Fermi Paradox

[Superfluous J]

24 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Its is an illustration of the most dangerous entity in the known universe. If you know what it is the you might also know why the pot of petunias said 'oh, not again'. Thats a view of his good side, to view all of his sides you need CN3D 

 

The only thing in that entire post that I *DID* understand was the pot of petunias saying 'not again'.

[Green Baron]

It's 3d-representation of a molecule, right ? But i don't know which one, so cancel the cooked ...

Edit: an amino acid ?

Edited June 2, 2016 by Green Baron

[PB666]

1 minute ago, Green Baron said:

It's 3d-representation of a molecule, right ? But i don't know which one, so cancel the cooked ...

You have to give me an accession number, otherwise i cannot answer you. 

[Aethon]

Hey, even if we can't have a dialog with them and they are long extinct, a decoded message could still be valuable/dangerous.  I've learned much from Aristotle's 2000 year old messages.

[PB666]

9 minutes ago, Aethon said:

Hey, even if we can't have a dialog with them and they are long extinct, a decoded message could still be valuable/dangerous.  I've learned much from Aristotle's 2000 year old messages.

Dangerous in what way?

beware, go back tomthe stone age, 

pay no attention to those large big gun woelding planet destroyer heading your way

Or from lore, 'pay no attention to the bypass plans kept in that office on pluto'

 

Would anyone like to borrow my el Nino for a bit, we all need to friggen dry out a wee little bit. Local river 10 feet over flood stage and its raining 4 inches per hour outside. 

Edited June 2, 2016 by PB666

[Aethon]

Dangerous in many ways.  Perhaps a dangerous religion or a computer virus.  Ideas have power.  Look at what happened with Orson Welles War of the Worlds.   

Perhaps to limit competition they send us plans on how to build a machine that would destroy us.  What do you think would have happened to the world if Alexander III (the Great) had been given plans to build A-bombs.  A decoded, advanced alien Wikipedia would destroy our culture and replace it with something new.

[Green Baron]

 

El Nino, just left, ... will have some in 6/7 years. Sorry .... and even then i can't guaranty if he'll do the job right at your place. Maybe ... his sister ... knows something about keeping things dry ?

Alltogether:

"The chances of anything coming from mars are a million to one he said"

"The chances of anything coming from mars are a million to one .... but still they cohome"

dadadaaa.dadadummdadadumm.dadadaaa.dadadummdadadumm.....

:-)

Edit: i doubt we can expect a blueprint for whatever, a threat or salvation from aliens ...

Edited June 2, 2016 by Green Baron

[PB666]

46 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

 

El Nino, just left, ... will have some in 6/7 years. Sorry .... and even then i can't guaranty if he'll do the job right at your place. Maybe ... his sister ... knows something about keeping things dry ?

Alltogether:

"The chances of anything coming from mars are a million to one he said"

"The chances of anything coming from mars are a million to one .... but still they cohome"

dadadaaa.dadadummdadadumm.dadadaaa.dadadummdadadumm.....

:-)

Edit: i doubt we can expect a blueprint for whatever, a threat or salvation from aliens ...

Didn't leave, moved to Texas, is camped out, just about over the whole damn state. Here little el Nino, would you like to go back to California. They have nicer beaches.
Santa Ana winds are nice this time of year.

 

 

[magnemoe]

10 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

Actually now that you brought it up, what IS your avatar? I always thought it was an anthropomorphized camel with a green hat, blue shirt, and pink pants. Made out of yarn.

No seriously that's what I thought it was.

EDIT: Nevermind. That's @PB666's avatar. He quoted you. Though that just pushes the question...

Its part of an series of images I made called first contact, mostly an joke but I also think first contact will be like this, some probe discover stone age aliens. 

[kerbiloid]

11 hours ago, PB666 said:

Dangerous in what way?

A haunting and nasty melody causing a hype effect and degrading the public culture.
Wait... I know several of them... O, sh...!

[Majorjim!]

On 06/01/2016 at 10:46 PM, PB666 said:

Why is there so much observed life in Earth and little or no observed life elsewhere.

