Heretical view: intelligent alien life is everywhere swimming around us. We are just not capable of really understanding it. When a human walks past an ant, maybe the ant senses the shadow and the blockage of the sun.. but it isn't equipped to recognize the human. Likewise, I suspect we are in a similar situation where even our smartest minds and best scientifically advanced sensors are simply incapable of properly detecting these forms. Remember, the average age difference between planets in our galaxy is roughly 2 billion years... just imagine that an alien life 2 billion years older than humans have found easier ways to travel than little metal flying saucers. The question then may be if it's ever possible for us to sense these higher (plausibly extra dimensional) creatures. I suspect this will be a more fruitful direction to investigate rather than assuming we just happen to be the only exotic intelligent life in the galaxy.
Most likely view ...We are so primitive we are like Sentinel Island. Nobody allowed to land here under severe penalties of the Galactic Council.
They were going to upgrade us to a class B-1 civilization, but that was stopped after a second audit looked at the Politicians we have been electing....
The same FIFA that made a documentary about how their leadership were battling corruption… a year before they were arrested on corruption charges? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Passions
Show them this video and they’ll immediately commence a mass sterilisation program, like we do with invasive mosquitoes.
Signal One is a free movie on Youtube that explores this idea along with the Dark Forest. I thought it was pretty interesting.
One problem with the idea is that not all aliens will be that advanced, and some of them should be detectable if they're that common, unless the super advanced aliens precluded their existence by being first.
Almost 20 years ago I did some calculations for a theoretical spacecraft traveling away from Earth with an Arecibo-sized receiver pointed toward home[1]. I found that omnidirectional radio emissions--by far the most common kind we emit--AM/FM radio, UHF television, etc--would be lost in static between Jupiter and Saturn.
In short, the universe could be teeming with intelligent, radio-communicating species, but we will never know it unless we a) build an enormous radio telescope larger than the Earth; b) get lucky enough to pass through a direct hit from a narrow radio signal such as radar; or c) a civilization detects us and points a tight message in our direction.
Hey thanks! I hope the world still has an appetite for original human-generated writing, I'd love to be able to keep doing it. I have hundreds of fascinating true stories still in the pipeline. It's been a labor of love for 20+ years now, and if I am forced by circumstance to stop, my sense of purpose will be in peril.
So far, the GoFundMe has raised almost 50% of the $40k goal, so I'm cautiously optimistic. $40k doesn't seem like such a large amount of money until you need it.
>Earth's television and radio broadcasts would only be detectable at distances up to 0.3 light-years, less than 1/10 the distance to the nearest star.
This is what I always thought was one of the major problems - unless an alien civilization is directly targeting Earth, we would never detect them. And our EM emissions are too weak to be detected by other aliens unless they stumble near us for some reason.
They found that airport radar systems, which sweep the skies for airplanes, send out a combined radio signal of 2×1015 watts. That’s enough for telescopes comparable to the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to pick up as far as 200 light-years away. [0]
Huh - very interesting! Now I am going to have to calculate this for myself!
Seems that (r_d/(theta_e z))^2Pt_p ~ 100 hv (~100 photons at 3 GHz; a single 3GHz photon is about 2e-24 J) I'll drop this to 1 photon below.
Where
r_d = detector radius,
theta_e = diffraction angle of source,
z is detection distance,
P = 2e15 W (peak power of source, according to article) and t_p is pulse duration (say, ~5e-9 s).
Now theta_e ~ wavelength/(emitter radius), let's say the detector radius r_d ~ emitter radius = r ~ 3 meters for simplicity. Lambda = l = 3e8/3e9 m ~ 0.1 m) E_p = Pt_p ~ 2e155e-9 ~ 1e7 J (!)
(r^2/l)^2(1e7 J)/(1002e-24 J) = z^2, so z ~ \sqrt(100 m*(1e29)) ~ 3e15 m
But one light year is ~1e15 m. If I assume they have single-photon sensitivity in the microwave regime, then I can boost this result to ~30 ly. So about 1 order of magnitude less than their paper, but that is for a single photon of a single radar pulse. If you sum over many pulses from all the different radars that could be emitting over the integration time then, yeah, I guess 200 ly isn't ridiculous.
