Why Can't We See Evidence Of Alien Life?
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Human intelligence is only 5k years old, on a 4.5BB year old planet in a 14BB year old universe. Yet, our level of technological advancement means if FTL travel or communication is possible, we'll probably discover it in the next couple of hundred years, and we would probably get rid of the inferior EM waves as a medium.
How long would the average civilization be detectable by our current means under these conditions? Makes a needle in the haystack seem simple.
Succinctly illustrated in http://xkcd.com/638/
That sort of intelligence only developed recently(When compared on a time scale).
The earlier man had a pretty neat life, tending to food and rest and physiological activities all the time without having nothing much to worry about.
Its only when the Philosophers and thinkers started originating, did mankind get some direction to work towards.
Also, take into account the possibility that other intelligent life might be more biological than technological (e.g. interconnected intelligence without technology like in Avatar).
Then factor in that intelligent life might be microscopic or just tiny.
It's really not hard to imagine that the search for alien life is a problem of asking a question for a rare/over-specified solution.
I have a feeling that the Avatar scenario is no more likely than tall blue-skinned humanoids. Our notion of intelligence pretty much defines it as collection of thought processes that end up manifesting themselves in the development of technology. Dolphins may be extremely intelligent on some scale unknown to us, but we don't observe them building submarines or decoding radio signals, so we don't consider them to be human-level intelligent. Similarly, to them, we may appear as these strange shore-bound small amphibious quadrupeds who carry various strange amulets on their bodies with which they do various strange things, all of them being of completely no use or interest to an average cetacean. I'm probably exaggerating cetacean intelligence a fair bit, but I just wanted to illustrate how closely our definition of intelligence is bound to the availability/use of technology.
Suppose bottlenose dolphins have an uncanny ability to "read minds" and interpret thoughts and emotions of other bottlenose dolphins (but only of individuals of their own species -- not of porpoises, humans, etc.) to the same or even better extent than we humans can read minds of other humans, but due to the accidental specifics of their bodily layout and environment (no limbs with which to grasp and manipulate objects, unsuitable environment for the use of fire) are unable to develop any semblance of technology. What would those "super-dolphins" look like to us? I have a feeling they would still look a lot like dolphins, and we, without some very specific/expensive/targeted research, probably would have never even realize that we are living right next to some "super-intelligent" animals.
Life is quite messy and obvious. It seems quite likely that traces would exist.
Our technological civilization in the sense of being capable of wireless electromagnetic signaling exists only around 120 years -- it started only ten years before my granddad was born. 120 years is nothing compared to the existence of life on Earth -- at least 3 billion years: one part of 25 millions.
Only around seventy years the humanity also produces nuclear bombs. Now at this moment there are around 5000 actively deployed nuclear warheads in the world, waiting for a press of some button to fly to their targets, every one more orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_wea...
Now the oil reserves, if we continue only to use them without any growth (which is not what politicians and the electorate are used to expect) will last only for next 64 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves
How many years are left to the humanity to enjoy the possibilities of the electromagnetic communication?
We're sitting here discussing most of the time the solutions to the following big problems of humanity:
https://plus.google.com/117114202722218150209/posts/KhMRNmgG...
(the companies) "make these apparati that draw a box on somebody's computer screen. That person then types words into that box on their screen. Then, the Internet Startup uses some computer codes to copy those words onto somebody else's computer screen, so that other person can then read them."
1. We waste far too much money on wars, weapons and fighting than what we should be spending on this sort of problems.
2. The pressing needs of human kind at this time are photo sharing apps and 'bird in pig' games.
3. No serious, I mean real serious intent on developing space travel, exploration and colonization.
4. Misplaced priorities, the people who can solve tough problems like educating kids, finding cures for diseases and space research are paid peanuts in comparison with people who are doing far easier jobs than them. There by scaring off more people working on those jobs.
5. Nation states must collaborate on working these kind of issues instead of developing weapons, wasting brain power, energy, money and resources to destroy each other.