For the totally obvious reason that we have not looked enough yet. We see our solar system quite well and we still don't know if there is life on any of the worlds within it.

 What hope do we have currently to know if there is life in another solar system in our galaxy? One that is one of countless trillions of other galaxys. As sure as there is life here on earth there is life elsewhere in the universe.

 

[PB666]

26 minutes ago, Majorjim said:

For the totally obvious reason that we have not looked enough yet. We see our solar system quite well and we still don't know if there is life on any of the worlds within it.

 What hope do we have currently to know if there is life in another solar system in our galaxy? One that is one of countless trillions of other galaxys. As sure as there is life here on earth there is life elsewhere in the universe.

 

Rather poor explanation, where we have looked so far the is obvious little diversity if not complete sterility, you are contriving evidence from a lack thereof? 

[KerikBalm]

20 hours ago, magnemoe said:

First issue with Fermi paradox is that we will receive radio signals from them, its an load of reasons why we dont. 
mostly as signal strength goes down for random transmisjons for ourselves. Doing regular broadcasts to planets who might have life have low chance for success and might be dangerous its also pretty expensive and boring over millions of years. 
In short nobody is sending out signals in any volume we will pick up.

The second argument is that some civilization will colonize the entire galaxy. Its unlikely described some of it earlier, 
You don't solve your population problems or get resources with interstellar colonization, you do it for honor and that fades as the number of colonies increase 
 

#1) I listed that as one of the potnetially bad assumptions, but the other point about range also deals with your second point

#2) No it doesn't assume that at all... When the fermi paradox arose, and for decades after... people weren't predicting 1 galaxy wide civilization/a species would spread throughout the galaxy... they were predictiong millions of civilizations in the galaxy... a galaxy only 100,000 light years across.

Lets just say you get a prediction of 1 million civilizations in the galaxy... r = 50,000 light years...

Thats roughly 1 civilization every 8,000 square light years (I'm going to treat everything as a flat disk... although when you start to "zoom in, that becomes a bad assumption"... so on average... there should be a civilization within 88 light years (at least on the projection to the XY plane)... which isn't so far at all.. considering we're looking at planets over 1,000 light years away...

Clearly... they were vastly overestimating the number out there... there don't seem to be any habitable planets within 100 light years of us, let alone ones hosting a civilization emitting radiowaves to the amount that earth is/was.

Even modest colonization of nearby start systems only a few lightyears away, would make civilization "confluent" in the galaxy... life bacteria overgrowing a petri dish from thousands of colonies... not one colony spreading throughout.

 

The "Rare Earth Hypothesis" doesn't say that there isn't any other life out there... its mainly saying that anything as complicated as multicellular plants or animals is exceedingly rare, and intelligent life is astonishingly rare, to the point that there may only be a handful (or less) of intelligent civilizations at once.

And then you've got the idea of a "great filter"... maybe the stumbling block is behind us (we're the first, yay!), if its ahead of us... we're probably doomed.

Its looking like we'll have an ecological collapse (strongly related to overpopulation) before we colonize space...

[Majorjim!]

35 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Rather poor explanation, where we have looked so far the is obvious little diversity if not complete sterility, you are contriving evidence from a lack thereof? 

Not really, no.

 Do you really believe we have looked sufficiently to be able to say there is a lack of life? We have no idea about the surfaces of any worlds outside of our own solar system. If there is life here then life is possible and given the sheer number of possible worlds where life could evolve it is almost a certainty that there is life outside of our solar system. To think otherwise is foolish. We know NOTHING about extra solar planets. Or are you speaking of planets without our own system? If so, then yes I agree.

Edited June 3, 2016 by Majorjim

[PB666]

6 minutes ago, Majorjim said:

Not really, no.

 Do you really believe we have looked sufficiently to be able to say there is a lack of life? We have no idea about the surfaces of any worlds outside of our own solar system. If there is life here then life is possible and given the sheer number of possible worlds where life could evolve it is almost a certainty that there is life outside of our solar system. To think otherwise is foolish. We know NOTHING about extra solar planets. Or are you speaking of planets without our own system? If so, then yes I agree.

