The Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > RSF: The Great Space Space > The Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

I think it's a question of time. Even if there are millions of life bearing planets, it's only been a relatively small amount of time, <100yrs, that we were able to detect, let alone announce our presence to anything that could be listening. If there is an ancient intelligent race that could both receive and respond to our transmissions, they'd have to be within 100ly of us to even have a chance of detection. With the Milky Way galaxy being 100,000 light years across, and us being in a relatively sparse arm of it, I think it's a very small chance that all of those conditions are true. Even if there was a bunch of intelligent life out there.

There is also only aroudn 34 or so "earth-like" planets within 50light years of us, and I'd bet there are 100times more within 500 lightyears of us. So maybe in 1000years time, to allow for two way communications, if we still haven't found any evidence of intelligent extraterrastrial life, then maybe we start considering the implications of Fermi. Until then, it's too early to say.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2021 05:46

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 00:43

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

mcbexx posted:

We are at a point where the space debris orbiting earth could soon prevent future space exploration for good.

The Kessler syndrome

The main issue with worrying about that causing space exploration being impossible is this: "However, even a catastrophic Kessler scenario at LEO would pose minimal risk for launches continuing past LEO, or satellites travelling at medium Earth orbit (MEO) or geosynchronous orbit (GEO). The catastrophic scenarios predict an increase in the number of collisions per year, as opposed to a physically impassable barrier to space exploration that occurs in higher orbits."

Like we shouldn't be "polluting LEO" with poo poo, but it's also not an intractable problem. If we really needed to, it would absolutely be possible to cleanup the various orbits.

Ocean Acidification? Huge problem not easily fixed. Cleaning up a beach? Trivial compared to the former. The Kessler Syndrome is more like needing to clean up the beach and less like causing mass oceanic extinction.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2021 19:33

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

mycomancy posted:

I think that prokaryotic life is the rule in the universe, and it's probably everywhere. As pointed out by a previous poster, life on Earth arose about as early as one could imagine possible, and it stayed prokaryotic for billions of years.

The Great Filter, in my opinion, is complexity. On Earth, we had the evolution of eukaryotes happen due to a hybridization of two separate lineages of life, the Eubacteria and the Archae. While previously thought to simply result in the acquisition of a mitochondrion, we now know that the separate genomes of these two branches of life hybridized to produce a third. This event kicks off a drive to increasingly complex organisms in this group only, as Eubacteria and Archae still remain largely unchanged.

The filter here is the chance of this happening, as we don't see multiple hybridizations happening in the eukaryotic lineage so it must be hyper-ultra-rare. I think there's also a "sweet spot" for hybridization to happen: too early and there's not enough genetic diversity for meaningful complexity to arise, too late and the organisms are so different that hybrids have too much of an initial fitness defect to survive.

Are there other filters? Oh most certainly. We're definitely in one right now, the Great Oxygenation Event was another, and the carbon-lock of the Carbinferous Period was a third. But the one that prevents aliens from being everywhere? I'd bet money on jumping to complexity being the reason why. It's even testable (are there slimeballs everywhere?) and likely universal (sacs of RNA won't make spaceships).

No, no vegetables on that Baconator please. Do you take American Express?

While all those events are interesting, there is nothing to suggest they are unique, or even rare. If earth-like planets exist (they do) given billions of years and the right energy inputs, I'd say life would HAVE to exist. Once you have life, you have iterative complexity. Failures disappear after one generation, but successes persist for many many generations and each success opens the door for more failures, but also more successes. Or for another analogy, let's examine the metaphor about the tornado going through a junkyard and building a 747. Assuming the pieces of the 747 exist, but they are just mechanically disassembled (The tornado is strictly a mechanical process in this analogy) and you allow successes to persist, a 747 will be constructed relatively rapidly, and not only that, but the construction becomes inevitable. Or another example on a smaller scale:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bnj1sPfo4Ek

tl;dr a billion years is a LONG time, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable imo.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2021 08:40

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

chaosbreather posted:

Moreover, this topic is steeped in anthropocentrism. First up the idea that an intelligent life capable of using radios, would use radios is totally baseless. Sight and sound, broadcast, culture, need only be primary to humans. There is nothing requiring radio for a species to be interplanetary. Radio seems easy to us but what if it isn’t, or what if hyperradio is actually simple as poo poo but we’re too loving dumb so we get nothing.

Here’s a thought: radio was invented in a time of relative peace, then applied pretty soon after to WWI, in pretty basic form. WWII saw encryption over radio with one time cyphers and Enigma. The Cold War saw numbers stations. Modern covert communication now sees massive use of steganography, not just hiding the message but hiding the fact a message has been sent. If we did slightly more wars, we’d probably need to find a way to communicate without telling enemies that someone is sending messages. If we had been smarter, we would have done that from the start, build it into the tech so even civilian applications would only see static if they weren’t authorised, like cable TV.

