Posted on 08/30/2010 6:56:20 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Enrico Fermi’s paradox has occupied us more than occasionally in these pages, and for good reason. ‘Where are they,’ asked Fermi, acknowledging an obvious fact: Even if it takes one or two million years for a civilization to develop and use interstellar travel, that is but a blip in terms of the 13.7 billion year age of the universe. Von Neumann probes designed to study other stellar systems and reproduce, moving outward in an ever expanding wave of exploration, could easily have spread across the galaxy long before our ancestors thought of building the pyramids.
Where are they indeed. Kelvin Long, one of Project Icarus’ most energetic proponents, recently sent me Poul Anderson’s thoughts on the subject. I probably don’t need to tell this audience that Anderson was a science fiction author extraordinaire. His books and short stories occupied vast stretches of my youth, and I still maintain that if you want to get not so much the tech and science but the sheer wonder of the interstellar idea, you can tap it in its pure form in his writing. Poul was also the author of Tau Zero, the novel which gave our Tau Zero Foundation its name, and we’re delighted to have Karen Anderson, Poul’s wife, as a valuable part of the organization.
In a letter to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1986, Anderson sketched the reasons why Fermi was asking his question, citing the von Neumann probes mentioned above, and noting that while interstellar travel was likely hard enough that civilizations practicing it might be rare, all it takes is one to eventually fill the galaxy with its artifacts. He found the notion that Fermi could be answered by saying we are the only high-technology civilization unlikely, but his reason for writing was to offer an entirely different suggestion based on practicality.
Let’s assume a stable civilization arises that achieves extremely long lifespans, if not physical immortality — this may be too big an assumption, but there are those arguing that our successors may be a form of artificial intelligence for whom this could apply. Such a civilization naturally would explore its neighborhood, moving out to local star systems and gradually spreading beyond. Anderson saw this as a problem: The farther from home you go, the longer it takes you to return information. The galaxy itself is 100,000 light years wide, he noted, and that means most information would be utterly outdated by the time it spread throughout the disk.
And what of this self-replication idea? Anderson saw problems there too:
…self-replication would probably already have broken down. Quantum mechanics alone guarantees gradual degradation of the programmes, an accumulation of ‘mutations’ generation by generation — without any natural selections to winnow out the unfavourable majority — until ultimately every machine is useless and every line of its descent extinct.
Can we conjecture a kind of self-healing technology that extends to fixing these errors to maintain the integrity of the expansion? Perhaps, but the data flaw remains paramount:
…long before this has happened, the sphere of exploration will include so many stars that the data flow from them saturates the processing capacity of the present civilisation. After all, with some 1012 stars in the Galaxy, a small fraction amounts to a huge number. Moreover, while they may fall into categories with predictable properties, we are learning in our own back yard that every planet any of them may have is a world, replete with mysteries and surprises. Every life-bearing planet offers endless matter for research, especially since the life will always be changing, evolving.
In short, Fermi’s ‘they’ are not here because they are kept too busy within a few score light-years of their various homes.
If Anderson is right, then we can imagine a galaxy in which technological civilizations arise here and there, each of them gradually filling a sphere of exploration and colonization until a kind of equilibrium is reached and there is no practical advantage to pushing further. Earth, then, could be seen as being in the spaces between such civilizations, not yet aware of their existence, preparing over the next few centuries to begin its own expansion to nearby stars.
Is the galactic population sufficiently dense that such ‘bubbles’ of expansion ever meet? Or is SETI our only chance to confirm the idea that the galaxy has brought forth other technological civilizations? If the latter, we may know them only by the whisperings of their local traffic, exchanging information and perhaps speculating as we do about still more distant suns.
Free speculative fiction online
I have found many stories that I read in High School 1951 -1955
I guess he never heard of Moore's law. If hardware can keep up with the glop from Microsoft, then it can keep up with interstellar expansion.
Life is extremely rare by almost every measure, even in our own solar system.
