We’ve talked often enough about the so-called ‘Fermi paradox’ in these pages, but Gregory Benford recently passed along a new paper from Robert H. Gray making the case that there is in fact no paradox, and that Fermi’s intentions have been misunderstood. It’s an interesting point, because as it turns out, Fermi himself never published anything on the subject of interstellar travel or the consequences if it proved possible. The famous lunch conversation at Los Alamos in 1950 when he asked ‘Where is everybody’ (or perhaps ‘Where are they’) has often been seen as a venue for Fermi to express his doubts about the existence of any extraterrestrial civilization, and the ‘Fermi Paradox’ has become a common trope of interstellar studies.
Robert Gray (Gray Consulting, Chicago) believes this is a misunderstanding, and sorts through the aftermath of that particular event. It would be another 27 years before the term ‘Fermi paradox’ even appeared in print, inserted into a JBIS paper by D. G. Stephenson. This followed upon Michael Hart’s 1975 discussion, which Gray sums up as ‘they are not here; therefore they do not exist,’ an argument Hart used to question the wisdom of pursuing SETI. Frank Tipler’s subsequent paper (1980) took us into the realm of artificial intelligence, claiming that self-replicating probes could use even current spacecraft speeds to colonize the galaxy in less than 300 million years. Tipler concluded that we were probably the only intelligent species in the universe since we had not encountered evidence for the existence of such probes.
Maybe we should leave Fermi’s name out of this, writes Gray:
Using Fermi’s name for the so-called Fermi paradox is clearly mistaken because (1) it misrepresents Fermi’s views, which were skeptical about interstellar travel but not about the possible existence of extraterrestrials, and (2) its central idea ”they are not here; therefore they do not exist” was first published by Hart. Priority of publication and accuracy suggests using a name like Hart-Tipler argument instead of ‘Fermi paradox.’
Image: Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), whose famous question may have been misunderstood by subsequent writers.
I notice that as it currently stands, the Wikipedia entry for Fermi Paradox describes it as “…sometimes referred to as the Fermi-Hart paradox,” but Gray can turn to no less an eminence than Iosif Shklovsky, Russian astronomer and co-author, with Carl Sagan, of Intelligent Life in the Universe (Holden Day, 1966), who preferred the term ‘Hart Paradox,’ while Stephen Webb opined we might try ”Tsiolkovsky-Fermi-
Viewing-Hart paradox” in his book Where Is Everybody (Copernicus, 2002). David Viewing had argued in 1975 that extraterrestrial civilizations might well exist despite the factors that Hart noted, meaning we should actively search for evidence of them.
Gray even falls back on Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who wondered about questions like these in the 1930s. But is there any paradox here? Gray thinks not, for a paradox implies a statement that is self-contradictory, the nature of the contradiction suggesting that something is wrong:
The Hart-Tipler argument takes the seemingly obvious fact they are not here as evidence that a premise ”technological extraterrestrials exist” must be false, because if they did exist, the colonization argument leads to the conclusion they are here, which seems absurd. This is a reductio ad absurdum argument, not a paradox, although like a paradox it depends on every statement being true—yet the argument consists of many speculations which are not known to be true.
Good point. Consider which statements we cannot know, starting with the assumption that interstellar flight is feasible, although most of us here believe that if we can envision it with our current level of technology, then it is at least a rational assumption. In fact, the original Project Daedalus was conceived in part as a way of showing that if we could, at levels of scientific development not far ahead of our own, design a starship, then surely other civilizations of much longer duration than ours would have found better ways to make these things happen.
As for the other implicit assumptions, the unknown nature seems clear enough. Would the galaxy indeed fill, as per Tipler, with self-reproducing probes in the kind of timeframes he imagined? Would this ‘colonization’ take a form we could understand or detect (Gray doesn’t get into this question, though it seems pertinent). Would any presence from another star system be likely to persist over millions or even billions of years? Clearly we have no answers here, and have no way of knowing whether we ever will. Assuming that each of these positions is therefore true and that Earth would be a visited world is thus a questionable stance.
