The Fermi Paradox - an explanation
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NASA Scientists Present Theory About Why We Haven't Met Other Intelligent Life. It's Crushing.
NASA scientists have explained in a new paper why they believe it’s likely we haven’t ever encountered intelligent extraterrestrial life — and it’s heartbreaking.
All intelligent life, they argue, has likely destroyed itself before reaching a sophisticated enough point in evolution to support such an encounter. And the same fate likely awaits humans unless we take action, they believe.
The “Great Filter” theory — as in “filtering out” various forms of life — argues that other civilizations, possibly several, have existed during the life of the universe. But they all destroyed themselves before they could make contact with Earth, noted the paper, “Avoiding the ‘Great Filter’: Extraterrestrial Life and Humanity’s Future in the Universe.”
The scientists fear that all intelligent life, such as humans, have deeply ingrained dysfunctions that may “snowball quickly into the Great Filter,” they wrote.
But there’s still a bit of hope for humans — provided we can learn and take steps to avoid our own extinction, noted the paper by a team of researchers based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California.
“The key to humanity successfully traversing such a universal filter is… identifying [destructive] attributes in ourselves and neutralizing them in advance,” astrophysicist Jonathan Jiang and his coauthors wrote in the paper that appeared online on Oct. 23.
The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Personally, I prefer Alastair Reynolds' explanation.
Link to video -
And did the event that caused life to begin on earth happen only once?
Or does it continue to happen?
Has it been recreated?
Maybe, kind of:
https://phys.org/news/2014-12-scientists-re-create-life.html -
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Seems very unsciency…
@LuFins-Dad said in The Fermi Paradox - an explanation:
Seems very unsciency…
There you go:
The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed.
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That theory, that technology destroys civilizations before it allows them to populate the universe, is probably old and common enough that it would be difficult to pinpoint who first thought of it. The first time I heard it was when Michiu Kaku was on Art Bell's show 30 years ago.
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I also think that the dinosaurs were around for millions (hundreds of millions) of years. They were intelligent life, and if the giant meteor did not kill them all, they may still be around today.
They were intelligent life, yet never built a house, never had machines, etc.
There may many many examples of this type of intelligent life out there in the universe.
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In Reynolds' universe, intelligent life pops up all the time. Machine-capable, space-faring intelligence, that is.
But, a long time ago, the propensity to destroy themselves, and potentially others, was recognized by one of the oldest space-faring civilizations. They developed a system of AI to check on these nascent space-farers. And, as soon as they became even remotely dangerous (like with the use of nuclear weapons), the AI (Reynolds calls them "The Inhibitors") snuffs them out - all life on the planet is erased, and the threat is removed.
The builders of the AI are long-since gone, but The Inhibitors are still out there. And that's the premise of his "Revelation Space" saga.
I've commented on it before. Reynolds is not an easy read. He's very dense, very - how can I put it - assuming that you'll eventually catch on to his concepts. He doesn't explain things, though in the read, they become clear. Reynolds is a challenging and visionary science fiction writer.
From Wiki:
" Fermi's paradox is explained as resulting from the activities of an inorganic alien race referred to by its victims as the Inhibitors, which exterminates sentient races if they proceed above a certain level of technology. The trilogy consisting of Revelation Space, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap (the Inhibitor trilogy)[1] deals with humanity coming to the attention of the Inhibitors and the resultant war between them."
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In Reynolds' universe, intelligent life pops up all the time. Machine-capable, space-faring intelligence, that is.
But, a long time ago, the propensity to destroy themselves, and potentially others, was recognized by one of the oldest space-faring civilizations. They developed a system of AI to check on these nascent space-farers. And, as soon as they became even remotely dangerous (like with the use of nuclear weapons), the AI (Reynolds calls them "The Inhibitors") snuffs them out - all life on the planet is erased, and the threat is removed.
The builders of the AI are long-since gone, but The Inhibitors are still out there. And that's the premise of his "Revelation Space" saga.
I've commented on it before. Reynolds is not an easy read. He's very dense, very - how can I put it - assuming that you'll eventually catch on to his concepts. He doesn't explain things, though in the read, they become clear. Reynolds is a challenging and visionary science fiction writer.
From Wiki:
" Fermi's paradox is explained as resulting from the activities of an inorganic alien race referred to by its victims as the Inhibitors, which exterminates sentient races if they proceed above a certain level of technology. The trilogy consisting of Revelation Space, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap (the Inhibitor trilogy)[1] deals with humanity coming to the attention of the Inhibitors and the resultant war between them."
Personally, I think the most likely reason we’ve not been contacted is that the universe is inconceivably huge, and nobody’s managed to get past the speed of light limitation, which could easily be an unbreakable speed limit.
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Personally, I think the most likely reason we’ve not been contacted is that the universe is inconceivably huge, and nobody’s managed to get past the speed of light limitation, which could easily be an unbreakable speed limit.
@Doctor-Phibes said in The Fermi Paradox - an explanation:
the universe is inconceivably huge
If you watch a bit of the Reynolds TED talk, he puts that in perspective.
