sentience comes about in resource limited environments and the resulting dynamics make it so they wipe themselves out eventually, each and every time. you have a front row seat to it, it's about to happen again
This could be a fake world somehow. Other stars and stuff doesn't really exist. Nothing about this world makes sense. We're creating our own aliens with AGI anyhow.
Actually, there's plenty of life. Here on Earth. The fact that it's a sample size of one is only a problem if you expect alien life to be louder and perhaps buzzing flying saucers around Washington DC.
I personally am quite comfortable with the amount of evidence we have. We've barely been looking for one hundred years.
No life beyond earth was obviously implied. Don't make yourself dumb. And we don't have a sample size of one. We have observed many other planets, been to some, looked at the entire universe through telescopes, listened on radio. As well as the fact that the earth is millions or years old and there's no evidence of anyone ever coming here.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Current instruments still have difficulty detecting Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of G-type stars but the large ground-based telescopes coming on line over the next few years should finally settle the issue. Just based on available data though, it's sadly looking like Earth is a very rare type of planet. We are most likely the only civilization in the galaxy at this time.
We are alone in the universe as whoever its creator intended. It was made for us to go out and explore, and the reason there is no visible evidence for aliens is because there are none. Only us.
>Where are all the aliens?
Earth has only had civilization for 6,000 years and we're already on the verge of developing AGI, nuclear fusion, fully reusable rockets and other technologies to develop the solar system and eventually reach other star systems. The galaxy is old enough that other technological civilizations should have already spread throughout the entire galaxy millions if not billions of years ago and yet there is no evidence that has ever happened. Our solar system should have been picked clean by alien machine intelligence for their own use long before humans walked the Earth but that hasn't occurred. So where are they? >t. just finished watching the Cool Worlds video on this subject
Whatever happens when a space-faring civilization "gets going" is so disruptive and pervasive that babby civs like ourselves could only exist where they are not anywhere near. Similar to how you couldn't replicate the earliest cells here in Earth without the current era microbes wrecking them immediately. Same as what already said.
Either that or they don't end up doing very much. And in that case you naturally wouldn't see evidence.
The scenarios where they're expansive and yet also meet us in this ultra brief slice of time where we just put up telescopes would require a gigantic coincidence. Or maybe we're in a "nature preserve" if you want to believe that.
>Whatever happens when a space-faring civilization "gets going" is so disruptive and pervasive that babby civs like ourselves could only exist where they are not anywhere near.
That was pretty much the Cool Worlds conclusion. There are no alien machine intelligence civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy yet since we don't see any but other galaxies are likely swarming with them by now. I guess that means our civilization will eventually create the machine empire that takes over this galaxy as well. Very good episode by the way.
The Fermi Paradox Has An Incredibly Simple Solution
No paradox.
We are very possibly the first.
When you research history of life on Earth - it seems to have required very specific circumstances to form (abundance of heavy elements, molten core, magnetic field, alkaline hydrothermal vents), and even once it spontaneously arose, it remained single-celled for over 2 billion years. That life existed as single-cells for 80% of the history of life on Earth tells us that multicellular life is not guaranteed - it might be even more difficult and unlikely than the formation of life itself.
Even once complex, multicellular life arose, it took another 500 million years for human intelligence to arise.
Consider pic related, all the elements required for life. According to our current cosmological model, these elements didn't exist in the early universe. Generations of stars formed, fused hydrogen through helium through iron, then exploded and scattered these elements which, eventually, became part of our early solar system.
As well as these elements, we require much heavier elements like gold and titanium for our high-technology, space-faring society, produced only in neutron stars we think.
We are very possibly the first intelligence to arise in the universe. Our emergence was not guaranteed.
>Consider pic related, all the elements required for life.
For human life. We adapted to utilize the elements around us. Bacteria are evolving to be resistant to antibiotics. Life is evolving to utilize plastic, a man made substance.
Anon, until proven otherwise, we can safely assume that the heavy elements above are required for anything resembling intelligent life. Even single-celled organisms require the majority of those elements, but especially complex multicellular life becomes dependent on more and more elements.
I'm not denying life could exist with only of the lighter heavy elements, but even if the biology could work, you're not going to have a high tech civilization on a planet without iron, copper or nickel.
>Life is evolving to utilize plastic, a man made substance.
Plastic isn't an element, it's just a polymer of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and occasionally trace elements. Some life is evolving to be able to digest certain plastics for energy, but they are still using the same elements they have always used, just from a different source.
we don't know how tech works out for us, and what it could enable. or maybe all of them eventually devolve into some religious worshiping morons that eventually get wiped by something.
