It's not just the region of the sky with the most radio signals, it's the region of the sky with the signal that's (arguably) most likely to be produced by intelligence, of the ones we've noticed so far - the "WOW!" signal.
> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.
&
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
I could see why the OP wanted to edit it if they were following the submission guidelines. You can make a case to keep the original title as is, but you can also make the case that “WOW! Signal” in the original title sounds like linkbait. So if there’s an error here, it looks like a good faith error in an attempt to follow the guidelines. :)
If you read up on it, that's the actual name of the signal though, exclamation point and all. This isn't some intentional doctoring on OP's behalf to garner clicks.
This distinction is more common online when talking about bad speech (e.g. profanity and racism); content filters simply can't tell if you are using a bad word in anger, or just mentioning its use by others; they merely match the presence of the bad word.
IMHO, the "!" should not be removed as the submission is not "doing things" (i.e. using a "!" to pep up the title ), they are mentioning the well-known existing name of the thing.
I, for one, found the previous title super clear and interesting enough to click further without being clickbait. The new one gives zero information. So thank you for your effort, OP.
We are definitely not alone. The great filter, in my opinion, does not exist. It's only the vastness of space and the relatively short time a civilization produces radio signals that makes it appear this way.
Any civilization that realizes that they are not alone quickly stops bleeding RF signals to outer space, or at least learns to mask them as natural.
Chances that two civilizations, if they detect each other, would be on the same level of development are slim. And once a less technologically advanced civilization meets a more technologically advanced one, game is over soon. Ask Aztecs, or Sioux, or pick any other historical example.
You're anthropomorphizing a hypothetical alien civilization. You can only speculate at what ideologies and motivations drive them, and those drives might (for example) involve maintaining military and technological superiority relative to other civilizations so they can make peaceful contact without risk. Imagine a Borg that seeks out and adapts technology and accumulates knowledge quietly while leaving civilizations to continue developing to a point where they're worth talking to.
There's a long history leading up to those events. I find it unlikely another planet will share it.
There need not be any nefarious intent. Just being around a civilization which is much more advanced is risky: if they operate nearby, they can hit you by mistake or negligence, and whatever consequences are tiny for them may be significant for you. They can just see you as a nuisance and want you to stay sufficiently away, no matter what your opinion is. Think about an anthill near a human settlement. (Don't think about a wasp nest near a human settlement; may be too depressing.)
>> "There are things in the universe billions of years older than either of our races. They are vast, timeless. And if they are aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants…and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us. We know. We've tried. And we've learned we can either stay out from underfoot, or be stepped on."
I think my favorite variation on why we seem alone was how Earth exists in a space version of the Bermuda Triangle, called the Veil of Madness, that all spacefaring civilizations avoid: https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Mankind
We can’t even go as far to assume that an alien species has anything resembling an ideology! even a brief glimpse of an alien intelligence could be completely incomprehensible to us… we could spend a thousand years trying to decipher a single signal and get nowhere.
People get all worked up about dyson spheres and radio signals, but these are so deeply rooted in the human understanding of things in our tiny tiny slice of the universe.
Also even if we got lucky and found AM signal of some alien speech. Would we have any idea how to translate that? My understanding is that we already have human text which we cannot translate. And that has some ties to existing concepts we know of. With truly alien speech we would have zero context or share concepts.
The masking is just a natural result of technological development. We can pick up recognizable signals only from civilizations that have worked out electromagnetic theory but have not yet developed information theory.
50-100 years is probably par for that particular course. A very narrow timespan in the grand scheme of things.
Even now we've adopted encryption, which appears sufficiently random. How long til all signals are just encrypted by default. Anyone picking up those signals would have a hard time proving they're not noise.
Plus our receivers have gotten more sensitive allowing us to reduce transmit power and a lot of systems use much higher frequencies, which are attenuated more strongly in atmosphere. With another 100-200 years of progress it would probably be pretty hard to pick up a radio signal (that isn't intentionally broadcast) at all from the nearest stars.
Radio signals sent to space unintentionally are waste - so over time you’d expect them to be reduced or eliminated just because you want to use lower power.
Yep, and that's another layer of noise on top of the noise that results from efficient spectrum utilization. Only n00bs transmit carriers or intelligible sidebands.
Even now we've adopted encryption, which appears sufficiently random.
When you pick up an encrypted signal, it's still obvious there's a signal there. Radio telescopes will pick up cell phone signals, for example; that's why there is a radio quiet zone near the Green Bank telescope. You just can't decode the message itself without the encryption keys and algorithm.
As long as it's over the thermal floor within its own bandwidth, yes, it will be obvious that there's still a signal there.
When it comes to interplanetary reception, though, any intelligently-constructed signals will likely be below the noise floor unless deliberately broadcast for our benefit. No coherent carrier or sidebands? No spreading sequence? No chance of detection, whether encrypted or not.
Only if it's strong enough to be obvious there's a signal there to begin with. The idea behind SS is to use more bandwidth than necessary, often much more, so that a much-worse SNR can be tolerated.
Many spread-spectrum applications such as GPS use signals that are well below the thermal noise floor by the time they're received. Those signals generally can't be detected without a known sequence to correlate them against.
