We would like to present with a gift miss Struthers this boy frozen in carbonite.
Posted on 02/24/2002 3:53:44 PM PST by LarryLied
Is there obvious proof that we could be alone in the Galaxy? Enrico Fermi thought so -- and he was a pretty smart guy. Might he have been right?It's been a hundred years since Fermi, an icon of physics, was born (and nearly a half-century since he died). He's best remembered for building a working atomic reactor in a squash court. But in 1950, Fermi made a seemingly innocuous lunchtime remark that has caught and held the attention of every SETI researcher since. (How many luncheon quips have you made with similar consequence?)
The remark came while Fermi was discussing with his mealtime mates the possibility that many sophisticated societies populate the Galaxy. They thought it reasonable to assume that we have a lot of cosmic company. But somewhere between one sentence and the next, Fermi's supple brain realized that if this was true, it implied something profound. If there are really a lot of alien societies, then some of them might have spread out.
Fermi realized that any civilization with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial incentive could rapidly colonize the entire Galaxy. Within ten million years, every star system could be brought under the wing of empire. Ten million years may sound long, but in fact it's quite short compared with the age of the Galaxy, which is roughly ten thousand million years.
Colonization of the Milky Way should be a quick exercise.
So what Fermi immediately realized was that the aliens have had more than enough time to pepper the Galaxy with their presence. But looking around, he didn't see any clear indication that they're out and about. This prompted Fermi to ask what was (to him) an obvious question: "where is everybody?"
This sounds a bit silly at first. The fact that aliens don't seem to be walking our planet apparently implies that there are no extraterrestrials anywhere among the vast tracts of the Galaxy. Many researchers consider this to be a radical conclusion to draw from such a simple observation. Surely there is a straightforward explanation for what has become known as the Fermi Paradox. There must be some way to account for our apparent loneliness in a galaxy that we assume is filled with other clever beings.
A lot of folks have given this thought. The first thing they note is that the Fermi Paradox is a remarkably strong argument. You can quibble about the speed of alien spacecraft, and whether they can move at 1 percent of the speed of light or 10 percent of the speed of light. It doesn't matter. You can argue about how long it would take for a new star colony to spawn colonies of its own. It still doesn't matter. Any halfway reasonable assumption about how fast colonization could take place still ends up with time scales that are profoundly shorter than the age of the Galaxy. It's like having a heated discussion about whether Spanish ships of the 16th century could heave along at two knots or twenty. Either way they could speedily colonize the Americas.
Consequently, scientists in and out of the SETI community have conjured up other arguments to deal with the conflict between the idea that aliens should be everywhere and our failure (so far) to find them. In the 1980s, dozens of papers were published to address the Fermi Paradox. They considered technical and sociological arguments for why the aliens weren't hanging out nearby. Some even insisted that there was no paradox at all: the reason we don't see evidence of extraterrestrials is because there aren't any.
Theoretical physicist Paul Davies claims that people are looking to extraterrestrials as "a conduit to the Ultimate." For many, the prospect of ETI has come to meet a need once met by religion. Even the SETI scientists say they are motivated by a nobler goal than the mere search for intelligence. Imagine, they say, the boost in knowledge, in morality, and maybe even in spirituality, to be gained from a billion-year-old civilization.Robert Jastrow imagines what it might do to our present religions. "When we make contact with them, it will be a transforming event," he says. "I do not know how the Judeo-Christian tradition will react to this development, because the concept that there exist beings superior to us in this universe, not only technically, but perhaps spiritually and morally, will take some rethinking, I think, of the classic doctrines of Western religion."
Any signals we detect, according to SETI astronomer Jill Tarter, will come from long-lived civilizations. This fact, combined with the fact that religions cause so many wars on this planet, means that our first detected signals will come from beings "who either never had, or have outgrown, organized religion," she said at a recent science/religion meeting sponsored by the Templeton Foundation and held in the Bahamas.
Other scientists and theologians at the Nassau meeting thought that pantheistic religions could survive an alien encounter, but most assumed that Western religion would certainly meet its fate when meeting extraterrestrials. Science historian Steven Dick called SETI "a religious quest" that might help to reconcile science and religion. But he assumed this would occur at the expense of Christianity, which could not accommodate the implications of ETI.
It strikes me that today’s scholars may be too quick to pronounce last rites over the faith that actually engendered most early ETI enthusiasts. Throughout the Middle Ages, well-read people believed that a "plurality of worlds" was impossible, following Aristotle’s arguments. In 1277, a council of bishops in France condemned this position, officially opening the way for many to take other worlds seriously.
Whether encouraged or discouraged by their churches, prominent Christians became the most prominent ETI promoters. These included Giordano Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa (fifteenth century), Johannes Kepler (sixteenth century), American Puritan divine Cotton Mather (seventeenth century), and Yale president/minister Timothy Dwight (eighteenth century).
Whether aliens will deliver a knockout blow to any particular religion depends, of course, upon exactly what aliens have to tell us about God. Materialists have traditionally assumed that Jews, Christians, and Muslims, believing in a transcendent God, will receive bad news. And the Christian belief in Jesus’ death for human sin seems particularly problematic to them. How could we reconcile Jesus’ death for all with the existence of other intelligent creatures in the universe?
Christian ETI enthusiasts, however, have a variety of responses to the skeptics:
- Jesus’ atoning sacrifice was a one-time event that covers aliens too. Oxford cosmologist E. A. Milne suggested that missionaries will eventually be preaching the good news to far-flung galaxies.
- Other civilizations may not have fallen into sin and so don’t require salvation. Oxford don C. S. Lewis wrote science fiction fantasies about such alien societies.
- God has become incarnate in the form of alien flesh in as many places where His creatures have fallen into sin. Scholars and rock singers have taken this position. And in the words of hymn writer Sydney Carter:
Who can tell what other cradle, High above the Milky Way, Still may rock the King of Heaven On another Christmas Day?
When we get done searching, let me know. Its a big universe, so far, we're seeing nothing but shadows. A couple of million / billion year old shadows is not a lot to base a hypothosis on.
Earth may be a galactic backwater, a sort of interstellar Casa Blanca, trod only by those aliens unfortunate enough to draw a tour of duty here as a punishment.
And our inability to 'see' and 'hear' evidences of their civilization(s) with our crude communication and observation devices may simply be the result of a routine embargo facilitated by blocking technologies which long experience has taught 'them' to routinely deploy to quarantine backward but evolving civilizations such as ours, which operate on principles that we don't yet have the words or concepts required to explain.
The gulf between us and their technology may, in fact, be an order of magnitude wider than that between a Neanderthal clan and the space shuttle... It might not be physically possible for our brains to understand the insrtumentalities of a race that's been sailing space for half a million years.
Are there aliens?
We don't, and -at this point- probably can't answer that question.
We would like to present with a gift miss Struthers this boy frozen in carbonite.
This also means that we never broke the light barrier or achieved time travel here on Earth with our own civilization. Not even millions or billions of years from now. Because if our civilization was able to time travel far off in the future, they would have already been here.
I certainly hope that if we ever discover time travel, we would be wise enough not to contaminate the timeline of the the past or future. Once time travel is discovered, I'm sure there will be laws in place to prevent timeline contamination.
If we accept that, then it's safe to assume that we would and should never know of any such visits.
But robot probes could travel at 5% (or less) of light speed. A "Von Neumann robot" is one that makes a copy of itself using local resources and dumps its database into the copy. Both then set off at random for new stars. Eventually, by random walk, one staggers home and dumps the entire data base collected by its ancestors. Thus a small initial investment yields a huge pay-off.
If we can think of such a scheme, intelligent ETs should do so as well. There has been ample time for every single star to be visited more than once. If intelligent ETs are common, there ought to be a traffic jam of probes swarming around the solar system right now.
We do not observe this; hence it is unlikely that there are many intelligent ETs--at least in this galaxy.
--Boris
But then can't we have an affirmative action program for all humans?
The first rule of the Federation (in Star Trek is "non-interference." Advanced civilizations are not supposed to get involved in, and change the course of, lesser civilizations. The idea is taken directly from Dr. Margaret Mead, the great sociologist, who said that our approach to the head-hunters in Borneo, for instance, should be to observe without interfering.
So I posit the answer as this: There are tens of thousands of civilizations out there which are millions of years ahead of us in development. But, we are to them as the head-hunters of Borneo were to us. Their proper course of action is to leave us alone until we grow up. Maybe in another 10,000 years (provided we don't nuke ourselves back to the Stoe Age). we'll have playmates in our interstellar backyard.
Congressman Billybob
Latest column up -- "America's Two-Women Bobsled Gold Proves Cornel West is a Moron."
Alien: "Oh, we broke the lightspeed barrier allright, but every time we really get goin' we run into sh&t!"
I go for the theory that it's hard to travel, and once you have the ability to create homes off planet there is no compulsion to do so.
We both are quite aware just how far it is "out there". With the speed of light being the fundamental limit for baryonic matter, it will be next to impossible to travel between the stars (at least under our current level of physics knowledge). So the universe may be populated with little isolated bits of intelligence all wondering if any other species are out there.
Just in the past few years we have advanced far enough in our technical prowess to both "announce" to the universe we are here (radio waves) and to receive the same from another species. With that in mind and the speed of light being a constant in a vacuum, the expanding sphere of radio noise heralding our presence has only gone about 60 light years or so. So there may be an entire galactic community out there but our "knock" hasn't yet hit the door so to speak.
Also there may be thousands of intergalactic signals bouncing around but we have not yet found the right frequency or built sensitive enough equipment to receive them. We really are kind of in the back woods of this galaxy 2/3rds the way down one of the spiral arms. So have we been visited? I don’t think so, How would a race even know we were here to come and visit us with out us heralding ourselves first. So far, radio is the only way we have done that, and its not gotten very far out there yet.
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