Fermi's Paradox

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I have always preferred explanation 2 possibility 3. Gets around the whole "light speed really is a limit" problem without having to be too far ahead of what can currently grasp. They are living inside their computers having a great time in a universe they designed.
 
I have always preferred explanation 2 possibility 3. Gets around the whole "light speed really is a limit" problem without having to be too far ahead of what can currently grasp. They are living inside their computers having a great time in a universe they designed.

I have to say, I'm going to be a bit disappointed if our species finally gets it together enough to traverse the vast reaches of space, and all we find when we get there is a bunch of aliens sitting on their fat alien asses, playing Alien Grand Theft Auto and Alien Call of Duty and watching Alien Online Porn. We thought you were better than this, aliens!
 
I have to say, I'm going to be a bit disappointed if our species finally gets it together enough to traverse the vast reaches of space, and all we find when we get there is a bunch of aliens sitting on their fat alien asses, playing Alien Grand Theft Auto and Alien Call of Duty and watching Alien Online Porn. We thought you were better than this, aliens!
If they come to my house they won't see me playing Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty.
 
I'm in favor of 6 and 9. We're receiving the signals, we just don't recognize them for what they are.
 
First you can write off half the total number of stars in the Milky Way as they are the shell stars part of the Shapley Center and are so close to each other, as little as light hours apart, and the resulting tidal effects of all the nearby stars, not to mention the super giant black hole they are whirling around, would make it virtually impossible for any of them to have stable planetary systems.

Next you can rid yourself of half the remaining half by discounting all the red dwarf stars. Ant Earth sized planet circulating a red dwarf close enough to receive enough heat to keep liquid water would be so close as to become tide-locked in short order. One face always pointed at the sun the other the near absolute zero of space.

Another aspect we’ve noticed about many of the stars where we have confirmed planets exist is that most seem to have a super planet in a close orbit to the primary. Not going to find an earth like planet around those stars.

Then there is the theory that our Moon played a large part in the evolution of life on land. For a rather small planet such as earth to have such an enormous moon as a companion could very well be a one in a gazillion event. If said theory has any validity then advanced life might be much, much rarer than we would like to believe.

Then there are all the horrendous way nature can wipe out any advancing civilization, or the civilization doing it to themselves, long before they get beyond their first steps into space.

And while the Milky Way is 11 or 12 billion years old, the starting gun for when advanced life would actually be possible in the Milky Way might not be that far in the past.

Poul Anderson had a rather interesting take on why there doesn’t appear to be anybody out there in his novel “Starfarers”.
 
Response from a friend who is a biochemical researcher in pharmacology.

Very interesting, Cecil-- put me down for explanation 1.1-- we're just very rare. Of course the biggest problem in thinking about this is that it's very difficult to do meaningful statistics with n=1. I base my thinking in part on experiments with combinatorial libraries (usually with about 10^10 members in a library) of partially randomized peptides and antibodies, where the goal is to obtain at least a modest binding affinity (say 10^6 /M) to a pharmacological target. Over a period of many years, I've seen the success rate of these hover around 70%. This is good enough to generate a profitable business for most biotechs, but it's somewhat surprising to many that with such large libraries we can't find ANYTHING in the synthetic polypeptide world that binds to 30% of targets. Now suppose evolution has been working at a similar problem on 25,000 genes (targets). Probability of success= 0.7^(25000)= darn close to zero; my calculator can't do it, but for example, 0.7^(500)= 3E-78! Even a billion years of "trying" might well fail. In fact, evolution has achieved quite a bit more than simple binary binding interactions, so perhaps the calculation should be more like 0.1^(25000); I can do this in my head-- it's 1E-25000!! Of course, this leaves open how many opportunities (suitable planets) it's had to try, but again I think we are extrapolating, for now, from n=1. We are perhaps so rare as to be considered miraculous.

Henry Lowman, PhD
 
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Boomtube,

Really enjoyed your speculations, especially this thought, which I personally think is the most likely explanation (just read history and look around the globe today):

Then there are all the horrendous way nature can wipe out any advancing civilization, or the civilization doing it to themselves, long before they get beyond their first steps into space.
 
