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Hot take: There’s no such thing as the Fermi Paradox, the day I learned anything about radio emissions is the day that theory became bunk to me, the radio bubble surrounding earth is only 75-light-years wide, and the furthest signals are weak and undetectable even with sensitive equipment
The theory rests on the assumption that radio is a universal technology and not a short-lived transitional technology, most of this planet already communicates primarily thru microwaves and fiber optics, even if radio is a common “transitional” technology the magnitudes of time implied in trying to find it at the right time in space makes detection nearly impossible
At a certain distance we can’t distinguish between natural and artificial radio signals, the debates over the WOW! Signal and BLC1 show even if you detect “something” it doesn’t mean much to the wider scientific community
We JUST started looking for techno-signatures in an organized fashion during the last four years, and even that method suffers from similar problems to the radio method (debate over Taby’s Star for instance)
We’re a blind, deaf person in the middle of the woods who occasionally whispers Marco Polo every ten years and then wonders where everyone is
Also thinking that civilization has to conform to human norms. Besides there could be hundreds of alien biospheres relatively close, yet a xeno tree or xeno fish can’t really send back a signal now, could it?
I think the Fermi paradox is anthropomorphic.
There’s an assumption built into it that “civilization” is the end point of life, the “highest” or “most advanced” form of life. But biology doesn’t work that way.
I’m absolutely certain that the universe is filled with organic chemistry and life but the idea that civilization is inevitable or stable seems anthropomorphic. Civilization has barely existed on earth for 5 or 10 thousand years, and it has only been doing stuff that would be detectable from far away for maybe 1 or 2 centuries.
From a sample size or 1 we can already see that is an uncommon state for life to exist in, and it already seems like an unstable niche to occupy.
Life has existed on earth for what 4 billion years, complex life for 500 to 1000 million, and civilization for 10,000 at most. There’s every reason to suppose that life is inevitable when the planet permits that kind of chemistry but practically no basis to assume civilization is inevitable when life exists.
Doesn’t detract from your point, but I think you’re meaning “anthropocentric” lol.
Yeah, the whole thing assumes that the aliens would be using a communications technology that:
- we can actually detect it with our current technology.
- would still be identifiable as communications by completely different alien species.
- wouldn’t just become a garbled mess by the time it reaches its destination.
We’ve had radio technology for about a century, vs the 10,000 years or so of human societies existing. Even as recently as 200 years ago, we’d probably be expecting the aliens to show up on horseback with a handwritten missive to be read to us. We make a lot of assumptions that they would use radio waves to communicate, and would beam radio waves at us, when we could very well be using technology that these aliens abandoned for more advanced communications technology centuries or even millennia ago.
Yeah, my position as a biologist is that, from everything we know, it looks like proto-life started pretty much as soon as conditions on earth made it possible. The chance that there’s no other life in the universe is pretty much just the chance that there are no planets substantially similar to earth (gravity not too crazy, has liquid water, atmosphere, magnetosphere etc) and that’s obviously bunk.
I think people underestimate just how much resources would be required even for our own planet to be fully space faring.
The fuel for our current ships, for example, is in short supply. There is only so much rocket fuel on Earth and each time we send something up requires a LOT. Remember that next time Tesla sends some burger or CEO to space for a PR stunt.
People treat technology and science like it’s some magic thing that will keep getting more advanced to the point it can do any magical thing. But sometimes the answer science gives you is “there is literally not enough matter and energy on our planet to ever do this.” But of course we have these weird infinite growth brainwarms that see technology like a progression line in a video game instead of the result of observing and studying the material world.
Don’t listen to this alien propaganda
The absolute idiot. If we don’t have enough matter, we will simply create more
Aliens pay me good money to post here you better not fuck up my gig.
Bitcoin fixes this.
Fuck I forgot to consider doge
Only to the moon though.
People treat technology and science like it’s some magic thing that will keep getting more advanced to the point it can do any magical thing. But sometimes the answer science gives you is “there is literally not enough matter and energy on our planet to ever do this.”
I blame the Civilization games
Liberal capitalism too, but also the Civilization games
Incidentally, this is one thing I love about Shadow Empire. It’s a 4X game that takes place on a randomly generated planet, all resource deposits are finite, and you have to tailor your economic and military strategy to the planetary conditions and resources available. If the planet’s a lifeless rock, it won’t have any oil reserves, so your motorized and mechanized forces will have to rely on biodiesel or electric engines. No atmosphere but lots of rare earth metals? Get your power from solar panels. Bone-dry desert world? You will fight all-out wars for an underground lake.
