12 ms·
TL;DR - It's not a paradox, because we're probably alone. Kind of a letdown!
by jpm_sd 8y ago
TL;DR - It's not a paradox, because we're probably alone. Kind of a letdown!
- amelius 8y ago> because we're probably alone ... in the observable universe.
- mikeash 8y agoWhich is another way of saying “within our light cone,” and anything outside it might as well not exist as far as we’re ckncerned.
- ssijak 8y agoHow did you/they calculate that probability of being alone? Anybody who tries to slap some number on such things as the probability for life to emerge is dishonest at least.
- mdpopescu 8y agoThat's the whole point of Michael Crichton's rant in "Aliens caused global warming" [1] [1] https://www.heartland.org/publications-resources/publications/aliens-cause-global-warming-a-lecture-by-michael-crichton https://www.heartland.org/publications-resources/publication...
- amelius 8y agoImagine a two-dimensional grid of squares, where all the squares are randomly chosen to be either black or white. Imagine that somewhere in this grid there's the appearance of a smiley in a 12x12 rectangle. How would this smiley compute if it's alone in the grid, and how close the nearest other smiley can be expected to be?
- dosshell 8y agoAnd some numbers from the paper: > we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). > ’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable.
- jandrese 8y agoThe Drake equation is the epitome of garbage in garbage out. Trying to draw a line using a single data point. There was recent news from NASA about the discovery of organic molecules on Mars and the possibility of life there at some point in the past. Discovery that life once existed on Mars would blow up the assumptions in the Drake equation. As for the Fermi paradox I'm still of the opinion that its solution is simple but depressing: Interstellar travel is so difficult that by the time you're capable of it you don't need it anymore, and even when you're capable of it you still don't get very far outside of your stellar neighborhood. Unlimited power systems, reactionless drives, and FTL travel (or even high-c travel) are depressingly impossible. And then the cold hand of entropy and the aggregate chance of disaster make it extremely dangerous to even attempt. Basically without Sci-Fi propulsion/power you end up traveling at an interstellar snail's pace, and the longer the trip the more likely it is that a random meteorite smashes through your vessel, or you simply run out of spare parts and materials to make them, and the amount of fuel you need to just keep the lights on becomes enormous. If you can build a starship that can travel between solar systems with our current understanding of physics, then you can build orbital colonies for basically unlimited living space much much easier. For one, they can be powered by solar cells instead of needing to carry fuel. It's not like we are going to run out of raw materials either. Even restricting yourself to the belt the amount of material available would last basically indefinitely. Worst case you can start breaking up moons. So even in a universe full of life everybody is alone. Especially if you think about how genetic algorithms tend to get hung up on local maxima, so lots of planets waste millions of years with dumb dinosaurs with no space program or radio telescopes.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoAlso, VR. I already fear the future of humanity is not exploring strange new worlds, but creating virtual ones, and converting the solar system into more computronium. (And the weird thing about that is that I feel it's a bad thing for some reason, but I can't articulate a coherent argument against it.)
- greglindahl 8y agoThere are a bunch of scifi novels that explore the issue, and most of them feature bad things that result.