Odds of communicating with 36 other possible intelligent civilizations are small
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cbc.ca
Their key assumption is: "We assume that if an SP remains in the circumstellar Habitable Zone (HZ) for a time equal to the current age of the Earth it will develop intelligent, communicative life." (page 5 at https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2004/2004.03968.pdf)
Why? Why do you assume a planet will develop intelligent life when it remains in the Habitable Zone long enough? Just because it happend on Earth?
And they continue with: "[...] according to the Copernican Principle – we propose that the likelihood of the development of life, and even intelligent life, should be broadly uniformly distributed amongst any suitable habitats"
We have no clue how likely it was at Earth that life developed at all. Maybe it was just a chain of many lucky coincidences that happen once in 10 billion years. How is distribution any relevant then?
Nobody knows how life is distributed in the galaxy. Assuming that we are not special (the Copernican Principle) is a valid prerequisite. As it neither can be proved or disproved, it's not unserious to just state what the unproven assumptions are.
If we effectively limit the definition of "life" to "the types of organisms we see on Earth", then of course we will never find life anywhere else.
Maybe there are aliens that live on a gas giant and they "eat" the lighting rather than food, and their bodies look more like circuitry than the chemical life on Earth.
Maybe there is a planet with a very strong magnetic field, and the life there is kind of like an electromagnet. They have bodies high in copper and the current of the ocean moves them through the magnetic field and generates electrical energy.
It makes sense that we restrict our search for life forms we know to be possible while we are stuck with limited tools at our disposal. But I don't want us to overlook some amazing discoveries because we have put blinders on.
It seems almost infinitely more likely that we will be able to communicate with life that is like us.
Even if that turns out not to be essential, it is a better starting place to spend your limited resources looking.
Life like us is probably so far away and so short-lived that we will never be able to communicate. An intelligence that is near enough to reply & able to survive millions of years (so its lifespan crosses ours) might provide some results.
If we start sending out signals and ask how long will it take for a reply? 17,000 years from something like us. Thats no use.
Might be better to phone every star in the neighbourhood starting with the nearest, and see if anyone picks up.
Things like Dark Matter, well, we know it falls down. That's about it, really. There's a lot of theories about it though. More unfortunately, we think Dark Matter is about 20% of the universe.
Then there's Dark Energy. It makes things fall up (?!). And we're not super sure about that, either. Most unfortunately, Dark Energy is about 75% of the universe.
We don't have a clue if any intelligence is even using photons to communicate anymore. Most of the universe doesn't seem to really interact with them anyways. And that's with this limited understanding of 'Dark' things. We're still standing at the shore of a vast ocean.
We thus suppose that life looks like life on Earth because life on Earth has several properties which allowed it to come into existence. By contrast, there are no known states that cause a strong planetary electromagnetic field to rearrange copper into self-reproducing patterns: if anything, such electromagnetic fields are more likely to disrupt any spontaneous order that happens to arise.
So it's true there may be other systems of life out there, but too much handwaving about that fact can obscure the fact that the other candidates for ordered systems arising from chaos are weak candidates. It would be unwise to rely on this wild speculation while trying to responsibly and conservatively estimate how much life there is.
I am unsure what variety of "opinion" you hope to extract from your hypothetical Neanderthal, and take the opportunity to note that, as social mammals with large and adaptable brains, the opinion systems of intelligent hominids are substantially shaped by their upbringing and how they relate to the society around them, particularly as regards the more complex systems of thought.
Even if you do manage to create a basic reproducing construct, that doesn't mean you are finished. The reproducing construct will only have a limited number of instances on its single planet. So once again, it is difficult to get to the next step beause your numbers are small relative to the the imaginable probability (of course what this is is not known).
On the other hand, the probability of us observing intelligent life is 1, since the intelligent life is the observer. No matter how few planets develop intelligent life, each will look at itself and say, "There it is." Our own existance or the history on our planet says nothing about the probability of life evolving without knowing the number of "tries" that failed to evolve life.
