Thank-you for the basic point: the very vastness in time and space that all-but-guaranties that there is other intelligent life out there also makes extremely unlikely that any of it could show-up here within the life-time of our civilisation or, likely, race. It won't help much, because:
People say they can distinguish [science] fantasy from reality, but what on the Serengeti or for hundreds of thousands of years afterward selected for not believing our eyes and ears and minds?
Charles Stross once unleashed a storm of criticism when he used simple physics and economics to demonstrate that large-scale space-colonisation were unlikely as a viable proposition. The replies were all over the place, but notable were incorrect calculations contradicting his, and 'What about The Human Spirit!?' ironically coming from people thinking of themselves as 'hard science-fiction'* fans… but I could swear that the underlying objection was 'But I'ʼve seen it done hundreds or thousands of times! '. That is to say, they' ve been reading about it happening or its having happened in a future's past, and/or seen films and television where &c., for _decades_.
*That is, s.f. that ostensibly cares about real, physical, laws…but has accumulated various tropes having nothing to do with those or contradicting them: to my jaundiced eye it might be better called 'butch science-fiction'.
I don't think there's any guarantee that the number of stars in the observable universe is enough to make it likely there are other intelligent beings in that region, much less the number of stars in our own galaxy (the universe presumably goes on beyond the observable region, but unless faster than light travel exists, no signal from outside that region could have had time to reach us between the Big Bang and today).
One point that's been made by the astrophysicist Brandon Carter (in the paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/0711.1985 for example) is that there could easily be a number of "hard steps" on the path to complex multicellular life, like the transition from prokaryote-like cells to eukaryote-like ones (which didn't happen for at least 2 billion years after the origin of life in our own planet's history), where even a planet that's made it through the previous steps has a low probability of making it to the next step in the habitable lifetime of their home planet. Even if the probabilities of each hard step were not astronomically low, the probabilities would have to be multiplied to get the total probability of making it through all of them--for example if you had 6 hard steps which each has a probability of 1 in 100, the total probability a planet would make it through all of them would only be 1 in a trillion, about 10 times the number of stars in our galaxy. And 6 hard steps with an individual probability of 1 in 10,000 would give a probability of 1 in 10^24, which is about the upper limit of estimates for the number of stars in the observable universe. There may also be various improbable elements of our planetary system that were needed in order for Earth to be a long-term habitable home for complex life, as discussed in the book "Rare Earth" by Brownlee and Ward, and those probabilities would have to be multiplied in to.
Meanwhile I am not convinced that the laws of physics would make it that difficult for a long-lived civilization to spread throughout the universe, so I don't think that's a good answer to the Fermi paradox. Stross' argument at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html which you mention above does not actually deny the possibility of space colonization:
"This is not to say that interstellar travel is impossible; quite the contrary. But to do so effectively you need either (a) outrageous amounts of cheap energy, or (b) highly efficient robot probes, or (c) a magic wand. And in the absence of (c) you're not going to get any news back from the other end in less than decades. Even if (a) is achievable, or by means of (b) we can send self-replicating factories and have them turn distant solar systems into hives of industry, and more speculatively find some way to transmit human beings there, they are going to have zero net economic impact on our circumstances (except insofar as sending them out costs us money)."
But note that self-replicating machines, like a fully automated mining and manufacturing facility that could be sent to an asteroid and make copies of itself with no additional investment of money or labor from Earth, would almost automatically get you both (a) and (b). And such an idea does not require human-like AI, you would "only" need robots good enough at doing physical tasks in real-world environment to take over all the rote tasks done today by humans in mining and assembly-line manufacturing (advances in 3D printing could help as well). There's a long history of people being overly optimistic about how soon robots will be able to master basic human dexterity and give us fully automated manufacturing, but I think one would have to be extremely conservative to say that it'll never happen even if technological civilization hangs on for centuries. (This is also why I'm optimistic that capitalism won't last forever even if purely political attempts to get beyond it end up failing; anyone who gives at least some credence to historical materialism should see that self-replicating machinery would cause serious problems for a capitalist economic system if it's still in place by the time such technology is developed.)
