Some solutions to the Fermi Paradox

[Kodiak]

Of course it could also be that the kind of mindset that would lead a species to that kind of expansion would also lead to thier own self destruction by tearing through their planetary resources before even regular interplanetary travel was possible. You know the thing that has a good chance of doing our species in.

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If they're aware enough of violence to be thinking that way, they also need to have gone past internal war before reaching a level of energy where they can boost colony ships out of their system.

The only plausible means of doing this for time horizons measured in three or four digits of Sol years are potentially destructive. Beyond that anyone with a space program can also make ICBMs and must understand nuclear physics.

I'd argue that the Fermi Paradox and Drake Equation are both way too anthropocentric to be of any use. It's entirely possible for intelligent life to be common, but civilization to be exceedingly rare, industrial/post-industrial civilization even rarer. I think the assumption that intelligence inevitably leads to civilization (that we would recognize as such, anyway) is a very, very big one. Big enough that the rest of the paradox itself is pretty much useless, IMO.

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And while we aren't consistently smart enough to make a generation ship easy, humans are far smarter than we need to be to be comfortably dominant. It's a very strange evolutionary leap.

 

[Apocal]

And while we aren't consistently smart enough to make a generation ship easy, humans are far smarter than we need to be to be comfortably dominant. It's a very strange evolutionary leap.

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Not if you think of the selection pressure being competition with other humans.

 

[Avernus]

Not if you think of the selection pressure being competition with other humans.

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This. I've sometimes heard it called the "Machiavelli theory of human intelligence"; that we have mainly become as intelligent as we are by scheming against each other and defending against such schemes. Which is a runaway process, since no matter how smart we become unlike non-human threats our competitors are always just as smart as we are because we're the same species.

 

[Kodiak]

Not if you think of the selection pressure being competition with other humans.

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Still doesn't inherently lead to (some of) us being able to invent and understand the technologies and sciences of the modern world. It's an unpredictable and not terribly useful sideline trait of a brain that hasn't changed much in hundreds of thousands of years.

High intelligence, and particularly the grade and type of intelligence for working at JPL, is fluky in every way. There is no evolutionary reason why that should happen.

 

[Nexica]

And while we aren't consistently smart enough to make a generation ship easy, humans are far smarter than we need to be to be comfortably dominant. It's a very strange evolutionary leap.

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I disagree. It's a very logical evolutionary leap. Our relatives were quite widespread and successful, too. We had to compete with them. I find they're easily forgotten (or dismissed entirely) despite interbreeding with us enough for their genes to be noticeably present in a large portion of the world's population. And they were likely smart. Smarter than I imagine we'll ever give them credit for.

More than that, even after we became the only human species left? We remained in the stone age for an extremely long time, some places remaining that way until extremely recently. And a scant few still being there. Which says, to me, that even our species, with the right set of physical and mental traits to produce civilization-as-we-know-it? Didn't have to. Could've easily never done so. It is entirely conceivable to me that modern humans could have never successfully hit upon the ideas that eventually led to 'civilization'. The competitive benefits are only obvious in hindsight, IMO.

Which, if you apply that to the universe at large and the enormous number of potential shapes, forms, psychologies and whatnot that alien life could have (never mind the environments they could develop in), so many of which are not conducive to civilization-as-we-know-it? I dunno, the Fermi Paradox stops looking all that paradoxical. That doesn't make us better than the sapient fungus-plant infesting the arthro-mammals of Glorbock VII, mind, just different.

Alien, if you will.

 

[Shane_357]

A thought about this I had today - we take certain evolved features of our bodies for granted. What if one of the 'filters' is that most sapient life cannot survive the acceleration/g-force required to escape their atmosphere?

 

[Kodiak]

A thought about this I had today - we take certain evolved features of our bodies for granted. What if one of the 'filters' is that most sapient life cannot survive the acceleration/g-force required to escape their atmosphere?

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Well with known physics - which can be taken as universal - a planet cannot get much more difficult to lift off from than Earth is unless you are willing to use nukes.