People who agree with what I have said so far may disagree with this next part, and that is ok. In counting the number of tries, we don't know that there is only one universe in which those tries exist, meaning we could be the only ones in this universe, and ours is one of the relatively small number of universes that have life.
Of course, I can't say the probability will be small. But I think it is also unfair to just assume the probability of life evolving is big.
Why would other sentient beings even want to communicate with those self-centered carbon-breathers? Why not just laugh about their hubris and that woefully incomplete definition of life? Telling them would spoil it!
Incidentally this is the "Rare Earth" hypothesis. There's a rather depressing book on this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Univers...
The media has told us that life is rare and that WE ARE ALONE IN THE GALAXY. I saw it with my own eyes of Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining in an authoritative way that we as a human species have to accept that we are alone in this galaxy.
Yet another lie pushed by the mainstream media. Also a glaring breakdown in logic to assert to a definitive negative, especially on the concept of life existing on one of the 100 billion or so star systems in the galaxy.
They can't even get their story straight. The US military is already acknowledging UFO's and the POTUS has hinted that the truth is a really big deal.
How many times will the story change and the goal posts be moved until we acknowledge that ET's have visited earth and have been for a very long time?
Still the successes in contacting these nonhuman sentient beings, even if they gladly support such contacts, like dolphins, is very limited at best. And those are our close relatives, fellow mammals, sharing the planet with us.
Now imagine an attempt to contact a sentient being which developed and lives in an environment totally alien to humans.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-17116882 [2]: http://www.animalcognition.org/2015/03/25/the-declaration-of...
The window of of that civilization being detectable is squarely between them developing radio and them dying off or using some tech that we cannot discern as artificial signals. The window for us detecting them has been ~50 years so far. Given the size of the galaxy and the minuteness of that window overlap it's pretty clear the chances of communication are slim. And indeed even if we do detect something, calling it communication might really be pushing our definition of that.
When the issue is interstellar communications, the minimum requirements are language and the technology to send and receive information between stars.
> Experiments have shown that they can learn human sign language and can use whistles for 2-way human–animal communication. Phoenix and Akeakamai, bottlenose dolphins, understood individual words and basic sentences like "touch the frisbee with your tail and then jump over it" (Herman, Richards, & Wolz 1984). Phoenix learned whistles, and Akeakamai learned sign language. Both dolphins understood the significance of the ordering of tasks in a sentence. [0]
Maybe this definition of sentience is too broad, but it is worth evaluating what you can hope to achieve, by looking at the closest approximation available and what you are achieving there. And in this case, I would say "not much". We know e.g. dolphins have a language and communicate, we can very coarsely decipher it, and they can learn to broadly decipher a language we engineered for them. But the most we are achieving with this communication are party tricks in a circus.
And by “a language like ours”, do you mean English? (The one language that we know you and I both have in common.) Noam Chomsky has spent a career looking for a common deep grammar for all human language, and it turns out that there is not much in common, except at the most fundamental and abstract level. Despite this, there are no human populations divided by having mutually incomprehensible languages, and maybe that is so throughout the galaxy.
How do they determine f_l, the probability of life originating on a suitable planet?
They follow the "Principle of Mediocrity", ie life exists on Earth, and we are not special, so probably it exists anywhere it can exist and f_l = 1.
This is the exact opposite of the Anthropic Principle, which says (correctly) that we cannot deduce anything about the probability of life originating from the fact of our own existence.
If f_l isn't 1, and it's some smaller number, like 1^-1000, then there won't be 36 alien civilisations in the galaxy - there will only be zero.
Even in the observable universe, there will be zero alien civilisations.
Your definition of the Anthropic Principle seems to clash with the Wikipedia definition [1], which states:
> The anthropic principle is the philosophical premise that any data we collect about the universe is filtered by the fact that, in order for it to be observable at all, the universe must have been compatible with the emergence of conscious and sapient life that observes it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
Also you use the word "correctly" for your definition, but as it isn't self-evident, some sort of proof should probably be required.
Either way, his point is fundamentally pretty close to even the WAP definition in the summary.
