7 ms·

Why we downplay Fermi’s paradox

42 points by dnetesn 8y ago

ianai 8y ago
I’ve never bought into the Fermi thesis. We’re still burning petroleum instead of using it for its other amazing uses and blowing each other up over myths - but we think we know the fundamental nature of all life in the universe enough to say we should see it.
- d0lph 8y ago
  There's a huge list of explanations on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_explanations_for_the_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...
- roywiggins 8y ago
  All life? No. But if life is very common, what are the odds that absolutely none of it looks like something we would recognize? If that's true then we are absolutely unique in the universe. It just takes one civilization with a runaway von Neumann probe to drop huge monoliths on every single rocky body in the Galaxy over a couple millennia, and since evidently nobody did that in our solar system, the question is why not. If there's a rule that forbids it, what is the rule and does it apply to us? That's the question posed by the Fermi paradox.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  We know that a star burns the available fuel and then expires, with a hard limit existing on the size of it's size based on various factors. We know that algae bloom similarly exhausts it's medium and shrinks. However, the going assumption of the Fermi thesis is intelligent life is different. Intelligent life forms civilizations that are expected to naturally expands forever, eating planets, stars and so-forth. So far, human behavior looks much like the other phenomena that expand to the limit of their fuel and then die. And, if somehow against all odds, we wise up and stop exhausting the resources needed for our existence, well, then that infinite expansion tendency quite likely won't be there. "If we humans are now on the cusp of colonizing our solar system, and we are not much faster than other civilizations, those civilizations should have completed this colonization long ago and spread to other parts of the galaxy." But what if we aren't on the cusp of this colonization, if one can argue such colonization would happen by quite a few technological advances that are purely hypothetical, that "colonizing the solar system" only seems plausible by incorrect analogy with the colonization of various areas of earth by various local societies. Space seem wholly hostile to human from it's lack of gravity to its lack of all other components needed by us. Our era has gone from believing "space the final frontier" to seeing just how fragile our condition on earth is.
  - tomp 8y ago
    > So far, human behavior looks much like the other phenomena that expand to the limit of their fuel and then die. Are you sure about that? It seems to me that humanity has often made a "leap" in the past... Romans "fed" on slaves, then collapsed, and eventually we found coal. The industrial revolution "fed" on coal, then we found "oil", there's probably the next thing!
    - joe_the_user 8y ago
      I shouldn't have implied the feed-and-collapse sequence could only happen once. There can be repeats even with bacteria and sure, humans are more complex than bacteria, the process can be more complex. The only thing not justified is the expand forever thing.
mikestew 8y ago
In summary, because we think we're special. Which brings to mind my long-running thought experiment: what if we're no more special on a larger scale than our own stomach floral are on our scale? Maybe there's no one else out there because we're the special oil-eating bacteria, only instead of oil we eat carbon and oxygen, turning it to "harmless CO2". Then, like many bacteria, we consume all of the carbon and oxygen and die off. Or maybe it's just the vast distances involved and some harsh physical reality. Warp drives, FTL, even approaching the speed of light, perhaps it's been tried repeatedly on one of those planets that's billions of years older than ours. And after billions of years and the best minds of planet Argwagh toiling away, turns out that c is the universe's speed limit...period. And when asked, "who wants to spend the remainder of their life in a tin can for the cause? And to doom your descendants to the same fate?", not a single hand went up.
- earenndil 8y ago
  > what if we're no more special on a larger scale than our own stomach floral are on our scale? I mean, this is kind of true already, although not exactly in that sense. Companies are essentially meta-entities made of humans, making their own decisions in the same way that humans are meta-entities made of cells, making decisions independent of any of those cells.
  - shawn 8y ago
    The interesting part is what ties all of them together: mutual incentives. It’s in your interest to eat because otherwise you’ll die, even if you don’t quite know what “you” is. And that’s sort of true of companies as well.
- hathawsh 8y ago
  If c is the issue, then some civilization will use solar systems as space ships. They'll figure out a way to move a star along a chosen path and keep the planets in orbit. The travelers would have all the comforts of home while wandering the galaxies. In fact, I wonder if anyone has done that already. It seems like we'd be able to see their stars dancing about.
earenndil 8y ago
There has been a big push, I've noticed, towards excessive generalization. We aren't special, life is generalised. This seems to have appeared as a pushback against the thought that we are somehow special, but it has imo gone too far. The fact is, we're attempting to quantize extremely unknown unknowns, and to claim that we're not special because we can conceive of other life that is essentially equivalent to us is to make a huge set of assumptions regarding the plausibility of said life. Let the argument that exponential societal/technological growth goes on forever be a warning that over-generalisation is sensationalism!
