4 ms·

Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens (2006)

38 points by blitzo 17y ago

rm-rf 17y ago
"Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children. They eventually die out when the game behind all games—the Game of Life—says “Game Over; you are out of lives and you forgot to reproduce.”" It's not hard to imagine that happening - or more likely, the fraction of civilization that is capable of advancing society fails to reproduce, and the part that does reproduce isn't able to advance society.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  It's not hard to imagine that happening - or more likely, the fraction of civilization that is capable of advancing society fails to reproduce, and the part that does reproduce isn't able to advance society. Once we are able to create viable new societies, societies themselves can evolve out of this trap. We may need space colonization before this can happen, however.
wheels 17y ago
What a silly thesis. I always find theories based on deep assumptions about extraterrestrial psychology bunk. The beginnings of social rather than biological evolution on earth are fantastically recent on a geological scale. 10,000 years, give or take. And it's only been in the last 100 that anything that we've had anything that would be detectable from space. On the sorts of timescale that the universe functions on, we simply have a tiny, tiny sample of what a technological society looks like in the one instance that we are aware of. It's such a recent thing that we can scarcely predict what it will look like in 1000 years, much less 100,000 or 1,000,000 and even 100,000 years would be a small sample to start generalizing upon. In other words, we have no idea what we're looking for when we're looking for extraterrestrial intelligence. The odds of finding another society that is exactly in this first 100 year sliver we're at are vanishingly small.
- drunkpotato 17y ago
  In the middle of reading it I wanted to reply by saying that the framing in terms of extraterrestrials was just a device to get across the real warning of obsession with virtual realities, but then I got the end and the essay dissolved into incoherence. I see no evidence that Christian and Muslim children are less prone to addiction. The high-minded Puritan work ethic attracts some, sure, but "the family values of the religious right" are in reality just a thinly-veiled excuse to be the mean, hateful, narcissistic, exclusive bastards they already are (why yes, I do have issues from my upbringing, thanks for asking, but it's still true). In any case, the essay says that we haven't met aliens because they wiped themselves out in an evolutionary dead-end, but then the religious assholes' descendants (sorry, the super-duper-moral humans) will be the future of humanity meeting other such dipshits. Which is it? In any case, to sum up, there's no there there. If you haven't read the article yet, it's really not worth it; if it's too late, I'm sorry.
watchandwait 17y ago
The real reason, as others have noted-- advance societies discover nuclear fission and supercollider technology and destroy themselves.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  The first mechanism you cite indicates you didn't read the article. The second is either tongue and cheek or indicates a big misunderstanding of science.
maximilian 17y ago
What of this possibility: Aliens and intelligent life-forms do exist at many levels of development, but no-one has discovered a way to travel the unimaginable distances of the universe. Even at near light speed travel, we can barely visit our own neighborhood in practical times.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Visiting stars in "practical" times is one thing. Colonizing a galaxy is another. The latter can be done through hops of just several light years in a matter of decades, using technology we can already envision. Laser sails and fusion drives let a civilization like ours colonize a galaxy in the space of a few million years. Fermi's paradox stands.
  - albertcardona 17y ago
    A million years ago, humanity's genome looked rather different. Is there any point in colonizing another galaxy with an alien species (i.e. ourselves, evolved)?
    - stcredzero 17y ago
      Is there ever any point in a world subject to the laws of Thermodynamics? Is there a point to leaving the world intact for your grandchildren? The problem with your question, is that the consequences are far off in the future. So the likelihood of affecting policy decisions is just about nil.
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
It's Sunday-morning, and this topic is near and dear to me ( http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is_h.php http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is... ) -- so time for a rant It's interesting that we generally suppose either we'll achieve some super-greatness as a species or die out in some horrible cataclysm. How species-centric. As the author notes, a long, slow, fizzle into nothingness seems much more highly probable than some dramatic ending. As an exercise, what do the democracies and the people in them spend their money on? Not space exploration. Not even war -- the last "real" earth-shaking war was well over 50 years ago. Lately it's all been bush wars. We spend more and more energy and money on ourselves. It's not the species, it's the comfort of each individual. What do people value and celebrate? Adventure and discovery by moving out into the Solar System? Heck, there's already a serious movement among scientists to eliminate or seriously limit human exploration. You see, we could contaminate the places we visit. I could continue with examples, but it's seemed obvious to me for many years that, as far as moving towards the conquest of space or self-destruction, we're doing a lot of plugging in, turning on, and patting ourselves on the back about it. But not a lot of exploration. Not only do we not live in a culture of risk-taking exploration, we actively view our presence in the universe as an evil and do all we can to avoid making any kind of permanent mark at all. I fear over the long term we will succeed at this.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  In the long term, we are fated to "succeed." Thermodynamics is on the side of our disappearance.
  - billswift 17y ago
    Thermodynamics would only matter over the multi-billion year span and is irrelevant for the matters discussed here.
- kiba 17y ago
  It's not about individualism, really. There are tons of individualists who would love to explore space and contaminates environment they touch. Generally, democracies have nothing to do with spending money on oursleves, but free market does. All that mean is that the average individual have very high-time preference. Meanwhile those individuals with very low-time preferences want to aim for the stars. The market can provide for them, too in the form of private space industries. Do I view our presence in the universe as an evil? Naw. That's for scary folks who hate their own humanity.
TNO 17y ago
