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[The Fermi Paradox] : ITT We Answer the Question, "Where is Everybody?"
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Corvids are actually fairly dexterous while standing on one leg.
Meeting a race of Ron Pauls would be awesome. See: Mr. Bean: The Animated Series.
Space P-zombies.
The mathematician divided the cow in many complex polygons to represent its volume and from that and previous estimations of the average density of cows derived its mass.
The engineer more or less copied the mathematician, only he decided to consider the cow a perfect sphere and just added a 30% error margin.
The physicist went classic and after some effort lowered the cow into a water tank and measured the displaced water.
The biologist observed the cow for a week, observed how much it ate and estimated the mass of the cow from its nutritional needs.
When everyone already had their answer, the philosopher was still stuck trying to determine what was the concept of "cow".
I always tell this to my philosopher friends and I think it's applicable to the latest discussions of this thread.
For intentional interstellar travel, some level of intelligence is probably necessary - not necessarily giant pulsing brain intelligence, possibly not even human intelligence, once you get far enough to create a machine capable of doing some kinds of thinking (like, say, math) better than you are, your own intelligence stops being the limiting factor in technology.
But, yeah, social and tool use are pretty optional. Being a solitary species would be an impediment, but even on earth we see solitary species that still learn and share information quite well. Tool use is a matter of how good your body is - Ours is fucking awful, but ants not so much.
But remember "tool" is an extremely general term. A computer, a rocket, a car are all tools. If nature equipped us with welding torches, wrenches, hammers, and tube benders we could have used our bodies to build a car instead of using small tools to build large tools and large tools to build the car, but eventually we're still using a tool.
Now, for a planetary "civilization"? I don't even think intelligence is necessary there. Hive insects have rudimentary agriculture, animal husbandry, and slavery, plus relatively impressive construction and military tactics... All kinds of things we like to use to set ourselves above animals, for better or worse. For most of our history, the only thing setting us apart was size and artificial lighting. A large hive creature with a bioluminescent sub-worker caste, capable of harnessing another bioluminescent species, or just capable of starting fires could create something we'd have a hard time calling anything less than an early agrarian or hunter-gatherer society. Expansion past their home world is very unlikely, or even reaching 20th Century analogs, but they could parallel much of our own history. For that matter, natural fission reactors are a real thing, using diverted water and an excavated uranium deposit for heat would be within their reach.
Well, conscious in what way? There's some theories on the border between psychology and philosophy that humans achieved what we consider consciousness a lot more recently than we usually assume. As the argument goes, based on ancient history, religion, and storytelling, it looks like the masses didn't seem to have an identity of self, but only of the group they belonged to. And there's some who take it a step farther: That we still haven't. They point to a disturbing amount of evidence, especially in certain aspects of politics and religion but also down to the lowest levels of discourse, that a great many people do not achieve Rochat's fifth level of self-awareness - they are not unable to separate their self from that of others, unable to process that others are not as they are and do not perceive them as they perceive themselves.
And none of that's slowed us down that much.
But the question then is, "Ok, and?"
Sure, all these circumstances could still give rise to planetary civilizations, and many combinations would add few or no additional barriers to spaceflight, but they also don't eliminate evidence of their passing or make them easier or harder to detect - certain combinations could be easier or harder but either way there's still the matter that they'd have to be improbably close to use to detect with current technology. They just tell our fiction writers to stop being so lazy.
Sentience as a mistaken byproduct rather than something useful. That success in the space race requires not having a concept of self.
Yes, but ants are social! And if they're building rockets/radios, those are tools! And the fact that they're capable of the physics/calculus to build those rockets, that's intelligence!
Most of the rest of your examples are dependent on a species like us having invented the technology, but the current users being different. Since we're talking about developing technology, that's perfectly compatible with what I'm saying
Finally, I had thought of your Zerg example as well. And that's why I brought up Godzilla. Godzilla is pretty much impossible because his size would cause his bones to collapse on themselves. Similarly, a creature capable of withstanding the forces necessary to accelerate to escape velocity would likely be too heavy/expend too much energy to be able to do so in the first place!
And that's without even getting into the concept of convergent evolution. We make an excellent starting point for thinking about alien civilizations, as long as we are aware that they will still be different from us in multiple ways.
Yes, but that's my point! They wouldn't come visit us or be able to communicate with us, which is what the Fermi Paradox is about!
I'm not claiming that there won't be weird aliens out there, just that the ones with advanced civilizations will generally be like us in a few critical ways!