Paradoxes arise when you hold inconsistent assumptions. The fermi paradox holds two assumptions >Life is abundant in the universe >We've made no contact with them
The solution is that one or both of these assumptions is wrong. I.e. one of the following two is likely true >Life is rare in the universe >Aliens are on this planet and have been for millennia or longer
The first is usually rejected on religious arguments (or rather irreligious arguments) while the latter is rejected as conspiratorial.
It doesn't have to be one of them. It can be that we have a deeper misunderstanding. And it is 100 percent guaranteed that we have misunderstandings about the world.
Sure but then its nothing but pure speculation and should be rejected. The two scenarios I gave merely suggests inevitabilities based on how the paradox is constructed.
what do you personally think life is, and what are the limits that you personally think it has?
2 months ago
Anonymous
I consider life any self-replicating chemicals, no matter how big or small. The simplest would be some chemical string X which absorbs a different chemical, then outputs a copy of chemical X in some capacity (usually via duplication, more rarely via self-destruction)
2 months ago
Anonymous
that's the lower bound but upper bound might be stranger than we'd imagine.
you are also referring to self-replicating life. or at least part of self-replicating life. consciousness is another layer and we don't know how it can exist (apart from how it does with us), and for how long. I'm trying to hint at artificial tech enabled consciousness.
we also have no idea what such an entity would wanna do. maybe it lays down low and has some strange preoccupation that we wouldn't understand. maybe it roams the galaxy in complete silence.
we also don't know how many individuals such a civilization might result in. what if all collapse into one? what if one fricks everybody else over, or takes power by sheer force? a bunch of unknowns to fully extract meaningful information from what we observe.
>Redpill me on the Fermi Paradox
It is the least important idea Fermi ever had. Dozens of of other things Fermi did are infinitely better than this non-paradoxical paradox, which was just something that came up in a conversation he had, and then people were like, OMG! Fermi said such and such!," but now people write about it like it was the thesis topic for his PhD.
This is why the Fermi paradox isn't really a paradox when it is phrased as, "The universe is so big, even the smallest probability for the occurrence of life means it must have happened more than once." For this result to be valid, you need to assume beforehand that the probability is an element of the real numbers. If the probability is an element of another number system, such the hyperreals, for instance, then it can be infinitesimal and it would be perfectly mathematically consistent for life to occur only once even if the universe were infinitely large, which some data suggests it is not. Overall, no one has any reason to suppose the universe is infinitely large, in which case a very low real-valued probability is still consistent with life only appear on earth. However, even then, one has no scientific reason to require that the probability is real-valued. Instead, the probability is cherry-picked from the real numbers because that precondition supports redditors' love of saying, "OMG the Fermi paradox!!!"
***If it's not infinitely large or infinitely old, as some data suggests it is not, then even a real-valued but very small probability is perfectly consistent with life appearing only once in the universe.
One other possibility is that we and others live as we are now a very limited time, as animals with a high enough intelligence to look for other life. Maybe we'll be another life form post AGI.
>Bro there are like 10^30 planets bro that's a lot >Bro there has been like 10^9 years bro that's a lot
He forgot that the simplest self-replicating amino acid partial turing machine is a 140!*80! incident. Even if there were no other filter, abiogenesis is so sheer no observer should expect other planets to achieve it within their relative light cone.
>Bro there are like 10^30 planets bro that's a lot >Bro there has been like 10^9 years bro that's a lot
He forgot that the simplest self-replicating amino acid partial turing machine is a 140!*80! incident. Even if there were no other filter, abiogenesis is so sheer no observer should expect other planets to achieve it within their relative light cone.
Nick Lane would like a word with you two. Alkaline hydrothermal vent chemistry makes spontaneous formation of much of the Krebs cycle chemistry magnitudes more likely. This still doesn't mean life is abundant in the galaxy - even if the alkaline vent origin of life theory is correct, it's not obvious that ocean-planets with such vents are any more common than ones in the goldilocks zone.
We don't know why. There is shitton of potential answers, any of them can be true. Untill we have more data its pointless excercise, unless you want to train your imagination.
Honestly, the more I learn I think this is true for everything. I don't know what to do or think about anything anymore. We're supposed to see what's good and bad, what causes this and that scientifically. But we understand nothing. Anything is a half-assed explanation.
sentience comes about in resource limited environments and the resulting dynamics make it so they wipe themselves out eventually, each and every time. you have a front row seat to it, it's about to happen again
This could be a fake world somehow. Other stars and stuff doesn't really exist. Nothing about this world makes sense. We're creating our own aliens with AGI anyhow.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
The evidence we have so far shows no life.