We can pick up recognizable signals only from civilizations that have worked out electromagnetic theory but have not yet developed information theory.
Really we are more likely to pick up recognizable signals from civilizations that are intentionally trying to contact us. It's possible we could pick up radio leakage, but the signal would be a lot weaker. So there are orders of magnitude more stars that could be intentionally contacting us, vs accidentally leaking a signal. (At least assuming the ratio of the strength of their intentional vs accidental radio emissions is similar to ours.)
And once a less technologically advanced civilization meets a more technologically advanced one, game is over soon.
That is true historically, but historically we weren't at a distance of light years. Given the vastness of the universe, it seems quite possible that by the time we detect another alien civilization via their emissions in the radio spectrum, that civilization has already gone extinct.
More controversially I would pick India and China's encounters with Europe. I think it's possible to argue that both India and China were substantially more technologically advanced than the Europeans when significant links were established. India had maths and spinning (also probably better guns), China had silk, porcelain, paper, printing and the compass; also bigger better ships.
Europeans reached India around 330 BC, in the form of the armies of Alexander the Great. I won't say that India folded in the result; it's rather the Alexander's makeshift empire folded.
There were several meetings of civilizations of comparable level of advancement and strength on Earth. I posit that in space it's significantly less probable, unless we consider these civilizations to also be sisters, all humanoids coming from a common source, like these of Earth.
It doesn’t seem likely to me that a civilization with the ability to travel interstellar distances would have any use at all for our planet or resources. I mean, the amount of matter in “empty” space between them and us would be enormous. What would they need our little rock for?
Not to mention the impracticality of communicating with your home planet across several light years.
If you’re basing this off of what’s happened in the past on this planet, without a good explanation as to why that would apply to an alien civilization, I’d suggest that you’re not using a good model. Bayesian epistemology is not a good way to decide what’s true, because new knowledge is created which makes the old models not work anymore.
I think that making the signal look natural does not need an intent to hide.
It is simply a result of Shannon's entropy. To be detectable, signals have to be broadcasted and low entropy, the opposite of what we need for efficient communication. A signal that makes best use of its bandwidth would be indistinguishable from noise for someone who doesn't know the protocol, it is also likely to be precisely targeted at the recipient and unwanted emissions kept to a minimum in order to limit interference.
It is already happening on earth as we are replacing loud analog TV emissions with more subtle and better targeted cell phone signals.
Any civilization that cares to travel to you to make contact is very likely expansionist. Or at least may have some plans on the space where you happen to dwell.
It doesn't even have to be likely for it to be a worry.
Imagine there are 1% chances that an encounter with an alien civilization spells the end of humanity.
Or 0.1%, or 0.01%
Now roll that dice for millions and millions of years. It's probably a good idea to switch to communication technologies that don't broadcast your location (and your technological unsophistication). Just in case.
You're assuming the probability for life, or at least intelligent life forming, is a lot greater than the amount of habitable places in the observable universe, such that there would be many civilizations. But we don't know what the probability is. It could be rather low, approaching the number of habitable worlds, such that we're alone or very rare, spread apart by vast distances of space and time.
I'd bet that the types of life that may exist in the universe far outclass our narrow definition of life. I get why we only look for life like ours, and I'm quite sure we're excluding the vast majority of life by narrowing the scope so much.
I'm saying that there are absolutely many more habitable planets around than we believe there to be, even among the planets we've observed. We just don't know what to look for, because we don't know what's possible.
There are multiple problems with the claim that a lack of evidence for intelligent life makes it more likely that it doesn't exist.
First, the further out we look, the less recent our data. Every event we observe that's more than 200 light-years away happened before slavery was abolished in the U.S., and well before Earth's first radio emission.
I'm not saying we shouldn't base conclusions on evidence, but I will say that our ability to gather _current_ data about our surroundings is limited to an infinitesimal fraction of the universe. Worse, it degrades with distance. Bacteria were there, but we couldn't see them for a long time. (They were theorized, though, their existence reasoned out and later proved with evidence)
Second, unlike bacteria intelligent life is...well, you know. Suppose we're the last ones to the interstellar party, or at least not the first. We come in, blasting radio waves like a toddler, BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. No signal hygiene whatsoever. Our neighbors on the other hand likely learned a long time ago to hide their presence from all but those they trust, and certainly from those on a lower technological playing field.
If the intelligence we're trying to prove can consciously avoid us finding out about them, then taking absence of evidence as evidence of anything becomes suspect.
Of all the intelligences that could exist - not just those we could detect, mind you - what percentage of those do you think are more advanced than us?
If you asked scientists 30 years ago about some of the extremophile life that we now know to exist, they'd have thought you were insane. They've recently found microbes loving in an asphalt lake in Trinidad. It doesn't have to be an with x% oxygen and x% CO2 and whatever else to support life. It doesn't have to be between -30 and 90 degrees C for things to survive. There's organisms out there that use sulfur compounds for respiration in the way we do oxygen.
