The_Wayward_Admiral
Spacefaring
The_Real_Slim_Shady
Atrox drew this awesome image of the Keldori!
Posts: 1,011
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Post by The_Wayward_Admiral on May 13, 2016 1:02:15 GMT
So you may have heard of the Fermi Paradox, whereby it's weird and kind of worrisome that with so many planets (we know about a few thousand) that we haven't heard anything from anyone.
The Great Filter is the idea that explains this, basically positing that there must be some stage of life that we have to pass through but most civilizations fail at.
Optimistically, it might be that life is rarely started, doesn't last long during the heavy bombardment, doesn't survive the great oxygenation, doesn't survive the great glaciation, doesn't survive meteors or novas, or intelligent beings just don't arise often. The fact that the universe is only 14 billion years old might play into this as well.
Pessimistically, some believe that civilization is not advantageous or that it's simply inevitable that society collapses on itself.
I personally think that the age of the universe is the biggest factor. For half of the universe's life (give or take), the only elements at play were hydrogen, helium, and lithium. Since Earyh is orbiting maybe a fifth or sixth generation star, what if we're the universe's first intelligent beings?
Anyway, just a thread to discuss the Fermi Paradox.
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RoboTrannic
Spacefaring
haunting deviantart
Posts: 1,005
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Post by RoboTrannic on May 13, 2016 3:51:05 GMT
when you think about it ya civs arnt really that beneficial
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Post by Atrox on May 13, 2016 3:57:10 GMT
Y'know I always had trouble imagining the scale of just how large the universe is, but this just made me think about age too.
It took about 300 million years for life to evolve and become as complex as it is today right? That is approximately 2% of the age of the universe. It didnt take Earth that long (relatively) for life to evolve, so I disagree with age being the biggest factor.
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Post by Atrox on May 13, 2016 4:00:26 GMT
when you think about it ya civs arnt really that beneficial What do you mean?
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The_Wayward_Admiral
Spacefaring
The_Real_Slim_Shady
Atrox drew this awesome image of the Keldori!
Posts: 1,011
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Post by The_Wayward_Admiral on May 13, 2016 4:03:43 GMT
Atrox while I cannot vouch for Robotranicrex's meaning, there are a few authors who posit that so far we haven't demonstrated any real staying power. We've been farming for no more than 10,000 years, which is remarkably little time geologically speaking. Tardigrades for example, have been around since before the Permian extinction without even being vertebrates. The argument goes that civilization is nice for us, but there isn't evidence that it leads to long term survival.
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Post by Atrox on May 13, 2016 4:09:35 GMT
The_Wayward_Admiral , that's a good point. All civilizations fall at one point. However civilization has led to great leaps in technological advancement in much shorter spans of time. Advances in medicine help us, as a species, live longer for sure, and other technologies help defend against natural disasters that would normally cull the populations in an ecosystem. If we keep it up, maybe we'll be able to live all the way up to the end of the universe ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Post by mitobox on May 13, 2016 6:55:22 GMT
Y'know I always had trouble imagining the scale of just how large the universe is, but this just made me think about age too. It took about 300 million years for life to evolve and become as complex as it is today right? That is approximately 2% of the age of the universe. It didnt take Earth that long (relatively) for life to evolve, so I disagree with age being the biggest factor. When you think about it, it could have taken more or less time if seemingly random factors were different. Earth's mammals have a wide array of features that snap together just well enough to allow us as we are now (milk to nurture offspring, live birth to remove the burden of eggs, etc.). Just like how dinosaurs having eggs alongside endothermism allowed then to get huge (baby sauropods could fend for themselves). Heck, if it weren't for Cretaceous plants and insects making the lucrative deal that led to flowers, there wouldn't have been fruit to tempt tiny shrew creatures into an arboreal lifestyle. Then, if some random mountains hadn't drifted in an arbitrary direction, there wouldn't have been a rainshadow to dry out a forest and force the tree climbers to walk upright. Not to mention one, ONE, volcano had the entire human race on its knees, but we were lucky enough to escape its grasp and deal with the resulting ice age instead. Kind of makes me think about Thrive players. Unlike real evolution, their actions in the editor have three goals; survive, develop intelligence, and look cool. That means they can get stuff done faster, even if the changes they make don't make much sense as they go (like if early amphibians wound up becoming salamander people for no logical reason).
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Post by Longisquama on May 13, 2016 10:00:10 GMT
Y'know I always had trouble imagining the scale of just how large the universe is, but this just made me think about age too. It took about 300 million years for life to evolve and become as complex as it is today right? That is approximately 2% of the age of the universe. It didnt take Earth that long (relatively) for life to evolve, so I disagree with age being the biggest factor. 300 million years? What do you mean? Life has been for around 4 billion years, almost as much as the Earth itself, and around 30% of the age of the universe. It took1.5 billion for the first eukaryotes to evolve, 3.5 billion for the first animals to evolve, 4 billion for sapient ones. I would say time is a pretty important factor.
