Should we really stop looking?
Yesterday Michael Anissimov wrote a provocative post entitled "Aliens - Stop Looking." An article that bravely desolate demands a response.
When it comes to intelligent life, we have a sample of 1. This means that we can't say anything about the number of civilizations present in the galaxy with any kind of certainty. The Drake equation is interesting because it showcases what we think we know about what it takes for a intelligent civilization to develop. But we can only guess at what values to plug into that equation. Intelligent people can differ - Carl Sagan used values that would have the galaxy teaming with intelligence. But you could also quite reasonably plug in numbers that would return something close to zero. If that's true we're all existential lottery winners.
Michael rightly criticises the blind faith of those who believe that there must be life out there because the universe is big. So what if the universe is big? Insert the right values into the Drake equation and the universe would have to be as big as it is to evolve just one civilization.
But then Michael goes one step further:
...SETI can throw in the towel right now.Before I go into the arguments, let me refer readers to the excellent Extraterrestrial intelligent beings do not exist, by Dr. Frank Tipler. It was quite a few years ago when I looked up to the stars, with Dr. Tipler’s book in my hand, that I realized he was right - the stars are empty, ready to be harvested and spun into pure energy with the help of gravitational singularity goodness. No aliens, green bug-eyed ones or otherwise, are waiting there to be inconvenienced.
Michael basically argues the Fermi paradox - that if there were intelligent life it would have been here by now.
Maybe, maybe not. Again, since we have a sample size of 1 for intelligent civilizations and a sample size of 0 for intersteller traveling civilizations we just can't say. The great filter may have a very narrow neck between intelligent civilizations like ours and civilizations that survive to travel between the stars.
I haven't read Tipler's book. I have read another book that probably made some of the same arguments: Rare Earth. Having heard both those arguments and also the arguments of others like Carl Sagan, it seems too early to be dogmatic either for or against alien civilizations.
So, keep looking SETI. Either way, the answer will be interesting.
Comments
I liked the remark about how, if there are aliens, we should be stumbling over their artifacts every time we get up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom. Assuming that aliens would inevitably send out von neuman probes is kind of like assuming that aliens would have to use radio waves -- it assumes that they are in some way like us. In the comments to Michael's post, our old buddy eisendorn makes the excellent point that any aliens out there might be post-singularity. Since we can't predict what a post-singularity world might be like, we can't state with confidence what attributes a post-singularity world would have to possess. John Smart has similarly argued that maybe the destiny of species is to reach singularity before star travel becomes possible, and then star travel no longer matters. What if all the aliens have gone digital and found a way to run their computers inside of brown dwarfs? They'd be awfully hard to detect.
Anyway, I enjoyed Michael's piece very much (even if I don't completely agree with him.) There's something refreshing about so much skepticism being aimed at something that's often treated with so much reverence.
Posted by: Phil Bowermaster![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.blog.speculist.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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January 19, 2007 03:59 PM
Of course any aliens out there are likely to have achieved something that would seem a singularity to us. If our own development is "normal" (speaking hypothetically, since I think the sample size is 1 and will remain so), it only takes perhaps 12,000 years from the development of organized civilization to singularity, and only 200,000 or so from the first emergence of intelligent life. Even so much as 10 years after singularity brings levels of advancement we can only guess at, since there is nothing that says that the law of accelerating returns stops there. More to the point, it only takes maybe 300 years at the outside from the development of radio and similar transmission technology to singularity. In evolutionary timescales, that's not even an eyeblink.
That doesn't take anything away from what Anissimov is saying, however. In fact, the singularity dodge is exactly what he's talking about when he mentions people moving the goalposts in order to justifying continuing to throw more and more money at the search.
If they're out there and want to be found, they'll make their presence known.
If they're out there and don't want to be found, we're not going to find them.
The more likely explanation is, in my mind, that they're not out there.
Posted by: Gramarye![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.blog.speculist.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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January 19, 2007 09:33 PM