So either whatever caused life on Earth was completely unique and couldn't have happened anywhere else, or there's a very good chance there's other life out there. The universe is huge and it's hard for me to believe that earth is the only place where the parameters were met to cause life. From there, it's hard for me to believe that those life forms couldn't adapt to circumstances that are beyond our wildest imagination.
Why is it a fallacy to believe life is elsewhere in the universe? It seems the most likely possibility to me. Of course we have no proof either way - because we've not really looked anywhere (we're not able to, yet), apart from the moon, and a few tens of square metres of Mars (both of which we knew, a priori were barren rocks - but at least they're not too far away). That doesn't make the idea of other life in the universe "wishful thinking", surely?
Why though? Surely you did not do a statistical analysis, because there are too many unknowns:
What is the likelihood of life (as we know it) forming on a given planet? What is the likelihood it will become multicellular? Life on earth was prokaryotic for billions of years and the Cambrian explosion is not yet entirely understood. How likely will it become intelligent? Remember, we don't have any reason to believe that intelligence is in any way a "goal" of evolution. Even if it does, will they have the resources necessary for becoming a technological species? Maybe dolphins are super intelligent, but living in the water and not having opposable thumbs sucks if you want to make tools and perhaps harness the power of fire to build even better tools and machines.
That does not even take into account the various catastrophic events that can happen in the universe where we do not have a good idea of how likely they are. What if a meteor hits at the wrong time? What about gamma ray bursts? What if a Carrington-type event wipes out all electronics? For all we know, these could happen with an average frequency of 100-200 years. Do we have an idea of how likely it is that the climate on a planet stays somewhat stable for a few hundred million years so it doesn't spontaneously become a planet like venus? We just don't have enough data points to assign probabilities there.
We don't know all forms that life can take. We simply do not know what is possible outside our own tiny realm, and our understanding is limited because of that.
In 1000 years, do you think we won't have discovered forms of life that we would say are impossible today? We've discovered things we thought were impossible just 20 years ago!
Maybe so, but what chance do have of detecting those life forms outside of our solar system? At least for now, a technosignature is our best bet, and as interesting as discovering an extremophile on some moon around a planet circling a brown dwarf would be, finding out we're not alone as a communicating civilization is what people really want to know.
While I can't fathom anything else I still believe it's hubris to believe we understand what forms of life may exist in the universe. Maybe we exist right along something else and will never notice each other.
The Great Filter can be a myriad of things. From how improbable life is to the hostility of the Universe. A magnetar has a hiccup and it sterilizes everything in a fifty light year radius. There are a shit ton of things out there that could eradicate life.
And the closest Neutron star is 200 ly away moving our way, thankfully in a safe distance in some 300.000 years. Had this thing flung in a short distance it could disturb planetary trajectories.
Supernovas can have the same effect as magnetars, as also black holes. There could even be a tiny one lurking in the outskirts of our solar system (the so-called planet 9). What I wanted to point out is that the Universe is a very hostile place. There could have been myriads of civilization that were eradicated because of a cosmic event every now and then.
Right now I rather believe in the Great Filter. If you look at e.g. Climate Change and the current war mongering including unprecedented nuclear threats, it's hard to imagine the current technical civilization is long-term survivable. During the next 500 years we will get delayed genetic weapons that can eradicate all of mankind, intelligent killer robots, probably even weapons that can destroy a whole solar system, in combination with exhausting all of Earth's natural resources. I used to be more positive but looking at our own behavior and judging that most intelligent life might evolve from former predators and technology involves heavy resource exploitation, the Great Filter seems quite credible.
It's also worth noting that long-term space survivability seems to be extremely hard to achieve, we haven't even managed to create long-term sustainable fully closed biospheres yet.
One possible solution to the great filter is that we're 'first.' It usually gets dismissed out of hand as both improbable and egotistical (or whatever the whole species level equivalent is). But it's also not impossible, and whatever species was 'first' would always think it improbable that they were first, but there has to be a first (if there are eventually more). Since there are so many unknown unknowns in discussing the great filter or the Drake equation, I'd even argue that being 'first' has as much merit as any other explanation for why we don't see other advanced life out there (even if it's statistically unlikely itself).
Even climate scientists don't argue it'll be extinction level, it'll just be really bad for some regions, great if you live in Siberia and suddenly Canada and Russia have shipping lanes in the arctic and are growing tomatoes. Calm down.
The Great Filter doesn't refer only to extinctions. Anything that makes it highly improbably for a civilization to advance from our current level of technology to significant space colonization would be a Great Filter.
Climate change itself perhaps not. I'd argue there's quite a bit of precedence to believe that the way humans will react to these changes could lead us down that path.
The same as its always been. A handful of people on top of some arbitrary social hierarchy in charge of the lions share of available resources. I believe this type of social organization is in our innate behavior like how insects form colonies and fish school.
The great filter is something with odds around 10^-30 of surviving.
It's hard to find any convincing argument that climate change will destroy our civilization with anything near 1/2 odds. It's a completely different ballpark.
I think it’s a definitional thing: “a great filter” assumes that life is basically everywhere and yet one specific something (or perhaps as many as “a few”) almost always prevents it from taking over a significant fraction of its future light cone.
If there are 10^30 stars in ours, the lower bound on the odds of surpassing it have to be close to that.
