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Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

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Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#211

Post by jerf »

HilbertSpace wrote: post #164
gizmo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First nearly every civilization that mastered, say, radio, did it millions of years ago So then we'd expect to receive signals from civilizations that are a few million light years away. Yet we don't see those signals. We're too young a civilization to be spotted by other life forms (as you said, they'd have to be within a 100 light years or so). But when we look at space in any direction it looks dead. Just backgr…

A point in my guess is that an old civilization won't be trying to use radio to communicate with us and will be using something better than radio we don't know about. Next, for communications over 1000 light years with just radio, there can be some issues of signal to noise ratio! Sure, we can see a star 1000 light years away, a galaxy 1 billion light years away, and a quasar 10 billion light years away, but a signal…

"A point in my guess is that an old civilization won't be trying to use radio to communicate with us and will be using something better than radio we don't know about."

While a popular conjecture in this recurring debate, over the decades we've built up an awful lot of evidence that there really is no better mechanism for distance communication than electromagnetic radiation. We're running out of places for such putatively better mechanisms to hide.

I dislike this line of argument in the modern time, because it conflates two discussions, "what we scientifically know about the universe", and "could conceivable be true even though we have no evidence for our conjectures". While the second may be superficially more fun, it's ultimately a waste of time for any sort of serious discussion because you can hypothesize anything you want. It's content-free, despite the haze of words you can throw up. The first is much more interesting, and while 50 years ago one could still hypothesize better communication mechanisms, I think the argument when used in a serious discussion is out of date. We can name some non-EM communication mechanisms (neutrino beams, for instance), but they all suck horribly by comparison.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#212

Post by fennecfoxen »

dextorious wrote: post #198
jseliger wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they're doing very well. It's very rare to pick up a device that does just one thing -- the days of the wristwatch and one-function cell-phone are gone. Now everything you touch is competing to take up all your braindwidth. Information is not passive any more; it's sticky. As a consumer you are not a entity who receives services from a webapp. This removes human agency, and it's only true if we, as individuals, w…

"""This removes human agency, and it's only true if we, as individuals, want it to be true. (I'm 28, wear a watch, and use a paper notebook ( http://jseliger.com/2011/05/11/eight-years-of-writing-and-th... ) in addition to having an iPhone; but the iPhone only takes up as much mental bandwidth as I let it).""" Yeah. So on top of owning an iPhone, you are also a hipster with a (trendy but useless, considering the iPho…

Seriously? A watch costs as little as $2 and goes on your wrist. You will never need to reach into your pocket or bag for it. It will run for months, or years, on a single battery. You will probably never drop it and break it. Unless it's stupidly expensive, you will probably never be mugged for your watch.

Anyway, Moleskine is nice but Miquel Rius notebooks have nicer grid paper options. :)

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#213

Post by balsam »

I always felt that the Dafoe vehicle "The Last Temptation of Christ" was scifi-ish in some obscure way. Thank you, the thing to do was to replace "Heaven" with "Outer Space". Everything goes back into its skin.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#215

Post by HilbertSpace »

jerf wrote: post #211
HilbertSpace wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A point in my guess is that an old civilization won't be trying to use radio to communicate with us and will be using something better than radio we don't know about. Next, for communications over 1000 light years with just radio, there can be some issues of signal to noise ratio! Sure, we can see a star 1000 light years away, a galaxy 1 billion light years away, and a quasar 10 billion light years away, but a signal…

"A point in my guess is that an old civilization won't be trying to use radio to communicate with us and will be using something better than radio we don't know about." While a popular conjecture in this recurring debate, over the decades we've built up an awful lot of evidence that there really is no better mechanism for distance communication than electromagnetic radiation. We're running out of places for such puta…

That we don't know everything is scientifically rock solid!

Your point is mostly that the stuff we don't know is bad science; I agree.

Still, this thread is to try to answer the question, where is ET?

Historically it would have been better to assume that there was stuff unknown that was better as an explanation than the stuff we did know, going WAY back: The Earth is a ball riding on the back of a turtle? We understood balls and turtles but not gravity of spheres! The earth is a ball held up by Hercules? Similar. To keep the sun moving across the sky we have to pour blood on this special rock? The planets are from wheels rolling in wheels? The stars are light coming through holes in ths sky? The sun is a fire based on coal? The Milky Way is all of the universe? The universe is expanding so there are just three cases, (1) keep expanding but more and more slowly, (2) stop expanding and reach 'steady state', (3) quit expanding and contract into a big crunch. It was ALL wrong! And in all cases the right answer was from things we didn't know yet!

For "We're running out of places for such putatively better mechanisms to hide". Ah, it's always been such! Where was Newton going to look for a solution to the orbit of Mercury? Where was Newton going to look for why he couldn't make gold with chemical reactions? The big bang seems to have things moving faster than the speed of light; where to look? We're not getting the right flow rate of neutrinos from the sun; where to look? Essentially all life on earth is just from DNA; so where to look for the reason there is no other mechanism?

