What I found most interesting about this model was the implication that humans are possibly one of the earliest sentient spacefaring species to have appeared so far. Which explains why we haven't seen any other signs of extraterrestrial intelligence yet.
That’s just because our neighbourhood is so boring in comparison to Earth.
Imagine that by some chance Mars was another Earth with a breathable atmosphere. NASA would have been given a trillion dollar budget and we would have been there in the 80s. Instead it’s a dead red rock so NASA gets a small budget and the US spends its money on blowing people up instead.
We have the technology to be a spacefaring civilisation but we won’t care until Earth becomes a worse place to be than the rest of the solar system, which is probably never given how bad the other bodies in the solar system are. Most likely we develop Von Neumann probes before we ever get bored of Earth.
I'm not sure which is more practical. Diverting enough material to replicate earth's natural magnetic core system on mars into the planet, or building an artificial system. The knowledge gained from attempting either is likely valuable.
Fucking journalists publish an article with magnetic dipole measured in Teslas... So I go to the linked paper, and it has basically the same contents, on basically the same wording, with the magnetic dipole measured in Teslas.
It appears that at some point, somebody involved with this knew what they were doing. But we are removed so many steps from that person, that anything said there could as well be Star Trek techno-jumble. Including the conclusions.
That's a pretty good comparison. We go to space but it's a fleeting excursion so far and we haven't yet evolved the necessary abilities to make it permanent
No, we wouldn't know today. But this is knowable in about 50 years or so, if we send probes to ~550AU and use the Sun as a gravitational lens; we will then be able to get high-res (1km resolution?) photos/videos of nearby extrasolar planets themselves. This may be enough to find a spacefaring civilization. (sure, rockets aren't 1km big, but they do leave big traces. maybe we could see that)
As Qem mentioned, and as laid out on page 7 of the source paper:
A significant difference of the solar gravitational lens from a conventional telescope is that the gravitational lens telescope is not in any practical sense pointable.
For the telescope at a distance F from the sun to be re-aimed to image a new target 1° away, it would have to move a distance of (π/180°)F, which is 10 astronomical units at the minimum focal distance-- a lateral distance equivalent to the distance from Earth to Saturn.
This means that, in practice, such a telescope is not able to be repointed.
Thus, a telescope at the gravitational focus is necessarily going to be a singlepurpose telescope, with the target of observation selected before the mission is launched.
A gravitational focus mission can’t be used as a telescope to search for a target: such a mission must be with the objective to observe a target whose position is already known.
Mission to the Gravitational Focus of the Sun: A Critical Analysis
Geoffrey A. Landis, NASA John Glenn Research Center
> The basic concept is to manufacture thin sheets of a radioactive isotope and directly use the momentum of its decay products to generate thrust.
Actually it's mentioned at the end of the article:
> Novel ability to reach deep space (> 150 AU) very quickly and then continue aggressive maneuvers (> 100 km/sec) for dim object search/rendezvous and/or retargeting telescopes at the solar gravitational focus over a period of years.
> if we send probes to ~550AU and use the Sun as a gravitational lens; we will then be able to get high-res (1km resolution?) photos/videos of nearby extrasolar planets themselves.
It doesn't scale well. The probe would be able to observe a carefully chosen extrasolar planetary system in the opposite direction in relation to the sun. If you want to observe a second system, it's necessary to launch a second probe 550 AU in another direction. You can't change targets just by rotating the probe, given its lens is the sun.
Oh yeah, I'm aware that you'll need multiple probes - but I imagine we could send 50 or 100 of these things starting in like 20-30 years once some of the required engineering on propulsion systems etc is done. Assuming we have the will and money to send 1, I think we'd have the will and money to send dozens.
Our ability to detect signs of ETI is very limited. It could be all over, and we could have even detected it already, but we don't realize it. Studying up on astrophysics (how we detect and transmit signals, how signals attenuate and fade over cosmic distances, and some of the signals SETI has already received) reveals that.
