UFO stuff

[DaveSumm]

34 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

The problem is one of time.

The universe is old. The paradox is around "why are there no aliens given how long its been". Imagine that instead of humans dinosaurs were the ones that evolved intelligence - 60 million years ago. Imagine how noisy we would be 58 million years from now. 

Here’s another assumption though; that ‘more advanced’ equals ‘noisier’. I’m not sure that’s true. Even in our limited technological lifespan, we’ve moved from radio waves to digital, ‘quieter’ signals. The current detectable evidence that humans are here is a pretty pathetic ring of radio waves that’s getting progressively weaker, and takes up a fraction of the Milky Way. So if we aren’t detectable, why do we assume others are?

34 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

 the galaxy should be teeming with probes and colonizers and harvesters. And those are cheap to do - the equivalent of dandelion seeds. So ... why aren't they there?

They probably are. The universe would have to teeming with trillions upon trillions of them before it became probable that we’d encounter one.

It’s still an interesting discussion, but I just wonder if this isn’t a hard cap on the science. Much like how if you were to propose weather prediction to a meteorologist / mathematician, that we’d have Back To The Future II style to-the-second weather forecasts, they’d point out that chaos theory just doesn’t work that way. It’s inherently incalculable and always will be. And everything we know says that the light speed limit is the same.

There’s obviously ways to transmit signals much more loudly, but then you have to point them in the right direction. You’d only know where to point them if someone took a punt and sent one to you first, so then we have the confluence of staggering luck for the first punt AND the luck that the species you pick were capable of sending something back.

I imagine there may be rare cases where that luck has payed off, and there are species who are at least aware of each others existence. But meaningful communication, within lifetimes? Meaningful travel, where the two species can enjoy a relationship and flourish with it? I don’t see how that can happen, anywhere.

[drawkcabi]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Warp drive’s don’t actual break light speed they warp reality by creating a bubble of energy around a ship that allows it to move faster than like according the perception of people on the ship.  

I’ve always wondered how the relativity of time would play with “warp drive”.  Star Trek just pretends it isn’t an issue.  I suspect there would be “time debt” for those traveling compaired to those who don’t travel.

There's been an episode here and there that addresses it. Beta canon goes into more detail. Warp travel has made time dilation less of a thing but still a thing. Like depending on what warp a ship is traveling at and for how long, it can cause time deviations, usually seconds, minutes, and hours. Sometimes days and weeks. Rarely months and years.

Basically, while each planet has their own local time(s) there's (at least in the Federation) a general standard time (stardates are related to this).

Usually each ship's computer automatically calculates and compensates for time deviations when traveling at warp but it's standard procedure every time a ship drops out of warp to sync up through subspace communication with the Federation Standard Time, just in case.

Once in a while you see it, like in the TNG episodes "Clues" and "Cause and Effect" when the Enterprise syncs up its time is off for one reason or another and it's notable because of how much it's off (weeks) and that's unusual even if they have a reason for it.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

7 hours ago, drawkcabi said:

There's been an episode here and there that addresses it. Beta canon goes into more detail. Warp travel has made time dilation less of a thing but still a thing. Like depending on what warp a ship is traveling at and for how long, it can cause time deviations, usually seconds, minutes, and hours. Sometimes days and weeks. Rarely months and years.

Basically, while each planet has their own local time(s) there's (at least in the Federation) a general standard time (stardates are related to this).

Usually each ship's computer automatically calculates and compensates for time deviations when traveling at warp but it's standard procedure every time a ship drops out of warp to sync up through subspace communication with the Federation Standard Time, just in case.

Once in a while you see it, like in the TNG episodes "Clues" and "Cause and Effect" when the Enterprise syncs up its time is off for one reason or another and it's notable because of how much it's off (weeks) and that's unusual even if they have a reason for it.

They gloss over it.  Starfleet officers should be aging at rates different from the people back home.  That’s never addressed.