I know it was just an example, but you can actually create the GRS in a lab if you layer the components of Jupiter's atmosphere properly and spin it around. Saw a show about it, it's pretty neat.
hmmm. I wouldn't consider ants social. There is basically only one mind, am I wrong? You can't be social with yourself. But anyways, I wasn't considering them building those tools, but accomplishing tasks some other ways.
You were specifically talking about meeting another space-faring alien with whom we could communicate, and the requirements on that alien. Now, if we are talking about meeting an alien that could develop space flight, that's a bit different. I would still argue that long-lived, independent, and incredibly intelligent aliens are a possibility and would not be social.
There's nothing that physically prevents an organism from being able to survive in space, or for that matter from being able to reach escape velocity of whatever planet/moon/body they are on. It would be hard, but that's no reason to discount it! There aren't any limits based on our rules of physics that say it can't be done. Which means, it is possible some organism will do it.
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There are lots of ways to rule out hypotheticals too. For example, we can probably rule out a race of star-eating Dyson Spheres, simply because we've been looking for the telltales of Dyson Spheres and haven't seen any. Same thing with beings that communicate using (unencrypted) EM or gamma bursts, because we haven't seen anything like that. We can draw a baseline on the chances of some possibilities, and reduce the size of our problem set.
Now, it's true that we have no idea what life would look like or live like. We can speculate based on our knowledge and draw probabilities, but it's all speculation. The chances are higher that whatever alien we find won't look exactly like us, simply because the factors that lead to our appearance are a result of many unique circumstances. Same thing with direct reproduction or even bio-compatibility. We probably won't be able to mate with them and have offspring using our methods, and they probably won't taste like and have the nutritional value of chicken. That doesn't tell us how they will mate, but we can also posit that if they come from a 1200* world, they probably won't store whatever genetic information they use as DNA identical to ours without some novel method of protecting it.
_J_ is right that we don't know much, but we definitely don't know so little that it's a futile effort to discuss.
As for the 'requirements' of interstellar life. I think people are trying to fit their own paradigm - society, communication, tools, culture, etc into this.
We've seen the variety of life here on earth, and seen that there are forms of life that metamorphisize greatly between stages. There are creatures that spend part of their life basically as plants, and part of it as animals. There are creatures that walk and eat, then change into flying creatures. There are creatures that reproduce by budding, there are plants that reproduce by casting their seeds using explosives. There are creatures that make high-tensile silk out their asses, and other creatures that have built in flame-throwers.
Here's the lifecycle of a hypothetical creature that doesn't fit any of the molds people have presented:
A plant that has three stages of life, living on a planet with extremely low gravity and an extremely long day / night cycle with extreme temperatures. The first stage is basically a seed pod that is dormant and resistant to extreme temperatures and conditions, including vacuum. Perhaps the husk is some sort of a mineral or metal deposit. When the seed pod is in the terminator between day and night, it 'hatches' into a somewhat intelligent creature that has the ability to find a place to plant roots and begin accumulating minerals / metals. In the third stage during the hot day, the metal it has accumulated heats up, and a gas pocket inside expands to increase the size of the tank / tree like creature. The creature uses vibrations and EM fields to manipulate a deposit of a ferrofluid, which it uses to store memories and communications between other 'trees'. Eventually when it's grown to sufficient size, the gas pocket ignites, launching the husk of the tree like a rocket, and spreading 'seed pods' across it's path.
Now, it's far fetched...but you've got to be able to look at some of the life cycles of creatures out there - real creatures we can see and confirm exist and evolved here on earth through natural selection...and say something like this is at least POSSIBLE. In the grand scheme of things, is some hybrid plant / animal like this that spreads 'seed pods' slowly from star system to star system that much more unlikely than monkeys riding thermonuclear explosions to Alpha Centauri?
We can come up with a million different possibilities for intelligent life that we might not even recognize as intelligent OR life. You can even take out the middle 'mobility' or animal-like portion.
It would sort of encourage spaceborn life capable of dealing with vacuum and cold(probably using methods that allow for periods of little/no biological activity). There would be very low escape velocities.
Is that even a thing that could form, or would everything get blown away by solar wind?
Ok, but how does that creature get to Earth for us to encounter it? Or generate a communication signal capable of being detected light years away?
All these speculative aliens are cool, but they're still missing the point of the Fermi Paradox.
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They wouldn't last. Comets are already pretty transient things. For example, Haley's Comet loses over 50 tons of mass per second at the inner end of its orbit, and about 5.7x10^11 kg per orbit. It's expected to be completely gone in about 90-100 orbits, and it's only losing significant mass for a few months each orbit. If it were diverted to a circular orbit in the inner solar system, it'd only take 30-40 years. Large comets, like Hale Bopp, could last hundreds to thousands of years.