According to three of those who were there (Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York, all quoted in the Gray paper), Fermi’s point was not that extraterrestrial civilizations did not exist, but that interstellar travel that might bring them here was infeasible. As Gray sees it, the true ‘they are not here; therefore they do not exist’ argument should be credited to Michael Hart and Frank Tipler. The question may not be purely theoretical, for it turns out that this Hart-Tipler argument became one of the reasons given for canceling NASA’s SETI program in 1981, being cited by William Proxmire, who referenced Tipler’s work. Gray asks whether continued use of it in this way may perpetuate low funding levels in SETI. And this is worth quoting:
The literature on searches (Tarter, 1995) indicates that only a small fraction of the radio spectrum has been searched—0.3 GHz in surveys covering much of the sky (Leigh and Horowitz, 2000) using transit observations, and 2 GHz in targeted searches of 800 stars (Backus et al., 2004)—out of a terrestrial microwave window from 1 to 10 GHz, a free-space window up to 60 GHz (Oliver and Billingham, 1971), and much more electromagnetic spectrum beyond, including optical. Few searches would have detected low-duty-cycle signals anticipated by some (Benford et al., 2010; Gray, 2011), because both radio and optical surveys typically observe positions for only minutes. An incomplete search for signals cannot be used as evidence of complete absence of technological extraterrestrials.
The paper is Gray, “The Fermi Paradox Is Neither Fermi’s Nor a Paradox,” Astrobiology Volume 15, Number 3 (2015). Abstract available.
That’s pretty much how I have always characterized it, but I don’t see the need for the “therefore.” More like, “they are not here, why is that?” We don’t know anywhere near enough to draw a definitive conclusion, but the paradox serves as an excellent mental lens to focus our analysis and challenge our assumptions.
It is very possible that only Replicating-Automated probes are able
to persistently form a an exploration wave across a galaxy. But I find the
impetus to build such probes weak. And as I and other have mentioned before, such probes would not be mere machines, therefore would not be
easy or inexpensive to build. A mere mundane Rube Goldberg of machine
is not going to reliably keep the exploration wave going .
Even a probe travelling at 5% C is going see something interesting what? once in 200-300 years. And it will only be interesting because there are rocky planets inside the Snow line. You could predict that after 1000 years, the creators of such probes will realize that no one in their society Is going to get too exited by Jovian Class # 60 and Neptune class # 299. After a few more millennia they might stop monitoring the probes due to sheer monotony, or simply because their civilization is no longer concerned with the non-digital world, or their civ just no longer exists.
The above statements do allow for co-temporal ET, but only a few
handful spaced far apart. But I think it more likely that we are alone in this
and probably in the nearby galaxies. (that’s right 1 trillion solar systems with nothing more sophisticated than Trilobites, save the one world)
The Tipler Argument strikes me as bizarre. Assume unproven self-replicating probes, unproven interstellar travel, unproven motives about what to do upon arrival at interstellar destinations, and so forth.
That’s not to mention that we’ve only glimpsed at a fraction of our solar system up close with probes versus telescopes. If there was a former probe that passed through 35,000 years ago, finished its mission, and crashed on to the surface of Venus, we’d have no idea that it was ever there or extant.
Off-Earth intelligent lifeforms could very well have decided not to pursue technological superiority in the directions and to the extent that our Western civilizations have. Who can say, for instance, what directions the native societies of North America would have evolved in if we hadn’t interferred?
Perhaps ‘they’ have discovered that Art in all its forms is the worthiest pursuit. Perhaps at the present time, our artists are involved in a kind of universal dialogue still in its infancy?
The argument about colonization always seemed to me a weak one. Even our civilization now limits its spread on Earth, and with more advanced technology we will see even less need to acquire more land. The Paradox also ignores realities of space and time. Other civilizations would be not only thousands of light years away from us but also millions of years ahead.And even resources of our own star system are sufficient to sustain trillions of humans for eaons.Besides exploration and the desire to be alone there is little need to colonize other systems extensively in my view.
One question that always bothers me over and over again is simply this:
why in the world does it MATTER if in fact that we are the only civilization in the entire universe ? Is it really so important that someone else be out there ? Certainly it may be interesting, it may have some kind of applicability even to us, but it certainly does not hinder nor help us if there does not exist someone out there. I think we have all become so brainwashed by Star Trek, Star Wars, and a whole multitude of other science-fiction shows which somehow seems to impart a godly type of wisdom to other civilizations and some type of helping hand that we’ve lost sight of the fact that being alone does not necessarily mean that we are actually ALONE. We do have our own resources and sells to depend on and that seems to be to be more than enough.