I think there is a bad assumption in this reasoning that there is no technology possible to bend space-time or travel faster than the speed of light.
Einstein’s theories are mind blowing and all, but they are less than 100 years old. How could we possibly imagine technology from 10,000 more years of development? Or 100,000?
On the macro scale they work as well as they've been tested. Your point is a good one, and one can write decent 'hard' science-fiction that has physics we don't know so long as it's used consistently and doesn't contradict what we already can measure 0.) within our ability to measure it and 1.) in the domains we can measure. I would characterise it as an assumption—and Stross mentions it explicitly (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html), but I would characterise it as a decent assumption, not a bad one: true, the universe is very different to what we knew 150 years ago, when Maxwell's equations started to break Newtonian physics, but we knew so little back then that wasn't all that hard, all it took was thousands of people working for that time…and the major, conceptual, leaps are now a century old and still seem to work well.
Physicists are constantly looking for ways around it, and maybe some of them will come-up with one that works, but not so far. For example 'Alcubièrre bubbles' are interesting, but so far it looks like they have to form with the universe and can't be accessed afterward; people play-around with the possibility of wormholes, but they would take.
I'd love practical immortality (advances in life extension producing increases in my life-expectancy at a rate greater than 1 year per year) so I could live long enough to be wrong—that at least is possible, as we're made of matter and if we got good enough at knowing how it needs to be arranged and arranging it, "Bob" would be our mutual, nigh-immortal, uncle….
This is why I've always been a sucker for sci-fi with lots of space travel that is all much slower than the speed of light. Europa report, the three body problem series, the expanse, etc. It's fun without all the goofy physics and it's cool that it's like a plausible near future for humanity
For my part, and I'll note that I'm a physicist in the right lighting (that is, I did as much after getting my degree as Rabelais did medicine), I'm willing to accept one or two goofy bits if they're used consistently and don't break what we've already verified. (A neat example of the latter, in the case of time-travel: some of Kip Thorne's grad students did a crude calculation and came-up with the strong suspicion that the wave-function for a universe with a close time-like loop goes to zero unless you can't much change the present from which the time-travel 'starts'…this at least theoretically has implication for quantum computers, though they're years away from mattering.)
>> If there was something that could make quick work of these distances and the physical constraints of faster-than-light travel, it would not be our imagined alien in a flying saucer, it would be more like an angel or some other supernatural being. We have to remember that our imaginations are conditioned by our own cultural productions: we see flying saucers or spacecraft, because that’s what’s in our movies, books, and shows.
This is a very, _very_ unoriginal point, so much so that I can't even remember from whom I'm ripping it off, but it feels like a part of the presentation of UFOs and aliens in modern culture is as a straightforward, science'd-up evolution of angels and supernatural beings. Which might partially explain why it gets bound with a desire for transcendence, and all that other jazz.
As much as I love that Posadist graphic, and find Posadism fun to think about, it seems obvious to me that a lot of UFOlogy and its associated ideologies is just sublimated religious feeling.
"“But the closest star is just four lightyears away!” Okay, but a lightyear is 5.88 trillion miles. Even if you could physically travel at the speed of light, which you really can’t because nothing with resting mass can, it would still take years to traverse these distances. And because of time dilation, in those relatively few years thousands and thousands of years would pass on the home planet of the voyagers. "
This is incorrect. If you built some kinda futuristic spaceship that could average half of lightspeed on a voyage between stars it would take 8 years to travel 4 lightyears from the perspective of observers on either of the two planets it was traveling between, and less from the perspective of passengers on the ship.
Not relevant to interstellar travel by humans in our lifetimes obviously.
“Observing the events of the past week or so, I find it increasingly hard to believe that there is intelligent life anywhere in the universe.” The spirit of Enrico Fermi is smiling.