"So evolving intelligence seems likely, given a propitious habitat..." I would argue the opposite. Human level intelligence isn't necessary for survival, so why should one assume that it's bound to be common when its not even the case on Earth now or in it's history? What percentage of life that has ever existed on earth could you consider to have an intelligence on par or better than ours? Obviously less that a hundredth of 1%. If evolution is the law of life, then I doubt that intelligent life in the universe is as common as is assumed
ecommando 17y ago
In any system, there has to be a "first". The first bacterial spore, the first amoeba, the first star, the first planet. Why is it so hard to think that we could be the first? Also equally curious, why MUST they look different? Maybe they're already here and they look just like us.
- almost 17y ago
  Simple probability, if you assume that there are lots over the whole space of time then the chances that you are the first is one divided by lots :) And I do think it's fairly safe to assume that we're not perfectly adapted to everything, that quite a lot of how we work (and therefor look) is down to chance turnings during our evolution.
- smanek 17y ago
  Probability. Drake's equation suggests there are millions of intelligent species in the universe (assume 1,000,000). Thus, the chances of us really being the first is only 1 in a million. Taking into account that the Earth was a relatively late bloomer (the universe was around for ~10 Billion years before there was any life on Earth ...) it becomes far less likely. Similarly, the chances of evolution creating two identical 'solutions' to very different environments (or hell, even nearly identical environments) is practically nil. Even if you buy panspermia (which is perfectly reasonable ...), there were still billions of years of evolution between then and now, and we should be unrecognizable from something we 'branched' from ~4 billion years ago.
SMrF 17y ago
It seems like a big leap to me to take the problems of our generation and extrapolate them to be a (literally) universal explanation for Fermi's Paradox. I have the same problem with the apocalyptic explanations. Just because humans have built enough nuclear weapons to destroy our civilization doesn't mean all other species in the universe would have the same inclination.
CraigBuchek 17y ago
I was listening to a talk on The Singularity, and it occurred to me that that might be a good explanation of the Fermi Paradox. (Which is similar to the author's idea, but a bit different.) Basically, our minds are likely to "merge" with the Internet, allowing us to tap into the internet as our personal and cultural memory storage system. But we cannot extend Internet access into outer space, due to latency and the inability to make copies of the entire Internet locally. So the future "us" would be tied to the planet in order to have access to our memories, which would be very difficult for us to live without.
- mcav 17y ago
  Until the Sun turns supernova, at which point we'd better hope that we discovered another planet to live on.
- ahk 17y ago
  If you want to follow that thought through, the future us would probably like higher fidelity of their memories and recordings, approaching real life quality. The limiting factor in doing this is likely the energy consumption (and in many other ways as well). The cheapest energy source by far is the Sun, consequently we will need to build Dyson spheres, thus pushing us off the Earth. Once we are at that stage the only way to get more energy (to support further fidelity or population growth) will be the other stars and similar mass concentrations, which will eventually lead to colonization of the galaxy and beyond to galaxy clusters/super clusters. Even the light speed barrier can't prevent such a movement for too long. A Singularity will likely only hasten the process (there will be nothing else to do).
CraigBuchek 17y ago
Another possible explanation is that interstellar travel is impossible. Perhaps there's too much debris between star systems, and it's not possible to create materials strong enough to make a spaceship that can withstand a collision with the debris at the speeds required. This doesn't quite explain the lack of communication signals. But if nobody can colonize the galaxy, then there would be less sources of signals. BTW, the Wikipedia article on the Fermi Paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox) does a very good job of detailing all the possible explanations.
- akkartik 17y ago
  In a world where interstellar travel is impossible, civilizations can't strike out too far for resources; they must make do with what is nearby. So as they get more and more efficient with their energy usage they'll emit less and less. Compare our solar system with a dyson sphere the size of the solar system, for example.
- kordless 17y ago
  I'm rather fond of a variant of the "we aren't listening properly" argument. If there exists a medium of which we are unaware, and which can be used to communicate effectively at large distances, perhaps interstellar travel is simply unnecessary, or overly dangerous.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Just one percent of C is awfully fast, but a crawl on interstellar scales. Still, it would be possible to colonize other stars even at such a pace. We can certainly envision accelerating a mass up to that velocity along with a spacecraft in its wake.
crazydiamond 17y ago
How about they just want to leave us alone ?
shadytrees 17y ago
> Fermi listened patiently, then asked, simply, "So, where is everybody?" And, shortly afterward, they stopped eating lunch with him.
jsz0 17y ago
I subscribe to the theory that our own bias as humans leads us to believe that human style intelligence is the pinacle of evolution throughout the universe. As one of the great old sci-fi writers said human intelligence has yet to be proven as a long term evolutionary advantage. It may be that less intelligent but more sustainable life is more typical. Look at the dolphins for example. They don't seem to have any interest in building radio transmitters or spaceships yet they are very intelligent. If this theory is true we can learn a major lesson: We have to become more sustainable creatures if we want to win the evolutionary contest over the long term.
- BigO 17y ago
  I would of gone with dinosaurs as an example but the point still stands
stavrianos 17y ago
http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html
jorgecastillo 17y ago
Maybe other intelligent beings in the universe didn't learn how to live with out fossil fuels, they overloaded the carrying capacity of their planets, global warming destroyed their environments and intelligent people stopped having children? The result would be that their complex civilizations crashed. I think we have more important stuff to invest our intellects in than space exploration. All our current technology depends almost exclusively on cheap energy derived from fossil fuels. Human actions are damaging the complex processes that maintain live. If we don't fix this problems I still think hedonistic technology is a better investment than space exploration. Well at least for the average folk it's not like we can send every human in to space.