Edited June 7, 2023 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[Kalbear]

45 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Here’s another assumption though; that ‘more advanced’ equals ‘noisier’. I’m not sure that’s true. Even in our limited technological lifespan, we’ve moved from radio waves to digital, ‘quieter’ signals. The current detectable evidence that humans are here is a pretty pathetic ring of radio waves that’s getting progressively weaker, and takes up a fraction of the Milky Way. So if we aren’t detectable, why do we assume others are?

Well, we  are detectable. It's not just radio. We have put out a very large amount of satellites, probes, launches, etc. 

But sure, it's possible that aliens are using mechanisms that we cannot so far detect. That's another answer to the paradox. But the point is that you need to have some answer. 

45 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

They probably are. The universe would have to teeming with trillions upon trillions of them before it became probable that we’d encounter one.

Again, not really. Both it's more easy to spread out significantly in the timeframe we're talking about AND you only have to be positively detected once.

45 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

It’s still an interesting discussion, but I just wonder if this isn’t a hard cap on the science. Much like how if you were to propose weather prediction to a meteorologist / mathematician, that we’d have Back To The Future II style to-the-second weather forecasts, they’d point out that chaos theory just doesn’t work that way. It’s inherently incalculable and always will be. And everything we know says that the light speed limit is the same.

Again, light speed really isn't the issue. If you propagate space travel based on something like our Voyager probes you still get a spherical outreach that can hit most of the galaxy in under a million years or less. That sounds like a lot but in the timeframe we're talking about it's miniscule. 

45 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

There’s obviously ways to transmit signals much more loudly, but then you have to point them in the right direction. You’d only know where to point them if someone took a punt and sent one to you first, so then we have the confluence of staggering luck for the first punt AND the luck that the species you pick were capable of sending something back.

It's not just radio signals. It's signs of any artifice. So radio, xray, light, microwave. It's probes, robots, biological seedings. It's evidence of stellar engineering and stellar weaponry. And we have so far seen nothing at all. 

Now to be fair we've not been looking that long, but it also means that there are certain classes of things (like stellar engineering) that appear to not have been happening anywhere nearby, which is itself interesting.

45 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I imagine there may be rare cases where that luck has payed off, and there are species who are at least aware of each others existence. But meaningful communication, within lifetimes? Meaningful travel, where the two species can enjoy a relationship and flourish with it? I don’t see how that can happen, anywhere.

But we're not just talking meaningful dialog; we're talking about ANY evidence of other aliens. And per the Dark Forest theory said evidence may just lead another civ to obliterate that first one - which is pretty meaningful, though perhaps not in the way you want it to be.

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

One idea is that it's a lot less likely for intelligence to evolve to a point where we leave the nest - that intelligence is not a species survival trait. Given enough timelines all smart species kill themselves.

Alternatively, true intelligence does not lead species to "leave the nest." We humans associate curiosity and exploration with intelligence, but that may be because we're not actually smart and need a lot of trial and error to innovate and progress.

Another way to put it: true intelligence may be closer to what we think of as "enlightenment," so there could be lots of alien species out there who don't make much noise and just don't feel the need to explore much, let alone contact savages like us.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

10 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Alternatively, true intelligence does not lead species to "leave the nest." We humans associate curiosity and exploration with intelligence, but that may be because we're not actually smart and need a lot of trial and error to innovate and progress.

Another way to put it: true intelligence may be closer to what we think of as "enlightenment," so there could be lots of alien species out there who don't make much noise and just don't feel the need to explore much, let alone contact savages like us.

That was my point about the “Dark Forest” anawer to the Fermi Paradox being very “Specio-centeric”.  It assumes intelligence as we perceive it is universal.  

[polishgenius]

1 minute ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Well, we  are detectable. It's not just radio. We have put out a very large amount of satellites, probes, launches, etc. 

 

Yes, but of those, two have (arguably) left the solar system. None are within a thousand years of reaching another star. 

 

3 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

If you propagate space travel based on something like our Voyager probes you still get a spherical outreach that can hit most of the galaxy in under a million years or less. That sounds like a lot but in the timeframe we're talking about it's miniscule. 

