With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven't any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now?
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-great-filter-comes-for-us-all
With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven't any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now?
This is based on a discussion I had in 2016 on the Boing Boing message boards: Let's talk Great Filter - general topics - Boing Boing BBS
I added
Although we often consider Pluto the end of the solar system, Voyager 1 is more than three times farther than that and yet still within the Sunās domain. (2012)
It is the farthest spacecraft from Earth and, as of 2013, the only one in interstellar space. Nearly forty years out, the radio signals from Voyager take over 18 hours to reach Earth. Voyagerās RTG energy source will give out around 2025. Voyager, deaf, dumb, and blind, will reach the next nearby star in 40,000 more years.
If Voyager was aimed at the nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, it would take over 73,000 years to arrive.
The most ā¦ appropriate song on the golden record attached to Voyager. If there was, or is, anything out there to hear it.
Or, life will reply to us within 1500 years from now?
A topic Iāve always found interesting. One thing Iāve observed is humansā conceit. Since our star is at the edge of just one arm of our Milky Way galaxy - and we cannot really āobserveā those planets that may be orbiting the hundreds of thousands of stars in the other arms - why would an advanced civilization want to travel to other arms without first exploring those stars/planets in their own arm first? The idea of āwe are important so ETs should visit usā is contrary to the fact that first we went to the moon, then to the planets in our own solar system, and finally onward and outward into inter-stellar space - without knowing where we (both Voyagers) are actually heading. Why would we expect other lifeforms to do anything different? Could it be they could simply be exploring/visiting their own solar system and galaxy before entertaining the idea of visiting other solar systems and galaxies?
For several millennia we had the idea the Earth was the center of the solar system - everything evolved around us. As we developed as a species, we assumed we were āimportantā and ETs should be contacting/visiting US. Maybe they arenāt interested in us, if they even know about us in the first place. There also is the possibility that other life forms could be in the āsame boat as usā - it simply takes too long to travel to other solar systems/galaxies to bother. Logic would dictate one develop oneās self first; then slowly expand outward within their own limited means.
Another concept Iāve given much thought to is even if there were advanced civilizations in more ancient galaxies, why in the world (pardon the pun) would they even consider traveling to āyoungerā galaxies billions of light years away?
Regardless, I do believe in our quest to explore. I am a member of the National Space Society and the Planetary Society (monthly donation for over 20 yrs). Iāve also contributed to various endeavors such as the Light Sail project. I have a 1 square cm of the sail from Light Sail 1 and have a personal message on board the craft visiting Europa. I also had my fatherās name added on a gold DVD on another space craft, since he was an avid space enthusiast. His collection dates from the early years of flight (Wright Flyers aircraft (Wright Brothers)) to early rocket development to the Space Shuttle program. His collection (Attil Pasquini Collection) donated to the Empire State Aerosciences Museum (formerly known as the Schenectady Space Museum).
A little trivia on the Space Shuttle program. When I was ~16 yrs old, my father showed me 2 photographs of Space Shuttle launches and asked me if I noticed anything different between them. When I didnāt, he pointed out the main boosters on one were painted white and on the other only had a primer coat. He said an employee tasked with painting the boosters realized how much weight the white paint weighed that he was using. He suggested not painting over the primer and using that weight for additional payloads. He was awarded $14,000 for his idea, which NASA did employ.
Ad astra! (To the stars!)
Personally I think that itās just a case of
Space is big. You just wonāt believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think itās a long way down the road to the chemistās, but thatās just peanuts to space.
It may be teeming with life, but detecting it (or others detecting us) is just really hard. And the speed-of-light barrier doesnāt help either.
But hey, hereās another (somewhat darker, depending on how you look at it) idea that I havenāt seen anyone talk about.
See, when you get right down to it, all that we humans do is to try and generate pleasure and avoid pain. All our struggles are really directed to this end goal. We might think that weāre trying to explore the vast mysteries of space, but really weāre just after the high that comes with a new discovery.
So what happens when we can get it directly? As our technology advances, eventually we should be able to directly interface with our minds. And thenā¦ wellā¦ hereās a concept: The Pleasure Pod.
Take one human, and discard all the unnecessary parts. Basically leave just the brain and maybe some of the spinal cord. Put it in a jar with life support and add electrodes to all the right places. Stimulate the brain to produce the maximum amount of pleasure and leave it there for eternity.
Sure, youāll also need a flock of robots that tend to the jars and maybe relocate the whole facility to a new star system once every few billion years, but thatās also doable.
