This was what seemed like a last minute article due the next day. It doesn't say anything new nor anything remotely stimulating. What it says is what's at the beginning which is something...
This was what seemed like a last minute article due the next day. It doesn't say anything new nor anything remotely stimulating. What it says is what's at the beginning which is something trumpeted in all corners of the internet and answered but the answers are less interesting than the attention grabbing headline.
Where are all the aliens?
There's a ton of theories that answer that question, many are incredibly sensible, and some are very involved but just as likely.
The point being, we don't know, and won't know until we go out into deep space with the answers that are likely being, physics is a bitch, and the rare earth theory.
The more we study our own planet the more we realize mankind is a fluke and a species like us existing is exceedingly rare considering all that is involved in our evolutionary chain.
Biology tells us a lot too. Things we take for granted like sweat, our hair, our stomachs, our ears, and more all gave rise to us being able to live anywhere on the planet and to manipulate the materials the planet has.
But it doesn't stop there, the planet also had to develop in such a way as to provide a peaceful, temperate, and stable environment(s) to allow humanity to develop the way it did. We've almost been wiped out many times and barely survived. Had earth had different predators, a bigger volcano, a meteor, be slightly colder or warmer, we wouldn't be here.
Over the millions of years just think of the staggering amount of variables that had to go right to give rise to us and that's just one planet that needed a perfect solar system with just the right things.
One.
To me, it's absolutely no wonder there's a lack of intelligent bipedal sentient life because even if they were common, with earth having a sample size of 1, physics would then step in. The laws of physics, as we understand them, mean they're pretty absolute the more we study them. They're hard rules that don't get broken and our understanding of spacetime is showing us more and more that go fast does not equal exploring space.
This either means we sorely don't understand how to be interstellar, and there's a point of view or understanding out there that we'll arrive at eventually to "cheat" the laws of physics, or the laws of physics are all there is and will always prevent interstellar travel and communication and there might be intelligent life out there but they'll never know we're here.
And these are just two theories out of a sea of theories. Another one being they're already here but we can't perceive them because they operate on a higher dimension. It just keeps going.
As such, despite it being a thought experiment, it's one that has both no answer and too many answers and does nothing more. Where are the aliens is a poor question.
You're kind of unfairly dismissing the article, or maybe I'm just not browsing the right places on the internet, but I didn't see that approach to the article's question yet. When confronted, most...
You're kind of unfairly dismissing the article, or maybe I'm just not browsing the right places on the internet, but I didn't see that approach to the article's question yet. When confronted, most responses focus on our radio emissions which have a fairly limited range purely in terms of time. Here, instead, the study's author tried to estimate the feasibility for a type 2 civilization to resolve our artificial surface structures, and arrives with the made assumptions and constraints - which there are a whole lot of - at a maximum detectable distance of 3000ly, compared to the ~100ly for radio wave emissions. So with this approach they managed to increase the "viable" detection volume by 5 4 orders of magnitude and the answer to the question changed from a defeating "no" to a more interesting "maybe, if life is very common and likes to build solar scale telescopes".
The approach the article took to show the limitations of seeing the pyramids and what would be required at what distance is answering the Fermi Paradox one way, which echoes what I said about the...
The approach the article took to show the limitations of seeing the pyramids and what would be required at what distance is answering the Fermi Paradox one way, which echoes what I said about the laws of physics. It's expanding on how the laws of physics make interstellar communication and travel incredibly difficult.
So the article is saying even if we pointed a telescope in the right direction, unless it was 10AUs, we wouldn't be able to discern or see anything anyway and the truth is in reverse, type 1, or 2 or whatever. In fact, a hypothetical type 3 being as powerful as the category suggests, would have no problems accounting for these issues in physics. A civilization that has used the entire galaxy for fuel would know how to travel vast distances, and how to communicate to account for the issues of time over distance.
And yet nothing. To me it's telling, sentient life that's able to form civilizations is incredibly rare and there probably is no type 3 due to physics.
Right, so the article is hinting at the nature of things makes it very difficult to peer into the universe with the intent of finding civilizations and structures and other races would have the...
Right, so the article is hinting at the nature of things makes it very difficult to peer into the universe with the intent of finding civilizations and structures and other races would have the same issues. I'm saying a type 3 civilization would have realized this and, because they conquered their galaxy, would have already figured out these limitations.
The fact we haven't been conquered or visited by such a civilization doesn't definitely tell us a lot and instead raises more questions, but my takeaway is there's no type 3 civilization and the laws of physics prevent us from going beyond a type 2.
Sorry to be pedantic, but that's 1-2 orders of magnitude, unless I've completely misunderstood the whole concept.
a maximum detectable distance of 3000ly, compared to the ~100ly for radio wave emissions. So with this approach they managed to increase the "viable" detection volume by 5 orders of magnitude
Sorry to be pedantic, but that's 1-2 orders of magnitude, unless I've completely misunderstood the whole concept.
You are correct, but since we are interested in the total number of potential planets around us, it makes sense to calculate the volume of the sphere with the maximum distances used as the radius....