38 points by blitzo 17y ago

rm-rf 17y ago

"Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children. They eventually die out when the game behind all games—the Game of Life—says “Game Over; you are out of lives and you forgot to reproduce.”" It's not hard to imagine that happening - or more likely, the fraction of civilization that is capable of advancing society fails to reproduce, and the part that does reproduce isn't able to advance society.

stcredzero 17y ago
It's not hard to imagine that happening - or more likely, the fraction of civilization that is capable of advancing society fails to reproduce, and the part that does reproduce isn't able to advance society. Once we are able to create viable new societies, societies themselves can evolve out of this trap. We may need space colonization before this can happen, however.

wheels 17y ago

What a silly thesis. I always find theories based on deep assumptions about extraterrestrial psychology bunk. The beginnings of social rather than biological evolution on earth are fantastically recent on a geological scale. 10,000 years, give or take. And it's only been in the last 100 that anything that we've had anything that would be detectable from space. On the sorts of timescale that the universe functions on, we simply have a tiny, tiny sample of what a technological society looks like in the one instance that we are aware of. It's such a recent thing that we can scarcely predict what it will look like in 1000 years, much less 100,000 or 1,000,000 and even 100,000 years would be a small sample to start generalizing upon. In other words, we have no idea what we're looking for when we're looking for extraterrestrial intelligence. The odds of finding another society that is exactly in this first 100 year sliver we're at are vanishingly small.

drunkpotato 17y ago
In the middle of reading it I wanted to reply by saying that the framing in terms of extraterrestrials was just a device to get across the real warning of obsession with virtual realities, but then I got the end and the essay dissolved into incoherence. I see no evidence that Christian and Muslim children are less prone to addiction. The high-minded Puritan work ethic attracts some, sure, but "the family values of the religious right" are in reality just a thinly-veiled excuse to be the mean, hateful, narcissistic, exclusive bastards they already are (why yes, I do have issues from my upbringing, thanks for asking, but it's still true). In any case, the essay says that we haven't met aliens because they wiped themselves out in an evolutionary dead-end, but then the religious assholes' descendants (sorry, the super-duper-moral humans) will be the future of humanity meeting other such dipshits. Which is it? In any case, to sum up, there's no there there. If you haven't read the article yet, it's really not worth it; if it's too late, I'm sorry.