 

I could be totally wrong about this, I'm just looking up numbers and of course speed is a bit tricky in space, it's all relative, so I'm not sure what the actual speed would be if you could point something directly away from the sun and make it go as fast as it will go. But:

A quick google says Voyager 2 is currently moving at 3.3 AU per year, relative to the sun. The center of the milky way is about 1.7 billion AU away from us. Double that roughly to get across the entire thing (we're not quite at the edge, but close enough to get the point). So 3.4 billion AU or so. By those numbers, it'd take something moving at Voyager speeds would take about a billion years to get across the galaxy. 

 

 

Add to that that we've been capable of detecting something like that in our solar system for a vanishingly tiny period of time, and while I could be wrong about this I'm fairly certain we'd still be super-lucky to spot it if it wasn't actively broadcasting and we didn't know where it is. If something like that passed through our system 200 years ago, we'd never have had a hope of seeing it. 

[Kalbear]

17 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Alternatively, true intelligence does not lead species to "leave the nest." We humans associate curiosity and exploration with intelligence, but that may be because we're not actually smart and need a lot of trial and error to innovate and progress.

Another way to put it: true intelligence may be closer to what we think of as "enlightenment," so there could be lots of alien species out there who don't make much noise and just don't feel the need to explore much, let alone contact savages like us.

Statistically it doesn't matter; unless we are INCREDIBLY unique there should be some species out there that are into curiousity and exploration. 

That is, of course, another answer - that while intelligent life is common we're weird in that we're noisy and expansionistic. But again, given the timeframes it only takes one other species to have existed in the last, oh, billion years for that to not be sufficient as an answer.

5 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

That was my point about the “Dark Forest” anawer to the Fermi Paradox being very “Specio-centeric”.  It assumes intelligence as we perceive it is universal.  

No, it doesn't. In fact it assumes the opposite - that you can assume nothing about any species you detect other than it could potentially be a threat to your life, and that survival of a species is one of the only moral imperatives that you can assume about another intelligent life - because without it they would not exist as a species. The Dark Forest theory bases the viewpoint that regardless of your societal viewpoints of the universe and how you are as a species you will come to the inescapable conclusion that another species out there can be a threat if they know you exist, and you have absolutely no way of knowing if they will be a threat or how fast they can act. Because the threat is so high - obliteration of your entire species - you must take it with the absolute most seriousness. It is based on the absolute minimum logical guardrails - very simple prisoner dilemma/game theory concepts - and has nothing to do with any specio-centric viewpoints.

1 minute ago, polishgenius said:

 

Yes, but of those, two have (arguably) left the solar system. None are within a thousand years of reaching another star. 

So in a million years that means how much do they propagate? 

In 50 million years how much more do they propagate?

1 minute ago, polishgenius said:

 

I could be totally wrong about this, I'm just looking up numbers and of course speed is a bit tricky in space, it's all relative, so I'm not sure what the actual speed would be if you could point something directly away from the sun and make it go as fast as it will go. But:

A quick google says Voyager 2 is currently moving at 3.3 AU per year, relative to the sun. The center of the milky way is about 1.7 billion AU away from us. Double that roughly to get across the entire thing (we're not quite at the edge, but close enough to get the point). So 3.4 billion AU or so. By those numbers, it'd take something moving at Voyager speeds would take about a billion years to get across the galaxy. 

Yep. That's across the galaxy though, from our position on one part of the outer rim. Now imagine there are 10 species that have existed in that timeframe, all scattered equally in the galaxy; you've dropped the number of years that you would have likely found one from 500 million to about 50 million. And 10 species is an incredibly small number compared to what the paradox would predict. 

1 minute ago, polishgenius said:

Add to that that we've been capable of detecting something like that in our solar system for a vanishingly tiny period of time, and while I could be wrong about this I'm fairly certain we'd still be super-lucky to spot it if it wasn't actively broadcasting and we didn't know where it is. If something like that passed through our system 200 years ago, we'd never have had a hope of seeing it. 

True! But again it's not just a voyager-type probe. That was literally our first attempt  at something like this. Think about how much more advanced and how many more probes we could launch right now. Or in 50 years. Think about how we could make probes that find other planets and start building probes from those planets to launch elsewhere. Think about other forms of stellar engineering like Dyson spheres that could exist. Think about other signals - xrays and radio and whatnot.

