http://io9.com/11-of-the-weirdest-solutions-to-the-fermi-paradox-456850746

11 of the Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox

Most people take it for granted that we have yet to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Trouble is, the numbers don’t add up. Our Galaxy is so old that every corner of it should have been visited many, many times over by now. No theory to date has satisfactorily explained away this Great Silence, so it’s time to think outside the box. Here are eleven of the weirdest solutions to the Fermi Paradox.

Where is everybody?

A very important question for SETI that has been debated more than once, still very much a current issue. The article mentions a few of the more interesting theories.

My money is on number 8, our technology is too primitive. Some day a scientist will invent subspace communication and the first thing he/she will hear when turning the device on will be the local space weather forecast broadcasted from Alpha Centauri.

(Wikipedia on the Fermi Paradox)

If the speed of light is an absolute unbendable limit no matter how advanced a civilization becomes at some point that civilization might come to realise the futility of attempting contact and turn it's energy toward making things as good as possible at home.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

Please explain what is "sub-space communication"

We haven't been visited because there is no one else close enough in the galaxy to even know we are here. Even if they could travel at the speed of light they would die before they got here anyway even if they knew where they were going.

William Rothamel wrote:

Please explain what is "sub-space communication"

Michel448a has the answer. It's a fictional form of communication from Star Trek that is faster than light. Although fictional, technology in Star Trek is often based on theories that are plausible. But of course, it could be tachyons or something we have never even heard of before.


Bob DeWoody wrote:

If the speed of light is an absolute unbendable limit no matter how advanced a civilization becomes at some point that civilization might come to realise the futility of attempting contact and turn it's energy toward making things as good as possible at home.

William Rothamel wrote:

We haven't been visited because there is no one else close enough in the galaxy to even know we are here. Even if they could travel at the speed of light they would die before they got here anyway even if they knew where they were going.

It could be that some law of fysics makes it impossible to travel and/or communicate over the vast distances of the universe. I found another article talking about such a “cosmic roadblock”.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/05/earths-technologies-may-be-too-primitive-to-detect-advanced-et-life.html

If the speed of light is an absolute unbendable limit no matter how advanced a civilization becomes at some point that civilization might come to realise the futility of attempting contact and turn it's energy toward making things as good as possible at home.

I think that the absolut limit about the speed of light its not enough by itself to make interstelar travels a futility...
Things like whormholes or space bending should also be prooved as imposibilities, and even if those things are not viable it might exist some other workaround...
I know, for now, those other things are still in the realm of fiction... but who knows...

Also, seeing that the speed of light of the electromagnetic waves is still slow for interestellar comunications, there are high chances of it beeing deprecated by advanced civilizations... But it doesnt mean they are not able to detect them... We dont use smoke signals anymore but if there is a hughe smoke column over a house we still understand the message and for sure will be using the phone to call the firemen...
(I just hope that if they see our signals they dont call the army...;b)

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Please explain what is "sub-space communication"

I think he meant in the context of the real world. not in the Star Trek fantasy world.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

Some of those 11 solutions to the Fermi Paradox in the linked article deserve comment. The last one first-- Gamma ray bursts would probably not wipe out a planet-wide civilization. They last from a small fraction of a second to several minutes. At worst, one might affect half of a world that happened to be faced in its direction. In any case, these bursts are in are quite narrow beams, more likely to pass through open space than strike an inhabited planet.
Two similar solutions involve fear of contacting a hostile civilization. A moot point, it seems. We, and presumably other 'naive' civilizations' have already released a great many radio waves over time. Any race intent on wiping out potentially competing ones would probably make a point of listening with great care and sensitivity for such signals. The fact that they have not swooped down on us suggests a few possibilities. 1.) There are no advanced, hostile ETs. 2.) Interstellar travel is impractical, so there is no real danger. 3.) We live in an occupied, orderly galaxy, where any hostile groups are held in check.
The idea that all ET races become 'homebodies', finding artificial realities more interesting than the real thing. Not all individuals on Earth are addicted to television or video games; some are busy exploring the real planets with actual space probes. As persons within our culture have a variety of interests, it seems not unreasonable that this would apply to other civilizations as well.

Bob DeWoody wrote:

William Rothamel wrote:

Please explain what is "sub-space communication"

I think he meant in the context of the real world. not in the Star Trek fantasy world.

Subspace communications isn't really explained in Star Trek but faster-than-light is theoretically possible using Star Trek's warp drive where you travel by warping the space-time matrix around you while traveling in a bubble of normal space, you are traveling without moving through space.

Although its science fiction right now its possible that it could work. Space-time isn't fixed, we live in an expandning universe. According to this article the latest results from Planck shows that the universe is expanding by 6,715 metres each second every 3,260,000 million light years.

But as I said, it just as well could be tachyons or something else.

Michael Watson wrote:

We, and presumably other 'naive' civilizations' have already released a great many radio waves over time. Any race intent on wiping out potentially competing ones would probably make a point of listening with great care and sensitivity for such signals. The fact that they have not swooped down on us suggests a few possibilities.

Yes we have. But only "slow" radio waves, they haven't had time to travel very far yet. And are our transmissions even powerful enough to be audible above the noice at a distance? It's not like they are powerful narrowband transmissions aimed at some star. I doubt that ET can watch our TV programs, or even notice us.

