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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
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