5 ms·

The Billion-Year Technology Gap: Could One Exist?

21 points by soundsop 17y ago

sown 17y ago
On the plus side, if aliens like these ever do show up it's because they genuinely have our interest at heart or they want something but not something they can just take -- leverage on our part -- which for them, would be easy. Also good, they can eliminate us in a heart beat so don't have to worry about waging war with them. :D
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
Since it's a weekend, I believe the board is open to rampant speculation, and this is a good topic as any for it. I mostly lean towards C -- all civilizations perish. But I think we use the word "perish" to mean some sort of cataclysmic end. That's probably not the case at all. As I look back on the last 300 years, I see mankind evolving more and more technologies. With each new evolution, people do less and less physical activity, and more and more emotion is put into virtual reality. The cataclysm won't be nuclear war -- we should be so lucky. The cataclysm will be eon after eon of inactivity and stagnation. (I already see this in the movement to "solve problems at home first" before space exploration and the "what right do we have to contaminate other planets" school of environmentalism. I'd give B good odds as well -- good enough that there are probably thousands or millions of civilizations that survived. Also looking at patterns in our own evolution, I think machine-based intelligences operating at super-high bandwidths and living for millions of years would have as much in common with us as we do with ants. Do ants know that people exist? Probably not.
- randallsquared 17y ago
  For your C to be the solution, you'd have to posit that all technological civilizations go this route. Maybe that'll turn out to be the case, but do you have a reason to think that, other than that it seems to be happening here?
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    None. A combination might be at work as well. Perhaps civilizations stagnate for so long that if they ever do evolve into a true space-faring species that they're so removed from our reality as to effectively have transcended it. This would explain the lack of contact, the observed trend of mankind, and the odds-on-favorite that something more advanced has to be out there somewhere.
    - berntb 17y ago
      Hmm... First, read up on the Orion project. Humanity could have had a technological infrastructure outside the atmosphere in the 1970s. (They sadly lost out to NASA politically.) An Orion exploration could generate money from extra-terrestrial mineral sources inside a not too long time window. Second, consider how much longer the virtual reality thing would take if we were half as fast at speeding up computers (3 years for Moore's law, not 1 1/2). A not unrealistic assumption for a civilization with some other focus. Third, consider if one of the small scale fusion projects (EMC, General Fusion, etc) works. Or a future idea. Then an Oort cloud would be livable, for a technological civilization. From that, it seems a large fraction of technological civilizations should not have all eggs on one planet/culture before cultural stagnation starts. And the groups further away would be able to see the problem happening to others and have a good chance to do things differently. In the same way, a physics experiment with "unexpected" results would need to destroy a whole solar system and not only a planet. The Fermi paradox should have some other answer.
      - randallsquared 17y ago
        And the groups further away would be able to see the problem happening to others and have a good chance to do things differently. Well, the initial premise that all civilizations have this happen suggests that later groups wouldn't see it as a problem, but as a goal or path to the goal. There are groups here on Earth that seem to be resistant to the pull of the virtual, but all by resisting technologies of other kinds as well, so it could still be that any group capable of building advanced computing succumbs. There's a depressing thought: Dune as an accurate picture of the attitude towards computing in long-lived technological civilizations.
joshu 17y ago
Or maybe bandwidth just gets too at any distance and nobody wants to be that far from home...
ojbyrne 17y ago
"The odds of there being only one single planet that evolved life among all that unfathomable vastness seems so incredible that it is all but completely irrational to believe." Not at all true, until we find a second. Because you can't really use statistics until that point.
ellyagg 17y ago
We do not know the rate at which technology-producing species come about, period. A couple months ago there was a post about how people will come up with a business idea and falsely extrapolate how much money they can make by assuming a seemingly tiny fraction of their imagined potential customer base: http://sivers.org/1pct http://sivers.org/1pct This is precisely the same principle. Remember, there is no designer. The universe was not created as a petri dish for technology-producing species. There is no evidence we are not the only one. This article tries to cloak the discussion in "logic", but the data is so horridly poor that any discussion about it will serve only to identify each respondent's personal biases about human nature and etc. Your opinion on this topic is all assumptions and no data.
- RevRal 17y ago
  Exactly. One billion years really is not that long, and we're still living in a young universe. I accept that as time goes on, the possible amount of intelligent life that exists/existed increases. Though speculation is fun, it is not meaningful until we have have another data point to connect.
baguasquirrel 17y ago
It appears that no one believes that c is impossible to circumvent.
- gojomo 17y ago
  There is still the mystery of not seeing radio waves or Von Neumann probes.
dgallagher 17y ago
