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Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

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Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#51

Post by vertexFarm »

adrianN wrote: post #15
shawn wrote: post #9

It has always seemed arrogant to think that aliens exist anywhere within our galaxy. Look at how many galaxies are out there. Now realize that the universe extends far beyond our Hubble sphere. We can’t hope to colonize even a fraction of 1% of our galaxy, even with wildly futuristic technology. There is one option, though: Become our own aliens. If we set up colonies separated by time and distance, we will culturall…

Von Neumann probes could probably colonize a good chunk of the Milky Way given a few hundred thousand years.

I think that's an overly simplistic assumption, even if we assume they weren't designed by a rational actor who programmed a generation limit into them to keep them from totally converting all matter in the galaxy into probes (an absolute must, obviously).

Life on Earth consists of Von Neumann machines. That's exactly what life is. Yet our life has not converted the entire mass of Earth into itself, and there's still plenty of places where you can't easily find signs of life. And our life has had billions of years. The assumption that Von Neumanns will very cleanly and exponentially increase in number until they are all over the galaxy is too ideal.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#52

Post by nervousvarun »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #48
mirimir wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but not necessarily even that. The flow of chemical evolution that leads to carbon-based life is just so highly likely. We see some key molecules just about everywhere we look out there. And various simulations (physical, not virtual) create nucleic acids, amino acids, fatty acids, carbohydrates, etc. So there's no reason to think that the Earth is special.

Something I don't get, people say something along those lines -- that with earth-like conditions, blah-blah, earth-like planets, ... then life! But also experts claim life only arose once on Earth. So, in a place with perfect conditions, the perfect distance from the sun, the perfect atmosphere, perfect trigger, perfect environmental conditions, life only started once! Doesn't that make it so infinitesimally unlikely…

Just curious how can anyone conclusively claim life arose only once? Don't they just say we only have evidence that it arose once?

Maybe it started twice or 100M times but 100% of those times the newly started life was "consumed" in some way by already existing life etc.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#53

Post by scott_s »

jerf wrote: post #38
scott_s wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you (and some others) are being dismissive of a good-faith attempt to formalize thinking of a problem with many unknowns. I can't access the paper itself, but commenter carry_bit posted a link to the slides, and the conclusion slide says: The Fermi question is not a paradox: it just looks like one if one is overconfident in how well we know the Drake equation parameters. • Doing a distribution model shows tha…

You should be able to access the paper. Arxiv doesn't require any logins or credentials or anything; just check the "download" section in the upper right. This should go straight to the PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404 (Unless, you just mean you're on a device that can't render PDFs or something. It's a simple PDF, though, even a phone should be able to handle it.)

I'm on a large corporate network for a research organization, and I think they're rate-limiting us. All of the links give me an "Access Denied" message, with a referral to https://arxiv.org/denied.html. I can't even access https://arxiv.org/.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#54

Post by burlesona »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #48
mirimir wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but not necessarily even that. The flow of chemical evolution that leads to carbon-based life is just so highly likely. We see some key molecules just about everywhere we look out there. And various simulations (physical, not virtual) create nucleic acids, amino acids, fatty acids, carbohydrates, etc. So there's no reason to think that the Earth is special.

Something I don't get, people say something along those lines -- that with earth-like conditions, blah-blah, earth-like planets, ... then life! But also experts claim life only arose once on Earth. So, in a place with perfect conditions, the perfect distance from the sun, the perfect atmosphere, perfect trigger, perfect environmental conditions, life only started once! Doesn't that make it so infinitesimally unlikely…

Or an anti-faith based assertion. It’s in many ways much more terrifying if we are, in fact, special.

If we are just one of billions of places that life is going strong then we’ll do the best we can but if we don’t survive the eons who cares.

If Earth is the one and only seed of life, then don’t we have an incredible moral imperative not to wreck things here, and if possible to spread life into the darkness?

Being truly alone in the vast dark is a much scarier idea to live with.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#55

Post by TeMPOraL »

PaulHoule wrote: post #31

Ecosystems are limited by the availability of water, not sunlight. Also there are more "habitable" places in the universe which are underground oceans (the default condition outside the frost line) as opposed to a tiny fraction of rock worlds which have to parametrically fine tuned to have water -- ex. there are 10-20 worlds that have underground oceans in our own solar system. Why would a spacefaring civilization ca…

> The most absurd thing about "Battle: Los Angeles" is not that aliens would come to Los Angeles (as opposed to Detroit) to steal water,

Hey, they landed near all major coastal cities; the movie was just following one group of soldiers fighting off one part of the invasion force.

> but that they would come to a planet which has a thin layer on the surface as opposed to being just a run-of-the-mill dwarf planet or asteroid or comet or whatever you call it that is closer to 50% water.

Fair enough.

Disclaimer: I really liked the movie and wish there was a sequel made.

