Don't understand it either. They should fit right in on either coast, since they're supposedly frail, skinny, and pale.
Posted on 06/20/2013 5:24:15 PM PDT by BenLurkin
As far as we know, Earth is the only place in the Universe where life has arisen, let alone developed an intelligent civilization.
This baffling contradiction is known as the Fermi Paradox, first described in 1950 by the physicist Enrico Fermi.
Scientists have been trying to resolve this mystery for decades, listening for radio signals from other worlds. We’ve only sampled a fraction of the radio spectrum, and so far, we haven’t detected anything that could be a signal from an intelligent species.
How can we explain this?
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
Don't understand it either. They should fit right in on either coast, since they're supposedly frail, skinny, and pale.
“A sufficiently active dyson sphere might glow in infrared but we’d think of it as a likely failed star!”
I read a sci-fi book that postulated that the reason red dwarfs are so common is that some actually much larger stars inside of dyson spheres. I suppose it would help with all the missing mass they talk about.
Freegards
Carl Sagan wrote something in Cosmos that really blew my mind. He said there are roughly 10,000 stars visible on a clear night to the naked eye. A handful of sand holds roughly 10,000 grains. There are more stars in the universe than individual grains of sand on every beach and desert on the planet.
Yes, the universe is that big!
I have no doubt that uncountable other planets have life, even intelligent life. Many of them have probably mastered intergalactic space travel at sub-light speeds. They just don't know we're here. If they had telescopes that could detect made-made objects, geometric shapes and such, they wouldn't see them if they were more than 4,000 light years away. If they were looking for radio signals, that lowers it to about a mere 80 or so light years away.
Good points. Light speed communication is basically new to the people of our planet.
Spot on. Folks who ask where all the aliens are have no comprehension of the size of this universe.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, they have about as as much understanding of space and time as a concussed bee.
We have had the ability to communicate electronically for only a few years. We assume that intelligent civilizations will last forever—but what if they don’t? What if they flower and then decay for all kinds of reasons. They may destroy themselves. They may degenerate due to ennui (reverse evolution). Or, as Arthur C. Clarke suggested, they may evolve to a higher plane that has no desire to communicate with physical beings.
Take your pick. It could be that the life a an intelligent civilization is anywhere from 50 to 10000 years. Potentially, a very short window. I find this the most likely explanation.
You left out golf.
"I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand feet for the base.
And it has advantages. The Ringworld will be much sturdier than a Dyson sphere. We can spin it on its axis for gravity. A rotation speed of 770 m/s will give us a gravity of one Earth normal. We wouldn't even need to roof it over. Place walls one thousand miles high at each edge, facing the sun. Very little air will leak over the edges.
Lord knows the thing is roomy enough. With three million times the surface area of the Earth, it will be some time before anyone complains of the crowding."
- - Larry Niven, "Ringworld"
Thank You for the LOL.
The civilizations all eventually catch the disease of Liberalism. This leads to de-evolution and eventually death.
Outside of UFO type conjecture the best place to look for aliens I believe is within our own solar system. Not necessarily intelligent life but I wouldn’t be surprised to find bacteria. There are some very interesting ancient sites that some have suggested are evidence of ancient alien visitors but they are more likely simply evidence of lost technology of very human ancestors.
Eventually there'd be so many rings we'd capture 100% of all the central star's energy. Still wouldn't be a sphere but it'd do everything we can do with a sphere, plus the gravity is the same everywhere we go.
The living space would be incredible.
I read all the same books myself.
Now, something you didn't read in books ~ the intergalactic wanderers travel about in far smaller vessels ~ but they mine planets for the purpose of acquiring minerals useful for sustaining life ~ you find a lot of that in the surface layers of planets with oceans.
Let's say they came into our solar system and began mining Venus ~ using that planet's then moon Mercury as a device for tossing loads of surface phosphates and carbonates to the outer limits of our solar system.
They finished up there when Mercury broke loose from Venus' control and became an independent planet itself.
Then they turned to Earth and began the same mining. Again, they used this local moon to toss loads farther out for pickup by the great space cruising ships.
They wrapped up operations here before they'd gobbled up all the continental land masses. On Venus they got all that stuff. That planet has no carbonates ~ just igneous bedrock.
Needless to say I"ve kept my eyes open for evidence, since mining on that scale ought to have left something for us to see.
There is evidence. The deepest hole in the solar system is smack dead center at the Moon's South pole. That's where the structure holding the giant boom arm that tossed loads was anchored, and around which it rotated.
Mercury has some areas of spreading basalt that suggest it, too, had once had a large hole dug out at one of the poles, probably for another boom arm.
There might be a 'construction shack' somewhere ~ and there's other evidence including the distribution of the easy to pump hydrocarbons on the planet. They've all been found in a zone that was THE EQUATOR at the time they formed. Are these the remains of the planet girdling space elevator system used to tote the loads up to the Moon? And really now, what happened to 60% of our surface ~ why are there only continents rather than a sturdy shell?
All possibilities for speculation.
Semantics- what are liberals-or ‘progressives’- but the stormtroopers of bureaucracy? More bureaucracy is all they ever offer.
And I’m not kidding. I see no evidence in history of anything that destroys civilizations like their own bureaucracies.
Much sci-fi, notably Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series, incorporate this idea.
It’s actually pretty simple. A combination of space and time, both of which are vast, and in which we occupy only a tiny region. Any possible intelligent life we could interact with would have to be “right next door” in both space and time.
The nearest star to our Sun is over 4 light years away. So to get there in a year, we would have to go more than 4 times the speed of light. To get to other stars in a year would take 10, 50, 100 times the speed of light, just to get around “our neighborhood”.
Even so, divide the number of potential intelligent life forms by the number of extermination events, such as a supernova, which could sterilize a large chunk of the galaxy. Heck, there are probably a hundred different such events that could wipe Earth clean.
All we've developed so far ar Dyson Vacuums.
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