You are correct, but since we are interested in the total number of potential planets around us, it makes sense to calculate the volume of the sphere with the maximum distances used as the radius. Though technically with the wiki definition 5 orders is indeed still wrong and it should be 4 orders of magnitude.
I always find the Silurian hypothesis pretty interesting. We assume we're the first species like us to evolve. But really, we don't actually know that. As you mention, there were times that we...
But it doesn't stop there, the planet also had to develop in such a way as to provide a peaceful, temperate, and stable environment(s) to allow humanity to develop the way it did. We've almost been wiped out many times and barely survived.
We assume we're the first species like us to evolve. But really, we don't actually know that. As you mention, there were times that we came very close to being wiped out. Our species' survival strategy is not to be the fastest, the strongest, the one with the biggest claws or most potent venom. Rather, our evolutionary strategy is one built on individual intelligence, strong social cooperation, and intergenerational knowledge transfer. (We may have some unique physical advantages such as the persistence hunter hypothesis, but our success is largely due to our intelligence and cooperative capacities.)
But it seems that evolutionarily, that may be a very narrow needle to thread. Because of our biases, we tend to assume that more intelligence is always best. But that's not really the case. A bigger brain costs more resources, resources that could be directed to gathering more food, reproduction, etc. In the very long term, an intelligence like ours wins out. Looking at all we have now, all we have learned to build and create, the strategy seems obvious. But we had to fight for everything we have. And like any exponential process, the development of knowledge started incredibly slowly. It's not enough to grow big brains and good social skills. You need to first develop those and then keep your species alive long enough for the extremely slow process of prehistoric invention to start giving you a return on that investment. You have to pay the evolutionary cost to have a brain big enough to build a spear or control fire before you can build them. Only afterwards do you start seeing the returns of those inventions and discoveries. At a species level, intelligence like ours is a risky and long-term investment.
We assume we're the first species like ourselves, but we don't actually know that. Through the long history of Earth, there could have been a hundred species like ourselves, each trying to thread that narrow evolutionary window of high intelligence. We would just be the first that luckily managed to hold things together long enough to produce enough inventions and discoveries to make our large brains worth keeping. There could have been a hundred other attempts that simply went extinct, much as we almost did on several occasions.
Would we know if such species existed in the past? Quite probably not. Fossilization is a very rare process; very few remains ever end up being fossilized, and few of these are ever discovered. We've been able to explore in some detail our own hominid evolutionary history, but that has a few things going for it. First, it's relatively recent in time. Paleontologists exploring human evolution mostly can work with fossils under a million years old. Second, we know what we're looking for. The hands of our ancient primate ancestors weren't so different from our own. We can try making stone tools, gain an understanding of the process, and then look for similar tools in the fossil record. It's a lot easier to identify a particular rock as an example of an ancient tool if it's clearly built to fit within a human hand, is fitted for human ergonomics, etc.
Imagine there was a group of hadrosaurs that evolved human level intelligence and social cohesion. Let's imagine they did so about 80 million years ago. They lived in one region of some continent, developed technology akin to humans circa 250k years ago, and never exceeded a few hundred thousand in number. Then, after a few hundred thousand years, they died out. Maybe they were in every way our intellectual equals; they developed language, social cooperation, and a sense of identity as strong as any we have. They were just like us, except they rolled a 1 on one of those survival checks that we rolled a 2.
We would have zero evidence these beings ever existed. The rate of fossilization is so low we probably wouldn't even ever find a single one of their skeletons. Even if we did, we wouldn't have any way of telling these highly intelligent hadrosaurs from the other ones. We can trace the evolution of our intelligence because we know what parts of our brain do what. We can look at our brains and compare them to those of chimpanzees, and in turn realize what those differences mean in terms of capability and behavior. But a hadrosaur? How would you even begin to distinguish the brain of a regular hadrosaur from that of the highly intelligent ones? You could perhaps measure brain volume, but brain volume does not map directly to intelligence. There's plenty of creatures with brains far larger than ours that we would consider to have much lower in intelligence than ourselves.
Well, even if we can't identify these smart hadrosaurs by their bones, what about artifacts? People 250k years ago were making plenty of those. But here again we would be limited. Most of the objects they built would probably be built out of wood and other quickly decaying organic materials. We might be able to find evidence of ancient fires. But it can be difficult to conclusively prove evidence of artificial fire even in a human context; we don't even really know how long humans have had fire. Mostly when we prove evidence of ancient fires, it's because the fire pits are found in places that wouldn't naturally have fires, such as deep inside caves. And caves simply don't last long enough to preserve evidence of Cretaceous-era artificial fires. Caves form in limestone and other porous rock as water erodes cavities within them; eventually those same waters erode so much that all caves eventually collapse in on themselves. Caves simply don't last long enough to preserve evidence of ancient hadrosaur fires.
Really all we're left with is stone tools, and we would have a hard time distinguishing those from natural rocks. I don't know what a tool crafted by a hadrosaur for the hand of a hadrosaur would look like. You might be able to create some mock-up with computer modeling and a fair bit of guesswork, but it would be just that, guesswork. And hadrosaurs are just one potential source for such an ancient intelligent species; it could just as easily be from a hundred other potential animal lineages.