mnm1 8y ago
> If we humans are now on the cusp of colonizing our solar system We're not. And we may never be, let alone able to travel through space continuously while somehow maintaining generation after generation of life using a finite amount of resources that could travel with us. The paradox assumes so many things that are far from a given, to me it's confusing why such a great thinker couldn't see his own fallacious thinking. Maybe there is a ton of intelligent life out there that can barely get to the moon once or twice before giving up forever. That intelligent life would be like us, possibly dreaming of colonizing the next planet over while destroying itself. We could not, with current technology, possibly detect such life. We can barely detect earth like planets as is. The assumptions Fermi makes are simply too great for this idea to be compelling.
- tiatia123 8y ago
  Look, I am an extreme pessimist in most things but here I disagree. If (big if) we escape some traps, we may be able to send at least unmanned space ships or Ships with Androids.
- deviationblue 8y ago
  This cannot be overstated. Also, we are treating this planet like we've got options elsewhere. This is setting people up for a rude awakening, whenever that may be down the line.
- megaman22 8y ago
  This sort of pessimism is depressing. We have to at least try, and we have more than enough capability if we cared to try - we put men on the moon while fighting a major war and engaging in a nuclear arms race, with computers orders of magnitudes less powerful than a raspberry pi.
  - mnm1 8y ago
    Pessimism? I think you mean a dose of reality. We aren't even close. That's reality no matter what Musk and others like him say. If anything, it's extreme, unwarranted, delusional optimism that sees us colonizing the planets. And that's just our solar system. We can't even get to Mars and probably couldn't even get to the moon at this point. I don't see why we would assume that other intelligent species would be able to escape, except briefly, their planets. There is nothing at all that warrants that assumption now or when Fermi was alive. Why would anyone assume this even for the future? Progress is not guaranteed and as we have seen throughout history, periods of progress are often followed by periods of decline.
skybrian 8y ago
This is handwaving at best. Here's a more rigorous argument that was published recently: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
- chillacy 8y ago
  So that would be option number 1: Rare Earth Hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_explanations_for_the_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...
jcranmer 8y ago
Fermi's paradox is basically an example of saying "the only two possibilities are that it's impossible or inevitable, and since we don't know it to be impossible, it must be inevitable"--actually multiplying a few of those together--and then being surprised that the evidence doesn't show that it's inevitable. We don't have enough knowledge of fundamental physics, chemistry, or biology to come up with any reasonably tight bound (tight here meaning only a few orders of magnitude) as to how likely alien interstellar voyaging is, to say nothing of our complete ignorance of xenosociology. Our own experience is n=1, which means it's extremely dangerous to generalize. But even then, we run into a problem: intrastellar travel is hard. We don't yet have the technology to colonize a single other body in our own solar system, and it's dubious that we could send a human to and from any other body save our own Moon. The only mechanism we have to travel in space is via rockets, whose fuel costs are prohibitive for any sort of long journey. Even getting out of our gravity well requires rockets, and while we have concepts of other ideas that are less expensive, they tend to have problematic requirements such as "requires things we haven't discovered yet."
- sebazzz 8y ago
  > We don't yet have the technology to colonize a single other body in our own solar system Is it? Or is it that no one wants to put any resources into that because you would probably get very little out of it. We are a money-based mostly capitalistic society, so unless there is any gain any entity whether it be a government or commercial company, investments in development of technology or actually attempting colonisation will not get anywhere anytime soon.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    If you define colonize as "build a self-sustaining colony," that is very much outside of our current capabilities. We don't know how to build a self-sustaining biosphere, let alone one any body so fundamentally hostile to life as Mars or any other rocky body in the planet.
- modzu 8y ago
  im not sure who you're quoting but i don't think that is Fermi. the point of the paradox is not merely wondering how likely alien life is. rather, it starts with the simple fact that no evidence for alien life has been observed, ever, anywhere. why? well, there's all kinds of potential explanations, maybe its far away, maybe its not advanced anywhere else, etc. we don't know the answer of course, but given the vastness of space one might expect to at least see some evidence of alien life, if not alien life directly, somewhere. that we do not suggests something fundamentally bigger is going on (ie the speed of light is legit)
herodotus 8y ago
