axeil posted:

This thread is great and the Fermi Paradox is a legit fascinating thing. I read a great book on it last year:

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life

It is swell, and I read this book too! It's a fascinating read and less full of woo than other books on the same subject.

[quote]
The Drake equation is:

N = R ∗ fp * ne * fl * fi * fc * L

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible (i.e. which are on our current past light cone);

and

R∗ = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space


If you do out the math based on what we know, N should be a very, very high number and yet right now our observed N is 1 (us). So if that's the case one of the numbers here must be spectacularly low and it's unlikely its R, fp, or ne just based on what we've discovered in the last 20+ years. Which means you need at least one very low number for the equation to work out and some of them being low (e.g. fc) implies that humans are extremely likely to destroy themselves.

The "good" news is that L is most likely the value that's really, really low as we already have seen our civilization move away from releasing detectable signals into space as things like terrestrial radio/TV are being deprecated.

Kerning Chameleon posted:

This is why discussions about the Fermi Paradox that don't end with "we simply can't detect them with our lovely instruments" get real facile real fast.

Like, we have people itt that seriously think we actually live in a Lovecraft story, I mean come on.

Deptfordx posted:

That all the fancy handwavy, basically magic, Nanotech self-repair you see in SF shows are not compatible with the actual laws of physics.

Kerning Chameleon posted:

Self repairing nanobots that do not survive well beyond the ionosphere at all.

Cable Guy posted:

I'd have to put Enceladus at least on a par with Europa, and probably above it. Volcanic activity, liquid water, complex organic molecules. A really good candidate for life...

... and its goddam beautiful

Unoriginal Name posted:

What makes people think that humans are intelligent

khwarezm posted:

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

There is pretty much nothing not made up that could make humans go extinct. There is a lot of humans, they live everywhere. They can survive in basically any conditions. Unless you managed to turn the whole earth to lava or something people are going to keep existing.

Probably not a real mechanism for us to get "blasted back to the stone age" either, no matter how much everything sucks, where we all lose language or existing objects vanish, like there is no realistic situation we end up knapping flint again, instead of using all the axes we already made or digging some copper wire out of some abandoned buildings and cold hammering a new axe. Like even if we got mindwiped and didn't recover till every book is rotted away, there is just so much stuff that contains so much information, even if all that survived was a bag of US state quarters or something you could crib a bunch of ideas on a what a boat looks like and a bad map of the coastline.

friendbot2000 posted:

Kerning has already established that he pretty much loathes science in general in other threads. His hatred of NASA is especially weird not only because he has this strange view that colonizing uninhabited planets equates to whitey colonizing Africa, but that everything NASA does in the fields of physics, astronomy, astrophysics, and geoscience is somehow useless and not worth the money.

Kerning Chameleon posted:

See, when I rail against space colonialism, this is the exact sort of poo poo I'm talking about. This is unbelievably narrow-minded, selfish, and geocentric thinking, believing our variety of life is the only valid kind and thus inherently special and deserving of expansion beyond its natural boundries.

but no, tell me again how introducing cane toads to australia was actually cool and good

Hungry posted:

I'm only half-joking when I say that's an incredibly bad idea but not for the reasons you're arguing.

Hello thread! I am the one crazy person who thinks that Active-SETI/METI is incredibly dangerous and stupid because if we're wrong about the answer to the Fermi paradox we'll be dead before we know it.

Hungry posted:

I mean I'm not 100% serious about this, it's more like a terrifying thought-experiment/answer to Fermi.

I've seen it called Dark Forest Theory. What if the reason nobody's talking is because broadcasting your presence to the galaxy is incredibly dangerous? What if the reason we can't see any evidence of alien life is because the only successful species are the ones smart enough to treat the galaxy like a dark forest at night? What if making noise and light attracts things like ... well, things like us humans, which like to colonize and extract resources? What if it's a real bad idea to let on you've got a tasty biosphere already set up, no terraforming needed?

Tree Bucket posted:

While we're talking weaponised Big Fast Rocks, there's a bit in one of the many Kim Stanley Robinson books where an AI arranges for hundreds of pebbles from all over the solar system to hit one particular place at one particular time. It's like being targeted by a big rock, only impossible to detect.

Anyway, this is an excellent thread and I'm glad it's here. I wish there were more like this, but I can't seem to find them- considering the huge number of threads on the forum there *must* be others out there. It's weird.

AGGGGH BEES posted:

The fact that most of the universe hasn't been eaten by endlessly self-replicating robot space probes is pretty good circumstantial evidence that humanity is alone, at least for the moment. It wouldn't take that long (relatively speaking) for such probes to spread throughout the entire galaxy.

khwarezm posted:

I'm a little bit disappointed that so much talk around the Fermi parodox in this thread so far has been fixated on corny sci-fi concepts like a super advanced race of implacable predators that manage to get advanced enough to destroy every other species (for seemingly no reason) effortlessly despite the inevitably massive gaps in time and distance they'd have to deal with under our current understanding of physics. Or the federation from Star Trek enacting the Prime Directive on us even though their giant star spanning empire should be nearly impossible to hide under our current understanding of physics and all it would take is one bad actor among their giant star empire to completely ruin their whole plan.