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Post by Longisquama on May 13, 2016 10:05:30 GMT
About the Fermi paradox, I suspect the technological singularity plays a big role in it.
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Post by Atrox on May 13, 2016 11:25:11 GMT
Y'know I always had trouble imagining the scale of just how large the universe is, but this just made me think about age too. It took about 300 million years for life to evolve and become as complex as it is today right? That is approximately 2% of the age of the universe. It didnt take Earth that long (relatively) for life to evolve, so I disagree with age being the biggest factor. 300 million years? What do you mean? Life has been for around 4 billion years, almost as much as the Earth itself, and around 30% of the age of the universe. It took1.5 billion for the first eukaryotes to evolve, 3.5 billion for the first animals to evolve, 4 billion for sapient ones. I would say time is a pretty important factor. I guess I didn't check my facts well enough. Thank you for the correction. Holy Belgium we could potentially be the first life forms of the universe then
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Post by Aquos on May 13, 2016 16:57:47 GMT
i personally think we might be one of the first species that's able to send stuff to space in tihs part of the universe atleast
alternetivly maybe going to space and speaking to alien lifeforms just isn't practical or even intresting for extraterriastals maybe there just more intrested in developping their one society or (if it's possible)go live in some kind of virtual reality Matrix style ...
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Post by Captain McDerp on May 13, 2016 17:41:17 GMT
I personally believe simple singlecellular could be quite common around the universe, simple extremophiles could be everywhere on habitable planets. With multicellular life being relatively rare and complex life such a reptiles and mammals being extremely uncommon.
Then, remember that life doesn't evolve towards intelligence. The dinosaurs roamed the earth for millions of years without ever becoming smarter than the most simple mammals. So that would make intelligent life such a humans, capable of wielding tools nearly non-existant at any time.
These civilisations would also having to chronologically overlap to meet eachother. If one dies out before one develops capable ftl spaceflight they would never find eachother. (And judging by our own ability to think ahead and take care of our enviroment, the time a civilisation would exist wouldnt be that long.)
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Post by tjwhale on May 13, 2016 18:35:45 GMT
Another issue is the size of the universe. So say you have a space faring civilisation that can travel at the speed of light which lasts for a million years. Which are both very improbable and epic achievements. Well the most space it could occupy is a 1m light year bubble which is enough to encompass a few galaxies, maybe 100. But this is nothing on a universal scale. Even if were within the first 1000 intelligent space faring species we could easily be the first in our neighbourhood.
I like the idea that one day we will invent a faster than light drive and as soon as we use it thousands of aliens will suddenly appear. Using FTL could be the end of the prime directive, meaning anyone who doesn't have it is not allowed to be interacted with. They'd all jump out of warp a the same time and offer crazy deals like "immortality serum for 20% of the uranium in your solar system" or "a fleet of 10,000 FTL starships in exchange for Jupiter". Would be hard decisions to make. Would be hard to know if you were getting fleeced.
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Post by Atrox on May 13, 2016 19:34:02 GMT
tjwhale that'd be absolutely amazing
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Post by geneticCreation on Aug 5, 2017 23:42:09 GMT
I think it probably has to do with the fact that we just don't have the technology yet to interpret or decode signals that we possibly COULD get, or that we're not using the same technology. Perhaps it's not radiowaves or the like that other species use to communicate cross-planet. Perhaps it's something different or even something that can get around the rules of lightspeed. Also, our definition of life is very skewed to life as we know it, so... There could be many things out there going through space that are aliens and we simply just, don't know?
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Post by BiologicalSomething on Aug 6, 2017 0:39:58 GMT
I think it probably has to do with the fact that we just don't have the technology yet to interpret or decode signals that we possibly COULD get, or that we're not using the same technology. Perhaps it's not radiowaves or the like that other species use to communicate cross-planet. Perhaps it's something different or even something that can get around the rules of lightspeed. Also, our definition of life is very skewed to life as we know it, so... There could be many things out there going through space that are aliens and we simply just, don't know? Not knowing is an excellent point. We don't know what's out there. We don't even know what's in our oceans. For all we know, we know nothing. The secret to space travel could be right under our noses, but we don't know. We say we're intelligent, but that's relative to the life on earth. To whatever's out there, we could might as well not have any intelligence. I also read somewhere that we could've simply evolved too early to encounter other species, and that's a considerable suggestion. I think it's one of three things why we haven't discovered extraterrestrial life- 1. We have no neighbours because we're too early/too late 2. The element necessary for space travel might not exist/is not present on earth or in the solar system 3. We don't know anything about how to find them.
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