If the efficiency of our detection technology is 10^-(big number) – which is almost certainly the case – then a lack of detection to date means almost nothing in the context of answering the question posed by Fermi.
Yeah, Landis argued this in his JBIS paper some 20 years ago ((http://www.wowsignalpodcast.com/2013/01/episode-2-what-about-fact-a.html). Self replicating probes are necessarily far more complex than just probes. No one has ever been able to give me a satisfactory example of a self-replicating machine that we have EVER built. Sure, biology does it, but requires a very long and messy development cycle and a stable habitat, and no one can predict what will happening the long term.
However, the key insight in Landis’ paper is that any kind of colonization program can not be centrally planned and controlled because of the speed of light delays. It will only happen if there is a built in expansionary impetus that persists form colony to colony.
William I can suggest a possible rational for caring if we are alone. It is counter to my thinking –
One argument is that yes, we ale alone because we were uniquely created by God – and all of life resides on Earth (or metaphysical places. . .)
So there is at times an almost frantic effort to prove or disprove, depending on which side of the argument one stands on.
My views are highly unorthodox. I believe that the structure of the universe as it exists makes the probability of life elsewhere and mostly everywhere very high. My personal metaphysical belief is that, if on some distant world, the inhabitants come from the fields, the foundries, the shops, and before their evening mea,l as their beliefs might dictate, they kneel in prayer and pray to the same God that I do.
Among inhabitants of earth there are many philosophies, and not all are supportive of the exploration of space. Perhaps on the distant planet which I propose the hard-wired pattern is to live conservatively with reverence to all life, and their fields and forests and their villages are ancient beyond our comprehension. Might that be the climatic pattern of all sustainable intelligent life?
My faith, my belief, is that we all start at different places and follow different paths. I do not proselytize. Each life is a separate journey of profound discovery. Religions are not reality but are human artificial constructs to establish a hierarchy of control and to insure conformity.
My opinion -works for me.
On SETI: I had an old book discarder from a library on a military post on radio. It was on printed acidic pulp paper and each page disintegrated as I read it. There was a chapter of WW I air to ground communications and the advancement brought about by the “new 3 element radio valves”. This was about a century ago. Radio signals from the past hundred years have not gone far at all on a galactic scale. Now, high frequency low powered multiplexed signals to and from satellites and fiber optics rule the day. How long was our noisy radio signals transmitted to the aliens out yonder? Were they listening during that interval? I do not believe we will ever receive an intelligent signal unless it is broadcast to us and we happen to “have our ears on” for that brief broadcast session. That assurdly does not mean they are not “out there.”
It seems that most people have turned against the “Hart-Tipler argument” or whatever you want to call it. I remain a supporter. Every premise of the argument seems highly plausible to me, so I think it certainly adds credence to the position that there are no extraterrestrial intelligences. Interstellar travel seems possible. Curiosity, thus the drive to explore, seems to be an inherent attribute of intelligent beings.
We simply don’t have much to go on to formulate an opinion for or against the existence of extraterrestrial intelligences. While it’s not a knock-down argument, I think the Hart-Tipler argument is the best that has been advanced, so if the question was put to me whether I believe ETI exists, yes or no, I would answer “no” tentatively. There is no argument at all that I have heard supporting “yes.” Most commonly, the only defense of the “yes” position is the appeal to “billions and billions of stars”.
I’m still quite interested in any new data or new searches that might reveal a signal or a remnant of past visitation. We’re beginning to search for near-IR laser signals, which is exciting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzlDtTE1va4
As a product of self replicating, unicellular automata of unknown origin i always found this speculation highly amusing. Something wrong with our perception perhaps? Self assembling and duplicating oxygen factories? Missing the forest because all of the trees? A ridiculous thing to think anyway. What a ridiculous thing to say. No. No. Nonsense. Can’t be said. Do not let anyone tell you different: self replicating automata do not exist. Its evidently an unworkable and impossible concept to begin with. Who would use something like that, for colonization in space anyway?
Wiliam : The one answer that fits all Is Fashion . The hardnosed selfconfident spirit of exploration is simply not fashionable anymore , in other words ”we’ the spacecomunity are entering a POST- exploration era …..SO much more developed and sentive to minority rights , human rights, animal rights ,aliens-rights and probably one day even Bacteria-rights !
We cant just run wild all over the galaxy trambling om the tall bue natives can we now ?
Or maybee thats just an excuse not to go anywhere ?
As we saw in Avatar , exploration is BAD !
Personaly I believe that the craving , the hunger for exploration is build into our DNA in a way that no stupid fashion-ideology can ever destroy , we’ll reach the stars in a far from perfect tin can , suffering impossible conditions for hundreds of years , but still getting there stronger than we left .
No Norwegians have ever visited me. Therefore, Norwegians do not exist.
We could simply be the first sentient creatures in the Unverse. But there are lots of us .So we are certainly not alone . perhaps we will eventually spread through out Space ,over a very long period, But there is no urgency in this matter .Is there?
Yes, thank you. It’s reached the point that I’ve begun cringing everytime I see an article labeled “Fermi Paradox”(Or “Great Silence” or “Great Filter” or…) because I know the odds are overwhelming it’s going to be a mass of unacknowledged assumptions and circular reasoning. We’ve only just begun to examine the larger universe, and with only a single data point(ourself and our planet) we have no ability to determine what factors were essential to are development and what was incidental(See the ongoing argument over the role of our unusually large and close moon, to begin with).
I believe, as is often the case, there’s a relevant XKCD cartoon…..
We just don’t know.
I hope we can reach other solar systems, though we need to build viable lasting biosphere colonies near ourselves first. It’s essential to spread and multiply our forms of life before contacting anyone else anyhow.
The knowledge we need will come to us when we’re really prepared just as people began correctly identifying fossils and the meaning of varying lengths of shadows as one traveled north and south when they had sufficient information.
The galaxy is vast – with hundreds of billions of stars and countless numbers of planets to explore, based on trends emerging from exoplanet studies. At the same time, whilst life might be common, intelligent civilisations might be less common.
My solution to Fermi’s Paradox – give them [ET] time…maybe they are still exploring, and they’ve not reached us yet because there are so many worlds to explore. But if they have, they are intelligent enough to know not to interfere in our natural development by arriving on our front doorstep with massive starships. Maybe they are observing our development from afar as we navigate through a challenging and dangerous period in our species’ development. We still fight wars, abuse the environment, allow poverty and inequality, and are intolerant of others and are only beginning to grapple with advanced technologies, some of which can lift us up to be a more advanced civilisation, and some of which can utterly destroy us. Maybe ‘they’ judge we are not yet ready for the ‘next step’ and we’d not handle ‘first contact’ very well.
So to me, the Fermi Paradox is easy to resolve – they are out there (probably) but they are not here just yet.
One thing that usually gets overlooked in this discussion is that it is not sufficient to argue against, for example, the colonization-by-self-replicating-probe idea by saying most civilizations would not bother to do that. For those to show up here, it would suffice that one subgroup of one civilization does that – and given what we know about subgroups of our own civilization, finding one of those to try it once the necessary tech level is available does not sound like an insurmountable obstacle.
You just need one such probe, pointed at one system with the necessary raw material, to start the wave. Just one.
And there does not look to be anything impossible about the necessary tech. There’s no unobtainium necessary.
So … either there’s nobody out there, or there hasn’t been enough time to reach from them to us (rather unlikely, if they’re in the same galaxy), or … we’re the first. Well, someone has to be.
Unless someone can come up with a reason why that scenario is absolutely flat out impossible. So far I haven’t seen anyone manage to do that.
… and no, I do not accept the possibility that we are alone in the Universe.
The bizarre idea that Life is unique to Earth is another example of extreme anthropocentric hubris, IMO. As to why we see no visitors, one has to realize (1) we have only announced our presence for a little more than 120 years, and not by using very strong signals, and (2) the enormous distances to other systems that might harbor Life. The speed of light is the limit for mass-less light, to have a viable massive transport system travel at even a small fraction of c requires technology that probably will not be realized for a good while yet.
Here’s a prediction: When/if humankind encounters extraterrestrial life forms, science will find that the alien cells are based on DNA. Just like in all Life, everywhere. (NB. Not religiobabble, physics: when/wherever conditions are right, the building blocks (amino acids) have no “choice,” just as hydrogen has no “choice” when it comes to being transformed into helium inside stars: it is dictated by physical conditions. Science just haven’t discovered the forces involved, yet.)