I posit that the only aliens we want to meet are ones that are not interested in us. Any interest, given the likely difference in technological levels, is unlikely to end well for us. The book Guns, Germs, and Steel painted a not-so-rosy picture of the meetings of societies at even small differences of technological advances. These differences are likely to be magnified for races without a common ancestral history and similar starting point in time.
The wishful thinking of people hoping to meet alien civilizations includes assumptions like:
* Alien civilization began just like ours.
* Time passed.
* ????????
* Magically altruistic alien society arises.
If this is true, great. But do I want to bet humanity on it? Hell no.
Heck, if your pessimistic outlook is correct, SETI is even more important, because it might provide the only early warning of an incoming invasion. That may not help in the end, but it's better than nothing.
I agree with you that it makes sense to be careful. Sending high-powered directed radio signals before we really know what we're dealing with does sound like a bad idea.
Why aren't there multiple species of intelligent life on earth? (yes some animals are pretty smart, but they don't build cars, make movies, have laws, etc.)
[1] Metabolically and in other respects; if you doubt this, I've listed what I know about this in http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics and especially the footnotes & hyperlinks.
I think this is a crucial point. If all of humanity had been wiped out in a famine in Africa fifty thousand years ago, there wouldn't be anyone sitting around today wondering, "Why is it there aren't any civilizations?"
And there were probably millenia that went by when the odds of that happening dwarfed the possibility that we might survive long enough to develop a writing system.
Typically, in species without language, it takes many generations for a "mutation"[1] to propagate across the species.
If I instinctually figure out a better way of hunting deer, which gives me an advantage over my competitors for mates, and I pass it on to my children, who pass it on to theirs, etc. eventually the new instinct will be present in most of the species.
(This is basic basic natural selection).
Language changed all of that. Now instead of waiting for offspring to carry a mutation, I can just tell people about the better way of hunting deer, they can do it, and they can tell people too.
Stuff spreads quickly. It makes humans able to evolve at a much, much, much faster rate than any other animal on the planet.
(And yes, really, humans are the only animals on the planet with language. Bird song, whale song, and tree-pheromones don't count.)
[1] In quotes because consciously iterating over a problem (like hunting deer) isn't a "mutation" in the classic sense.
According to who? Neanderthals had the capacity for language, that doesn't mean they used it.
That theory is being steadily debunked. I cannot find the link, but I'm looking for it and as soon as I do, I'll post it - however, a very recent study involved showing dolphins in one aquarium a series of objects and recording the sounds they made when seeing them, then travelling to another aquarium hundreds of miles away, placing the objects in front of the dolphins, and playing back a recording from the earlier round. The dolphins, at a statistically-relevant exceedingly high percentage of the time, would then identify the object the recording was made in response to.
This link was posted in an HN comment maybe 3-4 months ago.
Other animals can communicate in front of each other (bees, elephants, etc.), but the ability to convey arbitrary messages to strangers is, I would say, the very hallmark of a language.
Edit:
Here we go:
* http://wakeup-world.com/2011/11/28/the-discovery-of-dolphin-...
In his bid to “speak dolphin” Jack Kassewitz of SpeakDolphin.com, [...] designed an experiment in which he recorded dolphin echolocation sounds as they reflected off a range of eight submersed objects, including a plastic cube, a toy duck and a flowerpot. He discovered that the reflected sounds actually contain sound pictures and when replayed to the dolphin in the form of a game, the dolphin was able to identify the objects with 86% accuracy, providing evidence that dolphins understand echolocation sounds as pictures. Kassewitz then drove to a different facility and replayed the sound pictures to a dolphin that had not previously experienced them. The second dolphin identified the objects with a similar high success rate, confirming that dolphins possess a sono-pictorial form of communication.
That's the link I was referring to, and as far as I'm concerned, that's enough to treat dolphins as sentient beings.
Another HN link:
* http://current.com/community/91825903_scientists-say-dolphin...