Curious what the cosmic microwave background is compared to this though...
the assumption appears to be that intelligent life would wish to expand. the expansion drive makes sense for purely biological life as it arose by natural evolution, technologically advanced life isn't going to stay purely biological for long however.
interstellar expansion is going to be a huge hassle, at a minimum you are going to be mass constrained and require a long period of investment in fuel (such as antimatter production) during which your competitors that chose to stay in the solar system will gain an edge and may strike before you leave. there isn't going to be MAD in space once you no longer rely on your planet of origin for anything truly important.
we should actually be deeply worried about the space race, because the early adopters will be making nukes out there and may come back to yank up the ladders.
i think the answer is the unlikelihood of having life get started in the first place, we have a better idea of how life evolves than how it began. i think the reason it happened so early on earth's history isn't because it is common, but because something about the conditions of the early earth was uniquely well suited for it to happen
Not necessarily. We only have a sample of one (Mars remains unknown). Life being a low probability event is still consistent with the data. Low probability events can happen at any time. It is a big enough universe.
Have you seen that website that shows the solar system if the moon were only one pixel? [1]
Getting from the Sun to Pluto takes a very long time you might give up and close your browser tab.
Many theories attempt to explain why we haven’t yet encountered extraterrestrial civilizations. One possibility is that, given the immense scale of the cosmos, intelligent life may exist but is simply too far away for contact. Another idea is that while life may arise on other planets, it rarely, if ever, evolves beyond primitive intelligence. Intelligence here defined as ability to understand the cosmos and even leave their own world.
But there is another, more sobering theory. It suggests that when life does evolve to the point of intelligence, it eventually develops technology so powerful that it inadvertently brings about its own destruction. Whether through war, environmental collapse, or uncontrollable advancements, these civilizations may end themselves before they have a chance to explore the universe, or be found by others. This concept just described is called The Great Filter. The Great Filter proposes that there is some critical barrier or stage in the evolution of intelligent life that is extremely hard to surpass. [a]
There's a Wikipedia page dedicated to nuclear close calls between the United States and the former Soviet Union, and also present Russia. [2]
Perhaps the most famous close call is the one involving Vasily Arkhipov during the Cuban Missile Crisis [3] [2]
“Man has dominated man to his injury.”
— Ecclesiastes 8:9
The Great Filter need not be caused by the intelligent beings themselves and can be natural like the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. It's said that asteroids of varying sizes crash into Earth every X million years.
There's a counter argument to the Fermi paradox that perhaps we are too primitive for advanced alien beings to bother with us. One of my internet friends put it like this -
"there are counter arguments to the fermi paradox; one of which hires the analogy of, iirc, a guy looking over at a group of insects/anthill/ worms. he doesn't go wondering whether those worms are sentient enough to meditate on his thoughts. he doesn't think to sit back to converse with them. hell, they wouldn't understand him even if he tried. the paradox only holds water on the assumption that such civilisation is within the scope of our comprehension. " [4]
But there's a counter to that counter argument.
Yes it's possible that we're too primitive for advanced civilizations to bother about. But even in the case of ants and humans, isn't it true that we sometimes try to interfere with their lives just to see how they'd react either for fun or just sheer curiousity?
Yes, it's true that we might not be able to comprehend alien species. After all, they evolved in worlds different from ours. But, any sufficiently advanced civilization would understand Mathematics. Mathematics is a universal language and for them to be scientifically advanced means they understand science. They could, if they desired, find a way to communicate with earthlings using the universal language - Science. Carl Sagan made this point in one of his books and I think it was Pale Blue Dot (highly recommended).
I've shared some of my thoughts about aliens on my blog posts which my comment here were from. [4] [5]
> Given the complexity of the Periodic Table, molecules, DNA, &c can we agree that life is a low-probability event?
Given how quickly life started on Earth after Earth's formation, it seems like it isn't a low-probability event, but it still might be considering it's the only place we've found life (not that we've made a dent in our search of the cosmos for life).
"Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay." - Stephen Jay Gould.
> Previous paragraph omits the contextual perfection of our planet/solar system.
It's perfect because it's the world we grew up in.
Given the size of the observable universe, I think the most likely answer for the Fermi Paradox is "all of the above, and a secret nth thing."
Life is rare, intelligent life is more rare, intelligent technological life is even more rare and inherently unstable, intelligent technological life maintaining political and cultural stability long enough to discover space travel is harder, the actual space travel is harder still, interstellar travel is harder still, the universe is vast, electromagnetic signals diminish into the CMB over time and distance, we may simply not see them, they may simply not see us, they may see us and simply not care. Everything, everywhere, all at once and sometimes you just get sucker-punched by an asteroid or a gamma ray burst or your sun just explodes.
The universe is the most complex and complicated thing there is, and there are more unknown unknowns than stars in the sky.
There could be billions of intelligent civilizations in the visible universe, and we could still be effectively alone, given there are hundreds of billions of galaxies. The Grabby Alien solution argues that we're still early for such civilizations, because otherwise the grabby ones would have expanded and taken up all the real estate. Since we see no evidence for that, we must have arisen early while there's still plenty of available space (they can still be out there, just very far away).
As species become more intelligent, develop digital technologies, and their equivalent of the Internet, they become interconnected.
Interconnectivity is limited by the speed of light. Even here in Australia, the "lag" is very palpable. Conversely, whenever I visit the US, suddenly every web site provide instant satisfaction instead of frustrating delays.
As the speed of artificial intelligence increases, these delays become exponentially limiting. There's a point where you want to be in the same city, or even the same data centre as everything and everybody else. (US-East-1 comes to mind.)
Why would anyone voluntarily isolate themselves from the interconnected web, separated by positively glacial light-minutes, hours, or... gasp... centuries!
If the speed of light is an insurmountable barrier, then nobody in their right mind[1] would cut themselves off like this, from everything and everyone else.
Even huge "generational ships" would be like... a small rural country town compared to a glittering, vibrant city. No matter how much static information you crammed into its computers, no matter how much entertainment you brought with you, it would be less than that available on the home planet.
It's simple incentives: Why would anyone choose solipsism and isolation, at huge cost and risk, for effectively zero upside!?
Space is not the wild west. There are no prairies, no fertile lands, no rivers to fish. Certainly not in the relative sense compared to the towering cultural edifice that a multi-million-year-old civilisation could build up on their home planet.
Imagine being an artist, or a performer working at some cultural centre of the world like Broadway moving into the middle of totally empty desert.
"Woo! Isolation! No crowds! No fellow performers! No money! Yay! Finally!" -- said nobody ever.
[1] The corollary is that any members of a species willing to head out into the vast cold uncaring abyss of deep space are insane to a significant degree. Space is filled by crazy, dangerous aliens. The sane ones stayed at home!
Heretical view: intelligent alien life is everywhere swimming around us. We are just not capable of really understanding it. When a human walks past an ant, maybe the ant senses the shadow and the blockage of the sun.. but it isn't equipped to recognize the human. Likewise, I suspect we are in a similar situation where even our smartest minds and best scientifically advanced sensors are simply incapable of properly detecting these forms. Remember, the average age difference between planets in our galaxy is roughly 2 billion years... just imagine that an alien life 2 billion years older than humans have found easier ways to travel than little metal flying saucers. The question then may be if it's ever possible for us to sense these higher (plausibly extra dimensional) creatures. I suspect this will be a more fruitful direction to investigate rather than assuming we just happen to be the only exotic intelligent life in the galaxy.
Most likely view ...We are so primitive we are like Sentinel Island. Nobody allowed to land here under severe penalties of the Galactic Council.
They were going to upgrade us to a class B-1 civilization, but that was stopped after a second audit looked at the Politicians we have been electing....
Can you imagine trying to explain any of the current world leaders to little green men?
“After they killed their first hundred thousand other people, why weren’t they arrested and jailed?”
“Err…”
“And why not arrest them after they stole billions from the public they were supposed to serve?”