Plenty of well thought out responses above. While we are just now beginning to find real data on these questions, I think at this present time I lean toward believing we are alone in this galaxy. Like I said , based on very little real data.
I do have to disagree on one item. On far shorter time scales than discussed here I believe it will indeed be both easy and relatively cheap to build automated self replicating probes.
Tipler does not believe Hart-Tipler . He now thinks there must be life in Intelligent life elsewhere but far away . It still applies to this galaxy . I think he expects us to find life maybe in the solar system
He first made the argument to prove the steady state was wrong because if the universe was eternal somebody else should be here too. Its all in Anthropic Cosmological Principle and the rest including his anti matter probe in Physics of Immortality and Physics of Christianity I wish he would leave his exile and engage with us . He has a lot to offer on the Interstellar front. I understand he is Pod about some bad treatment but he is very popular with German Lutherans
My opinion, the solution is that the purpose of intelligent life doesn’t require it.
louis Wells : ”perhaps we will eventually spread through out Space ,over a very long period, But there is no urgency in this matter .Is there ? ”
There are several reasons to asume urgency .
One of them is to look at the rise and fall of former great civilisations . The romans was were advancing their capabilities over a long and stable period , only to colapse because of internal CULTURAL reasons .
The same can be said of several Chineese dynasties , som of which invented ships capable of sailing and trading around the globe , only to burned by the chineese them selves for internal cultural reasons .
We have no solid reason to believ our own culture is imune to the same internal proces of rejecting progres for cultural reasons …..actualy there are many simptoms pointing in exacly that direction !
To go beyond the stage at which humanity is currently at might lead (eventually) to the irrecoverable reordering of the entire universe into one immense mind. So there can have been none before us. One civilization per universe.
One aspect of SETI that is mentioned too rarely, in my opinion, is that a sufficiently strongly encrypted message could be indistinguishable from random noise for an observer. It is even possible that they would encrypt their messages precisely in order to prevent eavesdropping by curious civilizations like us.
Or maybe we are the colony, in that case they are already here. There is a problem with explaining the origin of life on Earth. Maybe that is because it never happened here? Oh, certainly some will point to the absence of any geological record from early Earth, but that in itself does tell us something, right? If rocks have not survived, how could a fragile, not adapted pattern replication survive events like the formation of our moon? Certainly its hard to tell something about a process which is outside of our realm of perception. However there are thermodynamic constraints that seem to be pretty difficult to surmount without already hardened thermophilic, chemoautotrophic organisms. And why so early in the Planet’s history? One would expect that an unlikely combination of preferences is somewhere along the way and not right from the beginning. It could be selective observer bias, of course.
There’s literature about spread spectrum SETI. I think the most commonly cited paper is by Messerschmitt: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.0547
There is the possible unintended consequence of Hart’s paper* , or at least it seemed so , the termination NASA’s nascent SETI program in 1982 by Senator William Proxmire.
I know it was more than this but moving ‘Fermi’s Problem’ to ‘Fermi’s Paradox’ engendered controversy and fostered a hostile air about funding SETI , and still does.
*Michael H. Hart, “An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 16 (1975): 128–35.
Breakout time is almost here…
Happy to experience the prototype of Hari Seldon’s Second Foundation…
The Skeptic thinks there are 3.24 civs in the galaxy and we’re the .24…
@William, re: why it matters,
One reason why it matters, to some people, is that proof of advanced exo-civilizations might cause some humans with beliefs possibly contrary to the good of our species to question those beliefs. In other words, the world might move closer to an atheist super-majority, as has already happened in the Nordic countries.
You might have a point that mere knowledge of exo-civilizations is not very interesting. It’s already assumed to be true by many anyway. So I do kind of agree. But, if we could gain new knowledge about or from exo-civilizations, imagine the ways humanity could be enriched.
Even if “they” do exist, others have given good reasons why we wouldn’t expect to be receiving radio signals. There’s just no communication-based reason for a high technology to be blasting mega-watts of radio energy in random directions through space.
