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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

#61

Post by Zarath »

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…

It's also plausible that such societies are non-physical, meaning the content of the society is less about the physical substrate and more about the properties of the system itself

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

#62

Post by dx034 »

pasquinelli wrote: post #52
dx034 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure someone has simulated that but it appears highly likely that a planet with plants (or any carbon based life) will at some point "generate" fossil fuels. And maybe, if we hadn't found oil, we would've come up with more efficient ways to use electricity generated from renewable sources. Would've taken longer but we could've made up for that later in the process. Batteries were known at the time of the oil revo…

or maybe we wouldn't have bothered with electricity because of a lack of energy reserves.

There's plenty of hydro energy available. Not having fossil fuels would've shifted where we settle. Texas would likely be less economically successful compared to Canada which has plenty of hydro capacity and hydro reserves. Long-distance electricity transportation would've come up later making ACs less popular. In the US, that would've favoured the north heavily over the south. In Asia, Singapore would've never been as successful (they say themselves that success came with the AC). Maybe China would've become dominant much earlier.

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

#63

Post by tremon »

dx034 wrote: post #45
ianai wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if all habitable planets with simple life would have the conditions necessary to create oil and coal. Love them or hate them, they still power most of our civilization. Imagine if we did not have a gas/coal readily available? We refined nuclear as a weapon first. The need for a nuclear bomb might not arise in a power constrained civilization and thus go much long before being discovered (if ever)

I'm sure someone has simulated that but it appears highly likely that a planet with plants (or any carbon based life) will at some point "generate" fossil fuels. And maybe, if we hadn't found oil, we would've come up with more efficient ways to use electricity generated from renewable sources. Would've taken longer but we could've made up for that later in the process. Batteries were known at the time of the oil revo…

That's a nice thought experiment. Our capability of harnessing energy from renewable sources (but not electrical energy) covers 3,000 years already: sailing ships and windmills. By the time magnetism and later electricity were discovered, we already had wind-powered propulsion, milling, and water drainage.

What made them impractical for industrial uses (the first applications for coal power were steam-powered textile mills iirc) was the same issue we have with solar and wind today: output is dependent on external factors that we can't control. Coal became valuable exactly because it was the first controllable energy source.

It's hard to imagine us making the same amount of progress without an ever-present energy source (coal caches, fuel tanks, and the electrical energy grid). And it's hard to imagine why we would construct an energy grid without a prior ever-present energy source. Looking at our current means of energy storage, it seems that only hydro-electric storage is a viable option if you discount fossil fuels.

So without fossil fuels, I think an electrical grid could have originated only in very specific locations: lots of wind power, and a natural basin to be converted into a reservoir with relative ease. We would have seen massively different industrial sprawl in such a scenario, and I wonder if such a situation would ever give rise to a truly continental electrical grid like we have now.

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

#64

Post by Chathamization »

pklausler wrote: post #30

We couldn’t detect a remote civilization at a 21st century equivalent stage of development. But at 22nd century level, they’d be able to launch a Bracewell-von Neumann self-replicating interstellar probe... and it would take just one such event to lead to the permanent saturation of the Galaxy by its descendants. So where are they? The only really satisfactory conclusion is that we’re the first or only civilization t…

> The only really satisfactory conclusion is that we’re the first or only civilization to approach a BvN launch.

That's carrying a lot of assumptions. That there's not a probe lying somewhere in the solar system watching us, that aliens haven't found a better way to observe us than probes, that they even care about observing us in the first place. Take the last one for example - 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone. It's entirely possible that we're not important enough for advanced societies to care, the way you're not going to stop and mess with every random anthill you pass by.

Imagine a couple of tigers talking. "Someone says there are 9 billion humans in the world." "That makes no sense. Take the amount of good hunting habitats in the world, divide it by the amount of territory an adult male would need to call their own, and divide that by the number of humans. You would have multiple humans fighting for each chunk of territory, and marking their scent everywhere. Yet I don't smell any human urine so the question is...where is everyone?"

As an aside, why do people focus so much on self replicating probes? Assuming aliens did want to send out a probe fleet - why not simply mass produce probes in one system (or a handful of systems) and send each in turn to their destinations? Having to accelerate, decelerate, build a probe, have the new one accelerate, decelerate, build another probe, have this new one accelerate, decelerate, etc., seems like it would take a lot longer than simply sending a probe directly to its destination (no need to constantly decelerate along the way, no need to waste energy moving replication units, etc.).

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

#65

Post by ioulian »

nerfhammer wrote: post #31
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 they might realize the universe is just inherently a dangerous place and design their own little universe to go inhabit. Peacefully exiting the universe.

What I've always thought about is if all life eventually struggles for power and destroys itself? Imaging what would happen if the whole world just worked together!

Is this something that is in our DNA, to be on top of everyone? 1% controlling the whole world, limiting their potential... Can we someday put aside our differences and work towards the same goal? Life on earth (humans and animals) don't really work together on a global scale. Is this only because of our nature, here on earth, that we need to destroy thing to live well (coal, forests, animals as food, ...)

Maybe there there are planets that have excess minerals, resources to build starships without killing their environment, without the need of wars (for oil for example).

Haven't we just had bad luck, being evolved on a planet with limiting resources, or just bad luck that we chose to use limited resources for our civilisation, or just bad luck that we need limited resources to survive? Are there a lot of civilisations struggling with the same problems? Or maybe there are aliens that can just drink water to survive and fly to other suns with just oxygen (just to make a silly example)?

This was kind of a response to "Can a civilisation really peacefully exist without destroying itself or the rest of the universe".

On the other note, imagination is such a big advantage of humans, we can achieve so much just by using our imagination. Also the whole topic of "Are we alone and where is the rest" is so interesting!

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

#68

Post by ssijak »

prmph wrote: post #54

Or, it could just be that there are simply no other civilizations other than ours. I don't see why that is not an acceptable possibility

Who said it is not acceptable. But many would just say it is more improbable than the other option.

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

#69

Post by KineticLensman »

davedx wrote: post #60
ajuc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's around 512 G-type stars in 100 light years radius around us. That's not many. Milky Way radius is 100 000 light years. If our galaxy had lots of civilizations that just learned radio in last 100 years - odds are quite high that we wouldn't be able to detect them YET, even if we had the technology to do so.

I understand the probabilities involved. The OP made a rather extreme claim that 'the universe could full of earth-level societies and we wouldn't know'. If all 512 G-type stars in 100 light years had earth-level societies, we would be able to detect their higher powered radio transmissions. Right?

Only those transmissions that were timed (travelling at the speed of light) to arrive in the small number of decades where we have been listening. Other constraints may also apply

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

#70

Post by quickben »

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.

I am not at a PC right now, but I can see your point. To counter, Seti should catch anything really high powered. Whether or not a civilization can operate something at that level of power, is a thought experiment.

But, still, they sift the skies, at least we are trying right ? :D

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