“Umm…”
“I can understand voters making a mistake once… but repeatedly voting in the same autocrat?”
“Well…”
Then when you explain the FIFA Peace Prize...I think we will be exterminated...
The same FIFA that made a documentary about how their leadership were battling corruption… a year before they were arrested on corruption charges? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Passions
Show them this video and they’ll immediately commence a mass sterilisation program, like we do with invasive mosquitoes.
Signal One is a free movie on Youtube that explores this idea along with the Dark Forest. I thought it was pretty interesting.
One problem with the idea is that not all aliens will be that advanced, and some of them should be detectable if they're that common, unless the super advanced aliens precluded their existence by being first.
Almost 20 years ago I did some calculations for a theoretical spacecraft traveling away from Earth with an Arecibo-sized receiver pointed toward home[1]. I found that omnidirectional radio emissions--by far the most common kind we emit--AM/FM radio, UHF television, etc--would be lost in static between Jupiter and Saturn.
In short, the universe could be teeming with intelligent, radio-communicating species, but we will never know it unless we a) build an enormous radio telescope larger than the Earth; b) get lucky enough to pass through a direct hit from a narrow radio signal such as radar; or c) a civilization detects us and points a tight message in our direction.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/space-radio-more-static-less...
I love your site. I've been an RSS subscriber for a long time, and tossed some money at the recent fundraiser.
(I mention that last bit not to be thanked, but to give others an opportunity to do the same without it looking like you're soliciting: https://www.damninteresting.com/a-possible-future/)
Hey thanks! I hope the world still has an appetite for original human-generated writing, I'd love to be able to keep doing it. I have hundreds of fascinating true stories still in the pipeline. It's been a labor of love for 20+ years now, and if I am forced by circumstance to stop, my sense of purpose will be in peril.
So far, the GoFundMe has raised almost 50% of the $40k goal, so I'm cautiously optimistic. $40k doesn't seem like such a large amount of money until you need it.
>Earth's television and radio broadcasts would only be detectable at distances up to 0.3 light-years, less than 1/10 the distance to the nearest star.
This is what I always thought was one of the major problems - unless an alien civilization is directly targeting Earth, we would never detect them. And our EM emissions are too weak to be detected by other aliens unless they stumble near us for some reason.
Not so:
They found that airport radar systems, which sweep the skies for airplanes, send out a combined radio signal of 2×1015 watts. That’s enough for telescopes comparable to the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to pick up as far as 200 light-years away. [0]
200 ly is about 100k stars
[0]: https://earthsky.org/space/airport-radar-could-signal-earth-...
Huh - very interesting! Now I am going to have to calculate this for myself!
Seems that (r_d/(theta_e z))^2Pt_p ~ 100 hv (~100 photons at 3 GHz; a single 3GHz photon is about 2e-24 J) I'll drop this to 1 photon below.
Where
r_d = detector radius,
theta_e = diffraction angle of source,
z is detection distance,
P = 2e15 W (peak power of source, according to article) and t_p is pulse duration (say, ~5e-9 s).
Now theta_e ~ wavelength/(emitter radius), let's say the detector radius r_d ~ emitter radius = r ~ 3 meters for simplicity. Lambda = l = 3e8/3e9 m ~ 0.1 m) E_p = Pt_p ~ 2e155e-9 ~ 1e7 J (!)
(r^2/l)^2(1e7 J)/(1002e-24 J) = z^2, so z ~ \sqrt(100 m*(1e29)) ~ 3e15 m
But one light year is ~1e15 m. If I assume they have single-photon sensitivity in the microwave regime, then I can boost this result to ~30 ly. So about 1 order of magnitude less than their paper, but that is for a single photon of a single radar pulse. If you sum over many pulses from all the different radars that could be emitting over the integration time then, yeah, I guess 200 ly isn't ridiculous.
Curious what the cosmic microwave background is compared to this though...
The signals will get there in up to 200 years from now.