The obvious resolution to the "paradox" is that we are alone, at least in the Milky Way. It is reasonable to conclude that, if the development of intelligent, technologically capable life was likely, then we would have seen signs of it. We have not. So it is not likely. So it is not really a paradox. But the author of the article says we want to ignore Fermi because we think we are special. No. If we don't ignore the paradox, the conclusion is that we are special. Mind you, if we are special, I am not that impressed.
- mavhc 8y ago
  We are special in one sense, we're really near the start of the universe, 1% of its lifespan, rather than the average of 50%. Given you probably need 3rd generation stars to create enough complex elements for life, it's only very recently that life has been possible at all
roywiggins 8y ago
Here's a strange thing: Many people believe that strong AI is inevitable, or at least possible within the next few decades to centuries. Many people also believe that there's a natural solution to the Fermi paradox (space travel is hard, signals are faint). But if strong AI is possible, then the Fermi paradox suddenly becomes much more acute because it makes von Neumann probes seem way easier- once you have self-replication across interstellar distance, you will blanket the galaxy with your Cylon spawn pretty quickly. The question isn't just why haven't we heard signals from people like us, but why haven't their robotic spawn already shown up and disassembled a few moons into robot factories?
- tshannon 8y ago
  The obvious answer is that one or more of the assumptions in those statements is incorrect.
  - dogprez 8y ago
    Or they are true but we are the first to reach this technology level.
    - etrautmann 8y ago
      I believe the classic argument against this is that it's statistically improbable/impossible for us to be first.
      - bena 8y ago
        It's a lottery paradox. It is statistically improbable for you to win. Given a large enough pool of players, statistically someone has to win. It's incredibly unlikely, but the chance isn't 0. Someone has to be first.
      - candiodari 8y ago
        If we're talking about intelligent species, first question should be : Why ? Why would they come here in the first place ? Now, you could make the same argument about evolution. Bacterial evolution is far quicker than human evolution. If they saw an advantage to killing humanity, we'd be dead before dinner. So why haven't bacteria killed us yet ? No advantage ... The simple truth is: it's not worth it. Large bacterial species lose and gain more biomass on a daily basis purely through accidents than all human biomass combined, and they wouldn't be able to use all that biomass if they took it from us, nor would they be able to harness the energy humans use, so that's no good either. So it's an idiotic thing to spend energy on, and so they don't spend energy on it. For space faring civilizations you can make a similar argument. Despite the movies, there is nothing on earth that is worth coming down the gravity well (especially not water. There is FAR more water in the asteroid belt, and it's far easier to collect and use), and maybe it goes so far that it's just not worth it to come into a yellow dwarf solar system : there'll be exponentially more materials and energy available in many other solar systems. So at the very least, we'd be last in line for a visit, and maybe just outright not in line at all. Reality is that humanity will never leave earth, and AI will never return home. We will launch AIs, and they'll decide to venture out, and conquer and multiply in starsystems with huge stars, massive asteroid belts (lots of resources ... no gravity wells you have to spend energy getting into and out of). Why haven't we seen aliens ? Same reason bacteria don't kill us (well, only by accident) ... we're just not worth their attention. And would they do it to study biology ? Well, you'd have to take into account that any race hopping solar systems we wouldn't be the first race they meet. Or the 100th. We'd be the 10000th. So would they still be interested ?
typetehcodez 8y ago
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” ― Arthur C. Clarke
SteveParker60 8y ago
dickbars: https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars
resu_nimda 8y ago
Honestly I don't understand the point of this article. The evidence that "we" as a collective whole have not given enough attention to the paradox is lacking. I'm not even sure what he's calling for - more research into specific areas? More people chatting about it on Twitter? Based on the evidence we have, the proposition that "there are no interstellar civilizations that have colonized our galaxy" seems reasonable. This whole psychological thing about how we think we're special and how we treat animals...I don't see how that is relevant at all. Is the assertion that this attitude is preventing massive amounts of funding for SETI programs? We don't have a single shred of evidence of extraterrestrial life, nor much of a clue on how to go about finding it. All the evidence we have says that, yes, life on earth actually is quite special. Didn't find any argument against that in this article.
mrlala 8y ago
Space is fucking big. So fucking big. So utterly enormously fucking big. And mostly empty. Time is long. So long. So insanely long. We live ~70 years. Most of us are half that age. It's not even close to a drop in the cosmic bucket that has been time. The speed of light is SLOW compared to the distance between everything.. so, depressingly slow. Life is complex, it took billions of years to evolve to something that could finally figure shit out. Our technology is impressive, but woefully inadequate for the distances we need to travel. Is it any wonder we haven't detected any life yet?
