Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Fermi Paradox

The Fermi paradox essentially says that if there?s extraterrestrial high technology intelligence anywhere they should have been here because if they travel at the speed of light, the galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, it takes you 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. The galaxy is 10 billion years old, they should be here. And if you say you can?t travel at the speed of light, take a tenth of the speed of light, a hundredth of the speed of light, still much less than the age of the galaxy.

If there are really a lot of alien societies, then some of them might have spread out.

Fermi realized that any civilization with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial incentive could rapidly colonize the entire Galaxy. Within ten million years, every star system could be brought under the wing of empire. Ten million years may sound long, but in fact it's quite short compared with the age of the Galaxy, which is roughly ten thousand million years.


If "they" are "out there" then where are "they" and why can SETI, for instance, not detect "them"?

The fact that aliens don't seem to be walking our planet apparently implies that there are no extraterrestrials anywhere among the vast tracts of the Galaxy. Possibly so.

Sincerely,

More alarmingly, we should ourselves be living in such a galactic civilization, see here.

My favorite solution to this problem is as follows. The technology you need to colonize the galaxy is a bit more than we have today, but it is certainly within reach of civilizations such as ours. However, intelligent creatures are in a certain sense ''technology'' too. What I mean is that people can sometimes be replaced by machines and/or computers. No employer will hire people if he can buy a cheap machine that can do the same job.

To completely replace humans you also need a bit more technology than we have today. Using the economic argument I gave above, you should expect that humans will be replaced by machines soon after the technology to do that arises. Of course this will be a gradual process, because humans won't vanish all of a sudden, but they will become worthless. Most humans will probably decide not to have children anymore. Remaining people will no longer be the dominant creatures on earth, just like today's Chimpanzees.


So, when will humans be replaced by machines? Clearly it doesn't make economic sense to develop an ''intelligent'' robot for many tens of billions of dollars that can barely outcompete a retarded child. However, if we decide to go to mars to build a base using humans for a few hundred billion dollars then it does make sense to spen tens of billions to develop more intelligent robots.

You can imagine a robot with the intelligence of a mouse that is able to search for fossiles on Mars. If that saves you from sending humans to Mars for that mission, you could save 100 billion dollars even if it takes, say, 20 billion dollars to develop such a robot.


Humans are simply not suitable to survive in space, but robots that we can make are. Economics will then drive the development of ever more intelligent robots once we decide to explore space. Those robots will then also replace us here on Earth.


I think that any machine civilization will become so alien to anything we would call a civilization that we won't be able to recognise one. Machines could have colonized many planets in our galaxy, but how would we know?

Interesting take, Count Iblis II. If an, intelligent and technologically advaced, alien species has a finite lifespan, such as ours... then robotics would make great sense for space exploration. But what if this species has mastered longevity and space travel ( to the extent that they can bend space, manipulate wormholes, or even time travel)? I would rather survive as a human (as is) than as computer code travelling in a robotic body. OTOH, if "surviving" as a robot prolongs life and enhances our physical and mental acuity then...

I get the sense that, presently, humanity is thousands of years away from any serious space exploration. Serious, in the sense, that placing human/robotic colonies in other star systems. Surely, we have very very much to learn about our own solar system - let alone others.

Sincerely,

Mung offered:

"If "they" are "out there" then where are "they" and why can SETI, for instance, not detect "them"?

The fact that aliens don't seem to be walking our planet apparently implies that there are no extraterrestrials anywhere among the vast tracts of the Galaxy. Possibly so."

Rep: Quite right for todays reasoning.

Astronomers observations place all objects. just in our Galaxy, very far from each other. If we speculate that there are other Solar Systems we do not see that are closer to us than suspected we would have a better ground plan to consider the possibility of other life forms within reach of Earth. This prospect is untenable because there is no scientific prospect for undetected Solar Systems within reach of us. We must have a new concept of observation to ponder it. I have not tried to calculate the likelyhood of the distance a nearby star must be, based on the inverse square rule, before the light of a small star would not be visible to us here at Earth. The other prospect could be that we do not fully understand the properties of light.

Back to Mung's ideas it seems the least expensive and the most expendable "robot" is a DNA designed living clone specialized for space travel. Stories of alleged aliens people claim to have seen always suggest this to me. Another point is that we may have been visited by some other life forms that do not want to expose themselves to us. Many potential reasons for them not to communicate- we have not exactly demonstrated friendship to each other.

jw

The expense of colonizing some planet by other star, whould be prohibitive, in my opinion.

Imagine a space ship takeover, a thousand times larger than Saturn.

Its crew will be in flight hundreds years, to achieve the destination.

Assuming it is hospitable, they live and multiply there.