Personally I expect there to be many smaller filters rather than a few great filters — 30 things each with a factor of 10 has the same effect, after all.
Personally, abiogenesis by itself looks like something on the 10^-60 to 10^-140 range, so it fully explains everything.
Anyway, there are indeed a few things in our past that look like a 10^-10 odds filter, like each time our genetic encoding changed to increase our codons and the oxygen catastrophe. There are more that look like merely "almost impossible to survive" (I'd guess some ~10^-4 filter) like large asteroid impacts, but not nearly enough to make a difference.
Some will survive but many will die as well. Our modern society has increased the carrying capacity of our planet. As we see climate change disturb food production we will see this carrying capacity fall. If this leads to the collapse of stability in regions the carrying capacity will fall further.
Climate change is a natural fact of our planet, it's been happening since its inception and will continue. Is this current push towards renewables our first forey into terraforming?
Your implicit assumption is that not a single other intelligent species decided to harness the universe by, for example, consuming stars for their raw matter, or building Dyson spheres to black out entire sections of the sky.
It is imo on you to explain why there's a hard cap on the exponential growth of intelligent life that prevents it from EVER reorganizing the universe in its own image. Not 99% of the time — that's not enough for these purposes.
The truth might be than physics are harsh mistress and there is no way to cheat. Thus actually working extra system space colonization is just not something that we or anyone else can do. Maybe even technology to do stellar engineering is out of reach.
This has always seemed like a hopeless star-eyed and wildly impractical idea.
So your robot ship turns up and what happens then?
If it's going to self-replicate it needs to recreate most of the features of an entire industrial civilisation. In our terms that would be metal refinement, chip manufacture, chemical life support and more - all done by bug-free software running on hardware which is perfectly error-free and reliable and lasts indefinitely.
If it's going to seed biological (or equivalent) colonists it needs to be clever enough to find candidate planets with an ideal biosphere and no biological threats. Then it needs to teach the colonists how to survive and colonise.
A lot of SETI and colonisation seems to be based a naive idea that all you have to do is get from A to B and you've solved your expansion problem.
In reality propulsion is just the loading screen. Winning the game is a much harder challenge. So many things that can break, fail, be destroyed by chance, or go wrong because of design flaws that it's an insanely difficult problem without very much more advanced tech.
It all depends on the goals behind leaving ones star system. If the goal is biological colonization, sending genetic material (or even better a gene database) across large spans of distance and time is far more practical than a generation ship or suspended animation. If the goal is to let your sentient machines explore then you don't even have to be burdened with recreating biological life.
To establish supply lines. If Alpha Centauri has something of value you could send out a self replicating robotic AI entity. It establishes its footing then start sending deliveries to Earth. If each one way trip takes 50 years, after say 120 years you could have a steady supply of resources.
You can only get so much power before something vaporizes. Some sort of ship emitting enough power to be detected at a non-trivial distance from Earth (see inverse square law) would vaporize itself.
Just because stealth in space doesn't work doesn't automatically mean you can see everything in space at all times. We need to build giant telescopes to see stars thanks to the inverse square law. The bigger our telescopes with better light collection the narrower their field of view. An antimatter spaceship could fly past Pluto tomorrow and we could easily miss it since we can't monitor all 4πr^2 of the sky at once with powerful telescopes.
The concept of the Great Filter is a shallow view on evolution.
Humans are likely at the end of our biological evolution. The next steps of human artificial evolution will accelerate which means extra terrestrial intelligence is unrecognizable to us currently.
We look for modern human-like civilizations, and those obviously won't exist much.
Not the first time I've said this but it's highly unlikely that we'll detect technological civilizations through radio emissions. We've had this kind of radio emission but it's incredibly brief so for Earth, you'd have to be listening for a few decades over the billions of years Earth has existed. That's incredibly unlikely.
The far more likely detection method is IR signatures, specifically from Dyson Swarms. A Dyson Swarm is not a rigid sphere (a confusion caused in part by the original name "Dyson Sphere"). It is a collection of orbitals with the intent of making full use of a star's energy output. The beauty of this is it's all rather low-tech needing little more than solar power, stainless steel level materials science and (this is the big one but is an engineering problem not a science one) getting access to basic raw materials.
Just like a cloud looks solid despite being water droplets, a complete Dyson Swarm would be the same. The visible light would be blocked out.
But here's where the IR part comes in. The only way to dissipate heat in space is to radiate it away. A habitat will have to do this. At any reasonable temperature the signature of that radiated heat is as IR radiation determined by the temperature of the radiating object. That's physics.
So if you see stars with low visible light output but shines like a beacon in the IR specturm (comparatively) that's a good candidate for a Dyson Swarm because stars don't otherwise look anything like that. This is what makes any "Hidden Aliens" type scenarios rather implausible. You just can't hide these things.
Let me add this perspective: on Earth we consume (IIRC) about 10^11 Watts of energy. The Sun's energy output is in the order of 10^26 Watts. It is almost unfathomable what you could do with that much power. That's using humanity's entire energy consumption about every 30 nanoseconds.
