I see what they are driving at. The conditions necessary for the development of life do not automatically guarantee the evolution of technological life, whereas many have previously believed that life will inevitably evolve to intelligent life if given a nearly infinite amount of time. These scientists posit that plate tectonics are also important to facilitate the progress from life to technological life.
I suppose it is also possible that intelligent life may not evolve even when all conditions are perfect. Our planet has all the right conditions, but we have technological life only because of a freak accident. The dinosaurs made no meaningful progress toward technology in approximately two hundred million years. Based on current theory, it was only a random asteroid collision that destroyed the giant predators and allowed mammals to evolve on our own planet. If not for that, the giant Cretaceous beasts might still be in the upper Midwest instead of Bismarck.
Which might actually be an improvement.
But because of the sheer enormity of the universe, there is still an overwhelming likelihood of the existence of intelligent life elsewhere. Take all the worse-case scenarios. Let’s say that only one star in a billion has a planet that can sustain life. And let’s assume that in 99% of those planets, life never advances to a technological stage. Given those assumptions, there is only one chance in a hundred billion that a star is orbited by a planet harboring intelligent life, and it would therefore not be totally illogical to posit that we are alone in the galaxy, because that’s about how many stars are in the Milky Way. In support of that pessimistic hypothesis, we’ve been scanning the galaxy for signs of technology, and it does seem mighty quiet out there.
BUT …
Even with those pessimistic assumptions, there might be a trillion planets out there with intelligent life. That’s right, a fuckin’ trillion. That’s a realistic estimate of the number of galaxies in the universe. At that point, the math is simply overwhelming. We may be alone in the galaxy (or we may not, because those numbers I used are totally arbitrary) but we can’t be alone in the universe. There are just too many chances for intelligent life to exist.
Nonetheless …
It is probably rare for those technological civilizations to encounter one another. The only concept as overwhelming as the number of galaxies in the universe is the sheer distance between them. The nearest one to the Milky Way is more than two million light years away. We probably won’t be hearing from them. Even if we could travel at 25,000 times the speed of light, it would still take a human lifetime to reach the nearest galaxy outside our own. Even if we got there, we wouldn’t know where to look. And that’s our cosmic neighbor. The most distant galaxies are billions of light years away.
I read that the most distant galaxy that we have discovered is estimated to be 13.3 billion light years away. If we could travel there at the speed of light, the time it would take would be longer than the current age of the universe itself, which is estimated to be 13.7 billion years. (Why would it take us more than 13.7 billion years if it is only 13.3 billion light years away? Because it would do us no good to arrive where it is now. In 13.3 billion years it would have moved further away. Or I suppose it may even have ceased to exist. Indeed it may not even exist now, since we see it as it was 13.3 billion years ago.)
On the other hand:
(1) Once again taking into consideration how many stars there are, there are probably some circumstances in the universe where advanced civilizations have encountered one another, despite the vastness of the cosmos. It could have happened around our own sun with just a slight change in the development of our solar system. If things had taken just a slightly different turn on Mars, we would now be visiting or studying whatever form of life existed there. Or perhaps they might have gotten here first.
(2) It is possible that our conception of physics is too limited. The great unknown is whether it is possible to travel through the universe, or to another universe, in some way that we can’t yet conceive, thereby defying the presumed limitation of light speed. I have heard and read of theories suggesting this possibility, but the science is too complex for me to understand.
Well, I got two thoughts. One is that closer to the galaxy core, the stars are closer together. So maybe interstellar travel is more feasible.
Second, I think there is some kind of “dimension” that we don’t know about yet. For example, on Earth you have aquatic animals, and they spend their time underwater. They are limited to how fast and how far they can swim. But the ones who live closer to the surface know that there’s something called “air”, and some of these animals can jump and fly for short distances and maybe travel faster than any other aquatic animal can. Then you have birds who can fly at speeds and distances unheard of. After air, there is space… which really isn’t a vacuum, but rather another element… so maybe there are actually animals that live in space. So what is past space? Maybe there’s another barrier that we cannot comprehend yet. Like a fish that gets bagged and put on an airplane to be shipped to a pet store on the other side of the country.
Interstellar travel doesn’t seem impossible. Our nearest neighbors are only a few light years away. Intergalactic travel, however, seems unlikely within today’s commonly understood principles of physics.
Given that, if we are truly alone in the galaxy, or at least in our corner of the galaxy, we may never become aware of another civilization, nor they us.