I like to theorize that there is some sort of undiscovered transmission method used by alien civilizations to communicate, one which we can't detect yet. Billions of neutrinos pass through your body every second, and trillions upon trillions through the Earth; a possible transmission medium which may be less susceptible to planetary interference than, say, radio waves. The speed of light appears to be an unbreakable barrier given our incomplete understanding of the universe. If it does indeed hold up, getting from one galaxy to another may take eons. Perhaps this is keeping the aliens at bay... It also makes more sense for our society to evolve into robotic intelligent life for space travel. Human bodies are poorly built to leave the Earth. We need to bring oxygen, air, food, etc... Atrophy of the muscles and bones occur during prolonged space flight. We're high maintenance, and not nearly as efficient as, say, a future robotic being specifically built for space travel. It may only needs sunlight for energy, or rely on nuclear fusion. If we ever meet one, an alien may simply be the evolutionary product of their own technology, looking nothing like the species which initially built it. Do you imagine humans will look like they do today 500 years from now, or completely different?
- dmix 17y ago
  > Human bodies are poorly built to leave the Earth. Indeed this is a very limiting factor. Space is a very hostile place. If we travel just 20 miles into the sky, without technology, our blood will boil and there is no chance for survival. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VdSeDqU3EY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VdSeDqU3EY
  - ars 17y ago
    Your blood will not boil, that's a myth - it's not true. You might not be able to breath though, but that's why we have space suits.
    - paulbaumgart 17y ago
      (a) source for that: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.html http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.h...
lionhearted 17y ago
> The US government, for example, spends on “Defense” (including “preemptive” warfare) and Homeland Security, 8 times what it spends on educating the next generation. You know, whenever I heard numbers like those, it always seemed like it was missing some very subtle point, but I never could quite put my finger on it. I think I just figured it out: Myself, American citizen, I've gotten, I don't know, maybe 1/10th of my knowledge and education from U.S. government related things? Something like that? Maybe I'm being charitable here, I've learned a heck of a lot more from books, primary and secondary research, my own experiences, and acquaintances with expert domain knowledge than I ever learned in school. I dropped out of two high schools, and I would've left the education system earlier if I was a little more self assured and independent when I was younger. So maybe 1/10th of my education has come from the U.S. government, maybe. How much of my defense against foreign warfare has? 90%? 99%? The rest being my utterly trivial-in-comparison training in martial arts, marksmanship, and other survival and combat skills? I guess you could count the time time I've traveled as under the protection of the English government, or French government, or whatever else. But the basic point is - various government-run military has provided almost all of my defense against foreign warfare, and very little of my education. If you cut military spending by 7/8ths without implementing mandatory service, conscription, or a draft, we'd be a hell of a lot less safe. Multiplying educational spending in the current American public education system by 8 times wouldn't make us a lot more educated.
- lionhearted 17y ago
  Curious about the downvote here - is my reasoning off? I'll elaborate on my position a little bit - It seems to me like top-down centralized education has historically done a somewhat poor job of teaching, and extra top-down education funding probably wouldn't make us more educated. Whereas top-down military seems to be the best way to defend against aggressive foreign powers. Considering that there's always been aggressive military powers in known history - the Khanate Mongols, Alexander's Greeks, Shaka's Africa, Imperial Japan, Fascist Germany, Soviet Russia, the Khmer Rouge, North Korea today, etc, etc - defense against these types of places becomes an unfortunate necessity. And it seems like top-down, state-run military/defense works better than individual militias, individual defense and military, or whatever the alternative solution should be. I think governments have done a relatively poor job as educators and education typically works well in an individual, decentralized way. Military? I don't think you want that as decentralized, but maybe you do. So when you see that the U.S. government has a much larger defense than education budget, that's because there's lots of quality private education happening, but not so much quality private defense happening. Agree? Disagree?
richcollins 17y ago
A friend suggested the possibility that advanced life might lose the desire to explore or engage in behaviors that would leak EMF (a sort of technical nirvana).
joecode 17y ago
Perhaps they just don't use anything so retro as radio anymore, and are so much more intelligent that they have no interest in communicating with us.
yosho 17y ago
why can't the answer simply be that we have not received any signs of ET life because the signals simply have not reached us yet? Assuming that the speed of light is still the fastest possible thing in the universe, we can infer from the vastness of space that the time required for a signal to reach Earth could be in the millions of years. Furthermore, just because a civilization is advanced, still doesn't mean it is capable of conquering the vastness of space. I think we've been watching too many Startrek and Starwar movies. Space is not something that an advanced civilization can just wonder through. These two points combined probably explain why we haven't encountered any real proof of ET life. Not to mention our time in the universe is merely but a spec in the grand scheme of things. Hardly a blip on anyone's radar.
qw 17y ago
There could be a fourth option: An advanced civilization has control over our region of the galaxy. Perhaps the reason why we don't detect other civilizations is because the dominant civilization neutralizes others when they get too advanced? If they have a billion years head start, it's hard for other civilizations to put up much of a fight. The reason why we haven't detected the dominant civilization is because they don't want to be detected :) As an alternative, there could also be one or more civilizations out there that studies us and shields us from outside signals.

