Answers to the Fermi paradox

[Perfection]

Someone has been looking at the wiki article

I have read no article in regards to this debate in months.

Anyway... killer Von Neumann probes is another one that I personally like.

Why?

And wouldn't they qualify as a form of ET life?

 

[Integral]

I'll just leave this here. http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html

 

[warpus]

I think in the next couple decades we are going to discover that life in the universe is far more abundant than we might have ever imagined.

I also think we are going to discover that intelligent life needs such a precise alignment of variables to arise that it is simply an incredibly rare occurrence. .. and even when it does arise, it sometimes doesn't lead to civilization at all, and only rarely to space-faring technology.

Sure, the Universe is huge, and there's probably trillions of intelligent civilizations out there.. but, we haven't ran into any yet because they are so far apart. And even if we did, would we even know it? I mean.. Just as North King said, maybe we're so different from them that we just wouldn't recognize them as life if we ran into some of their artifacts/communications/whatever.

I don't really think there is a paradox. If the Universe was a house, it'd be like saying that there are no cats in the entire house when you've only just looked through one of the closets in one of the many bedrooms.

There is no contradiction because our estimates for the number of intelligent, space-faring life out there must be way off.. or they're just not sending out the sort of flags we associate with "intelligent life". It's probably a combination of both.

 

[Perfection]

I think in the next couple decades we are going to discover that life in the universe is far more abundant than we might have ever imagined.

Why do you think that?

 

[warpus]

Why do you think that?

I've been watching Planet Earth, and have seen examples of life adapting to the craziest of conditions. It can adapt to anything, it seems. All it needs is an energy source, really.

I wouldn't be surprised if we found signs of life on Mars, Europa, embedded in the ice of asteroids, etc. Heck, it could probably find a way to thrive in the atmosphere of a gas giant.

Now, this basically brings up the question of how likely it is for life to arise in the first place, but I'm not touching that one.

And understand by life I mostly mean very simple stuff - stuff you'd see at the bottom of our oceans, bacteria, etc.

 

[Cutlass]

What about: earth is not a "rare" planet, but humans just happen to be the first civilization to arise in one such planet? Someone has to be first.

We don't have to be the first. Just the only current intelligent species in this region that has tech that can look for others. Many could have come and gone without leaving a trace we have yet been able to find. Or just too far away to detect.

 

[JerichoHill]

Aren't we searching for radio signals, something that maybe will last a grand total of 200 years on earth before we are all digitized. Has anyone conceived that the way we are searching may be highly flawed?

 

[emzie]

I've been watching Planet Earth, and have seen examples of life adapting to the craziest of conditions. It can adapt to anything, it seems. All it needs is an energy source, really.

I wouldn't be surprised if we found signs of life on Mars, Europa, embedded in the ice of asteroids, etc. Heck, it could probably find a way to thrive in the atmosphere of a gas giant.

Now, this basically brings up the question of how likely it is for life to arise in the first place, but I'm not touching that one.

And understand by life I mostly mean very simple stuff - stuff you'd see at the bottom of our oceans, bacteria, etc.

Adapting isn't the same as coming into existence in the first place.

Aren't we searching for radio signals, something that maybe will last a grand total of 200 years on earth before we are all digitized. Has anyone conceived that the way we are searching may be highly flawed?

There's really no better way. The only other thing that comes to mind is an alien civilization could shoot a bunch of a rare element into their star, adding an obviously artificial spectral bad. That requires the civilization be trying to broadcast "we are here" whereas radio emissions might be sent out incidentally. Of course the major problem is that our strongest radio stations (in North America, 100kilowatts) right now are a ~quadrillion times less powerful than our meagre star. We would be very hard to see based on radio broadcasts at 500 light years. The same would be true for us to detect a civilization at that distance.

 

[Dragonlord]

Aren't we searching for radio signals, something that maybe will last a grand total of 200 years on earth before we are all digitized. Has anyone conceived that the way we are searching may be highly flawed?

More or less this.

Sending radio waves in all directions is inefficient and I doubt any advanced species would do so indefinitely. Also, who really knows whether radio waves propagate over light years? Maybe they get absorbed on the way....? At least, at the power levels we achieve.

I believe it is a statistical certainly that there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe - but the distances involved are almost inconceivable.

What the Fermi paradox actually proves, IMO, is that Einstein was right and that no travel above the speed of light is possible. In fact, only a fraction of the speed of light may be realistically achievable.
If so, what are the chances of any race buiding a far-flung space empire and eventually contacting an intelligence on an insignificant planet like ours...?

No one is going to engage in casual travel when each trip takes decades or even centuries - maybe a massive effort to colonize a relatively near star system which has a promising planet, but such efforts would be rare and the colony would have to be self-sustaining.

As a long-standing Sci-Fi fan, I find this conclusion depressing, to say the least - but it does seem the most probable.

 

[JerichoHill]

I think one point on radio waves was missed.

Radio represents a very small period of our society's existence.

If i assume there is a galactic space-faring society of aliens out there, I'm going to assume they're more interested in solving how to exist when the universe dies.

Okay, really. Just thinking about the time differentials between different species becoming intelligent and then space-faring. Could be that 10,000 years, a blink in time, is too long for any species to meet each other.

 

[Leoreth]

Are we talking about:

a) Other intelligent life-forms existing during the existence of our universe,
b) Other intelligent life-forms currently coexisting with us or
c) Other intelligent life-forms whose existence will be proven to mankind at some point?

