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Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

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Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#51

Post by kieckerjan »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #10

Isn't it better to compute now with lower efficiency than waiting millions/billions of years doing nothing?

My thought exactly. Just run the whole thing at a very low speed. One clock tick every hundred years so to speak. This will make the whole uploaded species live in a slower lane, but subjectively for them the rest of the universe will seem to have sped up. Of course this has the disadvantage of them not being able to communicate with nervous short-loved critters like us, which also neatly explains why we don't hear or see them.

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#52

Post by pasquinelli »

dx034 wrote: post #45
ianai wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if all habitable planets with simple life would have the conditions necessary to create oil and coal. Love them or hate them, they still power most of our civilization. Imagine if we did not have a gas/coal readily available? We refined nuclear as a weapon first. The need for a nuclear bomb might not arise in a power constrained civilization and thus go much long before being discovered (if ever)

I'm sure someone has simulated that but it appears highly likely that a planet with plants (or any carbon based life) will at some point "generate" fossil fuels. And maybe, if we hadn't found oil, we would've come up with more efficient ways to use electricity generated from renewable sources. Would've taken longer but we could've made up for that later in the process. Batteries were known at the time of the oil revo…

or maybe we wouldn't have bothered with electricity because of a lack of energy reserves.

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#53

Post by amelius »

skgoa wrote: post #48
joe_the_user wrote: post #2

The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the very reasonable surmise that there must be other forms of technologically advanced life out there somewhere in our great galaxy and the complete lack of any evidence for it. But not quite. This paradox assumes that a more technologically advanced society would naturally expand it's energy usage and output to the point that it could be detected by us. That is, expand…

That's how I have always viewed this. There is no reason why a civilization would blast out EM waves in a 360°*360° sphere at incredibly high energy levels indiscriminately forever and ever. Instead what we have seen right here on Earth over the last 100 years is that technological progress lets us do ever more with ever less energy. Unless we are talking about detection from a relatively low range, a range where the…

I suspect that some thermodynamics law says that if you burn an amount of energy, you inevitably emit IR radiation. More energy means more radiation.

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#55

Post by camillomiller »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #20
camillomiller wrote: post #12

My humble impression is that each and every philosophical hypotesis we make is somewhat based on human paradygms, structures, and super-structures. Why can’t we accept that we populated this world for the equivalent of a cosmic blink, and we are therefore unequipped to even grasp the existence of other life forms? I am a fan of Bostrom’s conjecture about the simulation, though. 1/3 is a damn high probability. At the…

I'm reminded of the old problem of the flight of bumble bees. Someone did some calculations on bees, modeling their flight using the same properties of aerodynamics as fixed wing aircraft, and they came to the conclusion that bees couldn't fly. Of course the obvious answer was that bees simply don't fly the way that fixed wing aircraft do and we merely did not understand how they flew at the time (we do know). But im…

Amazing analogy. What an enjoyable comment.

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#56

Post by Normal_gaussian »

ianai wrote: post #36
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument I've heard most is that a civilization only has a short time where it's blasting broadcasts into space willy-nilly, before improving their tech and making it more efficient, thus dramatically lowering its potential to be discovered by its stray broadcasts.

I wonder if all habitable planets with simple life would have the conditions necessary to create oil and coal. Love them or hate them, they still power most of our civilization. Imagine if we did not have a gas/coal readily available? We refined nuclear as a weapon first. The need for a nuclear bomb might not arise in a power constrained civilization and thus go much long before being discovered (if ever)

The potential for nuclear as a power source was well known.

If you read the Farm Hall transcripts [1] there are several conversations in the vein uranium engine vs uranium bomb; they all knew a uranium engine was possible and was the original research, but the war drove them to a uranium bomb.

From section 5: "History will record that the Americans and the English made a bomb, and that at the same time the Germans, under the HITLER regime, produced a workable engine."

[1] http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English101.pdf

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#57

Post by davedx »

Chathamization wrote: post #13
davedx wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that’s the thing, if our galaxy had lots of 20-21st century Earth level civilizations, we would be able to detect them with our existing SETI programmes. Personally I like the hypothesis that states eventually all comms will be encrypted and therefore indistinguishable from white noise.

> But that’s the thing, if our galaxy had lots of 20-21st century Earth level civilizations, we would be able to detect them with our existing SETI programmes. But we couldn't. In general, SETI couldn't even detect such a civilization even if it was in the star system closest to earth: > If an extraterrestrial civilization has a SETI project similar to our own, could they detect signals from Earth? > In general, no.…

OP said: 'the universe could full of earth-level societies and we wouldn't know'. It's a very extreme claim and the SETI FAQ answer directly contradicts it.

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#59

Post by davedx »

joe_the_user wrote: post #7
davedx wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that’s the thing, if our galaxy had lots of 20-21st century Earth level civilizations, we would be able to detect them with our existing SETI programmes. Personally I like the hypothesis that states eventually all comms will be encrypted and therefore indistinguishable from white noise.

We could not detect civilizations at our level because standard transmissions decay the square of the distance and so such would be quantum noise by the time they got to the nearest start. And less than that by the time they further.

According to the SETI FAQ, it would be possible for alien civilizations to detect our higher powered radar systems with SETI setups similar to our own.

Do you dispute this claim from SETI? Can you provide a citation?

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#60

Post by davedx »

ajuc wrote: post #9
davedx wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that’s the thing, if our galaxy had lots of 20-21st century Earth level civilizations, we would be able to detect them with our existing SETI programmes. Personally I like the hypothesis that states eventually all comms will be encrypted and therefore indistinguishable from white noise.

There's around 512 G-type stars in 100 light years radius around us. That's not many. Milky Way radius is 100 000 light years. If our galaxy had lots of civilizations that just learned radio in last 100 years - odds are quite high that we wouldn't be able to detect them YET, even if we had the technology to do so.

I understand the probabilities involved.

The OP made a rather extreme claim that 'the universe could full of earth-level societies and we wouldn't know'.

If all 512 G-type stars in 100 light years had earth-level societies, we would be able to detect their higher powered radio transmissions. Right?

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