This whole thing actually made me reflect on the X-Files, which I haven't thought about since the show was popular in the 90s. Apart from the obvious observation that now, many of the show's plotlines and overall anti-government stance has been taken up by the right, where as on the show they're depicted as kind of having an affable, slackerish vibe to them, it made me think about your comment on the Matrix, and the idea that the "truth is out there" condemns you to a life of total alienation from the world around you. The thing I remember most about that show was how the very idea that aliens were "out there" made the entire American landscape Mulder and Scully were constantly traversing a bleak purgatory without any love or comfort or cheer. It made the very idea of believing in aliens seem like a horrible and bitter curse, rather than a potential new form of spiritualism.
"Aliens are probably real, almost certainly have never visited us, and almost certainly never will" has been my take for a long time, fully agree with that bit. If people would like to go deeper on the "whys" of UFO stuff, and the reasons it has had such a persistent role in the culture, I would recommend the 2013 documentary Mirage Men. That documentary has some pretty compelling evidence that the original "flying saucer" sighting reports in the 40s and 50s were basically a means to explain away weird-looking experimental aircraft civilians were spotting in the early jet age.
The national security apparatus then realized that this could be used more broadly as a shiny object to distract questioning-the-government oriented people, and so encouraged the development of UFO conspiracies. I like it because it suits a bigger pattern - the use of more ridiculous conspiracies to distract from actual malfeasance, and then point to those ridiculous conspiracies to paint a broader swath of official-narrative-questioners with a "loonie" brush.
The UFO thing is quite well documented at this point, and not only by unreliable observers, by hundreds of military and civilian pilots across continents. It is a recurring phenomenon, and particularly surrounding nuclear weapons in both the USA and Russia.
Might it be extraterrestrial visitors of some sort? I dunno, but what is this stuff that has now been documented so many times over by so many observers?
I don't know where your top graphic comes from, but "third time as LARP" is actually pretty brilliant.
Thank-you for the basic point: the very vastness in time and space that all-but-guaranties that there is other intelligent life out there also makes extremely unlikely that any of it could show-up here within the life-time of our civilisation or, likely, race. It won't help much, because:
People say they can distinguish [science] fantasy from reality, but what on the Serengeti or for hundreds of thousands of years afterward selected for not believing our eyes and ears and minds?
Charles Stross once unleashed a storm of criticism when he used simple physics and economics to demonstrate that large-scale space-colonisation were unlikely as a viable proposition. The replies were all over the place, but notable were incorrect calculations contradicting his, and 'What about The Human Spirit!?' ironically coming from people thinking of themselves as 'hard science-fiction'* fans… but I could swear that the underlying objection was 'But I'ʼve seen it done hundreds or thousands of times! '. That is to say, they' ve been reading about it happening or its having happened in a future's past, and/or seen films and television where &c., for _decades_.
*That is, s.f. that ostensibly cares about real, physical, laws…but has accumulated various tropes having nothing to do with those or contradicting them: to my jaundiced eye it might be better called 'butch science-fiction'.
I don't think there's any guarantee that the number of stars in the observable universe is enough to make it likely there are other intelligent beings in that region, much less the number of stars in our own galaxy (the universe presumably goes on beyond the observable region, but unless faster than light travel exists, no signal from outside that region could have had time to reach us between the Big Bang and today).
One point that's been made by the astrophysicist Brandon Carter (in the paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/0711.1985 for example) is that there could easily be a number of "hard steps" on the path to complex multicellular life, like the transition from prokaryote-like cells to eukaryote-like ones (which didn't happen for at least 2 billion years after the origin of life in our own planet's history), where even a planet that's made it through the previous steps has a low probability of making it to the next step in the habitable lifetime of their home planet. Even if the probabilities of each hard step were not astronomically low, the probabilities would have to be multiplied to get the total probability of making it through all of them--for example if you had 6 hard steps which each has a probability of 1 in 100, the total probability a planet would make it through all of them would only be 1 in a trillion, about 10 times the number of stars in our galaxy. And 6 hard steps with an individual probability of 1 in 10,000 would give a probability of 1 in 10^24, which is about the upper limit of estimates for the number of stars in the observable universe. There may also be various improbable elements of our planetary system that were needed in order for Earth to be a long-term habitable home for complex life, as discussed in the book "Rare Earth" by Brownlee and Ward, and those probabilities would have to be multiplied in to.