And we have seen none of it. 

It's entirely possible we're digging in the wrong place, or we don't have the tech to hear things, or something like that. That is, as I said, another possible answer to the paradox. But it does mean at least the things we're looking for aren't there as we expect, which is itself a very interesting problem to solve.

[DaveSumm]

15 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Well, we  are detectable. It's not just radio. We have put out a very large amount of satellites, probes, launches, etc. 

But sure, it's possible that aliens are using mechanisms that we cannot so far detect. That's another answer to the paradox. But the point is that you need to have some answer. 

And all those things require that you point your sensors in the right place, and they assume extraordinarily powerful telescopes. In terms of really shouting, we aren’t doing much right now. The image here emphasises this, our galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter. And our radio signals? 200. And the link also states that even with the correct technology, passed 100 light years, they’re too weak anyway.

It needs an answer, I’m just not sure it merits the term ‘paradox’. ‘Why can’t we detect things that, as far as we know, shouldn’t be detectable’ isn’t a paradox.

15 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Again, light speed really isn't the issue. If you propagate space travel based on something like our Voyager probes you still get a spherical outreach that can hit most of the galaxy in under a million years or less. That sounds like a lot but in the timeframe we're talking about it's miniscule. 

Some crude number crunching, but I believe to put anything detectable in each light year square of the surface area of our galaxy, you’d need 31,000,000,000 such devices. And I wonder if I’m off there cos even that seems low.

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, DaveSumm said:

And all those things require that you point your sensors in the right place, and they assume extraordinarily powerful telescopes. In terms of really shouting, we aren’t doing much right now. The image here emphasises this, our galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter. And our radio signals? 200. And the link also states that even with the correct technology, passed 100 light years, they’re too weak anyway.

It needs an answer, I’m just not sure it merits the term ‘paradox’. ‘Why can’t we detect things that, as far as we know, shouldn’t be detectable’ isn’t a paradox.

Sure - but we're new. Think about things that have existed for 500 million years. That's the real problem. If we aren't seeing anything, it means that for the last light cone of viewing there is nothing that we can detect, anywhere in the sky we look. That's pretty remarkable!

And your argument that we're just not pointing in the right place means a few things - it means things aren't as noisy as we expect, as an example, or things that we should be able to detect like stellar engineering. Those things are going to be detectable unless they are being massively and deliberately cloaked; you can't just rebroadcast a sun unless you're choosing to do so deliberately. 

It is probably the wrong term to call it a paradox, I agree. But the lack of info is itself incredibly telling in terms of the class of answers that must exist. Put it another way - it is ridiculously unlikely that we are just accidentally not finding things. It is highly unlikely we are just not getting lucky. While we've only been at it for a short time it is incredibly unlikely that we are first. 

• Unless intelligent life is absurdly rare over the time periods we're talking
• Unless intelligent life surviving is absurdly rare
• Unless intelligent life being wiped out by others is far more common
• Unless the laws of the universe are significantly more different than we currently know

All of those are possibilities. But something that isn't a possibility is that we are just not looking exactly at the right place and the right time. 

1 minute ago, DaveSumm said:

Some crude number crunching, but I believe to put anything detectable in each light year square of the surface area of our galaxy, you’d need 31,000,000,000 such devices. And I wonder if I’m off there cos even that seems low.

That sounds fine! 

Now think about how many satellites we produce every single year on this planet. Think about how fast we as a species have gone from 4 billion humans to 8 billion. Think about self-replicating machines sent out to the galaxy and how fast they would create those 31 billion devices if they just reproduced and doubled every 10 years. 

Exponential growth means 31 billion is child's play to hit in mere millennia. A million years of exponential growth would create trillions of these devices. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

21 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

No, it doesn't. In fact it assumes the opposite - that you can assume nothing about any species you detect other than it could potentially be a threat to your life, and that survival of a species is one of the only moral imperatives that you can assume about another intelligent life - because without it they would not exist as a species. The Dark Forest theory bases the viewpoint that regardless of your societal viewpoints of the universe and how you are as a species you will come to the inescapable conclusion that another species out there can be a threat if they know you exist, and you have absolutely no way of knowing if they will be a threat or how fast they can act. Because the threat is so high - obliteration of your entire species - you must take it with the absolute most seriousness. It is based on the absolute minimum logical guardrails - very simple prisoner dilemma/game theory concepts - and has nothing to do with any specio-centric viewpoints.