21 points by soundsop 17y ago

sown 17y ago

On the plus side, if aliens like these ever do show up it's because they genuinely have our interest at heart or they want something but not something they can just take -- leverage on our part -- which for them, would be easy. Also good, they can eliminate us in a heart beat so don't have to worry about waging war with them. :D

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

Since it's a weekend, I believe the board is open to rampant speculation, and this is a good topic as any for it. I mostly lean towards C -- all civilizations perish. But I think we use the word "perish" to mean some sort of cataclysmic end. That's probably not the case at all. As I look back on the last 300 years, I see mankind evolving more and more technologies. With each new evolution, people do less and less physical activity, and more and more emotion is put into virtual reality. The cataclysm won't be nuclear war -- we should be so lucky. The cataclysm will be eon after eon of inactivity and stagnation. (I already see this in the movement to "solve problems at home first" before space exploration and the "what right do we have to contaminate other planets" school of environmentalism. I'd give B good odds as well -- good enough that there are probably thousands or millions of civilizations that survived. Also looking at patterns in our own evolution, I think machine-based intelligences operating at super-high bandwidths and living for millions of years would have as much in common with us as we do with ants. Do ants know that people exist? Probably not.

randallsquared 17y ago
For your C to be the solution, you'd have to posit that all technological civilizations go this route. Maybe that'll turn out to be the case, but do you have a reason to think that, other than that it seems to be happening here?
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  None. A combination might be at work as well. Perhaps civilizations stagnate for so long that if they ever do evolve into a true space-faring species that they're so removed from our reality as to effectively have transcended it. This would explain the lack of contact, the observed trend of mankind, and the odds-on-favorite that something more advanced has to be out there somewhere.
  - berntb 17y ago
    Hmm... First, read up on the Orion project. Humanity could have had a technological infrastructure outside the atmosphere in the 1970s. (They sadly lost out to NASA politically.) An Orion exploration could generate money from extra-terrestrial mineral sources inside a not too long time window. Second, consider how much longer the virtual reality thing would take if we were half as fast at speeding up computers (3 years for Moore's law, not 1 1/2). A not unrealistic assumption for a civilization with some other focus. Third, consider if one of the small scale fusion projects (EMC, General Fusion, etc) works. Or a future idea. Then an Oort cloud would be livable, for a technological civilization. From that, it seems a large fraction of technological civilizations should not have all eggs on one planet/culture before cultural stagnation starts. And the groups further away would be able to see the problem happening to others and have a good chance to do things differently. In the same way, a physics experiment with "unexpected" results would need to destroy a whole solar system and not only a planet. The Fermi paradox should have some other answer.
    - randallsquared 17y ago
      And the groups further away would be able to see the problem happening to others and have a good chance to do things differently. Well, the initial premise that all civilizations have this happen suggests that later groups wouldn't see it as a problem, but as a goal or path to the goal. There are groups here on Earth that seem to be resistant to the pull of the virtual, but all by resisting technologies of other kinds as well, so it could still be that any group capable of building advanced computing succumbs. There's a depressing thought: Dune as an accurate picture of the attitude towards computing in long-lived technological civilizations.

