Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter

brainlet

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because we haven't discovered ayys, or traces of them, does not mean they don't exist or are very rare. In terms of astronomical time humanity has been around for the blink of an eye and only exploring for extraterrestrial life for a fraction of a fraction of our existence. We've barely scratched the surface in terms of space exploration and searching for extraterrestrial life.

We didn't even know for sure if planets existed around other stars until around 25 years ago when we had the first confirmed exoplanet discovery. Now we have discovered thousands of them and have determined planets are pretty common. We didn't get serious about listening for ayy radio transmissions until the 70s - again, almost nothing in terms of cosmic timescales. Despite that short timeframe, there has been one radio signal that we can't explain (look up the Wow signal). Doesn't mean it was sent by ayys but we can't dismiss it with any other explanation and it's the most promising hard evidence of an artificial radio signal. I'm really looking forward to the JWST. It should give us more clues on where to look for life. It will be able to analyze atmospheres of some exoplanets, which will give us prime SETI candidates.

tldr give it a few hundred more years of searching for life before definitively making any claims about how common it occurs

Yeah right because intelligent life could only ever use burning hydrocarbons as its source of energy.
Nuclear pulse propulsion cannot do .9c

And we still haven't eliminated the simplest "great filter" - that intelligent, technological life is simply quite rare to begin with. You simply cannot presume the probability of anything while your sample size is 1.

If even one civilization in the observable universe could build Dyson spheres and travel between stars, it would be very obvious. As we would see a galaxy with a section obscured in the visible spectrum, but glowing brightly in the infrared band.

well maybe Dyson spheres are actually just unnecessary?

You think a Dyson sphere will have solar panels with shitty efficiency?

Dyson sphere candidates are known by dozens
home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm

Using the Low Resolution Spectrometer yielded 17 ambiguous candidates of which four were slightly amusing but still ambiguous and questionable. The largest one sun bolometric distance in the 17 source sample was 118 pc. The 11000 source Calgary sample extended down to 1-2 Jy which would have given a maximum bolometric distance of 300 pc for LRS sources. This region includes something like a million stars.

home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Other_searches.htm

Slysh and Timofeev at al. have the IRAS database for a different approach. Slysh investigated the flux at the maximum of a Dyson Sphere spectrum. He estimated that all Dyson Spheres with temperatures from 50 to 400 �K within 1 kpc of the sun should have been detected. The Timoreev search looked at a population of IRAS sources in the 110-120 and 280-290�K temperature range as established by Kardashev and others and did Planck blackbody fits to the four IRAS bands. Sylsh identified one possible Dyson Sphere candidate, G357.3-1.3. The Timofeev at al. search identified 10 or so candidates but ruled out most of them, often on the basis of associations.

More recently several other searches have been conducted for partial Dyson Spheres. Globus, Backman, and Witteborn have searched by looking for a temperature/luminosity anomaly due to the fact that the luminosity of a star surrounded by a partial Dyson sphere would be lowered compared to a naked star of the same temperature. Conroy and Werthimer have searched by constraining the Jugaku infrared excess technique to older stars using a list of 1000 nearby older stars compiled by Wright and Marcy. Using older stars eliminates thick dust clouds around young stars. hey have found 33 candidates in the 12 μm IRAS band with 3 σ excesses from the mean.

Why? It's literally harvesting free energy that would be created from fusion reaction regardless of your will.

>dyson sph-
Let me stop you right there, and ask you to leave, and please, never some back.

If you see any Dyson spheres, you should see entire galaxies consumed by them. It takes a relatively tiny amount of time (a few million years) compared to the time it takes for life to arise and reach spacefaring technology.

what's your fucking problem?

shut the fuck up and keep suckin my cock you faggot

>If you see any Dyson spheres, you should see entire galaxies consumed by them.
>if you see a city you should see whole continent covered by it

There is literally no reason for extensive colonization of entire universe.
Even our civilization doesn't colonize every piece of livable land there is.

what if The Filter™ is becoming multi-cellular life?