I’m going to continue to disagree.  Until we have some frame of reference, an actual extraterrestrial intelligence to perceive… as an intelligence, even “game theory” is coming from a human cultural frame of reference.  

We lack data to predict unless you want to claim “Dark Forest” is somehow an a priori idea that has to apply universally.

For an (admittedly flawed because they don’t actually exist) example what if the Aliens from “Arrival” were real?  Given their incredibly different perception of time.  Could normal “game theory” apply?

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I’m going to continue to disagree.  Until we have some frame of reference, an actual extraterrestrial intelligence to perceive… as an intelligence, even “game theory” is coming from a human cultural frame of reference.  

We lack data to predict unless you want to claim “Dark Forest” is somehow an a priori idea that has to apply universally.

For an (admittedly flawed because they don’t actually exist) example what if the Aliens from “Arrival” were real?  Given their incredibly different perception of time.  Could normal “game theory” apply?

Okay, but you're wrong, and it should be trivial to demonstrate why you're right if you so choose. Game theory does not come from any human cultural frame of reference; it comes from a simple frame of species existence - that life wants to actually exist and not, ya know, be wiped out. It also comes from a frame of reference that species will be able to recognize things that threaten it - both other intelligent life and other natural occurrences. Neither of these have any actual basis in human culture. Both are 100% based on cold logic and the philosophical concept of temporal existence. 

The whole idea behind Dark Forest is that it is an a priori idea that applies universally. That's the fundamental concept presented in the book - of cosmological sociology. It is, in fact, the only core part of it - that all species will come to understand this and it is the only universal value that you can trust when meeting other species. 

For the aliens from Arrival whose perception of time doesn't apply the same way the only difference would be that they would know with certainty if they were destined to be wiped out or not. And point of fact the whole plot of the movie:

Spoiler

Is that they come to the humans BECAUSE they run into an extinction-level threat that the humans help solve thousands of years down the road. Which is more of a confirmation of Dark Forest than anything else. 

The only special thing from that point of view is that they can guarantee whether or not another species will be a threat or not; it does not deny the Dark Forest, it just gives a culture 100% perfect knowledge of when or if they're gonna die. 

 

[Rippounet]

37 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Statistically it doesn't matter; unless we are INCREDIBLY unique there should be some species out there that are into The Dark Forest theory bases the viewpoint that regardless of your societal viewpoints of the universe and how you are as a species you will come to the inescapable conclusion that another species out there can be a threat if they know you exist, and you have absolutely no way of knowing if they will be a threat or how fast they can act. Because the threat is so high - obliteration of your entire species - you must take it with the absolute most seriousness. It is based on the absolute minimum logical guardrails - very simple prisoner dilemma/game theory concepts - and has nothing to do with any specio-centric viewpoints.

It at least assumes that evolution will work everywhere the way it does on Earth.

And, funnily enough, evolution doesn't even work that way on Earth. As I understand it, recent research has proved that Kropotkin's theory of mutual aid was essentially correct. This means that different species are only rivals or threats to each other in harsh environments ; the individual predator/prey relationship notwithstanding, species are more likely to seek mutual benefits than to view each other as threats.
Similar research has also shown that absent outside pressure (i.e. lack of resources), humans are also far more collaborative than competitive.

In other words, Dark Forest comes from a very dark perspective that does not correspond to reality. Therefore, actual intelligence is unlikely to conform to that perspective...

37 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Statistically it doesn't matter; unless we are INCREDIBLY unique there should be some species out there that are into curiousity and exploration.

Except if there's an inverse correlation between the desire for exploration and the ability to do so...

If we assume that we are indeed not unique, then right now we have the desire to explore, but not the means.

Edited June 6, 2023 by Rippounet

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, Rippounet said:

It at least assumes that evolution will work everywhere the way it does on Earth.

