Since the question was once raised about nuclear power, I figured a healthy discussion on the Fermi Paradox might not be out of order.
For those of you not familiar, the Fermi Paradox was a question raised by a pretty smart guy by the name of Enrico Fermi that basically boils down to:
"If the universe is so very vast, and sentient life on Earth is not defined as a unique event, there should be other sentient species out there somewhere. Why haven't we been able to detect them, and why have we never been visited?"
You can get the reader's digest version from the Wiki page which, unusually enough, has several cited references that might actually be relevant. It would be a good place to start to find some references and get the basic gist of the concept. Extra Credits also did a short on it in their Funding X-Com series that gives a high-level overview.
In the face of our ability to observe our galaxy growing exponentially in recent years, cataloguing hundreds if not thousands of 'earth-like' planets, it only brings the question even more to the foreground.
This thread is for the discussion of this paradox and the various theories that surround the attempt to resolve it.
My personal idea is similar to one of the more popular ones, being 'It is the nature of sentient life to destroy itself'. At first, I scoffed at this one, then as I thought about it... I came to realize that it might have a point.
Let me ask you a question: When have we advanced most rapidly in technological advancements? The answer, historically, has been 'when we have been threatened'. In the beginning, we likely developed spears to be able to hunt mammoths, fire to cook our food and keep ourself warm, in effect we were making advances to stay alive. But nature only has so many ways of threatening a civilization. Once you get to a modern age, Nature might be able to throw you a curveball that might impact you in some way (a volcanic eruption in a populated region, massive earthquake and follow-up tsunami, hurricanes...) but they really don't provide the impetus necessary to develop the kind of technology we have developed. Once you hit a point, the only thing that can threaten us, that can challenge us to improve ourselves... is other humans.
Think about that a moment. The only reason we are as technologically advanced as we currently are is because of an arms race. We have pushed our technology with military projects that then had civilian implications. Even NASA was originally a military project. America would never have put anyone into space without the 'Space Race' with Russia.
Now let us look at the flip-side of this statement. The only reason we are as technologically advanced as we are is because we are constantly trying to kill each other off. Keep doing that, and sooner or later you can end up with a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario. We've already narrowly skirted this with the Cold War, with both America and Russia having enough nuclear missiles to ensure the extinction of humanity.
So any race technologically advanced enough to be able to project a message into space to be picked up by us is also going to be hostile enough that it might well kill itself off in the process and advanced enough to succeed at it.
By that same token, if you take for granted that any race technologically advanced enough to project a message into space to be picked up by us is also hostile enough that it might kill itself off, it might also be hostile enough to kill off any other civilization it might encounter.
So we may see periodic spurts of sentient growth, which inevitably dies back off. We've actually seen this quite often, at least insofar as development of apex predators that kill themselves off by being too successful. See also: the Mosasaur. For its time, it was the single most dangerous thing in the seas. Unfortunately, when the extinction event that happened to kill off the dinosaurs occurred, it also reduced the food supply in the seas. The Mosasaurs ended up going to cannibalization, then to extinction.
The question then begs... where is the evidence? After all, if a space-faring civilization existed then wiped itself out, there ought to be some kind of evidence that they were once there. Mosasaurs, for example, left behind their skeletal remains, with ones at the end of the line clearly showing signs of being attacked by other Mosasaurs. Yet not a trace can be found. Either they never went multi-system, and killed themselves off before going extra-system, or we are simply not sophisticated enough to detect what was left behind yet. It might well be that civilizations only would emit radio signals (currently the most commonly tracked attempt at finding sentient life) for a very brief period of time. So if they were to emit radio signals we could have found, say, back in the 1400's... it would've only missed our ability to detect them by about five hundred years or so. But if it only lasted for, say, a hundred years before they died off or before they switched to something else we haven't been able to detect yet... we'd have never known.
There's lots of different postulated ideas. This one's mine. What's yours?
For those of you not familiar, the Fermi Paradox was a question raised by a pretty smart guy by the name of Enrico Fermi that basically boils down to:
"If the universe is so very vast, and sentient life on Earth is not defined as a unique event, there should be other sentient species out there somewhere. Why haven't we been able to detect them, and why have we never been visited?"
You can get the reader's digest version from the Wiki page which, unusually enough, has several cited references that might actually be relevant. It would be a good place to start to find some references and get the basic gist of the concept. Extra Credits also did a short on it in their Funding X-Com series that gives a high-level overview.
In the face of our ability to observe our galaxy growing exponentially in recent years, cataloguing hundreds if not thousands of 'earth-like' planets, it only brings the question even more to the foreground.
This thread is for the discussion of this paradox and the various theories that surround the attempt to resolve it.
-----
My personal idea is similar to one of the more popular ones, being 'It is the nature of sentient life to destroy itself'. At first, I scoffed at this one, then as I thought about it... I came to realize that it might have a point.
Let me ask you a question: When have we advanced most rapidly in technological advancements? The answer, historically, has been 'when we have been threatened'. In the beginning, we likely developed spears to be able to hunt mammoths, fire to cook our food and keep ourself warm, in effect we were making advances to stay alive. But nature only has so many ways of threatening a civilization. Once you get to a modern age, Nature might be able to throw you a curveball that might impact you in some way (a volcanic eruption in a populated region, massive earthquake and follow-up tsunami, hurricanes...) but they really don't provide the impetus necessary to develop the kind of technology we have developed. Once you hit a point, the only thing that can threaten us, that can challenge us to improve ourselves... is other humans.
Think about that a moment. The only reason we are as technologically advanced as we currently are is because of an arms race. We have pushed our technology with military projects that then had civilian implications. Even NASA was originally a military project. America would never have put anyone into space without the 'Space Race' with Russia.
Now let us look at the flip-side of this statement. The only reason we are as technologically advanced as we are is because we are constantly trying to kill each other off. Keep doing that, and sooner or later you can end up with a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario. We've already narrowly skirted this with the Cold War, with both America and Russia having enough nuclear missiles to ensure the extinction of humanity.
So any race technologically advanced enough to be able to project a message into space to be picked up by us is also going to be hostile enough that it might well kill itself off in the process and advanced enough to succeed at it.
By that same token, if you take for granted that any race technologically advanced enough to project a message into space to be picked up by us is also hostile enough that it might kill itself off, it might also be hostile enough to kill off any other civilization it might encounter.
So we may see periodic spurts of sentient growth, which inevitably dies back off. We've actually seen this quite often, at least insofar as development of apex predators that kill themselves off by being too successful. See also: the Mosasaur. For its time, it was the single most dangerous thing in the seas. Unfortunately, when the extinction event that happened to kill off the dinosaurs occurred, it also reduced the food supply in the seas. The Mosasaurs ended up going to cannibalization, then to extinction.
The question then begs... where is the evidence? After all, if a space-faring civilization existed then wiped itself out, there ought to be some kind of evidence that they were once there. Mosasaurs, for example, left behind their skeletal remains, with ones at the end of the line clearly showing signs of being attacked by other Mosasaurs. Yet not a trace can be found. Either they never went multi-system, and killed themselves off before going extra-system, or we are simply not sophisticated enough to detect what was left behind yet. It might well be that civilizations only would emit radio signals (currently the most commonly tracked attempt at finding sentient life) for a very brief period of time. So if they were to emit radio signals we could have found, say, back in the 1400's... it would've only missed our ability to detect them by about five hundred years or so. But if it only lasted for, say, a hundred years before they died off or before they switched to something else we haven't been able to detect yet... we'd have never known.
There's lots of different postulated ideas. This one's mine. What's yours?
