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> “If there is intelligent life there, it would almost certainly have spread much more widely across the galaxy. The chances of the only two civilisations in th

> “If there is intelligent life there, it would almost certainly have spread much more widely across the galaxy. The chances of the only two civilisations in the entire galaxy happening to be neighbours, among 400bn stars, absolutely stretches the bounds of rationality.” This is a fallacy. If there's life all over the galaxy, then we'd be the most likely to detect radio signals first from our closest neighbors. Interstellar distances are, well, astronomical. Proxima Centauri is 1700 times farther from us than Voyager 1 (which was mentioned in the article). Because of the quadratic decay, a Voyager-type source in Proxima Centauri would send to us a signal more than 3 million times weaker. A star that is 10 times farther still will get a dimming of the signal of a factor of 100 on top of this. So, if there are aliens habitating the planets of all the stars around us, probabilistically we'd expect to first detect the signals originating with the closer among them.

m4rtink 6y ago
Thats why I'm thinking megastructure waste heat and weird planetary and stellar orbits (klemperer rosetete[1]) or some periodic high energy events (drives, fireworks, "disputes") will be how we find out about the more interesting advanced neighbors, possibly missing many closer ones who don't influence their environment too much yet.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Back in the 20th century, I might have said the same thing when I was enamored with Larry Niven’s hard sci-fi. Nowadays, I find it hard to entertain the possibility of civilizations much more advanced than our own: the persistently dismal news and noticeable slowdown in materials-science technological innovation since the turn of the millennium, makes me suspect that races inevitably hit the Great Filter around the point where we are now. After all, hasn’t it been noted that science-fiction is no longer as optimistic about technological progress as it used to be?
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    I think it's not that bad scientific progress wise if you know where to look - just a couple days ago I learned about an apparent revolution going on with camera optics via metamaterials for example. Back at university less then a decade ago I attended a talk by one of the leading metamaterial experts back then and the field of study was promissing nice benefits but was far from ready & it was not clear optical metematerials are even possible. Now major camera manufacturers are apparently close to shipping metamaterial camera lenses with before unseen performance at low cost. And that's just one of the examples - we might not be doubling airplane performance records every year as we did in the 1950s but a lot of (progressively harder) cool tech is being introduced every day (5 nm chips, HBM RAM, practical non volatile RAM from Intel, TsV technology making much more stacked chips possible & actual 3D designs in the future, massive expansion of 3D printing everywhere, quick to produce RNA vaccines, ubiqutous joint and even organ replacements, etc.). Not to mention all the IT systems now deployed making all these advances easily accessible to basically anyone on Earth. Also in some cases we hit the "road not taken" territory - with SpaceX Starship for example the Raptor engines are indeed novel and very huge achievement (and the best liquid rocket engine in existence effectively) but the fact that some types of stainless steel being stronger at cryogenic temperatures being was known before yet no one really realized how good match it is for reusable rocket manufacturing.

m4rtink 6y ago

Thats why I'm thinking megastructure waste heat and weird planetary and stellar orbits (klemperer rosetete[1]) or some periodic high energy events (drives, fireworks, "disputes") will be how we find out about the more interesting advanced neighbors, possibly missing many closer ones who don't influence their environment too much yet.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Back in the 20th century, I might have said the same thing when I was enamored with Larry Niven’s hard sci-fi. Nowadays, I find it hard to entertain the possibility of civilizations much more advanced than our own: the persistently dismal news and noticeable slowdown in materials-science technological innovation since the turn of the millennium, makes me suspect that races inevitably hit the Great Filter around the point where we are now. After all, hasn’t it been noted that science-fiction is no longer as optimistic about technological progress as it used to be?
- m4rtink 6y ago
  I think it's not that bad scientific progress wise if you know where to look - just a couple days ago I learned about an apparent revolution going on with camera optics via metamaterials for example. Back at university less then a decade ago I attended a talk by one of the leading metamaterial experts back then and the field of study was promissing nice benefits but was far from ready & it was not clear optical metematerials are even possible. Now major camera manufacturers are apparently close to shipping metamaterial camera lenses with before unseen performance at low cost. And that's just one of the examples - we might not be doubling airplane performance records every year as we did in the 1950s but a lot of (progressively harder) cool tech is being introduced every day (5 nm chips, HBM RAM, practical non volatile RAM from Intel, TsV technology making much more stacked chips possible & actual 3D designs in the future, massive expansion of 3D printing everywhere, quick to produce RNA vaccines, ubiqutous joint and even organ replacements, etc.). Not to mention all the IT systems now deployed making all these advances easily accessible to basically anyone on Earth. Also in some cases we hit the "road not taken" territory - with SpaceX Starship for example the Raptor engines are indeed novel and very huge achievement (and the best liquid rocket engine in existence effectively) but the fact that some types of stainless steel being stronger at cryogenic temperatures being was known before yet no one really realized how good match it is for reusable rocket manufacturing.