(September 20, 2017 at 5:43 pm)Aegon Wrote: Something I L O V E reading about is the Fermi Paradox. Basically it says that the math supports there being intelligent life in the universe other than ours, yet we have no evidence of any. The article seeks to answer why. Here are the cliffnotes:

Explanation Group 1: There are no signs of higher (Type II and III) civilizations because there are no higher civilizations in existence.
-The Great Filter theory says that at some point from pre-life to Type III intelligence, there’s a wall that all or nearly all attempts at life hit. There’s some stage in that long evolutionary process that is extremely unlikely or impossible for life to get beyond. That stage is The Great Filter. When it comes to the Great Filter, there are 3 possibilities:

1) We’re Rare (The Great Filter is Behind Us)
-One possibility: The Great Filter could be at the very beginning—it might be incredibly unusual for life to begin at all.
-Another possibility: The Great Filter could be the jump from the simple prokaryote cell to the complex eukaryote cell.
-Most leaps do not qualify as Great Filter candidates. Any possible Great Filter must be one-in-a-billion type thing where one or more total freak occurrences need to happen to provide a crazy exception—for that reason, something like the jump from single-cell to multi-cellular life is ruled out, because it has occurred as many as 46 times, in isolated incidents, just on this planet alone. For the same reason, if we were to find a fossilized eukaryote cell on Mars, it would rule the above “simple-to-complex cell” leap out as a possible Great Filter (as well as anything before that point on the evolutionary chain)—because if it happened on both Earth and Mars, it’s almost definitely not a one-in-a-billion freak occurrence.

2) We’re the First to Reach It
-For Group 1 Thinkers, if the Great Filter is not behind us, the one hope we have is that conditions in the universe are just recently, for the first time since the Big Bang, reaching a place that would allow intelligent life to develop. In that case, we and many other species may be on our way to super-intelligence, and it simply hasn’t happened yet. We happen to be here at the right time to become one of the first super-intelligent civilizations.
-One example of a phenomenon that could make this realistic is the prevalence of gamma-ray bursts, insanely huge explosions that we’ve observed in distant galaxies. In the same way that it took the early Earth a few hundred million years before the asteroids and volcanoes died down and life became possible, it could be that the first chunk of the universe’s existence was full of cataclysmic events like gamma-ray bursts that would incinerate everything nearby from time to time and prevent any life from developing past a certain stage. Now, perhaps, we’re in the midst of an astrobiological phase transition and this is the first time any life has been able to evolve for this long, uninterrupted.

3) We're Fucked (The Great Filter is Ahead of Us)
-If we’re neither rare nor early, Group 1 thinkers conclude that The Great Filter must be in our future. This would suggest that life regularly evolves to where we are, but that something prevents life from going much further and reaching high intelligence in almost all cases—and we’re unlikely to be an exception.
-One possible future Great Filter is a regularly-occurring cataclysmic natural event, like the above-mentioned gamma-ray bursts, except they’re unfortunately not done yet and it’s just a matter of time before all life on Earth is suddenly wiped out by one. Another candidate is the possible inevitability that nearly all intelligent civilizations end up destroying themselves once a certain level of technology is reached.

Explanation Group 2: Type II and III intelligent civilizations are out there—and there are logical reasons why we might not have heard from them. Here are the ones outlined:
-Super-intelligent life could very well have already visited Earth, but before we were here.
-The galaxy has been colonized, but we just live in some desolate rural area of the galaxy
-The entire concept of physical colonization is a hilariously backward concept to a more advanced species
-There are scary predator civilizations out there, and most intelligent life knows better than to broadcast any outgoing signals and advertise their location
-There’s only one instance of higher-intelligent life—a “superpredator” civilization (like humans are here on Earth)—that is far more advanced than everyone else and keeps it that way by exterminating any intelligent civilization once they get past a certain level
-There’s plenty of activity and noise out there, but our technology is too primitive and we’re listening for the wrong things
-We are receiving contact from other intelligent life, but the government is hiding it (pretty dumb in my opinion as well as the author's)
-Higher civilizations are aware of us and observing us (AKA the “Zoo Hypothesis”)
-Higher civilizations are here, all around us. But we’re too primitive to perceive them. (MY PERSONAL FAVORITE THEORY)
-We’re completely wrong about our own reality

I do enjoy "Wait but why" but I find this to be loaded with assumptions I find questionable.  Why should the amount of energy we can tap into be such an important organizing principle?  It kind of makes intelligent life forms sound like galactic viruses, keen on taking over as much as possible.  Why should an intelligent species or civilization share this basic drive with a virus?  To what end?  Perpetuation of the species beyond the death of the home star or galaxy?  Seems a little desperate.

(September 20, 2017 at 7:34 pm)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote:

(September 20, 2017 at 7:11 pm)The Valkyrie Wrote: Working on it.

"THIS PRIME REAL ESTATE AVAILABLE SOON."

