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That feels like too much assumption to me. The scenario described well by Michio Kaku is the only one that seems probable to me. "Lets say we have an ant hill

• agentgt 11y ago
  Yes I generally agree that this is one of the strongest explanations. Especially if you consider the small spectrum of communication we are examining (and thats just electromagnetic for all we know dark energy may provide a superior mode of communication). I just like the entertainment one because its amusing and sort of describe a great portion of our own civilization. The reality I think/hope is there will always be explorers/dreamers/big thinkers.... I hope.
  • rimantas 11y ago
    For me the best explanation is the size of the Universe. No other assumptions needed.
    • agentgt 11y ago
      Its not the size but rather intelligent entity density. You could have an infinite universe but still have high ratio of contact if the universe has a high density of life forms (think of it as collisions with particles in a large volume).
      • XorNot 11y ago
        Compared to the reducing human reproductive rate this is an important point. It's quite likely that somewhere in the regime of 12 billion is all the alive humans there ever will be - even with immortality technology. After all, how many times per 1000 years would you want to have some more children? How many of those people are likely to exist compared to a dormant mass who don't have children? Now factor in a lack of FTL travel. If it takes thousands of years to go exploring, how many explorers are there likely to be, and how likely are they to stop and setup colonies instead?
        • agentgt 11y ago
          Yes this is similar to the self replicating probe problem (one solution to the SETI problem is to launch probes that replicate). That probes start having the same problems as the creating intelligent entity has. Either the probes can't replicate fast enough or decide to stop replicating/exploring for whatever reasons and there are just not enough/fast enough probes.
    • ekianjo 11y ago
      > For me the best explanation is the size of the Universe Size, and time of the Universe. Most probably species do not last beyond a couple of million years no matter what, and there may be very little overlap between periods of intelligence even if they were in relatively close area of space.
• VLM 11y ago
  Agreed and please don't forget that our ants may very well have implemented a working planetary scale communications network with an overlaid sentient intelligence (can't really call it an AI) operating on that distributed computational network based on inter-nest chemical pheromone exchange operating continuously for several million years of uptime ... but ... "Hey man they're just ants, sure we don't understand them much better than dolphins or monkeys but I'm sure they're not implementing anything as important as one of our roads" Its quite likely the beings from planet X understand omnidirectional broadcast electromagnetic waves as an interstellar communications network technology about as well as your average software developer understands arcnet or 10base5 ethernet or flint-knapping.
• netcan 11y ago
  The problem with all ET intelligence analogies is that we don't have much to work with. Ants can't understand highways. Can dogs or chimpanzees? What does it even mean for a chimpanzee to understand a highway? You might get one to understand that it is for cars and you can get from place to place on it. Maybe she'll understand that we make them for this purpose. Would she understand why this is a big deal? How about a swing? Does a chimpanzee understand a swing? I have never personally known one, but I imagine that if a close friend of a chimpanzee was wont to occasionally come by with a rope and tire and construct a swing, she would eventually understand these can be sued to make swing. Is the difference between swing because the highway is more advanced or because it is more remotely related to fun? We've got questions to answer before we make these analogies. What does intelligence mean, in the context of ability to understand such things? Is it a hurdle that we are over or a continuous scale from slug to alien? From our (admittedly biased) perspective, it seems to be. Following from that, all these analogies about advanced civilizations destroying themselves, their planets, living in cerebra-utopian VR. These are all analogies to us, the only "intelligent" creatures we know. They're also based on a very brief period of civilization where we have been able to even conceive of our impact on the planet. Until people went to the moon, how strongly lodged in people's minds was the idea that we are on a planet? We are not even good about extrapolating 100 years into our own future. People thought factories and technologies would lead to 2 hour workdays and a pleasure society now. How good could we be at making analogies to creatures we don't know exist.
• sixQuarks 11y ago
  Elon Musk disagrees with that statement. He believes once intelligence gets beyond a certain threshold (which humans have), there are no such things that are beyond understanding. Most people don't know how to write complex math equations, but that doesn't mean they can't understand what mathematics is.
  • ekianjo 11y ago
    > doesn't mean they can't understand what mathematics is Yet humans clearly fail to understand things like radioactivity (and the risks involved, for good or bad). I'm not sure what Musk thinks is reliable at all in this matter.
    • tosseraccount 11y ago
      Humans do understand radiation dangers. Why do we have no nuclear war since the atom bomb? Why are there so few deaths from nuclear power plants? Why do people use sunscreen and shield spacecraft?
  • logingone 11y ago
    Elon Musk is an engineer, not a philosopher, and I stand to be persuaded, but I find using him to counter Michio Kaku ridiculous.