The Fermi paradox is only a paradox due to the assumption that in a few million years a civilization will colonize the entire Milky Way just because it's theoretically possible, so we should be up to our eyeballs with aliens' von Neumann probes. But many things are theoretically possible. We could build the world's largest house -- the size of Nebraska. Every nation could reorient and sink their economy into that megaproject and do it. But it's irrational to; there's better things we want to do with our resources (which will always be finite, all the way up the Kardashev scale). That's why I think it's silly to expect any intelligent life to be that ambitious (or competent).
i dunno bros, but this is the explanation of the fermi paradox for me. Sorry to go all HGTTG but...
>Wake up
>No idea where I am
>Hey we have no idea where everyone is
>According to history nothing much has happened in the universe
>Oh look at that, just now that you are alive you are hitting the singularity
Feels a little like a rehashed sitcom episode...like a director is just brute forcing shit to figure out a solution, with our lives. And its all probably just on how to make a good cup of coffee for his interdimensional space ship.
How would you know? Based on what we know of simulations in this reality, which has rules designed by whoever created it? If you're programming a simulated universe and don't want its inhabitants to know, it seems like a pretty obvious mechanism to try to enforce that would be to make the rules so that it seemed like "leaking" information into a simulation was impossible, even if the rules of their "outer" reality made it impossible for them to fully prevent it, only dissuade us from looking into it.
This is kind of why I mostly find the discussion of whether we're in simulation to pretty quickly reach a point where it stops being interesting even from a philosophical perspective. I don't really see how you can differentiate between fundamental properties that we observe that reflect the "real" universe where we're just a simulation and fundamental properties that explicitly designed for the purpose of the simulation itself and may not actually reflect the "real" universe. We might as well ask if the OS our simulation is running on has a toggle for dark mode or not.
There's no test that can make us convince ourselves that it's a simulation or not. The real question is if it even matters. We are just as real if we're not a simulation, or are a simulation.
Belief is simulated knowledge and we exist within our believed world...so we are in a simulation of some kind, but we don't know if we are also in "the" kind.
They can just simply pause, delete, reverse, or make us outright ignore anything. They are literal god and hold ultimate power over us, unless they are willing to deliberately let things happen.
Expecting ourselves to be special has a poor track record. The same evidence is compatible with lots of loud aliens yelling on channels we can't hear yet.
That’s the exact opposite of the grabby alien’s hypothesis tho. The grabby aliens hypothesis says that we’re very much average but that life as a whole is still quite young in the universe.
The galaxy is around 100k light years across and 13 billion years old. For us to be among the first generation born within 10^5 years of each other after a gestation of 10^10 years, would make us special.
Being among the first civilizations in the galaxy is less special than being the first civilization, but more special than being just another in an ongoing ecosystem.
I want humans to be casually interstellar and expand across the galaxy. I want this to occur in less than N years, N << 10^10.
If humans are casually interstellar and expansionist, then we would colonize the galaxy in M years, M << 10^10.
Humans are not special, therefore if another alien species existed in the past at current human tech levels, then they would do the same as humans would and colonize the galaxy within N + M << 10^10 years after achieving current human tech level.
We believe we can detect such a civilization. Therefore, if we are more than N + M years after a another civilization with current human tech level, then we would see them.
We do not detect any such civilizations.
Therefore one of the assumptions must be wrong.
1. We can not detect a galactic civilization.
2. No alien civilization has reached current human tech level within N + M years of now.
3. Humans are special. Only humans would colonize the galaxy if they had casual interstellar travel.
4. Humans are not special, but we will never invent casual interstellar travel/spread to the stars.
So, if you think humans are not special (3 is false) and you hope humans will spread to the stars in the future (hope 4 is false), then you hope the answer is 1 (humans are bad at detection) or 2 (humans are early).
