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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

#111

Post by DarkTree »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #82
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…

> My humble impression is that each and every philosophical hypotesis we make is somewhat based on human paradygms, structures, and super-structures. Exactly! Each time when I hear that scientists are looking for water because that's supposed to be a condition for life - I wonder how small imagination one needs to have to think that only "water-based" forms of life exist.

Think of it this way, it's not that these scientist think that only water-based forms of life exist, but the universe is very, very large, infinitely so. Since we have finite time to search it, where would you start looking? Would you start searching every single planet/star for some life we may not be able to recognize? Or would you take what we do know - that intelligent life can evolve from water-based planets - and at least start looking there?

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

#112

Post by sametmax »

pklausler wrote: post #108
sametmax wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others pointed out, you assume that other civilizations have similar technologies, motives, potential, political situation (or politics at all) and even material structure or needs. It's all speculation. We have satellites and yet know very little of what's happening in other countries. We mistake their needs and intents all the time. We are regularly surprised of what they are capable or incapable to do. And yet…

It takes just one BvN launch in galactic history to fill the galaxy up with self-replicating probes for the rest of its history. Doing this doesn't require much more technological capability than we have now. Motivation, politics, and ethics do not matter, just capabilities -- over such a huge volume of space, across billions of years, anything that's remotely possible will take place. The galaxy is very large and ve…

Again, you assume many things:

- they are interested in expanding;

- they didn't find a better solution to expand than going to other planets;

- their material structure is similar to us (they are physical, they have the same size/speed/time perception as use)

- the universe has no characteristics than we don't know about that could disallow us to perceive them (number of dimensions, or whatever)

- they emit some signals among the one we can perceive;

- they need and use energy as we do and as we understand it;

- they are not actively hiding;

- if we saw them we would realize what we saw.

It's like an ant assuming that because they can't smell pheromones from another hill, there is no life there.

Now, I'm for ocalm razor and I actually thing there is a strong probability that all those assumptions are true. But I don't know for sure that they are. They are just that: assumptions.

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

#113

Post by vorg »

marcosdumay wrote: post #104
Chathamization wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only really satisfactory conclusion is that we’re the first or only civilization to approach a BvN launch. That's carrying a lot of assumptions. That there's not a probe lying somewhere in the solar system watching us, that aliens haven't found a better way to observe us than probes, that they even care about observing us in the first place. Take the last one for example - 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone.…

The thing about the self replicating probes is that they are sufficient for taking over the entire galaxy. That doesn't mean that they are optimal. The Fermi paradox does not care about optimal, just possible.

The problem with self-replicating probes is they're likely to break down after so many legs. And every time they decelerate, they need to get more energy from the star system before accelerating again -- their AI might not be equipped to handle every situation they encounter, so failure to continue their mission might happen that way.

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

#114

Post by joe_the_user »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #96
Chathamization wrote: post #13

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. 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.…

> 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. Your quote relies on us detecting re-runs of "I Love Lzcwwdrrr", but our telescopes can reliably do spectrographic analysis of faraway stars and planets these days. We'd likely be able to detect things like unnaturally high levels of hydrocarbons in otherwise oxygen-full atmospheres, and ot…

Hmm, it is reasonable to speculate that once our sensor levels get much more accurate we might be able to sense fuzzy, indirect evidence of earth-level societies on other star systems though aggregates like city-light and pollutants. But that is a long way away from present day detection - we're detecting planets through planet going in front of them and other indirect approaches that don't yield detailed information.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_exoplanet...

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

#115

Post by joe_the_user »

davedx wrote: post #60
ajuc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Even Seven light years is a vast, vast distance. The limit isn't 100 light years, it's something like one or less light years.

Any ordinary radio transmission dissipates the square of the distance involved. At a certain level, transmissions become so faint they are indistinguishable from quantum noise.

You can find the math done on Quora (apologies for semi-walled-garden link). Remember, there's difference between getting a signal whose properties one knows and getting arbitrary signal - if there a strong GPS transmitter or something we knew, we could wait long enough and get micro-data. But arbitrary signal, no, information theory says no. (read all the answers together).

https://www.quora.com/How-far-can-radio-transmissions-from-E...

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

#116

Post by pklausler »

vorg wrote: post #113
marcosdumay wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about the self replicating probes is that they are sufficient for taking over the entire galaxy. That doesn't mean that they are optimal. The Fermi paradox does not care about optimal, just possible.

The problem with self-replicating probes is they're likely to break down after so many legs. And every time they decelerate, they need to get more energy from the star system before accelerating again -- their AI might not be equipped to handle every situation they encounter, so failure to continue their mission might happen that way.

You miss the point about replication.

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

#117

Post by oAlbe »

Zarath wrote: post #61
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…

It's also plausible that such societies are non-physical, meaning the content of the society is less about the physical substrate and more about the properties of the system itself

Care to elaborate please?

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

#118

Post by vorg »

pklausler wrote: post #116
vorg wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with self-replicating probes is they're likely to break down after so many legs. And every time they decelerate, they need to get more energy from the star system before accelerating again -- their AI might not be equipped to handle every situation they encounter, so failure to continue their mission might happen that way.

You miss the point about replication.

In order to replicate, a probe needs material from the star system it's visiting, stuff like iron and silicon. That process is likely to break down after so many journeys, so no more replicants. The probes would put their own AI into the child probes, including their own random defects. It would take a lot of trial and error, each trial being thousands of years, for the likely success of a single journey's replication to exceed the combined half lives of breakdowns and AI degeneration.

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

#119

Post by kobeya »

wazoox wrote: post #29

There's a serious argument to be made that the famous "WOW" signal can't be anything but an ET civilisation signal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal

Except that the WOW signal is fully explained now as due to a hydrogen gas halo around a solar system local source that the dish was pointed at at the time.

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

#120

Post by pseingatl »

Odd that no one has mentioned Cixin Liu's Dark Forest theory as an answer to Fermi's paradox: that the universe is a zero-sum game, and the safest reaction to the discovery of another civilization is to annhilate it. Therefore, hiding in the vastness of space to avoid any contact is the most prudent course.
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