Actually, there's plenty of life. Here on Earth. The fact that it's a sample size of one is only a problem if you expect alien life to be louder and perhaps buzzing flying saucers around Washington DC.
I personally am quite comfortable with the amount of evidence we have. We've barely been looking for one hundred years.
No life beyond earth was obviously implied. Don't make yourself dumb. And we don't have a sample size of one. We have observed many other planets, been to some, looked at the entire universe through telescopes, listened on radio. As well as the fact that the earth is millions or years old and there's no evidence of anyone ever coming here.
Current instruments still have difficulty detecting Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of G-type stars but the large ground-based telescopes coming on line over the next few years should finally settle the issue. Just based on available data though, it's sadly looking like Earth is a very rare type of planet. We are most likely the only civilization in the galaxy at this time.
We are alone in the universe as whoever its creator intended. It was made for us to go out and explore, and the reason there is no visible evidence for aliens is because there are none. Only us.
Then how do you explain Ariel and Westall school incidents?
Just dumb luck
What does that even mean. That you don't have an answer but wanna pretend you do?
Yes, but that also applies to you
No, it doesn't. I want an actual answer. And I don't want to pretend.
Well you came to the wrong place. This is IQfy and science doesn't provide answers, only hypotheses
>muh aliensszztthhhh
>Where are all the aliens?
Earth has only had civilization for 6,000 years and we're already on the verge of developing AGI, nuclear fusion, fully reusable rockets and other technologies to develop the solar system and eventually reach other star systems. The galaxy is old enough that other technological civilizations should have already spread throughout the entire galaxy millions if not billions of years ago and yet there is no evidence that has ever happened. Our solar system should have been picked clean by alien machine intelligence for their own use long before humans walked the Earth but that hasn't occurred. So where are they?
>t. just finished watching the Cool Worlds video on this subject
Whatever happens when a space-faring civilization "gets going" is so disruptive and pervasive that babby civs like ourselves could only exist where they are not anywhere near. Similar to how you couldn't replicate the earliest cells here in Earth without the current era microbes wrecking them immediately. Same as what already said.
Either that or they don't end up doing very much. And in that case you naturally wouldn't see evidence.
The scenarios where they're expansive and yet also meet us in this ultra brief slice of time where we just put up telescopes would require a gigantic coincidence. Or maybe we're in a "nature preserve" if you want to believe that.
>Whatever happens when a space-faring civilization "gets going" is so disruptive and pervasive that babby civs like ourselves could only exist where they are not anywhere near.
That was pretty much the Cool Worlds conclusion. There are no alien machine intelligence civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy yet since we don't see any but other galaxies are likely swarming with them by now. I guess that means our civilization will eventually create the machine empire that takes over this galaxy as well. Very good episode by the way.
The Fermi Paradox Has An Incredibly Simple Solution
No paradox.
We are very possibly the first.
When you research history of life on Earth - it seems to have required very specific circumstances to form (abundance of heavy elements, molten core, magnetic field, alkaline hydrothermal vents), and even once it spontaneously arose, it remained single-celled for over 2 billion years. That life existed as single-cells for 80% of the history of life on Earth tells us that multicellular life is not guaranteed - it might be even more difficult and unlikely than the formation of life itself.
Even once complex, multicellular life arose, it took another 500 million years for human intelligence to arise.
Consider pic related, all the elements required for life. According to our current cosmological model, these elements didn't exist in the early universe. Generations of stars formed, fused hydrogen through helium through iron, then exploded and scattered these elements which, eventually, became part of our early solar system.
As well as these elements, we require much heavier elements like gold and titanium for our high-technology, space-faring society, produced only in neutron stars we think.
We are very possibly the first intelligence to arise in the universe. Our emergence was not guaranteed.
>Consider pic related, all the elements required for life.
For human life. We adapted to utilize the elements around us. Bacteria are evolving to be resistant to antibiotics. Life is evolving to utilize plastic, a man made substance.
Anon, until proven otherwise, we can safely assume that the heavy elements above are required for anything resembling intelligent life. Even single-celled organisms require the majority of those elements, but especially complex multicellular life becomes dependent on more and more elements.
I'm not denying life could exist with only of the lighter heavy elements, but even if the biology could work, you're not going to have a high tech civilization on a planet without iron, copper or nickel.