This mindset existed long before Civ though.
A space elevator would fix this.
Imagine getting in the spave elevator and some jerk presses all the buttons 😩😡
I’m gonna take the space stairs and hit the stop button on every level.
What do you mean? Is there even enough steel on earth to build something that tall? How would such a structure be possible when we can’t even keep our ground level structures properly maintained?
The current idea is carbon tubes to make the supports light enough, but material science is nowhere near close enough for a space elevator.
and this is why we must build the space staircase first before we embark on the mysteries of the elevator
Oof I’ve heard of a walk-up but this is ridiculous!
The key idea of a space elevator is that it’s being held in tension by a counterweight just past the point of a geosynchronous orbit. The problem of course being that even being in tension like that we don’t have anything that could support its own weight let alone the capacity to construct and place such a massive structure.
A side note is that earth is probably one of the worst places for a space elevator anyways, the moon isn’t an awful choice though.
supposedly we could do one on the moon to lunar orbit with current materials…
except for the gosh dang UV sensitivity
Me if they send me to space
China’s single thorium reactor will take us there
Yeah you’re doing the spaceflight equivalent of the great horse manure crisis. Earth-to-space technology begins with rockets.
What else would possibly produce enough energy? Some imaginary technology we haven’t made yet? Something that defies the laws of matter and energy? We just assume we will find or create something before that fuel runs out, even though there isn’t a solid reason for us to make these assumptions other that “Sci-fi movies told me so.”
Expecting something that we have no reason to assume exists to save us isn’t any different from believing in the second coming.
You’re speaking without any investigation in the matter. In the 21st century, advanced spaceplanes, electromagnetic rail assisted launches (there was even a post about this here, and it concerned China so everyone was a big fan), and sustainable & advanced energy infrastructure that can synthesize fuels is the future of the launch industry. Eventually, costly and complex infrastructure projects such as skyhooks and launch loops can be employed. The task of humanity is to develop the productive forces that enable such projects, not throw our hands up in the air and pretend we will be stuck with the Saturn V and fossil fuels for all eternity.
Thinking that asteroid mining is on the level of ftl travel or penrose spheres is truly a take. This contrarian neo-luddite streak on the left is unconstructive
How is it neo-luddite to accept the reality that we need to carefully plan our resources and not just expect shit will go like the movies? If anything expecting space travel to be like a video game hampers our ability to find solutions that don’t live up the the “space colonial” ideal. Sure, if we figure out how to mine asteroids in my lifetime without expending more resources than we would gain, fine, I’ll eat my hat. But you’re talking a round trip of insanely heavy stuff over unfathomable distances when Space X currently can barely put people in orbit.
You are the one treating spaceflight like a video game here. FTL, stagnancy, and unrealistically efficient rockets are mainstays in that genre. Dialectical materialist analysis of the development of human civilization is not.
Hmm I’ll take your word for it, but I still don’t think it’s unreasonable to consider that the resources of a planet can dictate a civilisations technology.
Of course resources are a limitation. But instead of investigating a supposed limitation and seeing what can be overcome and what is truly fundamental, you have people either giving up and calling the issue intractable or not putting in the work while expecting it to be resolved. Example: liquid fuels. Inside of America there are two wolves—one correctly notes the high carbon cost of liquid hydrocarbons and the high money cost of synthesizing them and concludes there is no future for liquid fuels, while the other hears “synthetic fuels” and assumes the problem is already solved and so electrification need not be hurried. In reality, the high money cost can be overcome with sufficient buildup of renewables, as is beginning to be seen in China and will become obvious in the 2030s.
There are more resources in the solar system though
How do you extract them? How much energy would you be expending by extracting them?
If you don’t have to worry about money you can be very efficient with energy. It just takes a little mass to trick asteroids to leave the belt and hang out near the moon if you don’t have to have it done in time for a quarterly profit.
More iron than we can imagine nice and easy.
Humiliating. Yet another massive W for Earth, the best planet in the universe.
The moment I found out that other planets, even with moons, don’t have proper total solar eclipses I felt very privileged to be an Earthling.
