Ok, I'll try to ask it this way: is it wrong to think there's any relationship between how advanced a civilization is and how much evidence there will be for its existence? ie the more advanced an alien civilization is the more likely it is that we on Earth will have evidence of its existence (signals, probes, relics on the moon)? I assume that civilizations will always explore and communicate (that's what we've always done).

There is definitely some minimum level of advancement needed to make ones existence known. I don't think we are advanced enough to make our existence known to even the stars closest to us. Beyond that, it is a question of what can be gained from doing so. If there is a way to study what is on other planets without them knowing you are there, I think that would be advantageous for many reasons in terms of strategery and science.

My bad....sorry.....carry on.

I agree with your point about forming conclusions about civilizations at around our technological competence, but do you think that the absence of evidence (to this point) of significantly advanced civilizations should not alter the probability we assign to their existence? I get a little wacky about this topic because I'd imagine that technological progress eventually provides the satisfaction of all material needs (and if you live around a stable star and you haven't polluted your planet into oblivion, you wouldn't really need to go any where), so a society will explore/study the universe just out of curiosity or maybe out of some cosmic notion of eudaimonia.

The fact that we have no seen super advanced aliens is more important. It could me a few things, they don't exist or are very rare, the limit of transmitting things at c is absolute and there have not been any in out light cone, (but maybe in other regions of the universe it would be known by people as smart as us that there exist beings capable of say manipulating galaxies or civilizations that smart/powerful don't want to be found.

Do you have a sense of what you think is more likely:

1. No super advanced civilizations exist
2. Some super advanced civilizations exist but direct interstellar communication is impossible/extremely improbable
3. Some super advanced civilizations exist but they choose (for whatever reason) not to communicate

This is directly out of my butt, but I think that (1) is over 99% (2) is a fraction of a percent and (3) is on some distant order of magnitude near flopping a straight flush two hands in a row: but I'm definitely open to revising that pending this discussion

I'm surprised you find (3) so improbable.

I guess your thinking is that there might be reasons why more advanced civilizations would choose to leave less advanced civilizations alone, but the probability of every single advanced civilization (with the capability of contacting us) arriving at this conclusion independently (or not...) is extremely low?

Because even on Earth there are indigenous peoples still existing in South America that have had almost no contact with the outside world, and I'm sure if we took a vote in the first world many people would prefer we leave them completely alone.

If you can easily imagine it happening here then you can certainly imagine it on an interstellar scale where unlike on Earth accidental contact might be impossible.

A superadvanced civilization is going to realize they have nothing to gain from us and yet that they would drastically impact us with contact. Lots of reasons they might choose not to.

Let me just backtrack some and say that I don't think it's objectively so improbable, since I make highly disputable assumptions and speculations about what advanced civilizations will do. It's probably not appropriate for me to assign probabilities about their existence based on my speculative assumptions which themselves are not necessarily true and would have to be assigned probabilities.

That's an interesting point, but I would be surprised if even one advanced civilization decided not to communicate with us (assuming it was easy for them to do so, that they knew where we were etc.). I affirm the antique sense of the highest good as contemplation/knowledge, so I hold that materially secure civilizations will want to spread knowledge/ideas. It could be the case that some kinds of knowledge are inherently destructive and should not be spread (although, I'd argue about that), but some knowledge is benign if not ameliorative and should be spread - unless you think it's a significant risk that merely the knowledge of an another existing civilization will cause ruinous upheavals in civilizations like ours.

But that's something of a paradox, maybe the indigenous people would want to know about the outside world but they can't be offered the choice to know without then irreversibly knowing about the outside world? Wouldn't you say that the scientific community on this planet wants to be contacted by alien civilizations?

If a super advanced civilization cannot figure out a way to talk to a less advanced civilization without negative consequences, then that's an interesting and very strict sociological constraint on how civilizations progress in the universe. I don't think it's true though. The only sense in which I recognize the possibility of a drastic negative consequence is if influencing the evolution of a civilization is of itself a drastically bad thing to do; but I disagree with this too.