The simple truth is that we have no way of knowing if beings like ourselves have ever existed on this planet before us. As we ourselves came very close to extinction on several occasions, it is entirely reasonable that many other species attempted our evolutionary strategy in the past and simply didn't make it.
The Earth is incredibly good at recycling its surface and erasing records of the past. The only way we would ever be able to detect an ancient intelligent species is if they advanced to the point that they started having a meaningful impact on the planet as a whole. If they spread across the entire globe, industrialized, heavily mined mineral and fossil fuel resources, and started generating exotic isotopes through nuclear reactors and bombs, well we might be able to detect that. We could likely detect at least indirect evidence of a species of our present scale and complexity even tens of millions of years ago. Think evidence of certain radioisotopes in the atmosphere, rapid changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration, and certain durable artifacts. A large concrete building foundation for example, even after the rebar rusts, could remain a clear example of an artificial construct for millions of years into the future. Or things like stone statues, certain glass objects, etc. A global industrial civilization simply makes so much durable stuff that some of it should survive and remain as identifiably artificial eons into the future.
But a species that peaked at tech and population similar to humanity circa 250k BC? If it existed anywhere further back than a million or two years ago, we wouldn't recognize it. Most of their artifacts would decay away. And if any artifacts did survive, we would likely wouldn't even recognize them as artificial. And even if some of their bones did manage to get fossilized and be discovered, we likely wouldn't be able to recognize them as uniquely intelligent. Geological deep time is a terrifying thing, and there is a lot of room for things to hide in that misty valley.
All in all, it almost seems absurd to assume that we ARE the first species with intelligence similar to our own to evolve on this planet. Where else in the history of evolution do we see an evolutionary strategy that has only ever been pursued once by a single species? Most evolutionary niches have been filled thousands of times by different species. Why would we assume we're the first to go down the "intelligent social tool users" path? And again, we know that this isn't such an amazing strategy that any species that does it just instantly dominates the whole planet. Our path is not a shortcut to the top of the food chain. We ourselves nearly went extinct on several occasions as we tried to make this strategy work.
It seems more likely that our particular strategy, intelligence, tool use, and social cohesion, is one that has been tried many times before. It's just that it happens to be a very risky strategy. If you can keep things together long enough, then yes, eventually the tech you build up will give you a huge competitive advantage, eventually putting you on the top of the whole food chain. But it's the lottery of evolutionary strategies; and for every winner there are many, many losers.
Well written and I agree with most of what you said and also find this particular line of thought very interesting but I'll add one point to it where we differ. It is possible, as you said,...
Well written and I agree with most of what you said and also find this particular line of thought very interesting but I'll add one point to it where we differ.
It is possible, as you said, intelligent life capable of much of what ours is has existed and exists in this day and age. We find evidence of sentient life almost everywhere we look and more still of sentient life capable of transferring knowledge and working in a community. Ants do this just as an example.
Along this line of thinking, it is not unreasonable to assume intelligent life and sentient life is very, very common, but as you said, it is not the peak. Evolution does not end at intelligence, it ends at the path of least resistance with what just works. Sometimes having a large fang is good enough, nothing else is needed. Ask the shark or crocodile.
And true to your point, there could have been strange sentient life on this planet building tools and structures that we'll never know about.
But as you pointed out, they rolled a 1 to our 2 and couldn't overcome environmental changes, something that kills species left and right, we rolled a 2, but that 2 wasn't just our brilliance, it was in culmination with our biological advantages. Our stomachs being able to transition from meat to plants during famine. Our ability to walk vast distances to escape a hostile environment. Our ability to manipulate our environment thanks to our thumbs. Our ability to stand on our hind legs to theoretically see over tall grass. In no small way did these things play a role in our rolling a 2.
But the chimpanzee and gorilla laugh because for all our gifts and intelligence, they survived too with much simpler survival mechanisms.
It isn't a stretch to say there is intelligent sentient life everywhere. To look for aliens is to look at life here and understand there is a ghost staring at us from behind the eyes of most life here.
It's not a stretch to say every planet is probably filled with life.
But life that can do what we did? Life that can survive the growth of a planet? Life that can write? That can bend the elements to its will?
That's where I say the sample size is 1. Sure there has most likely been intelligent, communal, element manipulating life we'll never know about, but they did not have our biological gifts that are equally as impressive as our brains. The combination of the two is extremely unlikely. Even finding evidence of animals that can survive as we do is extremely rare and that's telling. Most animals on this planet will die if their environment changes in any meaningful way, if any part of their food chain changes at all, they'll die. Not humans though.
We're a fluke from any angle. We're what evolution could be, not what it is fated to be. The 17 year cicada has persisted through sheer numbers alone. Sharks are basically roaming stomachs. If it works, it works, that's the goal of evolution.
To be human like is to not just win a 2 at survival, it's to win a 2 at a myriad of things. We have no proof in the fossil record of anything like us because nothing was able to be both intelligent and had the biological ability to adapt to a volatile planet.