If you rule out 1 and 2, then 4 can only be true if 3 is true. If you rule out 3 as well, then you must conclude humanity will never spread to the stars for unknown reasons.
Isn't 4 equivalent to, 'no civilization will invent casual interstellar travel/spread to the stars'?
And isn't that hypothesis extremely likely, given what we now know about the costs of _interplanetary_ travel and its relative ease compared to interstellar travel?
That's another assumption, that it's _possible_ to colonize a galaxy from a planetary base. We don't even know that it's possible to colonize a nearby planet. If we were confident that we could, we'd be filling up Siberia, Ellesmere Island, and Greenland first.
There's also another assumption missing from your list- that technological civilizations can last long enough to colonize the galaxy. I'm also surprised that there isn't any discussion on the site or here of Great Filters. If the average technological civilization wipes itself out within a few hundred years of developing technologies that enable space travel or even radio, then all discussion of "filling the galaxy" is castles in the air.
> And isn't that hypothesis extremely likely, given what we now know about the costs of _interplanetary_ travel and its relative ease compared to interstellar travel?
Costs are a function of manufacturing productivity. What is the upper bound on manufacturing productivity? With automation and AI, I don't see any hard upper bound.
The raw resources are certainly available to build starships. I mean, your share of per capita energy consumption over your life would be enough to accelerate your body to maybe 700 km/s, and that's with us just using a small fraction of the energy available on a planet; energy in space would be many orders of magnitude more abundant.
It also could be that interstellar travel is possible but never inexpensive enough to be casual or useful for ever-expanding colonization. Or it could be that civilizations stabilize before the point where ever-expanding colonization becomes attractive.
As an example of the latter, look at birth rates in different societies on Earth: Almost universally, they decline to replacement level once they hit a certain level of per-capita wealth.
It’s very likely that a society that achieves interstellar travel will do so after it achieves the ability to provide the highest standard of living for all of its members indefinitely using just the resources of its local system. This already describes Earth; the reasons we don’t do this are ideological, not based on any inherent constraints, while interstellar travel isn’t in our grasp yet and is likely to be extraordinarily costly.
Such a society wouldn’t face any pressure to grow, so any colonization would itself likely be ideological—“We don’t want to do things Surak’s way, let’s pull up stakes and find a world where we can live the way we want!”—or as a contingency/hedge against large-scale existential risk. Neither demand colonizing even a small fraction of a galaxy, assuming habitable worlds are even remotely plentiful near and reachable from the origin world.
You have missed the point. The goal is humanity becoming Star Trek and enclosing every star in a Dyson Sphere; the goal is determining whether 4 is true or false. The question is what is stopping it. The entire point of these thought exercises is setting up proof by contradictions/falsifiable experiments to narrow that down.
Maybe (4 is false) is inevitable now that humanity has reached its current point. Maybe literally every human-like species will become Star Trek and enclose every star in a Dyson Sphere; that would be awesome since it means our goal is now a foregone conclusion. But how would we know? Well, we can do a thought experiment assuming it and extrapolate toward characteristics that we might be able to detect to falsify our hypothesis.
Well if literally every human-like species will enclose every star in the future, then we should not be able to see any stars at some point after one comes into existence. We can still see stars, therefore either it has not happened yet (1), there are no other human-like species (2), or the supposition is false (3). If the supposition is false, then there are risks ahead of us. If the supposition is true, then the risks are behind us, but then (1) or (2) must be true. For (1) to be true, we must either be early or it takes a long time. For (2) to be true, we must either be early or rare. If we can rule out (1) and (2), then we must conclude (3) which means we can be confident that there must be a risk ahead of us preventing us from reaching our goal that we as a species need to be wary of even if we do not know what it is specifically. We just know it has to exist otherwise we would see no stars.