Well first I didn't say that a SAC contacting us would necessarily have negative consequences, just that it would have drastic consequences.

With the hypothetical Amazonian tribe we may think it best to leave them uncontacted simply because we can't entirely predict how they will be affected, or because we like the principle of preserving old cultures for their own sake (similar to the preservation of endangered species, which imo is clearly not motivated by the pragmatic rationales people sometimes use).

Frankly what they would want if they understood the question is not really material to public policy.

It could also be that the SAC is ambivalent toward itself and does not necessarily think it is better off for being more technologically advanced, having lost its sense of awe or purpose or whatever, and so would regard itself as doing us a disservice by catching us up to speed.

After all the ancient Greeks whom you invoke, though they valued all forms of knowledge, valued political and moral philosophy over natural philosophy (science). From this perspective the SAC might not regard itself as more advanced than we are (since really technological supremacy is how we're defining a SAC.)

Finally it seems to me that you have democratized the Greek concept of the pursuit of knowledge. I'm not an expert of course but I know that in The Republic Socrates argues that philosophy is the highest activity only for philosophers, and that people in the lower orders have their own highest callings, like defending the community and doing commerce.

In fact the masses are specifically supposed to be shielded from the more dangerous consequences of philosophy by "noble lies", like for example believing your nationality is superior to others (which is necessary for a properly motivated military).

Not to get all pedantic, I just don't think you can cite the classical rational telos as naturally culminating in a missionary desire to spread knowledge (but admittedly it does make sense they would want to study other civilizations.) The Greek ideal seems more like a community of philosophers doing philosophy among themselves, and largely staying out of the way of practical politics, rather than an entire civilization focused on amassing let alone spreading knowledge.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startsw...how-to-fix-it/

Here’s a recent Forbes article from Ethan Siegel that suggests alterations to Drake’s famous equation. Do you agree with them and is it missing anything? I feel like this forum could have some input on the individual components and with the successful launch of TESS we’ll look forward to more detail about explanet atmospheres.

Idiotic equation since inception to eternity.

~10^-23 or less but bigger than 10^-30 probability is all you need courtesy of yours truly.

1 civilization on Milky Way. Better yet only 1 in the next 10 mil galaxies and likely more.

And yet we are not alone because if we were alone the age of the universe would have been trillions of trillions of years because we would be so rare an event that it would take an enormous amount of time bigger than the typical age of a stable long lived solar system.

Drake equation is ridiculous because we do not have abiogeneis decided yet so what on earth are they talking about, its uncertainty upon uncertainty and you get in the end a stupid result.

The logic is simple. If Milky Way had 2 civilizations or more even then the next 1 mil galaxies would have had easily 100k to 1 mil or more. The older one ahead in evolution history by even billions of years would have been so advanced as to visit everything in only a few million years and change the universe to amazing results. We would be living in their universe.

We needed to evolve in the ballpark of current time, say with a factor of 10^3, the fuel will run out of the universe:



(https://universe-review.ca/F02-cosmicbg08.htm)

Dark energy and the future of the universe speculation are bs physics and they are waiting a royal demolition at the hands of a true synthesis that is around the corner of geometry's soul.

Higher civilizations can persist indefinitely if they so desire. They will find a way to live even in artificial systems that do not need stars or have their own protective "geometry".

Right now if the losers we have for politicians and the other losers voting them didnt control the game we would be able to leave earth and live without a sun as far away as one can imagine from the sun and have amazing life style while at it. All it takes is a decision to go that way and make scientific society happen. It is trivially easy.

