The problem I have with the Fermi "Paradox," is that it is only a paradox to people who do not understand SNR or scale.

In the video and in the paradox itself there is an incredibly huge, completely untenable, assumption. That if there is other civilization, we would have seen them. Point blank, thats batshit insane talk.

  aka There could be an incredibly advanced civilization, literally next door to us in the Alpha Centauri system, and we simply dont have the technological ability to detect it yet.

The paradox is the same as a blind man saying "since I cant read a book on the other side of the world, no books exist anywhere." The fermi paradox itself is founded on a fallacy.

I know, right?  I figured it was this or the Prawn nomads' ship breaks down over South Africa and they eat all of our cat food.

Wish this guy would just share his Netflix sci-fi queue so we know what alien invasion to expect next.

If they don't come soon liberals will have disarmed the entire world and once the aliens get here they will become so annoyed at the whining liberal women and men who are less than women they will either nuke the entire rock into a cinder or flee hysterically

The idea is that if you project human technology progress out a few million years, we should be able to colonize the entire milky way within about 10 million years. We would also be able to construct massive astro-engineering projects, like a Dyson Sphere. Stuff like that would be visible at great distances, based on its gravitational effects. The fact that we've never seen anything like that indicates that either there is no life at all out there, or what life there is never gets to that point.

See the Great Filter

Mr. Hawking needs to get laid.

Oh, wait.

Back to what I said. NO we wouldnt see it. SNR is a bitch. Even if that shit was going on, right next to us over in Alpha Centauri, we wouldnt be able to detect it.

The premise itself if flawed.

And has a robot sex fetish. Fuck this guy. He thinks he knows everything.

Did you read the link I posted? You would most definitely be able to detect the gravitational effects of a structure that encompasses a star.

Shit, all the aliens would have to do is sit back and drop rocks on us until we surrendered or died.

Ain't a damned thing we could do to stop them, even if we could all get our shit together.

Yeah, like that's gonna happen.

We're doomed, doomed I say!

... With what? Our magical gravity detecting sensor?

We would never detect a dyson sphere in the 1st place, because the whole point of a DS is to capture all radiated EM. There would be nothing for us to detect.



Lets make this simpler. Do you understand the equation I posted earlier and what it is used for?

Which public school, did you not finish?

What you just quoted, had literally nothing what so ever to do with anything Hawkin said. In fact, the current thread discussion has to do with something quite different than the original subject. It moved past Hawkins postulate many posts back.


That's okay though, here is some science talk that is closer to your speed.

Yeah. Did you know that when you try to make people who are clearly able to discuss topics intelligently look like tools by asking condescending questions like "do you understand..." you actually just come off looking childish?

That said, I actually had the theorized means by which a Dyson Sphere would be detected wrong.

http://www.space.com/24269-how-to-search-for-alien-civilizations.html

If some of the very basics of the problem arent understood, having intelligent conversation about it is rarely productive.

Let me explain the equation and it's implication to the discussion at hand. Because you are correct, I would much rather talk about this topic with folks that actually want to discuss it.

Give me a minute, I'm gonna switch to my tablet so I can draw pictures & use equations to better illustrate the issue. On this particular topic got, I've got multiple peer-reviewed work, published in research journals.  



This plays directly back into the SNR issue that I raised. Gimme a bit to get on the other rig.

What if the aliens are super liberals and they let us destroy them due to their alien privilege?

You crack me up.  I'd venture to guess 90% of the people reading these posts are laughing at you.  But I may have that number too low.  I'd need Stephen to do some calculatin' for me to verify, then run it past the aliens to get their "OK".

That would be the shit. I want a fucking alien EBT card. Muh spaceships!

The effects on nearby objects and objects behind.

The premise of that video isn't about why haven't we detected them. The premise is why they haven't colonized everything with the few billion year head start they should have had.

Without incident radiation, how do you propose they are observed?

Keep in mind, within the Sol system, we have trouble detecting planetoids in the Edgeworth–Kuiper belt... and those have an albedo many millions of orders of magnitude easier to detect...

My embryonic pseudoplasmic proto-being din do nuffin!  

So, I'm curious, what is your gut feeling on the universe? Do you think it is teaming with life and specifically, intelligent life?

My comment on the video was more a generic reply to the Fermi Paradox.


To the video itself - I think the assumption that a civilization has to colonize other planets is flawed. That assumes a very human mindset of Manifest Destiny, so of course Aliens must be like that as well.

Without much faster than light travel it is a moot point.

Ain't no aliens got time to get here.

Not according to Fermi. A billion years ago there were a billion stars just like ours with planets similar to ours. Plenty of time for them to colonize huge chunks of our galaxy, even travelling slower than light.

You are both wrong. Hawking has failed to consider there is a video-gaming guy out there, who lives in a remote trailer court where his mother is manager and everyone is like a big extended family. He is seemingly doomed to stay at his trailer park home all in his life with a hot looking girlfriend and lots of rejection letters from colleges. Meanwhile, he becomes the top player of a stand-up arcade game where the player defends edges of the universe from an evil alien armada of sorts in an epic space battle. After achieving the best all time score and losing about $100 in quarters, he is approached one dark evening by the game's inventor. Stepping into inventor's vehicle will he find himself recruited as a gunner for an alien defense force when alien inventor disguised as a big eared human transports him off to another planet. He will hook up with an alien and employ an experimental technology that will wipe out the actual evil armanda and save us all.