There is a complete dearth of evidence for life anywhere as complex as Earth, there are hints of life on Mars, but that might be extinct. There is no evidence, not a smeg, of life anywhere else. 

More importantly, what you are saying is not science,mits guessing. 

[Majorjim!]

Just now, PB666 said:

There is a complete dearth of evidence for life anywhere as complex as Earth, there are hints of life on Mars, but that might be extinct. There is no evidence, not a smeg, of life anywhere else. 

More importantly, what you are saying is not science,mits guessing. 

Yes the worlds in our system are lifeless rocks. We simply do not have anywhere enough data about extra solar planets to say anything about what is on them. We have looked at an unimaginably small number of the planets in the universe. We can only guess at their size, mass, composition and place in their solar systems.

 What you are saying is like looking at three water molecules and proclaiming that you know what is in the ocean, That kind of thinking is absurd.

[PB666]

2 hours ago, Majorjim said:

For the totally obvious reason that we have not looked enough yet. We see our solar system quite well and we still don't know if there is life on any of the worlds within it.

 What hope do we have currently to know if there is life in another solar system in our galaxy? One that is one of countless trillions of other galaxys. As sure as there is life here on earth there is life elsewhere in the universe.

 

The lack of detailed observations is not a surrogate for data.

Venus, effectively sterile, mercury too hot, too cold, to dry no air. 

Mars, too dry, too cold, no air. Not enough sunlight

Asteroid belt, not enough light, too cold, too dry, no air. 

Jupiter too hot, too much atmosphere, no way to see deep into those layers. 

Jovian satellites, too cold, not enough light . . . . . . . . .

There could be life on the colder planets and satellites, but if there is life its heaviky restricted to volcanic zones, is non-photosynthetic, and cannot benefit from the effects of oxygen in the environemt. 

Which in total means there is no meaningful diversity if it exists. 

Outside of our system what do we see, gas giants in close orbits, large rocky planets that ate really hot, tidally locked planets. 

IOW there is a plethora of planets that lack the life facilitating qualities of Earth. There are no solid examples of planets with life facilitating qualities. 

 

[magnemoe]

42 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

#1) I listed that as one of the potnetially bad assumptions, but the other point about range also deals with your second point

#2) No it doesn't assume that at all... When the fermi paradox arose, and for decades after... people weren't predicting 1 galaxy wide civilization/a species would spread throughout the galaxy... they were predictiong millions of civilizations in the galaxy... a galaxy only 100,000 light years across.

Lets just say you get a prediction of 1 million civilizations in the galaxy... r = 50,000 light years...

Thats roughly 1 civilization every 8,000 square light years (I'm going to treat everything as a flat disk... although when you start to "zoom in, that becomes a bad assumption"... so on average... there should be a civilization within 88 light years (at least on the projection to the XY plane)... which isn't so far at all.. considering we're looking at planets over 1,000 light years away...

Clearly... they were vastly overestimating the number out there... there don't seem to be any habitable planets within 100 light years of us, let alone ones hosting a civilization emitting radiowaves to the amount that earth is/was.

Even modest colonization of nearby start systems only a few lightyears away, would make civilization "confluent" in the galaxy... life bacteria overgrowing a petri dish from thousands of colonies... not one colony spreading throughout.

The "Rare Earth Hypothesis" doesn't say that there isn't any other life out there... its mainly saying that anything as complicated as multicellular plants or animals is exceedingly rare, and intelligent life is astonishingly rare, to the point that there may only be a handful (or less) of intelligent civilizations at once.

And then you've got the idea of a "great filter"... maybe the stumbling block is behind us (we're the first, yay!), if its ahead of us... we're probably doomed.

Its looking like we'll have an ecological collapse (strongly related to overpopulation) before we colonize space...

