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Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

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Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#121

Post by WillReplyfFood »

joe_the_user wrote: post #7
davedx wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that’s the thing, if our galaxy had lots of 20-21st century Earth level civilizations, we would be able to detect them with our existing SETI programmes. Personally I like the hypothesis that states eventually all comms will be encrypted and therefore indistinguishable from white noise.

We could not detect civilizations at our level because standard transmissions decay the square of the distance and so such would be quantum noise by the time they got to the nearest start. And less than that by the time they further.

You can shine a laser at a place where you expect a planet.

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#122

Post by WillReplyfFood »

jules wrote: post #50
joe_the_user wrote: post #2

The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the very reasonable surmise that there must be other forms of technologically advanced life out there somewhere in our great galaxy and the complete lack of any evidence for it. But not quite. This paradox assumes that a more technologically advanced society would naturally expand it's energy usage and output to the point that it could be detected by us. That is, expand…

Or civilisations that reach a certain level go into a slow dysgenic decline because civilisation eliminates natural selection.

Oh, yes natural selection, that mechanism that mindlessly produced creatures adapted to the Loopdeformation (Regrow->Overpopulate->War->Regrow) and pushing for expansion of there speciality in the LD.

Totally something we should bring back. If evolution as a process could be stuck in local minima, then we would think otherwise - but that is heresy.

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#123

Post by pklausler »

vorg wrote: post #118
pklausler wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You miss the point about replication.

In order to replicate, a probe needs material from the star system it's visiting, stuff like iron and silicon. That process is likely to break down after so many journeys, so no more replicants. The probes would put their own AI into the child probes, including their own random defects. It would take a lot of trial and error, each trial being thousands of years, for the likely success of a single journey's replicatio…

You miss the point about replication.

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#124

Post by dwaltrip »

skgoa wrote: post #48
joe_the_user wrote: post #2

The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the very reasonable surmise that there must be other forms of technologically advanced life out there somewhere in our great galaxy and the complete lack of any evidence for it. But not quite. This paradox assumes that a more technologically advanced society would naturally expand it's energy usage and output to the point that it could be detected by us. That is, expand…

That's how I have always viewed this. There is no reason why a civilization would blast out EM waves in a 360°*360° sphere at incredibly high energy levels indiscriminately forever and ever. Instead what we have seen right here on Earth over the last 100 years is that technological progress lets us do ever more with ever less energy. Unless we are talking about detection from a relatively low range, a range where the…

The Fermi paradox isn't only talking about detecting alien civilizations via radio emissions and the like. More likely would be the detection of a civilization that is harvesting a respectable portion of their star's energy. Energy is power, and stars absolutely dwarf any other accessible source.

Once basic space construction is mastered (which we are very close to), large scale solar collection seems a likely path that many civilizations would take. A Dyson swarm would probably be the first step, which would be detectable from very large distances.

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