I dunno, it’s pretty specific, as is the paper it is based on. They see 3000 ly as the outer limit where the pyramids could be detected no matter how large of a telescope you have. It’s one little...
I dunno, it’s pretty specific, as is the paper it is based on. They see 3000 ly as the outer limit where the pyramids could be detected no matter how large of a telescope you have. It’s one little piece of a much larger problem, as is just about everything in science. Unless you’re that guy at Harvard who thinks he is living in a Chris Nolan movie.
Interesting article, though a bit bare-bones. At what distance would a Type 3 civilization be able to know we're here? But surely the more important question would be - would they care?
Interesting article, though a bit bare-bones. At what distance would a Type 3 civilization be able to know we're here?
But surely the more important question would be - would they care?
If life is rare then yeah they would care. We care about studying various species on earth to understand it better. I understand the mindset that advanced civilisations is wouldn’t care any more...
If life is rare then yeah they would care. We care about studying various species on earth to understand it better.
I understand the mindset that advanced civilisations is wouldn’t care any more than we care about “ants”. But we do care about ants, and we would care about ants even more if we were stranded on a desert island devoid of life, surrounded by trillions of similarly desert islands.
Some people do care about ants very much! Advanced alien civilizations don't have to be as uniform as they are painted in Star Trek. And even if they are organized completely different (e.g. like...
Some people do care about ants very much! Advanced alien civilizations don't have to be as uniform as they are painted in Star Trek.
And even if they are organized completely different (e.g. like ants) why wouldn't they invest some resources in astrobiology like we do? If they are completely uninterested in understanding new discoveries, how did they become so advanced? I think being curious about the world and the ability to combine efforts to reach greater goals are essential to any civilization.
Only if they come inside and try to steal my food. Am I aware that there are ants outside? Sure, even if I don't search for them, because usually there are many traces of them being there; but if...
Only if they come inside and try to steal my food.
Am I aware that there are ants outside? Sure, even if I don't search for them, because usually there are many traces of them being there; but if I don't se a anthill or ants going in and out a hole in the wall I wouldn't even know.
At the stage our civilization is we're probably less noticeable than an ant colony in midwinter, you may find it if you knew it was there, but would otherwise go unnoticed to most.
NASA says most of the liquid water in the universe is underneath the ice in outer solar system and probably interstellar bodies. Creatures that live out there might be really amazed that anybody...
NASA says most of the liquid water in the universe is underneath the ice in outer solar system and probably interstellar bodies. Creatures that live out there might be really amazed that anybody lives on dry solar system bodies like the Earth.
I think the reason for them to care would be the same way we could be noticed meaningfully - nuclear reactions giving off detectable energy that piques the interest of higher civilizations. The...
I think the reason for them to care would be the same way we could be noticed meaningfully - nuclear reactions giving off detectable energy that piques the interest of higher civilizations. The North Senitelese Islanders lived in a stone age society until a ship was wrecked along their shore, giving them Iron(!), exponentially advancing the quality of tool they could create as well as potentially advancing the learned disciplines of the society. Our discovery of the application of fission/fusion could be a similar analog to the leap iron tools afforded the Sentinelese, and maybe we will be just as drastically affected by any technology left behind by an advanced civilization akin to the shipwrecks of old.
I find all these conjectures so tiring, especially because they go in the same loops. I suspect that if we somehow had perfect information of the universe, we'd find that the fermi paradox has...
I find all these conjectures so tiring, especially because they go in the same loops.
I suspect that if we somehow had perfect information of the universe, we'd find that the fermi paradox has several incorrect assumptions (hell i think we already have decent evidence it does).
The vast distances between stars just limits how advanced a civilization can be, and even if the entire star wars and star trek style civilization's are out there, there's a very high possibility they can't see us and we can't see them. Until we know of a way to travel or view distances beyond light speed, all this feels like pointless conjecture, as even if there's ways to violate those rules, the universe is so obscenely large we might never overlap. Thus it's only the supposed frequency of the fermi paradox that leads to "well where are they" and if that's even slightly off then the answer is "really really really far away"
You don't need to travel faster than light to colonize most of the galaxy in a few thousand years. You just need to be able to make generation ships. But maybe civilizations haven't done that...
You don't need to travel faster than light to colonize most of the galaxy in a few thousand years. You just need to be able to make generation ships. But maybe civilizations haven't done that because it's expensive and the people who pay for it don't get a direct benefit.
Umm..maybe you're not being super specific, but the milky way is 100,000 ly's across. So if you're not traveling at light speed you're not colonizing the galaxy in a few thousand years. Hell...
Umm..maybe you're not being super specific, but the milky way is 100,000 ly's across. So if you're not traveling at light speed you're not colonizing the galaxy in a few thousand years.
Hell you're not doing it in a few thousand years at light speed. And if life is rare enough to be a "Maybe 1 per galaxy" thing, you're not interacting with or observable to other life for a very very very long time.
