Another explanation for the Fermi paradox
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We haven't been listening long enough?
A researcher from the Laboratory of Statistical Biophysics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland has now come up with yet enother explanation for the radio silence, one inspired by the humble sponge.
"We've only been looking for 60 years," says biophysicist Claudio Grimaldi. "Earth could simply be in a bubble that just happens to be devoid of radio waves emitted by extraterrestrial life."
In short, there's just too much space to scan, and most likely not enough alien transmissions cross our path. That's based on a statistical model previously used to study porous materials like sponges – only instead of pores within a material, it was deployed to assess the distribution of extraterrestrial signal emitters that may, or may not, be somewhere out there in space.
The message is to stay patient. Scanning for traces of communications out in the Universe requires time, effort, and money, and there is some debate as to whether or not the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is worth our while.
The research model starts with the assumption that there's at least one electromagnetic signal of technological origin in the Milky Way at any given time, and that Earth has been in a quiet bubble (or sponge pore) for at least six decades, if not more.
If that's the case, then statistically there are fewer than 1 to 5 electromagnetic emissions per century anywhere in our galaxy. To put it another way, they're about as common as supernovas in the Milky Way – so not very common at all.
Going by the most optimistic scenario, with the conditions set out above, Grimaldi says it could be at least 60 years before we get a hit on an alien transmission. In the least optimistic scenario, we're looking at a wait of more like 2,000 years. In both cases, we'd need to have a radio telescope pointed in just the right direction.
"We may have been unlucky in that we discovered how to use radio telescopes just as we were crossing a portion of space in which electromagnetic signals from other civilizations were absent," says Grimaldi.
"To me, this hypothesis seems less extreme than assuming that we are constantly bombarded by signals from all sides but are, for some reason, unable to detect them."
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I think I will always go back to the anthropic principle, which has roots in not only the earth, our solar system, our galaxy, the universe, and all physical properties of matter and energy.
It all lines up, we're it, and we're sentient. The infinities of the things that never lined up, won't be coming into contact with us.
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There is something intelligent out there.
I always think of the dinosaurs as an example. They were around for 100 of millions of years. I think most people would say that they had some intelligence. Yet, they never evolved enough to build a radio telescope, etc.
If it weren't for the giant asteroid the killed them off, they may even today could have been around.
There may be the equivalent of dinosaurs on many many different planets.
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I've always been intrigued by Alastair Reynolds' Inhibitor theory.
Also central to the Inhibitor project was the eradication of all species above a certain technological level until the crisis was over, as they believed no organic species would be capable of co-operating on such a large-scale project (an in-universe solution to the Fermi paradox). Whilst they were relatively successful, certain advanced species were able to hide from Inhibitor forces, or even fight back.