I bet their planet doesnt even have beans
How will aliens ever recoverPLA-NET EARTH
PLA-NET EARTH
Doesn’t the Fermi “Paradox” involve plugging in a lot of purely vibes-based values into the Drake Equation?
I thought it was essentially: the universe is really fucking big so there must be life, so why haven’t we seen it yet?
I think the answer is “The universe is really fucking huge and we haven’t explored even a fraction of it yet.” And “Alien animals do not want to make themselves known or are incapable of making themselves known.” Some alien species that resembles a microscopic sessile sponge colony isn’t going to be obvious to us, for example.
Also, the time scale is practically infinite as well. So infinity in (at least) 4 dimensions leaves a lot of room for empty space
Not being an pverspeculatovw nerd non paradox: there might be guys out there or there might not be but space is cool wither way so we should look at it more regardless. If we find guys, neat. Until them assume no guys
Oh yeah, totally I’m all for space exploration and it would be amazing if we found life. Just because we might not find anything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I just think we should be more careful about the way we do it, so we don’t miss our chance.
BECAUSE the universe is really fucking big.
Yes. I can’t find the original lecture, but here are the lecture notes and the paper that makes the argument that the Drake Equation isn’t necessarily a great argument for or against alien civilizations.
Not only are the assumptions in the Drake equation vibes, but if you tune them to get answers that (a) we are alone in the entire galaxy or (b) we are alone in the entire visible universe. There is also the assumptions that we could easily detect a signal for aliens. There’s also a compelling argument that we simply do not have enough information to clamp down on the parameters.
The Drake equation works exactly because there are many parameters. If you are off on one or all of the values, in most likelihood, the errors cancel out and you have a reasonable estimate for the odds of alien life. At least that’s the idea.
Except they are already vibes based so there is no reason to think the initial approximation is accurate. They could all be massive overestimates. There is no reason they need to regress to the mean.
True, and that uncertainty is something that Drake himself never denied. It’s more of a quick heuristic explanation that outlines the main questions that a search for life would need to answer. I think of it as more of a binary equation that answers: Is there extraterrestrial life or isn’t there? The precise value is not that meaningful.
I think it’s a somewhat useful thought experiment for asking why we don’t observe EM signals like our own (albeit incomplete re: detectability of far off signals). But it is very anthropocentric so it also serves as a useful object of criticism, as even the questions it asks are probably wrong.
It really wasn’t his best work, his discovery of the number of piano tuners in Chicago was much better.
The implication is that they can’t explore the universe because the gravitational pull of their planet is to big to escape?
We managed to escape our gravity well with technology from the 20th century.
K2-18bians could be at our technological level and still not escape their gravity well. I think a planet twice as big as ours would require rockets as heavy as the pyramids of Giza just to reach orbit, never-mind exiting their planet’s orbit into deeper space.
:history-channel:
wiki it says the gravity is 12.43 m/s2
Apparently much less dense
Yeah if Earth’s gravity is 9.8 m/s2, I think that would mean a planet twice the mass would have a gravity of ~96m/s2. Correct me if I’m wrong physicist hexbears.
Edit: upon cursory reading it seems much more complicated than this. Basically the force needed to leave the gravitational pull doesn’t necessarily directly correlate to the gravity exerted by the object, size and distance are involved too
Twice the mass is twice force twice the acceleration. Gravitational force is linear to the mass of one of the objects. It would be 19.6m/s2 if the radius was the same but the radius is larger and that’s inverse quadratic. Double the radius, quarter the acceleration. Although I really doubt that planet is only double our mass.
2.6x the radius of earth, 8.63±1.35 the mass of earth.
Fg=G(m_1 * m_2)/r^2
I think a planet twice as big as ours would require rockets as heavy as the pyramids of Giza just to reach orbit, never-mind exiting their planet’s orbit into deeper space.
Aw hell, this is how we get Stargates
it’s gravity, yes, but also that this is almost definitely an ocean planet with no land. Good luck developing metallurgy underwater, to say nothing of fossil fuels etc
Super soaker spaceship
But also if it’s an ocean planet and doesn’t have a dense iron core, it’s gravity won’t necessarily be greater than the Earth’s
Its likely a hycean world, so closer to neptune than a really really deep ocean world.
