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A Lonely Universe

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Re: A Lonely Universe

#41

Post by sethammons »

frazbin wrote: post #17
api wrote: post #13

On top of all these probabilities I think you also have to add the probability of high technology. Humans existed for 100k years before we started doing things like harnessing steam and electricity and we have no evidence early humans were insufficiently intelligent. There is a whole chain of mental and cultural developments that may very well not be common.

well we were having a real bad ice age for most of that time. We pretty much got busy immediate after shit thawed

I'm reading Guns, Germs, and Steel which goes into some detail in this topic

Re: A Lonely Universe

#42

Post by rwissmann »

betwixthewires wrote: post #34

The crow experiment as an analogy is so wrong I don't even want to read the rest of the article. It's a misunderstanding of statistics. We have one data point. To use that analogy, it's as if we performed one experiment with one crow once and are trying to deduce the difficulty. I read a study on HN a couple weeks ago that talked about likelihood of self replicating protein strings forming randomly, and the summary i…

You are actually largely in agreement with the author of the article. It just takes a a while to get there (and criticizes those conclusions from a slightly different angle).

Re: A Lonely Universe

#43

Post by [deleted] »

betwixthewires wrote: post #34

The crow experiment as an analogy is so wrong I don't even want to read the rest of the article. It's a misunderstanding of statistics. We have one data point. To use that analogy, it's as if we performed one experiment with one crow once and are trying to deduce the difficulty. I read a study on HN a couple weeks ago that talked about likelihood of self replicating protein strings forming randomly, and the summary i…

[deleted]

Re: A Lonely Universe

#44

Post by thrashh »

lubujackson wrote: post #24
Causality1 wrote: post #2

Either intelligent life is rare in the universe or there's something that happens to it that prevents it from what we envision as the future of our own species, i.e., colonizing and spreading among planets. Maybe 99.99% of species ruin their own climate before getting off-world. Maybe they all decide it's happier living as hunter-gatherers. Unless we're alone, there is some fate that's common to all intelligences and…

The third option is that everything is simply too far apart and any detectible transmissions are either too faint or buried behind all those massive fusion furnaces. For instance, if our best Earth tech was pointed at Earth from a distant star, how far away would we be able to detect our own traces of life? We know that life is "a little rare" at least, but there is a huge range of rarity where life is everywhere acr…

Another possibility is that energy is really hard to come by. Humans absolutely struggle to amass much energy. Think of the insane amount of energy required to lift things into space, and how many millions more amounts of energy we’ll need just to build something in space. Heck if you go drive off grid on Earth, you can barely bring any energy with you and you won’t really be able to generate an appreciative amount of energy to do anything major. Climate change is ultimately caused by our energy needs.

One day we might be able to harness the output of a whole star but the amount of energy we’d need to get to that point seems out of reach right now.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the lack of energy is a universal issue across the stars.

A huge game changer would be if we discovered some physical phenomenon to allow us to safely extract energy easier from mass. It would do to our progress like what the telephones and the Internet did to communication.

Re: A Lonely Universe

#45

Post by mrjangles »

throw0101a wrote: post #9

See also The Dark Forest: > The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicat…

I always liked this description because it is so similar to the descriptions of untouched cultures in West New Guinea when they were first discovered in the middle of last century.

These cultures were entirely untouched and it gave anthropologists a look into what life was like before before civilization.

The island was divided into tiny tribes which lead an incredibly brutal way of life. One of the interesting features that anthropologists remarked upon was the fact that when two people met each other out and about, if they didn't know each other, the first thing they would do is immediately start trying to kill each other.

If you take a cultural evolutionary point of view, then it is clear that these practices evolved because it was the best way to guarantee their own survival, and those tribes and people who behaved this way had a better chance of having offspring and passing on their way of life to the next generation.

Anyway, I don't see any reason to believe that the dark forest of our universe would be any different to the dark forests of West New Guinea.

Re: A Lonely Universe

#46

Post by 7thaccount »

fleddr wrote: post #15
mongol wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not possible that colonizing a galaxy is simply too hard, no matter what intelligence?

Exactly. For an optimist, we might one day colonize Mars. Next, getting out of our solar system is incredibly unlikely as the first habitable destination in our own galaxy is just so far away. Say we stretch our optimism and do make it. Now the colonization of the Milky Way starts. It's a 100,000 light years to the other end. You'd be a completely different species by the time you arrive. Say you achieve that (you wo…

SETI scientist Paul Davies says his belief is that "all biological life is transitory". Essentially a temporary blip on the road to something greater. I assume he just means intelligent life.

Re: A Lonely Universe

#47

Post by beecafe »

kerblang wrote: post #7

Dumb physics question: If a dying civilization 99,000 light years away sent its last radio transmission 100,000 years ago, we'd never know it happened, right? Maybe I'm missing something with those radio waves bouncing back and forth around us off of various big objects in the milky way.

Gravitational lensing could give us a few more chances if they were in just the right place, but the event would have to be really massive (supernova level) for light echoes from interstellar material

Re: A Lonely Universe

#48

Post by 7thaccount »

kingcharles wrote: post #30
Causality1 wrote: post #2

Either intelligent life is rare in the universe or there's something that happens to it that prevents it from what we envision as the future of our own species, i.e., colonizing and spreading among planets. Maybe 99.99% of species ruin their own climate before getting off-world. Maybe they all decide it's happier living as hunter-gatherers. Unless we're alone, there is some fate that's common to all intelligences and…

How about the possibility that perfect VR is invented, every person can live inside their own perfect universe, and the whole species just doesn't give a fuck about exploring the (real) universe? That would stop a civilisation from exporting any spacecraft or signals outside its homeworld.

This is my main theory. Humans will eventually abandon their own bodies and live in a VR world. I think you'd still have massive energy requirements in the real world to deal with of course.

Re: A Lonely Universe

#49

Post by abhishekjha »

kromem wrote: post #33
furyofantares wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fermi paradox makes sense within "just" the milky way, so the size of the entire observable universe or the speed it expands doesn't seem relevant.

"Just the milky way" You mean the collection of stars that's 100,000 light years across? How long has life existed on Earth? Of that time, how long has life on Earth been generating signals that could be detected elsewhere? How much of the Milky Way has recieved those signals by now? 50,000 light year radius squared (let's favor your argument by calculating the milky way disc as 2D area) = 2.5 billion square light ye…

>Of that time, how long has life on Earth been generating signals that could be detected elsewhere?

Earth has a magnetic core and there are million things that generate EM radiation. Earth would have started radiating the moment it was created. It has a magnetic core as well. Now as per if somebody could read it 100000 light years away? Well the Sun was way hotter then and it would have obscured anybody looking this way.

Why aren't we seeing signs now, well maybe the signals are on their way but it may take another 20000 years to get them. I hope there is somebody here to receive and respond back.

Re: A Lonely Universe

#50

Post by hyperpallium2 »

Causality1 wrote: post #2

Either intelligent life is rare in the universe or there's something that happens to it that prevents it from what we envision as the future of our own species, i.e., colonizing and spreading among planets. Maybe 99.99% of species ruin their own climate before getting off-world. Maybe they all decide it's happier living as hunter-gatherers. Unless we're alone, there is some fate that's common to all intelligences and…

  Re: too old
The Moore's law-like analysis of the exponentially increasing comlexity of life over time suggests the time for life of our complexity is... about now. We may he first.
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