I am a Christian, and my understanding of the Bible prevents me from believing there can be intelligent beings anywhere other than Earth. Of course, that's not based on science.
 
I am a Christian, and my understanding of the Bible prevents me from believing there can be intelligent beings anywhere other than Earth. Of course, that's not based on science.

I don't think we're supposed to discuss religion, but because I share the Christian faith how about a PM explaining why the faith excludes life elsewhere.
 
I am a Christian, and my understanding of the Bible prevents me from believing there can be intelligent beings anywhere other than Earth. Of course, that's not based on science.

I'm curious too. Where in the bible does it say that life only exists on our planet and nowhere else?
 
There is no doubt in my mind that there is life present throughout the Univers.
If any of it has become intellegent, I can only imagine that they are looking to space to save their race as we seam to be doing.
Probably for the same reason's, used up and polluted planet.
I hope we never incounter intellegent life, unless it can provide us with advancing knowledge to restore our planet without being inialated.
Would we do that to more primitive life? Let them do what we did? Or be able to retaleiate on our own level. I doubt it.
What would a more intellegent life being think of us as a race if they visited now? Just think a minute on all that they would see and find fault with. World Wide.
 
Perhaps life is abundant in the Milky Way but how about intelligent life?

Is the advancement from non-sapient to sapient life inevitable?

Think about this; the dinosaurs were around for something like 300 million years apx 19 times as long as human ancestry yet the dinosaurs showed no trend towards becoming a sapient intelligence.

Maybe by our own existence and our imagination, we presume there must be other intelligent races out there.

But maybe the leap from life to intelligent life is not a given or even likely.

But all that aside; I read somewhere that there could be a 1,000 intelligent advancing civilizations in the Milky Way and still they could be spread so far apart that contact would be virtually impossible.
 
Two decent books I've read on this topic, especially the former: "Rare Earth" and "The Erie Silence."

Life is probably very common, technological civilizations extremely rare. ET will most likely be AI due to the vastly faster "evolution" of that technology, something that Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and others are now concerned about with respect to human dominance/survival.

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov

https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

The window of opportunity for the detection of technological civilizations via their electromagnetic emissions is extremely short. Only 80 years after we became detectable, we are rapidly becoming undetectable at great distances due to more advanced and efficient communications technologies. Plus, not knowing the cultures of possibly far more advanced cultures, only stupid civilizations intentionally broadcast their presence by powerful directional broadcasts although the short duration and highly directional nature of those would make the likelihood of their detection absolutely minuscule. One very difficult, future detection method is via spectrometry of atmospheric pollutants possibly generated by technological civilizations. However, once again, advanced civilizations may not generate any. They would have, for instance, at least developed fusion as their energy source. If they've built a Dyson Sphere around their star:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

They might be detected by that.

Considering all that and more, the fact that we haven't detected anyone else yet doesn't surprise me in the slightest even though I'm virtually certain due to the odds that there are plenty of them out there. Actually, I'd be far more surprised if we did detect them.
 
Observations (science) seem to indicate that space is a cast iron, ... brat. And that desolate, poisonous rocks are ubiqtuous. Imagine you finally find a goldilocks planet, travel there, and find you have arrived during its large meat-eating dinasour period. Dissappointment bites!
 
Another good book is "Alone in the Universe" (2011) by John Gribbin. There is a wide dispersion of opinions. Some people take the Drake equation and calculate that there is 10,000 intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way. Gribbin states that there is only one civilization in the Milky Way and we are it.
 
Observations (science) seem to indicate that space is a cast iron, ... brat. And that desolate, poisonous rocks are ubiqtuous. Imagine you finally find a goldilocks planet, travel there, and find you have arrived during its large meat-eating dinasour period. Dissappointment bites!

Or worse; we finally find a “Paradise World” except all life thus all the proteins and carbohydrates are left hand evolved.
 
Or worse; we finally find a “Paradise World” except all life thus all the proteins and carbohydrates are left hand evolved.