There is no paradox because they are here already. Here she is:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
Made for the HN crowd :)
the assumption appears to be that intelligent life would wish to expand. the expansion drive makes sense for purely biological life as it arose by natural evolution, technologically advanced life isn't going to stay purely biological for long however.
interstellar expansion is going to be a huge hassle, at a minimum you are going to be mass constrained and require a long period of investment in fuel (such as antimatter production) during which your competitors that chose to stay in the solar system will gain an edge and may strike before you leave. there isn't going to be MAD in space once you no longer rely on your planet of origin for anything truly important.
we should actually be deeply worried about the space race, because the early adopters will be making nukes out there and may come back to yank up the ladders.
i think the answer is the unlikelihood of having life get started in the first place, we have a better idea of how life evolves than how it began. i think the reason it happened so early on earth's history isn't because it is common, but because something about the conditions of the early earth was uniquely well suited for it to happen
Starting so rapidly after there was water on Earth's surface, and probably starting on Mars very rapidly as well, mitigates against this view.
Not necessarily. We only have a sample of one (Mars remains unknown). Life being a low probability event is still consistent with the data. Low probability events can happen at any time. It is a big enough universe.
Have you seen that website that shows the solar system if the moon were only one pixel? [1]
Getting from the Sun to Pluto takes a very long time you might give up and close your browser tab.
Many theories attempt to explain why we haven’t yet encountered extraterrestrial civilizations. One possibility is that, given the immense scale of the cosmos, intelligent life may exist but is simply too far away for contact. Another idea is that while life may arise on other planets, it rarely, if ever, evolves beyond primitive intelligence. Intelligence here defined as ability to understand the cosmos and even leave their own world.
But there is another, more sobering theory. It suggests that when life does evolve to the point of intelligence, it eventually develops technology so powerful that it inadvertently brings about its own destruction. Whether through war, environmental collapse, or uncontrollable advancements, these civilizations may end themselves before they have a chance to explore the universe, or be found by others. This concept just described is called The Great Filter. The Great Filter proposes that there is some critical barrier or stage in the evolution of intelligent life that is extremely hard to surpass. [a]
There's a Wikipedia page dedicated to nuclear close calls between the United States and the former Soviet Union, and also present Russia. [2]
Perhaps the most famous close call is the one involving Vasily Arkhipov during the Cuban Missile Crisis [3] [2]
“Man has dominated man to his injury.” — Ecclesiastes 8:9
The Great Filter need not be caused by the intelligent beings themselves and can be natural like the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. It's said that asteroids of varying sizes crash into Earth every X million years.
There's a counter argument to the Fermi paradox that perhaps we are too primitive for advanced alien beings to bother with us. One of my internet friends put it like this -
"there are counter arguments to the fermi paradox; one of which hires the analogy of, iirc, a guy looking over at a group of insects/anthill/ worms. he doesn't go wondering whether those worms are sentient enough to meditate on his thoughts. he doesn't think to sit back to converse with them. hell, they wouldn't understand him even if he tried. the paradox only holds water on the assumption that such civilisation is within the scope of our comprehension. " [4]
But there's a counter to that counter argument.
Yes it's possible that we're too primitive for advanced civilizations to bother about. But even in the case of ants and humans, isn't it true that we sometimes try to interfere with their lives just to see how they'd react either for fun or just sheer curiousity?
Yes, it's true that we might not be able to comprehend alien species. After all, they evolved in worlds different from ours. But, any sufficiently advanced civilization would understand Mathematics. Mathematics is a universal language and for them to be scientifically advanced means they understand science. They could, if they desired, find a way to communicate with earthlings using the universal language - Science. Carl Sagan made this point in one of his books and I think it was Pale Blue Dot (highly recommended).
I've shared some of my thoughts about aliens on my blog posts which my comment here were from. [4] [5]
[1] https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsys...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov
[4] https://www.rxjourney.net/extraterrestrial-intelligence-and-...
[5] https://www.rxjourney.net/mutually-assured-destruction
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
Related to the #4, I recommend the book Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky.
“What if we finally got visited by aliens but the most important event in or history was simply an intergalactic roadside picnic for the aliens?