I think it's fairly self evident, though. If there is only one set of observers in the entirety of the observable universe, those observers would be inaccurate in assuming that they are unlikely to be special because they exist and therefor others likely to as well. We just can't make a deduction about the probability of life based on the fact we exist, because for us to make that observation we have to exist, regardless of (im)probable it was. You can reach the same conclusion just thinking about selection bias - we have selected for intelligent life out of necessity, because if we hadn't, we couldn't be around to make the argument either way.
If any exist (i.e., if other origins are possible, such as on Endor), we would only encounter expansionist cultures, because the others don't get out. If they all have controlled fusion (and how could they not?) they should have little interest in inner rocky planets, never mind the extreme primitives on them.
Look to the Kuiper belts, well supplied with frozen gases and extreme cold. Of the two, the latter is the far more valuable.
These people must have a very short sighted view of history? Our current trajectory for almost everything that matters is positive. Longer life spans, fewer wars, better medicine and technology, average base-level knowledge, etc. Barring some global unavoidable catastrophe, there is no reason to think we are going anywhere very soon.
If only we didn't live during a huge ecological disaster that is threatening to destroy the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people directly, with unforeseeable consequences for the rest of the world; which the major powers of the world are unwilling to act in any significant way to curtail; and which seems to require a re-structuring of the entire world's economy to actually solve...
Looking at the world right now, we know one thing for sure: none of the trends we see today will be relevant in 100 years. One way or another, the world will go through massive changes whose scope can't be predicted.
One possibility is global warming will continue unabated until we have hundreds of millions of people migrating from rapidly submerging areas (Bangladesh being one of the largest concentrations of population in the world living a few meters above sea levels), most likely followed by some kind of global war to prevent or redirect the massive migrations.
Another is that the global economy will be completely re-created to stop the production of greenhouse gases dead in its tracks, almost certainly in a non-capitalist system, since capitalism simply can't deal with externalities. The required political and economic shifts are hard to imagine, and the resulting world is equally hard to predict.
And of course, we are still always a few madmen away from nuclear war, with many of the world's most tense regions having nuclear weapons aimed at their enemies. Could global warming start a resource war between India and Pakistan that would lead to them using their arsenals? Could Israel decide to use its illegal nuclear weapons to attack Iran in a "defensive first strike"? Could the US decide that its interests are important enough that, as its soft power wanes, it could launch a bomb at some country to remind everyone of its hard power? Could the Europeans spark a new war, either among themselves or against some common threat, and feel the need to use their nuclear arsenal? Could the Chinese? As long as nuclear weapons exist, they are an ever growing threat.
Remember that just in the last few years, the long standing US-Russian non-proliferation treaty was unilaterally ended by the US, signalling a vast increase in the risk of nuclear weapons actually seeing use again.
Secondly, the climate change "catastrophe" isn't what we need to be worried about. Rather one of those events that has occurred before on earth, wiping out almost all existing life. But considering some non-intelligent life forms, or at least life forms without our superior intelligence, survived those events I'd bet that we would survive them too. Considering we can detect them, and (somewhat) protect against them.
Nuclear War is unlikely to happen since any instigator know it would come at tremendous cost. Also, the more countries that have nukes the better, since it levels the playground. Even if nuklear war happens, it wont wipe out all people, all communities.
A civilization with only a million people in it would have priorities vastly different than our own.
And nuclear war had been only narrowly avoided on around 13 documented occasions in the last 70 years [0]. Some of these events were avoided by happenstance, not any kind of systematic protection. This kind of luck will not continue forever. And if it does break out, right now we don't really understand what may happen to the planet if the US or Russia unleash their full nuclear arsenal, rather than just bombing one or two cities.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
Nothing will happen. Planetary nuclear arsenal yield is dwarfed by a single large vulcanic eruption, and those happen regularly. In fact, modern nuclear arsenal is barely enough to destroy military targets and major cities of both parties. Direct casualties will be in millions, but probably in single digits of them.
In other words, it will be a major humanitarian catastrophe, but nothing humanity (or even a major world power like US) can't survive. Probably the biggest change would be due to large areas rendered uninhabitable for decades, but then again, plenty will be left and "uninhabitability" is a matter of life quality standards. People live in Hiroshima and Chernobyl just fine.