But just now we have at least two biggie places to look: Dark matter and dark energy. About both, we don't have hardly a clue. We are unsure about the Higgs field. We haven't unified gravity. We haven't detected gravitational waves. We're unsure about why galaxies have black holes at their centers. There remain questiona about the 'size' of our universe, especially given the evidence about the flatness of the geometry. We're really mixed up about EPR.

But not all is lost! Some of the new telescopes on the way into orbit are amazing, maybe count the hairs on the back of ETs head! Maybe!

So, why haven't we heard from ET? My guess, stated as just a guess, is that ET communicates by means we don't understand yet. Is this answer solid science? Nope! Might it be correct? Yup! Is there some historical, circumstantial evidence for it? Yup. Are we still in the dark? Yup.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#216

Post by khafra »

jerf wrote: post #193

There are so, so many things wrong with this line of arguing presented as The Solution that I'll just present my two biggest. First, as a solution to the Fermi paradox this must mean that ALL the millions of species with quintillions of individuals MUST always prefer to retreat into virtual reality AND completely forget about reality. Most putative solutions to the Fermi paradox have this problem. It isn't enough to…

> the Rare Earth hypothesis

That's certainly the end of the Great Filter I'd prefer to be the significant one. Let's hope for no microorganisms on Mars, Titan, or Europa!

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#217

Post by dextorious »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #212
dextorious wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""This removes human agency, and it's only true if we, as individuals, want it to be true. (I'm 28, wear a watch, and use a paper notebook ( http://jseliger.com/2011/05/11/eight-years-of-writing-and-th... ) in addition to having an iPhone; but the iPhone only takes up as much mental bandwidth as I let it).""" Yeah. So on top of owning an iPhone, you are also a hipster with a (trendy but useless, considering the iPho…

Seriously? A watch costs as little as $2 and goes on your wrist. You will never need to reach into your pocket or bag for it. It will run for months, or years, on a single battery. You will probably never drop it and break it. Unless it's stupidly expensive, you will probably never be mugged for your watch. Anyway, Moleskine is nice but Miquel Rius notebooks have nicer grid paper options. :)

"""Seriously? A watch costs as little as $2 and goes on your wrist. You will never need to reach into your pocket or bag for it. It will run for months, or years, on a single battery. You will probably never drop it and break it. Unless it's stupidly expensive, you will probably never be mugged for your watch."""

My point was not that the watch itself was stealing his mental bandwidth, but rather hipster culture.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#218

Post by snowwrestler »

redwood wrote: post #52
ccc3 wrote: post #38

At some point in the article he states: Evolution 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.

I'm sorry but this is a way of speaking that doesn't necessarily imply he believes in an evolution capable of cognition. It's a short hand for saying "humans evolved in situations so unlike the situation they have today, that the traits they evolved are no longer best-suited for survival in today's world"

It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the traits related to cognition. Our "selfish genes" do not tell us how to think; instead cognition represents a delegation of authority from the genes to the carrier. We are attracted to porn, yes, but we are also aware that we are attracted to porn. Thus as some citizens descended into opium stupor, others observed that descent and made conscious choices to avoid it. As a result, human society did not devolve into one big opium den. Just like it will not devolve into one big World of Warcraft game.

The real reason we have not heard from aliens is that the distances are physically impossible to bridge.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#219

Post by rationalbeaver »

incandenza wrote: post #130
HilbertSpace wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possible answer: First nearly every civilization that mastered, say, radio, did it millions of years ago. Second, nearly every such civilization long ago found much better means of communications than we know about. Third, they realize that trying to communicate via radio is silly and use much better means we don't know about. Net, they are out there and communicating, but we don't hear them and they don't hear us or…

That is my preferred explanation as well. A caveman would not notice a WiFi signal even if it was blasting right through the cave; he would probably be looking for smoke signals or something. Also, a huge intelligence gap makes communication uninteresting. e.g. we know a little bit about how ants communicate via pheromones, but we're not trying to send "messages" to them; what would it possibly be useful to say?

"Stay the hell out of my kitchen" comes to mind. :)

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#220

Post by maaku »

HilbertSpace wrote: post #47
exratione wrote: post #19

A terrible article. So let's say something more interesting. There are several important ideas intertwined together around the Fermi Paradox: 1) Fermi Paradox Why haven't we seen any evidence in the observable universe of megascale activities and exponential growth comparable to those that we know that our descendants will be capable of, and fairly soon? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox 2) The Outer Bounds…

Possible answer: First nearly every civilization that mastered, say, radio, did it millions of years ago. Second, nearly every such civilization long ago found much better means of communications than we know about. Third, they realize that trying to communicate via radio is silly and use much better means we don't know about. Net, they are out there and communicating, but we don't hear them and they don't hear us or…

The issue is not radio waves--it's Dyson spheres (look it up). It does not take very long at all for a space-faring civilization to advance to such a point that it's artifacts would be (spectrographically) visible from our telescopes today.

It doesn't have to be Dyson spheres either. A large object moving near the speed of light through the interstellar medium would give off one of a few very specific and very strong spectral lines. Now there hasn't been a concerted effort to look for interstellar travelers, but nevertheless in all our years of searching such oddities haven't shown up.

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