This is why Drake "equation" is a bs joke before abiogenesis is decoded. Because the very moment the equation predicts 2 for this galaxy or more it has indicated its own idiocy massively. So it better predict 1 per few billion galaxies. If the avg galaxy distance is 1 mil light years, within 100 mil light years you have over 1 mil civilizations and at least one if not 100 of them have 2-3 bil years if not 10 head start from us. With such time advantage they did exactly what to their galaxies? Nothing, Nothing, nothing! Even if you could move at 10% of the speed of light you would be able to travel 100 mil years in 1 bil years and visit all the the other galaxies and all you need is a spaceship that is 1 kgr big to actually transfer in it all your genetic code, knowledge and life 2.0 that could recover everything within 100 years in another system and then with light transfer all information beyond that expanding exponentially in all directions so that all technology remains updated.

Yes i can buy 10-20-50 even 99% of them somehow not being interested in expanding and exploring the universe but i call bs on that number being 100% that such ridiculous Drake result as >1 per galaxy would have you require to explain the total silence and lack of any megastructures. It is a lot more likely instead that the very universe is their mega structure!

It's interesting how the Drake equation is tied to the time it was proposed. Then people were prepared to take in the possibility of radio communication. Had he included the natural expansion of an alien lifeform he wouldn't have gained as much respect, maybe been labeled a (bad) dreamer. We had just reached orbit around the earth a few years earlier. That naturally was the reference.

This reminds me (I think) of how they included wide screens on Star Trek when everybody knew they existed but few still had them. Wow, the future! People want to feel cozy when watching. Nothing out of the ordinary, just a bit popped up.

"Where are they?" is a quote meant to be taken seriously.

The Drake equation had its time. Sparked some, delayed some. Was kind of progress all in all though, it didn't kill anybody.

It always takes me a while to digest a masque post (that’s a compliment) but I’m a little surprised that you’re taking the line that our galaxy has only us. Sure that’s all we have evidence for but you don’t think it’s likely that there is a great filter that necessarily dooms any advanced life? I would imagine AI being one of those filters, once it gets going it takes over and decides not to travel to the stars because anything it would encounter would necessarily pose a greater threat than staying on the planet for example.

And sure we could be the first to get past all the filters but is that more likely or are we headed for when someone says, “when I push this button, this will fix everything” and we accidentally destroy ourselves.

I suppose the Drake equation is naive but I do remember reading about it in a time life book series as a kid and things like that got me interested in Astronomy and Science as hobby for the rest of my life so there something to be said about it.

Me too of course same thing as kid. And thank you both for your links and reviving this thread.

I just came to realize through physics and math that the unsupported optimism about abundance of intelligent life in the universe or the attempt at predicting occurrence from first ground up principles is very naive (when abiogenesis theory is not already in place) and the people in interviews like Tyson etc are totally inept at understanding how the world works moreover their "careers". When you develop so high technology and start traveling around a lot of interesting things happen in all directions. It is as if they never thought about exploring the universe and what it takes to do it. But people like Fermi or Von Neumann did get it.

Also if AI is the threat, then AI is the dominant species in the universe and can hide efficiently but why would it hide if it can dominate everything? The first one of them would quickly learn it is first and dominate for security. Life expands.

The problem is that if this galaxy has more than 1 civilization then the problem for Fermi paradox gets enormous as soon as you add the galaxies in the next 10-20 mil light years even. You easily start getting 1000+ civilizations and easily 1-10% of them would have been here earlier like 1-2-3 billion years earlier in cosmic expansion time and that is enough time to dominate all their galaxy and we still see nothing in so many millions of them around.


I can show you easily how to dominate this galaxy and convert stars to massive energy sources that create unreal solar systems that emit enormous thermal spectrum due to technology and energy usage. I can show exactly how long it takes to dominate the galaxy once you reach our level. Only 100k years!!! So what do you do in 100 mil or 1 bil? Nothing????????

We are rare. Very rare but not rare enough to be a total miracle. We are so extraordinary rare which makes it massively insulting how morons worldwide destroy the planet with their bs and leaders.

We are a miracle of some type damn it. Because i am saying without the slightest fear this simple thing. We are most likely not only the only civilization in this galaxy but 100 mil more galaxies too around us!