That, however, is still an enormous IF. There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. The dice may be rigged against it, but that’s a lot of dice rolls. With so many rolls, the long shot may come in.
Humanity will not find any “alien” race within its short and insignificant lifetime. That’s the one thing we can be completely sure about.
I don’t know if you can be completely sure about anything, but yes, homo sapiens may just not be on the right timeline to interact with other planets.
Or our level of “intelligence” may not be on the same level as the real intelligentsia in the universe.
There’s definitely “aliens,” it’s only a matter of when/where. Humans becoming interstellar would go a long way. With that said, unless society improves – and I don’t mean in regards to usual tropes – then it might be better if we remain bound to Earth. We’ll probably know in a few hundred years tbh, depending on whatever replaces liberal democracy & capitalism.
Also, if IQ keeps dropping. Current politics, especially in regards to immigration, suggest that pattern will continue.
It does seem that we are getting dumber, but …
IQs keep increasing constantly, at the rate of slightly more than 3 points per decade, so they have to keep re-norming the IQ tests to stabilize the mean back down to 100. This phenomenon is called the Flynn Effect
If you are a completely average person, the same answers that give you a score of 100 on Stanford-Binet today would be scored 133 a century ago, more than two full standard deviations above the mean, in the 98th percentile. The 98th percentile is the MENSA qualifying point, so the average person today, if he could time travel, would be a MENSA member a century ago (although there was no MENSA in 1924).
Sounds like the tests are flawed then. They’re testing knowledge more than raw intelligence. Testing knowledge is fine, but it doesn’t provide any information on the natural abilities of someone’s brain.
There can’t be good tests of a thing being tested for unless such thing actually exists. That thing is a hypothetical single number that would indicate a proposed “general intelligence.” As opposed to an ad-hoc collection of mental gimmickry, which I think is the better summary of our state of the art description of how our brain is organized.
That said, in defense of the flawed tests… Not so long ago, “the calculus” was considered difficult. 20th century physics didn’t exist at all. Yet they’re both taught to undergrads today.
New tricks, new teaching, new ways of thinking. What was hard yesterday is today’s easy peasy. What used to be “advanced” is now “the grind.”
Good IQ tests for adults are set up to measure reasoning, with problems like “which of these small formations has been removed from the larger one, ” or “assuming no spaces between them, how many blocks are there, including the ones you can’t see.”
It’s just not clear what percentage of “intelligence” consists of reasoning. I know a musical genius who couldn’t solve a simple equation to save his life, but can write a musical score for an entire orchestra purely from his imagination, and can remember everything he wrote for the French horn (and every other instrument) when he’s creating the piccolo’s part. He is obviously highly “intelligent” by any reasonable definition of the word, and has some astounding, unique brainpower, but scores in the average range on IQ tests.
Consider Terrence Howard. Smart enough to get into Engineering at university. Has a better grasp on some mathematical theories than I do.
And what does he use those smarts for? To prove 1×1=2.
Some people can use their intelligence to break down their blind spots. Other use it to increase them.
BTW, see: Gould, S.J. “Mismeasure of Man.”
We all have our thoughts on this topic, but for me, Gould’s swing at it is the well.
Me, I know I rate somewheres betwixt 98 & 99, but I still take it with a grain of salt. I know I’m not “the real deal.” If that’s even a thing. I mean, Ramanujan is mind-boggling. Even so, it’s unclear to me he wasn’t pretty much a parlor trick.
Gould is, unfortunately, a hack 🙁 Look up “Scientists Measure the Accuracy of a Racism Claim” by nytimes which discusses that book in particular.
“‘Ironically, Gould’s own analysis of Morton is likely the stronger example of a bias influencing results,’ the Pennsylvania team writes.”
“But Ralph L. Holloway, an expert on human evolution at Columbia and a co-author of the new study, was less willing to give Dr. Gould benefit of the doubt.”
“‘I just didn’t trust Gould,’ he said. ‘I had the feeling that his ideological stance was supreme. When the 1996 version of ‘The Mismeasure of Man’ came and he never even bothered to mention Michael’s study, I just felt he was a charlatan.'”
Unfortunately, 1950s onward, people like Gould became nornalized. See Ashley Montagu as an example.
@mehboring Ad hominem uber alles. You rely on the NYT. I hold them off with a ten-foot pole. The NYT relies on vibe quotes from authors of the “Penn team” paper. “I didn’t trust Gould.” “I just thought he was a charlatan.” WTF? Yet you still think this paper is free of spin?