I want to posit a few more grounded ideas, one I was thinking about recently revolves around the fact that we know that Super Earths are extremely common in the galaxy, and it seems that our Solar System is quite aberrant in not having one (though I've heard that Planet 9 could be a Super Earth, but it's so insanely far away that it doesn't count). Super Earths commonly occupy positions around the parent star similar to our own rocky planets including actual Earth, some scientists have suggested that their greater mass could make them overall much more conductive towards the evolution of life compared to smaller planets like our own, the size will help keep a molten, dynamic core around for a lot longer with the magnetic field to protect the planet (compare against Mars), as well promote the process of plate tectonics which might be critical in maintaining a healthy carbon cycle and continent formation (compare against Venus!) and finally hold on and keep a thick atmosphere (compare against Mercury!). With assumptions like this Super-Earths might actually be the site of the vast majority of life in the universe and perhaps Earth is on the very lowest end of planetary size to keep stable conditions long enough for life like we know it to flourish.

The catch comes with the fact that Super Earths are, well, super, their significantly larger mass makes it far more difficult for any civilization to escape the gravitational pull of the planet using only technology they manage to develop with terrestrial methods and resources. We can already see the gigantic amounts of fuel that needs to be invested on Earth to get even small amounts of material into orbit (and things like Kessler syndrome could make things far worse in the future). If Earth really is on the lowest end of planetary habitability it could mean that it is so ridiculously difficult or simply impossible to create a space faring civilization due to the hard realities of the energy expenditure to get off the vast majority of life supporting planets in existence that it just doesn't happen with any kind of frequency. The universe could be teeming with tens of millions of technological civilizations, but biases in planet suitability mean that the planets most likely to develop stable life end up locking them into a planetary prison permanently as a cruelly ironic twist, stuck waiting out the days until their planet becomes uninhabitable either due to natural processes like their sun brightening or if they ruin things themselves like we seem set to do.

A flip on this could be that planets that are smaller could develop life fine, but somewhere like earth has been blessed with just enough critical resources of things like rare metals that planets with less simply cannot build the technological civilization needed to get into space, even if they wanted, or maybe smaller planets are just naturally more barren which prevents the creation of a big enough critical mass of their local intelligent creature to kick-start civilization (sorry I know that's a bit of a loaded term in this context, but creating high density mass-agricultural societies around fertile areas could well be crucial to end up building rocket ships) and especially industrialization.

LtStorm posted:

An amazing post

Bug Squash posted:

Maybe we'd have to deconstruct a couple of planets to build this.

my dad posted:

I mean, we have a working proof of concept - us.

quote:

The Earth is far more alive than previously thought, according to “deep life” studies that reveal a rich ecosystem beneath our feet that is almost twice the size of all the world’s oceans.

Despite extreme heat, no light, minuscule nutrition and intense pressure, scientists estimate this subterranean biosphere is teeming with between 15bn and 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms, hundreds of times the combined weight of every human on the planet.

khwarezm posted:

This thread could probably do with a second wind so it's probably not aliens... but please god be aliens.

Kerning Chameleon posted:

https://www.cnet.com/news/chinas-moon-lander-sprouted-a-plant-but-now-its-dead/


Of several seeds sent, only one had actually sprouted, and then promptly died afterward.

Yet more evidence organic life has no business ever being in space, and a rather poetic one at that

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I highly doubt you are sad about a cotton seed.

ashpanash posted:

Sure, but there's always some value even in testing things that you think should be obvious.

Kerning Chameleon posted:

Every new thing we learn about space just further contextualizes how puny and irrelevant we are. I would argue persisting in this vain endeavor is actually increasing overall pessimism in our species, and in fact continuing to explore space is the most cynical decision we could make.

If you care about the future of humanity at all, you should be demanding an immediate end to all space scientific research.

Kerning Chameleon posted:

The government can ban more than one thing at a time, you know. There are already plenty of anti-weapons people in the world, and not nearly enough anti-spacers.

Kerning Chameleon posted:

Saw that special on PBS about the moon landings, and while most of it was rather appalling blowjobs to MURICA, SCIENCE, AND gently caress DA RUSSKIES and ended on a naked propaganda note to supprt landing on Mars, I was struck by the civil rights leaders of the day bravely denouncing the endeavor. Dr King himself equated the Apollo Project to the horror of the Vietnam War. Got me thinking, and so I went and found a good article about the immorality of space exploration: The racist language of space exploration:


But no, tell me again about how space colonialism is only upsides.

suck my woke dick posted:

Keming Chameleon bravely standing up for the rights of rocks ITT.