As for visiting Earth, the reasoning is even simpler. Earth, and earthlike planets in general, have no economic attraction. We humans are obsessed with them, of course, because those are the planets where we anticipate that life would appear, evolve, and develop to become something recognizeabe to us. But that’s just a phase. Once a technological species has the practical ability to leave its home world, it finds that there are far richer sources of available natural resources to sustain itself with. Every system is likely to have icy asteroids and comets, the detritus of its formation. And those bodies, with their abundant water, carbon, nitrogen, metals, electrolite minerals, and organic compounds, are where the real wealth of the galaxy lies. Forget massive gravity wells like Earth, where most of the resources are sequestered in the crust or even the core. Small icy bodies are where these technologies will gravitate (pardon the pun)– they require very low energy to reach, and they provide very high returns. And there are very, very many of them.
Gray is right in suggesting that we should leave Fermi’s name out of this discussion. Not only was he misrepresented; he was not the first.
Pioneering spaceflight theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovski made the basic argument a century ago. Envisioning human expansion throughout the solar system, he reasoned that older and more advanced intelligences must have done so already.
Why don’t we see them? Tsiolkovski suggested that, because older and wiser civilizations know that contact would ruin us, they leave us alone. We have been set aside as a reserve of intelligence; other civilizations will visit us when we are more advanced. In effect, he proposed an idea similar to the “Zoo Theory” long before that theory’s modern publication.
Interesting. However, “why don’t we see them?” raises the question of what to look for, and if we have ever really looked for it. What is the search space? What evidence would we expect? I don’t know the answer to those questions, but I’m not at all sure anyone else does either.
” One civilization per universe.”
A grand vision. It would of course require ultra FTL, the type with flexible destinations and no forward infrastructure requirement. Also assumes the first civilization would actually wish a universal mono culture,and the ability to enforce it in ten million trillion solar systems.
Michael Michaud March 11, 2015 at 12:31
“Why don’t we see them? Tsiolkovski suggested that, because older and wiser civilizations know that contact would ruin us, they leave us alone. We have been set aside as a reserve of intelligence; other civilizations will visit us when we are more advanced. In effect, he proposed an idea similar to the “Zoo Theory” long before that theory’s modern publication.”
We assume many things with this “Prime Directive” to use the Star Trek term. Among the main assumptions are: That aliens will recognize us as younger and less sophisticated versions of themselves at least culturally; that every ETI in the galaxy will obey this rule or that there is one particular alien civilization or an organization of cultures which protect us from all the others; that being “advanced” means no mistakes, misunderstandings, or active behavior against the standard order.
As for the paper linked to in this article: 51 dollars?? No, thank you, much as I would like to read it. I have bought many far more informative books for far less money.
Al Jackson said on March 11, 2015 at 9:56:
“There is the possible unintended consequence of Hart’s paper* , or at least it seemed so , the termination NASA’s nascent SETI program in 1982 by Senator William Proxmire.
“I know it was more than this but moving ‘Fermi’s Problem’ to ‘Fermi’s Paradox’ engendered controversy and fostered a hostile air about funding SETI , and still does.”
I remember when Sky and Telescope magazine dealt with this issue around the same time. The article focused on Tipler’s theory that machines would duplicate themselves endlessly and spread across the galaxy in short order – and focused on little else.
S&T has gotten much better regarding SETI and alien life in the following decades, but it was pretty clear at the time that the subject made your typical amateur and professional astronomer’s feelings range from uncomfortable to outright derisive, in no small part due to the UFO community’s antics. SETI was in the ghetto for a long time and judging by its lack of funding still is in certain key ways. Hopefully this will change now that we have known about exoworlds for the last 20 years.
I fully agree that there is no paradox. The claim that other civilisations exist now or have existed in the past is purely speculative. Our lack of observational evidence for them should be used to constrain scenarios of life in the Galaxy, not used to construct an unnecessary paradox. See my latest on the subject: S. Ashworth, “A Parameter Space as an Improved Tool for Investigating Extraterrestrial Intelligence”, JBIS, June 2014, p.224-231.
Stephen A.
Jim Strom’s comment was very offensive! Please note that the vast majority if religious people, at least here in the USA and other g7 nations, support biological evolution and the big bang. For the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the interaction of science and faith,I suggest the book “Brother Astronomer” by Guy Consolmagno, Jesuit brother who, at the time he wrote the book, was a senior astronomer at the Vatican Observatory. They do mainstream secular astronomy there. Consolmagno holds a B.S. in planetary science from MIT and a PhD in the same subject from the University of Arizona. He said that when the state of Kansas decided not to teach evolution in public school, the Catholic church continued to teach it in Catholic schools. He says the Jesuits see the study of science as a way of worshipping God.