>Life is evolving to utilize plastic, a man made substance.
Plastic isn't an element, it's just a polymer of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and occasionally trace elements. Some life is evolving to be able to digest certain plastics for energy, but they are still using the same elements they have always used, just from a different source.
we don't know how tech works out for us, and what it could enable. or maybe all of them eventually devolve into some religious worshiping morons that eventually get wiped by something.
Paradoxes arise when you hold inconsistent assumptions. The fermi paradox holds two assumptions
>Life is abundant in the universe
>We've made no contact with them
The solution is that one or both of these assumptions is wrong. I.e. one of the following two is likely true
>Life is rare in the universe
>Aliens are on this planet and have been for millennia or longer
The first is usually rejected on religious arguments (or rather irreligious arguments) while the latter is rejected as conspiratorial.
It doesn't have to be one of them. It can be that we have a deeper misunderstanding. And it is 100 percent guaranteed that we have misunderstandings about the world.
Sure but then its nothing but pure speculation and should be rejected. The two scenarios I gave merely suggests inevitabilities based on how the paradox is constructed.
what do you personally think life is, and what are the limits that you personally think it has?
I consider life any self-replicating chemicals, no matter how big or small. The simplest would be some chemical string X which absorbs a different chemical, then outputs a copy of chemical X in some capacity (usually via duplication, more rarely via self-destruction)
that's the lower bound but upper bound might be stranger than we'd imagine.
you are also referring to self-replicating life. or at least part of self-replicating life. consciousness is another layer and we don't know how it can exist (apart from how it does with us), and for how long. I'm trying to hint at artificial tech enabled consciousness.
we also have no idea what such an entity would wanna do. maybe it lays down low and has some strange preoccupation that we wouldn't understand. maybe it roams the galaxy in complete silence.
we also don't know how many individuals such a civilization might result in. what if all collapse into one? what if one fricks everybody else over, or takes power by sheer force? a bunch of unknowns to fully extract meaningful information from what we observe.
>Redpill me on the Fermi Paradox
It is the least important idea Fermi ever had. Dozens of of other things Fermi did are infinitely better than this non-paradoxical paradox, which was just something that came up in a conversation he had, and then people were like, OMG! Fermi said such and such!," but now people write about it like it was the thesis topic for his PhD.
This is why the Fermi paradox isn't really a paradox when it is phrased as, "The universe is so big, even the smallest probability for the occurrence of life means it must have happened more than once." For this result to be valid, you need to assume beforehand that the probability is an element of the real numbers. If the probability is an element of another number system, such the hyperreals, for instance, then it can be infinitesimal and it would be perfectly mathematically consistent for life to occur only once even if the universe were infinitely large, which some data suggests it is not. Overall, no one has any reason to suppose the universe is infinitely large, in which case a very low real-valued probability is still consistent with life only appear on earth. However, even then, one has no scientific reason to require that the probability is real-valued. Instead, the probability is cherry-picked from the real numbers because that precondition supports redditors' love of saying, "OMG the Fermi paradox!!!"
***If it's not infinitely large or infinitely old, as some data suggests it is not, then even a real-valued but very small probability is perfectly consistent with life appearing only once in the universe.
One other possibility is that we and others live as we are now a very limited time, as animals with a high enough intelligence to look for other life. Maybe we'll be another life form post AGI.
>Bro there are like 10^30 planets bro that's a lot
>Bro there has been like 10^9 years bro that's a lot
He forgot that the simplest self-replicating amino acid partial turing machine is a 140!*80! incident. Even if there were no other filter, abiogenesis is so sheer no observer should expect other planets to achieve it within their relative light cone.
This
Initial life is too statistically improbable that we shouldn't expect it anywhere else
Nick Lane would like a word with you two. Alkaline hydrothermal vent chemistry makes spontaneous formation of much of the Krebs cycle chemistry magnitudes more likely. This still doesn't mean life is abundant in the galaxy - even if the alkaline vent origin of life theory is correct, it's not obvious that ocean-planets with such vents are any more common than ones in the goldilocks zone.
We don't know why. There is shitton of potential answers, any of them can be true. Untill we have more data its pointless excercise, unless you want to train your imagination.
Honestly, the more I learn I think this is true for everything. I don't know what to do or think about anything anymore. We're supposed to see what's good and bad, what causes this and that scientifically. But we understand nothing. Anything is a half-assed explanation.
“The ancient Oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.”
We're just a bit early. It all makes sense considering the scale.