The Fermi Paradox -- Where is everybody?

Ukerric

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khorum said:
At 1g constant acceleration and 1g deceleration at the halfway point it would take a vessel less than 4 hours to reach the moon.
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And between 8 and 13 days (from memory) to reach Mars depending on respective positions.

Which is another of my peeves regarding that shit of movie (Ad Astra), where you can see the script writers made a serious effort of making the trip easy to film by having the Moon-Mars ship obviously go 1G... then the director shat on every helpful notes they did and made everyone in micro-g all the time. I'm pretty sure the flight time to Neptune under constant accel is probably about the ballpark indicated...
 
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Sentagur

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khorum said:
No they didn't fail to account for it, don't NEED to account for it.

Once again, as entertaining as it may be to anthropomorphize hypothetical alien civilization---they could find jesus and reject capitalism one generation or discover marxism and try to settle into a marxist-like Malthusian spiral in another generation---we DO NOT NEED TO imagine the shifting priorities of hypothetical alien civilizations. We just need to use what information we have confirmed empirically that governs the regulation and distribution of energy of all things from sub-cellular organisms to the cliodynamic cycles of ancient Rome.

We know that no known organism willingly surrenders to entropy so long as there is a remote chance of survival. We know that the second law compels energy to move from volumes of high concentration to volumes with lower concentration. We know that ecosystems which have failed to respond to entropic externalities have met mass extinctions at least five times in the one sample we have. We've been shown that civilizations that arrive at the capacity for spaceflight we achieved in 1969 could have colonized the entire galaxy 100 times over since the time the galaxy cooled enough to harbor Earth-like planets.

So the prospect that a civilization would find some "zen moment" and accept the futility of survival is not only a possibility, but is one of the potential Great Filters that regulated the rise of advanced civilizations across the universe. That's actually MY favored prospect of all, the Malthusian End-State, wherein hypothetical civilizations are COMPELLED by the same thermoeconomic forces to redistribute energy equally across every member of the civilization and reach a point-of-no-return where that civilization can no longer sustain its population/energy equilibrium and survive civilization-ending externalities at the same time.

1969 keeps coming up because Heir and Hedman noted that was the last time >95% of the Earth's resources was under the control of less than 10% of the population that was bent on sending a man to the moon. Afterwards rising populations and the entropic reaction against that inequality inevitably VOTED US back down to Earth.

It's Socialism as a Great Filter.
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I am not disputing that there is motivation to spread out into the galaxy and that is magnified if you planet is about to go get blowed daF up.
I am questioning the assertion that a civilisation(similar to ours) could get its shit in order and work cooperatively to escape their planet in case of catastrophe.

Imagine that we find out that we have 10-15 years before a planet killer asteroid bumps us off. I think that might be a realistic forewarning window. Do you think the enlightened 21st century humans could work together and save the civilisation or would we devolve into a bucket full of crabs. Pulling each other down as soon as someone reaches the rim. Yeah pockets full might be able to escape but not without some serious shitstorm and collateral damage. Does that mean the civilization itself would survive or do we need more than a few hundred people. I also doubt we have the tech to make self sustaining ships capable of multi generational space travel supporting 100s of people with our tech level.

Edit: I might be a pessimist but i dont see large portion of population sacrificing everything they have just so a few ships that can save a handfull of thousands can get built without any chance of getting off earth as well. Panic , unrest, disintigration of social order would be inevitable.

Disclaimer: I dont know shit about this topic beside the rudimentary primer, i just like discussing it because its incredibly interesting
 
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pharmakos

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TheBeagle said:
*space-time....and it is "something" since it is expanding.
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i was giving Sanrith the simplfied version, you think getting into how it's all really four dimensional is going to help him understand anything? :p
Lendarios said:
wat?
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oh christ dorito you would wait until 8 minutes after someone else tried to correct me to say anything, even tho that post had already been up for a bit. just shoo.
 
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Cybsled

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Sentagur said:
Imagine that we find out that we have 10-15 years before a planet killer asteroid bumps us off. I think that might be a realistic forewarning window. Do you think the enlightened 21st century humans could work together and save the civilisation or would we devolve into a bucket full of crabs. Pulling each other down as soon as someone reaches the rim. Yeah pockets full might be able to escape but not without some serious shitstorm and collateral damage. Does that mean the civilization itself would survive or do we need more than a few hundred people. I also doubt we have the tech to make self sustaining ships capable of multi generational space travel supporting 100s of people with our tech level.