The initial civilization never gets return on its huge investment. Only idiots would go for it, the advanced civilitation won't.

ES

Has it ever occured to you that, You, We, Us, Everyone in fact, are those extraterrestrials.

Given the Galaxy's tens of millions of years of time scale that may have elapsed, the odds that WE are the living extraterrestrials, is slightly better than if we are alone.
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A Pessimist believes the Future is Certain. Michael Kremer

Sure, they have sent here a couple of monkeys, and vuala! - a cool mil years later we have human civilization!

e s

I'm not going to knock your favorite solution regarding the use of robots in colonisation.
I'm sure they will be used for exploring surveying, gathering data, etc.
But you must have a poor conception of the human mind, if you really believe that we will allow them to replace us? Yes we will need their intelligence gathering, all their data will be sent back to us humans for our own use.
We will never allow robots to rule us to such an extent that we become superfluous, worthless and extinct.
It would become a science fiction horror story, were robots to send back their findings to other robots on a human dead extinct world.
I just cannot believe that after coming through thousands of years of human civilization that we would ever allow robots to take control of us. That would never happen.

I think that if an extraterrestrial high tech intelligence had discovered us, we wouldn't be here by now.

'Observe how these bipeds abuse their planet, war with each other, rape, torture, murder, abuse their children - heck, even sexually abuse their own children sometimes, AND waste their lives watching reality TV. These critters could be dangerous with the right technology in their hands.
Let's just irradiate their planet and leave it to the cock-roaches, come back in a million years and see if they have made a better job of things'.

But of course it is conceivable that the visitors are as uncivilised as us, and then we are still in trouble.

Blacknad.

There is book review on scienceagogo about exactly such a scanario on the main page

I believe that humans will replace their brains by computers. It won't be something confrontational like a war between robots and humans. We won't make robots with the purpose of being replaced at first.

Economics will drive the development of ever more intelligent robots, as I wrote above. At a certain point you can have robots that can replace humans in all respects. You could raise such robots as your children.

The difference between humans and robots is a matter of hardware. I.e. we humans are ultimately machines too. Mike Kremer is being run by a neural network. All one has to do to run ''program Kremer'' is to create that network. Simulating it on a computer will also do.

Robots can thus be the same as humans, but with a clear advantage. They can travel great distances by just uploading their program. They don't need a material vehicle to travel. If someone needs to go to Mars, it will be much cheaper to upload a program to a machine that is already there via radio than sending a human using a rocket.

Some scientists think that it will become possible in the future for humans to upload their neural network in digitized form to a computer. You can then imagine that people will want to become almost immortal using this uploading technology.


Now, there will always be people who oppose the robot technology. But what matters are the people in power: The business leaders and the politicians. They will do what is best for the economy. They will certainly not decide to curtail robot technology. Replacing humans from the work force allows you to save enormous amounts of money. Productivity will skyrocket.


Most people will thus be out of work living on welfare. Their consumption is provided by robots who do all the work. The government will then have to control production, and they'll need pretty powerful computers to do that to prevent the problems the Soviets had. So, the government will ultimately be controlled by computers. The computers will have control of all the factories.


The few people in power will realize that it is better to be a robot, so if possible, they will certainly upload themselves to computers. Perhaps they will restrict uploading technology to certain selected individuals. The status of all other people will gradually become similar to that of today's Chimpanzees.

If economics rules everything then you are right. But it seems the world is at war at the moment between purely economic reasoning and something else, call it against religion, culture, east versus west. The present economics only rules like a chain letter, eventually it will run out of victims. But the above post is certainly logical by present day beliefs. I just don't believe the rat race will continue once we discover there can be only one winner. Then we'll change the rules, and robets will be seen to advance mankind, not obsolute power for one person or race or company. Now where's that spell check so I don't look stupid like a human.

You all have covered the bases. One other area:

People, Humans, have a heavy downside. Separate from space travel and computerized brains robots have a more important asset, longevity.

In theory no sickness or headaches or depression or any of the other many things, not to exclude spider and mosquito bites, etc., etc. The bugs are more likely to take over the world than robots are. I can envision a robot ensnared in a fungus that slurries all his inner workings or a brain bashed robot but the repairs are so easy. Dunk it in carbon tetrachloride or simply plug on a new head and put it to work. My personal view, based on robotics that have appeared so far, is that it will take another 20 to 30 years for a robot design that will walk and run like a human, then try to have him carry a martini while doing so. A robot that can not carry a martini is not worth having.
jw

Well wishing pawes the road to hell


es

"A robot that can not carry a martini is not worth having."

Well said indeed. It would be nice if he were equipped with some bug spray and a few canapes too.