The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations
livescience.com
The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations
1–10 of 62 posts
Re: The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations
#2It seems equally likely to me that conditions in the Universe just weren't amenable to life until relatively recently.
Radio waves take time to travel; there could be many civilisations out there whose signals haven't had time to reach us.
If that's the case, we're just the first intelligent civilisation to evolve in our immediate vicinity.
Re: The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations
#3Looks like a bullshit paper. This big question mark is: assuming life evolves on a suitable planet, what are the odds that something like an intelligent technological species would ever evolve? We only have one example: us. You can't extrapolate from that, so they just made up numbers.
Re: The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations
#4(2020)
Re: The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations
#5It seems equally likely to me that conditions in the Universe just weren't amenable to life until relatively recently. Radio waves take time to travel; there could be many civilisations out there whose signals haven't had time to reach us. If that's the case, we're just the first intelligent civilisation to evolve in our immediate vicinity.
Not really. Microbes have been around for a long time. And there are more of them today than there are stars in the sky. No intelligence required. Plus they change so fast that what Life looked like yday can look totally different tomorrow.
As Lynn Margulis would say the chimps aren't the main show. Intelligence maybe an over rated and very buggy feature of Life. And the bugs get amplified as the minds interact with each other and group size increases.
The philosophers have talked about the bugs for a long time (see Plato's chariot, Hobbes passion vs reason, Freuds id-ego-superego, Kahnemann's system 1 vs system 2, Haidt's Elephant Rider). The mind needs stories to handle the bugs. And there is no dearth of stories on Earth to keep the 3 inch chimp brain occupied forever.
Re: The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations
#6Looks like a bullshit paper. This big question mark is: assuming life evolves on a suitable planet, what are the odds that something like an intelligent technological species would ever evolve? We only have one example: us. You can't extrapolate from that, so they just made up numbers.
Correct. Obviously no honest person can claim to have an objective way to quantify “intelligent creatures' tendency toward self-annihilation”
Re: The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations
#7If the Milky Way is "full", imagine how many there are in the universe.
Re: The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations
#8WAG in WAG out
Re: The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations
#9It seems equally likely to me that conditions in the Universe just weren't amenable to life until relatively recently. Radio waves take time to travel; there could be many civilisations out there whose signals haven't had time to reach us. If that's the case, we're just the first intelligent civilisation to evolve in our immediate vicinity.
Not really. Microbes have been around for a long time. And there are more of them today than there are stars in the sky. No intelligence required. Plus they change so fast that what Life looked like yday can look totally different tomorrow. As Lynn Margulis would say the chimps aren't the main show. Intelligence maybe an over rated and very buggy feature of Life. And the bugs get amplified as the minds interact with…
If that's the case, we're just the first intelligent civilisation or civilisation of radio-wave-emitting bugs to evolve in our immediate vicinity. :)
Re: The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations
#10It seems equally likely to me that conditions in the Universe just weren't amenable to life until relatively recently. Radio waves take time to travel; there could be many civilisations out there whose signals haven't had time to reach us. If that's the case, we're just the first intelligent civilisation to evolve in our immediate vicinity.
Not really. Microbes have been around for a long time. And there are more of them today than there are stars in the sky. No intelligence required. Plus they change so fast that what Life looked like yday can look totally different tomorrow. As Lynn Margulis would say the chimps aren't the main show. Intelligence maybe an over rated and very buggy feature of Life. And the bugs get amplified as the minds interact with…
All of the evidence we have suggests that the mitochondria-archaea endosymbiosis event that created the eukaryotes has happened only once in our entire history.
If there were no eukaryotes, there'd likely be no way of getting past the energy per gene ceiling that constrains the other two domains of life.