>Even our civilization
Yes. But our civilization =/= all of intelligent lifeforms. 1 that never stops colonizing is enough for it to be visible.

>1 that never stops colonizing is enough for it to be visible.
Well we know that there isn't a civilization that colonizes everything so we can safely scratch that from our list.

>There is literally no reason for extensive colonization of entire universe.
Yes there is. Gathering up resources to last as long as possible. And then there is the simple fact that in a civilization of trillions even a small proportion that wants to expand can do so.

And even if you can come up with a reason to not expand, if even just a few civilizations do it anyway you would see them everywhere.

>we know that there isn't a civilization that colonizes everything
No we don't. We know humans haven't (so far), but you can't extrapolate this.

>Yes there is. Gathering up resources to last as long as possible.
You don't get how big space is. Our Solar System can support trillions of humans for billions of years alone.
> And then there is the simple fact that in a civilization of trillions even a small proportion that wants to expand can do so.
Why would there ever be a civilization of trillions?
>And even if you can come up with a reason to not expand, if even just a few civilizations do it anyway you would see them everywhere.
Well, we can safely say there are no civilizations that want to endlessly expand since we don't see them.

>No we don't. We know humans haven't (so far), but you can't extrapolate this.
Didn't you just say that we would see one if it existed? Since we don't see it, it is safe to say that there is no civilization in our observable universe that endlessly expands

>You don't get how big space is. Our Solar System can support trillions of humans for billions of years alone.
And a billion solar systems can do even better. You're drawing arbitrary lines in the sand here.
>Why would there ever be a civilization of trillions?
Because that's what even a K1 civilization can support.
>Well, we can safely say there are no civilizations that want to endlessly expand since we don't see them.
But you can't assert that there are civilizations to begin with until you see them.

No you fucking brainlet. Your claim is
>1. There are civilizations out there
>2. But they don't expand
You need to prove the first part, otherwise the more believable explanation is that there are no civilizations in our neck of the woods.

Of course there are people out there. Heaps of people.

I'm sure we've seen everything that could be seen with our garden telescopes.

>nuclear pulse propulsion
>These types of spacecraft could potentially accelerate to 80-90% the speed of light. And it wouldn't even take that long to do it. Only a few months.

You have no fucking idea what you're talking about.

I've only ever heard an optimistic estimate of 10% c. for this type of spacecraft.

Or you brainlets are taking space opera seriously and thinking that an interstellar civilization is going to look like "Star Trek".

A species switching to a virtual existence using Matrioschka Brains is a more likely outcome, meaning that they would be very difficult to detect, because every last joule of stellar output would be absorbed by the construct (if they didn't just disassemble their star and switch to a more efficient utilization of energy production).

I was the guy who started the rumor that the Boötes void might be a colossal galactic empire, based on this notion...

(no, I wasn't serious)

>Fermi Paradox
not science or math

the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

I really think it comes down to resources. I mean assuming a species develops to the point where they have the ability to go into space on the same level we can. They would also be individuals. So you don't see any insane amount of resources going into space. Also technological limitations. Which also covers the whole AI/Dyson stuff.

citation needed

If our galaxy was a bunch of dyson spheres we'd know it. Or rather wouldn't because we wouldn't exist

>And a billion solar systems can do even better.
Why would you need billion solar systems? Is whole Earth covered with atomic powerplants

>Because that's what even a K1 civilization can support.
And human civilization can support in theory a trillion people. Yet it doesn't. Or on smaller scale France can have 200 million people yet it doesn't.

>But you can't assert that there are civilizations to begin with until you see them.
It is not me that makes a claim that civilization would constantly expand and colonize every system in the universe. There are Dyson sphere candidates and if there are indeed correct we can assume they don't belong to ever expanding civilization.

. There are civilizations out there
>2. But they don't expand
>You need to prove the first part, otherwise the more believable explanation is that there are no civilizations in our neck of the woods.

