Re: Why we haven't met any aliens -- article from Seed Magazine

John Harshman wrote:
Tiny Bulcher wrote:

John Harshman wrote:


<snippery>

Yes. I think the popular belief takes no account of the age of the
universe. A couple of million years one way or another is nothing in
cosmic terms, but it means we have no chance of seeing any species
that's not synchronized with ours within a very narrow window.

Of course the Fermi argument can be extended: if there ever have
been species like ours anywhere in the galaxy, why don't we see any
signs that they ever visited our solar sysem, even if it happened a
few hundred million years ago?


Three possible responses to that are that 1) species that develop
intelligence may never develop the technological capability for
interstellar travel; 2) What signs of such a visit would remain
after [foo] million years? and 3) FTL travel is impossible.

All this has been done to death in years of argument over the Fermi
paradox. Rather than rehash all that, I'll quite after one response.

1. Seems unlikely considering the speed with which we (the sole known
example from which all estimates must be constructed) achieved space
flight.

Depends whether you think dolphins are intelligent or not, I suppose.
There's no need to suppose that an intelligent species /must/ be a
technological one. And space flight is not interstellar travel.

2. The postulate is that they want to find places to live. We might
not find evidence on earth, given the speed of erosion, though in
fact a widespread technological civilization should leave all manner
of
artifacts in a fossil horizon somewhere; we make many things that last
longer than the average clam shell. At any rate, we should find better
preserved evidence on the moon, which preserves surfaces that are
billions of years old. And other similar places, though we haven't
looked much yet.

Suppose nowhere round here was good to live on (for them)? They came, they
saw, they naffed off again leaving no trace.

3. Who mentioned FTL travel?

I did. Surely the likelihood of species embarking on interstellar travel
increases by several orders of magnitude if FTL travel /is/ possible.

To put my position in a nutshell, the Fermi paradox isn't a paradox at all.
It's just a silly question, akin to one of those 'if evolution is true, how
come ...' questions beloved of creationists. It is entirely within the
bounds of reason to suppose that there have been and are many other
intelligent inhabitants of the universe, and that humanity will complete the
entire course of its existence without ever finding out about any of them.
OTOH, the little green men could land next week. Like the man said, it's a
mistake to theorize in the absence of data.

--
Tiny


.

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