If not the universe is so big that you should have had at least one of the billion civilizations around dominate their entire galaxy and then expand to another million galaxies within 1 billion years.


People see a great filter. I only see how precious rare abiogenesis and further evolution without disasters is. The filter is at the beginning when life is vulnerable or not there yet at the beginning. The beginning is not trivial.

https://www.ibiology.org/evolution/origin-of-life/

But the fact we exist only 14 bil years later when average stable not super hostile solar systems last order 1 -10 bil years implies we are not super rare, so one can have both happen, us being locally first here and still many civilizations in the visible universe but probably separated by billions of light years in all directions.

Finding nada suggesting life on any of the exoplanets so far helps evaluating. Gradually getting facts instead of speculation.

Well, this has helped shed light on my apparent bias in assuming intelligent life is more common than what we have detected. I guess many public figures like ndgt often lean that way and surely influence me. Abiogenesis or even the step from prokaryotes to eukaryotes may be the great filter behind us.

I will still eagerly await results of Tess/Webb which will hopefully give us a lot more data on exoplanet atmospheres; oxygen would be a crazy result.

The possibility of finding extraterrestrial life has been a great psychological motivator for many cosmologists. It has become a routine in every popular scientific program concerning space to at least once mention it just about everywhere currently hidden from us. Nicely so, but a bit exaggerated. Instead of seeing extraterrestrial life as a possibility to win a lottery it has become viewed as something natural that just must happen.

The abiogenesis is of course one of the big things. You could expect scientist being able to produce life with enhanced processes at this point. Or a computer simulation how it might have taken place for mimicking the long time and vast areas on earth. No breakthrough so far.

Remember if we get to analyze for example one thousand planets, and not one contains life, then we can extrapolate a lot. We can ask: what is the expected probabilities for life anywhere on say one billion planets, if you don't find life on a single one of the first thousand ones? masque, could you help with this statistical analysis?

Try this;

Your claim is say life happens with 1 in 300 chances per planet. You observe 1000 and nothing seen, assuming your can detect well by then, one can exclude that claim at the

(1-1/300)^1000=3.5% level ie such no observed result under the 1/300 assumption has 3.5% chance to happen.


But what if i told you this now to convince you about my 10^-23 idea above;

Imagine we examine the next 1 billion light years radius and we have in it 1000^3 = 10^9 galaxies and in each 10^11 solar systems and in each system 3 reasonable conditions planet candidates or satellites and say in 14 bil years you can have this times 3 opportunities as stars and their solar systems are recycled ie;

10^9*10^11*3*3~10^21 systems the experiment took place within a fraction of the universe (less than 0.1% of the visible universe even!!!) .

Then follow this not at face immediately unreasonable claim (given what else you hear out there but i am trying to be very conservative vs them ) that abiogenesis has 10^-9 chance per habitable conditions system and that then it has 10^-6 chance to lead to intelligent life and then 1 in 100 to lead to very intelligent technologically strong civilizations and 1 in 100 chances that each of these decides to expand and colonize the greater neighborhood of galaxies altering its properties (something that for us looks like over 50% actually the way we like exploring things - not at all different than what other life has done before colonizing all earth places).

Then not having a world with obvious higher intelligence signature or consequences in that 1 bil light years radius has a chance of only;

(1-10^-9*10^-6*0.01*0.01)^(10^21)~(1-10^-19)^(10^21)~((1-10^-19)^(10^19))^100~e^-100=3.7*10^-44

to happen.

That is, the way it looks out there under the above numbers has only 3.7*10^-44 chance to happen!!!

So even if one is so conservative as i listed above you still get a chance the world looks that way if the above is true that is order 10^-43.

You see what i mean? It cant happen that way with such numbers really. The numbers need to be worse to look that way!!!

It must be very rare to start and develop intelligent life before something wipes out the conditions of the planet.

But because i think that once life is initiated it will find a way to overcome a great deal of adversity i tend to believe abiogenesis is very rare, probably worse than 10^-12 per system.

