Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing

(Click on "Print" up at the top to condense the multiple pages down to one.)

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I hardly think that the absence of extraterrestrial life insures any kind of great future for humanity. A lifeless void would surely guarantee a healthy supply of real estate and resources. But it would also encourage those dimwits who think there's no real reason to have a space program BECAUSE it's a lifeless void.

If we found life, I think it would promote research and funding, and reignite the interest the general population once had for exploration.

Pretty rocks and flow charts don't inspire Joe Public to do anything but flip the channel.

If we found anything that was alive -- like Europan Sea Monkeys -- at least some people would wake up and have something to occupy their minds instead of Lindsay's or Paris' recent pantiless reemergence from rehab.

We need to know that we're not alone.

The religious zealots need to know it so they'll stop harping about how 'special' humans are. I mean, if God(s) made us in His/Her/Their own image, then who made the Greys?

We need a kick in our complacent primate booties. Even if they're monstrous bloodthirsty creatures from Whatevatopia, or just Tribbles.

We need to know that we don't own it all, and we just might need to push harder to make ourselves better than we already are.

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Angel of the Abyss
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"I am Ripper...Tearer...Slasher...Gouger. I am the Teeth in the Darkness, the Talons in the Night. Mine is Strength...and Lust...and Power! I AM BEOWULF!"

OFCOL Thanks ToSeek I just wasted 4210 words.

There are more than two possibilities. For instance, the "Great Filter" might be ten gazillion years wide and we might be at any point along it.

PS: Nick Bostrom's home page "Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. Philosopher, polymath, leading transhumanist thinker and spokesperson."

I'm a wee bit annoyed.

I clicked the link here in Firefox... It took forever to load.
Read page one- Hit for page two...
It gave a funny URL and a blank screen saying "done."

Did that twice- and did that anytime I hit "print" at the top.

Copy and pasted the link into I.E.

Accepted all their cookies in the off chance that they were annoyed by my rejecting their lint encrusted stale cookies.
I got the first page up- clicked right to page two... It was that author going on and on about Great Filter... OK <Skim Skim> <whatever>. Went and clicked page three...
"This Page Cannot Be Displayed."
Did that three times in a row.

Considering what I saw on the first two pages, I didn't really think I needed to waste my time fighting their website only to read 4 more pages of it trying to satisfy my curiosity about what this droning guys beef was


Hopefully, the author does not read this post.

Arguement seems to be based on two assumptions:

1. Space aliens would come to our solar system and do stuff we would notice.

2. The first bunch of aliens to colonize the galaxy would do nothing to prevent other aliens from coming to earth and doing stuff that we'd notice.

Since we know of only one advanced technology using species, ourselves, we can conclude nothing from our sample of one. We have no reason to conclude that aliens would act as we think we would act ourselves. In fact, when you look at history you can see our own attitudes have change dramatically over very short periods of time. One hundred years ago many supposedly civilized people had no problem with the idea of exterminating humans that belonged to what they called "lesser races." Nowadays, fortunately most of us find the idea abhorrent. A hundred years ago people wrote about the thrill of killing the last member of a species and making it extinct. Now we frown on that sort of behaviour. People used to look forward to the day when all wilderness would be replaced by farms and cities. White people used to be considered athletically superior to black people. Basketball used to be a Jewish sport. Since we can't seem to get our own motivations straight for more than a generation, I don't see how we can conclude much about alien motivations.

Bostrom is a profound thinker, but I think that his suggestion that finding dead vertebrates on Mars would be Bad News is going a little too far. The fact that Mars might have supported complex life that then died out has no real relevance for the Earth- that planet is entirely different in many characteristics to our own, so may be intrinsically more likely to become a dead planet.

A dead Mars with fossils doesn't imply anything about the existence of a Great Filter that eliminates intelligent life on Earth-like worlds.

However a Dead Mars with cities might give a hint or two... That might suggest that intelligent life tends to die out, despite the emergence of civilisation.

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Orion's Arm . The Starlark . Voices: Future Tense . OA Flickr set

From the article:
I agree with the majority of the opinions here, that this is really rather bogus. First, it is based on this hypothesis of a "Great Filter" event, which is unproven.

It also is kind of depressing - hoping that life isn't found elsewhere as some sort of glimmer of hope that humans will survive. It comes across and weird, stupid, and grasping at straws. Frankly, I rather hope we are not alone in the universe.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Most Christian theologians don't beleive that "in God's image" means that God looks like us, but that our minds look more like His than those of any other animal - with the capacity for rational thought and imagination.
So the typical Christian's answer would be "God made the Greys too, and they are also in God's image."

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

I note that this opinion piece is based on the speculation of finding only evidence of the former existence of life forms - their corpses, as it were. Certainly if we only found dead things and signs of destroyed civilizations we might have cause to wonder just how dangerous the universe really is. If we found living organisms on Mars or Europa, or actually encountered living intelligent aliens it would be a different story.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

The great assumption is that advanced civilizations will remain in material form. It could be that very advanced minds necessarily migrate to some kind of virtual environment and continue the quest for the Final Truth [which seems to be what intelligent beings do] as tenous pulses of energy. The only material need would be the 'server' in a remote corner of a run-of-the-mill planet that would host the virtual mind-beings. They wouldn´t be noticed as a material presence in anywhere else. That would solve the Fermi paradox and do away with the 'Great Filter'. This concept has been already explored in many SF stories, and I don´t see any reason why it couldn´t be.

