One of my favorite explanations is that there are other ET out there but they are two engrossed with their own entertainment to "give a fuck" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#They_tend_to_iso...). I find it amusing and ironic while also seriously consider it a possibility.
From wikipedia:
It may also be that intelligent alien life develop an "increasing disinterest" in their outside world.[71] Possibly any sufficiently advanced society will develop highly engaging media and entertainment well before the capacity for advanced space travel, and that the rate of appeal of these social contrivances is destined, because of their inherent reduced complexity, to overtake any desire for complex, expensive endeavors such as space exploration and communication. Once any sufficiently advanced civilization becomes able to master its environment, and most of its physical needs are met through technology, various "social and entertainment technologies", including virtual reality, are postulated to become the primary drivers and motivations of that civilization.[72]
aka Star Trek holodeck.... the best drug in the future.
"Lets say we have an ant hill in the middle of the forest. And right next to the ant hill, they're building a ten-lane super-highway. And the question is 'Would the ants be able to understand what a ten-lane super-highway is? Would the ants be able to understand the technology and the intentions of the beings building the highway next to them?"
So it's not that we can't pick up the signals from other worlds using our technology, it's that we can't even comprehend what the beings from Planet X are or what they're trying to do. It's so beyond us that even if they really wanted to enlighten us, it would be like trying to teach ants about the internet."
If there are structured radio signals being emitted, it matters not whether or not we understand what the aliens are up to, if it hits a sweetspot between noise and simplicity we can tell it's a signal. And no, "radio waves" aren't the equivalent of "smoke signals", if there are better ways to communicate across space, that would change a lot our understanding of physics. This isn't to say that our understanding is complete, but the default assumption should be that it's very unlikely that there is a better way to communicate long distance.
Compression is an issue in that respect, but that's a different argument.
What if the super-advanced aliens are us?
Its quite likely the beings from planet X understand omnidirectional broadcast electromagnetic waves as an interstellar communications network technology about as well as your average software developer understands arcnet or 10base5 ethernet or flint-knapping.
We've got questions to answer before we make these analogies. What does intelligence mean, in the context of ability to understand such things? Is it a hurdle that we are over or a continuous scale from slug to alien? From our (admittedly biased) perspective, it seems to be.
Following from that, all these analogies about advanced civilizations destroying themselves, their planets, living in cerebra-utopian VR. These are all analogies to us, the only "intelligent" creatures we know. They're also based on a very brief period of civilization where we have been able to even conceive of our impact on the planet. Until people went to the moon, how strongly lodged in people's minds was the idea that we are on a planet?
We are not even good about extrapolating 100 years into our own future. People thought factories and technologies would lead to 2 hour workdays and a pleasure society now. How good could we be at making analogies to creatures we don't know exist.
Radio SETI is the most popular, but searches have been done in a wide variety of ways. For instance, A search for a complete Dyson swarm can be done by looking for "stars" which only emit radiation in the far infrared. Partial Dyson swarms can be detected by comparing the mag of a star at two different wavelengths. Megastructures are potentially detectable via the tranit method. And searches have been done to look for signs of galactic engineering.
I'm still willing to entertain the idea that Kaku is correct, but it mostly just seems like wishful thinking to me.
The evidence thus far suggests that even if life is everywhere in the universe, technological life may not be.
I think as far as we know, ant's don't even ask themselves the question "what is this ant hill". Human cosmologists, on the other hand, seek an explanation for everything that they see in the cosmos. The only way some alien phenomena would be ignored would be if it seemed to have the qualities of some apparently easily explained phenomena. This is certainly possible but it seems unlikely it would happen by accident - cosmology's models for ordinary, unexceptional stars, nebula and galaxies are all fairly detailed.
Maybe they'll just wait for the ants to start to build roads. Maybe what we think are roads (Electromagnetic waves) are to the beings as scent trails are to ants.