Aaand thatās where everyone is. Once the Pleasure Pod of Immortality becomes available, it kinda becomes pointless to try and do anything else.
Some people might disagree and think that such a pod would be very unpleasant or unsatisfying, but by definition it wouldnāt. Entering it would be the most awesomest thing anyone could ever do.
The everything gets smaller theory is interesting, but you should be confronted by an implication of this prediction. If things do indeed get smaller, a form of Mooreās law should end up applying and they also accelerate. This is in addition to any truth to other existing acceleration theories.
As things miniaturize, the travel time of any interaction should shrink, and the population should grow, and so time should seem to move faster and faster in terms of evolutionary progress. Even if thereās no hard lower wall on miniaturization, you have to wonder if the rate of acceleration from miniaturization and thus observability from scope of impact of extended evolution and the lower observability from evolution of miniaturization would be in equilibrium or be biased toward greater observability.
I think thereās a pretty hard wall for miniaturization. You canāt shrink elementary particles and you need at least so many of them to do useful stuff.
If you are interested in this topic, you might want to read about Robin Hansonās āGrabby Aliensā theory. That is the cleanest and most plausible resolution of the Fermi Paradox I have seen yet.
I think that the Fermi paradox has been convincingly explained by Sandberg et al as an artifact of point estimates; if you look at full probability distributions instead, our sadly solitary state is unsurprising:
Humans depend on the warmth of the sun, on fresh air to breath, on water to drink, on grass to grow and on insects and fish and animals to help with it all. We are a local phenomenon.
If you can convince yourself that we went to the moon you can dream about other space journeys. Just as you write, that is only after one ādoes away with all physical stuffā.
My theory: the filter is behind us, and itās the leap from single- to multicellular life.
Fossil evidence says that this took a whopping 3 billion years on Earth. Thatās a quite significant chunk of the age of the universe.
Itās not all that unlikely that we got lucky and the mean time for this to happen is actually so long that it hasnāt happened anywhere else yet.
On the other hand there are billions of galaxies much older than the Milky Way, so why would it be unlikely that this hasnāt happened in any (many) of those? Because of the vast distances, the universe may be teaming with life - we just canāt see itā¦ yet.
Some other possibilities:
Another aspect - either faster-than-light (FTL) communication is possible, or itās not. Therefore:
Either way, we shouldnāt expect a whole lot of interstellar chatter to be going on in the universe that we could eavesdrop on.
Movie suggestion: The Thirteenth Floor
Itās a cool take, and itās interesting that multiple medias (tv, videogames, books, etc) have fantasized/theorized/explored multiple ways regarding that, in all 3 great filters.
Star Trek for one, goes into the āuniverse is full of different peopleā (and ignoring the reasoning given for most of species looking like humans is that we all have one common ancestor that sew their seeds everywhere, which in my opinion feels like itās a post concept to explain our regular human actors cosplaying other races without spending much in 3D lol) and you could say that each planet had itās own Great Filter (#1) as each has itās dominant civilization, and now the human space exploration is just tying these different civilizations together (being space-nosy) bringing every planet into an entire spaceās great filter situation (which could be the Borg assimilating everyone - filter #3, etc).
The great filter #1 and also #3 āAlmost no life makes it to this pointā has been beautifully explored in the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, in the Endwalker expansion (spoilers ahead lol):
The thriving ancient civilization of eos ago (of the planet your character is from) had powers to create anything at will had as one of their citizens, a guy curious about the possibility of other civilizations elsewhere, created sentient āprobesā (Meteion and her sisters) that were sent across space in order to find other civilizations. What each found was pretty much the great filter #1 happened AKA there were other civilizations in different planets BUT with a mix/caveat that all of them had already been past a second Great Filter of sorts, which exterminated all of them.
The āUltima Thuleā region explores 4 civilizations (Dragons, Ea, Omicrons, one necropolis thereās no actual name of the race, from what I remember) and the dungeon āThe Dead Endsā explores this too, with the āprobeā showing us players 3 of such other civilizations, all of them in different civilization levels, but that shows that each civilization had went past the filter #1, into their bigger filter:
In the narrative, seeing so many of said planets going through different filters but all of them ending in death made the āprobesā kinda just assume everything in the entire universe boils down to pain, suffering and deathā¦ And they started attacking the ancient guyās civilization because thereās nothing else to be had.
Itās pretty cool reading about these Great Filters after experiencing the gameās expansion years ago, I can totally see how the filter theory can apply to these different fantasy/fiction civilizations and how they could be used as theory examples for our IRL predictment of āwhere are the other civilizationsā.