watchandwait 17y ago

The real reason, as others have noted-- advance societies discover nuclear fission and supercollider technology and destroy themselves.

stcredzero 17y ago
The first mechanism you cite indicates you didn't read the article. The second is either tongue and cheek or indicates a big misunderstanding of science.

maximilian 17y ago

What of this possibility: Aliens and intelligent life-forms do exist at many levels of development, but no-one has discovered a way to travel the unimaginable distances of the universe. Even at near light speed travel, we can barely visit our own neighborhood in practical times.

stcredzero 17y ago
Visiting stars in "practical" times is one thing. Colonizing a galaxy is another. The latter can be done through hops of just several light years in a matter of decades, using technology we can already envision. Laser sails and fusion drives let a civilization like ours colonize a galaxy in the space of a few million years. Fermi's paradox stands.
- albertcardona 17y ago
  A million years ago, humanity's genome looked rather different. Is there any point in colonizing another galaxy with an alien species (i.e. ourselves, evolved)?
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    Is there ever any point in a world subject to the laws of Thermodynamics? Is there a point to leaving the world intact for your grandchildren? The problem with your question, is that the consequences are far off in the future. So the likelihood of affecting policy decisions is just about nil.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

It's Sunday-morning, and this topic is near and dear to me ( http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is_h.php http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is... ) -- so time for a rant It's interesting that we generally suppose either we'll achieve some super-greatness as a species or die out in some horrible cataclysm. How species-centric. As the author notes, a long, slow, fizzle into nothingness seems much more highly probable than some dramatic ending. As an exercise, what do the democracies and the people in them spend their money on? Not space exploration. Not even war -- the last "real" earth-shaking war was well over 50 years ago. Lately it's all been bush wars. We spend more and more energy and money on ourselves. It's not the species, it's the comfort of each individual. What do people value and celebrate? Adventure and discovery by moving out into the Solar System? Heck, there's already a serious movement among scientists to eliminate or seriously limit human exploration. You see, we could contaminate the places we visit. I could continue with examples, but it's seemed obvious to me for many years that, as far as moving towards the conquest of space or self-destruction, we're doing a lot of plugging in, turning on, and patting ourselves on the back about it. But not a lot of exploration. Not only do we not live in a culture of risk-taking exploration, we actively view our presence in the universe as an evil and do all we can to avoid making any kind of permanent mark at all. I fear over the long term we will succeed at this.

stcredzero 17y ago
In the long term, we are fated to "succeed." Thermodynamics is on the side of our disappearance.
- billswift 17y ago
  Thermodynamics would only matter over the multi-billion year span and is irrelevant for the matters discussed here.
kiba 17y ago
It's not about individualism, really. There are tons of individualists who would love to explore space and contaminates environment they touch. Generally, democracies have nothing to do with spending money on oursleves, but free market does. All that mean is that the average individual have very high-time preference. Meanwhile those individuals with very low-time preferences want to aim for the stars. The market can provide for them, too in the form of private space industries. Do I view our presence in the universe as an evil? Naw. That's for scary folks who hate their own humanity.

TNO 17y ago

"So evolving intelligence seems likely, given a propitious habitat..." I would argue the opposite. Human level intelligence isn't necessary for survival, so why should one assume that it's bound to be common when its not even the case on Earth now or in it's history? What percentage of life that has ever existed on earth could you consider to have an intelligence on par or better than ours? Obviously less that a hundredth of 1%. If evolution is the law of life, then I doubt that intelligent life in the universe is as common as is assumed

ecommando 17y ago

In any system, there has to be a "first". The first bacterial spore, the first amoeba, the first star, the first planet. Why is it so hard to think that we could be the first? Also equally curious, why MUST they look different? Maybe they're already here and they look just like us.

almost 17y ago
Simple probability, if you assume that there are lots over the whole space of time then the chances that you are the first is one divided by lots :) And I do think it's fairly safe to assume that we're not perfectly adapted to everything, that quite a lot of how we work (and therefor look) is down to chance turnings during our evolution.
smanek 17y ago
Probability. Drake's equation suggests there are millions of intelligent species in the universe (assume 1,000,000). Thus, the chances of us really being the first is only 1 in a million. Taking into account that the Earth was a relatively late bloomer (the universe was around for ~10 Billion years before there was any life on Earth ...) it becomes far less likely. Similarly, the chances of evolution creating two identical 'solutions' to very different environments (or hell, even nearly identical environments) is practically nil. Even if you buy panspermia (which is perfectly reasonable ...), there were still billions of years of evolution between then and now, and we should be unrecognizable from something we 'branched' from ~4 billion years ago.