Neutrino78x, my comment was directed to humanity, not the Roman Catholic Church. In addition, the facts you point out are irrelevant. Whether most Jesuits/deists believe in evolution and the Big Bang has no bearing on whether it’s true that proof of exo-civilizations might cause some to question their belief in God or dieties, as the case may be. You talk about the Big Bang and evolution, but I’m talking about the potential discovery of exo-civilizations. Since exo-civilizations have yet to be discovered, we don’t know really know how science-accepting deists would react. I offered only one reason why such a discover could matter, and that reason was based on the premise that increased atheism is good for mankind.
If you take offense to the premise that the world would be better off if more (or all) people stopped believing in deities, well, it’s called an opinion, albeit supported by facts and reason, though this isn’t the place for that discussion. I regret that if that offends you, though I see no reason why it should.
I don’t think we can possibly conceive the motivation of a truly alien civilisation till we encounter it. We live in an era where our scientists consider calling it the “anthropocene” . After ourselves. The anthropocentric era would be better. We just can’t help putting ourselves at the centre of everything. Copicernus was obviously up against a whole it more than a heliocentric universe. An anthropocentric one and we are still at it. We can never understand the philosophy ,if that is the right word even, of alien neurobiology until we encounter it. That is all the reason I need to explain the so called Fermi Paradox. The “Paradox” was just a challenging question ( something Fermi did all the time ) inviting thoughtful replies ,yet it has come to be seen as almost as a physical law like E=mc2. That’s the danger of collecting symptoms together and adopting them as ” syndromes” in medicine and then seeing the them as bone fide illnesses.
That apart the Universe is huge both in terms of space and critically time. Even a million year civilisation only represents the tiniest fraction of a 14 billion year old Universe . The chances of two advanced civilisations living in anything like close proximity ,simultaneously ,are remote in the extreme. “Space is big” as the Encyclopedia Galactica stated so presciently in the Hitchhikers guide to the Universe. It’s follow up, “The Restaurant at the end of the Universe” has a terrible punishment reserved for the most recidivistic felons. “The total perspective vortex” by which these poor souls were made to see how totally small and inconsequential they were in the greater background of the universe . We certainly need a dose of that ! As Arthur C Clarke said , “we are either alone or we are not. Both concepts terrify me.” We will find evidence of life within the next twenty years I’m certain , it’s then just a question of how far our technology can go to understand it’s nature.
Agree with James E Garratt, “Off-Earth intelligent lifeforms could very well have decided not to pursue technological superiority in the directions and to the extent that our Western civilizations have.” Also with Harold Daughety, “Perhaps on the distant planet which I propose the hard-wired pattern is to live conservatively with reverence to all life, and their fields and forests and their villages are ancient beyond our comprehension. Might that be the climatic pattern of all sustainable intelligent life?”
Indeed, the assumption that the technological trajectory which leads to radio transmitters is intelligent is a very questionable idea. Since humans invented radio transmitters, they have burnt through nearly half of their endowment of fossil fuels and more than half of their high quality mineral ores. In addition, they have reduced their remaining wild megafauna and old growth forests by 99%, their fisheries by 90%, and seriously depleted soil fertility, aquifers, and phosphate reserves. This is a strategy more likely to lead to collapse of the civilisation than the stars. The short and sad history of reindeer on St. Matthew Island comes to mind.
Jim Strom, most religions accept existence of exo life, mormons, islam, roman carholic faith are good examples. Its discovery is expected by these religions.I can write more on the subject if needed.
llanitedave is right that about abundant natural resources.Perhaps the only unique resource is a independent culture and civilization, which would be ruined by contact with one millions of years ahead.
Fermi’s Paradox is clearly a paradox, and it’s bizarre to me that Gray is challenging this. Paradox is a vague term and is commonly used to refer to a wide range of linguistic phenomena. What they all seem to have in common is the *appearance* of contradiction. It may turn out to be an actual contradiction, or it may turn out one or more assumed propositions (whether explicit or implicit) is incorrect and the contradiction evaporates. In either case, the appearance of contradiction remains, so the label of paradox remains.
