Looking for the Smart Aliens

By | April 11, 2008
3 Comments

An intriguing post on The Daily Galaxy:

The 1.5 Gigayear Technology Gap

Some of the world’s smartest astronomers estimate that some of the more advanced technological civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy may be 1.5 gigayears older that Earth (that’s 1.5 billion years older). In other words, the search for extraterrestrial life is not going to end with us meeting the Hollywood kind of alien. ET or the Asgard (from Stargate) are not going to be who we first meet. Instead, we’ll be greeted by highly evolved robots.

Yes, in other words, Battlestar Galactica has got at least one thing right. The hit Sci Fi channel show’s bad guys are, unlike most other Sci Fi shows, highly evolved robots that have turned on their human creators.

But first, the real story.

“There are two kinds of encounters with aliens you can have,” said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the California-based SETI Institute. “Either you pick up a signal, or you pick them up on the corner. But I think it’s safe to say that in both instances they will be synthetic. They will be artificial constructions.”

starbuck.jpg

  • MDarling

    Just to be less precise- it isn’t just that our sample size is too small. I can have one coin and still know it’s 50/50 for heads or tails.
    It’s that we don’t know how likely life on earth was. Is.
    Perhaps- as some have published- at some point in the past earthly conditions were such that life was a near certainty. Perhaps it was unlikely in the extreme. We don’t know and until God tells us, we may not be able to know.

    I love when circumstance lines up so that someone with expertise (what a concept!) happens to be on the spot when the thing they are expert in actually happens. Sure, we can try and create that moment – (CERN, any important lab, Wrigley Field) – but then the brain scientist has a stroke. Or the astronomer witnesses the big bang.

    Ok- the first is an elsewhere referenced TED talk and the second didn’t happen. Yet.

    And – as far as I know- no biologist or scientist of any kind, and no babe aliens neither – were around to observe the conditions that created life on earth.

    So – does the “life on earth” coin have two sides? 2 billion? 2 raised to the 20th? We don’t know- so even estimating the number of stars in the MilkyWay at 200b- tells us nothing of the probability of other planets like Earth nor of the likelihood of life.

    And so the Fermi paradox is not so much a “paradox” as it is an inspiration for opera. (All due respect to Fermi- whether he said it or not he’s credited with one of the funniest existential statements ever attributed.)
    And the kind of opera that gets farcical- the premise is a false or at least unprovable assumption.

  • Phil Bowermaster

    >>so even estimating the number of stars in the MilkyWay at 200b- tells us nothing of the probability of other planets like Earth nor of the likelihood of life.

    Observation is starting to give us hints about these things. There seem to be planets everywhere we look. So far, we haven’t found an “earthlike” planet to the extent that they have a Bed, Bath and Beyond at every shopping mall, but we are closing in on smaller, rockier planets. We find one of those with an atmosphere somewhere between the freeze-out and burnout radii of its sun, and we have something to go on. Life seems such a ubiquitous and persistent phenomenon here that I would be very surprised — should we eventually find, say, 100 such planets fitting that description — if there wasn’t some form of life on at least a few of them. If we establish the existence of life elsewhere, the next question is where is the intelligence? And where are the civilizations?

  • Karl Hallowell

    And let’s keep in mind that we might not be natural either, but rather an advanced intelligent vehicle designed and driven by the bacteria worldmind.