Why we haven't met any aliens.

I was reading this article... sort of interesting, and vaguely related to SL
It says that aliens haven't contacted us yet cause they are too busy playing computer games to care about space exploration.

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/05/why_we_havent_met_any_aliens.php

I can't help but think this is overly alarmist... and far fetched. Has anyone stopped to think a little? As long as you're radiating enough energy to be picked up by some alien civilization, you are being terribly inefficient. That energy could be put to better use down here. So as we evolve better technologies, energy will stop leaking to outer space in measurable quantities.

Scientific American had a feature article a couple of years ago on the SETI program, written by one of their lead researchers. He offered some logic, some calculations and surmised that we have only explored (including listening electronically) less than 1/4 of our galactic neighborhood (eg, our arm of the Milky Way). It surprised him that we have not encountered any other signals, since our own experience implies that early communications will usually involve undirected radio signals. But he held out hope that advanced civilizations might just be rare, not non-existent.

He also offered the opinion that technological advancement would allow any civilization to spread over an entire galaxy in roughly 1/4 million years (far faster than Fermi's colleagues estimated)-- our own civilization is roughly about 12,000 years old and our homo sapiens species is about 100-130,000 years old. Assuming we're somewhere on either side of a galactic average age, the next 100,000 years are going to be extremely interesting.

YOU HAVE DISCOVERED OUR SECRET. NOW WE WILL BE FORCED TO COME TO YOUR HOME LATE ONE NIGHT (PROBABLY ON A FRIDAY BECAUSE THAT IS WHEN SOME ASSHAT USUALLY CRASHES THE GRID) AND VAPORIZE YOUR SORRY HUMAN A$$. THANK YOU.


P2

i'm a alien... in human disguise!!!

The real reason is that any aliens close enough for us to notice have already noticed us and decided they don't want anything to do with us. I mean, we've been broadcasting daytime tv at them for decades... it probably breaches some kind of galactic Geneva Convention or something...

I started thinking about I Love Lucy, which reminded me of the movie Rat Race, where someone was driving a bus full of Lucy impersonators. Then I realized you're right.

Another factor to add into the Drake equation, huh Eggy? Or rather a modification of the one about being "willing and able to communicate". There was another article in Scientific American that pointed out that, with our current capability, we wouldn't be able to detect intelligible signals from our own civilization from more than a few light-years away. So SETI is assuming at this point that someone out there would be purposefully blasting out a signal strong enough to reach across interstellar distances.

It also assumes that any civilization advanced enough to do so wouldn't have come up with a better way than light-speed signals to pass messages across the galaxy. If there is a better way, the whole galaxy could be teeming with intelligent life and we would never know it.

The whole thrust of technology since wearing animal skins has been protection from the environment and to allow us more control over our existance.

You may have noticed that in SL you really are immortal as long as the sims stay up, and you can do lots of things not possible in the physical world. Soooo...

IMHO it won't be a lot longer (<10000 yrs) before humans just move into virtual space with essentially failsafe hardware and software. At that point I'm not sure that we'd be detectable by another civilization, or for that matter what our concerns for them would be. It might be like asking if mound building termites have detected humans.

If there's only a few thousand year window when civilizations are detectable, it makes the odds of finding one nearby pretty low.

Or what if they've already been here? Maybe all those UFO sightings are tourists? Like how some people travel to a 3rd World Country, like India, for a vacation.

Earth- Nice place to visit, but I wouldnt wanna live there!!!

The option I like is that a civilization probably uses energy-wasteful things like radio for only a short period, relatively speaking. We don't see any radio signals because they either can't, or they're all using sub-ether or something.

Watch one hour of any newscast - would you want to go visit a place like that?

We'll make great Pets!

Speak for yourself eggy

Or crowds of delusional people seeing light tricks?

if you were an alien, would you want to come meet humans? I sure as fuck wouldnt.

Maybe Earth has been quarantined for scientific study. Teams of aliens working on their equivalent of the PhD while picking up tacking souvenirs.

Or as a hunting preserve.. don't forget Predator!

Maybe they just don't want to be labelled as illegal aliens. Seriously tho, on the mothership, they let me probe a couple of the female aliens and the drugs up there are awesome...

I like philosopher Nicholas Rescher's ideas about "alien contact". He rightly points out that we have a hugely difficult time communicating among humans of different cultures, different time periods (think Shakespeare), or even different genders. He doubts convincingly that we would have much that is meaningful to say to sentient species from an entirely different evolutionary schema, and explodes the myth that mathematics and science could be a common point of communication. He wonders whether the answer to the Fermi Paradox ("if they exist, why haven't we heard from them?" is that they generally realize that communication isn't really worthwhile.

A healthy antidote to the Star Trek universe of big-headed humanoid aliens that fill our own preconceptions and needs.

Well, we could, but then we’d have to charge you money.

P2

LOL, I'll stop with the wingdings since quoting it decodes it.

Are you sure you're interpreting him accurately? Most scientists are only saying that mathematics is the universal language (1+1=2 is true on any planet), not that we have anything interesting to say to anyone. Considering Rescher's credentials, I can't see him claiming that mathematics would NOT be a common ground of communications. If you're going to determine another species' intelligence, gauging their ability to understand mathematics is a reasonable first step. If you're saying that communicating and understanding are different things, then I can agree with that.

The assumption should be that inter-species contact is so rare that the contact itself would be awe-inspiring, at least at first. Boredom and xenophobia (and inter-galactic war) can come later

If they have the technology to travel to earth, it seems reasonable they would have a grasp of mathematics. If, however, we traveled to their home world, who knows?

It does? Not from my end...

P2

Yes. I'm sure.

The essay in question is Rescher's "Extraterrestrial Science" from the collection entitled Extraterrestrials: Science and Alien Intelligence, published in the eighties by Cambridge University.

Rescher's point was that science and mathematics are not necessarily commonalities that we can count on to communicate with extraterrestrials. Sentient life with significantly different biologies or environmental backgrounds could have very different ways of conceiving and practicing such things - ways that would make little sense to humans. Rescher noted that objectives, methods, evaluation of success, methods of modeling reality - even basic notions of quantification and qualification - might be unrecognizable.

Your notion that aliens would share common mathematical concepts with us (1+1=2) is a great example - Rescher suggested that a common knowledge of natural number sets (1,2,3....) and their rules would not be necessary to create the technologies to achieve contact between species, and that other forms of value quantification were possible. Rescher's idea was demonstrated by mathematicians John Casti and David Cartier a few years later, in an arithmetical system based not on quantification but on comparative values. (You can, they found, understand electromagnetics and develop radio technology with a recognition-based arithmetic that did not utilize numbers at all.) So broadcasting prime numbers to the stars in an effort to attract attention, like Carl Sagan recommended, is not necessarily a good way of establish contact.

Actually, many scientists - astronomers and physicists, mostly - have claimed that recognizable science and mathematics would be a "universal constant" shared between humanity and extraterrestrial civilizations. It's the mathematicians, philosophers, biologists, linguists, and cognitive psychologists who have the greater doubts.