Also its reasonable to expect that life finds a way to intelligent life through evolution very often and not just 10^-6.


So the barrier is very early on.

Why is it so hard to imagine that the chance per system may be as little as 10^-23 for a space traveling species to emerge?

But it cant be as bad as 10^-30 because then why did it take so little time for us to happen? We happened relatively fast in the age of universe. If life was super rare we would have typically happened with the age of the universe being millions of times bigger than the age of this system.

If you have 1 in 500 mil chance to win the lottery you typically win it after about order 500 mil trials for the first time! Sure you can win it the first time too or even after only 1000 trials but the chances are vastly against it (to happen sooner than 1000 trials has only 1-(1-1/500 mil)^1000~2*10^-6

So yes we can be very lucky but it takes <1 in 1 mil luck to be observing ourselves so early in the age of the universe if we were so seriously rare.


The most logical conclusion in all this is that life is very very rare like 10^-23 or worse per system but probably no worse than 10^-30. That makes us alone in over 1 bil light years radius but still not the only civilization in the universe likely.


People will start thinking that hey they lose interest after a while and never explore or they wipe themselves out in Armageddon etc but i say this is all bs because it requires to wipe out everything perfectly, something that once you start moving to other planets becomes super difficult. You can have 99.99999% of people not wanting to colonize space and the rest is enough to make it happen eventually.


Ps: super advanced AI is impossible to ignore that reality of rarity and will for that reason respect life and protect it.

Have thought some about this. As I think you have said earlier a reasonably smart civilization could be expected to expand with one tenth of the speed of light. So be "taking over" the Milky Way in just one million years, as "we" may do now.

So, how did it take 14 billion years to come to this stage? Yes, there had to be supernovas etc. for getting heavy elements. But you could think there could have been enough of suitable material say 7-8 billion years ago, our solar system is just 5. Why are we the one? We are not very very early, that could point to that intelligent life is rare, because we would not have come into potential expansive stage hadn't we been the first.

On the other hand, hydrogen fusion will continue for a long time as you indicated, according to the diagram I posted earlier, say 1000 billion years. So there could be some anthropocentrism baked in. Hadn't we evolved quite early we would maybe not have been the first, and hence maybe never have come to existence in the first place. So hadn't we evolved, some else might have done so in say 10-100 billion years. And if so there may be someone else in the visible universe. Their light might not have reached us yet though.

Hopefully this won’t derail too much, a good friend of mine is an artist and we have cs6, canvas, watercolor, etc available to use and she’s creating what a von Neumann machine arrival would look like. It’s just a fun personal project but she is a very practiced and good at translating my ideas to paper.

The only thing I’m stuck on is what those machines would look like, I suppose they could be a swarm of independently traveling units but I also think an Independence Day style mothership that spawns minions after travel might be more likely.

I’ve imagined ion thrusters and/or light sails would have to be involved but perhaps not if payloads just have to arrive somewhere and could use local materials to generate the means to launch to the next system.

If anyone wants to help, what would you describe the units to look like? What features need to be present in such a technolgy?

So the odds of finding aliens is what now? How many aliens are there?

Think it depends on where you want to find them. Can't see any in the room right now, but may naturally be mistaken :-)

There may be factors we can't analyze well yet, for example how the whole process needs to go forward for getting proper amounts of water, as we have. Enough but not too much. We may be more or less goldilock. I think the honest answer is: we don't know, but intelligent life is probably not very abundant.

If abiogenesis, life out of non-life, is happening say once in 10^50 planetyears, then we are alone in this universe. The argument masque presented is substantial imo for us not being totally alone, but as I said there may be some factors making this time, say 10-20 billion years after the big bang especially suitable, and then we could be alone after all.

Every decade that now passes I'd say will sharpen the theories. And actually finding extraterrestrial life would of course bring the process hugely forward in one step.

I want to find one on my birthday! I'll be in my house!


I am goona keep one! :P




The close up ones are really good hiders! But i'm good at finding! :P