Michael Watson wrote:

We, and presumably other 'naive' civilizations' have already released a great many radio waves over time. Any race intent on wiping out potentially competing ones would probably make a point of listening with great care and sensitivity for such signals. The fact that they have not swooped down on us suggests a few possibilities.

Yes we have. But only "slow" radio waves, they haven't had time to travel very far yet. And are our transmissions even powerful enough to be audible above the noice at a distance? It's not like they are powerful narrowband transmissions aimed at some star. I doubt that ET can watch our TV programs, or even notice us.

We've had reasonably high power transmitters at high enough frequencies to penetrate Earth's atmosphere for about sixty years. The early signals from these have reached on the order of 5000 stars. If an aggressive advanced species in space wanted to detect potential rivals they could probably arrange to do so. Its been shown that an entire star could be used as a gigantic focusing element for radio waves, providing more than enough sensitivity.
Even if our already-sent signals have not yet come to the notice of an aggressive species, this might happen at any time, as our radio, television, and radar signal continue to expand into space. The objection to active SETI-- that the sending out of signals intended to contact extraterrestrial species could be dangerous, seems a bit beside the point. Personally, I suspect the galaxy is densely populated with intelligent species, and that among those ~5000 stars our signals have already reached, a good number of them host advanced technical civilizations.
Quite apart from any of the above, an advanced hostile civilization capable of coming here needn't wait for our radio waves to reach them. They could travel about from star to star and check planets for potential competitors. Our planet's oxygen signature proclaims to the galaxy that there is some kind of life here.
I think the absence of hostile aliens at Earth is much more difficult to explain, assuming they exist, and have a free hand to do as they wish, than the absence of ET life in general. The later could just be a case of their wishing to observe us, without unduly influencing our behavior, at least for the time being.

That statement is illogical. The Vulcans are a mythical species. ; )

Please explain how "Warp Drive" works and how to build one

Please explain how "Warp Drive" works and how to build one

Here is a mainstream media news article about actual scientific work, theoretical and experimental, on a warp drive.
http://techland.time.com/2012/09/19/nasa-actually-working-on-faster-than-light-warp-drive/

Michael Watson wrote:

We've had reasonably high power transmitters at high enough frequencies to penetrate Earth's atmosphere for about sixty years. The early signals from these have reached on the order of 5000 stars.

Even tough our radio transmissions can penetrate Earth's atmosphere, would they be detectable from a couple of lightyears distance? There's several factors involved, it would be interesting to see some number crunching. Any astrophysicists/radio astronomers around?

Something that could possibly be detected from a fair distance is our aimed transmissions into space. Like Space Fence and Deep Space Network.


Michael Watson wrote:

If an aggressive advanced species in space wanted to detect potential rivals they could probably arrange to do so. Its been shown that an entire star could be used as a gigantic focusing element for radio waves, providing more than enough sensitivity.

Gravity lenses is interesting and does work. The question is how practical they are for surveillance, it's a huge undertaking.

An example: The distance from the Sun to Earth is one Astronomical unit (AU). The farthest planet in our solar system is Neptune at a distance of 30 AU, the Kupier belt extends another 20 AU out to 50 AU. The farthest man-made object is Voyager 1 at a distande of 123 AU and is about to leave the heliosphere, it has been traveling for 35 years to get that far.

If you were to use the Sun as a gravity lens telescope a telescope would have to be sent out into interstellar space to a minimum of 550 AU, with 700 AU being better. At Voyagers speed that would take 140 years, just to start observations.

Even imagining alien technology with close-to-light or faster-than-light speeds it is huge distances, especially if you imagine the distances a telescope would have to travel on it's 550+ AU radius circle around the star to track a target or change to another target.


Michael Watson wrote:

Quite apart from any of the above, an advanced hostile civilization capable of coming here needn't wait for our radio waves to reach them. They could travel about from star to star and check planets for potential competitors. Our planet's oxygen signature proclaims to the galaxy that there is some kind of life here.

Using spectroscopy is is certainly possible to detect planets with atmospheric chemistry suitable for life (with a huge telescope and if the planet is backlit by it's star), but we have at the moment no way of telling how unique our type of planet is. There might be lots of planets with "dumb" life, with just a few planets with intelligent life hiding in the mix.

Sakletare; You raise some interesting questions. The range at which a radio transmission of a given strength can be detected depends on the receiving technology. This is often expressed as how far off a civilization with equipment like our own could detect our signals. Since we've only been at this business of radio astronomy for decades, such a limitation seems overly confining. A civilization that might have been doing this for a million years or more could probably do much better.
A civilization using its star as a gravitational lens, it has been calculated, could receive transmissions of very modest power from much of the galaxy. Perhaps a fleet a probes are positioned so as to receive the signals from many promising-looking star systems.
This could probably be determined by a number of means, such as a sufficient age of the star to have allowed a technical civilization to evolve, photometry of terrestrial planets in habitable zones of such stars, and perhaps even the detection of technologically produced trace gases in such planets' atmospheres.

Please explain what is "sub-space communication"

Have you never watched Star Trek ??? ;)

John3760

EDIT :
OOPS

I'll read the whole thread before I reply next time !!! :)

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Please explain what is "sub-space communication"

Have you never watched Star Trek ??? ;)

John3760

EDIT :
OOPS

I'll read the whole thread before I reply next time !!! :)

No need. People who can imagine are sometimes the innovators. Those that cannot, never innovate and just post on internet forums. :)