Meanwhile I am not convinced that the laws of physics would make it that difficult for a long-lived civilization to spread throughout the universe, so I don't think that's a good answer to the Fermi paradox. Stross' argument at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html which you mention above does not actually deny the possibility of space colonization:
"This is not to say that interstellar travel is impossible; quite the contrary. But to do so effectively you need either (a) outrageous amounts of cheap energy, or (b) highly efficient robot probes, or (c) a magic wand. And in the absence of (c) you're not going to get any news back from the other end in less than decades. Even if (a) is achievable, or by means of (b) we can send self-replicating factories and have them turn distant solar systems into hives of industry, and more speculatively find some way to transmit human beings there, they are going to have zero net economic impact on our circumstances (except insofar as sending them out costs us money)."
But note that self-replicating machines, like a fully automated mining and manufacturing facility that could be sent to an asteroid and make copies of itself with no additional investment of money or labor from Earth, would almost automatically get you both (a) and (b). And such an idea does not require human-like AI, you would "only" need robots good enough at doing physical tasks in real-world environment to take over all the rote tasks done today by humans in mining and assembly-line manufacturing (advances in 3D printing could help as well). There's a long history of people being overly optimistic about how soon robots will be able to master basic human dexterity and give us fully automated manufacturing, but I think one would have to be extremely conservative to say that it'll never happen even if technological civilization hangs on for centuries. (This is also why I'm optimistic that capitalism won't last forever even if purely political attempts to get beyond it end up failing; anyone who gives at least some credence to historical materialism should see that self-replicating machinery would cause serious problems for a capitalist economic system if it's still in place by the time such technology is developed.)
I think there is a bad assumption in this reasoning that there is no technology possible to bend space-time or travel faster than the speed of light.
Einstein’s theories are mind blowing and all, but they are less than 100 years old. How could we possibly imagine technology from 10,000 more years of development? Or 100,000?
On the macro scale they work as well as they've been tested. Your point is a good one, and one can write decent 'hard' science-fiction that has physics we don't know so long as it's used consistently and doesn't contradict what we already can measure 0.) within our ability to measure it and 1.) in the domains we can measure. I would characterise it as an assumption—and Stross mentions it explicitly (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html), but I would characterise it as a decent assumption, not a bad one: true, the universe is very different to what we knew 150 years ago, when Maxwell's equations started to break Newtonian physics, but we knew so little back then that wasn't all that hard, all it took was thousands of people working for that time…and the major, conceptual, leaps are now a century old and still seem to work well.
Physicists are constantly looking for ways around it, and maybe some of them will come-up with one that works, but not so far. For example 'Alcubièrre bubbles' are interesting, but so far it looks like they have to form with the universe and can't be accessed afterward; people play-around with the possibility of wormholes, but they would take.
I'd love practical immortality (advances in life extension producing increases in my life-expectancy at a rate greater than 1 year per year) so I could live long enough to be wrong—that at least is possible, as we're made of matter and if we got good enough at knowing how it needs to be arranged and arranging it, "Bob" would be our mutual, nigh-immortal, uncle….
s/they would take./they would take massive amounts of negative energy in a small area, {solar lack holes}-worth./1
This is why I've always been a sucker for sci-fi with lots of space travel that is all much slower than the speed of light. Europa report, the three body problem series, the expanse, etc. It's fun without all the goofy physics and it's cool that it's like a plausible near future for humanity
Here's Stross' original: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html
For my part, and I'll note that I'm a physicist in the right lighting (that is, I did as much after getting my degree as Rabelais did medicine), I'm willing to accept one or two goofy bits if they're used consistently and don't break what we've already verified. (A neat example of the latter, in the case of time-travel: some of Kip Thorne's grad students did a crude calculation and came-up with the strong suspicion that the wave-function for a universe with a close time-like loop goes to zero unless you can't much change the present from which the time-travel 'starts'…this at least theoretically has implication for quantum computers, though they're years away from mattering.)