It is possible to write a series of mathematical statements that appear to form a proof that 1 = 2 (and so all numbers are equal). At first glance, it appears to be a contradiction, and a very worrisome one at that. On further scrutiny, a flaw in the proof may be found, so there is no contradiction. The fake proof still looks intuitively convincing, so it is still called a paradox.
The “Fermi Paradox” is not just Hart and Tipler’s reductio. It is the simultaneous assumption not only of the premises of their argument, but also of the statement their argument is leveled against. They singled out a particular assumption to challenge, in just the same way Fermi did. Hart and Tipler challenged the application of the Copernican principle to intelligent life by assuming interstellar travel to be feasible, while Fermi challenged the feasibility of interstellar travel by applying the Copernican principle to intelligent life. The common starting point is the naive assumption of both. Both are questionable, but it is perfectly reasonable to make both assumptions when first approaching the topic and then see where they lead. Well, they end up appearing to contradict each other, so it is indeed a paradox. It’s not meant to be something that stands up to any scrutiny, because then it would be an *actual* contradiction.
It seems best viewed as a heuristic – a naive initial set of assumptions that are pitted against each other, from which we can proceed to explore the possibilities. The post attacks a number of implicit assumptions in the paradox and seems to take this as a weakness in the concept – a reason to remove it from the discussion. To me it’s done just the opposite – validated its utility. The paradox is useful precisely because there are so many unstated assumptions. It presents an obstacle that inspires creative solutions. It provides a framework for digging into its own hidden assumptions, breaking them, and mapping out the problem space.
Michael Michaud March 11, 2015 at 12:31
“Why don’t we see them? Tsiolkovski suggested that, because older and wiser civilizations know that contact would ruin us, they leave us alone. We have been set aside as a reserve of intelligence; other civilizations will visit us when we are more advanced. In effect, he proposed an idea similar to the “Zoo Theory” long before that theory’s modern publication.”
The great spaceflight pioneer Tsiolkowsky could be right, it is incredible how far his cosmic visions went more than 100 years ago. Have a look at this wonderful paper from the Royal Astronomical Society:
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?db_key=AST&bibcode=1995QJRAS..36..369L&letter=.&classic=YES&defaultprint=YES&whole_paper=YES&page=369&epage=369&send=Send+PDF&filetype=.pdf
Joy: Having worked in agricultural chemical R&D the first half of my adult life I know there are horror stories more profound than cutting down the forest. Phosphate fertilizer from calcium phosphate deposits is vitally necessary for modern agriculture, and we are expending it to grow biofuels which do not replace the fossil fuels used, from the farm through harvesting, drying, shipping, processing, and the distribution of hooched-up gasoline.. . . Persistent insecticides are well known, but persistent herbicides are found in estuaries and even in the depths of the ocean. A simple thing like auto wheel weights have spread heavy metal contamination that is rarely seen and to my knowledge never cleaned up when an auto junkyard is repurposed. Sustainable life? Not here.
As to why haven’t we seen “them?” Maybe they just haven’t got here yet.
To me it is SETI itself that turns Fermi’s question into a paradox.
SETI requires at least a hundred ETI in our galaxy transmitting messages with almost unbelievable power, for it to have any chance of success. Not knowing we were here, this situation must have lasted several billion years. If one of those outward looking civilisations spent the same expenditure on space travel they could probably launch an interstellar von Neumann probe per annum for the same expenditure. That would make it, at the very least, a trillion times more likely that they, or their probes, are already than that we can detect a message.
Joy, I am very interested in your figures for the drop in ocean fertility. I have seen similar figures elsewhere, but really want to see peer reviewed sources. I have a very unusual need to find this information which I shall give briefly.
Recently I found that sperm whale coda (their social vocalisations), break down under Duda-Hart analysis to a complexity similar or higher (the sample sizes are never sufficient to the determination of their minimum complexity) to that of human language. This is currently being ignored as an ‘obvious’ red herring.
In peer reviewed research, sperm whales are also the only cetacean that have been shown to fertilise the oceans to a greater extent than the food they consume. I wish to know how great their effect might have been it the past before we launched two genocides against them.
I believe that even the craziest leads should be followed, so PLEASE give me anything relevant here
My vote is for the Zoo Hypothosis, with a sprinkle of Hitch Hiker’s “space is very big”
I mean, would you contact this planet?