I think technological civilizations are exceedingly rare and they don’t stay around forever. If you think of the “keyhole” events are own race went through to reach this point, realize we have been on the cusp of our own technology destroying us, and how long complex life took to develop; I can see technological civilizations separated by 10s of thousands of light years making any sort of interaction impossible. Probability may hint that we are the earliest possible anyway (2nd generation star system with heavy elements, time to develop complex life etc). I think we should be looking for sophisticated propulsion systems (on the order of solar energy releases) to find other tehnological civilizations. Radio signals just don’t cut it. We should keep looking though.
lolololol...NPR.....idiots.
I agree. The Drake equation put the chance at developing life as 1 in 100. The chances of a single protein molecule forming into a polypeptide is 1 in 100 trillion trillion, and since the simplest life would require hundreds of thousands of these, the chance for life to arrive through abiogenesis would be several THOUSAND orders of magnitude smaller than what the Drake equation postulates.
Thanks for the Post. I enjoy Poul Anderson and have just picked up again a collection of some of his stories.
A question I wanted asked is...
What if we are the First one to develop? At some point, something has to be # 1.
Hi, Dryman!... It’s true; we might be first. But the average star is 6.5 billion years old. The Sun and its planets are 4.5 billion years old. If the evolution of life on Earth is typical of life in the universe, life on the average life-bearing planet has a two billion year head start on us. Given these facts, how likely is it that we’re first? The situation seems to be calling out for more data.
We might be the only ones (not likely, imho). Or we might be the only ones that currently exists in some huge volume of space around us (more likely). Or ours might be the only planet with intelligent life on it (less likely). Or the only one with an advanced technological civilization on it (more likely; dolphins and whales haven’t invented anything and they’re pretty smart). Or we’re first as you suspect. Maybe the Mogradathians have exterminated all the others and just haven’t taken notice of us yet (least likely of all, but still possible). But which is it? We need more data at a time when Zero wants to turn NASA into an agency whose prime directive is reaching out to his fellow 7th Century primitives.
thanks LibWhacker.
Did hunter’s infrared camera capture images of UFO?
latimes | August 26, 2010 | Kelly Burgess
Posted on 08/28/2010 1:33:16 PM PDT by JoeProBono
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2579303/posts
Ain’t never going to happen. Even if you assume that was in priciple possible I remember reading an article in Scientific American several years ago that discussed a possible plan to send a probe to Alpha Proxima the closest star other than the Sun. They proposed a fusion powered rocket. They calculated that the space ship would be massive—a spherical fuel tank about a mile in diameter. The payload would be a camera weighing a few ounces. You’d run the rocket engines full time for 50 years. In 50 years, the probe would arrive at Alpha Proxima, the closet star at 4.5 light years. But it would be traveling at about 10% of the speed of light and would zip thru the solar system in a few hours. So you ca see the difficulty involved in interstellar travel. Vast amounts of fuel. Long missions. Tremendous speeds. And technology which is visionary. And that just gets us to our nearest neighbor.
I used to read a lot of scifi; sadly, I don’t believe anymore.
Travis Taylor, David Weber, John Ringo, David Drake, and Eric Flint top my reading list, these days. Used to be Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. Before that, Bob Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Andre Norton, H. Beam Piper, etc.
I am getting tired of outliving my favorite writers. Since I'm really not ready to die, they need to take better care of themselves!
One thousand years ago, the fastest modes of transportation maybe could do 15 mph. People believed the earth was flat & the sun revolved around the Earth. Today, the Shuttle & satellites routinely do 15,000+ mph. One thousand years from now, I expect the same quantum leap in technology. A million years from now, the speeds possible might very well be light years per SECOND, making your vacation trip to Proxima Centauri* take 4.5 seconds, plus 3 hours in the security check line. Of course, if you manipulate space/time properly, you can get there before you leave.
“Ain’t never going to happen.”
No disrespect intended, but history has frequently proved that statement to be incredibly wrong.
*I believe you meant Proxima Centauri vs. Alpha Proxima. Anyway, PC is a red dwarf & not very appealing. Also, no pool at the Holiday Inn & the neutral gravity beds are lumpy.
Unfortunately, neither of us is going to live long enough to say I told you so, unless of course the laws of physics receive a revision, which I personally think is more likely than the possibility that man ever will get there.
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