EDIT: My guess would be that the alien military tech was running off water (probably hydrogen/oxygen), so they started the invasion on the coasts to have essentially unlimited supply of water, but the actual purpose for the invasion was something else entirely. The "aliens need our water" hypothesis was AFAIR proposed by some talking head in the movie, not stated as in-universe fact.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#56

Post by jessriedel »

true_religion wrote: post #49
jessriedel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the math on probabilities should be using distributions Do you really think that this is novel in any way whatsoever? There is some yearly chance of nuclear war, and I don't know about geopolitics so I have a prior distribution over that yearly chance. Should I cite this paper? I actually really like the authors, and for all I know the paper may have some new insights or perform a calculation that hasn't been done…

What does novelty have to do with dissolving the Fermi Paradox? Is Fermi is some well established science, with repeated experimental proof, upon which numerous other conjectures have been built on? Does it really require a novel approach to attack its basis?

The top-level commenter wrote

> Everyone considered this option. From the very first day the paradox was posed. We don't know the parameters well, it's within our margin of error that no one else is out there, so it's an option.

And the person I replied to was rebutting this point (that the approach is obvious and considered long ago).

It's fine to write review articles, or clean up old arguments and repackage them, but it shouldn't be presented as a new idea, and in particular it should point to the prior work.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#57

Post by PaulHoule »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #55
PaulHoule wrote: post #31

Ecosystems are limited by the availability of water, not sunlight. Also there are more "habitable" places in the universe which are underground oceans (the default condition outside the frost line) as opposed to a tiny fraction of rock worlds which have to parametrically fine tuned to have water -- ex. there are 10-20 worlds that have underground oceans in our own solar system. Why would a spacefaring civilization ca…

> The most absurd thing about "Battle: Los Angeles" is not that aliens would come to Los Angeles (as opposed to Detroit) to steal water, Hey, they landed near all major coastal cities; the movie was just following one group of soldiers fighting off one part of the invasion force. > but that they would come to a planet which has a thin layer on the surface as opposed to being just a run-of-the-mill dwarf planet or ast…

I liked the movie too, not so much as science fiction but in how the relationship is developed between the staff sergeant and the junior officer.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#58

Post by TeMPOraL »

jandrese wrote: post #46
jpm_sd wrote: post #2

TL;DR - It's not a paradox, because we're probably alone. Kind of a letdown!

The Drake equation is the epitome of garbage in garbage out. Trying to draw a line using a single data point. There was recent news from NASA about the discovery of organic molecules on Mars and the possibility of life there at some point in the past. Discovery that life once existed on Mars would blow up the assumptions in the Drake equation. As for the Fermi paradox I'm still of the opinion that its solution is sim…

Also, VR. I already fear the future of humanity is not exploring strange new worlds, but creating virtual ones, and converting the solar system into more computronium.

(And the weird thing about that is that I feel it's a bad thing for some reason, but I can't articulate a coherent argument against it.)

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#59

Post by rtkwe »

adrianN wrote: post #15
shawn wrote: post #9

It has always seemed arrogant to think that aliens exist anywhere within our galaxy. Look at how many galaxies are out there. Now realize that the universe extends far beyond our Hubble sphere. We can’t hope to colonize even a fraction of 1% of our galaxy, even with wildly futuristic technology. There is one option, though: Become our own aliens. If we set up colonies separated by time and distance, we will culturall…

Von Neumann probes could probably colonize a good chunk of the Milky Way given a few hundred thousand years.

That also makes an assumption about the actual ability to make a machine capable of self replication. That in and of itself is a really hard problem as it has to replicate the entire high industrial base needed to create itself which is a LOT of stuff. Just our current technology requires hundreds of processes and chemicals to create critical things like the circuit boards and the components (capacitors, ICs, etc) on it. Then it needs the intelligence and sensors to identify all the constituent sources and address production problems (eg: impurities in source stock) and breakdowns of it's own internal equipment.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#60

Post by jessriedel »

gwern wrote: post #44
light_hue_1 wrote: post #8

It's "papers" like this by people that are either clueless or malicious that make everyone pine for the pre-arxiv days. Everyone considered this option. From the very first day the paradox was posed. We don't know the parameters well, it's within our margin of error that no one else is out there, so it's an option. This is such an absurd claim to take as your own that it's literally on the wikipedia page! It's also e…

Can you point to a single person making the point previously that even small amounts of uncertainty in the distribution of each variable in the Drake equation often implies a small or near-zero number of ETI even when the best mean point-estimate of the distribution for each variable, when multiplied together, predicts a large mean number of ETIs ?

I don't understand. Your point ("even small amounts of uncertainty ... a large mean number of ETIs?") sounds just like a rephrasing of his ("We don't know the parameters well, it's within our margin of error that no one else is out there"). In particular, how could your statement be false while his be true?
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