Which we aren't, for the record. So the observation record is 0/1 advanced planetary civilizations tolerate ground-launch Orion.

You also have to discover nuclear fission for that to even be an option.

 

[kingreaper]

That seems a bit chicken and egg though; are those elements necessary for life anywhere, or did Earth life evolve to use them and need them because they're relatively common on Earth?

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The more available elements, the more complex the chemistry can be, which allows for more complex life to evolve. There will certainly be a threshold level of chemical complexity required for sapient life to naturally evolve - although how far past it we are is hard to say - and "nothing past Iron" is almost certainly not good enough.

 

[Arthur Frayn]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't we only been able to (maybe) detect alien civilizations in the past hundred years or so? And we'd only be able to detect them if they were actively looking for us, ala SETI?

I mean, odds are we just haven't been looking/listening long enough, and our neighbors aren't flashing a sign saying "HELLO HUMANS".

 

[kingreaper]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't we only been able to (maybe) detect alien civilizations in the past hundred years or so? And we'd only be able to detect them if they were actively looking for us, ala SETI?

I mean, odds are we just haven't been looking/listening long enough, and our neighbors aren't flashing a sign saying "HELLO HUMANS".

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The issue with that answer on its own is that it leaves us with the question of why the alien civilisations aren't more noticeable. Why have none of them built dyson swarms around their stars? Why haven't any of them sent out an ever-expanding army of von neumann probes (with or without biological crews) such that some are visible in our own solar system.

If they have a massive head start, there's so many things they could be doing that would be noticeable. When you picture humanity in the year 1 million, do you picture us being more inconspicuous than we are now?

 

[Arthur Frayn]

The issue with that answer on its own is that it leaves us with the question of why the alien civilisations aren't more noticeable. Why have none of them built dyson swarms around their stars? Why haven't any of them sent out an ever-expanding army of von neumann probes (with or without biological crews) such that some are visible in our own solar system.

If they have a massive head start, there's so many things they could be doing that would be noticeable. When you picture humanity in the year 1 million, do you picture us being more inconspicuous than we are now?

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I mean, presumably for the same reasons we haven't built Dyson Swarms or ever expanding army of Von Neumann probes - turns out they're stupidly expensive and require labor orders of magnitude beyond what we can realistically marshal at present. Maybe they hit some kind of technological bottleneck, or a million year head start really doesn't amount to all that much given the vast timescales of the universe.

My point is that we're assuming that it's an either/or proposition - either the galaxy is chock-a-block full of Literally Star Trek (or beyond) level aliens and we're somehow missing them, or it's devoid of intelligent life all together. It's just as possible that there's Drake equation levels of civilizations out there, it's just that that we're all (roughly) on the same technological level and it's really fucking hard to spot each other, let alone talk (let alone travel) to each other.

 

[kingreaper]

Maybe they hit some kind of technological bottleneck, or a million year head start really doesn't amount to all that much given the vast timescales of the universe.

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Then your answer isn't just "we're not good at picking up broadcasts" it's "I suspect space-faring technology can't go much past the 21st century level".

I think that's a very meaningful expansion on the explanation.

 

[Dmol8]

OP the answer to you post is Mu. The very way you are imagining the Fermi Paradox as a problem is wrong.

it's not an issue of silicon or iron it's stuff like Iodine, elements critical for life that are only formed by neutron star collision.

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More like phosphorus. There's a video on the idea that our star system has a larger than normal concentration of phosphorus here that enabled life to evolve into more complex dorms.

Let's look at a specific scaled-down mimicry of interstellar travel: wooden boats navigating Oceania back in the day.

We just need to expand ship empty weight, engine rating, crew accommodations and the relative palatability of the umpteenth food waste recycled back into 'sea creatures' themed tenders plus how well the passengers handle cryogenically induced stasis, and we can draw some conjectures about 900 years of nautical tradition over, say, a larger hurdle of 93 kiloparsecs.

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No you can not do that. You can draw some conclusions about stages of development for new methods of transportation that render the idea of having cities on Mars this century unfeasible, but a space ship is not the same thing as a river ship which is not the same as a lake ship which is not the same as an ocean ship.

tbh, I tend to subscribe to the more depressing interpretations.