I think there may be many "Great Filters" to explain the Fermi paradox, and the rise of metazoans may be one of those filters. But I'm not necessarily convinced that complex life requires, for instance, a large moon to stablize the tilt of the planet. Evolution seems a little more robust to me.
I do not know if they mention this in the book or not, but I am afraid that the transition to land may be infrequent (many worlds may not even have land above sea level). Even if dolphins or whales were as intelligent as people want to believe, they are unlikely to ever develop space travel or even radio communication.
I'm equally on the fence about the mediocrity principle. Maybe complex life takes a long, long time and Earth somehow got lucky. We are already freaks because we orbit a G-type star. Most stars are M-type (red dwarfs). They are very long lived and have plenty of time for life to form and evolve on planets around them. Put another way, maybe somehow we are just "first".
That's only something you can say with n size=1 (human civilization). We have no idea if intelligent species out there with similar capacities as humans would actually think in the same way or not. Let's not assume every intelligence out there is just like ours.
Similar to the original entertainment idea is to imagine though a super intelligence that understands almost everything. What goals would it have? What would it do? Its hard to imagine anything motivating other than perhaps itself. But to your point who knows however its still fun to think about.
Let's remember that Castro was begging the Soviets for a nuclear strike against the US and Khrushchev had to fight off a Politburo that wanted nuclear war during the crisis.
I can't see any reason why this wouldn't happen. Bigger guns means bigger consquences and eventually you'll have a war with the biggest guns - nukes or biological or grey goo or whatever and life will end. Funny how the most obvious answer is almost the most horrifying, thus all the silly suggestions about aliens becoming VR addicts or trans-dimensional supermen or whatever.
Let's say that life on another planet 150 million billion miles away wanted to send us a message. So that's 25,000 light years away. They send us one single 1 minute duration message at t=0 and that message travels at the speed of light as an example. And let's just say t=25000 happens to be today. Does that mean that we have a one minute window to intercept part of the message otherwise it's lost?
If so, let's say the life on that planet was persistent and continued to send messages continuously directly to us and no other planets for 500 years. Then I would assume we have a 500 year period to play with. If they started sending signals let's say 10,000 years ago, it seems we have absolutely no chance to receive the message unless this program is operational for the next 15,000 years or so. But our odds of receiving an intelligent signal is vastly higher simply due to the number of planets in our galaxy. Is my understanding remotely correct?
Even for intentional messages, it's certainly conceivable that another civilization with sufficient power simply transmits the message in all direction continuously.
I think that scenario would imply a relative scarcity of intelligent life: after all, if a space-faring civilization needs to transmit powerful, omnidirectional signals in the blind, it must be pretty lonely. Maybe, just maybe, the fact that we're not seeing much is actually indicative of a fairly rich sea of life in the galaxy, communicating point-to-point with each other. Not so much to randomly overhear in that world.
The Lunar X Prize might have been that project but it doesn't seem to be making progress:
A carrier costs roughly $12 billion, and costs about $1.5 billion per year in operational costs.
People really have no concept of how much NASA costs. They think NASA gets an insane amount of money. We'd have moon bases and maybe even a Mars base if NASA got the funding people think they get.
1. Tech development: It requires changes in thinking, tools, procedures etc. Perhaps harder than tech itself is to acquire the required mindset.
2. Legal: Space law is fun but complex once it goes into the details. US laws like ITAR (now a bit milder than before) haunt us. Plus plenty of other laws.
3. Funding: It's hard to make business cases for a (literal) moonshot. Sponsorship and payload are the main revenue sources, but most teams don't succeed. Their story (or presentation) is not exciting or convincing, their team is not adequate (skills, mentality, manpower), so they don't get sponsors, investors, or customers. Or they're just in a country where risk is not rewarded or capital is absent.
4. Launch: Finding the right rocket is important; it influences spacecraft design. Then negotiating a contract and sticking to it. Many hurdles. And it's expensive before the launch. Launch is the biggest cost center.