In one study, [...] showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognise themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.
In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.
[...]
In one recent case, a dolphin rescued from the wild was taught to tail-walk while recuperating for three weeks in a dolphinarium in Australia.
After she was released, scientists were astonished to see the trick spreading among wild dolphins who had learnt it from the former captive.
There are many similar examples, such as the way dolphins living off Western Australia learnt to hold sponges over their snouts to protect themselves when searching for spiny fish on the ocean floor.
Such observations, along with others showing, for example, how dolphins could co-operate with military precision to round up shoals of fish to eat, have prompted questions about the brain structures that must underlie them.
What more do we need to stop being so arrogant as to think ourselves the only creatures on the planet capable of thinking, feeling, remembering, teaching, communicating, and being self-aware?
It is only humans that learn from their experience and pass it on. One generation teaches the next one what it learnt. If you sit still for a while and wonder just how we can make such complex things, its because we are building on the knowledge of those that came before us (I think Newton once said "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulder of Giants", which was a reference to Galileo, Kepler etc. all of whose work was important for Newton's own discoveries)
At that point I doubt it would be too hard for them to hide from us, anyway. They could cover their planet in a shield that makes it look and act like a non-planet to us ( whatever that would be).
http://images.cryhavok.org/v/Calvin+and+Hobbes+-+Intelligent...
(Calvin & Hobbes: Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.)
at least that's my take on it. i'm pretty darn sure we're not the only ones out there.
Either that, or SETI is completely off.
2: The galaxy is teaming with life, but just like a flower in the amazon rain forest is wondering why there is not life all around it, the flower simply lacks the basic tools necessary to find any evidence whatsoever of the lifeforms all around it.
3: Radio silence is required, as there is a bully in our solar system who sterilizes any life forms found. And as soon as we have the technology to broadcast our location, we will be extinguished by a process designed to keep this galaxy pure.
4: Life is right next to us, inside us, all around us. Just in alternate dimensions which make our galaxy look like a drop of rainwater. We just can't see it.
5: The human race is an experiment by a higher life form, and it's empty because it was designed to be empty. This one planet was seeded, and we are being watched.
6: DNA based life, like a virus, extinguishes all resources it can get it's hands onto, Humans will explode with productivity until we exhaust every resource available to us. We do not understand the word sustainable, even the green weenies acknowledge growth of O(n^n)
7: Humans are a weapon of mass destruction, and we have been planted, as a terrorist would plant a bomb in the other guy's house. We humans will consume every last calorie of energy from this universe. We are a weapon, and our growth is the explosion which will knock out the enemy alien.
8: When species get advanced enough to travel throughout the galaxy, we figure out that this isn't a universe at all, and we hack into the holodeck projectors in the wall and then forget about the useless projection that we call the universe.
9: The suns and phenomenon around us in the universe is an alien life form's abdominal fat, and we are bacteria who is growing inside it. As soon as we start consuming too much, demanding our life is more important than the natural decay of suns, the white blood cells will come to our planet and destroy us.
10: We will find life in other parts of the galaxy, as surly as the homo sapiens on the earth figured out that when you cross the great blue expanse, other strange cultures, much like our own, were growing there.
11: What we understand as the universe, with height width and depth, velocity, time, inertia and such, is a completely incorrect view of the universe. It's the same problem with how the flower sees the universe in terms of it's own life and needs. The flower only knows it's root structure and the properties of the ground, wondering why it doesn't find other flowers in its root structure. The flower simply cannot fathom that the life is actually touching it, around it, and inside it.
I dunno guys, maybe the universe is a lot stranger than we can get our heads around, and we should admit that we don't know.
For an example of a genuinely strange resolution to the Fermi paradox, see Paul Almond's "Civilization-level quantum suicide": http://www.paul-almond.com/CivilizationLevelQuantumSuicide.p...
There are a lot of scientistic answers in this thread that are as scientifically valid as "God created us uniquely in his own image". Admitting that would be a good first step.
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