Thanks for the link! I also studied physics and enjoy some good goofy-but-plausible sci-fi physics
>> If there was something that could make quick work of these distances and the physical constraints of faster-than-light travel, it would not be our imagined alien in a flying saucer, it would be more like an angel or some other supernatural being. We have to remember that our imaginations are conditioned by our own cultural productions: we see flying saucers or spacecraft, because that’s what’s in our movies, books, and shows.
This is a very, _very_ unoriginal point, so much so that I can't even remember from whom I'm ripping it off, but it feels like a part of the presentation of UFOs and aliens in modern culture is as a straightforward, science'd-up evolution of angels and supernatural beings. Which might partially explain why it gets bound with a desire for transcendence, and all that other jazz.
As much as I love that Posadist graphic, and find Posadism fun to think about, it seems obvious to me that a lot of UFOlogy and its associated ideologies is just sublimated religious feeling.
"“But the closest star is just four lightyears away!” Okay, but a lightyear is 5.88 trillion miles. Even if you could physically travel at the speed of light, which you really can’t because nothing with resting mass can, it would still take years to traverse these distances. And because of time dilation, in those relatively few years thousands and thousands of years would pass on the home planet of the voyagers. "
This is incorrect. If you built some kinda futuristic spaceship that could average half of lightspeed on a voyage between stars it would take 8 years to travel 4 lightyears from the perspective of observers on either of the two planets it was traveling between, and less from the perspective of passengers on the ship.
Not relevant to interstellar travel by humans in our lifetimes obviously.
I misstated this principle a bit in the case of alpha centuari, but in distances of thousands of light years it would be true.
“Observing the events of the past week or so, I find it increasingly hard to believe that there is intelligent life anywhere in the universe.” The spirit of Enrico Fermi is smiling.
And speaking of believing, any take on the Seymour Hersh article?
This whole thing actually made me reflect on the X-Files, which I haven't thought about since the show was popular in the 90s. Apart from the obvious observation that now, many of the show's plotlines and overall anti-government stance has been taken up by the right, where as on the show they're depicted as kind of having an affable, slackerish vibe to them, it made me think about your comment on the Matrix, and the idea that the "truth is out there" condemns you to a life of total alienation from the world around you. The thing I remember most about that show was how the very idea that aliens were "out there" made the entire American landscape Mulder and Scully were constantly traversing a bleak purgatory without any love or comfort or cheer. It made the very idea of believing in aliens seem like a horrible and bitter curse, rather than a potential new form of spiritualism.
What is to be made of the fact that this predisposition to UFO sightings/belief is seemingly concentrated in these united states?
"Aliens are probably real, almost certainly have never visited us, and almost certainly never will" has been my take for a long time, fully agree with that bit. If people would like to go deeper on the "whys" of UFO stuff, and the reasons it has had such a persistent role in the culture, I would recommend the 2013 documentary Mirage Men. That documentary has some pretty compelling evidence that the original "flying saucer" sighting reports in the 40s and 50s were basically a means to explain away weird-looking experimental aircraft civilians were spotting in the early jet age.
The national security apparatus then realized that this could be used more broadly as a shiny object to distract questioning-the-government oriented people, and so encouraged the development of UFO conspiracies. I like it because it suits a bigger pattern - the use of more ridiculous conspiracies to distract from actual malfeasance, and then point to those ridiculous conspiracies to paint a broader swath of official-narrative-questioners with a "loonie" brush.
I’m agnostic on the aliens.
The UFO thing is quite well documented at this point, and not only by unreliable observers, by hundreds of military and civilian pilots across continents. It is a recurring phenomenon, and particularly surrounding nuclear weapons in both the USA and Russia.
Might it be extraterrestrial visitors of some sort? I dunno, but what is this stuff that has now been documented so many times over by so many observers?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/what-the-pentagon-report-says-about-ufos
Truly outstanding movie premise. Elements of Ace in the Hole in it. Perfect vehicle for Gene Wilder if he were still available.