5 ms·

I mean the most obvious solution to the fermi paradox is just that aliens are hard to see. If we put an equivalent human civilization even on one of the explan

I mean the most obvious solution to the fermi paradox is just that aliens are hard to see. If we put an equivalent human civilization even on one of the explanets we've identified, we'd never know it. Our signals are simply too weak and disorganized, and the switch to digital has made them even harder to identify from the background. Planets are located right next to huge sources of radio noise: stars. Until we can reliably detect a species like ourselves on another planet, it seems very silly to assume they aren't there. The assumptions on detection all kind of assume that aliens that are much more advanced will have much more obvious signals of emery usage or other detectable signals, but I've never been convinced by these assumptions. Energy usage is likely a logistic curve rather than an ever expanding exponential. There so much room at the bottom for greater efficiency. It also seems quite sensible that a species either eventually copes with equilibrium or dies out due to issues with unchecked growth. There's SO MUCH energy available here on the earth that we could go for millenia of computational/energy growth while pursuing more efficient systems. The assumptions that lead to conclusions about megastructures are pretty dubious. I could go on at length about that, but I will just leave it at that.

marcosdumay 2y ago
We can find life like our own hundreds of ligh-years away. And there are plenty of plans for improving this. Anyway, the Fermi paradox isn't about finding life on other planets.
MattPalmer1086 2y ago
It only takes one life form to achieve interstellar capability, and they would spread across the galaxy in only a few million years. That doesn't seem to have occurred (although, maybe it has and as you say, we just can't detect them, and they're leaving us alone).
- Enginerrrd 2y ago
  Yeah but IMO expansion via "interstellar capability" is just not compatible with a civilization. As our species has developed, the time scales that matter to us have shrunk, not grown. I just don't think you can have a single coherent civilization work when relativity places such stringent limitations on communication speed. A super advanced civilization likely evolves and changes on much smaller time scales than ours does currently. It doesn't seem possible for such a civilization to not totally fracture at interstellar scales. Unless there's physics we don't know about, interstellar distances are probably just not really compatible with a civilization. So, if one exists, its probably a serious rarity within a rarity. i.e. the lack of observable existence of such a noticeable civilization does not make a good argument against aliens in my opinion.
  - MattPalmer1086 2y ago
    It's a good point, but there is no reason to suppose they have to be a unified civilization. Just that they can spread in the first place and their descendants can do the same.
  - rowanG077 2y ago
    I'm not so sure I agree. There is nothing stopping a species that experiences years as we do minutes. Such a species would have no problem with the time scales needed for interstellar travel.
    - sdenton4 2y ago
      A fun problem with this is that there are 500k minutes in a year, so the critical free minutes needed to get into orbit quickly would be like working at nanosecond scale... Our slow friends would presumably need 100% automation to survive just about any kind of launch. (Nevermind landing.) (This also raises for me a fun way to continue Moore's law by making lived experience slower...)
  - jacobolus 2y ago
    > time scales that matter to us have shrunk, not grown I don’t think this seems right. More realistically, the further back into the past we look, the more we notice people, institutions, and changes operating on longer time scales, partly because our knowledge becomes much less granular the further back we look and partly because slower changes are less noticeable or impressive when examined from partway through without the benefit of hindsight. Unless you just mean that with improved technology we can now do a better job inspecting and sequencing things that happen very quickly. That’s clearly true, but is substantially unrelated to human-scale goals or the behaviors of larger organizations.
- krapp 2y ago