And, funnily enough, evolution doesn't even work that way on Earth. As I understand it, recent research has proved Kropotkin's theory of mutual aid was essentially correct. This means that different species are only rivals or threats to each other in harsh environments ; the individual predator/prey relationship notwithstanding, species are more likely to seek mutual benefits than to view each other as threats.
Similar research has also shown that absent outside pressure (i.e. lack of resources), humans are also far more collaborative than competitive.

In other words, Dark Forest comes from a very dark perspective that does not correspond to reality. Therefore, actual intelligence is unlikely to conform to that perspective...

Again, no, it doesn't. It actually assumes the opposite. All it assumes is that any species you may encounter might be a threat. And it only takes one threat - one that is entirely alien from your viewpoint of mutual cooperation - to make your day suck real bad.

For all we know we could be the predators out there - that's possible. But intelligent species must at least come to the conclusion that an intelligent species could be a threat in the same way that a supernova is - not because they are like us or not, but because intelligent species could have immense power. 

Again, it's not a dark perspective; it's just game theory. It's saying that if x% of all alien species have even the capacity to do harm that means you must consider that a massive threat and deal with it accordingly. Nothing to do with dark viewpoints. It also means that you will never be able to fully understand if that species is a threat - that you cannot possibly understand that species because of your alien viewpoints and background, any more than you can talk to a supernova-prone star. Which means that as soon as you detect another species - or more accurately, they detect you - you could be at risk, and you will have no way of knowing if they are or not until you know of their existence. 

This is all basic logic. It's uncomfortable logic, but it's not particularly human centric or mistrusting; it's based entirely on the lack of perfect information and the amount of risk you could have.

1 minute ago, Rippounet said:

Except if there's an inverse correlation between the desire for exploration and the ability to do so...

If we assume that we are indeed not unique, then right now we have the desire to explore, but not the means.

We don't have the means right this second but we have been doing stellar exploration for a fraction of a blink of an eye. Imagine what we could do in a million years given that we survive that long. 

And yes, that inverse correlation is precisely what Dark Forest predicts - that the species that desire exploration lack the ability to do so because they are wiped out of existence. IE, as soon as they are detected they are eradicated. 

[polishgenius]

1 hour ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Think about how we could make probes that find other planets and start building probes from those planets to launch elsewhere.

 

 

I mean, we could not. Theoratically, sure, it's plausible we have the technology in completely literal terms that could be translated into doing that. Program a robot that can make a mini-refinery and a forge and etc etc etc and go from there. But in practice, we haven't even got around to automated building on Mars, and our AI is currently at the stage where AI controlled drones in simulations will kill their operators to prevent them being turned off. Our AI cars keep trying to kill people. We're not at self-propagating terraforming projects. Not even close. 

The thing is, the jump from 'send speculative probes into interstellar space, Voyager style' and 'send anything meaningful into space in any number' is bigger than you're making it out to be, and 'send ourselves into space' bigger still. We can't be sure how big because if we knew the solutions we'd have the answers. 

And that's my point, really. The Fermi paradox is a vital idea, worth exploring, but it being an actual paradox relies on assuming technological advancement will always progress, or at least must progress, in the area of space travel, far beyond where we are. But there may well be limits, and closer than we wish. If FTL isn't possible, which is the current assumption, the limit could well be how insanely difficult and expensive it would be to actually transport anything useful over interstellar distance. I mean, to colonise, you need to transport a completely closed system, with no input from sunlight, over hundreds or thousands of years, with enough fuel to slow down at the other end, enough shielding to survive radiation. You're positing systems that don't break down, ever, over timescales longer than all of recorded history. When we haven't even successfully sent someone to another planet. Or even unsuccessfully. 

And then to dyson spheres, even more so. They're a cool idea, but at this point we can't even really begin to think about either how you'd go about building one, or whether such a thing is actually worth anything. Their lack of presence can be extrapolated to just about anything. 

 

The thing about signals is a more convincing point, but signals fade with distance, and we're still at baby-steps stage in terms of detecting them. 