They don’t even bother with us ants. They just pull over have some fun for a couple of hours and leave a mess behind…”
Oh, man. You have no idea how long my to-read book list is. But I just added this to it.
Thanks. Haha.
> rarely, if ever, evolves beyond primitive intelligence.
Given the complexity of the Periodic Table, molecules, DNA, &c can we agree that life is a low-probability event?
Previous paragraph omits the contextual perfection of our planet/solar system.
Seems fair to assert that we are a one-shot deal, until proven otherwise, here on Terra Fermi.
> Given the complexity of the Periodic Table, molecules, DNA, &c can we agree that life is a low-probability event?
Given how quickly life started on Earth after Earth's formation, it seems like it isn't a low-probability event, but it still might be considering it's the only place we've found life (not that we've made a dent in our search of the cosmos for life).
"Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay." - Stephen Jay Gould.
> Previous paragraph omits the contextual perfection of our planet/solar system.
It's perfect because it's the world we grew up in.
We hand-wave at each other.
The repeatable experiment would be another universe itself.
Cutting to the chase and declaring you the winner of the discussion.
Not only that, but we are searching time as well as space.
Let say our civilization lasts for a million years. That's a blip.
We are searching across tens to hundreds of light-years for just our galactic neighborhood as well as cross time spans in the billions of years.
Given the size of the observable universe, I think the most likely answer for the Fermi Paradox is "all of the above, and a secret nth thing."
Life is rare, intelligent life is more rare, intelligent technological life is even more rare and inherently unstable, intelligent technological life maintaining political and cultural stability long enough to discover space travel is harder, the actual space travel is harder still, interstellar travel is harder still, the universe is vast, electromagnetic signals diminish into the CMB over time and distance, we may simply not see them, they may simply not see us, they may see us and simply not care. Everything, everywhere, all at once and sometimes you just get sucker-punched by an asteroid or a gamma ray burst or your sun just explodes.
The universe is the most complex and complicated thing there is, and there are more unknown unknowns than stars in the sky.
There could be billions of intelligent civilizations in the visible universe, and we could still be effectively alone, given there are hundreds of billions of galaxies. The Grabby Alien solution argues that we're still early for such civilizations, because otherwise the grabby ones would have expanded and taken up all the real estate. Since we see no evidence for that, we must have arisen early while there's still plenty of available space (they can still be out there, just very far away).
Cognitive geocentrism. How does a physical system transition into intelligence?
"Latency" is my answer to the Fermi Paradox.
As species become more intelligent, develop digital technologies, and their equivalent of the Internet, they become interconnected.
Interconnectivity is limited by the speed of light. Even here in Australia, the "lag" is very palpable. Conversely, whenever I visit the US, suddenly every web site provide instant satisfaction instead of frustrating delays.
As the speed of artificial intelligence increases, these delays become exponentially limiting. There's a point where you want to be in the same city, or even the same data centre as everything and everybody else. (US-East-1 comes to mind.)
Why would anyone voluntarily isolate themselves from the interconnected web, separated by positively glacial light-minutes, hours, or... gasp... centuries!
If the speed of light is an insurmountable barrier, then nobody in their right mind[1] would cut themselves off like this, from everything and everyone else.
Even huge "generational ships" would be like... a small rural country town compared to a glittering, vibrant city. No matter how much static information you crammed into its computers, no matter how much entertainment you brought with you, it would be less than that available on the home planet.
It's simple incentives: Why would anyone choose solipsism and isolation, at huge cost and risk, for effectively zero upside!?
Space is not the wild west. There are no prairies, no fertile lands, no rivers to fish. Certainly not in the relative sense compared to the towering cultural edifice that a multi-million-year-old civilisation could build up on their home planet.
Imagine being an artist, or a performer working at some cultural centre of the world like Broadway moving into the middle of totally empty desert.
"Woo! Isolation! No crowds! No fellow performers! No money! Yay! Finally!" -- said nobody ever.
[1] The corollary is that any members of a species willing to head out into the vast cold uncaring abyss of deep space are insane to a significant degree. Space is filled by crazy, dangerous aliens. The sane ones stayed at home!