Yes, I think there's a very very very high chance that there is intelligent life, even life as intelligent as or more intelligent than we are. However, I highly doubt that any of them will be create space-faring civilizations. Here's why.

Civilization, the organizational structures that support it, and the mindframe necessary to actually allow it to happen without realizing that it goes against almost everything that our brains and bodies are programmed for, happened because of a long string of accidents, drastic climatological changes, and other such situations. Civilization wasn't a natural offshoot of human history, quite the opposite.

Homo Sapiens has been around a few hundred thousand years, and human ancestors have been around for millions, but civilization, government, organized religion, and agriculture have only been around for 8-10,000 years - the evolutionary blink of an eye - and we didn't evolve into it. We are, physically and psychocemically, exactly the same as our ancestors of 300,000 years ago.

Therefore, even though a humanlike species (or something much much more intelligent) could possibly living very happily on another planet or a million other planets, I highly doubt that they have or will ever reach the "civilized" point that allows for something like space travel.

At least, I hope they don't. One is enough.

George,

Your arguments don't hold sway under the onslaught of extremely large hyper-exponential numbers. You do understand the magnitude of such a number do you not? :)

Using combinatoric probability statistics there are more chances for space faring ET's than there are molecular systemic combinations on a planetary surface. This means the odds of there being a space faring civilization is far greater than you being alive to finish reading this sentence.

hey, I completely understand that there's a POSSIBILITY that it's happened.

I'm just saying that according to what we know so far (which, I'll grant, isn't actually alot)

in order to have civilization, you have to have the human race, as it was at that time, in the situation it was in then, in that part of the planet, in those climatological conditions, with just the right number of people, and just the right amount of intelligence, just the right crops that can be stored correctly and for the right amount of time in order to allow stratification of society...

well, you get my point.

I get your point, however the idea that any intelligent species on another planet would have to pass through something almost or nearly identical to homo sapiens is extremely anthropocentric. The space of possible intelligent life forms is exponentially greater than the numner of lifeforms on this planet, including the millions of varieties micro-organisms.

Yeah, but I think it' sjust the opposite of anthropocentric.

I don't think that there's no way any other species can be intelligent enough to create civilization - I think civilization is what's wrong with our species, and I think it was a huge random mistake predicated by so many factors that the chances of it happening again (though not zero) are very very very very low.

I just pray that I'm right, because if another species has mastered space travel, we're probably on the way to being destroyed.

George,

If another species has mastered space travel, there is almost no chance at all that we will be destroyed, quite the contrary actually. Why? Because how could any civilization surpass the singularity bottleneck and retain any degree of malevolence? It would be almost impossible, as such a malevolent technological singularity would self-destruct. That's the beauty of it, if a singularity is reached and the species passes through it safely, the odds are highly in favor of it being benevolent, much more benevolent in fact that we can even conceive. See Eli Yudokowsky's Friendly AI, and the Hedonistic Imperative.

Ah... the vastness of space. I have fond memories of when I was around 13 years old, hanging out with friends in the hills under the night sky, beginning to ponder the imponderable physicality of space. My favorite was "If there is an edge to space, what's on the other side?"

Considering space travel over incomprehensible distances, I like Grant Morrison's notion of what the singularity might entail. He envisions our current 4D, linear time reality as a larval stage. The singularity brings the mutation into 5+ Dimensional space when we step outside of time, free to view history as an open line set before us. We can re-enter at any point in spacetime. If spacetime is illusory, then we should be free to move within the plenum as we will. Distance would be inconsequential.

LVX23,

Yes, of course! I was leaving the idea open as to HOW we might traverse such distances. As I mentioned getting from one place to another will be childs play for a sufficiently advanced intelligence. The challenge will be deciding where to go, as the space of choices will be almost infinite, compared to our relatively finite minds, even if they are super-dense jupiter brains. I agree with you about the 5D thing. My conjecture has always been that shortly after a technological singularity said activities of such intelligence will rapidly proceed into a higher ontological domain - what I have called, Ontological Transcendence, rendering them both invisible and incomprehensible to any species still in the previous domain.

Yahoo artivle: "Universe Measured: We're 156 Billion Light-years Wide!"
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=96&e=1&u=/space/20040524/sc_space/universemeasuredwere156billionlightyearswide

Paul,

I understand that if they've passed through the singularity they'll likely be benevolent, but who says they have to pass through the singularity to master space travel?

Either way, I stand by my point.

How could they master space travel without passing through a singularity, defined as self-augmenting intelligence?

