Fermi paradox, your own belief?

"gswork" wrote in message
om...
ON the off chance you don't know, Fermi's paradox is basically - if
even conservative estimates suggest that adanced life in the galaxy is
abundant then even more conservative estimates show that the entire
galaxy should be explored already, so why aren't the aliens here?


My belief is that Someone much more powerful than even the universe itself
controls it. Therefore, barriers, such as the enormous distance between
stars, were already put in place before the universe was created. There are
certain thresholds that no one will ever cross.

Jon

While reading in the bathroom on 18 Jun 2004 01:51:13 -0700, I saw
that (gswork) had written:

[Bear with me to the end of this, you'll see that my response really
does relate]

I think this because, based on what i've read, Earth has been around
for nearly 5 billion years,

13.7 billion

microscopic life for perhaps 3 billion,

Err, ahhh, "September 21," on the Cosmic Calendar. That translates to
roughly 3,787,500,000 years

and more complex life for only 700 million or so.

Define "roughly." The CC places stromatolites at September 29, and
sex (yippee!) at November 30.

A couple of billion years hence, maybe more, the earth tips over into
runaway greenhouse and becomes a milder, but equally deadly version of
Venus, utterly devoid of life.

See Sagan's "Cosmos." He has a neat sentence in there that introduces
the entire sequence: "There will be one final, perfect day, then..."

So Earth can support complex life for something like 1.5 billion years
start to finish. It took half that to to get to Humans...

Again, we need to clarify definitions: Do you mean "could" support
life, or "did" support life? And what kind of life? While the CC
puts the advent of "life" at September 21, it wasn't until November 8,
that there was a significant oxygen atmosphere. Seaweed didn't appear
until December 5, apes at 1 AM on December 31, homonids at 9 PM, and
tool-making "humans" at 10:30 PM (homo sapiens came along at 11 54
PM).

Anyway, even without doing all the conversions, it's easy to see that
Humans have been around for far, far less than half the time that
earth has been capable of supporting life. Even using just the CC,
the difference is staggering: "life" first appeared on September 21,
but human ancestors didn't come along until 90 minutes before the year
ended, and true humans only six minutes before..

Life itself may be rarer than we think, and space faring life may be
so exceptional that it's more likely we *won't* encounter aliens.

It's apparently a lot more rare than you thought. On the Cosmic
Calendar's scale, Copernicus lived in the final second of the year.
At this scale, human spacefaring isn't even a blip.

[ATTENTION!!!! We have finally arrived at my point!!!]

Now, assuming that any other planet will follow roughly the same
development on roughly the same time scale as earth did, but that it
starts to form one or two Cosmic Minutes earlier or later than earth,
where does that leave us as far as actually meeting the other
civilization? If their galaxy/solar system/planet formed just one
Cosmic Day earlier, then they would have first entered orbit just as
our dinosaurs became extinct. A Day later, and they will first leave
their planet just as earth's humanoid descendants become extinct,
whether through evolution or self-immolation.

Whatever, the prospects for meaningful communication between the two
races don't look good.

(perhaps you have
book recommendations in this area too?)

The Cosmic Calendar can be found in Sagan's "Cosmos" (and "Pale Blue
Dot"?), and is available in poster form from Allposters:
http://www.allposters.com/gallery.asp?aid=817727252

Also, keep an eye out for an oop paperback, "Interstellar Travel,
Past, Present and Future," by John W. Macvey. A believer, he still
attempts to keep things realistic. He approaches the question from
the angle of "Assuming that we have been visited by ETs, and assuming
that the laws of physics hold true as we know them, then how could
they do it?"



--------------
Beady's Corollary to Occam's Razor: "The likeliest explanation of any phenomenon is almost always the most boring one imaginable."


-----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =-----
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While reading in the bathroom on 18 Jun 2004 01:51:13 -0700, I saw
that (gswork) had written:

[Bear with me to the end of this, you'll see that my response really
does relate]

I think this because, based on what i've read, Earth has been around
for nearly 5 billion years,

13.7 billion

microscopic life for perhaps 3 billion,

Err, ahhh, "September 21," on the Cosmic Calendar. That translates to
roughly 3,787,500,000 years

and more complex life for only 700 million or so.

Define "roughly." The CC places stromatolites at September 29, and
sex (yippee!) at November 30.

A couple of billion years hence, maybe more, the earth tips over into
runaway greenhouse and becomes a milder, but equally deadly version of
Venus, utterly devoid of life.

See Sagan's "Cosmos." He has a neat sentence in there that introduces
the entire sequence: "There will be one final, perfect day, then..."