A KBO, large enough to hold an atmosphere (assuming the theory that such objects are effectively immense comets), could last millions of years, an extremely large one a few billion perhaps. But they'd be constantly losing mass the entire time through what would effectively be continuous global vulcanism, any advanced organic compounds or life precursors would also be at risk of being shot off into space. Their gravity could be high enough that after the ice is mostly gone, what's left can hold together as a single body, but it would have lost a lot of useful compounds first.
Now, if it were big enough that its gravity could hold most of the lost gasses as an atmosphere, or if it were shielded (such a body wouldn't have a magnetic field, but it might orbit a gas giant with a powerful one) it might even last basically forever. Except then, it's no longer really relevant to the question, it'd have a significant atmosphere and high escape velocity.
If your argument is that we're not encountering aliens because they aren't enough like us to communicate/travel that's fine.
It then just leads to the conclusion that those aliens who might communicate/travel to us will share similarities. And if they're somewhat similar, we can at least partially extrapolate our experiences onto them.
Which is my whole initial assertion
(And, IMO, being surrounded by non-intelligent aliens makes us just as alone as there being no aliens at all.)
A very large 'tree' - say, Saturn V sized - manages to get some 'seed pods' into orbit or even escape velocity. Nearby or passing moon / planet / star gives it a gravity assist to leave the system. Fifteen thousand dormant years later, the seed pod makes it to our system, lands on the moon / Mars / etc and starts growing.
It's explaining that there could be life out there - even intelligent, space-faring life - that we wouldn't detect simply because our model for intelligent life is too narrow. The whole 'ant confirms no humans because they don't get a response to their pheromones' mindset.
It's also a simple thought experiment of how some form of life could travel through space, even though they lack society, civilization...hell, in my example intelligence isn't even necessary. It's not TOO much of a stretch to imagine a planet with conditions where natural selection brings about some form of 'life' that has the natural ability to leave the planet / survive in space.
The biggest flaw though that I see with the Fermi Paradox / Drake Equation is that we know for a fact that EM emissions become virtually indistinguishable from background noise relatively quickly, and in < 100 years we've seen that with encryption / compression, and better signal processing, detectible emissions drop significantly. We can't assume that other life will follow the same path, but that alone is a reasonable answer to the Fermi Paradox.
"Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
Dawkins then said it better:
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
The universe is huge. Life is weird. We may find a dozen worlds nothing like our own, or a dozen worlds eerily similar. The only way to find out is to keep searching.
We are actually pretty good at separating analog signals from noise. Digital signals, encryption, frequency agility and multiplexing all make that more complicated.
We would be able to detect the sort of message you would probably send to someone, if you wanted them to detect it and assumed they knew next to nothing about your math or technology. We would have a lot harder time detecting the random electromagnetic detritus of a culture.
"See? See! Natural cloud storm thingies!"
"Granny, seriously, that's enough."
Also, to not artificially limit what counts as "searching".
My problem with the Fermi Paradox is that it was a quick calculation during lunch by one admittedly brilliant man 63 years ago.
In the case of normal science this would not really be a problem. Einstein's calculations are also old. However Einstein's stuff has a tremendous weight of evidence behind it. Fermi's has nothing because it's made on a set of assumptions made decades ago that seriously need to be updated. It doesn't deserve to be called a paradox. It gives the theory more weight than it really has. It's just a theory, a very old seriously outdated one.
I do think it has value as a starting point for thinking about the issue in general though, even if I don't treat it as a serious paradox.
If we suppose, with our current (conservative) projections, that there are somewhere in the realm of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, conservatively estimated to each have 1 planet (some have none, many have detected so far have more than 1), we - at first glance - have quite a bit to work with. But even within our own solar system we have dozens of planetary bodies that could be considered planet-sized and only one has been shown to harbor life, so we're fairly confident there's only a small habitable band capable of supporting life. But we could be generous and think that a significant fraction of stars have planets capable of supporting life. In the end I don't think that necessarily matters.
The biological functions and events that have allowed humans to even exist are arguably as infintesimally improbable as the number of available planets is astronomical. As far as I know, conjecture about the basis of mutation for evolution is based on tiny particles being extremely lucky and altering the composition of DNA (or, commonly in the present day, chemicals doing the same thing). Which means you've got tiny particles basically coming from a star to hit an infintesimally small molecule sheathed inside some chemicals and hoping it makes beneficial, reproducible change. If you manage to get amino acids to form (which, as far as I am aware, is actually not a significant hurdle based on proto-earth composition) and develop functional, advancing DNA you've come a long way in the battle against probability. On Earth - not knowing whether we are inclined or disinclined to such activity - it basically took at least 1,000,000,000,000,000s of generations of lifeforms and at least 2,900,000,000 years to get us something bigger than a marble to work with. So let's say we defy the odds and have complex life.
