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Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

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Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#111

Post by carapace »

taylorswift_ wrote: post #109
carapace wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where is this lake in WA state? I' don't know. Even if I knew I wouldn't say in a public forum like this, it would be irresponsible. > have you been there? No. If I wanted to talk to aliens I wouldn't go rubbernecking at them like a yokel. > are you reptilian? We're all reptilian. ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory The "reptilian" thing is a human psyc…

but how do you know it exists if you've never been there? who told you? > there are no reptile aliens secretly ruling Earth. perhaps not ruling it...

Look, my basic point is that we're not alone, rather nobody wants to talk to us because we're terrifying ravenous monsters.

> but how do you know it exists if you've never been there? who told you?

I can't tell you that in a public forum. And again, even if I could I wouldn't. Either you don't believe me in which case what's the point? Or, worse, you do believe me and want to go there.

I'm not interested in helping anyone talk to aliens, it's just frustrating to me personally whenever the subject of the Fermi Paradox comes up because it's such a foolish question.

The critical issue people are dealing with whether it's UFOs, reptilians, crop circles, bigfoot, pyramid power, crystals, etc... it's all one thing: where is the edge of consensus reality?

To me, the important thing is this: if we don't learn to live in harmony with Nature, and damn quickly, we're going to crash our world civilization.

We don't need aliens to fix our shit. We have the technology and the understanding, it's really down to our fundamental nature: do we wake up and course-correct fast enough or will the oceans rise and wipe us out, leaving a world-wide desert and tropical regions at the poles?

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#112

Post by perl4ever »

vertexFarm wrote: post #45
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…

The most interesting option (danger: my dumbass opinions ahead) for why there's no other communicating species in radio range is whether there's a great filter right under our nose. If we can ever prove that there's plenty of planets and plenty of abiogenesis and plenty of multicellular things out there that just don't know how to make radio waves, then either the leap to technology is exceedingly rare or we are in v…

"Most of our biome is still matter which is not life, and it's been here for billions of years."

Our planet is called Earth you know, which also means dirt. Because it seems to be covered in organic matter. If your perspective was correct, wouldn't we call the planet "Rock" or something?

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#113

Post by ExactoKnight »

mirimir wrote: post #16
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…

Agreed. This is just picking parameters consistent with no detection of extraterrestrial civilizations. The point of the Fermi paradox is that it's a stretch to assume such parameters. It's not prediction about extraterrestrial civilizations collapsing or whatever. It's just an alternative to consider. And perhaps a warning about shouting at the Universe. Although it's probably too late to fret too much about that.

> And perhaps a warning about shouting at the Universe. Although it's probably too late to fret too much about that.

Any civilization sufficiently advanced to threaten us already has the capability to see we exist. For those with a large enough telescope, we have been emitting signs of life to the rest of the galaxy for billions of years.

It's only more recently that we have been showing signs of intelligent life (through radio waves and changes to our environment). These signs have not yet propagated throughout much of the galaxy yet, and there is a good argument we ought to get as advanced as possible as quickly as possible, so we can defend ourselves before others become aware of our intelligent existence.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#114

Post by taylorswift_ »

carapace wrote: post #111
taylorswift_ wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but how do you know it exists if you've never been there? who told you? > there are no reptile aliens secretly ruling Earth. perhaps not ruling it...

Look, my basic point is that we're not alone, rather nobody wants to talk to us because we're terrifying ravenous monsters. > but how do you know it exists if you've never been there? who told you? I can't tell you that in a public forum. And again, even if I could I wouldn't. Either you don't believe me in which case what's the point? Or, worse, you do believe me and want to go there. I'm not interested in helping a…

Oh I'd love to go to that lake...

I agree it's foolish conjecture and I believe we are certainly not "alone". I had an experience when I was 10 that infused fear and curiosity in me.

I'd like to say I am hopeful about our future but we are just evolved organisms from a long chain of creatures designed to compete for survival... it's in our own nature to self-destruct.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#115

Post by adrianN »

ghaff wrote: post #42
adrianN wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interstellar travel is definitely possible. The only question is how long the trips take. You can build nuclear pulse propulsion vessels fairly easily that can reach a few percent of the speed of light. Those things can cross the Milky Way in less than ten million years.

I wouldn't use the term "definitely." But it looks like "just" a (very hard) engineering problem [i.e. no known fundamental reasons why it's impossible]. And humans are pretty good at solving engineering problems over relatively short periods of time. ADDED: There are also questions of resources, motivations, and e.g. whether we'd even want to build self-replicating probes.

No, speed is the hard engineering problem. The Voyager probes for example have reached escape velocity from our solar system. That's fairly primitive rocket technology.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#116

Post by jandrese »

greglindahl wrote: post #84
TeMPOraL wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

There are a bunch of scifi novels that explore the issue, and most of them feature bad things that result.

To be fair, if it turned out all hunky dory then the novel wouldn't be very exciting. Sometimes the downsides are rather contrived.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#118

Post by adrianN »

rtkwe wrote: post #59
adrianN wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Earth is full of machines that are capable of self-reproduction (e.g. bacteria), and some of them are clever enough to build rockets, so I don't think it's such a big stretch to assume that von Neumann probes are possible.

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#119

Post by gmuslera »

jobigoud wrote: post #82
gmuslera wrote: post #75

The reasoning seem to be "as we don't have enough data, lets conclude whatever I want". The Fermi paradox assumes that if there are aliens more advanced than us somewhere for a long time, they should be here by now. Maybe more advanced technology enables interstellar travel (maybe not, maybe is not practical at all), maybe they may not have all our motivations (expansion, technological advancement in our own focus, e…

When talking about the Fermi Paradox it's not about what this or that extra-terrestrial civilization might do. It's about what none of them is doing. When you say "maybe they don't want to expand", if you want this to explain the paradox, you actually mean "none of them want to expand". Because if just one did, we would see it.

Is not "none of them" but "all the ones that reached certain knowledge level", after you know something, you avoid expanding or showing yourself.

The dark forest idea comes from Liu Cixin Three Body Problem trilogy, if you show yourself you risk being destroyed by even more powerful civilizations that are hidden in the dark. And they are hidden because are afraid that the same happens to them, with a third one or with the one they destroyed after they advanced enough.

It is not the only possible reason, just one of the possible things that we don't know (or even don't know that we don't know) that can disprove or at least atenuate enough the paradox hypothesis.

Can be like explaining a caveman why you can't make a building high enough to reach the moon, so far he knows would be doable and even desirable for us, so why we didn't built one yet?

Re: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

#120

Post by pfdietz »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #19
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…

>We can’t hope to colonize even a fraction of 1% of our galaxy, even with wildly futuristic technology. If you can do any colonization at all it shouldn't be that much harder to colonize the whole galaxy. Once you've got the ability to colonize exponential growth will take over and pretty soon* you'll be everywhere. *In the context of the Fermi paradox, we're wondering why no aliens have already colonized the galaxy…

We're also wondering why we haven't seen any other galaxy that's been fully colonized and industrialized. K3 civilizations would be detectable at cosmological distances.
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