sgillen 8y ago
Personally, my guess is that we will find that life is actually pretty common, but that civilization like we have is very rare. I mean life on earth has been going for what? 4 billion years? and yet only in the last 10,000 or so did civilization actually start. And even when (modern) humans showed up on the scene it still took them another 300,000 years to start doing civilization looking things. There is just such a huge variety of factors that had to go right on top of life being on the planet already for civilization to get going.
- bena 8y ago
  Also, dogs are pretty rare. And kangaroos. Dolphins are as uniquely rare as humans. We do have a surprising variety of life forms here on Earth. True, they all developed from a common base, but they've splintered into what seems like an infinite diversity. I mean, as far as we know, dinosaurs weren't building spaceships. But proponents of the Fermi paradox say that even if human-style intelligence is incredibly rare, the universe is incredibly old. The sheer magnitude of the timescales involved mean that there are literally no new ideas we could think of. That it only needs to have happened once for it to be noticeable. Of course, the Fermi paradox assumes that it is possible and desirable to do such a thing.
  - bmer 8y ago
    How old is the universe?
    - bena 8y ago
      IIRC, it's roughly 14 billion years or so. Earth has been around for I think 4 billion. Humans for around 10,000-ish. That number may be off, but it's well under 100,000. We, as a species, have gone from crudely drawn shapes on caves to starting to explore beyond the bounds of our planet. The claim is that our journey into the stars is inevitable. That we will begin to colonize other planets. And that this colonization is exponential. To illustrate let's say tomorrow we know how to do it. The only issue is the time it takes. Let's pretend we can do it in 10 years. From nothing to fully functional, autonomous human colony in 10 years. Technologically equivalent. Which means that colony is also capable of sending out colonies. So now instead of one planet sending out colonies, you have two. Then four, then eight, and so on. Basically, every 10 years, you would double the number of planets inhabited by a species. In just 100 years, there would be 1024 planets supporting human life. In 1000 years? 100 cycles of colonization? 1.2e+30. Huge. There are "only" 40 billion planets that seem habitable in our galaxy. We'd have run out of planets to colonize at the 36th cycle. And even if it takes 100 years to colonize a planet to the point where they're just as capable, you're just really shifting the decimal one point. That's 3600 years to a fully inhabited galaxy. Cosmically, a blip in time. So, the Fermi paradox says that given that colonization of other worlds is inevitable for an intelligent species, if life and human-style intelligence aren't unique, why haven't we seen evidence of other civilizations yet? Either been contacted, run into an artifact of some sort, or found some sort of signal.
sgt101 8y ago
There are two issues that are not generally considered, the first is that it may be that the normal size of intelligent beings is rather larger than humans. Secondly it might be that the size of the worlds that the live on is larger than the earth. Bigger worlds will have bigger gravity and might have thicker atmospheres, possibly less deep though. All of these factors would make space travel much harder, life support would be more difficult. take off harder (much) return to the surface much, much harder. So I think that even if civilisation is common space faring civilisation is going to be rare, and as we know even space faring civilisation doesn't approach interstellar civilisation.
- sgt101 8y ago
  Also chemistry, the chemistry of an atmosphere may screw up rocketry..
- modzu 8y ago
  two counterpoints would be: (1) life as we know it can exist at extremely small scales (2) intelligence is not correlated to brain size: ex. birds
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
pmichaud 8y ago
I found this answer to the Fermi Paradox compelling: http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/03/ssc-journal-club-dissolving-the-fermi-paradox/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/03/ssc-journal-club-dissol...
skywhopper 8y ago
The problem is that Fermi’s paradox assumes interstellar travel to be an inevitable and achievable goal of intelligent life given enough time. Why should that be? I would argue that assumption is itself far more self-aggrandizing than what this article accuses the doubters of being. Why should we assume that intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy that has progressed hundreds or thousands of years beyond our level of technology would even value interstellar travel? Maybe by the time such technology is possible, other grander frontiers that the human race cannot even perceive will be more compelling. Or maybe the practicalities make interstellar travel impossible. Why do we assume this is even a solvable problem given the resources available in a typical solar system? Or that such exploration would then be sustainable beyond the first leg?
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
Why we downplay Fermi's paradox is because most of us know that it's making up numbers, and then using the made-up numbers to reach a conclusion. Most of us have little faith in the numbers, and therefore little faith in the conclusion. Why should it be otherwise? People love to make these big-sounding claims of Having Figured It All Out. But the data don't support the conclusions, most of us don't really buy the conclusions. That's a good thing.