>if civilization expands it will colonize every rock in the Universe, no other options are possible!
Nope brainlet, just like humans haven't colonized whole Earth, alien civilizations don't have to colonize whole galaxies if they exist.
One type of civilization we can of course confirm to be non-existant is the one that colonizes everything. After all we would see it. Civilizations with limited or no expansion are possible.It is perfecty possible to imagine civilizations engaging in only limited colonization of their stellar neighberhood and just exploring the rest.

>If our galaxy was a bunch of dyson spheres we'd know it. Or rather wouldn't because we wouldn't exist
As quoted above there are Dyson Sphere candidates. Read the link, they are known to exist but we can't confirm if they are artificial or really unique cool stars. There are other objects in the galaxy that possibly could be artificial but we have no way of confirming it, like Przybylski Star

>I was the guy who started the rumor that the Boötes void might be a colossal galactic empire, based on this notion...
There is a galaxy that consists almost only of red dwarfs and we have also detected a star that has geometric patterns on its surface.
Plenty of weird stuff that could be artificial but would require confirmation.

>You need to prove the first part, otherwise the more believable explanation is that there are no civilizations in our neck of the woods.
>Civilizations don't exist because there is no retard civilization spamming every object in the galaxy with colonies

>Because that's what even a K1 civilization can support.
I can support 5 children yet I have none.
I prefer luxury and comfort in my life rather than reproduction.
Self-awareness and technology stand in the way of biological needs.

>80-90% the speed of light
NO.
Why does no one use the Lorentz transformations. Why does no one understand something as simple as fucking special relativity. You fucking brainlets. NO! okay? NOOOOO!

Sorry to burst your bubbles but aliens do not exist. God created only humans in the universe.

But there are plenty of other people who reproduce anyway. You are not a universal yardstick.

>But there are plenty of other people who reproduce anyway. You are not a universal yardstick.
Reproduction rate for developed countries has been falling universally

>rare
Water is the most common compound in the universe so no, life would be common at least single celled life, multicellular would be rare.

>it causes a runaway greenhouse effect which destroys its civilization
Just move to the poles.

>But by the time the species realizes the damage it's done to it's biosphere it causes a runaway greenhouse effect which destroys its civilization.
Buahah, climate change is GOOD for our civilization.
It will reduce deaths from cold, flu.
It will increase agricultural yields.
It will allow us to raise more cattle.
It will allow us to build longer because winter means shorter construction time.
It will allow for better transport infrastructure(snow blocks roads and railways).
It will help to create new cities as coastal ones are abandoned and build new well planned modern high-tech cities.

Global Warming is a GODSEND.

all fun and games before you have to evacuate 2 billion people from the coasts and another 2 billion from temperate areas that turned into fucking desert

>turn into desert
Um no sweetie a hotter rock means more evaporation means a higher rate of rainfall meaning more moist latitude in general like the paleocene period of history when this rock was hotter dumbass.

>all fun and games before you have to evacuate 2 billion people from the coasts
It will happen over a century and is perfectly doable.

>2 billion from temperate areas that turned into fucking desert
Not going to happen

The problem with that is if you're not constantly expanding then you're only increasing the likelihood of a singular event wiping you out with every tick of the clock.
The further and faster you spread, the longer the odds get that any one thing could get everyone. It's like if you had a planet where a paradise for intelligent tool using life formed in the shadow of a volcano. They have everything they need, and no problems, and never go anywhere else. Eventually the volcano would wipe them all out though.
Even if you've managed to download the conscious mind into an enormous AI construct it doesn't make you invincible, shit can still happen.

>you're only increasing the likelihood of a singular event wiping you out with every tick of the clock.
In movies, yes.
We're talking about reality though.
Even a large scale nuclear war would just mean a decrease in population, nothing more.

It still increase deaths from malaria and other tropical diseases, which are more dangerous than the flu by far.
It will destroy the majority of the world's farmland through flooding and desertification.
It will flood and destroy coastal cities where the majority of humanity lives, raising demand for construction and so making it much more expensive.
It will lead to massively increased risk of fires.
It will lower the amount of oxygen seawater can hold, causing ecosystem collapse in the oceans.

Global warming is not a good thing you idiot. Why do you think everyone, including people who study it for a living, is so worried about it?

I'm talking about neutron stars running into each other in an adjacent part of the galaxy. The black hole at the center of your galaxy becoming periodically active.
There are plenty of things on the candidates for great filter that are far bigger than piddly bullshit like muh nukes, muh climate change that you've just got to throw your hands up at the prospect of preventing them from happening.
If you stay in one place long enough, the more extremely unlikely things happening begin to have a non zero probability. That's not sci fi, that's how the dice roll.

>a loss of montane glaciers and snow coverage won't lead to desertification
>increased evaporation only impacts they oceans, not the land

>water is all you need for life

Look at how all the great civilizations, except for the chinese, have destroyed themselves via dysgenetics & mongrelization with low IQ hordes

Look at how the west is now doing the same.

Look at how liberal retards, while babbling about "where are all the aliens", are cheering on the genocide of the race that invented everything on this planet? There is no paradox, intelligence is not a survival trait, and if any generation goes bad then thats the end of the climb of civilization on a planet.

>malaria increase is because you drive cars not because us noble greenfags banned pesticides!

>Why do you think everyone, including people who study it for a living, is so worried about it?
Because they want to see their trillion dollar fake green industries, and associated kickbacks.

As usual this is just the marxists trying to destroy our countries, our economies, our ways of life.
They want to raise taxes on us & increase our costs of living, while the third world ignores it.

A mass flood of migrants would finally force the cucks to defend their borders, or perish, it wouldn't be a bad thing. The world has been too comfortable in the west for too many people.

>Look at how all the great civilizations, except for the chinese, have destroyed themselves via dysgenetics & mongrelization with low IQ horde
The chinks suffer dysgenics alright, it's just that their barbarian hordes are high IQ

>DDT has no harmful side effects
>mosquitoes do not thrive in warmer conditions

>lmao don't you know that science is fake? I'm smarter and holier than everyone else in the world :))))))))
Get over yourself.

Yea but mountains and jungles seperated them from the low IQ populations of India/South East Asia/etc

Even still, I believe the Southern Chinese population is lower IQ than the North

It really takes nerves to talk about alien life when we didn't even directly look at any rocky planet outside of our solar system yet. We know three rocky planet that lie in the habitable zone of their star. And this the earth, mars and venus. From three planets one houses very complex life, one probably houses or housed at some point very primitive life forms, and one probably never did. So statistically speaking, from three planets in the habitable zone, two house life, and from those two one houses very complex life.

Of course we have a too small number of observations to make any meaningful assumptions. This will change soon when we have telescops that can look at planets directly and check their atmosphere for bio-signatures. If we find several true twins of earth, e.g. similar size, similar star they orbit, and similar age, and their atmosphere has no indicator for life whatsoever, then yeah, we can start reasonably assuming that there are no other civilizations. Until then, it's foolish to make any assumptions. Luckily, by 2050 we will probably know the answer to this since we are going to have the first telescopes capable of looking directly and relatively small rocky planets in just a few years.

If we assume that the rules of evolution are the same everywhere, then it is extremely likely that there will be a species with an extreme intelligence sooner or later. Evolution tends to develop extremes: A species can develop extremely big teeth, extremely good ears, or extremely good eyes etc. in its struggle to survive. It is only a matter of time until a species develops an extreme intelligence in the same way.

I think the universe has a lot of intelligent species. But they cant communicate with each other, because the chance that they are even remotely at the same technological level are ridicolously low.

> mfw when I realised great filter and white genocide are the same

These people cheer the death of civilization, or at least will attack those who would prevent it as racists, and yet they wonder how alien civilizations might die off before spreading amongst the stars

>
Of course we have a too small number of observations to make any meaningful assumptions. This will change soon when we have telescops that can look at planets directly and check their atmosphere for bio-signatures. If we find several true twins of earth, e.g. similar size, similar star they orbit, and similar age, and their atmosphere has no indicator for life whatsoever, then yeah, we can start reasonably assuming that there are no other civilizations. Until then, it's foolish to make any assumptions. Luckily, by 2050 we will probably know the answer to this since we are going to have the first telescopes capable of looking directly and relatively small rocky planets in just a few years.

Yup, finally an intelligent answer.

However I wouldn't dismissi possibility of life being in clouds of Venus or Jupiter. However for the general purpose of this topic this is irrelevant(as are possible primitive lifeforms under Europa or Enceladus).

The new telescopes will be really civilization changing for us.
They also will make humans aware that any alien civilization that existed in observable universe probably knows about Earth's biosphere.
But due to distance of development of millions of years meaningful contact is probably impossible.
Exciting times ahead. Until we get these telescopes we can only speculate on what we can find. The same telescopes could allow discovery of alien megastructure artifacts if they exist.

Once the chinks take over the world the kikes and coloreds will wish whites still ran things.

The chinks a couple hundred years ago destroyed all their naval ships and never left China again

You can't rely on them for exploration

They have learned from that mistake.
They won't innovate much but will perfect our technology to the maximum possible levels.
And even with 70s technology you can colonize the stars.
I for one, welcome our Chinese overlords and next year I am going to China to work for them.
Pax Sinica is so much preferrable to the word.

here's the thing you fucking retard, radio signals are weak as fuck and attenuate to noise. You couldn't detect a mirror Earth that was 10ly away.

Most intelligent species we are going to find in the universe are either going to be way behind us (e.g. they are still apes or pre-historic development level) or way ahead of us (e.g. trans-/post-humanism). In both cases, communication is probably neither possible nor specifically desirable. It would be quite the coincidence to find another intelligent species that is +/- within 10.000 years of our development level.

>You couldn't detect a mirror Earth that was 10ly away.
You can with hypertelescopes

>cruising space is impossible
>but making an artificial environment that feeds their brains through eternity with no need for physical maintenance, Dyson swarms and star deconstruction are definitely a go

>Plenty of weird stuff that could be artificial but would require confirmation.

It might surprise you that the book on this situation was written back in the 1990s.

Read it...nothing surprises me anymore.

>With that said. What is stopping someone from piloting one of these spacecraft implementing PNP at 0.9c right into planet Earth?
There's no technology that can make a vessel reach 0.9c. Maybe they could get pretty fast if they found a perfectly reflexive surface and harvested the star making a big fucking laser, reflecting of a solar sail for a long long time. The thrust would be proportional to the area of the sail and the amount of light the laser could provide, so this really is only possible if there is a 100% reflective surface, as the amount of energy necessary to accelerate such a vessel using light alone would burn through anything else if there was any tiny imperfection. The thrust would also diminish as you got it closer to c because of the doppler effect. The reason for the light sail is obvious: it's the only way to accelerate anything without using propellant, and if you use propellant your mass diminishes as you travel and the energy gained by accelerating won't do much damage when you hit if you end up with only 10% of your initial mass. Go ahead and calculate the energy of something with the mass of an aircraft carrier hitting at 50%c, it won't be that much more than a nuke.

>we have also detected a star that has geometric patterns on its surface.
Dude what?

>making an artificial environment that feeds their brains through eternity with no need for physical maintenance

Virtual existence is practically free.

>Dyson swarms

Near certainty.

>star deconstruction

A little tricky...you (meaning a superior AI) have to engineer a form of computronium that can progressively get closer and closer to a given star, harvest its matter, and then dart away before it's burned to a crisp.

All the same, physically do-able.

But it's much easier to envision star travel, slow as it may be, than any of that shit. Particularly autonomous VR (machines break, and who knows when a comet is gonna hit your pc) and the star deconstruction. The Dyson swarms might not be that hard depending on the coverage you want, but eventually the panels are going to break and would need to be replaced.

And considering that in all the life a species might have they would only need to successfully send 2 ships that reach good destinations every 1000 years or so to be able to launch another 2 and thus have an exponential growth through the stars, adding to that that the milky way is more than 13biY old, but even supposing that it has only made habitable planets in the last 9biY, and from experience we know that 4biY is sufficient time for intelligence to develop, that leaves 5biY for any intelligence to grow exponentially in the galaxy, eventually having send multiple ships to every star, even if unmanned to only know if they are suitable.

