My latest novel, Existence, reveals dozens of scenario about first contact, including a couple of unique ones concerning the Fermi Paradox or The Great Silence, as the quandary of why we have never encountered extraterrestrial civilization has been called. I’ve written about all this extensively in scientific papers and in fiction.
...
Complete entry
Posted by
martinchoops on 06/23 at 09:01 AM
One of the possible reasons why we may appear to be alone is that indeed we are simply alone. Perhaps there is life, perhaps life of the simple forms of bacteria is all around us and indeed at that level it is common, but not complex life that gives rise to conscious/sentience that can collapse a quantum wavefunction by an act of awareness (a consciousness causes collapse interpretation of QM). It’s an answer that is unnerving to many, but it has to be contemplated I think. There is a cosmological principle called the final anthropic principle that suggests that we are the only sentient life form in this universe (perhaps out of a multiverse with other sentient life forms, one to each) because we have acausally brought this perfectly tuned universe into being by being here and being a sentient observer - collapsing the “universal wavefunction”. Such a model would fit our quantum cosmological observations.
Also there is this… http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428700.100-life-is-it-inevitable-or-just-a-fluke.html?full=true
Posted by
martinchoops on 06/23 at 09:11 AM
PS: to my last post… Actually, as I see it, the Final Anthropic Principle is a possible consequential extension to the Participatory Anthropic Principle.
For a review of these and other Anthropic speculations, see… http://www.bluffton.edu/~bergerd/essays/impert.html#part
Posted by
Christian Corralejo on 06/23 at 01:43 PM
I wish I knew about this sooner. I would have loved to give my opinion.
Posted by
Valkyrie Ice on 06/23 at 07:26 PM
I’ve looked at this question as being one of the dumbest ever asked.
Can primitive natives detect radio communications?
Can a tribe that has never heard of the airplane understand it is not a bird?
Can a person with no concepts of technology figure out HOW even the simplest electronics work?
SETI is looking for something it has no hope of finding, because any society able to travel interstellar space is going to know things about physics we haven’t even begun to suspect exist. Why use radio if some as yet unknown technique would allow them to use Bell’s theorem to communicate FTL? Why suppose that a “sufficiently advanced technology” would produce waste heat, or ANY form of waste products we could detect?
We’re just now developing our understanding of what “the limits of the possible” even are, and are who knows HOW many decades or centuries away from a complete understanding, not to mention the indications we have that perhaps even some of our most basic assumptions about reality are flawed and incomplete, like the inability to reconcile physics with quantum dynamics, and our failure to find “gravitons” and the Higgs’ Boson. WE DO NOT KNOW ALL THERE IS TO KNOW. So at it’s most basic, SETI is a flawed project with almost no merit.
Simply put, if we HAVE been visited, and there is some not quite so easy to dismiss anecdotal evidence to it’s slight possibility, there is not, and never has been, a way we could have resisted an invasion if that was their goal. One nanovirus would wipe this ball of rock clean and we would not have the slightest hope of combating it. Arguments about resources are just idiotic, because why bother to collect resources from Earth when there is a billion billion times more resources floating around the solar system in places where there is no gravity well making it hard to collect.
TBH, I simply cannot read about SETI with a straight face. It’s just one expensive joke.
Posted by
Christian Corralejo on 06/24 at 08:00 PM
@ Valkyrie Ice
To an extent I agree with you. I’ve heard recently from an episode of the History Channel show “The Universe” (talking about the micro-universe) that quantum physics can allow communication between any two points in the universe instantaneously. I also agree that a lot of the money given to SETI could be better spent elsewhere. However, the laws of physics are universal and have limits themselves so I find it doubtful that any advanced civilization would discover something incredibly new.
Posted by
advancedatheist on 06/24 at 09:38 PM
We have a defective theory of mind, and SETI resembles those foolish ghost-hunting reality series on cable. The ghost hunters hear some random noise, attribute it to the spirit of the dead lighthouse keeper or something, and then try to engage in communications with this nonexistent mind they just imagined.
SETI makes about as much sense, only geeks consider it more respectable and “scientific” than ghost hunting.
Posted by
Intomorrow on 06/24 at 11:24 PM
This is ambiguous on universal physics laws:
http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/viewnews.php?id=190062
Posted by
David Pearce on 06/25 at 07:26 AM
I suspect we’re looking in the wrong place. Unless our best theory of the world, quantum mechanics, is false, then an abundance of other civilisations exist, and they leave their signature on “our” world, and we on theirs, in the guise of subtle interference effects.
(cf. http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mert0130/books-emergent.shtml ) Decoherence (“splitting”) is never complete.
Posted by
Facilitator DaNee on 06/30 at 02:06 PM
I think were just not useful yet. The Voice of Cepheus, one of my favorite books, uses something similar to that scenario. We simply aren’t advanced enough for them to use yet. Maybe they are an organism which needs more server space and we don’t have a compatible system yet.
IEET Blog