This is something I’ve been thinking about. My gut feeling is that life or some life equivalent has independently evolved near countless times, but the whole “why have we not detected signs of some advance alien civilization yet” paradox is explained by memes like these. Just because you have life and even intelligent life doesn’t mean they would be starfaring. People focus on stuff like the habitable zone, but what about the conditions needed for natural furnaces to form or conditions needed to build an artificial furnace? My guess is that a planet that could support a furnace would need:
-
Oxygen. Combustion is needed for oxygen.
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Organic substance as fuel. This could be in the form of hydrocarbons or things like wood.
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Dry land. This is to actually build the furnace. Plus, it’s a lot harder to ignite wet things.
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Not being cold as fuck. I guess I’m just listing the fire triangle at this point lol
From here, it would then come down to whether the planet has anything worth putting into the furnace to smelt.
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What if they just build a really big staircase
I think Led Zeppelin tried this back in the 70s
The meme makes a great point actually. Though I feel it should also be pointed out that there would be many small planets, earth size and smaller, that we struggle to detect. Our detection method works by measuring the dip in starlight as a planet eclipses the star, and it is much easier to detect a large planet with a short orbit. This one orbits in about 30 days, so lots of transits.
thick atmosphere makes spaceplanes easy
You play KSP too?
This doesn’t mean there isn’t life there, they basically just detected fart gas, at no point were they suggesting intelligent life
That’s true, but even if it’s xeno algae farting, the fact it’s a measly 124 light years away basically confirms the Universe is teeming with life
Which gives us an incredibly high numerical value for the f1 factor of the Drake Equation, which then gives us a foundation for the next factor which deals with intelligence emerging
The distance is the most interesting potential aspect of this discovery
I think this is an important point that gets glossed over. Alien life does inlcude stuff such as micro organisms and that is mostly what its going to be when talking about life . Folks just think of stuff like highly advanced civilizations.
Why leave a perfect planet when you can create remote devices to explore the cosmos for you and do more important things like summon the
aww day and such and spend the time thinking of how you will avoid things like the death of your star, heat death of the universe and other ‘threats’.Serious question: Can some science person here give me the more realistic answer on the possibility of life on K2-18b? Because the media always assumes the coolest possibility.
The paper says it has a 3 sigma chance of life given the compounds assuming their methodology is good, scientific proof requires 5 sigma. Its a difference between 99.7% accuracy and near 100% accuracy, kind of important though when we’re talking about shit we have no clue about and can’t observe by conventional means.
It should be noted that the majority of the citations on the paper are the same guy citing himself. I’d take it with a grain of salt until other people can corroborate it. Most other papers say the planet is a hot, small mini-Neptune gas planet with rings probably, maybe a warm enough atmosphere for life. The compounds measured are basically related to farts and decaying plant matter in a hot environment, should smell like mexican food a bit. In a comparison, the planet should have about 20-1000x more plant-fart compounds than we do, some people argue this is evidence of early algal/bacterial growth like on earth’s oceans.
If the other papers are right about the pressure of the atmosphere the water on the planet would behave quite differently than here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid
what is a sigma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68–95–99.7_rule
Basically had to do with standard deviations, for something to be very certain it needs to be beyond 99.7% on accurate equipment.
In the social sciences, a result may be considered statistically significant if its confidence level is of the order of a two-sigma effect (95%), while in particle physics and astrophysics, there is a convention of requiring statistical significance of a five-sigma effect (99.99994% confidence) to qualify as a discovery.
The whole incel thing of a sigma male is supposed to be a male that is in the top percentage of males, thats the whole joke.
There’s a strong clue but it will take more investigation before we know one way or the other.
It could be decades before we are fully confident in either direction (could be less than that), but it’s an exciting prospect.
It’s ultimately going to take multiple lines of evidence. Yes, there are compounds that we think are strong indicators of life; we don’t know how to explain them except for life. However, we can never rule out some other abiotic origin for that compound exists that we simply haven’t discovered yet. We don’t know what we don’t know. Abundant life however is likely to cause all sorts of these biosignature compounds to be present in an atmosphere. If we find a planet with many of these compounds, we’ll have many independent lines of evidence pointing at life being present there. That is how we are likely to finally accept that life has indeed been detected.
Another pathway that may result in the acceptance of a detection of life is us learning more about the origins of life. It’s possible as we learn more about how life started on Earth, we will discover that mechanisms to get it going make it a near inevitability where the necessary conditions exist. That would make its detection much easier to accept.