Edit: I might be a pessimist but i dont see large portion of population sacrificing everything they have just so a few ships that can save a handfull of thousands can get built without any chance of getting off earth as well. Panic , unrest, disintigration of social order would be inevitable.
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I agree that it would be hard. There was an interesting TV special a while back that put forth a scenario where a pulsar is observed heading towards Earth and we have 80 years before it gets here. The governments of the world agree to basically pool all their resources to make a gigantic generation ship in orbit (using detonated nukes as a means of propulsion) and send it off to where their best guess is a habitable planet within realistic range (the show had it taking like 80+ years to get there). Part of the premise was that the current generation at time of discovery wouldn't go, so they would also spend the next 80 years trying to get the best genetic results from various groups and also focus on specific skills/etc. Society does get kinda fucked up from what I recall, although they have the advantage of indoctrinating the younger generations on this so they are more accepting of it.

10-15 years, though, you'd need secrecy on the project to be sure. That is a short enough timescale where panic and collapse of society would be almost guaranteed if the secret got out.
 
TheBeagle

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pharmakos said:
i was giving Sanrith the simplfied version, you think getting into how it's all really four dimensional is going to help him understand anything? :p


oh christ dorito you would wait until 8 minutes after someone else tried to correct me to say anything, even tho that post had already been up for a bit. just shoo.
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My favorite analogy in thinking about the expansion of space is imagine bread dough with raisins. It starts as one compressed ball all mushed together but as the bread rises(space expansion) the raisins(galaxies) move further apart. If you look at it like that, the raisins themselves aren't hurtling through the bread, the expansion of the bread itself is creating the increasing distance between the raisins.
 
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pharmakos

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TheBeagle said:
My favorite analogy in thinking about the expansion of space is imagine bread dough with raisins. It starts as one compressed ball all mushed together but as the bread rises(space expansion) the raisins(galaxies) move further apart. If you look at it like that, the raisins themselves aren't hurtling through the bread, the expansion of the bread itself is creating the increasing distance between the raisins.
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Yup, basically you HAVE to look at it all with respect towards time, since the only way any of "it" matters is when viewed relative to the stuff around "it," eh?

Sanrith was just having the same "so the x and y axises go on FOREVER?" thought that any kid with half a brain has in Geometry when they're 12 haha, so I didn't think it prudent to go into the difference between Euclidian "space" and real "Space" haha

I wonder if doritos understood either of these posts
 
Sadre Spinegnawer

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Thanks The Beagle. I had not heard that analogy before, it is a very good one.

Additionally, you can add energy states to the analogy. IE, why does the bread expand? Because it is ... yeasty.
 
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TheBeagle

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Sadre Spinegnawer said:
Thanks The Beagle. I had not heard that analogy before, it is a very good one.

Additionally, you can add energy states to the analogy. IE, why does the bread expand? Because it is ... yeasty.
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You can take it one step further and note that the raisins are only "moving" relative to an outside observer. Since the bread is the entire universe itself there is no outside observer, therefore the raisins have actually maintained their original positions, relative to each other, since the big bang of the bread dough. The only thing that's changed through time is the expansion of the bread dough.

Everything always comes back to Relativity. Einstein was either an alien or God himself.
 
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Sadre Spinegnawer

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This reminds me of an old thought experiment, if tomorrow everything was ten thousand times current value, internal to the system one could not tell. Not sure if that thought experiment holdsup, but I like it.

 
Aaron

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I'm starting to think that Aliens are watching us, and that we're the equivalent of some trash tier day time reality TV drama show.
 
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spronk

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the theory i liked reading is that we are still essentially in the "big bang" phase of the universe, where all the basic building blocks of the future are still in play. we don't understand dark matter or dark energy at all, space seems to be inflating faster and faster due to those two things, whats up with black holes, etc.

We see a universe that is 13.7 billion years old and are amazed at how old it is and think a ton of important things have happened, but if the universe putters on for another 1 trillion-trillion years or 100 times that it would be less than a second of relative time, and who knows what the universe may look like in that time. Yeah, we may be the only intelligent species around (probably not) but the universe is not yet in a configuration that is suitable for exploration, and maybe in 500 billion years it will reach a steady state that lets intelligence flourish.

We are nothing more than the salt in the pot of pasta's boiling water that hasn't even reached boiling point.

The weirdest thing for me to try to understand is the hypothesis that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating due to dark matter. That is just so weird and counter intuitive.

For anyone interested in this kinda shit definitely recommend the podcast Daniel and Jorge explain the universe, a large hadron physicist and cartoonist (with a PhD) tackle two topics every week and they are both great.
 
