Posted on 05/19/2004 12:46:40 PM PDT by Conservomax
No aliens? I want a DNA test from James Carville! :)
But seriously, thanks for posting. I will read in more detail as soon as I get a chance.
Berserkers: The Galaxy is filled with killer robots looking for signals. ET is keeping low. Problem: where are the berserkers coming after us?
That's the Borg - they aren't here yet.
In the article, the author postulates that if aliens exist we should be overrun by probes by now. The rebuttal to that is that either they have different methods of probing than we have come up with (hey, they're aliens, they think differently), or, like ours would be, theirs are small enough that we have never noticed one (it might not have come close enough to us to be recognized).
Just thought I'd throw that in. I tend to think it is a combination of distance and incomprehensibility that has kept us from detecting/recognizing our neighbors.
We should build a Dyson Sphere. It might take 100,000 years, and it might take more engineering knowhow than we currently would consider possible to attain, but I think we could eventually do it. We're humans - solving impossible problems is what we do best. Bickering over little problems is what we do when we're not solving impossible ones.
Read it before and I think that it's combinations of
Planets With the Right Conditions are Rare
Planetary systems are rare
Habitable zones, proper distance from star for liquid water, are narrow
Galaxy is a dangerous place (gamma-ray bursters, asteroid impacts, etc)
Earth/Moon system is unique (large tides needed for molecular evolution)
Life Is Rare
Life's Genesis is rare
Intelligence/Tool-Making is rare
Language is unique to humans
Technology/Science is not inevitable
AND a third thing, we are still assuming that life is like terrestrial life.
If a being has no eyes, doesn't see the stars, can't imagine another world beyond the limits of his own, why would he try to go beyond it?
And that's an EASY example.
Well of course not, we don't make first contact until 2063...
"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it hasn't tried to contact us." -- Calvin
Sometimes the best wisdom comes from a comic strip.
At any rate, perhaps the rest of the universe is still trying to determine if there is actually intelligent life on this planet. One could have difficulty determining that if they were assessing the ape logic found in the major media outlets.
Very good diagrams.
One week the question was "Is there intelligent life on earth?"
On the Friday of that week as I passed it I noticed that someone had scrawled an answer right below the question: "Yes but we're only visiting"
That was my nearest contact with extra-terrestrials
Is it possible that any society smart enough not to destroy itself would be smart enough not to construct Bracewell-von Neumann probes? I'm thinking Star Trek I here, folks.
Oh, and by the way... Once we reach step 2, I'd argue it would be fairly impossible to exterminate ourselves. The window for an intelligent race to annaihilate itself seems rather small for me. BUT! There are other means of population containment besides self-annaihilation. In certain regions of Europe, medieval civilizations avoided overpopulation by the development of a large celibate class. In England, for instance, this led to 3 centuries of peace, and life expectancies that would not again be reached until the 20th century. Fermi seems to believe that population dynamics of intelligent races mimic those of bacteria. (There are arguments for this... It takes only one dissident planet to start populating the galaxy, and this would have to take place among the outer planets -- the most likely to be dissident.)
Because of the distances and energies involved. The Fermi Paradox is pure codswallop IMHO.
Of course another possibility is that a "colonization" took the form of genetic seeding of planets. In that case the answer to Fermi's question would be "You're looking at them".
read later
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