-Maybe we're incapable of building technology to actually fill up the universe with much of anything.
Like, remember when Venus was full of jungles, before we realized every planet in the solar system was a barren rock?
Remember when every nearby star system was surely full of life, but now it mostly looks like more barren rocks except so far away the human mind can't conceive it?
Remember when we were gonna have Warp Drives by 2070?
Seems like every time we learn something, Star Trek gets a little further away.

-If we can, that tech level could be insanely destructive.
Pretty much every interesting sci-fi setting has gadgetry that can wipe out a population center with the equivalent of a backfiring winnebago.
How do we live in a world where anyone can kill everyone?
Probably: We don't, and trying to spread out won't help because there's even more energy being thrown around at even more vulnerable targets.

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OK first of all FTL is possible with just the science we have now, we just lack the technology to build such drive, but the theories are sound.

So to live in a world where anyone can kill anyone a species has to be able to not escalate conflicts (internal or external) to the point of mass murder.

I'm writing a draft of a hard sci-fi book right now about an interstellar colonization mission. Being realistic about things...this is incredibly expensive, dangerous and generally uneconomical. I have some plausible technological cheats - and major ethical violations - to make the story what it is. And this is going to a nearby star, reachable in a couple centuries.

There may not be any reason IRL to go to our nearby systems, of course. Centauri, which we know the most about, is likely uninhabitable. We would never send humans there and it is questionable at best if sending a probe is worthwhile.

So if it's not common for advanced life to have the right mix to explore space and it is extremely difficult to do STL and FTL doesn't exist...it's not that much of a paradox. We humans probably don't have the right mix for it, at least as we are now. We would have to use generation ships, and we aren't well suited to those because of how we breed.

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We already might have survived 5 different Fermi Paradox filters for sapient life. And please stop modeling the colonization of other star systems when we haven't really figured out how to colonize our own yet. It's like trying to sail the deep ocean with ideas for shipbuilding that haven't even been tested on lakes.

Of course it could also be that the kind of mindset that would lead a species to that kind of expansion would also lead to thier own self destruction by tearing through their planetary resources before even regular interplanetary travel was possible. You know the thing that has a good chance of doing our species in.

Click to shrink...

Why are you using a robber baron capitalist mindset to predict species development when that particular aspect of human culture was always considered bad for most of humanity?

This. I've sometimes heard it called the "Machiavelli theory of human intelligence"; that we have mainly become as intelligent as we are by scheming against each other and defending against such schemes. Which is a runaway process, since no matter how smart we become unlike non-human threats our competitors are always just as smart as we are because we're the same species.

Click to shrink...

Or you know we could have gotten more intelligent by a desire of people to figure out the world's rule so they can protect their own families and friends from it's dangers. Since schemers dont' care about being smarter only more powerful intelligence wouldn't be as focused in human evolution if scheming was all we were competing with.

Still doesn't inherently lead to (some of) us being able to invent and understand the technologies and sciences of the modern world. It's an unpredictable and not terribly useful sideline trait of a brain that hasn't changed much in hundreds of thousands of years.

High intelligence, and particularly the grade and type of intelligence for working at JPL, is fluky in every way. There is no evolutionary reason why that should happen.

Click to shrink...

Only if you think good and evil are part of the same moral scale. If you take that the opposite of good is indifference and the opposite of evil is wisdom then the selection pressures make more sense since wisdom has been treasured in most human civilizations and those that didn't/don't treasure it fail in a few generation or rediscover why wisdom is so treasured.

I disagree. It's a very logical evolutionary leap. Our relatives were quite widespread and successful, too. We had to compete with them. I find they're easily forgotten (or dismissed entirely) despite interbreeding with us enough for their genes to be noticeably present in a large portion of the world's population. And they were likely smart. Smarter than I imagine we'll ever give them credit for.