Radio is a fundamental property of elctro-magnetism and every star and most planets of sufficient size will have a magnetic field. If you are postulating a spacefaring race that doesn't understand magnets and the relation between magnetism and electricity, you aren't grounded in the physical universe that we actually exist in, you are just describing a cut-rate sci-fi plot and betraying your own ignorance.

You also betray your lack of understanding between radio, a way to communicate, and the fairly difficult problem of real-time coding/decoding, and then immediately jumping into magical thinking of communicating across a distance that is impossible to detect except by anyone except the designated receiver. The fact remains that radio was developed because it was useful, it will be useful to any society that has beings that wish to communicate in a way that their innate communication capability cannot. It remains useful even without magical abilities.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2021 05:02

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

chaosbreather posted:

If manmade radio waves made everyone dizzy and disoriented, there's no way they'd gain popularity for broadcast.

This is the part that belies your fundamental misunderstanding. All energy that is transmitted through space can be considered "radio waves," or specifically EM waves. The "manmade" part is immaterial. The principles of radio work at all frequencies of the EM spectrum. If the current FCC broadcast spectrum caused problems for human society, we would have simply chosen a different band of frequencies, there is an infinite number of to choose from.

quote:

No magical elements are required here for reliable signal camouflage, just continually adjusting the transmitting frequency probably be plenty enough to fool SETI / the enemy.

This is just straight up wrong. How do you think FM radio works?

quote:

There's also anthropocentrism in the idea that every society believes new technology is good and should be adopted broadly and quickly by everyone

We are talking about spacefaring societies or at least civilizations that are producing and consuming a large amount of energy and thus generating a large amount of EM. We aren't considering "every society" including the one you made up that don't live within our universe.

Salt Fish posted:

SETI searches being done today are looking for advertised radio beams that would be deliberately sent out. We don't try to eavesdrop because it would be practically impossible at any reasonable distance.

Since we want to find a deliberate contact attempt the radio signals we calibrate around are where the optimal energy efficiency for broadcasting exists, a few ghz, in the microwave band. We look for frequencies like 21cm which have special physical meaning thats separated from human social pieces.

For SETI to work we would need a powerful radio beam to fall directly on the solar system and even then we're talking about 100 or 1000 light years of realistic distance. We might be capable of seeing signals from 10⁵ stars with our very best radio telescopes. Compare to 10�� stars in the milky way.

For SETI specifically yes, but for radio-telescopes, we are looking at much broader signals. Any radio signals that are detected and don't fall within what we consider "natural" phenomenon, get looked at much more closely (eventually, we only have so many telescopes, and space is pretty big I'm told). If we started picking up alien Hitler starting a global war in some far-off solar system, that would stick out like a sore-thumb compared to anything else we have observed so far.

ate shit on live tv fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Feb 27, 2021

# ¿ Feb 27, 2021 09:05

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

Salt Fish posted:

Thats not really true. For an ordinary TV broadcast on earth the signal is going to be too weak to detect even at the closest stars. Eventually you'd just be collecting single photons and it would be impossible with any technology to discover information in the signal. In practical energy terms you have to ask why some alien would be beaming signals out at a strength where they're interpretable at multiple light years distance. It wouldn't be by accident.

Agreed. I don't mean we'd necessarily see alien Hitler and be able to interpret the broadcast's meaning. But if the origin signal were strong enough, or close enough, what we picked up would be obviously "different" from background radiation and other naturally generated phenomenon. If it's too far away or was too weak we wouldn't pick it up at all, or rather it would be indistinguishable from the usual noise.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2021 16:08

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

Phanatic posted:

This whole post is extremely relevant:

https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39571/how-far-away-would-an-alien-civilization-need-to-be-for-us-to-not-notice-them

nice post, and it supports what im saying.

"We might be able to detect the presence of an EM radiation spectrum that does not match either the cosmic background radiation or what you would expect from natural processes in a solar system. "

though i admit i was very optimistic in my detection capability.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2021 22:58

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

Why does everyone assume that humans aren't special? Is that just one of the postulates Fermi requires for his paradox? I think we are genetic badasses that are the culmination of the survival of at least 5 mass extinction events over billions of years. That's pretty loving special.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2021 05:51

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 00:43

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

We�re an evolutionary dead end insofar as we�re the cause of the sixth mass extinction

Not yet and even though it looks pretty dire right now, it's not guaranteed that we will be extinct even after triggering the 6th.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2021 23:24

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > RSF: The Great Space Space > The Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter