Where are the Aliens? Fermi Paradox. Great Filter. Are we alone?

[Otaku.edc]

A Type III Civilization blows the other two away, accessing power comparable to that of the entire Milky Way galaxy.

If this level of advancement sounds hard to believe, remember Planet X above and their 3.4 billion years of further development. If a civilization on Planet X were similar to ours and were able to survive all the way to Type III level, the natural thought is that they’d probably have mastered inter-stellar travel by now, possibly even colonizing the entire galaxy.

One hypothesis as to how galactic colonization could happen is by creating machinery that can travel to other planets, spend 500 years or so self-replicating using the raw materials on their new planet, and then send two replicas off to do the same thing. Even without traveling anywhere near the speed of light, this process would colonize the whole galaxy in 3.75 million years, a relative blink of an eye when talking in the scale of billions of years:

Continuing to speculate, if 1% of intelligent life survives long enough to become a potentially galaxy-colonizing Type III Civilization, our calculations above suggest that there should be at least 1,000 Type III Civilizations in our galaxy alone—and given the power of such a civilization, their presence would likely be pretty noticeable. And yet, we see nothing, hear nothing, and we’re visited by no one.

[NH Shooter]

Traveling at light speed raises another question..What happens to time, if you travel at light speed, say for years at a time??

http://www.superconsciousness.com/to...ime-not-linear

[BehindBlueI's]

My biggest beef is that we're extrapolating from a sample set of one. For an aquatic species that developed technology, their equivalent to space flight would be leaving the water and exploring the land. That environment would be almost as hostile to them. They probably wouldn't have radio. Or there might be a land-dwelling intelligent species on a planet with heavier gravity; it might take the equivalent of a Saturn V to boost a Mercury-sized capsule into orbit. Maybe it's not worth the bother.

Cetaceans seem to have a form of language. We don't understand them. Hell, without the Rosetta Stone, we'd probably still be trying to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Physics is same-same everywhere, though, and there's only so many ways to do things. An aquatic species wouldn't have access to so many pre-cursors to technological advancement. Fire, electricity, arguably agriculture, etc.

[GardoneVT]

Bigghoss has it right..until we can devlop the ability to travel in space at light speed,we're going to have to be happy poking around the Moon, or possibly Mars, the simple fact is.. we're too slow, and space itself is too big. So, until we can travel around out there in a timely fashion (meaning light speed) we'll never really know who, or what's out there.. and anything else is theory, or speculation..

Traveling at light speed raises another question..What happens to time, if you travel at light speed, say for years at a time??

I hope we never develop this technology anytime soon.

The amount of energy required to send a Volvo wagon to Alpha Centauri is fairly massive,as in basically every megawatt of power the Earth uses in a year. A vehicle capable of exploring the cosmos in human timescales would make a devastating WMD. At the very least it would use high energy power systems which too would make for disastrously powerful weaponry. An antimatter bomb is both exponentially more efficient then a plain old nuclear bomb- and the last thing our planet needs. I’d comfortably say that NO nation on this rock is capable of managing that kind of tech responsibly. Eventually the knowledge would be stolen/declassified/ reverse engineered and dudes like Kim Jong Un would have info on antimatter energy tech, including weaponry. One things for sure, in a world with an interstellar drive Mideast peace accords would get interesting.

[OlongJohnson]

Douglas Adams has a few things to say about all that:

"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."

That is actually wrong. There are larger and smaller infinities. Half of an infinity is still infinity, but it's also half of the larger one.

A fraction of an infinite number of worlds is still an infinite number. But AFAIK, the astrophysicists are still debating about whether the universe is finite.

And then there's the many-universes interpretation of quantum mechanics. If that's true, it's possible that we're just locked in a particular divergence where we seem to be alone, and in other universes, we achieved interstellar travel a long time ago and - there's a vast number of possible outcomes of that, all occurring in different universes.

Stuff gets weird.

Interesting thought. It seems logical that the paradox of early adopters would apply. For example, it's likely that if one makes a personal investment in solar power generation without some kind of artificial subsidy, before that investment is paid off, the performance and cost of solar power generation technology will have so far surpassed its state at the time of the original investment that one would prove to be financially better off just waiting and then buying better, cheaper tech in a few years.

In the graphic above, assuming technology continues to develop beyond what makes the first steps possible, there's going to come a point where the pioneering explorers will be passed up at a very high rate (conceivably so severely that they aren't even aware of it) by people who waited.

An interesting question is, does a given technology develop without the early adopters jumping in and paying the price for the rest of us to benefit by putting it into practice when it's still expensive?

[RevolverRob]

In interesting conceptual idea, but one that is fundamentally flawed, by assuming the percentages of survival for "intelligence". In ~4 billion years of life on Earth, we have no idea how many "intelligent" species have spawned and died. 1% of everything to ever have lived is alive. Humans are ~0.000000001% of the total species diversity of Earth, currently - we are vastly outnumbered by bacteria. If alien life landed on our planet they would probably assume bacteria and then plants were the dominant life forms, not humans. So the assumption they are making is that 1% of total life to evolve on the other planet is intelligent and survived and could colonize and survive new planets and could go on. That's incorrect and borderline impossible.

Not too mention the conceptual idea of harness power the size of the milky way is currently physically impossible, unless these life forms are now (physically) larger than our current galaxy - which case, we couldn't conceptualize of them as species equivalent to our own and likely wouldn't understand them if they did contact us (not too mention they would not be able to physically manifest themselves in our galaxy).

Physics is same-same everywhere, though, and there's only so many ways to do things. An aquatic species wouldn't have access to so many pre-cursors to technological advancement. Fire, electricity, arguably agriculture, etc.

Well...not exactly. Physics in theory works the same way everywhere, except where it doesn't. Black holes and high gravity situations being the big ones, we have absolutely no true idea how physical and chemical interactions occur in an entirely reducing atmosphere. We can make some solid hypotheses for how it should work, but we lack the capacity to create large-scale reducing atmospheres for investigation at present. It should work the same...but hell quantum mechanics wasn't a thing 130 years ago...so you know...

An interesting question is, does a given technology develop without the early adopters jumping in and paying the price for the rest of us to benefit by putting it into practice when it's still expensive?

Short answer is no. Natural Selection is a natural law and while we don't have all of the physical evidence we would like, computational assessments indicate that social construction results in break down due to inherently selfish behavior. The behavior isn't "programmed" genetically, it's created by the need to survive. No species, human to vulcan can supersede this. In short all systems collapse eventually because of selfish behavior, the first law of thermodynamics remains true - nature tends towards maximum entropy.

[Stephanie B]

One things for sure, in a world with an interstellar drive Mideast peace accords would get interesting.

Americans, being people largely descended from immigrants, might opt to just leave en masse and let the entrenched nationalities blow each other to smithereens over butthurts going back for centuries and millenia.

[Stephanie B]

Physics is same-same everywhere, though, and there's only so many ways to do things. An aquatic species wouldn't have access to so many pre-cursors to technological advancement. Fire, electricity, arguably agriculture, etc.

They might be able to substitute hydraulics for a lot of things that we use electrical motors for. The more problematic thing is developing an ability to manipulate stuff. There are various primates, other mammals (like trash pandas) and birds that can manipulate things and in some cases develop tools of a sort. Maybe advanced crabs can do it.

It only takes one spark. Somewhere I read that the idea of an alphabet, symbols that can be combined to designate sounds, only happened once.

[Bigghoss]

Bigghoss has it right..until we can devlop the ability to travel in space at light speed,we're going to have to be happy poking around the Moon, or possibly Mars, the simple fact is.. we're too slow, and space itself is too big. So, until we can travel around out there in a timely fashion (meaning light speed) we'll never really know who, or what's out there.. and anything else is theory, or speculation..

Traveling at light speed raises another question..What happens to time, if you travel at light speed, say for years at a time??

Um, I said even if we could travel at light speed we'd probably still never find life. If we knew where to look we might be able to reach it if we had that ability but just randomly poking around it doesn't matter how we're able to travel. The universe is THAT big.

It's also worth pointing out that it's physically impossible for a spacecraft to travel at light speed.

[NH Shooter]

It's also worth pointing out that it's physically impossible for a spacecraft to travel at light speed.

Don't get caught in the trap that immense speed is required to travel great distances. Time is neither linear (hypothetically) or constant (proven fact).