5. Politics: XPRIZE Foundation is a US org, so US law and politics determine much of what you (not) do, e.g. avoid tech or people from blacklisted countries. Or when geopolitics kicks in and the rocket in another country suddenly or potentially becomes unavailable.
And much more. So we're making progress. But it's not something we talk about much.
I just realize that I wrote the five points above in a kind of negative tone. They're not. E.g. once you have the required mindset, you're filled with nearly unshakable certainty about what you do and why. Laws are solved problems--or when they work on them, they make open problems pretty clear. The pressure to find business cases makes you think hard about what is possible and economical at what time, you start to see a roadmap of doable things until you reach your goal; after all to kickstart private space is one of the GLXP's intentions. The launch sector is a funny business, you meet interesting people and it gives you insights into one of the greatest filters that still stops humanity from going into space at large scales. Politics is not always a burden, it can also be a source of support and goodwill; e.g. if you align interests and avoid stepping on the wrong toes, it can be very helpful.
So, yeah, space is hard. But we're getting there.
The imaging and spectroscopy of exoplanets has proceeded quickly [1] and in a not-too-distant future we may be able to roughly analyze the composition of the atmospheres of exoplanets.
Now, given that microbial life formed on earth pretty much right after the young planet had cooled down, it may not be too far fetched to hope to find a planet with oxygen in its atmosphere, signaling the presence of at least microbial life.
Now that would be something.
[1] http://www.pppl.gov/events/colloquium-adaptive-optics-imagin...
It's cool to hear that people are podcasting about it. I'm glad you were able to plug them on HN.
By comparison private wealth in all of Europe is about $60 to $65 trillion. [2]
[1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/Current/z1.pdf
[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/01/us-europe-wealth-s...
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/apr/26/stephen...
Voyager 1 and 2 both carry with them a 12-inch golden phonograph record
that contains pictures and sounds of Earth along with symbolic directions
on the cover for playing the record and data detailing the location of
our planet. The record is intended as a combination of a time capsule
and an interstellar message to any civilization, alien or far-future
human that may recover either of the Voyager craft. The contents of this
record were selected by a committee that included Timothy Ferris and
was chaired by Carl Sagan.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#Voyager_Golden...
________________________________________________________
Edit:
Voyager has on board antennas and a sufficiently intelligent civilization would be quite interested in intercepting a spacecraft which seems to be on a mission to somewhere carrying <creator>-knows-what.
So let's say that by examining the petabytes of data that's received from the telescopes, at some point a signal is detected.
Let's say that somehow all the competing scientests and skeptics, religious and opinion leaders magically and peacefully agree: the signal is from an inteligent life form. Somewhere close, just a couple of hundred light years away ...
Then what ?
Do we build rockets to travel there ? Do we 'tune-in' and decipher the signal ? Do we send them our own signals in the hope that they are listening ?
In fact, a much harder task would be to prove that life absolutely doesn't exist anywhere else in the Universe.
So we instinctively believe, but we still want proof. So would the SETI thing provide that definite proof ?
In many ways this is similar to 'does life exist after death'. Either way you stand, it's impossible to absolutely prove it, but some day everyone will definetely find out ;).
Edit: Does anyone know the current thinking of the odds that information could be able to travel faster than light, ie a wormhole? As far as I know they are very slim.
It's rich people playing with their toys.
On the other hand, if they spent their energy sending ships, they would eventually find us, and they would learn phenomenally about technology, science and their place in the world, even before they reach us.
That's sounds like exactly the sort of outcome we want, regardless of what else happens.
Aliens probably use Brainfuck [1], so we need a substantial increase in Brainfuck AI research. Some modern-day Kennedy needs to step up to this challenge.
Maybe the Universe's scale compared to our physical form has a purpose. Maybe it's intended to not be traversed physcally. Maybe that's the most obvious conclusion an intelligent life form might draw from analyzing it's scale ?