SMrF 17y ago

It seems like a big leap to me to take the problems of our generation and extrapolate them to be a (literally) universal explanation for Fermi's Paradox. I have the same problem with the apocalyptic explanations. Just because humans have built enough nuclear weapons to destroy our civilization doesn't mean all other species in the universe would have the same inclination.

CraigBuchek 17y ago

I was listening to a talk on The Singularity, and it occurred to me that that might be a good explanation of the Fermi Paradox. (Which is similar to the author's idea, but a bit different.) Basically, our minds are likely to "merge" with the Internet, allowing us to tap into the internet as our personal and cultural memory storage system. But we cannot extend Internet access into outer space, due to latency and the inability to make copies of the entire Internet locally. So the future "us" would be tied to the planet in order to have access to our memories, which would be very difficult for us to live without.

mcav 17y ago
Until the Sun turns supernova, at which point we'd better hope that we discovered another planet to live on.
ahk 17y ago
If you want to follow that thought through, the future us would probably like higher fidelity of their memories and recordings, approaching real life quality. The limiting factor in doing this is likely the energy consumption (and in many other ways as well). The cheapest energy source by far is the Sun, consequently we will need to build Dyson spheres, thus pushing us off the Earth. Once we are at that stage the only way to get more energy (to support further fidelity or population growth) will be the other stars and similar mass concentrations, which will eventually lead to colonization of the galaxy and beyond to galaxy clusters/super clusters. Even the light speed barrier can't prevent such a movement for too long. A Singularity will likely only hasten the process (there will be nothing else to do).

CraigBuchek 17y ago

Another possible explanation is that interstellar travel is impossible. Perhaps there's too much debris between star systems, and it's not possible to create materials strong enough to make a spaceship that can withstand a collision with the debris at the speeds required. This doesn't quite explain the lack of communication signals. But if nobody can colonize the galaxy, then there would be less sources of signals. BTW, the Wikipedia article on the Fermi Paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox) does a very good job of detailing all the possible explanations.

akkartik 17y ago
In a world where interstellar travel is impossible, civilizations can't strike out too far for resources; they must make do with what is nearby. So as they get more and more efficient with their energy usage they'll emit less and less. Compare our solar system with a dyson sphere the size of the solar system, for example.
kordless 17y ago
I'm rather fond of a variant of the "we aren't listening properly" argument. If there exists a medium of which we are unaware, and which can be used to communicate effectively at large distances, perhaps interstellar travel is simply unnecessary, or overly dangerous.
stcredzero 17y ago
Just one percent of C is awfully fast, but a crawl on interstellar scales. Still, it would be possible to colonize other stars even at such a pace. We can certainly envision accelerating a mass up to that velocity along with a spacecraft in its wake.

crazydiamond 17y ago

How about they just want to leave us alone ?

shadytrees 17y ago

> Fermi listened patiently, then asked, simply, "So, where is everybody?" And, shortly afterward, they stopped eating lunch with him.

jsz0 17y ago

I subscribe to the theory that our own bias as humans leads us to believe that human style intelligence is the pinacle of evolution throughout the universe. As one of the great old sci-fi writers said human intelligence has yet to be proven as a long term evolutionary advantage. It may be that less intelligent but more sustainable life is more typical. Look at the dolphins for example. They don't seem to have any interest in building radio transmitters or spaceships yet they are very intelligent. If this theory is true we can learn a major lesson: We have to become more sustainable creatures if we want to win the evolutionary contest over the long term.

BigO 17y ago
I would of gone with dinosaurs as an example but the point still stands

stavrianos 17y ago

http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html

jorgecastillo 17y ago

Maybe other intelligent beings in the universe didn't learn how to live with out fossil fuels, they overloaded the carrying capacity of their planets, global warming destroyed their environments and intelligent people stopped having children? The result would be that their complex civilizations crashed. I think we have more important stuff to invest our intellects in than space exploration. All our current technology depends almost exclusively on cheap energy derived from fossil fuels. Human actions are damaging the complex processes that maintain live. If we don't fix this problems I still think hedonistic technology is a better investment than space exploration. Well at least for the average folk it's not like we can send every human in to space.