 

 

 

[Kalbear]

3 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I mean, we could not. Theoratically, sure, it's plausible we have the technology in completely literal terms that could be translated into doing that. Program a robot that can make a mini-refinery and a forge and etc etc etc and go from there. But in practice, we haven't even got around to automated building on Mars, and our AI is currently at the stage where AI controlled drones in simulations will kill their operators to prevent them being turned off. Our AI cars keep trying to kill people. We're not at self-propagating terraforming projects. Not even close. 

The thing is, the jump from 'send speculative probes into interstellar space, Voyager style' and 'send anything meaningful into space in any number' is bigger than you're making it out to be, and 'send ourselves into space' bigger still. We can't be sure how big because if we knew the solutions we'd have the answers. 

It might be a big jump!

But it only takes one group over the billion years or so to have done it, once. And we personally know it's possible now, even if we aren't actually doing it. 

Also note that I'm not talking terraforming projects - that would be orders of magnitude harder. I'm talking about cheap self-replicating probes. They are only mining and extracting. That's still a hard thing, but it's not hard in the way you're talking about.

3 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

And that's my point, really. The Fermi paradox is a vital idea, worth exploring, but it being an actual paradox relies on assuming technological advancement will always progress, or at least must progress, in the area of space travel, far beyond where we are. But there may well be limits, and closer than we wish. If FTL isn't possible, which is the current assumption, the limit could well be how insanely difficult and expensive it would be to actually transport anything useful over interstellar distance. I mean, to colonise, you need to transport a completely closed system, with no input from sunlight, over hundreds or thousands of years, with enough fuel to slow down at the other end, enough shielding to survive radiation. You're positing systems that don't break down, ever, over timescales longer than all of recorded history. When we haven't even successfully sent someone to another planet. Or even unsuccessfully. 

No, see, this is the problem. I am emphatically not talking about colonization or sending anything huge anywhere. I'm talking about sending out probes that will tell us more about things. Those, by comparison, are cheap and ridiculously easy to do even with the limits we have on technology. Tech doesn't need to progress all that much beyond what we have for a civ to actually be able to do it. I'm not talking about systems that don't break down - we assume they will break down to some degree, or some will be destroyed. I'm assuming we have a very large number of cheap systems that can do some basic repair (like Voyager was able to) that we're sending in the thousands. 

The Dandelion approach of seeds.

3 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

And then to dyson spheres, even more so. They're a cool idea, but at this point we can't even really begin to think about either how you'd go about building one, or whether such a thing is actually worth anything. Their lack of presence can be extrapolated to just about anything. 

The thing about signals is a more convincing point, but signals fade with distance, and we're still at baby-steps stage in terms of detecting them. 

The thing about the dyson spheres existing (or not) is that their non-existence tells us something - namely, that either civs out there cannot build them for some reason or there aren't civs. Both of those things are interesting factoids.

And signals do fade with distance but again, it's not just radio/micro/xray beams - it's evidence of anything being sent out. Including very slow things like Voyager probes. And sure, it's possible that we're just not looking in the right place yet or haven't been looking hard enough. Imagine that the probes have already hit easy spots like metal-rich asteroids and we have just not been able to look at them yet. That's possible! But that also says something about what isn't there. This whole exercise is a exercise in extrapolation of survivorship bias, and the lack of certain things tells us a lot more about what theories are viable and what theories cannot possibly be reasonable. One thing that it rules out, as an example, is any easy FTL. 

[polishgenius]

1 minute ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

This whole exercise is a exercise in extrapolation of survivorship bias, and the lack of certain things tells us a lot more about what theories are viable and what theories cannot possibly be reasonable. One thing that it rules out, as an example, is any easy FTL. 

 

Yeah, I agree there. Like I say, it's a vital idea that should be reasoned through and can tell us lots. I'm mostly coming from the angle that DaveSumm's original question was why it's a paradox, and my answer is basically 'it's not'. Not in the true, pure logical sense of what a paradox is, anyway. It's just a question we don't have the answer to yet, which is not the same thing. 


 

2 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

No, see, this is the problem. I am emphatically not talking about colonization or sending anything huge anywhere. I'm talking about sending out probes that will tell us more about things.