And people do not live in Chernobyl at all. However, it's not really relevant to a discussion of nuclear weapons, as nuclear plant meltdowns are a completely different problem. For sure if the Chernobyl core had melted down and exploded nothing would be living in Ukraine at all, and possibly a much larger area. Hopefully though, that is one area though where technological progress has actually significantly reduced the chance that it would ever happen, in a systematic manner.
But in general: all the articles greatly exaggerate the volume of nuclear arsenal (tenfold), the number of actual nuclear detonations, the territory of fire and ash yield of the fires. And even then, the planet has tolerated all those at larger scale in volcanic eruptions and forest fires.
Napkin math: US/Russia arsenal is about 1500 warheads on 500-1000 carriers each, which is about 500MT combined. Out of those optimistically maybe a half will detonate on each side (they will be destroyed in preventive strikes/intercepted/etc.), which leaves you with about 125MT total yield - about the yield of a couple of Tsar Bombs that was detonated in 1961 without any consequences whatsoever. The majority of the strikes will be on military targets in the middle of nowhere, where there won't be any fire at all. The rest will fall on modern concrete cities that don't have much fuel either.
> And people do not live in Chernobyl at all
They do, there are about 3000 people working there at any given time and even more living there illegally. Also, animals have no problems living there whatsoever and in fact the ecosystem is in a better shape due to low human activity. Also, you are aware, that Chernobyl power plant itself was operational until year 2000, right?
> nuclear plant meltdowns are a completely different problem
I absolutely is, and in terms of ecological consequence Chernobyl is far more severe than thermonuclear warhead detonation. The core HAS melted down and exploded, pieces of graphite rods were found as far as hundreds of meters away from the building.
I'm not saying nuclear war is nothing to think about - this would be a major catastrophe. But it's very unlikely to end the civilization.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...
That's the American "best thing against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" attitude. Empirically this does not hold true. With the density of lethal weapons in the U.S. and the statistically lower safety from gun violence compared to other developed countries, it's safe to assume that the world would be a safer place with a reduced number of countries having nukes (or ideally none of them) rather than an increased number.
We've only had organized societies for somewhere around 20,000.
There could have been say, intelligent life on Venus, then they triggered a runaway greenhouse effect, everything died, the oceans boiled, and then 700,000,000 years pass before we started talking pictures of the dead planet with all signs of previous life completely erased.
I'm leaning towards us leaving some evidence behind, but it's such an inconceivable amount of time that I'm not really sure.
Near-Earth satellites, yes; the thinnest wisps of the edge of the atmosphere slow them down. Further out, however, in geostationary orbit, satellites are not subject to such forces. They may be disrupted long-term by the gravitational influence of other distant bodies, but I think I'd worry more about the potential impact from micrometeorites.
I've seen this discussed a bunch over the years, and the informed answer to me seems to be that various isotopes and such would remain in trace amounts as clear evidence of technology.
Even if we use the entire output of a nuclear reactor to power the transmitter, even if we tighten the beam ten times beyond what's currently possible and even if the receiving collector is square kilometers wide, the signal is still going to be very weak.
I can't even fathom how to make this work at 10K light year scale.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer
The technical term is space-time block coding [1]. The speed negotiation would take at least 3x the distance between the two start systems though, until which time they'd be limited to a conservative estimate based on the channel impairment between the star systems, aka max expected noise between the two astronomical phased arrays.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%E2%80%93time_block_code
like -.-- -.-- --..
Sat (500AU) sun (N light years) sun (500AU) satI had a problem like this on my wireless systems exam recently, where the setup was two Arecibo style antennas with a reasonable 20ly distance, a low 48bps, an Eb/N0 of at least 10dB, and a few other reasonable assumptions. The transmit power needed turned out to be less than 250kW.
Would be really grateful if you could link me to some learning resources!
I'm writing out the basics of the solution below, but the physical reason for the non-impossibility is that the problem statement assumes the lowest possible amount of noise to overcome, long symbol durations, and high gain antennas.