42 points by dnetesn 8y ago

I’ve never bought into the Fermi thesis. We’re still burning petroleum instead of using it for its other amazing uses and blowing each other up over myths - but we think we know the fundamental nature of all life in the universe enough to say we should see it.

d0lph 8y ago
There's a huge list of explanations on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_explanations_for_the_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...
roywiggins 8y ago
All life? No. But if life is very common, what are the odds that absolutely none of it looks like something we would recognize? If that's true then we are absolutely unique in the universe. It just takes one civilization with a runaway von Neumann probe to drop huge monoliths on every single rocky body in the Galaxy over a couple millennia, and since evidently nobody did that in our solar system, the question is why not. If there's a rule that forbids it, what is the rule and does it apply to us? That's the question posed by the Fermi paradox.
joe_the_user 8y ago
We know that a star burns the available fuel and then expires, with a hard limit existing on the size of it's size based on various factors. We know that algae bloom similarly exhausts it's medium and shrinks. However, the going assumption of the Fermi thesis is intelligent life is different. Intelligent life forms civilizations that are expected to naturally expands forever, eating planets, stars and so-forth. So far, human behavior looks much like the other phenomena that expand to the limit of their fuel and then die. And, if somehow against all odds, we wise up and stop exhausting the resources needed for our existence, well, then that infinite expansion tendency quite likely won't be there. "If we humans are now on the cusp of colonizing our solar system, and we are not much faster than other civilizations, those civilizations should have completed this colonization long ago and spread to other parts of the galaxy." But what if we aren't on the cusp of this colonization, if one can argue such colonization would happen by quite a few technological advances that are purely hypothetical, that "colonizing the solar system" only seems plausible by incorrect analogy with the colonization of various areas of earth by various local societies. Space seem wholly hostile to human from it's lack of gravity to its lack of all other components needed by us. Our era has gone from believing "space the final frontier" to seeing just how fragile our condition on earth is.
- tomp 8y ago
  > So far, human behavior looks much like the other phenomena that expand to the limit of their fuel and then die. Are you sure about that? It seems to me that humanity has often made a "leap" in the past... Romans "fed" on slaves, then collapsed, and eventually we found coal. The industrial revolution "fed" on coal, then we found "oil", there's probably the next thing!
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    I shouldn't have implied the feed-and-collapse sequence could only happen once. There can be repeats even with bacteria and sure, humans are more complex than bacteria, the process can be more complex. The only thing not justified is the expand forever thing.

mikestew 8y ago

In summary, because we think we're special. Which brings to mind my long-running thought experiment: what if we're no more special on a larger scale than our own stomach floral are on our scale? Maybe there's no one else out there because we're the special oil-eating bacteria, only instead of oil we eat carbon and oxygen, turning it to "harmless CO2". Then, like many bacteria, we consume all of the carbon and oxygen and die off. Or maybe it's just the vast distances involved and some harsh physical reality. Warp drives, FTL, even approaching the speed of light, perhaps it's been tried repeatedly on one of those planets that's billions of years older than ours. And after billions of years and the best minds of planet Argwagh toiling away, turns out that c is the universe's speed limit...period. And when asked, "who wants to spend the remainder of their life in a tin can for the cause? And to doom your descendants to the same fate?", not a single hand went up.

earenndil 8y ago
> what if we're no more special on a larger scale than our own stomach floral are on our scale? I mean, this is kind of true already, although not exactly in that sense. Companies are essentially meta-entities made of humans, making their own decisions in the same way that humans are meta-entities made of cells, making decisions independent of any of those cells.
- shawn 8y ago
  The interesting part is what ties all of them together: mutual incentives. It’s in your interest to eat because otherwise you’ll die, even if you don’t quite know what “you” is. And that’s sort of true of companies as well.
hathawsh 8y ago
If c is the issue, then some civilization will use solar systems as space ships. They'll figure out a way to move a star along a chosen path and keep the planets in orbit. The travelers would have all the comforts of home while wandering the galaxies. In fact, I wonder if anyone has done that already. It seems like we'd be able to see their stars dancing about.

earenndil 8y ago

There has been a big push, I've noticed, towards excessive generalization. We aren't special, life is generalised. This seems to have appeared as a pushback against the thought that we are somehow special, but it has imo gone too far. The fact is, we're attempting to quantize extremely unknown unknowns, and to claim that we're not special because we can conceive of other life that is essentially equivalent to us is to make a huge set of assumptions regarding the plausibility of said life. Let the argument that exponential societal/technological growth goes on forever be a warning that over-generalisation is sensationalism!

