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The notion in the article is great fodder for a novel, but I think this perspective is sound. You've said almost as much, but I think there's a good argument to

The notion in the article is great fodder for a novel, but I think this perspective is sound. You've said almost as much, but I think there's a good argument to be made that societies which undergo an industrial revolution either collapse the ecology that supports them, or survive it by maturing and expending energy on QoL for the whole biosphere. In either case the window of time for making a cosmic racket is fairly small. It could just be that interstellar networking is generally quite rare. Personally I think the same tendency which makes us so enterprising and leads to thinking up 'paradoxes' like this, is the same thinking that makes us not-so-certain to pass the ecological test.

KozmoNau7 9y ago
The argument I've heard most is that a civilization only has a short time where it's blasting broadcasts into space willy-nilly, before improving their tech and making it more efficient, thus dramatically lowering its potential to be discovered by its stray broadcasts.
- ianai 9y ago
  I wonder if all habitable planets with simple life would have the conditions necessary to create oil and coal. Love them or hate them, they still power most of our civilization. Imagine if we did not have a gas/coal readily available? We refined nuclear as a weapon first. The need for a nuclear bomb might not arise in a power constrained civilization and thus go much long before being discovered (if ever)
  - dx034 9y ago
    I'm sure someone has simulated that but it appears highly likely that a planet with plants (or any carbon based life) will at some point "generate" fossil fuels. And maybe, if we hadn't found oil, we would've come up with more efficient ways to use electricity generated from renewable sources. Would've taken longer but we could've made up for that later in the process. Batteries were known at the time of the oil revolution and electricity from hydro & wind were also known.
    - pasquinelli 9y ago
      or maybe we wouldn't have bothered with electricity because of a lack of energy reserves.
      - dx034 9y ago
        There's plenty of hydro energy available. Not having fossil fuels would've shifted where we settle. Texas would likely be less economically successful compared to Canada which has plenty of hydro capacity and hydro reserves. Long-distance electricity transportation would've come up later making ACs less popular. In the US, that would've favoured the north heavily over the south. In Asia, Singapore would've never been as successful (they say themselves that success came with the AC). Maybe China would've become dominant much earlier.
    - tremon 9y ago
      That's a nice thought experiment. Our capability of harnessing energy from renewable sources (but not electrical energy) covers 3,000 years already: sailing ships and windmills. By the time magnetism and later electricity were discovered, we already had wind-powered propulsion, milling, and water drainage. What made them impractical for industrial uses (the first applications for coal power were steam-powered textile mills iirc) was the same issue we have with solar and wind today: output is dependent on external factors that we can't control. Coal became valuable exactly because it was the first controllable energy source. It's hard to imagine us making the same amount of progress without an ever-present energy source (coal caches, fuel tanks, and the electrical energy grid). And it's hard to imagine why we would construct an energy grid without a prior ever-present energy source. Looking at our current means of energy storage, it seems that only hydro-electric storage is a viable option if you discount fossil fuels. So without fossil fuels, I think an electrical grid could have originated only in very specific locations: lots of wind power, and a natural basin to be converted into a reservoir with relative ease. We would have seen massively different industrial sprawl in such a scenario, and I wonder if such a situation would ever give rise to a truly continental electrical grid like we have now.
      - wongarsu 9y ago
  - Normal_gaussian 9y ago
    The potential for nuclear as a power source was well known. If you read the Farm Hall transcripts [1] there are several conversations in the vein uranium engine vs uranium bomb; they all knew a uranium engine was possible and was the original research, but the war drove them to a uranium bomb. From section 5: "History will record that the Americans and the English made a bomb, and that at the same time the Germans, under the HITLER regime, produced a workable engine." [1] http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English101.pdf http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English101.pdf
- tatersolid 9y ago
  Or everything they’re broadcasting is encrypted, even the metadata and framing bits. With spread-spectrum, directional and burst patterns to mitigate side channels and jamming. So the alien communications just look like noise to us here on earth. We’re nearing the “everything encrypted” point ourselves, and we would certainly be very careful about emissions control if we ever got ourselves out of the solar system. Presumably any other advanced civilization would have had its own paranoid Sci-Fi literature/film/whatever, and would behave accordingly.
  - sigstoat 9y ago
    > With spread-spectrum, directional and burst patterns to mitigate side channels and jamming. without regulatory constraints, our own use of radio would've required that rather quickly. i think it's entirely possible another civilization simply never would've used radio at beyond a hobbyist level without the use of spread-spectrum heavily-coded techniques. > Presumably any other advanced civilization would have had its own paranoid Sci-Fi literature/film/whatever i don't think it's a given that another species would even have fiction. or paranoia.