For learning resources to recommend I'm lacking a little, since I mainly relied on lectures etc, but if you're interested in terrestrial wireless communications you could check out Stanford's class by Andrea Goldsmith. [1] There's very little about antennas, satellites, long distance communications and all that, but a draft of her book is available and all the lectures, so it's very comprehensive even though it's only tangentially related. You can also check out the link budget Wikipedia page [2] for an overview of things affecting these kinds of transmissions, as well as many links to interesting related topics, like the voyager program and their unique struggles (300+dB path loss and still hanging in there!)
The path loss is L = (4 * pi * d/lambda)^2, where lambda is wavelength. At 1.5GHz carrier frequency this results in L = 1.41e38 = 382dB, which definitely is a monstrous number, and with no antenna gain and terrestrial noise powers this would be practically impossible to overcome.
But with an equivalent receiver noise temperature of 5K (meaning the noise we are receiving is only the faint radio noise from space [3]) and a bandwidth of 100Hz the signal is only competing with noise with power N_0 = kBT = 6.90e-21W = -202dBW giving us some hope of establishing communications.
The gain of the 300m diameter antenna is G = 4 * pi * Area/lambda^2 = 2.2e7 = 74dB, and we have one transmitting and one receiving so we can double that dB gain.
Given the Eb/N0 = 10dB requirement and the rate of R = 48bps we can figure out the necessary received power after the antenna gain. Energy per bit is N_0 * 10, so the received power has to be Pr = N_0 * 10 * R = 3.3e-18W = -175dBW.
The transmit power plus gains minus loss has to be greater than the receive power limit, so it should be Pt >= Pr - 2G + L = -175dBW -(2 * 74)dB + 382dB = 59dBW = 800kW
I'm getting a different answer here because the exam had some additional pointing/polarization loss, which I apparently flipped the sign on in my solution. So the correct answer for my problem should be in the low MW, but still not outlandish. I have not received the corrected exam yet, so there might be other errors too.
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee359/courseinfo.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_budget
[3] I'm a little unclear on how this would be achieved, since the earth antenna is, well, earth based and at some 290K. This is however what the problem assumed, so maybe they're counting on cooled space based antennas.
Check your priors.
Does that part of their calculation seem awfully conservative?
That should get the attention of any listeners out there. There should be no natural process which could explain that.
Bonus:
An incredibly strong, directional and short pulse could be directed by placing a mylar parabolic shape behind the bombs. Just before being vaporised, the mylar would reflect the initial energy.
The same could be done with the radio energy by a thin copper mesh.
Edit - downvoter thinks it’s untenable or just a bad idea in case it works? :-)
Wolfram has an alright interview where he considers this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez773teNFYA
My own thoughts: intelligence is something which you need to observe predicting the future, ie something proactively reacting to the future in order to achieve a goal. This means ideally you have a bit of interaction so that you can see that you're interacting with is capable of learning in response to you
And if we did decide it had to be aliens, the point is they don’t have to be intelligent to do prime numbers — they might be space cicadas who evolved to spread around Oort clouds by gathering enough uranium to go prompt-critical[0].
From the point of view of aliens looking at us if we detonated nukes in a prime sequence, the same arguments apply.
[0] this is a reference to a novel or short story which I can’t remember enough details of to find on Google or DDG.
If a species finds those and aren't delighted, I feel sorry for them. (At least the first time they find space cicadas.)
A directional pulse may be an option, but then you have to pick a particular star at which to aim it.
Then, you’d have to calculate where that part of the galaxy will be, by the time you reach it. Then, you aim yourself at those coordinates, and hope you don’t have any mechanical issues that will prevent you from gravitationally locking on to your destination star system.
One way to avoid that is to project a powerful beam of electromagnetic radiation to ionize these atoms, and then swipe them away with magnetic field. But it adds significant energy requirements, and adds noticeable "friction" to your spaceship.
Amazing work, and makes this paper seem very week. He identifies many possible filters beyond the Drake equation.