I know the prediction was both lots of civilizations but also an short lifetime of all of them,first is wrong and second is unlikely.
The galaxy wide colonization was an later idea. if some of the civilizations is long lived and produce some colonies it would have lite impact on the overall situation as it would be few of them say 10 in the galaxy, the colonies would have most likely have limited interest in starting new ones. Note that this require that interstellar colonization is as hard as we think now.
An good em-drive or even an slower then light warp drive would make it unlikely that its many advanced civilizations around as it would make interstelar travel so easy it would be likely that someone would spread out.  

Think most filters is behind us, first is as you say an good planet for advanced life, second is intelligence, civilization is easy for us, might well be rare for aliens. next is advanced technology. 
Our problems might well not affect aliens anyway, someone with noses like dogs would not tolerate much pollution having less problems with it, on the other hand they might not tolerate cities either so not much civilizations
Population will peak around 2050 at 12 billion after most estimates so its an solvable problem, again aliens might have serious problems here. 
 

[KerikBalm]

yes, I don't think there is a single "great" filter... but each element of the drake equation (and other elements not originally included) are just "filters"

If we get fusion power and our population under control before we destroy our ecosystem/ loose the nukes/have a runaway greenhouse, then we pass another filter.

I'm getting pessemistic about our civilizations chances of going interplanetary, let alone interstellar.

We have the scientific/engineering capability to do them, but our social structure has potentially fatal flaws.

[Green Baron]

44 minutes ago, PB666 said:

 

IOW there is a plethora of planets that lack the life facilitating qualities of Earth. There are no solid examples of planets with life facilitating qualities. 

 

 

... yet. New techniques (interferometry) and telescopes might reveal more information in the future. For now we have to live with the information you compiled for us :-)

 

[PB666]

59 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

yes, I don't think there is a single "great" filter... but each element of the drake equation (and other elements not originally included) are just "filters"

If we get fusion power and our population under control before we destroy our ecosystem/ loose the nukes/have a runaway greenhouse, then we pass another filter.

I'm getting pessemistic about our civilizations chances of going interplanetary, let alone interstellar.

We have the scientific/engineering capability to do them, but our social structure has potentially fatal flaws.

I'm still optimistic, I'm pessimistic that in the next billion years we would go far enough out to find other sentients other than the evolved products of ourselves.

The essential problem is the distances between fertive objects in space and our/their inability to travel those distances with great facility.

And what are we after? Dim stars that last forever, in the future we will not be interested in solar power, but in hydrogen and dueterium . . .which means that the only thing we really need is a small gravity well and a means of concentrating these things, for example nebula and pre-protoplanetary nebula and the like.

A brown dwarf would be a great place to set up a colony, more or less invisible past 100 light years from any viewer, does not create reflections, you could create a sort of a dysan ring without being detected (dwarves emit in the IR anyway). Tiny gravity well compared to our sun.

Think about this, once you have fusion power in space and a space factory that can build fusion reactors as well as anything else, would you ever come inside the kuiper belt? You might send a space tug out to move asteroids from MSO to the kuiper belt, or move Saturn trojans out, but you probably would not waste the effort coming inside to Earths system. If you carve through enough comets, using their ICE as a heat sink for your fusion reactors, you evaporate off the volatiles and are left with the constituants that make up the rocky planets. No need for even going for asteroids after a while.

And some of the rarest compounds on earths surface are siderophiles, the prefer to be in the core and lower mantle not on the surface, so that if you are picking these minerals out of primordial space dust, concentrating them is far easier.

The question we have to ask, would alien sentients really want to come to our system other than for scientific reasons. Would we not behave the same to other systems, what we really want is a place where gathering E=mc2 is the easiest. The sun is a great thing, but it has a lower energy production density that the human body, and unless you like to bath in the heat of Mercury you are stuck with densities of 1 KW per sq. meter. With nuclear you can increase this by a 1000 fold.  And you are not limited to dipping deep into a gravity well to get it. What would an alienr have to fear from us, they will always be able to expand faster and farther from us, we would be like the children that scavenge the garbage dumps around big cities, so from their point of view when we come they should be moving on to happier hunting grounds. So either we are the first in our hard to expand out of vicinity, or they have already seen us but didn't care and moved on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[DChurchill]

On 6/1/2016 at 2:23 PM, PB666 said:

The simplest answer here is that life is rare and sentient life is even rarer, but we do not know what degree or why because our sampling is too poor. The sampling maybe poor because there is roughly nothing to sample......only statistics, however poor, are permissible at this point, nothing else has relevance.

