The Fermi Paradox

[BridgeTroll]

I love this stuff...    Here is a few excerpts...

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old "existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour." But everyone feels something.

Physicist Enrico Fermi felt something too—"Where is everybody?"

A really starry sky seems vast—but all we're looking at is our very local neighborhood. On the very best nights, we can see up to about 2,500 stars (roughly one hundred-millionth of the stars in our galaxy), and almost all of them are less than 1,000 light years away from us (or 1% of the diameter of the Milky Way). So what we're really looking at is this:

Moving back to just our galaxy, and doing the same math on the lowest estimate for stars in the Milky Way (100 billion), we'd estimate that there are 1 billion Earth-like planets and 100,000 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.[1]

it must be that there are no super-advanced civilizations. And since the math suggests that there are thousands of them just in our own galaxy, something else must be going on.

This something else is called The Great Filter.

Group 2 explanations get rid of any notion that we're rare or special or the first at anything—on the contrary, they believe in the Mediocrity Principle, whose starting point is that there is nothing unusual or rare about our galaxy, solar system, planet, or level of intelligence, until evidence proves otherwise. They're also much less quick to assume that the lack of evidence of higher intelligence beings is evidence of their nonexistence—emphasizing the fact that our search for signals stretches only about 100 light years away from us (0.1% across the galaxy) and suggesting a number of possible explanations.

[acme54321]

Thanks for the link.  Much better than the typical squabbling going on in the other threads.

[Non-RedNeck Westsider]

Thanks for the link.  Much better than the typical squabbling going on in the other threads.

Give it a few hours. 

I can start now if you'd like.

[BridgeTroll]

The waitbutwhy website is pretty cool for a bunch of other subjects also...

http://waitbutwhy.com/

[BridgeTroll]

My own opinion is the galaxy is soo vast that we simply have not detected anything yet.  We are in a relatively remote section of the Milky way...

[Non-RedNeck Westsider]

My own opinion is the galaxy is soo vast that we simply have not detected anything yet.  We are in a relatively remote section of the Milky way...

So your take on the UFO 'sightings'?

Is it that we haven't detected anything or that maybe other civilizations out there are like us and haven't advanced enough to probe any farther than we have.

[BridgeTroll]

My own opinion is the galaxy is soo vast that we simply have not detected anything yet.  We are in a relatively remote section of the Milky way...

So your take on the UFO 'sightings'?

Is it that we haven't detected anything or that maybe other civilizations out there are like us and haven't advanced enough to probe any farther than we have.

I think the term Unidentified flying objects describes them better than alien spacecraft.  Like Bigfoot and Lochness... I am still waiting for a clear non blurry photo of one...

[BridgeTroll]

I will say I read and reread Erich von Danikens Chariots of the Gods? as a teenager.  He was quickly discredited and I have been disillusioned by these types of "sightings" ever since...

[Non-RedNeck Westsider]

I think any species that is coming to us via a flying saucer has to be relatively close to us, and only slightly more adventurous and possibly more tech advanced than we are.

I cannot imagine that exponentially advanced civilizations would explore planets like ours in flying tin cans.  Much less if they are physically located many light years away.  If there are aliens in machines, then I think that Life must be far more prevalent than we are calculating for, either that or we are statistical outliers to be close enough to a nearby tech based life system that they could physically travel from somewhere close enough to survive the trip.  Which means a limited number of planets and planetoids around a handful of star systems.

Why would they be relatively close?

I have the relative same approach as what you stated, but I have to force myself out of the box and ask myself these questions:

It's an easy assumption to make, but is it because I'm basing my assumption off of only what I can see as feasible?

Assuming that they're 'tin cans'. 
Assuming that they're carbon based life forms or similar to us in other ways.
Assuming based off of what we know and not what we don't know nor would be able to comprehend. 

[bencrix]

Thanks for posting this, both for highlighting a personal-favorite topic on MJ and for exposing me to  waitbutwhy, which seems really great.

I second (or third?) the idea that distances are too great, ROI of contact / travel is low.

The whole discussion seems based on hard-to-verify assumptions, which guarantee that any hypothesis (such as mine above) is highly likely to be wrong.

What is so interesting is the assumptions / hypotheses seem to be so applicable issues of today (e.g. information technology, resource management, climate change, bioethics, etc., etc.).

Is that a coincidence?

[BridgeTroll]

I love this dilemma... What should we do?  Perhaps we should be glad we are in a sleepy quiet piece of the galaxy...

There's a debate going on currently about whether we should engage in METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence—the reverse of SETI) or not, and most people say we should not. Stephen Hawking warns, "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans." Even Carl Sagan (a general believer that any civilization advanced enough for interstellar travel would be altruistic, not hostile) called the practice of METI "deeply unwise and immature," and recommended that "the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes, before shouting into an unknown jungle that we do not understand."

[acme54321]

That's a can of worms right there. 

[bencrix]

hard to vote against carl and stephen (hawking, but not necessarily dare)... it's fairly un-american, but i think its best to invoke to precautionary principle here.

[Charles Hunter]

We've been sending unfocused radio "messages" out for a century.  So there's a sphere 200 light years in diameter where, if there is anyone to do, our presence could be detected.  Now, can they do anything once they've intercepted our signals?

Is anybody out there?

[Charles Hunter]

Which is part of the problem (if it is a problem) - would an alien intelligence recognize our random mutterings?  Heck, try to find a computer that can read a 5.25" floppy disk.