  Or maybe any number of things can go wrong within a million years that prevents the few species capable of interstellar travel from unbounded exponential expansion, including but not limited to said species not wanting to engage in unbounded exponential expansion. Mathematicians always seem to assume that reality is as simple as a plot on graph paper, but if that were the case we would have had hotels on Mars by now.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Perhaps there is some obvious direction in which to engage in unbounded exponential expansion, more attractive than exploring the galaxy - not full of vacuum and vast distances and cold rocks. Everybody else is exploring that space instead, and we haven't found it yet. Or, quite reasonably, human-like intelligence is special and galactic-scale rare. Do we think every other kind of unlikely life exists elsewhere in the galaxy? If there are definitely other human-like intelligent life forms in the galaxy, then there are even more definitely flying pigs with nineteen legs and wheels on the ends. Does it feel so intuitively correct, considering that? The argument here is "but orangutans ... and crows and parrots ... and dolphins ... and octopuses ... and elephants ... they all abound with the potential to build rockets and electronics and self-replicating space probes. Any million years now, any one of those species could flip into producing lots of ideas and constructions and exploring everywhere." But, really? Sure, they do stuff with sticks and half-coconuts, but is "the parrot/octopus/elephant space program is just around the corner" really a parsimonious extrapolation from observed animal stick-handling? Besides, nerve cells only evolved once, maybe that was a freakish event. Maybe every other animal in the galaxy is a sponge.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I think the simple answer to that is that the distances are simply too vast (and they are expanding). FTL is impossible and even approaching light speed is not economically feasible. That limits any spacefaring beings to their local planets, pretty much, and if our solar system is at all representative, the majority of the planets are uninhabitable.
  - MattPalmer1086 2y ago
    We are already planning interstellar probes that appear feasible with only modest advances [1]. Imagine what we will be able to do with another 1000, or 10000 years of development. Can't see any fundamental reason why we could not ultimately build infrastructure and print up some lifeforms at their destinations. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      For some definition of "modest"
    - refulgentis 2y ago
      Orders of magnitude are unusually easy in our industry. These are absolutely mindboggling numbers beyond comprehension. You need to move 500K hiroshimas a second for 80 kg (175 pounds). You'd also need some pretty fast brakes lest you run into some pretty small things. You also have a really bad recursive problem, at 100% E=MC^2 efficiency, you need to turn 100 kg of mass to pure energy, per second, to move 80 kg. So actually you need to move 180 kg, which requires...etc. etc. This is the base of this thread, the Fermi Paradox: if it was a relatively quick scaling away, where is everybody? It's "turtles all the way down" to respond that there is no paradox, just imagine us in 10K years, even if we knew for 100% certainty we'll be there in 10K years. Note the wikipedia article you linked uses "concept" 10 times, the roadshadow was in 2016, and has no updates after November 2017, 6.75 years ago.
  - pixl97 2y ago
    At the same time it only takes one civilization making Von Neumann probes change the equation from soft fragile biological life to things like spreading probes that don't care quite as much about the conditions.
- manquer 2y ago
  Technological feasibility is not economic feasibility. We spend a minuscule amount of our resource budget on science without short term profit . There are orders of magnitude of things we can achieve as a species with current technology if we all work together efficiently but we don’t . We ascribe to aliens a singular purpose that we have never achieved in our history as a species. Our competitive, acrimonious past is fundamental to our scientific progress (we research more during war than peace) . A peaceful civilization may not reach technologically maturity. It could also be just that Interstellar travel is not simply be economically viable in time frames that those civilizations optimize for. Ours can barely look beyond a quarter, why do we think any other civilization would plan for hundreds if not thousands of years .
- stubish 2y ago
  It takes both technology and motivation. Why populate the next star system? Why the next? And the next few million? You need technology developed by a civilization with the need or desire to expand infinitely. Humanity's only motivation to send people out to suffer the deprivations of frontier life and colonize another star system is essentially religious, either owing it to the universe to spread life and preserve humanity, or the belief that life for our decedents would be better off if we cast off the old society and built a new one. Would this really drive us to millions of stars?