Which is why I absolutely hate the Drake equation and other speculative "proofs" of life in the universe. And "scientists" who claim we will find life off earth in the next 20 years. Utter hogwash. The data set is entirely too small to make any meaningful value of what that probability actually is. Life may very well be singular. I expect that it's not, but to be intellectually honest we have to entertain that possibility. We have several theories as to how life may start. Until we can answer that question, all else is an interesting conversation, but not proof.

[justidutch]

3 hours ago, PB666 said:

… The question we have to ask, would alien sentients really want to come to our system other than for scientific reasons….

 

 

 

 

 

They would come for the women, for the beer (in some countries), and the ski-boxing

[PB666]

19 minutes ago, justidutch said:

They would come for the women, for the beer (in some countries), and the ski-boxing

If anything they would come for the zombies and to see who gets killed on game of throwns. 

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, PB666 said:

I'm still optimistic, I'm pessimistic that in the next billion years we would go far enough out to find other sentients other than the evolved products of ourselves.

The essential problem is the distances between fertive objects in space and our/their inability to travel those distances with great facility.

And what are we after? Dim stars that last forever, in the future we will not be interested in solar power, but in hydrogen and dueterium . . .which means that the only thing we really need is a small gravity well and a means of concentrating these things, for example nebula and pre-protoplanetary nebula and the like.

A brown dwarf would be a great place to set up a colony, more or less invisible past 100 light years from any viewer, does not create reflections, you could create a sort of a dysan ring without being detected (dwarves emit in the IR anyway). Tiny gravity well compared to our sun.

Think about this, once you have fusion power in space and a space factory that can build fusion reactors as well as anything else, would you ever come inside the kuiper belt? You might send a space tug out to move asteroids from MSO to the kuiper belt, or move Saturn trojans out, but you probably would not waste the effort coming inside to Earths system. If you carve through enough comets, using their ICE as a heat sink for your fusion reactors, you evaporate off the volatiles and are left with the constituants that make up the rocky planets. No need for even going for asteroids after a while.

And some of the rarest compounds on earths surface are siderophiles, the prefer to be in the core and lower mantle not on the surface, so that if you are picking these minerals out of primordial space dust, concentrating them is far easier.

The question we have to ask, would alien sentients really want to come to our system other than for scientific reasons. Would we not behave the same to other systems, what we really want is a place where gathering E=mc2 is the easiest. The sun is a great thing, but it has a lower energy production density that the human body, and unless you like to bath in the heat of Mercury you are stuck with densities of 1 KW per sq. meter. With nuclear you can increase this by a 1000 fold.  And you are not limited to dipping deep into a gravity well to get it. What would an alienr have to fear from us, they will always be able to expand faster and farther from us, we would be like the children that scavenge the garbage dumps around big cities, so from their point of view when we come they should be moving on to happier hunting grounds. So either we are the first in our hard to expand out of vicinity, or they have already seen us but didn't care and moved on.

Well if you prefer the outer solar system, why go interstelar at all? 
It should be enough resources there for an long time, closer in you have the partial dyson swarm and low lightspeed delay. Think that the outer system is a bit too much water and not enough other stuff compared to the belt then you factor in the distances, on the other hand taxes are lower

One thing who might be valuable on planets with advanced life would probably be the life itself, the most valuable the Spanians looted in America was the potato. 
Just vanity items like pets or decorative plants could be very valuable if you have an large and rich population.
The genes themselves might also be very valuable here as bulding blocks or ideas.

Another reason might be infotainment, the science program is financed by the media generated, here something like Earth would be an killer, one interesting thing about us is that we are in the middle between stone age and long term stability.