(the number of generations is purely my conjecture and is probably grossly understated, seeing as precambrian algae was probably a new generation every day at least)
We are the beneficiaries of the dinosaurs' destruction (and, as someone's link has pointed out well, the dinosaurs benefited from a supervolcano extinction event, etc.). And since we have no evidence of dinosaur civilizations (outside ABC sitcoms from the 90s), or trilobite civilizations or anything else, we are well within our right to assume that the evolution of life in a manner supporting civilization-capable creatures is not deterministic and may require probabilistic intervention (of asteroids or tectonic activity or solar activity) to give more creatures an opportunity to develop reasoning intelligence with forethought. This means there is likely a low probability of creatures evolving to circumvent natural extinction events (as we likely have, since we are probably capable of having some humans survive a naturaly cataclysmic event).
There are so many predictions of human near extinction that we can convince ourselves that it has been a marvel that human civilization developed (and hasn't been destroyed). And many people today still believe we are on the brink of annihilation by our own hand (in the form of nuclear weapons, mismanaged genetic manipulation, biological weapons and other things). Based on the number of 'near misses' we could claim for our own civilization, there's a decent chance that any set of creatures that managed to have the fortune to develop on a life-bearing planet, to survive or thrive through evolution, to have the intelligence to create civilization may inadvertently destroy itself artificially.
So I have no qualms about thinking that 1,000,000,000,000,000s of generations of organisms undergoing unknowable amounts of particle bombardment over up to 30,000,000,000,000 years on 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 potential planets with however many unkown cataclysmic natural destruction and artificial extinction events may not create human-esque life on more than one planet that has or will be capable of interstellar travel within the period we are observing things beyond our speck in the universe.
I think Dawkin's supositions about a tiny world and a big world would have to receive more credance if we expect to see interstellar life. There must be tiny or massive or (currently) incomprehensible life that does not conform to the expectations that we look for in extraterrestrial life. And, as Sagan points out, if we did come across them it's very unlikely we would be at technological parity (we'll either stumble across stone age neanderthals or meet hyper-advanced beings).
It's like there's a population of more or less stationary boss-ants, using a complicated system of add-mobs to compete or breed with eachother. Maybe even cooperate, or ignore eachother.
I think there's some communication between ants, though a lot of interaction seems pretty simple.
IF don't recognise
THEN attack
This is neat, too.
The complexity of some ant species are boggling for how simple each individual ant is.
But yeah, not a "hive" mind.
The way I first heard the story, Fermi's question was about why the aliens aren't physically here, on this planet, right now. They may not have anticipated encryption/compression, but my understanding is that the limits of radio signal detection in general have been known for quite a while (our own unencrypted radio traffic would be almost impossible to detect outside the solar system), so presumably Fermi was aware that we would only detect them if the alien civilizations were intentionally beaming unencrypted signals at us for the purpose of contacting us. There are so many imaginable reasons for that not being the case, that it's very difficult to see the "galaxy humming with life" part of the hypothesis as a paradox. We don't even have to get terribly imaginative about it: we humans don't systematically broadcast out presence either. We've sent out a handful of isolated transmissions, none of which have high odds of being heard by anyone (and some, like the famous Arecibo signal, were never even seriously intended to be detected).
What would be interesting to see is if the development of human-level intelligence precludes that sort of community behaviour.
Intelligent ants would probably resemble a feudal society that no one could even comprehend of overthrowing.
Intelligence doesn't create conflict by itself - in humans it can be a factor, but the underlying cause is that our group structure is closer to a wolf pack or monkey troop, with internal competition, a dominance hierarchy, and impermanent membership.
Hives don't have internal competition , do have permanent membership, members are literally bred for a specific purpose, and as for hierarchy, members are a sea of uniformity and breeders of many species are effectively an enslaved underclass.
The interesting thing is how intelligence could manifest in a hive race. The entire species wouldn't have to be intelligent. I'd expect a non-breeder caste like soldiers or the brain bug from Starship Troopers to be intelligent and guide the hive/city, while workers are perhaps trainably intelligent but with no will of their own, and breeders would probably be no smarter than they are now, since they'd be isolated from most activity and, let's face it, giving a queen ant intelligence would be an act of cruelty, you'd only be making her aware of how shitty it is to be trapped in a room giving birth for your entire life.