Edit: Bolstrom, as a 'transhumanist', should have thought about that, but the idea is absent from his essay.

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"Shut up and calculate" R. Feynman

Material form for has many advantages, for example you don't kapoot when the power goes out. Besides to keep the machinery operating you would need an army of robots to mine the resources to keep things nifty. And such activity would leave traces, that we don't see. So uploaded mega-god type civilizations don't alleviate the paradox.

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Well, such activity wouldn´t necessarily leave traces that could be detected [by people like us] on the order of parsecs [let alone the fact that such activities would presumably be carried out with a high efficiency, with minimum energy requirements]

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"Shut up and calculate" R. Feynman

It also involves coming to sweeping conclusions based on scant evidence.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

For that matter, flesh and blood aliens going about their daily business
may not either. We ourselves couldn't detect us. To me Fermi's paradox means that life is even more precious then it seems. Also, we talk of solar system, and star fairing peoples, but does a single planet have the resources to develop the infrastructure to plunder the vault of heaven? Sure it happens all the time in science fiction, but so far we haven't done squat in that direction, and sadly show no signs of doing so. We have done much research, and that is admirable, but it feeds and clothes no one.

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Thank you ToSeek for that great link. I am very surprised at the negative response on this forum of the best theory (that I have seen in years) of why we see no evidence of alien life. I have very great respect for the opinions on this forum, the place I come to for comfort. LOL. Seems to me that most of the negative responses were of misinterpretations of what was intended?? I think that ravens_cry has one of the best answers to this theory “but does a single planet have the resources to develop the infrastructure to plunder the vault of heaven?” I was really feeling stupid until I came upon this remark. I may change my mind after rolling this story around in my gray matter for awhile. I will continue coming here for comfort!!

We have been considering the Great Filter at Orion's Arm for quite some time. Bostrom has the right ideas; there are a number of critical periods in the development of a civilisation which might filter out most, or all, potential contenders. In order for our fictional scenario to work, a scenario which has several advanced civilisations in each galaxy, we have had to imagine a Great Filter which somehow removes star-faring civilisations from the Galaxy after they have expanded for some limited period, but before they colonise the entire galaxy and set up homesteads on every rock, nook, and cranny.

One possibility is that an advanced civilisation always collapses due to warfare: internal strife, or in conflict with other nerby civilisations. Or there may be an existential threat from high technology itself- advanced automatic defences might decide to wipe out all potential enemies, or some experimental technology might backfire and destroy the civilisation in some way. But I suspect we would see evidence of this in distant galaxies. For instance an advanced civilisation might decide to build a large number of superweapons, such as the so-called Nicoll-Dyson Laser
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D...ll-Dyson_Laser
which could wipe out a solar system in a single blow. If an advanced civilisation had too many such weapons they might run the risk of an accidental war. Because of light speed delays all the potential targets could be destroyed by beams emitted by lasers which are subsequently destroyed themselves.

But if such energetic warfare occurs frequently we would surely see the evidence in distant galaxies. Perhaps that is the explanation for the anomalously bright gamma-ray burst seen recently...

Another possibility is that very advanced civilisations remove themselves from our universe and create artificial universes of their own; some cosmologists think that it may be possible to create new universes in the laboratory, and perhaps tune them to be more suitable for intelligent processes. If you can make your own paradise, why stay in this cosmos where stars and planets are so far apart? When I am feeling hopeful, I tend to favour this explanation. Perhaps these advanced civilisations in their basement universes have a way of communicating with our own world when necessary; perhaps not. A daunting thought.

But most of the time I tend towards thinking that civilisations are very rare, and the Filter is in our past.

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Orion's Arm . The Starlark . Voices: Future Tense . OA Flickr set

I disagree that Bostrom has the right ideas, of course.That's the big mistake that Bostrom makes. There is no such thing as a Great Filter that exists only at a single critical juncture. We have plenty of evidence that it does not--our own earth fossil record shows all sorts of time lines and possibilities. We all are aware of the possibility of our own annihilation that could occur if a large body impacted the earth, or would have occurred had the impact already have happened, for another instance.

Assuming that a Great Filter is either in our past, or in our future, but not both, is a horrible mistake. By that, I mean first that it is a totally unsupported assumption, and second there is a lot of evidence to the contrary.

If we assume that there is no one Great Filter, that seems to imply that there are lots of 'little filters', which are somewhat less difficult to get through. Or that there are lots of little filters in the past, and perhaps just one big one in the future of a civilisation like ours.

Whichever is the case, it seems likely on the evidence available that there are no billion-year-old interstellar civilisations in our galaxy.

Whether that is the end result of an accumulation of slightly dangerous filter episodes or the result of one big dangerous episode (the GF) which consistently prevents such a civilisation from forming, is open to debate. If we are past that one big filter, then that is a good thing.

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Orion's Arm . The Starlark . Voices: Future Tense . OA Flickr set