Read the below article fully through to the end and then realize that if these thereums could prove true, then God (the almighty we largely believe in) could be no more than the beings that were posit about in an episode of Star Trek: TNG where humans, Romulans and Ferengi were all generated from the same DNA base. :cool:
http://gizmodo.com/the-fermi-paradox-where-the-hell-are-the-other-earths-1580345495
Comments
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Doesn't have to be far in the future. We have the technology to make our species extinct now.
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If we're lucky and we don't annihilate ourselves at some future point, and doing succumb to a natural calamity like a gamma ray burst or asteroid, or get annihilated by alien intelligent life, some of us alive today might become part of the singularity and get immortal computer brains and live to see type II or III.
Joined January 2009
Ermagerd! It's Sperk!
Not joking either...take a moment to think about it, eh? It's also far less pretentious.
Yeah that's all the more scary. The Great Filter could literally begin as I type this sentence because Putin gets an itchy trigger finger or an aging ICBM-detecting instrument has a malfunction or a false positive.
Joined January 2009
Yup and because of the energy requirements for brains, it's more likely that intelligent life will be carnivorous. Carnivores have things with territory typically, so as the civilization and technology advances, the species eventually wiping themselves out could be almost guaranteed.
Thank you. Very interesting article. I am more inclined towards that Zoo Hypothesis, but we will never know. Our knowledge and understanding of the universe its so small that even this Fermi Paradox may be far from the truth.
While ai could without a doubt become a threat in the relatively near future. The danger of our nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons can not be understated. We haven't had a nuclear war yet. However we've come close many times. Nuclear weapons and technology are even more wide spread and available, and even without a direct nuclear weapon exchange, nuclear technology has rendered some spots on our planet uninhabitable. The danger of these weapons is no less than it was sixty years ago, and in some ways has even gotten worse. This doesn't require any outside influence like an AI but is the result of the way our brains have evolved with a focus on territory and resources.
I don't think anyone has ever done all the math to show what kind of effort and resources are required to build a Dyson Sphere, for example. We only defined a state, but do we have a good idea on the process to get there? We probably still lack a lot of information about that so we can't even make good guesses.
But basically, it seems to require that we can leave Earth and create a production facility in space that is sustainable, with or without help of Earth, the entire system has to be sustainable - if we run out of resources (be it nuclear fuel or metals) before we can collect enough resources from other planets or asteroids, the whole thing doesn't work.
I suppose my doubts are basically a variant of the "Great Filter" - with the special assumption that no one can pass it.
That doesn't at least mean there is no intelligent life out there - it might just mean that it's stuck on its home planet, limited to sending electromagnetic signals. Of course, it could also mean that all this life will eventually die off, because a lone planet can't survive a technological civilization for long. Unless it scales back to a point where it is sustainable?
I find this to be the best explanation so far, don't take it too hard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM1-DQ2Wo_w
The concept is simple for a Dyson Shell. Make a bunch of space stations, all of them in the same orbit, eventually you'll fill up the orbit and connect them together. It's a ridiculously extravagant project by the standards of most races in Star Trek. Maybe the Borg could do it but that's about it... A full Dyson Sphere is ridiculously large by comparison. It is TOO large to actually orbit the star and needs to have artificial gravity to hold it in place.
My character Tsin'xing
I suspect that Type II is possible, but a race will evolve beyond such concerns before they get to Type III.
I actually came up with an idea for creating a Dyson Sphere that is possible for the 24th Century Federation to do if they had the desire for it. Basically instead of creating the entire Dyson Sphere as a whole, it is done in self-sustainable sections. Each section would have its own shielding, solar power generation, air recycling, and everything else that is required for it to be self-sustainable. After one section is completed, it is moved into position and people can move in. Newer sections would dock with the older ones until the star is completely surrounded.
The benefits for using this method is that it is usable right away instead of people having to wait thousands of years to use it and a cataclysmic event will only damage a portion of the Dyson Sphere instead of the whole thing.
That would probably be for the best. Extermination could prevent a future of banal human idiocy such as politics, religion and sports...