joshu 17y ago

Or maybe bandwidth just gets too at any distance and nobody wants to be that far from home...

ojbyrne 17y ago

"The odds of there being only one single planet that evolved life among all that unfathomable vastness seems so incredible that it is all but completely irrational to believe." Not at all true, until we find a second. Because you can't really use statistics until that point.

ellyagg 17y ago

We do not know the rate at which technology-producing species come about, period. A couple months ago there was a post about how people will come up with a business idea and falsely extrapolate how much money they can make by assuming a seemingly tiny fraction of their imagined potential customer base: http://sivers.org/1pct http://sivers.org/1pct This is precisely the same principle. Remember, there is no designer. The universe was not created as a petri dish for technology-producing species. There is no evidence we are not the only one. This article tries to cloak the discussion in "logic", but the data is so horridly poor that any discussion about it will serve only to identify each respondent's personal biases about human nature and etc. Your opinion on this topic is all assumptions and no data.

RevRal 17y ago
Exactly. One billion years really is not that long, and we're still living in a young universe. I accept that as time goes on, the possible amount of intelligent life that exists/existed increases. Though speculation is fun, it is not meaningful until we have have another data point to connect.

baguasquirrel 17y ago

It appears that no one believes that c is impossible to circumvent.

gojomo 17y ago
There is still the mystery of not seeing radio waves or Von Neumann probes.

dgallagher 17y ago

I like to theorize that there is some sort of undiscovered transmission method used by alien civilizations to communicate, one which we can't detect yet. Billions of neutrinos pass through your body every second, and trillions upon trillions through the Earth; a possible transmission medium which may be less susceptible to planetary interference than, say, radio waves. The speed of light appears to be an unbreakable barrier given our incomplete understanding of the universe. If it does indeed hold up, getting from one galaxy to another may take eons. Perhaps this is keeping the aliens at bay... It also makes more sense for our society to evolve into robotic intelligent life for space travel. Human bodies are poorly built to leave the Earth. We need to bring oxygen, air, food, etc... Atrophy of the muscles and bones occur during prolonged space flight. We're high maintenance, and not nearly as efficient as, say, a future robotic being specifically built for space travel. It may only needs sunlight for energy, or rely on nuclear fusion. If we ever meet one, an alien may simply be the evolutionary product of their own technology, looking nothing like the species which initially built it. Do you imagine humans will look like they do today 500 years from now, or completely different?

dmix 17y ago
> Human bodies are poorly built to leave the Earth. Indeed this is a very limiting factor. Space is a very hostile place. If we travel just 20 miles into the sky, without technology, our blood will boil and there is no chance for survival. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VdSeDqU3EY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VdSeDqU3EY
- ars 17y ago
  Your blood will not boil, that's a myth - it's not true. You might not be able to breath though, but that's why we have space suits.
  - paulbaumgart 17y ago
    (a) source for that: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.html http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.h...