I'm trying really hard, and I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I can't understand your sentence. :confused2:
 
I'm trying really hard, and I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I can't understand your sentence. :confused2:

Complex organics like sugars and proteins can be "right or left handed." It's called chirality. Here on Earth, we use "right handed" versions of most things ( a somewhat arbitrary designation, since molecules can have chirality but they don't have hands!). It could just as easily have gone the other way, with the result being proteins and sugars being chemically identical otherwise, but incompatible with Earth life. Read here for more info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(chemistry)
 
Star Trek had an episode or two that mentioned that or something similar. TOS "Mirror, mirror" was one, I think. In it they talked about how some food could be consumed but certain vital amino acids would pass through the digestive tract because the body would be unable to break them down or use them because their construction was essentially a mirror image of our own.

It wouldn't take much to make a beautiful plant uninhabitable. A little bit of arsenic in the air, acids in the water, most anything you can imagine being just a little bit "off" and it becomes incredibly more difficult or impossible to be any more than a moon-like outpost where we have to synthesize much of (or everything) we need.
 
Star Trek had an episode or two that mentioned that or something similar. TOS "Mirror, mirror" was one, I think. In it they talked about how some food could be consumed but certain vital amino acids would pass through the digestive tract because the body would be unable to break them down or use them because their construction was essentially a mirror image of our own.

It wouldn't take much to make a beautiful plant uninhabitable. A little bit of arsenic in the air, acids in the water, most anything you can imagine being just a little bit "off" and it becomes incredibly more difficult or impossible to be any more than a moon-like outpost where we have to synthesize much of (or everything) we need.

I don't recall any mention of this from the original series, but it was a significant part of the story in the James Blush novel "Spock Must Die".
 
Or worse; we finally find a “Paradise World” except all life thus all the proteins and carbohydrates are left hand evolved.
I'm not smart enough to know why we can't be nourished by proteins and carbs that are left hand evolved. I can imagine a few problems if they are intelligent but their math and sciences are based on a left hand rule.
 
I'm not smart enough to know why we can't be nourished by proteins and carbs that are left hand evolved. I can imagine a few problems if they are intelligent but their math and sciences are based on a left hand rule.


Ever hear or read the term “Invert sugar”? This is simple sugar but the carbon/hydrogen/oxygen chain is formed “Left handed” instead of “Right handed”. This does not happen in nature, to the best of my knowledge, but can easily be manufactured.

Invert sugar tastes just like regular sugar and can even be used in baking cookies etc. But invert sugar cannot be digested, it passes through our system virtually unchanged, we can derive no calories from invert sugar.

Invert proteins and starches are the same; we could eat a ton of the stuff and starve to death.
Our enzymes and the bacteria in or gut can’t breakdown inverted hydrocarbons.

I’m not sure if there is any theory as to why all Earth life evolved “Right handed” ie. is there a significant advantage to being “Right handed” vs “Left handed” or was it just a 50/50 chance.
 
Somehow, I can't help but feel there's a great filter in our near future.

I thought of your comment when I read this sentence from a friend:

"I have to agree that given enough time our kind will foul the nest sufficiently or enact some cataclysm of destruction that puts our future prospects with the dinosaurs'.
 
Boom-tube, I'm afraid you're confusing food industry jargon with chirality. Invert sugar is sucrose that has been converted to its constituent glucose and fructose. It can be done with enzymes, but a little heat and citric acid works, too. And is cheaper. 'High' fructose corn syrup mimics invert sugar, but derives from an all glucose base. Breaking the sucrose dimer is called 'inversion'.

Invert sugar isn't levulose. And it isn't dietetic.

The company I work for (not AEppeltreow) did make a levulose separation process, and got as far as making candy bars with it ( and feeding them to execs) before learning that undigestible starches count as fiber.

No one knows why biogenesis broke symmetry the way it did - left handed amino acids and right handed sugars. Once symmetry was broken, there are physical reasons it stayed that way.

It's fun to think about, but my problem with any claim (like most in this thread) is that we have a sample pool of one. That leaves no degrees of freedom to have -any- certainty about a claim as to the origins or character of life.
 
The company I work for (not AEppeltreow) did make a levulose separation process, and got as far as making candy bars with it ( and feeding them to execs) before learning that undigestible starches count as fiber.

Sounds like this might have created an emergency situation in the executive washroom.
 
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