Even at current technology we can barely keep tin cans in orbit. Without something like nanotechnology the space frontier will remain a bastion of large, expensive government sponsored boondoggles with no sustainable infrastructure.

And what about traveresing interstellar distances? The shear scale of engineering required to pull that off would be astounding. There is no way they could exercise such a level of technological sophistication without also having the abilty to create hyperbolic bootstrapping intelligence.

Therefore, interstellar travel means they have survived a technological singularity, which is the natural outcome of rising intelligence and molecular/atomic control via nanotechnology. And unless they have figured out the malevolence problem that we currently suffer with, there is no way they could survive proliferating nanotech.

The article makes sense to me. However, I still think that we are alone in our galaxy.

The nearest ETIs are probably in that galaxy about 10-20million LY away.

You're going to need one hell of a warp-drive or traversable wormhole to get to them.

At least it means we have several galaxies-worth of real-estate all to ourselves.

They say life formed on Earth almost as soon as the Earth itself formed, about 4 billion years ago. This tells us that life is common and will form in any evironment that it possibly can. Complex life formed about 650 million years ago, and climbed up onto the land about 400 million years ago.

Anythin resembling human civilization has been around for about 10,000 years.

Lets say that there are 1 million Earth-like planets running around goldilocks orbits in our galaxy. Almost all of these will have some form of life. About 150,000 of them will have complex life, 100,000 with complex life on land. Only 2-3 of these planets will anything resembling the Greeks or Romans on them. We are the only ones to have technology, and we still have not made it into space in a big way.

Either way you look at it. 1 out of 400,000 Earthlike worlds; with the large moon (this is important) and the gas giants in the right orbits and of the right size (this is also important); is likely to have anything remembling civilization. The chance of a dual Earth-moon system is, at best, one in a thousand.

This means that one in every 400 million Earth-like worlds is going to have an alien civilization.

I think garden worlds are common. I think ETI is rare (but DOES exist).

We are alone in the galaxy.

Maybe those UFOs are from the galaxy somewhere past Andromeda.

First, I don't think that ANYONE should be using the word "can't." If the universe is as vast as this article suggests, then ANYTHING is possible ONCE. To say that there CAN'T be space faring civilizations BEFORE the singularity, is as small minded as saying there CAN'T be space faring civilizations at all. In a universe as vast as ours, there could be monkeys opening worm holes for all we know. So just as a suggestion, don't use the word "can't."

Milan M. Cirkovic the cosmologist has responded to this article courtesy of George P. Dvorsky

~~~
Well, in my view the seriousness of FP is large in all cosmological models and only weakly dependent on the spatial size of the universe. The reason is, of course, that the Milky Way is, imho, sufficiently large for the paradox to be very serious, even if no other galaxy existed in the universe. Of course, the larger the universe is, the problem does become somewhat more serious, but this is just a pedantic reasoning: in my view the difference between 95% and 99% is really not very important... Thus, from my personal viewpoint ironically (since I was trained as cosmologist, and did my PhD in cosmology), the link of astrobiology and cosmology is very weak one, indeed.

(Of course, if you believe the sort of "rare Earth" arguments of Ward and Brownlee, than it becomes somewhat more important, but I personally don't buy that. Opportunities for life and increase in diversity and disparity are so big even in the history of the Solar System, that it is by far premature, not to mention epistemologically unsound, to speculate that we're unique in any reasonable sense.)

I agree with Milan. I was using the rarity hypothesis to demonstrate that the universe is so big, that even the most CONSERVATIVE astrobiologist theories of the non-existance of ET's are weak. So Fermi's Paradox is a serious issue. I'm sticking with my ontological transcendence model for now.

And I still believe the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42....The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Could not "civilization" been given to us?

PLEASE GIVE ME THE NAME ETC OF THE AUTHOR OF THIS ARTICLE. I WANT TO USE SOME OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED AND I WISH TO PAY CREDIT TO THE AUTHOR!

JOHN HADJIMINAS, MD

PROFESSOR EMERITUS (PHYSIOLOGY)
ATHENS' UNIVERSITY MEDICAL SCHOOL

ATHENS, GREECE

Citation details: me too! I first read this post on another message board (fermi parydox www.tribe.net with link back)and its a great piece... the author has definate put the whole issue into perspective and in plain English.. well done!

If your the author Paul could you supply your citation details.

Malcolm,

The article is based on several articles, all with links above. The rest of it is my own calculations and me tieing it all together in a hopefully novel way. If there is any specific fact that you would like a citation or more background I would be all too happy to provide it for you. :)

Paul

ur crazy people!

u are vall going to die!