Aaah, good ol' Fermi!
Feb. 22nd, 2023 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteIf intelligent life is out there, why hasn't it showed up yet? Why hasn't the whole galaxy been paved over with alien fast-food joints?
Well, that could be a difficult question to answer, except it's probably the wrong question, since it assumes the answer to an earlier question: Is paving over the whole galaxy really the top priority for intelligent life? Or even any kind of priority?
We're asking why alien dumptrucks haven't showed up orbiting Earth, demanding coal or uranium or whatever, to feed their hungry engines. We're asking why space isn't echoing with radio signals from all directions, as aliens yell at each other through a medium that takes tens or hundreds of years per exchange. Burning extracted resources for energy and using radio to communicate is the current obsession of modern humanity. But will it be forever? In the meantime, aren't we just projecting our own obsessions onto alien life?
Before we discovered radio, we looked up in the sky and wondered why the gods didn't fly down on winged feet or whatever and stride among us. Now that we've had a good probe around up there and even sent a few humans in cans, we've had to move the gods somewhere else, but found a whole lot more open space than we expected. Electromagnetic energy comes raining down from there, so we've started listening -- in an extremely limited way. And now we ask, why isn't anyone talking to us?
Well, who says the electromagnetic spectrum, radiating out from points in space, is the pinnacle of interstellar communication? There may be something we're missing, down in the quantum foam between atoms, hanging around here on the Earth. It may look like noise right now, and one good reason for that might be that it's packed with trillions of overlaid signals that we don't have the hardware to untangle, or the computing power to decrypt. A whole universe full of life chattering away. Sending signals by wave might be such a crude and energy-hungry strategy that any civilization older than a hundred thousand years or so has advanced right out of it, and into this new thing.
It may also be that such technology brings parallel discoveries. It may be that any intelligent life that joins this unseen conversation also moves beyond energy scarcity ... or finds it easier to spawn entire universes of energy and space right in their own yard, than sending clunky machines made of matter cannonballing around the galaxy to try and gather it up. I mean, really, have you looked into the resource cost of terraforming the planets sitting just one orbit away in our own front yard? It's appalling. How well is that effort going to go across a gulf of, say, twenty trillion miles? And besides, if you heard orderly radio signals coming from a distant star system, wouldn't that star go to the bottom of your terraforming list? Anyone already living there would immediately sabotage your work. Why bother?
This planet sloshed around for 4.5 billion years before intelligent life appeared on it. Humans have been able to listen to space and send crap out into it for one hundred millionth of one percent of that time. Why declare radio and rocketry the last inventions that matter? Why be so quick to declare the end of science? Why characterize spacefaring alien civilizations using conquistador logic that even us lowly humans have discovered is a very poor way to ensure one's survival?
Well, that could be a difficult question to answer, except it's probably the wrong question, since it assumes the answer to an earlier question: Is paving over the whole galaxy really the top priority for intelligent life? Or even any kind of priority?
We're asking why alien dumptrucks haven't showed up orbiting Earth, demanding coal or uranium or whatever, to feed their hungry engines. We're asking why space isn't echoing with radio signals from all directions, as aliens yell at each other through a medium that takes tens or hundreds of years per exchange. Burning extracted resources for energy and using radio to communicate is the current obsession of modern humanity. But will it be forever? In the meantime, aren't we just projecting our own obsessions onto alien life?Before we discovered radio, we looked up in the sky and wondered why the gods didn't fly down on winged feet or whatever and stride among us. Now that we've had a good probe around up there and even sent a few humans in cans, we've had to move the gods somewhere else, but found a whole lot more open space than we expected. Electromagnetic energy comes raining down from there, so we've started listening -- in an extremely limited way. And now we ask, why isn't anyone talking to us?
Well, who says the electromagnetic spectrum, radiating out from points in space, is the pinnacle of interstellar communication? There may be something we're missing, down in the quantum foam between atoms, hanging around here on the Earth. It may look like noise right now, and one good reason for that might be that it's packed with trillions of overlaid signals that we don't have the hardware to untangle, or the computing power to decrypt. A whole universe full of life chattering away. Sending signals by wave might be such a crude and energy-hungry strategy that any civilization older than a hundred thousand years or so has advanced right out of it, and into this new thing.
It may also be that such technology brings parallel discoveries. It may be that any intelligent life that joins this unseen conversation also moves beyond energy scarcity ... or finds it easier to spawn entire universes of energy and space right in their own yard, than sending clunky machines made of matter cannonballing around the galaxy to try and gather it up. I mean, really, have you looked into the resource cost of terraforming the planets sitting just one orbit away in our own front yard? It's appalling. How well is that effort going to go across a gulf of, say, twenty trillion miles? And besides, if you heard orderly radio signals coming from a distant star system, wouldn't that star go to the bottom of your terraforming list? Anyone already living there would immediately sabotage your work. Why bother?
This planet sloshed around for 4.5 billion years before intelligent life appeared on it. Humans have been able to listen to space and send crap out into it for one hundred millionth of one percent of that time. Why declare radio and rocketry the last inventions that matter? Why be so quick to declare the end of science? Why characterize spacefaring alien civilizations using conquistador logic that even us lowly humans have discovered is a very poor way to ensure one's survival?
no subject
Date: 2023-02-23 12:47 pm (UTC)Makes sense. It's ridiculous to watch people thinking that 10ky or 10my there will be the same humans on rockets using radio. But that's what people believe. We just don't know. We are not there yet.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-28 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-28 01:35 am (UTC)Definitely. The secret of concrete was unknown for about 1000 years. In year 1100 the Romans were clueless about making stone coffins, so they reused. And I remember reading a book by Diogenes Laertius, about the history of philosophy, and he mentioned Egyptian barbarians that believed that lunar eclipses happen because the Moon gets into the shadow thrown by the Earth. He definitely found this idea weird.