When I saw this headline I was expecting it to be about this phys.org article. The JWST can analyze exoplanet atmospheres for evidence of advanced civilizations up to 50 light-years. Using optical...
The JWST can analyze exoplanet atmospheres for evidence of advanced civilizations up to 50 light-years.
Using optical lenses to detect the pyramids seems extremely unlikely to me. I would expect spectroscopic analysis of the atmosphere would be much more probable.
I'm betting there's a reasonably high chance there are other intelligent species/societies in the universe. I'm also willing to bet only slightly less that none of those know about each other at...
I'm betting there's a reasonably high chance there are other intelligent species/societies in the universe.
I'm also willing to bet only slightly less that none of those know about each other at all due to the sheer distances between them + challenges in communication/recognition.
Just based on the immense size of the universe, to me it's a physical impossibility that we are the only sapient life out here. It's entirely possible these other races are in the same boat as we...
Just based on the immense size of the universe, to me it's a physical impossibility that we are the only sapient life out here. It's entirely possible these other races are in the same boat as we are; they're either not looking in the right places, don't have comparable technology to do so, or are simply too far away for any of it to work.
Are there other technically advanced alien civilisations? Are there any that are alive right now? The math says... probably? But the math also says very few at any given time. Where are they / why...
Are there other technically advanced alien civilisations? Are there any that are alive right now?
The math says... probably? But the math also says very few at any given time.
Where are they / why haven't we seen / heard from them?
Well... space is big, and the speed of light + the Drake Equation says it is vanishingly unlikely they will see our light/radio waves or that we will see their light/radio waves anytime soon, if ever.
This was what seemed like a last minute article due the next day. It doesn't say anything new nor anything remotely stimulating. What it says is what's at the beginning which is something trumpeted in all corners of the internet and answered but the answers are less interesting than the attention grabbing headline.
Where are all the aliens?
There's a ton of theories that answer that question, many are incredibly sensible, and some are very involved but just as likely.
The point being, we don't know, and won't know until we go out into deep space with the answers that are likely being, physics is a bitch, and the rare earth theory.
The more we study our own planet the more we realize mankind is a fluke and a species like us existing is exceedingly rare considering all that is involved in our evolutionary chain.
Biology tells us a lot too. Things we take for granted like sweat, our hair, our stomachs, our ears, and more all gave rise to us being able to live anywhere on the planet and to manipulate the materials the planet has.
But it doesn't stop there, the planet also had to develop in such a way as to provide a peaceful, temperate, and stable environment(s) to allow humanity to develop the way it did. We've almost been wiped out many times and barely survived. Had earth had different predators, a bigger volcano, a meteor, be slightly colder or warmer, we wouldn't be here.
Over the millions of years just think of the staggering amount of variables that had to go right to give rise to us and that's just one planet that needed a perfect solar system with just the right things.
One.
To me, it's absolutely no wonder there's a lack of intelligent bipedal sentient life because even if they were common, with earth having a sample size of 1, physics would then step in. The laws of physics, as we understand them, mean they're pretty absolute the more we study them. They're hard rules that don't get broken and our understanding of spacetime is showing us more and more that go fast does not equal exploring space.
This either means we sorely don't understand how to be interstellar, and there's a point of view or understanding out there that we'll arrive at eventually to "cheat" the laws of physics, or the laws of physics are all there is and will always prevent interstellar travel and communication and there might be intelligent life out there but they'll never know we're here.
And these are just two theories out of a sea of theories. Another one being they're already here but we can't perceive them because they operate on a higher dimension. It just keeps going.
As such, despite it being a thought experiment, it's one that has both no answer and too many answers and does nothing more. Where are the aliens is a poor question.
You're kind of unfairly dismissing the article, or maybe I'm just not browsing the right places on the internet, but I didn't see that approach to the article's question yet. When confronted, most responses focus on our radio emissions which have a fairly limited range purely in terms of time. Here, instead, the study's author tried to estimate the feasibility for a type 2 civilization to resolve our artificial surface structures, and arrives with the made assumptions and constraints - which there are a whole lot of - at a maximum detectable distance of 3000ly, compared to the ~100ly for radio wave emissions. So with this approach they managed to increase the "viable" detection volume by
54 orders of magnitude and the answer to the question changed from a defeating "no" to a more interesting "maybe, if life is very common and likes to build solar scale telescopes".The approach the article took to show the limitations of seeing the pyramids and what would be required at what distance is answering the Fermi Paradox one way, which echoes what I said about the laws of physics. It's expanding on how the laws of physics make interstellar communication and travel incredibly difficult.
So the article is saying even if we pointed a telescope in the right direction, unless it was 10AUs, we wouldn't be able to discern or see anything anyway and the truth is in reverse, type 1, or 2 or whatever. In fact, a hypothetical type 3 being as powerful as the category suggests, would have no problems accounting for these issues in physics. A civilization that has used the entire galaxy for fuel would know how to travel vast distances, and how to communicate to account for the issues of time over distance.
And yet nothing. To me it's telling, sentient life that's able to form civilizations is incredibly rare and there probably is no type 3 due to physics.