    • adventured 11y ago
      A philosopher would be the first to understand that no one is or can be excluded from the realm of ideas or thought. Being a philosopher is not an extraordinary designation, such that it puts them beyond the mental abilities of someone of Elon's obvious mental aptitude.
      • logingone 11y ago
        Exclusion? Oh dear, here we go with the black or white. "realm of ideas or thought" - and the simplification. "not an extraordinary designation" - and dismissing philosophy. "beyond the mental abilities" - and more simplification. "mental aptitude" - you'll be fine then with neuroscientists or some such fixing the falcon.
• mortenjorck 11y ago
  Then there's always the possibility that we're the superhighway builders and we can't see the ants. Could there be billions of worlds with life that have yet to (or more likely failed to) even evolve chordates? What if the super-advanced aliens are us?
  • mlitchard 11y ago
    Yeah there's a horrorshow idea to contemplate. Humanity is the Elder Race. Yikes!
• eloff 11y ago
  Understanding all the motivations for building a highway or how it is built may be beyond us currently, but we can still differentiate it from naturally occurring phenomena. All we're talking about here with the Fermi paradox is detecting evidence of intelligent life, not understanding their technology or motivations.
• murbard2 11y ago
  The only thing this argument has going for it is sounding wise by virtue of being self-deprecating. If there are structured radio signals being emitted, it matters not whether or not we understand what the aliens are up to, if it hits a sweetspot between noise and simplicity we can tell it's a signal. And no, "radio waves" aren't the equivalent of "smoke signals", if there are better ways to communicate across space, that would change a lot our understanding of physics. This isn't to say that our understanding is complete, but the default assumption should be that it's very unlikely that there is a better way to communicate long distance. Compression is an issue in that respect, but that's a different argument.
  • Panoramix 11y ago
    Those are huge assumptions IMO. Maybe they don't feel the need or comprehend the concept of communicating over long distances. Maybe they discovered a different force we don't know of. Just because radio waves worked for us, it doesn't mean every advanced civilization will makes use of them. The possibilities are so vast and endless.
    • murbard2 11y ago
      If they are a space faring civilization, they need long distance communication. No the possibilities aren't endless, there's a lot of physics that we know that strongly constrains the search space. AFAIC, I think compression is the big issue, we should be looking for forward error correcting codes in the data.
      • wlesieutre 11y ago
        Laser communication seems more likely for long distance communication. Omnidirectional radio broadcasts need a comparatively huge amount of energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPALS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPALS
        • murbard2 11y ago
          I agree, but that's a very different argument from "who are we, measly little ants to think we can understand..."
• jboy55 11y ago
  My thoughts are, its not just that ants trying to understand the superhighway. Its the beings that create a superhighway wishing to communicate in a way the ants would understand. Maybe they'll just wait for the ants to start to build roads. Maybe what we think are roads (Electromagnetic waves) are to the beings as scent trails are to ants.
• cgriswald 11y ago
  We may not be able to understand the ten-lane superhighway, but we can certainly distinguish it from natural phenonemon. Radio SETI is the most popular, but searches have been done in a wide variety of ways. For instance, A search for a complete Dyson swarm can be done by looking for "stars" which only emit radiation in the far infrared. Partial Dyson swarms can be detected by comparing the mag of a star at two different wavelengths. Megastructures are potentially detectable via the tranit method. And searches have been done to look for signs of galactic engineering. I'm still willing to entertain the idea that Kaku is correct, but it mostly just seems like wishful thinking to me. The evidence thus far suggests that even if life is everywhere in the universe, technological life may not be.
• joe_the_user 11y ago
  This kind of argument seems like it's only appealing through it's similarity to one of Aesop's Fables. I think as far as we know, ant's don't even ask themselves the question "what is this ant hill". Human cosmologists, on the other hand, seek an explanation for everything that they see in the cosmos. The only way some alien phenomena would be ignored would be if it seemed to have the qualities of some apparently easily explained phenomena. This is certainly possible but it seems unlikely it would happen by accident - cosmology's models for ordinary, unexceptional stars, nebula and galaxies are all fairly detailed.
• Cyph0n 11y ago
  This same argument is quite validly used by people like myself (a Muslim) who believe in a creator.
• JulianMorrison 11y ago
  What's odd and strange is how many ten-lane superhighways we don't see. Because while the highway may just be a "infinite stone plain of death" to an ant, it's there. But you look up in the sky and you don't see stars reduced to heat-radiating Dyson shells, or towed around by Shkadov thrusters. And you really ought to, because any civilization before us should by any reasonable dice roll, be millions of years ahead of us.