Which makes me believe that the great filter is the development of intelligence.

>t. isaac aurthur

Some civilizations might turn into virtual beings and try to wait out the hot period of the universe to conserve their energy until the end of time but most won't I'd wager

I agree with you but in regards to France they don't have 200 million people because Napoleon killed off an entire generation of young men and then the same happened in WWI (and WWII.)

>But it's much easier to envision star travel, slow as it may be, than any of that shit.

Star travel is a one way trip. It only needs to succeed ONCE. After that, all information is sent at light speed, the usual way.

>The Dyson swarms might not be that hard depending on the coverage you want, but eventually the panels are going to break and would need to be replaced.

These things are ALIVE, in all the usual ways we associate with that word. They heal and replace themselves.

>And considering that in all the life a species might have they would only need to successfully send 2 ships that reach good destinations every 1000 years or so to be able to launch another 2 and thus have an exponential growth through the stars

I have no idea why you would think that. Thousands of tiny ships could easily be sent to a target star (or stars) on a continual basis, until mission success and a communication is sent back to the base system that arrival was successful.

Upon arrival, each ship would contact the base system to establish a communication stream, then build more starships to send to more star systems.

>it is a popsci bullshit thread again

perhaps a dyson swarm that is a self-replacing matrioschka brain is the most likely outcome based on our understanding. They could have probes that went out and collected matter that was brought back and fed into batteries (and eventually into their star although a blackhole is more efficient I think in the long run.)

This is only feasible if a civilization wants to essentially be isolated and slow down time in order to survive for trillions of years instead of millions. I think most will probably want to control the physical realm due to primordial instincts (at least at first) and thus would leave behind traces of their existence.

>Thousands of tiny ships could easily be sent to a target star (or stars) on a continual basis, until mission success and a communication is sent back to the base system that arrival was successful.
>Upon arrival, each ship would contact the base system to establish a communication stream, then build more starships to send to more star systems.
Oh yeah, now the Fermi Paradox makes so much more sense! I guess that's settled then, we don't hear anything and don't see the trillions of ships perpetually multiplying through the universe for billions of years because they would be invisible on the matrioschka brain... or something? I should've guessed you were a retard by the reddit spacing of your first post. Well, too late for that now.

...

>Global Warming is a GODSEND.
Don't forget your Friend in the Sky has sent flood, rivers of blood, frogs,
lice, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the death of innocents.

its a way to refer to a dyson swarm...

oh, you actually think we were talking about an actyual sphere. HAHAHAHAHA you ahvent even started college

>Even our civilization doesn't colonize every piece of livable land there is.
actually yes we do, we tend to keep growing and occupy every space possible.

Life on Earth exists for over a billion years yet a species capable of building civilization only appeared 200k years ago.

There is 0 guarantee that life leads to civilization. Galaxy may be full of life and some intelligent species but no civilizations other than humans.

But people acting like we know for 100% that aliens don't exist are retards. We wouldn't be able to detect a civilization on our level if it was 50 light years away.

because there is a possibility that FTL travel is impossible and your brainlet brain cannot comprehend how gigantic space distances are

>people acting like we know for 100% that aliens don't exist are retards
absence of evidence is evidence for absence
believing there is life on different planets is the same as believing in god, no evidence for both

>actually yes we do, we tend to keep growing and occupy every space possible.
Nope. See national reservation parks. Also the numerous abandoned islands

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermadec_Islands

atlasobscura.com/articles/the-incredible-ruins-of-12-abandoned-islands

>We wouldn't be able to detect a civilization on our level if it was 50 light years away.
New telescopes will be able to do that.
But I agree it is unlikely any civilization is that close or would be on our level.

>believing there is life on different planets is the same as believing in god, no evidence for both
Except life exists on our planet and is result of natural events. We have no known example of god, we have an example of life.
We have therefore assume that as life is a result of natural processes, these procesess can happen elsewhere as well.