mnm1 8y ago

> If we humans are now on the cusp of colonizing our solar system We're not. And we may never be, let alone able to travel through space continuously while somehow maintaining generation after generation of life using a finite amount of resources that could travel with us. The paradox assumes so many things that are far from a given, to me it's confusing why such a great thinker couldn't see his own fallacious thinking. Maybe there is a ton of intelligent life out there that can barely get to the moon once or twice before giving up forever. That intelligent life would be like us, possibly dreaming of colonizing the next planet over while destroying itself. We could not, with current technology, possibly detect such life. We can barely detect earth like planets as is. The assumptions Fermi makes are simply too great for this idea to be compelling.

tiatia123 8y ago
Look, I am an extreme pessimist in most things but here I disagree. If (big if) we escape some traps, we may be able to send at least unmanned space ships or Ships with Androids.
deviationblue 8y ago
This cannot be overstated. Also, we are treating this planet like we've got options elsewhere. This is setting people up for a rude awakening, whenever that may be down the line.
megaman22 8y ago
This sort of pessimism is depressing. We have to at least try, and we have more than enough capability if we cared to try - we put men on the moon while fighting a major war and engaging in a nuclear arms race, with computers orders of magnitudes less powerful than a raspberry pi.
- mnm1 8y ago
  Pessimism? I think you mean a dose of reality. We aren't even close. That's reality no matter what Musk and others like him say. If anything, it's extreme, unwarranted, delusional optimism that sees us colonizing the planets. And that's just our solar system. We can't even get to Mars and probably couldn't even get to the moon at this point. I don't see why we would assume that other intelligent species would be able to escape, except briefly, their planets. There is nothing at all that warrants that assumption now or when Fermi was alive. Why would anyone assume this even for the future? Progress is not guaranteed and as we have seen throughout history, periods of progress are often followed by periods of decline.

skybrian 8y ago

This is handwaving at best. Here's a more rigorous argument that was published recently: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

chillacy 8y ago
So that would be option number 1: Rare Earth Hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_explanations_for_the_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...

jcranmer 8y ago

Fermi's paradox is basically an example of saying "the only two possibilities are that it's impossible or inevitable, and since we don't know it to be impossible, it must be inevitable"--actually multiplying a few of those together--and then being surprised that the evidence doesn't show that it's inevitable. We don't have enough knowledge of fundamental physics, chemistry, or biology to come up with any reasonably tight bound (tight here meaning only a few orders of magnitude) as to how likely alien interstellar voyaging is, to say nothing of our complete ignorance of xenosociology. Our own experience is n=1, which means it's extremely dangerous to generalize. But even then, we run into a problem: intrastellar travel is hard. We don't yet have the technology to colonize a single other body in our own solar system, and it's dubious that we could send a human to and from any other body save our own Moon. The only mechanism we have to travel in space is via rockets, whose fuel costs are prohibitive for any sort of long journey. Even getting out of our gravity well requires rockets, and while we have concepts of other ideas that are less expensive, they tend to have problematic requirements such as "requires things we haven't discovered yet."

sebazzz 8y ago
> We don't yet have the technology to colonize a single other body in our own solar system Is it? Or is it that no one wants to put any resources into that because you would probably get very little out of it. We are a money-based mostly capitalistic society, so unless there is any gain any entity whether it be a government or commercial company, investments in development of technology or actually attempting colonisation will not get anywhere anytime soon.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  If you define colonize as "build a self-sustaining colony," that is very much outside of our current capabilities. We don't know how to build a self-sustaining biosphere, let alone one any body so fundamentally hostile to life as Mars or any other rocky body in the planet.
modzu 8y ago
im not sure who you're quoting but i don't think that is Fermi. the point of the paradox is not merely wondering how likely alien life is. rather, it starts with the simple fact that no evidence for alien life has been observed, ever, anywhere. why? well, there's all kinds of potential explanations, maybe its far away, maybe its not advanced anywhere else, etc. we don't know the answer of course, but given the vastness of space one might expect to at least see some evidence of alien life, if not alien life directly, somewhere. that we do not suggests something fundamentally bigger is going on (ie the speed of light is legit)

herodotus 8y ago

The obvious resolution to the "paradox" is that we are alone, at least in the Milky Way. It is reasonable to conclude that, if the development of intelligent, technologically capable life was likely, then we would have seen signs of it. We have not. So it is not likely. So it is not really a paradox. But the author of the article says we want to ignore Fermi because we think we are special. No. If we don't ignore the paradox, the conclusion is that we are special. Mind you, if we are special, I am not that impressed.