More than that, even after we became the only human species left? We remained in the stone age for an extremely long time, some places remaining that way until extremely recently. And a scant few still being there. Which says, to me, that even our species, with the right set of physical and mental traits to produce civilization-as-we-know-it? Didn't have to. Could've easily never done so. It is entirely conceivable to me that modern humans could have never successfully hit upon the ideas that eventually led to 'civilization'. The competitive benefits are only obvious in hindsight, IMO.

Which, if you apply that to the universe at large and the enormous number of potential shapes, forms, psychologies and whatnot that alien life could have (never mind the environments they could develop in), so many of which are not conducive to civilization-as-we-know-it? I dunno, the Fermi Paradox stops looking all that paradoxical. That doesn't make us better than the sapient fungus-plant infesting the arthro-mammals of Glorbock VII, mind, just different.

Alien, if you will.

Click to shrink...

The places that remained in the stone age until very recently either lacked agricultural resources or lacked easy access to certain resources (usually metals), early humans easily hit upon the idea of civilization so long as they had agricultural and forging resources.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't we only been able to (maybe) detect alien civilizations in the past hundred years or so? And we'd only be able to detect them if they were actively looking for us, ala SETI?

I mean, odds are we just haven't been looking/listening long enough, and our neighbors aren't flashing a sign saying "HELLO HUMANS".

Click to shrink...

That's before we get into the problem with signals degrading with distance in space and with the fact that we are assuming that our signals will be recognized as having been caused by sapience instead of a number of other reasons.

The issue with that answer on its own is that it leaves us with the question of why the alien civilisations aren't more noticeable. Why have none of them built dyson swarms around their stars? Why haven't any of them sent out an ever-expanding army of von neumann probes (with or without biological crews) such that some are visible in our own solar system.

If they have a massive head start, there's so many things they could be doing that would be noticeable. When you picture humanity in the year 1 million, do you picture us being more inconspicuous than we are now?

Click to shrink...

Because dyson swarms in and of themselves are a Fermi paradox failure event since they represent an over-saturation of resource gathering for a class 2 civilization. In case you didn't know entropy as it is currently defined is more a venture capitalist fairy tale than it is any sort of realistic definition of physics since the universe doesn't need to remember where every single speck of dust was yesterday.

Between the concept of the Stellar Horizon (an illusion caused by the various ways separate sources of light can interact with one another that brings into question the very concept of accurate data past a certain distance of observation that depends on the wavelength of light observed), the idea that any species that reaches high enough energy storage density for interstellar voyages would have to have learned methods of conflict resolution that prevent conflicts from escalating into mass murder and the fact that most of scientists and science fiction writers skip over the developments in both society and technology necessary for a sapient species to even be a class 2 civilization in the first place without blowing themselves up I doubt that the concept of the Fermi Paradox has really been properly defined let alone properly explored.

If you got any questions or if you think I've badly explained something put up a post and I'll try to give a reply to it in the morning. Good night.

 

[SeptimusMagisto]

The issue with that answer on its own is that it leaves us with the question of why the alien civilisations aren't more noticeable. Why have none of them built dyson swarms around their stars? Why haven't any of them sent out an ever-expanding army of von neumann probes (with or without biological crews) such that some are visible in our own solar system.

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In fairness, if they did build a dyson swarm, we probably wouldn't notice it except as weird occlusion around one particular star.

 

[Byzantine]

In fairness, if they did build a dyson swarm, we probably wouldn't notice it except as weird occlusion around one particular star.

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Or if the swarm is complete enough we wouldn't see anything. There is actually a pretty narrow window where you'll notice the star being occluded then disappear.

 

[DracoDracul]

@Dmol8 Because that robber Baron mindset is the one that pushes for endless expansion.

 

[Sandy River DL]

Or if the swarm is complete enough we wouldn't see anything. There is actually a pretty narrow window where you'll notice the star being occluded then disappear.

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We'd see a star that only exists in infra-red, actually.

 

[Kodiak]

We already might have survived 5 different Fermi Paradox filters for sapient life. And please stop modeling the colonization of other star systems when we haven't really figured out how to colonize our own yet. It's like trying to sail the deep ocean with ideas for shipbuilding that haven't even been tested on lakes.