So Earth can support complex life for something like 1.5 billion years
start to finish. It took half that to to get to Humans...

Again, we need to clarify definitions: Do you mean "could" support
life, or "did" support life? And what kind of life? While the CC
puts the advent of "life" at September 21, it wasn't until November 8,
that there was a significant oxygen atmosphere. Seaweed didn't appear
until December 5, apes at 1 AM on December 31, homonids at 9 PM, and
tool-making "humans" at 10:30 PM (homo sapiens came along at 11 54
PM).

Anyway, even without doing all the conversions, it's easy to see that
Humans have been around for far, far less than half the time that
earth has been capable of supporting life. Even using just the CC,
the difference is staggering: "life" first appeared on September 21,
but human ancestors didn't come along until 90 minutes before the year
ended, and true humans only six minutes before..

Life itself may be rarer than we think, and space faring life may be
so exceptional that it's more likely we *won't* encounter aliens.

It's apparently a lot more rare than you thought. On the Cosmic
Calendar's scale, Copernicus lived in the final second of the year.
At this scale, human spacefaring isn't even a blip.

[ATTENTION!!!! We have finally arrived at my point!!!]

Now, assuming that any other planet will follow roughly the same
development on roughly the same time scale as earth did, but that it
starts to form one or two Cosmic Minutes earlier or later than earth,
where does that leave us as far as actually meeting the other
civilization? If their galaxy/solar system/planet formed just one
Cosmic Day earlier, then they would have first entered orbit just as
our dinosaurs became extinct. A Day later, and they will first leave
their planet just as earth's humanoid descendants become extinct,
whether through evolution or self-immolation.

Whatever, the prospects for meaningful communication between the two
races don't look good.

(perhaps you have
book recommendations in this area too?)

The Cosmic Calendar can be found in Sagan's "Cosmos" (and "Pale Blue
Dot"?), and is available in poster form from Allposters:
http://www.allposters.com/gallery.asp?aid=817727252

Also, keep an eye out for an oop paperback, "Interstellar Travel,
Past, Present and Future," by John W. Macvey. A believer, he still
attempts to keep things realistic. He approaches the question from
the angle of "Assuming that we have been visited by ETs, and assuming
that the laws of physics hold true as we know them, then how could
they do it?"



--------------
Beady's Corollary to Occam's Razor: "The likeliest explanation of any phenomenon is almost always the most boring one imaginable."


-----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =-----
http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World!
-----== Over 100,000 Newsgroups - 19 Different Servers! =-----

John Beaderstadt wrote:

I think this because, based on what i've read, Earth has been around
for nearly 5 billion years,

13.7 billion

That's certainly not the age of the Earth.

--
__ Erik Max Francis && && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
/ \ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
\__/ Smaller than the eye can see / Bigger than the mind can conceive
-- India Arie

John Beaderstadt wrote:

I think this because, based on what i've read, Earth has been around
for nearly 5 billion years,

13.7 billion

That's certainly not the age of the Earth.

--
__ Erik Max Francis && && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
/ \ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
\__/ Smaller than the eye can see / Bigger than the mind can conceive
-- India Arie

On 2004-06-18, Tony Flanders wrote:
Well, my own hunch is that humans will never travel (in person) to
another star. I can give supporting arguments, but obviously that
kind of statement can't be more than a hunch; it can never be proved.

Sure it can. Eliminate the human race. Methods are left as an
exercise to the reader.

--
Aaron Denney
--

On 2004-06-18, Tony Flanders wrote:
Well, my own hunch is that humans will never travel (in person) to
another star. I can give supporting arguments, but obviously that
kind of statement can't be more than a hunch; it can never be proved.

Sure it can. Eliminate the human race. Methods are left as an
exercise to the reader.

--
Aaron Denney
--

Aaron Denney wrote:

Sure it can. Eliminate the human race. Methods are left as an
exercise to the reader.

Well, that's not really validating a prediction, now is it?

--
__ Erik Max Francis && && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
/ \ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
\__/ You are my martyr / I'm a vestige of a revolution
-- Lamya

Aaron Denney wrote:

Sure it can. Eliminate the human race. Methods are left as an
exercise to the reader.

Well, that's not really validating a prediction, now is it?

--
__ Erik Max Francis && && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
/ \ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
\__/ You are my martyr / I'm a vestige of a revolution
-- Lamya

On 2004-06-18, Erik Max Francis wrote:
Aaron Denney wrote:

Sure it can. Eliminate the human race. Methods are left as an
exercise to the reader.

Well, that's not really validating a prediction, now is it?

Sure it is. He's part of the human race, so it counts as natural
evolution.

--
Aaron Denney
--