marcosdumay 2y ago

We can find life like our own hundreds of ligh-years away. And there are plenty of plans for improving this. Anyway, the Fermi paradox isn't about finding life on other planets.

MattPalmer1086 2y ago

It only takes one life form to achieve interstellar capability, and they would spread across the galaxy in only a few million years. That doesn't seem to have occurred (although, maybe it has and as you say, we just can't detect them, and they're leaving us alone).

Enginerrrd 2y ago
Yeah but IMO expansion via "interstellar capability" is just not compatible with a civilization. As our species has developed, the time scales that matter to us have shrunk, not grown. I just don't think you can have a single coherent civilization work when relativity places such stringent limitations on communication speed. A super advanced civilization likely evolves and changes on much smaller time scales than ours does currently. It doesn't seem possible for such a civilization to not totally fracture at interstellar scales. Unless there's physics we don't know about, interstellar distances are probably just not really compatible with a civilization. So, if one exists, its probably a serious rarity within a rarity. i.e. the lack of observable existence of such a noticeable civilization does not make a good argument against aliens in my opinion.
- MattPalmer1086 2y ago
  It's a good point, but there is no reason to suppose they have to be a unified civilization. Just that they can spread in the first place and their descendants can do the same.
- rowanG077 2y ago
  I'm not so sure I agree. There is nothing stopping a species that experiences years as we do minutes. Such a species would have no problem with the time scales needed for interstellar travel.
  - sdenton4 2y ago
    A fun problem with this is that there are 500k minutes in a year, so the critical free minutes needed to get into orbit quickly would be like working at nanosecond scale... Our slow friends would presumably need 100% automation to survive just about any kind of launch. (Nevermind landing.) (This also raises for me a fun way to continue Moore's law by making lived experience slower...)
- jacobolus 2y ago
  > time scales that matter to us have shrunk, not grown I don’t think this seems right. More realistically, the further back into the past we look, the more we notice people, institutions, and changes operating on longer time scales, partly because our knowledge becomes much less granular the further back we look and partly because slower changes are less noticeable or impressive when examined from partway through without the benefit of hindsight. Unless you just mean that with improved technology we can now do a better job inspecting and sequencing things that happen very quickly. That’s clearly true, but is substantially unrelated to human-scale goals or the behaviors of larger organizations.
krapp 2y ago
Or maybe any number of things can go wrong within a million years that prevents the few species capable of interstellar travel from unbounded exponential expansion, including but not limited to said species not wanting to engage in unbounded exponential expansion. Mathematicians always seem to assume that reality is as simple as a plot on graph paper, but if that were the case we would have had hotels on Mars by now.
- card_zero 2y ago
  Perhaps there is some obvious direction in which to engage in unbounded exponential expansion, more attractive than exploring the galaxy - not full of vacuum and vast distances and cold rocks. Everybody else is exploring that space instead, and we haven't found it yet. Or, quite reasonably, human-like intelligence is special and galactic-scale rare. Do we think every other kind of unlikely life exists elsewhere in the galaxy? If there are definitely other human-like intelligent life forms in the galaxy, then there are even more definitely flying pigs with nineteen legs and wheels on the ends. Does it feel so intuitively correct, considering that? The argument here is "but orangutans ... and crows and parrots ... and dolphins ... and octopuses ... and elephants ... they all abound with the potential to build rockets and electronics and self-replicating space probes. Any million years now, any one of those species could flip into producing lots of ideas and constructions and exploring everywhere." But, really? Sure, they do stuff with sticks and half-coconuts, but is "the parrot/octopus/elephant space program is just around the corner" really a parsimonious extrapolation from observed animal stick-handling? Besides, nerve cells only evolved once, maybe that was a freakish event. Maybe every other animal in the galaxy is a sponge.
SoftTalker 2y ago
I think the simple answer to that is that the distances are simply too vast (and they are expanding). FTL is impossible and even approaching light speed is not economically feasible. That limits any spacefaring beings to their local planets, pretty much, and if our solar system is at all representative, the majority of the planets are uninhabitable.
- MattPalmer1086 2y ago
  We are already planning interstellar probes that appear feasible with only modest advances [1]. Imagine what we will be able to do with another 1000, or 10000 years of development. Can't see any fundamental reason why we could not ultimately build infrastructure and print up some lifeforms at their destinations. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    For some definition of "modest"
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    Orders of magnitude are unusually easy in our industry. These are absolutely mindboggling numbers beyond comprehension. You need to move 500K hiroshimas a second for 80 kg (175 pounds). You'd also need some pretty fast brakes lest you run into some pretty small things. You also have a really bad recursive problem, at 100% E=MC^2 efficiency, you need to turn 100 kg of mass to pure energy, per second, to move 80 kg. So actually you need to move 180 kg, which requires...etc. etc. This is the base of this thread, the Fermi Paradox: if it was a relatively quick scaling away, where is everybody? It's "turtles all the way down" to respond that there is no paradox, just imagine us in 10K years, even if we knew for 100% certainty we'll be there in 10K years. Note the wikipedia article you linked uses "concept" 10 times, the roadshadow was in 2016, and has no updates after November 2017, 6.75 years ago.
- pixl97 2y ago
  At the same time it only takes one civilization making Von Neumann probes change the equation from soft fragile biological life to things like spreading probes that don't care quite as much about the conditions.
manquer 2y ago
Technological feasibility is not economic feasibility. We spend a minuscule amount of our resource budget on science without short term profit . There are orders of magnitude of things we can achieve as a species with current technology if we all work together efficiently but we don’t . We ascribe to aliens a singular purpose that we have never achieved in our history as a species. Our competitive, acrimonious past is fundamental to our scientific progress (we research more during war than peace) . A peaceful civilization may not reach technologically maturity. It could also be just that Interstellar travel is not simply be economically viable in time frames that those civilizations optimize for. Ours can barely look beyond a quarter, why do we think any other civilization would plan for hundreds if not thousands of years .
stubish 2y ago
It takes both technology and motivation. Why populate the next star system? Why the next? And the next few million? You need technology developed by a civilization with the need or desire to expand infinitely. Humanity's only motivation to send people out to suffer the deprivations of frontier life and colonize another star system is essentially religious, either owing it to the universe to spread life and preserve humanity, or the belief that life for our decedents would be better off if we cast off the old society and built a new one. Would this really drive us to millions of stars?