KozmoNau7 9y ago

The argument I've heard most is that a civilization only has a short time where it's blasting broadcasts into space willy-nilly, before improving their tech and making it more efficient, thus dramatically lowering its potential to be discovered by its stray broadcasts.

ianai 9y ago
I wonder if all habitable planets with simple life would have the conditions necessary to create oil and coal. Love them or hate them, they still power most of our civilization. Imagine if we did not have a gas/coal readily available? We refined nuclear as a weapon first. The need for a nuclear bomb might not arise in a power constrained civilization and thus go much long before being discovered (if ever)
- dx034 9y ago
  I'm sure someone has simulated that but it appears highly likely that a planet with plants (or any carbon based life) will at some point "generate" fossil fuels. And maybe, if we hadn't found oil, we would've come up with more efficient ways to use electricity generated from renewable sources. Would've taken longer but we could've made up for that later in the process. Batteries were known at the time of the oil revolution and electricity from hydro & wind were also known.
  - pasquinelli 9y ago
    or maybe we wouldn't have bothered with electricity because of a lack of energy reserves.
    - dx034 9y ago
      There's plenty of hydro energy available. Not having fossil fuels would've shifted where we settle. Texas would likely be less economically successful compared to Canada which has plenty of hydro capacity and hydro reserves. Long-distance electricity transportation would've come up later making ACs less popular. In the US, that would've favoured the north heavily over the south. In Asia, Singapore would've never been as successful (they say themselves that success came with the AC). Maybe China would've become dominant much earlier.
  - tremon 9y ago
    That's a nice thought experiment. Our capability of harnessing energy from renewable sources (but not electrical energy) covers 3,000 years already: sailing ships and windmills. By the time magnetism and later electricity were discovered, we already had wind-powered propulsion, milling, and water drainage. What made them impractical for industrial uses (the first applications for coal power were steam-powered textile mills iirc) was the same issue we have with solar and wind today: output is dependent on external factors that we can't control. Coal became valuable exactly because it was the first controllable energy source. It's hard to imagine us making the same amount of progress without an ever-present energy source (coal caches, fuel tanks, and the electrical energy grid). And it's hard to imagine why we would construct an energy grid without a prior ever-present energy source. Looking at our current means of energy storage, it seems that only hydro-electric storage is a viable option if you discount fossil fuels. So without fossil fuels, I think an electrical grid could have originated only in very specific locations: lots of wind power, and a natural basin to be converted into a reservoir with relative ease. We would have seen massively different industrial sprawl in such a scenario, and I wonder if such a situation would ever give rise to a truly continental electrical grid like we have now.
    - wongarsu 9y ago
- Normal_gaussian 9y ago
  The potential for nuclear as a power source was well known. If you read the Farm Hall transcripts [1] there are several conversations in the vein uranium engine vs uranium bomb; they all knew a uranium engine was possible and was the original research, but the war drove them to a uranium bomb. From section 5: "History will record that the Americans and the English made a bomb, and that at the same time the Germans, under the HITLER regime, produced a workable engine." [1] http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English101.pdf http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English101.pdf
tatersolid 9y ago
Or everything they’re broadcasting is encrypted, even the metadata and framing bits. With spread-spectrum, directional and burst patterns to mitigate side channels and jamming. So the alien communications just look like noise to us here on earth. We’re nearing the “everything encrypted” point ourselves, and we would certainly be very careful about emissions control if we ever got ourselves out of the solar system. Presumably any other advanced civilization would have had its own paranoid Sci-Fi literature/film/whatever, and would behave accordingly.
- sigstoat 9y ago
  > With spread-spectrum, directional and burst patterns to mitigate side channels and jamming. without regulatory constraints, our own use of radio would've required that rather quickly. i think it's entirely possible another civilization simply never would've used radio at beyond a hobbyist level without the use of spread-spectrum heavily-coded techniques. > Presumably any other advanced civilization would have had its own paranoid Sci-Fi literature/film/whatever i don't think it's a given that another species would even have fiction. or paranoia.