So what's more likely: 1. Detecting a few decades of radio emissions or 2. the IR signature of what would likely be millions of years?
So I applaud any investigation into the wow! signal just like I do of FRBs. We should understand likely causes but technological life? It almost certainly isn't.
No stake in this game, but your likeliness assumption depends on the idea that a civilization could get to the point of creating a Dyson Swarm. If civilizations are statistically likely to destroy themselves before then, 'detecting a few decades of radio emissions' could be the only scenario.
Or civilizations find a better way to generate energy.
Why would you build this big mass around a star when you can create your own, much more efficient fusion reactor where and when you need it? Stars are insanely inefficient; they convert less than 1% of their mass into energy, take billions of years to do it, and you can’t turn them off when you aren’t using them. Plus, if you wanted to use it for some exotic warp drive or something, you would have to haul the mass of a star around. None of it really makes sense to me.
Or civilizations stop growing and never get to a Dyson something stage. You're a hundred billion or so immortal beings that can engineer their very wants and propensities, with a trillion autonomous robot minions, near-inexhaustible amounts of raw materials from asteroids, and more than enough renewable energy to live very happily ever after, why keep growing? Maybe the great filter is just that, a shift in priorities that prevents the others from getting big enough to be easily detectable.
The most likely alternative energy soruce is fusion. Personally I'm not convinced this will ever be commercial. I'm not saying it won't be but there are huge problems to overcome, most notably destroying the container and plasma turbulence.
We already have the tech for space-based solar. Putting it in space makes it much more efficient. It's relatively low tech and doesn't require exotic materials or solving the massive engineering problems that fusion (for example) does.
Then there are other way more exotic methods (eg antimatter, black holes).
But all this misses the point. If you generated 10^26 Watts of power on Earth using fusion power you would still need to dissipate that heat into space or you'd quickly cook the Earth. So you're pretty much back to where you started.
What I like about the Dyson Swarm idea is that it requires no new physics and is relatively low-tech. So even if there is something far-future that's an option (eg antimatter, black holes) you have to ask questions like: Will everyone reach that point? Will civilizations build Dyson Swarms as an intermediate step anyway? How long is that reality? Will there still be a mixed-use future with both space-based solar and exotic enegy generation?
The Sun radiates a ton of energy into space. Capturing it is relatively simple. Dismissing that seems to defy credulity (IMHO).
Yeah any civilization capable of building a dyson swarm could probably develop technology to dissasemble a star and use its matter for a more efficient nuclear process. I'm not sure how you would practically go about doing that though, a dyson swarm at least is relatively simple (in principle) to construct
> "Our best interpretation so far is that we caught this binary system in a moment shortly after one of the stars had sucked the atmosphere off its companion star, said co-author Julia Bodensteiner, an ESO fellow in Germany. "This is a common phenomenon in close binary systems, sometimes referred to as 'stellar vampirism' in the press. While the donor star was stripped of some of its material, the recipient star began to spin more rapidly."
The efficiency of stellar fusion doesn't matter, only the cost does. Whether or not humanity decides to harvest it, the sun emits a ludicrous amount of energy for free, just waiting to be captured with today's tech.
Of course, you'd never want to actually use a Dyson Thing to ever transmit 100% of the Sun's energy to Earth, because all energy turns to heat eventually and you'd scour the planet clean from all the inevitable waste heat.
The second possibility is that there’s just another form of communication using a known or unknown physics phenomena which becomes common for long term usage. There’s this baked in presumption that we have discovered all of the basic technology and physics in the last couple hundred years that civilizations would be using for millions of years.
In the context of the Fermi Paradox, that's not really an issue. Let me explain.
Imagine the chance of a civilization getting from our point to a Dyson Swarm without destroying themselves is 1% for wahtever reasons you like. If there are 10,000 equivalents to us within 10,000 light years it becomes incredibly likely we won't see one of these. You can argue we're "first" but being "first" out of 100 or 10,000 civilizations gets unlikely.
Now imagine there are 5 instead of 10,000. Then not seeing any gets much more likely.
So my point is that not seeing any evidence of these so far is still evidence of something and that something is most likely to be that civilizations reaching even our point is rare.
As for destruction of a species at our point, that's a whole separeate avenue of discussion. But the short version is that this is incredibly likely. Even if all the superviruses get released and all the nuclear weapons get detonated humanity will still likely survive.
A lot of our advances were delayed not because that advance is hard but because we didn't know any better and just coming up with that idea is the problem. Once you know the structure of matter and ideas like smelting steel (which is realtively low tech) can be recovered way quicker than they're lost.
1,000 years ago we were throwing spears at each other. A little over 100 years ago we took our first flight. In the last 50+ years we've gone from landing on the Moon to reducing LEO payload costs from $50,000+/kg to arguably <$1,000/kg and it's likely in the next 20 years that'll come down to possibly as low as $100/kg.
Barring some cosmic catastrophe it seems that permanent habitation of orbitals within the next 1,000 is pretty conservative.