If I get it right the point of that paper was that past 3000 ly there aren’t enough photons and a bigger telescope doesn’t really help.
That was also my interpretation.
Right, so the article is hinting at the nature of things makes it very difficult to peer into the universe with the intent of finding civilizations and structures and other races would have the same issues. I'm saying a type 3 civilization would have realized this and, because they conquered their galaxy, would have already figured out these limitations.
The fact we haven't been conquered or visited by such a civilization doesn't definitely tell us a lot and instead raises more questions, but my takeaway is there's no type 3 civilization and the laws of physics prevent us from going beyond a type 2.
Sorry to be pedantic, but that's 1-2 orders of magnitude, unless I've completely misunderstood the whole concept.
You are correct, but since we are interested in the total number of potential planets around us, it makes sense to calculate the volume of the sphere with the maximum distances used as the radius. Though technically with the wiki definition 5 orders is indeed still wrong and it should be 4 orders of magnitude.
Right, you were talking about the volume, I was only thinking about the distance! My bad. :-)
I always find the Silurian hypothesis pretty interesting.
We assume we're the first species like us to evolve. But really, we don't actually know that. As you mention, there were times that we came very close to being wiped out. Our species' survival strategy is not to be the fastest, the strongest, the one with the biggest claws or most potent venom. Rather, our evolutionary strategy is one built on individual intelligence, strong social cooperation, and intergenerational knowledge transfer. (We may have some unique physical advantages such as the persistence hunter hypothesis, but our success is largely due to our intelligence and cooperative capacities.)
But it seems that evolutionarily, that may be a very narrow needle to thread. Because of our biases, we tend to assume that more intelligence is always best. But that's not really the case. A bigger brain costs more resources, resources that could be directed to gathering more food, reproduction, etc. In the very long term, an intelligence like ours wins out. Looking at all we have now, all we have learned to build and create, the strategy seems obvious. But we had to fight for everything we have. And like any exponential process, the development of knowledge started incredibly slowly. It's not enough to grow big brains and good social skills. You need to first develop those and then keep your species alive long enough for the extremely slow process of prehistoric invention to start giving you a return on that investment. You have to pay the evolutionary cost to have a brain big enough to build a spear or control fire before you can build them. Only afterwards do you start seeing the returns of those inventions and discoveries. At a species level, intelligence like ours is a risky and long-term investment.
We assume we're the first species like ourselves, but we don't actually know that. Through the long history of Earth, there could have been a hundred species like ourselves, each trying to thread that narrow evolutionary window of high intelligence. We would just be the first that luckily managed to hold things together long enough to produce enough inventions and discoveries to make our large brains worth keeping. There could have been a hundred other attempts that simply went extinct, much as we almost did on several occasions.
Would we know if such species existed in the past? Quite probably not. Fossilization is a very rare process; very few remains ever end up being fossilized, and few of these are ever discovered. We've been able to explore in some detail our own hominid evolutionary history, but that has a few things going for it. First, it's relatively recent in time. Paleontologists exploring human evolution mostly can work with fossils under a million years old. Second, we know what we're looking for. The hands of our ancient primate ancestors weren't so different from our own. We can try making stone tools, gain an understanding of the process, and then look for similar tools in the fossil record. It's a lot easier to identify a particular rock as an example of an ancient tool if it's clearly built to fit within a human hand, is fitted for human ergonomics, etc.
Imagine there was a group of hadrosaurs that evolved human level intelligence and social cohesion. Let's imagine they did so about 80 million years ago. They lived in one region of some continent, developed technology akin to humans circa 250k years ago, and never exceeded a few hundred thousand in number. Then, after a few hundred thousand years, they died out. Maybe they were in every way our intellectual equals; they developed language, social cooperation, and a sense of identity as strong as any we have. They were just like us, except they rolled a 1 on one of those survival checks that we rolled a 2.
We would have zero evidence these beings ever existed. The rate of fossilization is so low we probably wouldn't even ever find a single one of their skeletons. Even if we did, we wouldn't have any way of telling these highly intelligent hadrosaurs from the other ones. We can trace the evolution of our intelligence because we know what parts of our brain do what. We can look at our brains and compare them to those of chimpanzees, and in turn realize what those differences mean in terms of capability and behavior. But a hadrosaur? How would you even begin to distinguish the brain of a regular hadrosaur from that of the highly intelligent ones? You could perhaps measure brain volume, but brain volume does not map directly to intelligence. There's plenty of creatures with brains far larger than ours that we would consider to have much lower in intelligence than ourselves.
Well, even if we can't identify these smart hadrosaurs by their bones, what about artifacts? People 250k years ago were making plenty of those. But here again we would be limited. Most of the objects they built would probably be built out of wood and other quickly decaying organic materials. We might be able to find evidence of ancient fires. But it can be difficult to conclusively prove evidence of artificial fire even in a human context; we don't even really know how long humans have had fire. Mostly when we prove evidence of ancient fires, it's because the fire pits are found in places that wouldn't naturally have fires, such as deep inside caves. And caves simply don't last long enough to preserve evidence of Cretaceous-era artificial fires. Caves form in limestone and other porous rock as water erodes cavities within them; eventually those same waters erode so much that all caves eventually collapse in on themselves. Caves simply don't last long enough to preserve evidence of ancient hadrosaur fires.