So Steven Hawking believes in aliens?

I saw the documentary of his life when I was a teen. Changed my life.

I remember a SciFi book I read years ago.  At the end, when earth is nearly destroyed - but victorious there is one surviving alien (humanoid, but alien) in a high security military hospital.

When they are questioning him they ask him why his race/species had tried to take over earth (they were kidnapping humans by the hundreds of thousands and taking them up to their ships).

His reply was, "Because we were hungry."

What else motivates any creature to travel, fight, kill - but survival.

But why do Altliar and Dakliadid come all the way across hundreds of galaxies and millions of light years avoiding asteroids and other planets only to crash the space segway on Earth? Bad brakes?

 
Would you like to know more?

I actually would like to see a remake of Last Starfighter. With modern gaming as a concept and CGI that that movie would rock.

That would be good. Anyone could play the video game nerd, but what actor could follow Robert Preston?

But "her" name would be Roberta Presto-Biggums and she'd be a 6" tranvestite lesbian social worker from New York with 2 kids and a hipster husband more feminine than she is.

 

Or something like that.

Well we've got trouble. Right here in Nostalgia City. Trouble starts with a T, and that rhymes with T, and that stands for....trannies?

Lemme 1st address what I said I was going to acouple posts back on SNR. I'm kinda procrastinating drawing pictures and equations on my other tablet right now, cuz lots of great college games on right now. I did at least get it out .

Using the free space electric field strength equation, you can easily derive certain characteristics of unidirectional radiative signals. This is a common calculation engineers use all the time. It's one of the 1st steps in determining transmitter or receiver system needs.  Relevant to this discussion is signal strength at some given distance.

Currently the absolutely most state of the art, biggest/baddest detection equipment that we have doesnt even have the sensitivity to detect directed signals even half a light year away from us (Our closest neighbors are ~4.3 light years away). By that, I mean even if someone was literally inside of our house, in bed with us (in a cosmological scale), and sending a directed signal specifically at us; we dont have the ability to detect it. The power of the signal would be completely eclipsed even by some random dude running his microwave over to cook a tv dinner, hundreds of miles away. By the time the signal got here, it would be so weak the EM field of the pacemaker of the technician manning the radio telescope could completely drown out the signal.  The types of things we can/do detect are huge cosmological events, like gama ray bursts and pulsars. Even those are relatively close, like "in the neighborhood" type events. The universe is fucking huge. Any signal will essentially be indistinguishable from background radiation; unless the signal was essentially powered by a star and beamed directly at us. Even then, we probably wouldn’t detect it.
The whole problem with the Fermi “paradox” is that it assumes we should have detected something. The problem is, for all intents and purposes, we CANT.  You can’t have a credible theory that you do not possess the capability to measure or in any way validate. We currently don’t have the technology to be able to detect signals even if they are beamed directly at us. The SNR is just too low.

The other issue I have with it is time. On a cosmic scale, the time we have been looking for signals is still essentially zero. So we haven’t even been looking for signals and the Fermi “Paradox” declares, before we even started, “well, we haven’t found anything; therefor nothing exists.” The Great Filter means nothing, as it tries to explain why certain things did/didn’t happen from a nonsensical premise (fermi paradox). It’s like trying to explain why you should use cheese from the south polar region of the moon on your nachos as opposed to cheese from the north polar region of the moon.  

I’m sorry, I should have explained my issue from the start; with this particular topic.

Do I think there is life out there? Yeah. It’s probably teeming with it. On planet earth, we have thousands of examples of life not only surviving in the most extreme conditions; but thriving. I would put good money on life being in multiple locations, in the Sol system. But the problem is that it will be a thousand year before we have the capability to even detect signals coming from outside Sol. It’s just the nature of EM propagation…

I think listening for signals, at this point, is wasted effort. That’s effort that could be put to use exploring our own Sol system and looking for life here. We need to get our asses to Europa.

That's just it, the Fermi Paradox is about space travel, not receiving radio or other signals.

The basic assumption is that of manifest destiny. Applying ANY human trait to something completely alien; is a non-starter.

Want to know the truth?

Hawking is a God fearing, evolution shunning, anti-global warming theorist.....but the smart alek kid who programmed his computer to speak for him is remote control hacking him to say what he wants!

Logical fallacy.   Kinetic energy is significantly more difficult to defeat than thermal energy.  Super high velocity projectiles may just be the ultimate weapon of the future.

Colonization is a trait shared by all life, no? Calling it manifest destiny and saying only humans do it seems illogical. At east to me.

resources. always about the resources.

Rachel Carson has killed us all.

Here's the thing. Who knows?

In less intelligent life on earth, life tends to form homeostasis. Even different human cultures, have no interest at all in colonization.

Now take into consideration a culture that is so advanced it can travel the stars at ease. That basically implies that energy, is not a concern for them any more. Control of energy generation makes the need for all other resources negligible in comparison. By the time you're a Type 3 civilization, you dont need rapid expansion to ensure your survival. You dont need special effort to secure resources, as you can probably make them directly from energy. Thus invalidating the very premise that you need to expand and colonize in the 1st place.

LOL. I live between DC and Baltimore and I'm supposed to worry about aliens?!

If we lose power for more than 72 hours I'm toast!


.

Gun control will solve the problem.

Beside the worthless fucks in D.C.?

Noice.