Good explanation, but I disagree about the improbability of being “first”. Probability doesn’t apply when taking about why we are conscious at this moment in time. The same applies to the why I experiencing consciousness as a 21st century human verses a 50,000 BC human. Unless we propose that there is a unique pre-existing soul that gets assigned to a single human body out of every single human who will ever exist, consciousness is just a non-individualized phenomenon of the brain and has a 100% chance of existing for every human who will ever exist.
When you look at it this way, the idea of being “first” is actually the most simple solution to the Fermi paradox. It fits with what we see (or rather don’t see) without denying what history shows us: life seems to have sprung up quite easily on earth and by its nature is driven toward intelligence, insofar as intelligence is at root the capacity to predict and control the world around us. Non-intelligence can flourish as long as conditions in its world don’t diverge from the survival patterns encoded into biology. Only intelligence is capable of adapting to new and changing circumstances. Ironically, the harder it is for life to avoid annihilation, the more that evolution needs to select for intelligence. The same is true even for self-annihilation: we will have to be smarter to avoid it, not dumber.
Additionally, why would we expect earth to have evolved intelligent life if another intelligent species spread and settled across the galaxy?
Not the OP, but if you think about it, putting devices at Lagrange points is in some ways the start of the process of building one.
The JWT is the most famous device at such a point, but there are a few others as well. [0]
The great thing about a swarm is that you can do it one at a time. Change the timescale to a thousand years or more, and there implied size even with our current level of tech would be nearly unimaginable compared to what we have today, while probably nowhere near a sphere.
— - -
EDIT: meant to add - even if the world were destroyed today, the JWT would still transmit signals for some time (I don’t know it’s design lifetime, but likely years if not decades).
I'm not sure but there is question also about resources. Let's say we turn all rocky objects excluding most of Earth and our Moon in the solar system to Dyson swarm. Would this have any noticeable effect on how we show outwards? There is lot of dust around solar system already and asteroid belt is also there.
No stake, but what if a civilization just doesn't care any more? For instance, we all download our consciousness into the Singularity and our every wish is fulfilled. Why bother doing anything else as long as you have enough solar power hitting your planet's surface for whatever you are currently doing?
This assumes everyone in the civilization would want to do that, including any AIs. We don't have an example for history or contemporary society where this is true. Not everyone wants to immerse themselves in digital entertainment, despite the proliferation of it. People engage in a wide range of activities, some of them which require deprivations and real danger, like climbing mountains. It would be odd if nobody from a civilization retained an interest in exploring space, with the possibility of finding something truly alien.
You assume mass competence of different governments in different countries over a dozen administrations. That’s a mass conspiracy theory, one which seems pretty much impossible.
And with all the media stories about alien life with laughable grainy footage of people walking in stilts and anal probes, what signal would you use to be able to determine what the "truth" is on alien contact? Would it be "your gut feeling"?
There's literally so much mainstream disinformation in the UFO space that there is zero chance that someone casually be able to figure out what's fact from fiction. The noise is so high that the signal is effectively buried.
So I disagree with your assessment that the truth would be viral. Most of the human population has already been inoculated to a viral UFO truth narrative.
I mean, it makes sense. If we had definitive proof that alien life existed a large portion of society would go absolutely bonkers. I'm pretty sure I would.
The Dyson sphere hypothesis always bothered me because it rests on a lot of assumptions, most of them are anthropomorphic in nature, unless, of course, the hypothesis is only meant to recognize a very specific, human-like civilizations with human-like motivations and needs.
Who is to say that alien life would form human-like civilizations at all? Or that Dyson spheres are the "obvious" next steps for even our own civilization? Or that Dyson spheres would even suit the use cases of alien, or human, civilizations?
Life seems way more likely to evolve in a gravity well. That creates certain constraints. Likewise, it's hard to imagine how life would become a spacefaring species without some form of social organization (ie they'd need to be social creatures).
And thing slike generating and using energy and creating living area also seem to be quite fundamental.
An alternative is for a meatbag civilization to go virtual. That's possible of course but computing power is a function of energy expenditure so you're kind of back where you started.
We know of one instance of a civilization broadcasting radio waves. But a Dyson Swarm has never been seen, it's purely speculative at this point. Uncertainty that Dyson Swarms ever exist changes the expected outcome of searching for them.
It's interesting that we're building a poor man's Dyson swarm of sorts. More and more of our communications are conducted along waveguides -- fiber optics -- that leak no signal. Remaining radio signals are being engineered to operate at lower power and be increasingly hard to distinguish from noise. And our long distance power transmission might switch to DC any day now. This took roughly a century from our first radio emanations, so the time frame for picking us up from a distance might be pretty short.
Another civilization might notice the IR signature of chemical changes to our atmosphere, as a clue that we're harboring intelligent life.
They probably assume that if we're smart, we're not going to try to communicate outside of our own solar system by radio. Even with a big enough antenna, radio signals eventually spread out and are governed by the inverse square law. We'd be better off sending out a matter-based container that remains intact along its journey, and can be programmed to engage in short-distance communications at its destination. Such a thing could also steer itself if it receives better information.
I find the concept of Dyson swarms or spheres to be too grounded in what we humans would do now to capture that sort of energy. What are they going to use all that energy for anyway? We may as well discuss how alien civilizations handle mortgage interest rates.
