Basically he purposes that there is either a barrier somewhere before our point of biological progress or after; as he explains in the video, the desired reality is that we have already surpassed that barrier. He reasons that space travel is a simple engineering challenge compared to evolving intelligent life on the cosmological scale, so there's less reason to believe the barrier lies after our point of progress.
Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens
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Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens
#32Has anyone thought about this...astronauts release their waste into space. There's bacteria that gets frozen almost as soon as it leaves the ship/space station right? Couldn't it stay preserved until it lands on a distant planet that hasn't formed an atmosphere and be the seeds for life on infant planets? I'm no physicist (or scientist, period), but it's just a question that's been bugging me for a while.
Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens
#33If alien species limited themselves to entertainment for such a long time, then where are the broadcasts from other solar systems? On the other hand, recent studies apparently hint that things like electrical and gravitational constants may not be the same everywhere, so maybe they don't transmit their signals with light. One more thing is that the argument that the age of the universe combined with its propensity to…
Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens
#34The technology-enslavement theory is bunk because humans pretty much tend to self-correct over time. We start destroying the environment, somebody notices, we start pulling back on our rampant destruction enough to keep things operating. An epidemic of fat kids goes on, people start complaining, and schools begin the process of sort-of making their lunches healthier. If it got so bad that we almost destroy ourselves from too much internet use somebody would start complaining and we'd reign back on that too.
Probably the real reason we haven't met any is that they probably have agreements that they don't come down and show themselves to new planets until the new planet's peoples advance their space technology to an appropriate level; ours is still kind of dark-ages technology. Maybe after the military invests we can have a nice big boom in space travel.
Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens
#35Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens
#36The physicist David Deutsch makes the point that there is no real way to distinguish a consistent, convincing virtual reality from reality itself. Therefore, there is no real moral difference between richly populating such virtual worlds (once we can construct them--we can't quite, yet) and populating actual other planets. Nick Bostrom would say that even using the word "actual" is probably wrong, since we're likely…
Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens
#37The universe is a big place. There are probably trillions of habitable planets. We're just not that special. Maybe one day, if we somehow become "worth it", they'll stop by.
Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens
#38Evolution simply could never have anticipated...
Evolution, by definition, doesn't anticipate anything. It's disappointing to see a university professor writing on evolution who seemingly doesn't even understand the evolutionary process.
Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens
#39Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens
#40b) We can't begin to conceive of the sort of technological advances achieved by other lifeforms. The fermi paradox rests on probabilities accumulated over billions of years, but ignores how briefly human intelligence has existed - the written word is only a few thousand years old. If your species advances to the point of being able comprehend and control all of reality, is there much point in having endlessly bigger LCDs powered by your awesome discworld, built by your giant starfleet? Is our faith in the inevitability of endless growth and expansion not itself a sort of primitive cargo cult?
If the entire process of going from advanced social being with primitive tools and language to a post-physical singularity takes on average 50,000 years, the drake equation need changing