Really all we're left with is stone tools, and we would have a hard time distinguishing those from natural rocks. I don't know what a tool crafted by a hadrosaur for the hand of a hadrosaur would look like. You might be able to create some mock-up with computer modeling and a fair bit of guesswork, but it would be just that, guesswork. And hadrosaurs are just one potential source for such an ancient intelligent species; it could just as easily be from a hundred other potential animal lineages.
The simple truth is that we have no way of knowing if beings like ourselves have ever existed on this planet before us. As we ourselves came very close to extinction on several occasions, it is entirely reasonable that many other species attempted our evolutionary strategy in the past and simply didn't make it.
The Earth is incredibly good at recycling its surface and erasing records of the past. The only way we would ever be able to detect an ancient intelligent species is if they advanced to the point that they started having a meaningful impact on the planet as a whole. If they spread across the entire globe, industrialized, heavily mined mineral and fossil fuel resources, and started generating exotic isotopes through nuclear reactors and bombs, well we might be able to detect that. We could likely detect at least indirect evidence of a species of our present scale and complexity even tens of millions of years ago. Think evidence of certain radioisotopes in the atmosphere, rapid changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration, and certain durable artifacts. A large concrete building foundation for example, even after the rebar rusts, could remain a clear example of an artificial construct for millions of years into the future. Or things like stone statues, certain glass objects, etc. A global industrial civilization simply makes so much durable stuff that some of it should survive and remain as identifiably artificial eons into the future.
But a species that peaked at tech and population similar to humanity circa 250k BC? If it existed anywhere further back than a million or two years ago, we wouldn't recognize it. Most of their artifacts would decay away. And if any artifacts did survive, we would likely wouldn't even recognize them as artificial. And even if some of their bones did manage to get fossilized and be discovered, we likely wouldn't be able to recognize them as uniquely intelligent. Geological deep time is a terrifying thing, and there is a lot of room for things to hide in that misty valley.
All in all, it almost seems absurd to assume that we ARE the first species with intelligence similar to our own to evolve on this planet. Where else in the history of evolution do we see an evolutionary strategy that has only ever been pursued once by a single species? Most evolutionary niches have been filled thousands of times by different species. Why would we assume we're the first to go down the "intelligent social tool users" path? And again, we know that this isn't such an amazing strategy that any species that does it just instantly dominates the whole planet. Our path is not a shortcut to the top of the food chain. We ourselves nearly went extinct on several occasions as we tried to make this strategy work.
It seems more likely that our particular strategy, intelligence, tool use, and social cohesion, is one that has been tried many times before. It's just that it happens to be a very risky strategy. If you can keep things together long enough, then yes, eventually the tech you build up will give you a huge competitive advantage, eventually putting you on the top of the whole food chain. But it's the lottery of evolutionary strategies; and for every winner there are many, many losers.
Well written and I agree with most of what you said and also find this particular line of thought very interesting but I'll add one point to it where we differ.
It is possible, as you said, intelligent life capable of much of what ours is has existed and exists in this day and age. We find evidence of sentient life almost everywhere we look and more still of sentient life capable of transferring knowledge and working in a community. Ants do this just as an example.
Along this line of thinking, it is not unreasonable to assume intelligent life and sentient life is very, very common, but as you said, it is not the peak. Evolution does not end at intelligence, it ends at the path of least resistance with what just works. Sometimes having a large fang is good enough, nothing else is needed. Ask the shark or crocodile.
And true to your point, there could have been strange sentient life on this planet building tools and structures that we'll never know about.
But as you pointed out, they rolled a 1 to our 2 and couldn't overcome environmental changes, something that kills species left and right, we rolled a 2, but that 2 wasn't just our brilliance, it was in culmination with our biological advantages. Our stomachs being able to transition from meat to plants during famine. Our ability to walk vast distances to escape a hostile environment. Our ability to manipulate our environment thanks to our thumbs. Our ability to stand on our hind legs to theoretically see over tall grass. In no small way did these things play a role in our rolling a 2.
But the chimpanzee and gorilla laugh because for all our gifts and intelligence, they survived too with much simpler survival mechanisms.
It isn't a stretch to say there is intelligent sentient life everywhere. To look for aliens is to look at life here and understand there is a ghost staring at us from behind the eyes of most life here.
It's not a stretch to say every planet is probably filled with life.
But life that can do what we did? Life that can survive the growth of a planet? Life that can write? That can bend the elements to its will?
That's where I say the sample size is 1. Sure there has most likely been intelligent, communal, element manipulating life we'll never know about, but they did not have our biological gifts that are equally as impressive as our brains. The combination of the two is extremely unlikely. Even finding evidence of animals that can survive as we do is extremely rare and that's telling. Most animals on this planet will die if their environment changes in any meaningful way, if any part of their food chain changes at all, they'll die. Not humans though.