mavhc 8y ago
We are special in one sense, we're really near the start of the universe, 1% of its lifespan, rather than the average of 50%. Given you probably need 3rd generation stars to create enough complex elements for life, it's only very recently that life has been possible at all

roywiggins 8y ago

Here's a strange thing: Many people believe that strong AI is inevitable, or at least possible within the next few decades to centuries. Many people also believe that there's a natural solution to the Fermi paradox (space travel is hard, signals are faint). But if strong AI is possible, then the Fermi paradox suddenly becomes much more acute because it makes von Neumann probes seem way easier- once you have self-replication across interstellar distance, you will blanket the galaxy with your Cylon spawn pretty quickly. The question isn't just why haven't we heard signals from people like us, but why haven't their robotic spawn already shown up and disassembled a few moons into robot factories?

tshannon 8y ago
The obvious answer is that one or more of the assumptions in those statements is incorrect.
- dogprez 8y ago
  Or they are true but we are the first to reach this technology level.
  - etrautmann 8y ago
    I believe the classic argument against this is that it's statistically improbable/impossible for us to be first.
    - bena 8y ago
      It's a lottery paradox. It is statistically improbable for you to win. Given a large enough pool of players, statistically someone has to win. It's incredibly unlikely, but the chance isn't 0. Someone has to be first.
    - candiodari 8y ago
      If we're talking about intelligent species, first question should be : Why ? Why would they come here in the first place ? Now, you could make the same argument about evolution. Bacterial evolution is far quicker than human evolution. If they saw an advantage to killing humanity, we'd be dead before dinner. So why haven't bacteria killed us yet ? No advantage ... The simple truth is: it's not worth it. Large bacterial species lose and gain more biomass on a daily basis purely through accidents than all human biomass combined, and they wouldn't be able to use all that biomass if they took it from us, nor would they be able to harness the energy humans use, so that's no good either. So it's an idiotic thing to spend energy on, and so they don't spend energy on it. For space faring civilizations you can make a similar argument. Despite the movies, there is nothing on earth that is worth coming down the gravity well (especially not water. There is FAR more water in the asteroid belt, and it's far easier to collect and use), and maybe it goes so far that it's just not worth it to come into a yellow dwarf solar system : there'll be exponentially more materials and energy available in many other solar systems. So at the very least, we'd be last in line for a visit, and maybe just outright not in line at all. Reality is that humanity will never leave earth, and AI will never return home. We will launch AIs, and they'll decide to venture out, and conquer and multiply in starsystems with huge stars, massive asteroid belts (lots of resources ... no gravity wells you have to spend energy getting into and out of). Why haven't we seen aliens ? Same reason bacteria don't kill us (well, only by accident) ... we're just not worth their attention. And would they do it to study biology ? Well, you'd have to take into account that any race hopping solar systems we wouldn't be the first race they meet. Or the 100th. We'd be the 10000th. So would they still be interested ?

typetehcodez 8y ago

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” ― Arthur C. Clarke

SteveParker60 8y ago

dickbars: https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars

resu_nimda 8y ago

Honestly I don't understand the point of this article. The evidence that "we" as a collective whole have not given enough attention to the paradox is lacking. I'm not even sure what he's calling for - more research into specific areas? More people chatting about it on Twitter? Based on the evidence we have, the proposition that "there are no interstellar civilizations that have colonized our galaxy" seems reasonable. This whole psychological thing about how we think we're special and how we treat animals...I don't see how that is relevant at all. Is the assertion that this attitude is preventing massive amounts of funding for SETI programs? We don't have a single shred of evidence of extraterrestrial life, nor much of a clue on how to go about finding it. All the evidence we have says that, yes, life on earth actually is quite special. Didn't find any argument against that in this article.

mrlala 8y ago

Space is fucking big. So fucking big. So utterly enormously fucking big. And mostly empty. Time is long. So long. So insanely long. We live ~70 years. Most of us are half that age. It's not even close to a drop in the cosmic bucket that has been time. The speed of light is SLOW compared to the distance between everything.. so, depressingly slow. Life is complex, it took billions of years to evolve to something that could finally figure shit out. Our technology is impressive, but woefully inadequate for the distances we need to travel. Is it any wonder we haven't detected any life yet?