Self-awareness is also an interesting question. How they're selected as traits might also be pressure away from sentience, even if other forces select towards high intelligence. Even the intelligent caste may have no sense of self separate from the group. It could also make an intensely feudal society - with the hive being both the lowest level of individual and the highest level of authority, cooperation between hives wouldn't be impossible, but would be a much bigger obstacle to overcome than humans moving from city-states to nation-states.
The interesting question is this: "To what extent can a creature become intelligent without, as a consequence, becoming self-aware?". It's only speculation, but I'd expect it come along with advanced abstract reasoning, which is likely necessary to advance beyond Newtonian physics.
As for which caste becomes self-aware, I'd expect it to be the breeders.
The problem with soldiers is that I would expect self-awareness to be harmful, due to the potential for an increased value of the self. A soldier ant valuing itself at all, would likely result in failed competition against those hives without such awareness.
A Brain bug ant has the problem that it's pretty much a second "queen". I realize evolution is "random", but it strikes me as very much the path of most resistance as compared to the queen becoming self-aware. There's nothing to say that the queen's psychology wouldn't develop such that she didn't mind her role.
So, other than queens, I think that the males are potential route for self-awareness. Assuming I remember my ant biology correctly, males are pretty much disposable. But a male that evolved the ability to strategize or invent would be a massive boost for the hive. Instead of having a caste of ant that's merely a drain (but needed for reproduction), the ants would have a sort of think tank, capable of improving the hive while reaching maturity (or potentially post breeding).
To use a contemporary fictional example: the Zerg from Starcraft. Is the long-term survival of such a species even possible?
The answer to that question is that self awareness does not appear to be entirely linked to intelligence. There's a parallel, but it's not as strong as you'd think just looking at primates.
Cephalapods show no signs of any type of self awareness, but show problem solving intelligence and abstract thinking higher than many species that do. At the other end, magpies and rats show some of the signs of self awareness, but are less intelligent than dogs, which appear to only have no sense of self separate from the group. And comparing magpies to other birds, a number of birds show problem solving intelligence and rudimentary language capacity, but completely fail the mirror test. Magpies have none of those traits, but can pass it.
It's even interesting how the great apes often fall short - ones raised closely by humans and taught sign language usually self identify as human, even though they can tell humans and others of their own species apart easily. That is, they fail Rochat's 5th level of self awareness and don't completely satisfy the 4th. The 5th is the same ones humans have trouble with, but not to this extent. And that's something not observed in less intelligent dolphins raised by pilot whales. They behave and vocalize like pilot whales, but will still show preference for a group of their own species - hardly conclusive without being able to give them language to relate the experience back to us, but still an interesting difference.
Now, as for hive insects, a brain bug would not be an additional queen, because queens are not guiding forces in the hive. They're isolated from all activity not relating to birth, and in fact, they're the least necessary caste in a hive - the hive will usually continue to function without one until it's existing members die off, but remove all its workers and in many species a mature queen literally can't produce replacements, the eggs and larvae die without workers to care for them. If intelligence weren't universal to the species, the caste which was intelligent would be the leader and guiding force of the hive, and the closest thing seen in ants is some species' soldiers, which have been seen laying down boundaries workers won't cross to effectively direct the flow of work. Extreme case: Siafu. The soldiers are in full control of the hive - they set the direction it moves, and literally railroad the workers down that path with their bodies. The queen and any males are carried by the workers and their wings and legs are cut off to make sure they can't escape.
Hive insects also raise another pretty important point that the hive are not individuals, the hive is AN individual. Group identity is functionally self identity.
The super clever ant creature you guys have been mentioning wouldn't have any need for it.
And yes I am aware that because the English language is an imperfect lip flapping crude method of communicating that using "I" would appear to be inconsistent. I'm using the terms for other peoples sake, not my "own". Trying to third person something like this gets ridiculously convoluted fast. Just ignore it.
Just to be clear, I think a large part of the specialisation of our brains isn't completely genetic but also nurture. Children who don't interact with other people properly during critical periods where their brains are temporarily specialised to learn this stuff as soon as possible suffer tremendous deficits in these areas in later life. So when I say our brains I mean functioning normative adults. However considering that it is the norm for children to interact like this and has been for much of history, and indeed would have to be for humans to have evolved these critical periods in development in the first place, it's safe to say that most of the time in history when people have been thinking and writing about self as a construct they have been doing so as adults who developed more or less normally. For example, they weren't locked in a box their entire life from birth and only let out until they were adults. They encountered other people as children.