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C

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spronk said:
if the universe putters on for another 1 trillion-trillion years or 100 times that it would be less than a second of relative time, and who knows what the universe may look like in that time. Yeah, we may be the only intelligent species around (probably not) but the universe is not yet in a configuration that is suitable for exploration, and maybe in 500 billion years it will reach a steady state that lets intelligence flourish.
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In the far future, the universe looks pretty boring. The expansion of space will eventually cause molecules, atoms, and even protons to evaporate, which basically leaves lots of black holes floating around in a pitch-black near-absolute zero void. The universe will only support life for a tiny fraction of its eventual timeline. For life as we know it, this is about as good as it gets. (This shouldn't be a surprise, since we're adapted to our present environment.)

 
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pharmakos

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TheBeagle said:
Everything always comes back to Relativity. Einstein was either an alien or God himself.
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In Mayan Astrology, according to his birthdate, Albert Einstein's sign was "Yellow Cosmic Sun," the 260th of their 260 unique signs, THE "big deal" sign in their zodiac, meant to represent ultimate enlightenment and eternal wisdom and etc etc. Always kind of blew my mind.
 
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Sentagur

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Captain Suave said:
In the far future, the universe looks pretty boring. The expansion of space will eventually cause molecules, atoms, and even protons to evaporate, which basically leaves lots of black holes floating around in a pitch-black near-absolute zero void. The universe will only support life for a tiny fraction of its eventual timeline. For life as we know it, this is about as good as it gets. (This shouldn't be a surprise, since we're adapted to our present environment.)

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My favorite sci fi fantasy is that after all the matter has evaporated and even the black holes have shed their mass with hawking radiation the universe will resemble something similar to pre-big bang state. Matter particles and anti particles popping in and out of existence until eventually a pair fails to anihilate itslef and kicks off another domino effect big bang 2.0( or insert big number here)
 
reavor

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or in the end of Time by Stephen Baxter, humanity turns out to be the only space faring organism and quickly conquer the universe. but as the heat death settles in, and black holes begin to be used up as energy sources, they create a essentially lossless computational substrate. however, as there is only so much energy and mass in the universe, there is a finite amount of degrees of freedom and a finite amount of configurations, thus causing the substrate to enter a periodic state, meaning they eventually repeat the same thoughts, the same actions forever, as the universe succumbs into heat death into infinity.
 
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P

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khorum said:
You can't be sure the path is clear. You'd engineer the costs of mitigating those impacts through detection/shielding and factor that in to the vessel's mass. Then it becomes a matter of the energy to accelerate that mass at a sustained rate.

At 1g constant acceleration and 1g deceleration at the halfway point it would take a vessel less than 4 hours to reach the moon.
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But the point they are making is that traveling at relativistic speeds is a giant question mark. Based on what we know now, there's a good chance we'll never be able to.
 
Merrith

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Still my favorite thread on the board. Khorum the only part I'm skeptical on is the colonizing the galaxy in 50 million years with ~1969 tech. Is that assuming constant expansion and travel to go from one edge to the other basically on that rocket tech? Just feels like that ignores so many challenges that are unknown to us for interstellar travel, and the idea of just constantly expanding over that entire time period seems surprising to me. We've had that tech for 50 years, went to our closest other object (moon) a few times, then haven't actually sent a man even back that far in the last 47 years.
 
pharmakos

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Merrith said:
Still my favorite thread on the board. Khorum the only part I'm skeptical on is the colonizing the galaxy in 50 million years with ~1969 tech. Is that assuming constant expansion and travel to go from one edge to the other basically on that rocket tech? Just feels like that ignores so many challenges that are unknown to us for interstellar travel, and the idea of just constantly expanding over that entire time period seems surprising to me. We've had that tech for 50 years, went to our closest other object (moon) a few times, then haven't actually sent a man even back that far in the last 47 years.
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No one was saying it would be a GOOD IDEA to use 1969 tech to travel to Alpha Centauri or anything, just that it wouldn't take that much time in a cosmic time scale. 50 million years was lazy expansion pretty much just put off til necessary every time. 5 million years was aggressive expansion.

Basically, the idea is that in the next few hundred years at the latest, we will probably be able to at the very least make probes that are self-replicating and designed to spread across the galaxy purely via automation. Once we make that technology, even if they for some bizarre reason it travelled at 1960s rocket speeds, it would only take a fraction of the age of the universe to saturate pretty fully

So if it would be that easy for a civilization to spread, how come we've seen no evidence that it's happened at all in the 14 billion year age of the universe? (Fermi Paradox restated to bring the conversation back home, I know you don't need to hear it again :) )
 
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