We've got no concept of power requirements or generating capacity for even our own species given a few thousand years. No need to be projecting our own technology onto another potentially intelligent civilization.
Dyson swarms are fascinating concepts, but as we are learning about our own ever increasing energy requirements harvested from our ecosystem, moving around too much energy in a complex system can have undesirable consequences.
I would imagine that a planetary system as a whole has a 'climate' driven by it's host star, and redirecting large amounts of that energy would have unpredictable consequences. While most of the suns energy does leak off into interstellar space, before it reaches that point it interacts with various bodies big and small, solid and gaseous, it generates magnetic fields and powers phenomena we may not be aware of.
Perhaps the choice of creating a Dyson swarm IS the great filter, and any civilization that has achieved it finds itself in a state of 'solar climate crisis'.
Whenever these discussions on mega structures come up I feel compelled to mention the ratios of mass-energy in the universe.
~5% of the universe is made up of the stuff you and I are. Most of that is hydrogen and helium, cooking in stars.
~20% of the universe is dark matter. We know very little about it except that it falls down.
~75% of the universe is 'dark energy'. I use quotes because we know almost nothing about it except that it seems to fall up (!?).
Give us another 500 years and who knows what the %s will look like. We could be missing dozens of whole categories still.
So when talking about aliens and hyper civilizations, I'm on the side that we know too little to even properly speculate. Like goldfish stuck in a pond.
That said, yeah, it's suuuuper fun to speculate about this stuff. I enjoy it a lot too.
Energy is the ultimate limiting factor in everything we do. Cheaper and more abundant energy creates applications just like increasing bandwidth leads to new applications (eg video is really predicated on megabit+ connections).
But two things spring to mind:
1. Computing power. AGI is an obvious one. But can you imagine the virtual worlds people could lose themselves in or even live in permanently? and
2. Interstellar travel ie space highways. Curently interstellar travel is effectively predicated fusion power (or something more exotic) because of the reaction mass problem. But another possibility is concentrating sunlight to accelerate vessels out of the Solar System. This is currently the likeliest scenario for reaching a high percentage of light speed.
The SETI assumption is that some alien civilizations want to make themselves known, and radio is the easiest way to do this. It would mean committing to a long term project of beaming powerful radio signals at candidate star systems. So we just need to scan radio frequencies for enough stars before we stumble across a beacon.
Are there other phenomena that have similar affects on a star? Dust clouds?
I’m not really familiar with astronomy but I did follow the story around Tabby’s Star, which dimmed over a very short period. People threw around the idea of a Dyson swarm, but, I believe the most likely source of the dimming is believed to be a passing dust cloud.
I have come to the same conclusion. More than likely we’ll know about other civilizations not from radio waves but from either a celestial event they have created or by them visiting us (and letting us know).
Searching for radio waves is like digging for celestial dinosaurs without a shovel. Just hoping there’s a fossil on the top soil.
"We've had this kind of radio emission but it's incredibly brief so for Earth, you'd have to be listening for a few decades over the billions of years Earth has existed."
This signal could have been repeating every 100 years for billions of years, for all we know.
The question is if we can direct the radiating of heat. So instead of an omnidirectional beacon it could be directed towards a target and as such reduce the probability of being detected.
> In fact, if we analyse the history of (the few) radio signals that humanity have sent to several targets in the hope of contacting a civilization, none of those transmissions had a long duration or were repeatedly sent for a long time. [...] An extraterrestrial civilization could have opted to behave in a similar manner.
Except SETI sends the equivalent of a greeting card, it would be futile to send a big buzz without information because the huge distances forbid a conversation. This means that the WOW signal should have decoder-friendly information, but IIRC it didn't.
Reading the Abstract I can't help but wonder if their scientists discovered the same thing about us and pointed their 'eyes' (or whatever!) this way. Fun to think about.
The actual title is "An approximation to determine the source of the WOW! Signal"
It does not say that a sun like star was found in a region of the sky with the "most" radio signals.
You can find sun like stars anywhere. It's an analysis of whether there are sun like stars in a region of the sky where the "wow!" signal was detected. That signal was extremely powerful, but has never been detected again.
> In this article an attempt is made to create a list of the possible sources of the signal assuming that, if it was produced by an extraterrestrial civilization, their exoplanet could be similar to Earth.
Citation needed. Quite simply there is no reason given, or obvious, that the exoplanet should be similar to Earth. (Though many Star Trek alien worlds look a lot like California.)
Why would you even bother searching for extraterrestrial works that are not as nice as California? Nobody is going to travel 50,000 light years to get to a colder, drier Saskatchewan.
In some seriousness though, the total range of possibilities is almost endless. You have to start somewhere. Best to start with things you might actually understand.
It's because Earth is the only planet we know of with life. In particular, the environment to support complex life long enough for an intelligent civilization to emerge. There could be other kinds of planets where this occurs, but of course we don't know about them. It could be that the conditions on Earth are a rare combination needed for intelligent civilizations. Or at least, one of the few ones.
I've been to a couple of the planets in the Star Trek world. In fact, there's a portal right off a California highway that will transport you directly to one of these worlds if you can park your car.