lionhearted 17y ago

> The US government, for example, spends on “Defense” (including “preemptive” warfare) and Homeland Security, 8 times what it spends on educating the next generation. You know, whenever I heard numbers like those, it always seemed like it was missing some very subtle point, but I never could quite put my finger on it. I think I just figured it out: Myself, American citizen, I've gotten, I don't know, maybe 1/10th of my knowledge and education from U.S. government related things? Something like that? Maybe I'm being charitable here, I've learned a heck of a lot more from books, primary and secondary research, my own experiences, and acquaintances with expert domain knowledge than I ever learned in school. I dropped out of two high schools, and I would've left the education system earlier if I was a little more self assured and independent when I was younger. So maybe 1/10th of my education has come from the U.S. government, maybe. How much of my defense against foreign warfare has? 90%? 99%? The rest being my utterly trivial-in-comparison training in martial arts, marksmanship, and other survival and combat skills? I guess you could count the time time I've traveled as under the protection of the English government, or French government, or whatever else. But the basic point is - various government-run military has provided almost all of my defense against foreign warfare, and very little of my education. If you cut military spending by 7/8ths without implementing mandatory service, conscription, or a draft, we'd be a hell of a lot less safe. Multiplying educational spending in the current American public education system by 8 times wouldn't make us a lot more educated.

lionhearted 17y ago
Curious about the downvote here - is my reasoning off? I'll elaborate on my position a little bit - It seems to me like top-down centralized education has historically done a somewhat poor job of teaching, and extra top-down education funding probably wouldn't make us more educated. Whereas top-down military seems to be the best way to defend against aggressive foreign powers. Considering that there's always been aggressive military powers in known history - the Khanate Mongols, Alexander's Greeks, Shaka's Africa, Imperial Japan, Fascist Germany, Soviet Russia, the Khmer Rouge, North Korea today, etc, etc - defense against these types of places becomes an unfortunate necessity. And it seems like top-down, state-run military/defense works better than individual militias, individual defense and military, or whatever the alternative solution should be. I think governments have done a relatively poor job as educators and education typically works well in an individual, decentralized way. Military? I don't think you want that as decentralized, but maybe you do. So when you see that the U.S. government has a much larger defense than education budget, that's because there's lots of quality private education happening, but not so much quality private defense happening. Agree? Disagree?

richcollins 17y ago

A friend suggested the possibility that advanced life might lose the desire to explore or engage in behaviors that would leak EMF (a sort of technical nirvana).

joecode 17y ago

Perhaps they just don't use anything so retro as radio anymore, and are so much more intelligent that they have no interest in communicating with us.

yosho 17y ago

why can't the answer simply be that we have not received any signs of ET life because the signals simply have not reached us yet? Assuming that the speed of light is still the fastest possible thing in the universe, we can infer from the vastness of space that the time required for a signal to reach Earth could be in the millions of years. Furthermore, just because a civilization is advanced, still doesn't mean it is capable of conquering the vastness of space. I think we've been watching too many Startrek and Starwar movies. Space is not something that an advanced civilization can just wonder through. These two points combined probably explain why we haven't encountered any real proof of ET life. Not to mention our time in the universe is merely but a spec in the grand scheme of things. Hardly a blip on anyone's radar.

qw 17y ago

There could be a fourth option: An advanced civilization has control over our region of the galaxy. Perhaps the reason why we don't detect other civilizations is because the dominant civilization neutralizes others when they get too advanced? If they have a billion years head start, it's hard for other civilizations to put up much of a fight. The reason why we haven't detected the dominant civilization is because they don't want to be detected :) As an alternative, there could also be one or more civilizations out there that studies us and shields us from outside signals.