If you like this sort of discussion, you will almost certainly like the podcast.
Relevant playlist
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh...
> you'd think the chance that there is intelligent extraterrestrial life in our galaxy seems enormous
"And the Earthling rocket ships departed Planet X3, having found no life, only an advanced civilization of extraterrestrial robots."
> Another study out of the University of British Columbia looked at the number of sun-like stars in the galaxy and estimated that one in five of them could have an Earth-like planet
On Earth, Life has embarrassed us by being found in the most inhospitable, acidic, saltiest, hottest places. And then embarrassed us again, by turning up in the cold black energy-poor ocean depths, sipping sulfur from vents. Life is surely bigger than Earth-like planets. And Intelligence is surely bigger than Life.
In Sagan's book Contact, the hard problem was not finding intelligence, but recognizing it. By the end, we learn that the arrangement of the stars and the digits of pi itself carry a message. This is the level of thinking that our search calls for.
I don't think your advanced civilization of extraterrestrial robots is doing enough work to establish this particular point.
That said I would think looking for earth like planets is not so much just for finding life, but also for the point of making it easier to recognize it as life, and finally hopefully having enough points in common to communicate.
And yet, all life on Earth has the same basic structure. The most likely reason for this is that life only originated once, and in one "place". This observation significantly reduces the probability we should ascribe for life to appear, and/or the specificity of the conditions required. For example, we know for sure that a planet like the Earth today is completely inhospitable to the emergence of life (there has not been an abiogenesis event for billions of years).
The other option is that life has emerged in many places/times on Earth, but with the exact same structure. While unlikely, this would suggest that life must have a very specific structure, that at least on Earth-like planets we should also expect RNA and DNA based life at least. This would also suggest that the likelihood of other kinds of life existing is smaller than initially could have been conceived. And even with this assumption, it would still not be clear that life is appearing on Earth today anymore, as the life forms we've looked at seem to have a phylogenetic link with other life (though our methods may be weak if the possibility of abiogenesis were correct). And even if abiogenesis was still occurring on Earth, it would have to be in some remote place in extreme conditions, as we have tried in all regular places with no success.
Overall, my belief is that the emergence of life is likely a vastly improbable event, and that we shouldn't expect to "see" a living (or formerly living) being that is not related to life on Earth in the lifetime of the Earth.
> And Intelligence is surely bigger than Life.
This seems a mystical belief, given all we know of the world.
> This seems a mystical belief, given all we know of the world.
if you assume that intelligence comes from the brain and if you assume that the brain is just a very highly optimized computer, there's no need for an intelligent entity to be alive. it just needs an adequate computer to exist.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz3qvETKooktNgCvvheuQDw/vid...
(I'm just a happy listener.)
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/15/world/intelligent-civiliz...
So far, we only have proof that civilisations can exist for at least several thousand years if you consider the Human civilisation.
But so far, the data on civilisations capable of interstellar communication doesn't look too promising. The "unless they wiped themselves out" is the big question. Are we behind or in front of the Great Filter.
The universe is ~15B years old, and we expect it to keep forming stars (as good as any of a metric for “hospitable to life”) for another trillion years. In other words, we’re in the first percent or so of the lifespan of the universe.
Doesn’t seem too crazy that if we start conquering the stars, we might be the first ever species to do so.
(And if history is any indication, we’ll probably cause some sort of galactic global warming in the process, that all starfaring species after us will curse us for)
The only serious theoretical FTL paper (Alcubierre drive) I know of requires exotic matter (negative mass) or energy equivalents of entire planets so if we ever manage to build it, I think that's a fair bet.
Another paper calculated that the space-time bubble created by the Alcubierre drive would capture radiation and particles along its path, creating a gamma ray burst at the destination in a large cone in the direction of travel. Meaning, we'd be sending deadly bursts of radiation all over the galaxy that would wipe out all carbon based life for tens or hundreds of light years every single jump. A rogue actor or a miscalculation could wipe out significant fractions of our own civilization.
The kind of colonization you’re describing requires exponential growth, but at least on Earth we’ve seen that birth rates dropping in developed nations.