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Physics haven't budged in a long time so we have a solid idea of how much energy and time it takes to go to another star. The numbers are enormous and if you can do it, you aren't concerned with silly things like incoming asteroids. Additionally, both FTL and anything near-c have been repeatedly proven to be impossible. The universe as we know it works without them and doesn't really work with them. These are off the table in any serious discussion.

One can theorize how various future technologies that don't offend physics would be used for interstellar exploration, but speeds, distances and mass ratios are fixed. This is a major resource commitment.

Or you know we could have gotten more intelligent by a desire of people to figure out the world's rule so they can protect their own families and friends from it's dangers. Since schemers dont' care about being smarter only more powerful intelligence wouldn't be as focused in human evolution if scheming was all we were competing with.

Only if you think good and evil are part of the same moral scale. If you take that the opposite of good is indifference and the opposite of evil is wisdom then the selection pressures make more sense since wisdom has been treasured in most human civilizations and those that didn't/don't treasure it fail in a few generation or rediscover why wisdom is so treasured.

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Intelligence isn't so predictable and the specific kind of technical intelligence necessary to build and run a space program isn't plausibly needed for anything else. It's more or less an accident that we are smart enough to describe astrophysics and build advanced microprocessors.

However, it is a prerequisite for a serious space program and a huge problem for any multi-lifespan effort that isn't being fed by the home planet.

 

[SeptimusMagisto]

The hopeful scenario is that we're the equivalent of an uncontacted tribe surrounded by vast civilizations that are invisible to us even as they send radio signals literally straight through us, change our climate, and plant flags on our moon.

 

[Avernus]

Or you know we could have gotten more intelligent by a desire of people to figure out the world's rule so they can protect their own families and friends from it's dangers.

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No; we wouldn't need to be nearly as intelligent to do that, as has already been said. Nature unlike other humans doesn't grow in intelligence to match us, and so to deal with natural threats we only had to get just intelligent enough to deal with them and then the evolutionary pressure for more intelligence would stop.

 

[Ralson]

OK first of all FTL is possible with just the science we have now, we just lack the technology to build such drive, but the theories are sound.

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No idea what you're talking about.

AFAIK the only method that holds any water is using a wormhole to break causality. And by "holds water" I mean it'd require harnessing all the energy of an exploding star using some kind of space god magic.

Did I mention any FTL would also be a time machine, as far as we can tell right now?

 

[Nexica]

The places that remained in the stone age until very recently either lacked agricultural resources or lacked easy access to certain resources (usually metals), early humans easily hit upon the idea of civilization so long as they had agricultural and forging resources.

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What are you considering "early humans" here? Because even considering nothing but Homo sapiens proper, we've been around for over a quarter of a million years. And agriculture has been in practice for only ten to eleven thousand years. Agriculture did not begin easily even in places ideal for it.

 

[Sandy River DL]

No idea what you're talking about.

AFAIK the only method that holds any water is using a wormhole to break causality. And by "holds water" I mean it'd require harnessing all the energy of an exploding star using some kind of space god magic.

Did I mention any FTL would also be a time machine, as far as we can tell right now?

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Alcubierre's warp field metric is a non-causality violating FTL method and doesn't use wormholes. It doesn't even need negative mass at this point. The problems with it currently lie in getting the thing moving, power generation, and creating the field to begin with. Well, that and the whole 'sterilize half the system when the field breaks' issue...

 

[Kodiak]

Alcubierre's warp field metric is a non-causality violating FTL method and doesn't use wormholes. It doesn't even need negative mass at this point. The problems with it currently lie in getting the thing moving, power generation, and creating the field to begin with. Well, that and the whole 'sterilize half the system when the field breaks' issue...

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While it doesn't break physics in its own local reference frame, there is a solid argument it can be used for shenanigans that do have the impact of violating causality.

Alcubierre drive - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Chronology protection conjecture - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Ciber]

That the equations permit a particular solution does not in itself imply physicality. You have to consider the context of the reality which your equations model.