Yeah well, I read the NYT article which BTW is behind a paywall, the Penn paper, the Michael study, & there’s another more balanced paper by Mitchell JW titled The Fault In His Seeds, available thru PMC. There’s no reason for SJG to cite Michael. The Penn team misses the point in several ways. They circle the wagons confirming their faith that science self-corrects. That’s an untenable position today. Gould too makes some mistakes, indeed the key one is that he’s looking for Morton’s evident racism in the wrong place.
Nobody seems to get SJG’s biggest beef with Morton’s skull data. Gould in one case lets known gender be a proxy for stature (how tall). Everyone else treats Gould’s points separately as minutiae. But Gould spells it out: We should expect height to correlate with skull size. So we need to control for it. Morton’s data does not give us stature info. In a few cases, we know the specimens are female. So we can expect a smaller skull on average because women are shorter than men on average. His main point is already made without all that silly & error-prone recalculating. Morton just barges right ahead with race comparisons in spite of unavailable control for height.
Mitchell points out that Gould’s claim could’ve also been proved another way. Race bias cuts both ways. Indeed, two researchers supporting opposing sides of the race debate decided on different figures of merit. Morton chose to use average skull size, Tiedemann supported his anti-racist position by selecting min-max skull size ranges as his basis for race comparisons. They were each enabled thereby to establish rankings as they wished them to be.
Archives are a thing, and so is sci-hub. Every news media org is pretty much owned by billionaires & millionaires, they all serve propaganda to different extents. NYT is decent-ish, and the reason I mentioned the article is since it talks about the study which you can look up yourself afterwards. His fumbling with the data speaks for itself, no amount of propaganda for or against will change that, for sure.
Science, as a process, is dependent on the system. It doesn’t exist in abstract, as an ideal, but in reality where money is king.
If you’ve paid attention in regards to research concerning any controversial subject – whether that’s race, sex, or transness – many figures (“scientists”) have been quite open on calling for either censorship or outright ban on “ethical” grounds in such research.
Yes, I conceded Gould’s attempt was unsuccessful in the end. He gilded the lily, & trod where his skills weren’t up to the task. But I claim sometimes the hack is correct despite failing to complete the task. That was so, here, as the Mitchell paper showed.
Wherever there’s a knob that the investigator can freely tune, biases get traction. Morton tweaked a parameter that helped him drive home a point he’d wished into existence. His adversary tweaked a similar parameter over almost indistinguishable data to drive home exactly the opposite point.
Calling the source of a claim a hack even when it’s truly a case of faulty methodology, is ad hominem. Disproving the method doesn’t disprove the claim itself. It just means the question remains open.
I agree with your observation that ulterior motives pollute the science, rampantly. I’ve had to make so many subjective calls on dueling studies bc I have a choice to make. Each side delivers study after study supporting their opposite conclusions. It’s a nightmare of modern science abuse.
I’ll add that I don’t appreciate paywalled cites. It’s an impediment that I can usually surmount. But frankly, it’s a pain in the neck that I hold you to blame for.
Yeah, I’m aware of the flynn effect. But in general, despite that it does seem to be declining – globally, at that.
I find the dark forest theory as an answer to this pretty compelling (and scary)..
“Which might actually be an improvement.” Indeed!
Another question is how long industrial civilizations capable of developing and maintaining space technology can survive without some kind of mutual assured destruction: war, political failure, climate disaster, new meteor strike, etc. If we’re talking under 1000 years–I’m not sure the math would be much different at 10,000 or 100,000–the odds of these civilizations intersecting temporally as well as spatially could be quite low.
Yes, that’s a good point that should be added to my calculations. Of course, we don’t really know the lifespan of technological civilizations, but given a reasonable set of assumptions, a technological society might never encounter or even detect the presence of a near neighbor in the cosmos simply because they didn’t evolve until the other became extinct. I’m not sure how the math might work out, but I know the correct direction – it makes it even less likely that technological civilizations might meet.
Advanced civilization doesn’t need to end to go off-grid. Dewdney’s “Yes, We Have No Neutrons” utterly skewers the Drake equation. Term by term, he shows the values are unknown, total nonsense, or based on the only example we know: ourselves. We don’t even know for a fact dinosaurs didn’t have civilizations.
All of Scoop’s takes are well-considered. Yet our ignorance cuts both ways. We don’t know what we don’t know. Our best estimates aren’t the ones advocated by proponents of the Drake equation.