(all of the above was brought to you from some random tool on the internet, and should not be taken more seriously than anything else you see on the internet.)
A Sphere just requires a lot of satellites placed around the sun to collect the sun's energy.
I think the problem with a Dyson Shell instead of a Dyson Sphere is that the shell requires more building materials than even exists in a star system. So by the time you try to build it, you will need to be able to get materials from other star systems.
If FTL travel isn't possible, such an endeavour would take decades and centuries. And that's even assuming that there are cost-efficient ways to get close to the speed of light. If we're stuck with speeds like the Voyager or our fastest probes could achieve, it might take millions of year. That's a project of a magnitude that is way beyond anything we can really imagine, it would take longer than our own existence on Earth.
I think a future of that still beats a future of apes slinging sh*t, lions hunting antilopes and whales swallowing plankton or whatever. At least I know that humans sometimes try to find a purpose for their existence and seek to understand the Universe. Even if it's not everyone and all the time, and we're failing a lot.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
A couple notes about the "great filter".....
One is that the moon happens to regulate the earth's temperature..without it there would be no life and the likelihood of there being a moon may be vanishingly small. We just don't know.
The other comment I have is that it may be that civilizations will always encounter the same issues mankind is facing and there is no way out of it. They all destroy themselves in short order or run out of resources and destroy their environment. I think that unlikely though. the earth is bathed in free energy and full of resources that are nearly inexhaustible.
So, I still am a bit of an optimist on the topic. Other civilizations out there probably have no interest in us being as they are many millions/billions of years more advanced. They don't need our planet for resources and likely don't even know we have evolved into an actual civilization.
But what if there isn't warp travel? < 1.0 c is all we can get. Worse, what if we can't really get a space ship to any significant fraction of c in a practical amount of time and with a practical amount of resources? So slow that we don't even get to benefit much from relativistic effects?
humanity is about a cycle of endless death, destruction and ignorance into each new generation who just repeat while building new and destructive ways of changing and damaging the way humans go about it at the next phase.
dont believe it? maybe looking back the past 8,000 years of human history, from any view point, it's death by sword, death by accident, death for revenge or something else, all these ideologies and these fake countries, people believing themselves better then others and eating that ignorance cake whole, people thinking themselves special enough to want to carry a deadly weapon for "self defense" which is a crock, its either used with the intention of killing as that is its purpose or its not used at all, in which case why have it for?
there is no changing humanity if no one has the idea to stop and think about the fundamentals... oh wait, its a "tinfoil hat" debate.. and you see the problem straight away, no one wants to know. so we go back to our ignorance and the cycle repeats.
in a few thousand years humans will be shooting each other with spaceships over which planet has the best resources and these "other earths", oil reserves :P and typical ignorant crackpot religious/political TRIBBLE. i just cant see humans ever changing until someone goes overboard and forces something even worse on everyone else and in the meantime earth will become uninhabitable because someone thought destroying all the trees for profit was the best way to go to solve overcrowding... meanwhile the profiteer escapes to his nice moon side villa and completely isolated and completely independent.
in the end our species is far more primitive then a basic creature like a bottle nosed dolphin or a african grey parrot, at least these creatures are willing to be friendly, and learn, that makes them more evolved then humans will ever be. i dont see humans lasting much longer and all it will take is one stupid silly act gone too far and its game over for everyone nevermind the other earths.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Personally, I believe the "Great Filter" might be the point where a species leans toward, or away from, exploring beyond their home turf rather than choosing to stay in one place. There could be thousands of species who simply never left their homeworld because they don't see any need to.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
Once something is shown to be possible it can be. Solar sail can achieve 0.2 Perhaps 0.3 or higher. We will see this within 50 years.
matter antimatter is a ways in the future. the cost of making antimatter has to come down. I think we will have this within 100 years, along with the engineering problem of controlling and containing it.
It will take some commitment and desire from the world. We have shown some of this with large hadron. We need much more of this and to begin to move beyond nationalism. We'll see!
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Actually, on a spectrum from the smallest functional orders of magnitude to the largest functional orders of magnitude, humans (and ants for that matter) fall in the range of 'fairly enormous'.