Put stronger telescope in space now I need to see it for myself
Recent takes are more sceptic. Besides its not a confirmation of life, just a 3 sigma detection of DMS.
They used telescopes to infer that this planet has a specific molecule on it that is known to be made by life on earth and not en masse by any other process.
IMO this is a stretch because life on another planet probably has somewhat different chemistry. There is a massive unfounded bias in all pop exobiology that finding other life means finding stuff just like life on earth.
Which is not to say it isn’t neat but it is literally another planet light years away. We know almost nothing about it.
IMO this is a stretch because life on another planet probably has somewhat different chemistry.
Astronomers are aware of this possibility. But because chemistry as such is pretty certain to be the same everywhere in the universe (confirmed, for instance, by stellar spectroscopy), we can study chemistry in the laboratory to understand the conditions under which chemicals are made. The more we understand chemistry, the smaller the set of unknown abiological methods of producing “biosignature” chemicals and the more certain we can be that a chemical was produced by something biological in origin. I mean yeah, we can say forever that we don’t know everything (that will always be true) but there are some things that we do know pretty damn well enough.
it’s a bias sure but the more similar the life is to us the easier it would be to recognize in the spectrum shit
Yes but it’s actually the opposite of what to look for, understanding evolution. Evolution is historically contingent - it only builds on what it already has. Life on earth has billions of years of a semi-random walk on which life was built. If you replayed it under slightly different conditions you would expect to see something quite different.
For example, we depict aliens as humanoid in fiction, mostly so we can tell storoes. The more imaginative writers might make them look reptilian or something. But there’s no reason to think they would even have bilateral symmetry. Or have cells. Or live on the same spatial or temporal scale. The same applies to biochemistry.
It’s understandable that people would want to look for the familiar to look for life, but our own knowledge of how life on earth operates tells us that we need to look for something fairly unfamiliar.
even so, we can’t really look for what we don’t know to look for. if we take spectra from a billion exoplanets we’d definitely recognize something very similar to ours if that happened to exist in the set.
you drop your phone at night and look for it where the streetlight illuminates because you can’t see in the dark
The problem here is that we don’t know you dropped your phone. Instead of a phone it might be a pool of jelly or an entire asteroid or a lichen thing that eats methane and only lives on the absolute best, truly primo rocks. So when you illuminate it you go, “aww man it’s just a rock!” and move on. And you already know other life isn’t going to be a phone, that’s something for humans in particular. You need to look for the rock dwellers, they are more likely than the phone-havers.
One also has to make peace with the fact that we may not know if there is life in other solar systems for a very, very long time. It probably requires making an actual visit and sending back results. And that would likely take hundreds of thousands of years in our small neighborhood of systems. We can imagine getting really good telescopes before that, I suppose, but they would probably have limits. As in, with what resolution could we make observations via a constellation of telescopes distributed around the solar system? So we can get much better spatial resolution to ask the most important question: is there metabolism?
The problem here is that we don’t know you dropped your phone.
sure maybe it’s in your pocket. the point of the analogy is that you look where you can see, i.e. with bias, not that we’re looking for evidence of silicon fabrication.
The bias is incorrect, though
It makes sense to me why they’d look at stuff that indicates life on earth though, because we don’t yet know what causes life to form, all we have is Earth life. We know life can form on planets like Earth because, well, it has.
Even then, evolution is historically contingent. If you rewound and replayed the tape of life on earth and changed a few early conditions, you’d end up with a very different story. Evolutionary biology teaches us that life on other planets should be different from us more than similar. This also applies at the biochemical level.
It’s understandable that people take your logic and run with it, but it rapidly clashes with evolution. In addition, we don’t actually know what conditions are necessary for abiogenesis (probably not just one kind). Even on our own planet! We know there wasn’t much atmospheric oxygen at the time. And possibly not that much water. Yet exobiologists look for oceanic planets with atmospheric oxygen because that’s what we have. Sure, oxygen is a good electron receptor and can be produced from water (in our case, chlorophyllic photosynthesis), but there is mo reason to think photosynthesis would evolve the same way independently. Exactly the opposite, actually. It should be different. No reason to think there would even be proteins. The chemistry would be very different. And it took over a billion years for chlorophyllic photosynthesis to evolve on earth!
This is one of the legit, actually promising announcements. But still only at the “follow up for more clues” stage.
They probably use stargates