"Avoid the glowing bits"

(September 20, 2017 at 7:51 pm)The Valkyrie Wrote:

(September 20, 2017 at 7:34 pm)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: "THIS PRIME REAL ESTATE AVAILABLE SOON."

"Avoid the glowing bits"

Hey! That's the "curb appeal" bit. 

Do you guys think it's possible for intelligent life to evolve with a radiation rich atmosphere? The type Godzilla likes? Or will it kill all early biology before they can evolve any immunity...

(September 20, 2017 at 5:06 pm)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote:

(September 20, 2017 at 4:27 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote: It is not convincingly from ET.  We have no fricking clue whether it is from ET or not.

One burst of random noise coming from the Universe. Which way would you bet?

Betting is not the same as betting in a informed way.  Our knowledge of the frequency, capability and behavior of intelligent life on the one hand, and the range of manifestations of  non-intelligence driven processes in the universe on the other, is each so scarce that we are really not in a position to compare the odds of one being the cause of WOW vs the other.

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(September 20, 2017 at 5:08 pm)Jehanne Wrote:

(September 20, 2017 at 4:27 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote: It is not convincingly from ET.  We have no fricking clue whether it is from ET or not.

I agree with that.  But, the Big Ear is now a golf course.  If it was an ET beacon and had we been looking continuously since it was discovered in 1977, it may have been the greatest discovery of all time.  May have done more for international peace and goodwill than the International Space Station and McDonald's combined!

If you think humans on the whole are susceptible to being inspired towards international peace and goodwill by a discovery that fundamentally alters humans' perception of their place in the universe, then there must be ETs and you must be one yourself.

(September 20, 2017 at 8:43 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote:

(September 20, 2017 at 5:08 pm)Jehanne Wrote: I agree with that.  But, the Big Ear is now a golf course.  If it was an ET beacon and had we been looking continuously since it was discovered in 1977, it may have been the greatest discovery of all time.  May have done more for international peace and goodwill than the International Space Station and McDonald's combined!

If you think humans on the whole are susceptible to being inspired towards international peace and goodwill by a discovery that fundamentally alters humans' perception of their place in the universe, then there must be ETs and you must be one yourself.

It's just basic anthropology.  If you were in Iran, you would gravitate towards anyone who was an American, or, for that matter, a Westerner.  Ditto for Earthlings in the Galaxy.  If it could be shown that there were millions of civilizations within the Local Group of galaxies (say, through a unique spectral signature), then, yes, human beings, I believe, would become closer to one another.  Impossible to prove or disprove until such happens, of course.

Quibble noted, Anomalocaris.

(September 20, 2017 at 7:50 pm)Whateverist Wrote: I do enjoy "Wait but why" but I find this to be loaded with assumptions I find questionable.  Why should the amount of energy we can tap into be such an important organizing principle?  It kind of makes intelligent life forms sound like galactic viruses, keen on taking over as much as possible.  Why should an intelligent species or civilization share this basic drive with a virus?  To what end?  Perpetuation of the species beyond the death of the home star or galaxy?  Seems a little desperate.

You can see this happen throughout history. Every time we've tapped a new power source it's allowed society to grow larger and more complex. Society would collapse if our only power source came from burning wood for example and when that was all that was available the global population was much smaller. Then we started burning coal, found a way to create steam engines and this kicked off the industrial revolution. After that came the oil age which is even more energy concentrated, allowing us to use the internal combustion engine. The problem is that the cheap oil is running out and we not only have to find a substitute for it, but demand is still increasing as all the developing countries and pollution is reaching a limit.

What we need is an energy source even cheaper and more abundant than oil in order to continue expanding and developing, otherwise society will start to decline as the oil runs out.

Think about the energy requirements to clean up the pollution we're currently producing yet alone the pollution incurred so far. We can continue mining resources but it becomes more expensive in energy over time as we have to dig deeper, mine less rich seams or access oil from more difficult places.

Basically, energy is everything. If there is a Great Filter, then it's probably that you can't grow beyond using fossil fuels.

We could use a new power source, but we don't need to keep up with the bacteria-like expansion.

(September 21, 2017 at 6:57 am)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: We could use a new power source, but we don't need to keep up with the bacteria-like expansion.

Quite agree but this is the flaw of our economic system. It needs to exponentially increase in size in order to function otherwise you end up with recessions or depressions. General economic opinion is that 2% annual growth is best to aim for to compensate for errors in measuring growth.

This happens because banks need to continually lend money, but they expect it to be paid back with interest. So there is always more debt than money in existence. This is how the money supply grows over time and debt grows even faster. The interest is paid back with future productivity, and if this productivity does not take place because of a lack of growth then the debt gets written off. If this happens too much then you risk bank runs and the collapse of the economic system. Because of fractional reserve banking, banks only have to hold a fraction of the money deposited with them, literally just a few percent. They lend the rest out to be paid back with interest. The system collapses if too many withdraw their money at once.

This has allowed society to expand rapidly, but only works while we're still able to expand. Unfortunately the system won't change until it has to, probably when it collapses.