We're a fluke from any angle. We're what evolution could be, not what it is fated to be. The 17 year cicada has persisted through sheer numbers alone. Sharks are basically roaming stomachs. If it works, it works, that's the goal of evolution.
To be human like is to not just win a 2 at survival, it's to win a 2 at a myriad of things. We have no proof in the fossil record of anything like us because nothing was able to be both intelligent and had the biological ability to adapt to a volatile planet.
I dunno, it’s pretty specific, as is the paper it is based on. They see 3000 ly as the outer limit where the pyramids could be detected no matter how large of a telescope you have. It’s one little piece of a much larger problem, as is just about everything in science. Unless you’re that guy at Harvard who thinks he is living in a Chris Nolan movie.
Interesting article, though a bit bare-bones. At what distance would a Type 3 civilization be able to know we're here?
But surely the more important question would be - would they care?
If life is rare then yeah they would care. We care about studying various species on earth to understand it better.
I understand the mindset that advanced civilisations is wouldn’t care any more than we care about “ants”. But we do care about ants, and we would care about ants even more if we were stranded on a desert island devoid of life, surrounded by trillions of similarly desert islands.
Yeah—do you care there's some ants outside?
Some people do care about ants very much! Advanced alien civilizations don't have to be as uniform as they are painted in Star Trek.
And even if they are organized completely different (e.g. like ants) why wouldn't they invest some resources in astrobiology like we do? If they are completely uninterested in understanding new discoveries, how did they become so advanced? I think being curious about the world and the ability to combine efforts to reach greater goals are essential to any civilization.
Only if they come inside and try to steal my food.
Am I aware that there are ants outside? Sure, even if I don't search for them, because usually there are many traces of them being there; but if I don't se a anthill or ants going in and out a hole in the wall I wouldn't even know.
At the stage our civilization is we're probably less noticeable than an ant colony in midwinter, you may find it if you knew it was there, but would otherwise go unnoticed to most.
NASA says most of the liquid water in the universe is underneath the ice in outer solar system and probably interstellar bodies. Creatures that live out there might be really amazed that anybody lives on dry solar system bodies like the Earth.
I think the reason for them to care would be the same way we could be noticed meaningfully - nuclear reactions giving off detectable energy that piques the interest of higher civilizations. The North Senitelese Islanders lived in a stone age society until a ship was wrecked along their shore, giving them Iron(!), exponentially advancing the quality of tool they could create as well as potentially advancing the learned disciplines of the society. Our discovery of the application of fission/fusion could be a similar analog to the leap iron tools afforded the Sentinelese, and maybe we will be just as drastically affected by any technology left behind by an advanced civilization akin to the shipwrecks of old.
I find all these conjectures so tiring, especially because they go in the same loops.
I suspect that if we somehow had perfect information of the universe, we'd find that the fermi paradox has several incorrect assumptions (hell i think we already have decent evidence it does).
The vast distances between stars just limits how advanced a civilization can be, and even if the entire star wars and star trek style civilization's are out there, there's a very high possibility they can't see us and we can't see them. Until we know of a way to travel or view distances beyond light speed, all this feels like pointless conjecture, as even if there's ways to violate those rules, the universe is so obscenely large we might never overlap. Thus it's only the supposed frequency of the fermi paradox that leads to "well where are they" and if that's even slightly off then the answer is "really really really far away"
You don't need to travel faster than light to colonize most of the galaxy in a few thousand years. You just need to be able to make generation ships. But maybe civilizations haven't done that because it's expensive and the people who pay for it don't get a direct benefit.
Umm..maybe you're not being super specific, but the milky way is 100,000 ly's across. So if you're not traveling at light speed you're not colonizing the galaxy in a few thousand years.
Hell you're not doing it in a few thousand years at light speed. And if life is rare enough to be a "Maybe 1 per galaxy" thing, you're not interacting with or observable to other life for a very very very long time.
When I saw this headline I was expecting it to be about this phys.org article.
The JWST can analyze exoplanet atmospheres for evidence of advanced civilizations up to 50 light-years.
Using optical lenses to detect the pyramids seems extremely unlikely to me. I would expect spectroscopic analysis of the atmosphere would be much more probable.
I'm betting there's a reasonably high chance there are other intelligent species/societies in the universe.
I'm also willing to bet only slightly less that none of those know about each other at all due to the sheer distances between them + challenges in communication/recognition.
Just based on the immense size of the universe, to me it's a physical impossibility that we are the only sapient life out here. It's entirely possible these other races are in the same boat as we are; they're either not looking in the right places, don't have comparable technology to do so, or are simply too far away for any of it to work.
Are there other technically advanced alien civilisations? Are there any that are alive right now?
The math says... probably? But the math also says very few at any given time.
Where are they / why haven't we seen / heard from them?
Well... space is big, and the speed of light + the Drake Equation says it is vanishingly unlikely they will see our light/radio waves or that we will see their light/radio waves anytime soon, if ever.
I believe Human race is the Advance Civilization.