy up too.

So, the answer to the paradox: There's most likely higher intelligence out

there. And, because it's higher, it's most likely embarrassed to hell and back

by us and screening itself from us. Problem solved.

Posted: 2010746@860.28

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stranger

End