Has anyone heard anything about a supposedly classified version of the story that goes into deeper detail as to why this signal was even more significant?
How would you feel if 6EQUJ5 happened to be the passphrase for the day that the operator used tty into the telescope's systems?
I guess if anything, it increases the chances that there is some memory leak or buffer overflow somewhere.
Sadly 1800 light years away means transmission to 2MASS 19281982-2640123 is impractical at best but observing it more to determine if other techno signals originate is a worthwhile endeavor.
The ghosts of a distant civilization may still hold clues and even the knowledge that 1800 years ago we were potentially not alone is still an existential epiphany we are all hoping for.
I would guess that if we are technologically advanced species we will. Though there is really question could we discern those signals. Probably there would be push to maximise the usage of available spectrum and then minimize use of power and probably even look into massive mimo.
Or would we have transitioned to highly directed laser pulses, or perhaps using a medium not yet discovered? Since we are still fumbling in the dark about fundamental physics, having no grand unifying theory between large and small, or even much progress in understanding gravity, it is entirely possible that we wouldn't be using radio because we found something much better.
A small note: a Grand Unified Theory is not a theory that unifies the large and small (presumably you mean something that solves the measurement problem in QM), it is a single theory that unifies the electro-weak force and the strong force, leaving us with just two fundamental forces: the unified one and gravity. Solving the measurement problem is necessary for having a complete picture of the universe, but a GUT is not - it is logically possible for the universe to have several different fundamental forces; but it's not logically possible for the macrocosm not to be reducible to the movement of its constituent particles.
Other than as an inception agreement for a cult (has someone already written that book, other than L Ron Hubbard) 1800 years is unfortunately a very long time in the scale of any human project.
I guess it would depend on the ship... Though I am reading Rendezvous With Rama right now (my first time), which has completely changed my imagining of space ships. So much of sci-fi owes so much to Artur C. Clarke. I knew, but I didn't realize until I read more and more =/
After 72 generations on a ship, it’s possible the occupants won’t even know they are on a ship (fictionalized by Brian Aldiss in the excellent book “Non-Stop”).
And if they know they’re on a ship, why would they leave? After all, it is home and will have been for ages.
Also if you can build a space habitat that can support 72 generations. Why ship it away anyway? That is bit nasty move to those eventual descendants. Instead put it orbit somewhere in system. Where you have at least chance to maintain or rescue the people. And save a lot on propulsion. Just build enough of them house people you need.
I never understood the whole colonization for sake of colonization. In past it was either glory or better living conditions. And you will have much better living conditions if you don't send it to empty space on unknown risky voyage...
I have always wondered, how do astronomers identify a particular star? I assume there’s some kind of coordinate system, but how do they keep track of everything with star systems revolving around galaxies which itself are also moving and/or rotating as well as the earth moving and the universe always expanding?
Then there are a bunch of different coordinate systems, you usually want to be doing lookups like "I have this particular telescope at this particular location and orientation, how should I configure it to point at this celestial object" and there is typically some astropy library function that will figure that stuff out for you.
In practice the stuff outside our solar system doesn't change its apparent motion much from our point of view. The further away an object, the less its apparent location changes. So these databases get updated every once in a while.
Well, it isn't really that hard even for nearby stars. You need to be sure to get an updated version of the library like once per decade. I think once you're further away than 100 or so light years the star movement is no longer apparent, and our galaxy goes up to 100,000 light years away or so, so most of the stars in the Milky Way are still far enough away that there's no apparent movement. These numbers are a bit of a guess and I could be off.
Spectrum, brightness, etc. all help, but mostly the fact that they don't move relative to other stars very fast on a human timeframe. Even the closest star only shows motion over a decade or so. https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2013/22/3192-Im...
I can't understand SETI at all. We have been listening to the sky for over 40 years with radio scopes and have found nothing, yet funding is persistently available to keep it up. Meanwhile, there are credible reports of UFO/UAP/whatever flying about and nobody will put sensors out to try to gather data on those things. Just recently the US congress has hearings about how the US does not really control its own airspace due to these objects buzzing about, many of which are reported to so radically outperform available human tech that there is only one plausible explanation for them. Yet the SETI community is complete crickets on this issue. Is the goal of SETI to fail? Is it just a radio astronomer job program? Is the UFO stigma really that great? I honestly don't understand doing something that fails consistently when there is ample evidence of a successful outcome by observing things right here on Earth.
Possibly it's just a matter of astronomers being particularly interested in this topic and pursuing it the way they're best qualified to, because we happen to already have all sorts of equipment for gathering signals.
I like the idea of gathering more data on UFO sightings as there have been very credible reports shared by the military lately, but what other sensors do you think would be practical to deploy? They may happen a lot overall, but you can't predict where to place sensors. We see them now because someone happens to have a camera pointed in the right direction, or because they show up on some broad-area radar. What else could be deployed in a practical way to gather meaningful data?
They observe things right here on Earth, even up to the orbit of satellites. That effort, no matter how secretive, is very well funded. Now, looking for a needle in the universal hay stack takes time and dedication, you can't seriously expect a massive sky scan to be completed in four decades, specially when the funding is not that generous.