Worst case, we don’t know new constants of nature didn’t well up abruptly somewhere in the universe, already. It might be spreading like wildfire at the speed of light. Yet, we’d know nothing about it till it hits us. Like thunder without the lightning.
Anyway, never mind space travel. It’s possible, but as far as we know, it’s hard to do. But just signaling to nearby star systems is plenty hard already. What do we know from our own civilization? Well, we’ve been sending radio waves that radiate in all directions into outer space. That lasted, what, a century? It’s arguably over. Once we sent up satellites, we far more efficiently bounce all our signals up to them & right back down to the ground. Those Alpha Centaurians listening in had to have picked us up during that one century.
And what about signal strength? The only way we can achieve any kind of signal strength would be by direct beaming. As an example of the futility of scattering radio waves across the entire sky, think about stars. They’re extremely powerful, but we see them as dots. Now, consider brown dwarfs. They’re “very dim” even though their “signal” is many times as bright as Jupiter. But mapping the brown dwarfs in our own neighborhood is an incredibly hard task.
Look at us: We’re that Pale Blue Dot. Who’s gonna aim their signal at that spot? Why ever would they pick us out of the endless void? How many other dim specks are equally promising? Imagine how much energy they’d have to waste sending out so many powerful beams? And eagerly await the meager replies. For decades if not centuries. Could that happen? Sure. But let’s not imagine it likely.
After all, SETI never sent out the kind of signals it hopes to detect.
Actually, the people working on SETI say they have only barely scanned our skies. The sky is just too big and they have precious little time to look. We’ve only barely scratched the surface.
Generally, I believe your points about us not really knowing anything. We try to come up with estimations and calculations on so many things, but in reality there is just so much that we don’t know and understand. There is no way we can be accurate in many of these things. Same goes for all these computer models people want to use to prove a point. Sounds impressive, but computer models have all the same issues we have because the models are created by us. When the best they can say is that they run 12 different computer models and go with the most common result of the 12 then you know they have absolutely no clue.
Acknowledged. Michael Crichton has the last laugh. On balance, I’m not quite as down on models as he was. Arguably, we’re alive because our brain holds a complicated though wrong model of reality. But that model is effective enough, often enough.
We may yet tip too far & fall over a cliff. I’m fairly comfortable I’ll be long gone by then.
Exactly. Just look at a moth flying aimlessly around a light source and that’s pretty much all our attempts at space travel or even understanding the universe. Too vast and complex for our limited minds to ever comprehend or grasp.
Yes, that’s mostly true, likely, of most things in the universe worth knowing. Still, I’m not shaking a stick at the many marvels we’ve labored to uncover over the last century or so. Quasars, CMB, stellar fusion, antimatter, quarks, chemical potential, the hits have burped & burped out. DNA, neurotransmitters. Such a fireworks of light sources to fly aimlessly around.
The 20th century invented both the pre historic past (in the 1800s most educated people maybe thought the world was 6000 years old, or maybe 100,000, but not billions) and also the idea of far life (the near certainty that space opera is real and there are people out there). Again in the 1800’s how many people could conceive of galactic distances.
The 21st century will reveal we live in a the middle if a giant desert with nobody around us. We’re alone. There is no god, there are no aliens, and we’re stuck on this rock until we blow ourselves up.
Not sure which belief system is superior.
Young Earth Creationism didn’t become popular until the latter half of the 1900s. It is relatively really recent that people decided to think that en mass. In the 1800s very few people believed that nonsense.
It depends on which mass of people you are referring to. Men of science have realized for some time that the earth was more than 6,000 years old, although even the most learned men of the 19th century had no idea just how old it was.
But as for the great mass of people, they had no idea what to believe. Lacking modern geology and biology, and lacking education in general, Jews and Christians probably relied on the Old Testament. To my knowledge, there has been no systematic study of how people viewed the age of the earth through history from culture to culture, but some available evidence does point to the prevalence of young-earth views over a significant cross-section of Georgian society, not just a handful of reactionaries on the fringes. Going back to the 17th century, Bishop Ussher fixed the age of the earth at some 6,000 years, Martin Luther agreed, and Shakespeare also believed the world was 6,000 years old. Even the astronomer Kepler agreed.
What’s new to the 20th century is the attempt to show that the young earth is not just the word of the bible, but is somehow scientifically justifiable. That is, as you implied, nuckin’ futz.
Following up on your point, here is one of the most frightening facts I’ve ever encountered: “According to a 2019 Gallup poll, 40% of US adults believe that God created humans in their current form within the last 10,000 years.” It is difficult for me to accept that modern man is that ignorant, but that conclusion seems unassailable.