If (1) or (2) is true, then (3) no longer needs to be true. It might still be the case that the goal is impossible, but at least we have a chance. The point of this analysis is trying to theorize where we need to look that gives humanity the most information about if and how to become Star Trek. It is not about coming up with the "correct" answer; we do not have enough information for that. We are trying to create theories that take facts that we can find (or can in theory find) as inputs and generate predictions that can be tested and falsified.
Why is being first, or being among the first, “special”? To me “special” is different than just “specific.” If some civilization knew it was the 50th advanced civilization in the universe, 50 might seem like a very special number, but is it really more special than 1?
We have seen signs, they were called UFOs but are called UAPs now, at least by the US government. People have tried coming forward over the years and talk about the subject, but was met with ridicule.
I suggest googling David Grusch to read about the whistleblower from inside US intelligence services. Also search for “Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet ufo” and you’ll find additional comments.
Such conspiracy theories amuse and confuse me in equal measure.
Do you also think North Korea, Cuba, and Iran either don't exist or want to be part of this coverup? Do you live in a world where there's really only one government and any indication to the contrary is mere kayfabe?
I’m sure they do, and for all we know may Iran is part of the conspiracy. Cuba and NK are small fry and are probably excluded.
In the lore, multiple governments are involved in the conspiracy. They keep it secret because it is a race to see who can crack the alien tech the fastest.
There have been cases in the lore of other countries (Brazil and Zimbabwe i believe) having encounters or alleged down aircraft and the US has came in to investigate/recover the down object.
I don’t think there is a world government, but i do think we cooperate with each other.
Also President Clinton says he tried to get information on UFOs but they refused and gave him the runaround.
My previous (brief) line manager was Iranian. I asked him if the Iranian rhetoric about the USA being "the great Satan" was a translation issue or sincere, he said it was sincere.
Must say, from practice of living on fast changing territory, it is very typical for people to hate all new, because sometimes new things appear too fast, that just their appear are pain.
This is not something supernatural. Even more - for people is natural when things are NOT change fast, even when all these new things are good. I'm sure, you will admit, from steam railroad there was many things very scary. And Iranians have right to say, that English and Americans opened this Pandora box.
That is difference of "1st world" and other world.
In 1st world, changes are just literally changes, may be you retire later or your deposit will become smaller for few bucks.
But in "3rd world", life is extremely fragile. Most people does not have savings, and typically to not have any safety measures, just because constant under-financed. For example, in India, great disaster, when temperature falls below zero - every time this happen, people die.
So, people in 3rd world typically consider literal daemon everyone who do risky things or ask others to do risky things. People even could literally kick somebody for talking about risky things.
You're over-estimating the average first-world experience; people on this forum are mostly much richer than the average of those who live in the same nations. People die in the UK from the heat and the cold, and yet religious beliefs are on the decline; the US is richer yet more religious than the UK.
Also, the theocratic leadership of Iran is not so fragile.
> Also, the theocratic leadership of Iran is not so fragile
You're confusing leadership and economy. This is very significant difference - when economy suffer in first-world, whole world hear this from independent press, but when similar thing happen in countries like Iran, people are killed if try to open truth, because leadership pressures to open just info it think should be open and nothing more.
For example, when in North Korea happen great hunger, nobody outside country knows except CIA.
And it is also important to notice - leadership consists of humans and humans could make mistakes, and in Democracy, exists feedback via human rights and via independent press, but in totalitarian countries both things does not exist, and also does not exist feedback, so, when totalitarian leadership make huge mistake, nobody could tell them and whole country become like uncontrolled auto, running into abyss on full speed, and very frequently this end with total fiasco.
BTW people on this forum are mostly have much higher education, than the average of those who live in the same nations, and this is one obvious reason, why they are richer than average.
In countries like Iran, NORMAL higher education just does not exist. For example, I lived in USSR, where instead of Philosophy learned history of communists party. Imagine, what happen with other knowledge, which communists considered harmful - laws and rights, journalism, history, diplomacy - they just substituted whole parts of science with their surrogates.