It's also likely that a self sufficient, long-term thinking planetary civilisation would limit their population to a certain size, to not needlessly exploit the resources that they have available.
In fact, the only motivation that makes sense w/o exponential population growth is a militaristic/defense oriented one, which would also favor the dark forest theory.
Suppose it turns out that there is nothing faster for interstellar travel than rockets or light sails. No wormholes stabilized with exotic matter. No warp drives. No other tricks.
I'm not sure in that case that those long lasting civilizations would bother trying interstellar colonization. The round trip transport time between the home world and colonies would be so long that it is hard to come up with any economic benefit establishing such colonies provides to the home worlds.
If medium human life were only 4 weeks, nobody would find funding for a 1 year colonization trip across a different continent. You wouldn't find a crew when it'd take one generation just to cross the atlantic once.
I think it's similar here. With future (bio-)technological improvements, we might live for hundreds or thousands of years. Suddenly individuals would start thinking really long term...
At one point every niche of the solar system will either be declared a national park/treasure, or mined, filled with real estate developments, etc. We'd run out of space and some rich folks would meet on one of the private moons of Jupiter (like how there are private islands today) to discuss a venture towards another star.
Let’s just hope, for the sake of any beings already on other planets, that you are right.
History here on Earth suggests that long journeys are not a sufficient obstacle for exploitation.
This is really, really unlikely to be true, for all kinds of reasons.
There's a huge difference between colonising a galaxy - which assumes some kind of uniform culture, and common strategic goals - and simply throwing more or less living/sentient stuff around a galaxy and hoping some of it sticks.
We've gone from barely being noticeable on Earth to being in danger of being responsible for a planetary extinction event in around 12,000 years.
We know nothing about building a stable culture that can last for millions of years. It's unlikely any sentient species will be able to learn that skill without making a lot of mistakes - some of which will be terminal.
So galactic colonisation requires a lot more than solving the mechanics of transportation. And the "few million years at 0.1c" estimate is going to be Not Even Wrong.
We colonized the whole planet without that. Likewise a locust-like swarm of colonizing ships without any central control or common culture would also be a possibility.
So far our only example doesn't seem to act like we are.
The book that came to mind is a classic, "The Mote in God's Eye." Though there are dozens of delightful variations and imaginative situations, such as with "The Saturn Run." There's an entire spectrum that's been imagined and explored.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
But the only scientific method to exceed the speed of light is to loosen the fiber optic cables on your neutrino detector.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...
As far as I know (not a physicist), it takes infinite energy to reach FTL, so out of the question with modern science as you've said.
As a non scientist, I'm also confused with some of the relativistic implications of FTL. I think motion through space and motion through time add up to the speed of light. If so, time would freeze when hitting the speed of light, but does that happen to the traveler moving at C, or to the outside observer? Also, if traveling faster than light (FTL), do I go back in time? Again, is that from the traveler or outsiders perspective?
As far as getting FTL, you've probably heard of the Alcuberrie (spelling) drive which expands spacetime behind a ship and contracts in front of it to push a ship through spacetime via a bubble? Sounds great, but I think it requires exotic materials which don't exist. So we're stuck. I'm pointing this out in the chance you don't already know this.
My hope is that within the next century or millennia, our understanding of math and physics will advance to a point to where things like wormholes become possible, but it'll be long after I'm dead. What worries me is if we're nearing the end of what the human brain is capable of realistically uncovering. Like if my brain's network was significantly denser and able to think better, maybe we could come up with something? I don't think the solutions to the next problems will be a single equation like some physicists like to claim (note they're far more qualified than I to speculate on this). I just see things like the proof for Fermat's Last Theorem that is like 80 pages and one man took like a decade to figure out and other mathematicians took like a year to check. Someone like me has zero chance of intellectually following that. If we have indeed "picked all the low hanging fruit" we can expect very small marginal gains in the upcoming years even with legions of scientists.
My hope is that we're just in another phase waiting for another Newton or Einstein to come up with a single beautiful idea that revolutionizes the field and leads to an explosion of progress.