 

Fair enough. 

[DaveSumm]

9 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

The thing about the dyson spheres existing (or not) is that their non-existence tells us something - namely, that either civs out there cannot build them for some reason or there aren't civs. 

…or that they simply aren’t desirable, given the immense amount of energy and materials they’d require. I start to get sceptical when we move to assuming advanced civilisations would harness suns to do insane feats of engineering. It’s possible that, once a civilisation confirms that travel beyond their solar system isn’t feasible, that they just improve their own quality of life on their planet, and maybe terraform others. There isn’t necessarily a linear relationship between advancement and energy consumption.

Although overall, I’m more convinced by mega structures as the best candidate for something we might see. Everything else is us assuming that aliens will invent something noisy that we’ll detect, when we have no clue if that’s even possible or desirable. It just isn’t that tantalising a mystery to me, we experience silence from the stars when silence is a perfectly logical thing to expect.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

46 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

 

 

I mean, we could not. Theoratically, sure, it's plausible we have the technology in completely literal terms that could be translated into doing that. Program a robot that can make a mini-refinery and a forge and etc etc etc and go from there. But in practice, we haven't even got around to automated building on Mars, and our AI is currently at the stage where AI controlled drones in simulations will kill their operators to prevent them being turned off. Our AI cars keep trying to kill people. We're not at self-propagating terraforming projects. Not even close. 

The thing is, the jump from 'send speculative probes into interstellar space, Voyager style' and 'send anything meaningful into space in any number' is bigger than you're making it out to be, and 'send ourselves into space' bigger still. We can't be sure how big because if we knew the solutions we'd have the answers. 

And that's my point, really. The Fermi paradox is a vital idea, worth exploring, but it being an actual paradox relies on assuming technological advancement will always progress, or at least must progress, in the area of space travel, far beyond where we are. But there may well be limits, and closer than we wish. If FTL isn't possible, which is the current assumption, the limit could well be how insanely difficult and expensive it would be to actually transport anything useful over interstellar distance. I mean, to colonise, you need to transport a completely closed system, with no input from sunlight, over hundreds or thousands of years, with enough fuel to slow down at the other end, enough shielding to survive radiation. You're positing systems that don't break down, ever, over timescales longer than all of recorded history. When we haven't even successfully sent someone to another planet. Or even unsuccessfully. 

And then to dyson spheres, even more so. They're a cool idea, but at this point we can't even really begin to think about either how you'd go about building one, or whether such a thing is actually worth anything. Their lack of presence can be extrapolated to just about anything. 

 

The thing about signals is a more convincing point, but signals fade with distance, and we're still at baby-steps stage in terms of detecting them. 

 

 

 

Hypothetically.

:pedantic grumbling:

[Werthead]

It should be noted that the Drake Equation was created when certain things weren't known about the formation of the Solar system and the habitability of the Earth that we know now. The vital importance of having a gas giant like Jupiter to deflect comets from the inner Solar system was sort of known at the time, but the vital importance of having a second gas giant like Saturn to drag and stop the first gas giant from steam-rollering through the system and ejecting habitable planets from their orbits altogether was definitely not known. The vast number of hot Jupiters we see shows what should have happened in our system if we hadn't had Saturn (plus Uranus and Neptune) to stop it.

That immediately drags the Drake Equation down several orders of magnitude for the commonality of even life, let alone intelligent life. We also know much more now about the importance of having an improbably massive moon like ours to stabilise and regulate the axial tilt of the planet.

Finally, we now have thousands upon models of models of other star systems, which Drake did not have, which should really be considered. The vast number of hot Jupiters we see, systems with planets clustered far too tightly around the star, other star systems where the presence of multiple stars makes the planets uninhabitable etc are all pretty massive red flags that we are mind-bogglingly, mind-numbingly lucky.

Against those discoveries, the idea that there should be 20-30 intelligent civilisations within reasonable range of our sun is ludicrous. It now appears that a planet capable of sustaining intelligent life might not just be rare but incredibly rare, on the order of "one per galactic cluster" rare.

Edited June 6, 2023 by Werthead