Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:I'm curious what kind of advanced alien life Mr. Tobin evisions exists, and what kind of technology they have if they're here?
I can't imagine, with the kinds of time and distances we're dealing with, we'd ever come into contact with another alien civilization.
Here is another explanation:
SUMMA 3.3 The Statistics of Cosmic Civilizations (by Stanislaw Lem)
As we have said, assigning stellar civilizations life span equal to that of their parental stars, which practically means that once it emerged a civilization lasts for billions of years, inevitably leads to the conclusion of a “civilization congestion”, that is, any two inhabited worlds separated by only a few light years. This conclusion is at variance with observations, which include the negative results of the radio eavesdropping of the Universe, by the absence of any signals of another kind (for example “alien” rocket probes), and last but not least, the complete absence of “miracles”, that is, phenomena brought about by the astroengineering activity. This state of the matter forced Bracewell and von Hörner, as well as Shklovsky, to accept the hypothesis about the short lifetime of civilizations when compared to that of stars. If the average life span of a civilization is “only” a hundred million years, then (due to the inevitable lower density in the period of their existence) the statistically most likely distance between two civilizations is around 50 light years. This also is extremely doubtful. Therefore the above authors favor a hypothesis that predicts that the average civilization life span is less than twenty thousand years. In that case two highly developed worlds would be separated by a distance in the order of thousands light years, which makes the failure of our eavesdropping and of our search understandable.
Hence, the larger the number of planets in the Galaxy to which we assign the chance of biogenesis, culminating by the emergence of the “Psychozoic”, the shorter the average life span must be assign to civilizations if we want to avoid a conflict with the observation. Currently it is believed that from the 150 billion stars in the Galaxy about a billion possess planets that are capable of conceiving life. And making that number even ten times smaller would not significantly change the results of the probabilistic calculations. This seems completely inexplicable: evolution of life in its pre-civilization forms takes billions of years, and it is difficult to understand why the “Psychozoic”, after such a wonderful start, is to end after merely a few millennia. When we realize that even a million years represents just a small fraction of the time in which an average civilization could continue its development, as its maternal star guarantees an uninterrupted radiation power for many billion years, then we will fully understand the mystery of this phenomenon, whose explanation presently eludes our ingeniousness.
In the light of the above considerations, intelligent life appears to be a rare phenomenon in the Universe. Let us emphasize, not life in general, but rather life contemporaneous with ours, since what concerns us is not how many myriads of civilizations have emerged and disappeared throughout the existence of the Galaxy (about 15 billion years), but how many of those coexist with us in the same time period.
Accepting the ephemeral nature of the “Psychozoics” as a fact that needs an explanation, von Hörner lists four possible reasons for it: 1) the total extinction of life on the planet, 2) extinction of only highly organized beings, 3) mental or physical degeneration, and 4) loss of interest in the scientific and technological matters.
Having assigning to each of those reasons an arbitrarily selected probability factor, von Hörner obtains an average lifetime of civilization of about 6,500 years; an average inter-civilizational distance of a thousand light years; and finally, his calculations suggest that the most probable age of the civilization, with which we establish the first contact will be 12,000 years. The probability of the (first) contact with a civilization that is at the same stage of development as the terrestrial one is slim, less than 0.5%. Von Hörner takes into account, among other factors, the possibility of the repeated emergence and extinction of civilizations on the same planet.
In light of such results the fiasco of the American eavesdropping becomes understandable. The issue of information exchange, should we actually manage to receive any signals, also remains doubtful, since after posing a question we would have to wait 2,000 years for an answer…
Von Hörner considers that the “positive feedback” effect, whereby, given the statistical character of life distribution in the Galaxy, a local cluster of cosmic civilizations might emerge, possible. When the time required for an answer in such “locally concentrated Psychozoics” becomes a relatively small fraction of the civilization lifespan, an effective information exchange can occur between civilizations, which in turn could prolong their lifetimes (thanks to the exchange of experiences, etc.).
Shklovsky points out the similarity of this process with the exponential reproduction of organisms in a supportive environment. Once started anywhere in the Galaxy, such a process, propagating into increasingly larger regions, can attract into its sphere a growing number of galactic civilizations, which together would form something like a “super-organism”. It is most strange, and frankly, most incomprehensible, that such a possibility has not yet realized. Let us assume, even just for a moment, that von Hörner’s catastrophic hypothesis is a cosmic law. Its statistical character makes it highly probable that a handful of civilizations with extreme longevity exist. (Because to absolutely rule out the existence of a civilization lasting up to a million years would amount to transmogrifying a statistical law into a mysterious, fatalistic determinism, into an utterly demonic inevitability of a rapid extinction.) If that is the case, then at least a few of those extraordinarily long-lived, million-years-old civilizations must have conquered long time ago the star realms extremely distant from their home planets. In other words, a handful of those civilizations would have become the decisive factor of the galactic development, and the postulated positive feedback would have been a reality. Indeed, it should have been in operation for hundreds of thousands of years already. Why then are there no signals from such civilizations? No signs of their gigantic astroengineering activities? Of the countless information probes that they have produced and sent to populate the vacuum or of the self-reproducing automata that penetrate to the most distant corners of our star system?
In short, why are we seeing no “miracles”?
Lem is wrong.
We are seeing
astroengineering activities.
The aliens
- encourage sex of humans (see Joseph Smith)
- inhibit sex of humans (see Mr. Tobin)
They
loss of interest in the scientific and technological matters --- except sex --- see above Von Hörner's list!
- Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message. - Umberto Eco
- To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin. - Cardinal Bellarmine at the trial of Galilei
