Maybe the Aliens Are Addicted To Computer Games 496
Hugh Pickens writes "Geoffrey Miller has an interesting hypothesis in Seed Magazine that explains Fermi's Paradox — why 40 years of intensive searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing: no radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind. All the aliens are busy playing computer games. The aliens 'forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism,' writes Miller. He says the fundamental problem is that an evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself, and that although evolution favors brains that tend to maximize fitness (as measured by numbers of great-grandkids), no brain has capacity enough to do so under every possible circumstance. 'The result is that we don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography,' writes Miller. 'Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot.' Miller adds that most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children, until they eventually die out."
Who here doesn't think a TNG-style Holodeck would lead to the downfall of our civilization?
Simpler explanation (Score:3, Informative)
((1 MW) / ((4 light year)^2)) * (100 (m^2)) = 6.98311557 × 10^-26 watts
So even if there are aliens in the closest star broadcasting using a 1 MW transmitter, the output here is way to low to measure.
They're probably sitting there wondering why they don't receive anything either.
Re:Yea (Score:5, Informative)
There are better reasons (Score:3, Informative)
I think there are better reasons for us not being able to find alien radio signals than "they're all playing video games." Any alien civilization out there could be undetectable by us for a number of reasons:
1. We've only been listening for alien signals for 40 years. That's not even a blip in the cosmic scale. It's sort of like being in the middle of a giant warehouse, taking two steps forward and declaring that your intensive searching has revealed no "outside world." Perhaps we need to wait a few more decades, centuries, or millennium for the signals to reach us.
2. Perhaps the signals have already passed us. Maybe, sometime during the building of the pyramids, radio signals from an alien world were passing by us. The humans of the time would have had no way of knowing that proof of alien life was right in front of them. By the time SETI began searching for life, the alien signals stopped either due to the civilization dying out or due to the aliens moving on to technology that "leaked" less. We've used radio for a little over a century and are already switching to technologies that don't involve tossing unencrypted signals in the air all over the place. Perhaps there's only a 1 or 2 century window from when a civilization first uses radio to when they move to a different, more undetectable, technology.
3. Perhaps we've seen it but didn't recognize it. Who says that we'd actually recognize an alien signal. If I gave you some network monitoring tools and sent a few hundred streams of data down the pipe, most of which was random but one of which was encoded information, would you be able to tell the random from the information? Even if you didn't know the encoding scheme or what kind of information you were dealing with? I'd bet that it would be tough to do and that's dealing with human-created encryption schemes. Add an alien intelligence to the mix and the difficulty would skyrocket.
4. Maybe we haven't looked in the right place. The universe is huge and we've only searched tiny fragments. Going back to #1's warehouse analogy, it'd be like searching a giant warehouse, opening one box and declaring the item to not be in the warehouse because it wasn't in the first box you opened.
Any of these could easily be the reason why we haven't found intelligent alien life yet and are more likely than "the aliens are playing video games."
Re:Yea (Score:3, Informative)
Don'd feed the extremely inaccurate troll. The probability of complex organic [space.com] life coming into being [wikipedia.org] is actually much higher than most people [sciencemag.org] realize.
I think the real reason we haven't found anyone out there is probably things like interstellar hydrogen getting in the way of space travel, and causing scattering and absorption of communications signals. Most people agree that the SETI project is fundamentally flawed [faqs.org] in that way. Doesn't make it an unworthy cause, however, just an unlikely one.
Re:Yea (Score:3, Informative)
This is where the Fermi Paradox comes from. Our galaxy is only about 100,000 light years across. Sending something at 1% of the speed of light is not too far off our current capability. Sending something at 10% is not difficult to conceive. At this speed, you could explore and colonise the entire galaxy in just one million years. Even if you took a year to set up each colony and didn't take the most direct route, 2-3 million years doesn't seem too long. A single Von Neumann probe could do it in about this time, maybe 5 million years to give it a bit of leeway.
The oldest star in this galaxy is around 13 billion years old. Five million years is a tiny fragment of this, and yet we haven't found any evidence in our system of any visitation. Statistically, it seems probable that at least one civilisation would have reached the required level to be able to explore the entire galaxy in this time, so where are they? Why haven't we seen any evidence of them? The models that we have predict that either life could not develop at all (disproved by the simple fact that we exist), or it should spread out over a massive area and end up covering the entire galaxy.
Re:Oh stop (Score:3, Informative)
what are the chances that the agricultural resources of the planet will be able to continue to feed us?
They will feed us just fine.
Back some time in the '70s there was more than one book that extrapolated population growth with arable land and other factors and concluded that most of the world would be starving by the year 2000. They didn't take into account technological progress; but then, you never can. Few would have envisioned the internet, for example, or genetic engineering.
Re:Yea (Score:4, Informative)
Sending something at 1% of the speed of light is not too far off our current capability.
I think you better check your numbers. The fastest ship we have launched is the New Horizons probe which is headed for Pluto. It has a speed relative to Earth of 16.26 km/s. Note: The fastest ship if we include gravity assists is Voyager 1 at 17.15 km/s relative to Earth. However, the speed of light is 300,000 km/s. So, 1% would be 3,000 km/s and we are running around 17 km/s as our best effort, which means we need to get 200x faster to reach the 1% goal.
Moral of the story: Light is really, REALLY fast and we can't build anything (larger than a few atoms) that can travel fast enough to be conveniently compared to the speed of light. (Yet.)
Re:Yea (Score:3, Informative)
Project Daedelus and other similar more recent projects have looked/are looking for ways to bring back nuclear propulsion using "bombs" that produce no radioactive fallout.
Anyway, the point is that we have the technology NOW to do it, but we have political barriers preventing us. It seems somewhat unlikely that all civilizations who have developed such a technology would be restricted by the very same political barriers.