Maybe in the future we will understand it just like the aliens we're looking for did a long time ago - that the way to communicate in this Universe does not involve physical travel or physical signals.
Just look up some pictures of Pablo Amaringo - a shaman making drawings of his trips on ayahuasca. Notice the 'aliens' and the galaxies and the the distant worlds that he is visiting while tripping.
Anyone who has been on powerful psychedelic trips would agree that there is a lot of stuff to explain there, besides just the brain reaction to a chemical. Stuff like traveling through time, out of the Universe, into the microcosmos, before and after life, etc.
People did this for thousands of years - they used terms such as 'spirits', 'beings' and 'gods' to describe who they made contact with.
But what if those substances are more than just intoxicants, what if they really trigger some unknown mind-space-time gateway which we haven't yet tapped scientifically, which makes space and time travel possible. What if we could approach this scientifically and actually make these trips predictable and repeatable ?
What if the aliens are actually just high tech savages using advanced psychedelic drugs + mind machines to travel and explore time and space, while sitting in a forest around a fire ?
We should start exploring the inner space just like we are exploring the outer space. When will we see $100m invested in that ? :)
We already have: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/why-spend-...
And I'm sorry to tell you that I think brain science does a good job at explaining perception when intoxicated without invoking "other stuff out there"
It would be so easy if it were that easy...
And brain science can't explain too much, because it couldn't research these substances, since they're illegal everywhere in the world.
Edit:
Long story short - take the red pill and you'll see for yourself how little we understand about the mind and the Universe.
Or maybe, the Creator just said "let me see how far these guys will go?"
I suspect even if this is unsuccessful at finding ET, it will do lots of awesome other things.
And if it is successful in finding ET, then it's probably the most significant possible discovery.
If the livestream is overlaid with page elements for you as well, try this URL:
http://livestream.com/accounts/6714632/events/4205486/player...
Secondly, although it's hugely unlikely they'll find anything, in the event that they do it'll fundamentally change our perspective of who we are and where our place is in the universe. The outcome, while improbable, is so huge it's still worthwhile trying.
The same can be said about digging holes and filling them afterwards.
Yes, space is vast but once upon a time the ocean was too.
Or would it have to "stand still" out there, which would make it fall back to earth?
Technically, a satellite could be parked in a Lagrange Point. But the signal would have to be very, very convincing because there will be many, many very smart people looking at it.
ATM, a manned mars mission is in the "very hard and expensive" file. Unmanned missions to anywhere in our solar system are doable on smaller budgets. We can use telescopes to look much further. In all cases information is being moved back and forward between earth and space.
But even robotic missions are very limited. We just had our first flyby of Pluto (not an orbiter). Jupiter doesn't get an orbiter until 2016 (Juno). No orbiters around Neptune or Uranus. So, lots still left to explore and observe with probes in our own solar system.
The Dominant Life Form in the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots
“If they were interested in us, we probably wouldn’t be here,” said Schneider. “My gut feeling is their goals and incentives are so different from ours, they’re not going to want to contact us.”
That’s a welcome divergence from Steven Hawking’s claim that advanced aliens might be nomads, looking to strip resources from whatever planets they can, and that all efforts to contact said aliens may end in our own demise.
“I’d have to agree with Susan on them not being interested in us at all,” Shostak said. We're just too simplistic, too irrelevant. “You don’t spend a whole lot of time hanging out reading books with your goldfish. On the other hand, you don’t really want to kill the goldfish, either.”
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-dominant-life-form-in-t...
EDIT - HN discussion for that article, 212 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8773778
The idea of SAI is that it progresses at a significantly faster rate than biological processes can. For example, if humans and chimps were on a "staircase of evolution" and were one step apart; SAI would be one step above us a mere hour after it is turned on. After 2 hours it would be multiple steps above us. So the theory goes, anyway.
This means that evil aliens would be unlikely more dangerous than evil SAI.
Not that he's suggesting we announce our presence to aliens, merely look for them.