sgillen 8y ago

Personally, my guess is that we will find that life is actually pretty common, but that civilization like we have is very rare. I mean life on earth has been going for what? 4 billion years? and yet only in the last 10,000 or so did civilization actually start. And even when (modern) humans showed up on the scene it still took them another 300,000 years to start doing civilization looking things. There is just such a huge variety of factors that had to go right on top of life being on the planet already for civilization to get going.

bena 8y ago
Also, dogs are pretty rare. And kangaroos. Dolphins are as uniquely rare as humans. We do have a surprising variety of life forms here on Earth. True, they all developed from a common base, but they've splintered into what seems like an infinite diversity. I mean, as far as we know, dinosaurs weren't building spaceships. But proponents of the Fermi paradox say that even if human-style intelligence is incredibly rare, the universe is incredibly old. The sheer magnitude of the timescales involved mean that there are literally no new ideas we could think of. That it only needs to have happened once for it to be noticeable. Of course, the Fermi paradox assumes that it is possible and desirable to do such a thing.
- bmer 8y ago
  How old is the universe?
  - bena 8y ago
    IIRC, it's roughly 14 billion years or so. Earth has been around for I think 4 billion. Humans for around 10,000-ish. That number may be off, but it's well under 100,000. We, as a species, have gone from crudely drawn shapes on caves to starting to explore beyond the bounds of our planet. The claim is that our journey into the stars is inevitable. That we will begin to colonize other planets. And that this colonization is exponential. To illustrate let's say tomorrow we know how to do it. The only issue is the time it takes. Let's pretend we can do it in 10 years. From nothing to fully functional, autonomous human colony in 10 years. Technologically equivalent. Which means that colony is also capable of sending out colonies. So now instead of one planet sending out colonies, you have two. Then four, then eight, and so on. Basically, every 10 years, you would double the number of planets inhabited by a species. In just 100 years, there would be 1024 planets supporting human life. In 1000 years? 100 cycles of colonization? 1.2e+30. Huge. There are "only" 40 billion planets that seem habitable in our galaxy. We'd have run out of planets to colonize at the 36th cycle. And even if it takes 100 years to colonize a planet to the point where they're just as capable, you're just really shifting the decimal one point. That's 3600 years to a fully inhabited galaxy. Cosmically, a blip in time. So, the Fermi paradox says that given that colonization of other worlds is inevitable for an intelligent species, if life and human-style intelligence aren't unique, why haven't we seen evidence of other civilizations yet? Either been contacted, run into an artifact of some sort, or found some sort of signal.

sgt101 8y ago

There are two issues that are not generally considered, the first is that it may be that the normal size of intelligent beings is rather larger than humans. Secondly it might be that the size of the worlds that the live on is larger than the earth. Bigger worlds will have bigger gravity and might have thicker atmospheres, possibly less deep though. All of these factors would make space travel much harder, life support would be more difficult. take off harder (much) return to the surface much, much harder. So I think that even if civilisation is common space faring civilisation is going to be rare, and as we know even space faring civilisation doesn't approach interstellar civilisation.

sgt101 8y ago
Also chemistry, the chemistry of an atmosphere may screw up rocketry..
modzu 8y ago
two counterpoints would be: (1) life as we know it can exist at extremely small scales (2) intelligence is not correlated to brain size: ex. birds
deleted 8y ago
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pmichaud 8y ago

I found this answer to the Fermi Paradox compelling: http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/03/ssc-journal-club-dissolving-the-fermi-paradox/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/03/ssc-journal-club-dissol...

skywhopper 8y ago

The problem is that Fermi’s paradox assumes interstellar travel to be an inevitable and achievable goal of intelligent life given enough time. Why should that be? I would argue that assumption is itself far more self-aggrandizing than what this article accuses the doubters of being. Why should we assume that intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy that has progressed hundreds or thousands of years beyond our level of technology would even value interstellar travel? Maybe by the time such technology is possible, other grander frontiers that the human race cannot even perceive will be more compelling. Or maybe the practicalities make interstellar travel impossible. Why do we assume this is even a solvable problem given the resources available in a typical solar system? Or that such exploration would then be sustainable beyond the first leg?

AnimalMuppet 8y ago

Why we downplay Fermi's paradox is because most of us know that it's making up numbers, and then using the made-up numbers to reach a conclusion. Most of us have little faith in the numbers, and therefore little faith in the conclusion. Why should it be otherwise? People love to make these big-sounding claims of Having Figured It All Out. But the data don't support the conclusions, most of us don't really buy the conclusions. That's a good thing.