I’d love to see the Venn Diagram on that 40% and the 40% that support Trump.
I wouldn’t say it’s ignorance as much a necessary result of religion. In as much as believing that a man can be a woman or vice versa is a necessary result of being so called “woke,” which to me seems much more fundamental than people who (in fairness, casually, given an average “stan” is more devoted to pop-stars than an average religious person in the west lol, I know from first hand experience) believe that god created universe would believe that humans were created by god rather than evolving from apes, whether that’s recently or not.
I think you’ve mentioned it before yourself, but (unfortunate?) reality is that an average person is, well, average. An average rarely tends to be an example of perfection.
Certainly, ignorance isn’t absent either lol. See: people who don’t know what cheese is made of, hamburgers, or for that matter, those who believe that chocolate milk comes from chocolate cows.
“I’d love to see the Venn Diagram on that 40% and the 40% that support Trump.” LOL, you KNOW exactly what that Venn Diagram looks like. 😭
You think it’s just a single circle? I don’t think so. Some Black people also embrace fundamentalist beliefs, and not many support Trump.
But if you did the Venn of “white people who believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old” and “white people who support Trump,” then it might be pretty close to a single circle.
There is no limit on how much we can bend space. This allows for travelling very long distances far faster than light could traverse it without breaking the speed of light. There are designs based on this such as a ship that can bend space both in front of and behind it. This trick will allow it to go faster than the speed of light without breaking any laws.
Also, if you travel close to the speed of light, time would slow down so much that you could travel very long distances without aging much. Not breaking the speed of light, but the time going by wouldn’t seem that long.
These are all theoretically possible, but we have no idea if we can build the machines needed to do this. The amount of energy often seems daunting, but we are just beginning to understand these things so we don’t know what we don’t know. If we survive as a technological species for another 1000 years, it is hard to imagine what we will be capable of then. It would be hard to predict even 100 years out. For people used to dynamite, a hydrogen bomb is pretty mind blowing. AI is already being used to solve problems that would have taken humans thousands of years to complete on their own. This breakthrough alone is going to accelerate us to things that we would have a hard time even imagining. It’ll make what we’ve done in the last 100 years look like nothing. Technology tends to grow exponentially. Let’s just hope we don’t destroy ourselves first which is something I’m afraid may be famous last words for many intelligent civilizations.
Granted. Yet, I ain’t predicting nuttin. Let’s say, I’m not holding my breath.
Let’s not get too excited about exponential curves. Exponential can be within sampling error of linear for centuries. Economic miracles around the world are a dime a dozen. To my knowledge, we can boil them all down to a one-time bump from literacy. Every time, once we’ve squeezed that lemon, the miracle evaporates. The economic boom makes its nice landing right back here on the planet. True, computers can beat grandmasters. Today, myriad AIs can write essays better than me. Do they “think?” I dunno. Do I? I mean, I used to think so, but now I’m not so sure. In many ways, I’m a clever bot. And only vaguely.
“ There is no limit on how much we can bend space.” No, WE can’t…
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former. ~ Einstein. 😛
We seem to assume that any other intelligent civilization in the universe would naturally become technologically advanced, because that’s the way we went. They could be out there enjoying an artistic creative existence without cars, planes, missiles, oil wells, AI… In fact, I recall once reading that a slight difference in the composition of our atmosphere could have prevented the type of combustion that led to mechanization and industrialization. So we might have peaked at around the Renaissance and now be creating literature and art instead of weapons and social networks.
Great point. Yes, we could call it techno-arrogance or something. When we talk about exponential extrapolations or expect miracle cures, we’re often stripping the lower fruit branches bare, & assuming we’ll have an equally easy climb up the tree. Using AI to bootstrap even better AI may or may not work. That brute force leads to singularity assumes facts not in evidence. Is “higher intelligence” even a thing? And even if yes, will brute force necessarily get you there?
All that has in fact happened was a convergence of lucky accidents. The future will depend sensitively on accidents we have no good reason to anticipate. And I did mean literally luck, not “good luck.”
Cyanobacteria evolving photosynthesis to then oxygenate the seas & sky is an example of what I think of as excessively good luck. Oxygen-based metabolism is chemical sorcery. But photosynthesis evolved just one time. As did oxygen metabolism. We eukaryotes appropriated the technology by corporate takeover. Literally. We enslaved the mitochondrion. Man-made tech pales in comparison.