Then my answers were:

a) probably yes
b) probably no
c) definitely not

The only interesting point is (c), because (a) and (b) will always stay speculation based on insufficient information about the distribution of planets, the probability of life-sustaining planets and the probability of life developing on such a planet ("copping out" here ).

We know mankind has existed for roughly 10,000 years as a species distinguishable from animals. Human civilization is able to transmit information at the speed of light for roughly 100 years (exact numbers don't matter much). It's not guaranteed that mankind will continue to exist for another 10,000 years, and it's reasonable to assume that other civilized life-forms have roughly the same amount of time to receive a transmission from another planet.

So even if you accept (a) as possible due to the multitude of stars in our universe, the probability for (b) to be true will be extremely low, given the assumed short life of civilization compared to the age of the universe (of which we are sure it is more than 4 billion years old).
But even if we accept (b) to be true, chances are low that any existing species will be close enough to us to become aware of them while our own civilization lasts. The lowest estimations say that there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe. And even in the extremely unlikely case of two intelligent civilized life-forms evolving in the same galaxy, our galaxy is still 100,000 lightyears in diameter. So it's still not guaranteed that two civilizations coexisting within the same galaxy will become aware of each other at some point of their existence.

 

[Perfection]

I think one point on radio waves was missed.

Radio represents a very small period of our society's existence.

I'm a little skeptical on that notion. Why should we presume that radio will die out?

 

[Maeztu]

You cannot make any sort of conclusion with no information. To assert anything, you need some sort of valuable information.

Anything else would be baseless speculation with no grounding in data.

There is some information. Don't mix up negative results with no results. So far, all the info we have is that we are not being visited openly and the noises recorded at SETI are not produced by intelligent live as far as we know it.

I agree it is not too much but enough to say that alien civilizations are not throwing a party every weekend all over the galaxy and we are the last ones to join the party.

 

[flamingzaroc121]

My feeling is that Earth is the only planet capable for the development of carbon-based life forms (us). However, to think that some form of life hasn't developed on another planet just doesn't work out to me. And maybe thats why we haven't found the other life, because we are looking for creatures similar to us.

 

[warpus]

Aren't we searching for radio signals, something that maybe will last a grand total of 200 years on earth before we are all digitized. Has anyone conceived that the way we are searching may be highly flawed?

Or maybe, most intelligent life in the Universe are NOT social creatures such as ourselves, and as such, they don't communicate nearly as often.

Adapting isn't the same as coming into existence in the first place.

Oh, I know. But after seeing all the places where life can thrive, it's lead me to the conclusion that it could basically thrive in space, or even on Ann Coulter's face.

My feeling is that Earth is the only planet capable for the development of carbon-based life forms (us). However, to think that some form of life hasn't developed on another planet just doesn't work out to me. And maybe thats why we haven't found the other life, because we are looking for creatures similar to us.

Really? The only planet?

It's one thing to say that it's the only planet where carbon-based life arose, but quite another that it is the only planet capable of doing so.

There must be trillions of billions of Earth-like planets in the Universe.

 

[Leoreth]

Or maybe, most intelligent life in the Universe are NOT social creatures such as ourselves, and as such, they don't communicate nearly as often.

I'm not sure if that's possible. I'm no anthropologist, but being social strikes me as a necessary condition of becoming intelligent. At least it seems impossible that a species can achieve civilization without cooperation.

My feeling is that Earth is the only planet capable for the development of carbon-based life forms (us). However, to think that some form of life hasn't developed on another planet just doesn't work out to me. And maybe thats why we haven't found the other life, because we are looking for creatures similar to us.

Carbon (and other elements of the same group, such als silicon) seems to be the only possibility for sufficiently complex life. Atoms of other groups are unable to form bindings to four other atoms, and thus reducing the achievable complexity drastically. While silicon could achieve that, too, it's much heavier, too heavy for many purposes. So if there really is a life form not based on carbon, it's drastically different from anything we can possibly imagine.

If life ALWAYS develops when the right circumstances are given, is still unknown. Although I've once read about an experiment that inserted certain amino acids into an environment with the same conditions as the early oceans of Earth. Interestingly, they formed proteins without any further incentive, and small portions of higher concentration of proteins began to form, not unlike cells. Those cells even began to grow while "eating" more amino acids, if I recall correctly. The system was stable as long as there were enough amino acids, which could not be produced by it itself.

 

[Formaldehyde]

You cannot make any sort of conclusion with no information. To assert anything, you need some sort of valuable information.

Anything else would be baseless speculation with no grounding in data.

Which makes it the perfect topic for endless OT threads.

There must be trillions of billions of Earth-like planets in the Universe.

I think you just broke Carl Sagan.

 

[Darth_Pugwash]

Time, distance, and the scant likelihood of intelligent life occuring at all make it a pretty long shot in terms of us actually ever meeting any smart aliens. Given the size and time-span of the universe though, there must be decent odds of them actually existing someplace, sometime.

I once read a theory that intelligent species rarely go space faring because by the time they achieve that technology, they've perfected virtual reality systems so awesome that everyone would much rather muck about in super-fantasies than go explore space, which struck me as a load of BS.

 

[illram]

Alien civilizations intentionally hide themselves from contact with others and/or they have created Dyson Spheres/swarms around their suns and become essentially hidden. DONE.

 

[warpus]

I'm not sure if that's possible. I'm no anthropologist, but being social strikes me as a necessary condition of becoming intelligent. At least it seems impossible that a species can achieve civilization without cooperation.

You can still have species that co-operate without being social animals with complex social structures (that say, humans have)