For those who might misinterpret my prior comments on Darwinism here’s a clarification.
The philosophy of Darwinism leads many people to use the word “paradox” to describe the lack of alien visitors. They all “know” that the evolution of sentient life is easy, so facile, that the Milky Way “must be” teaming with intelligent life. Therefore the lack of alien visitors to Earth is a paradox.
So here’s the real science. There is no evidence that any aliens have ever visited our solar system. There is no evidence of artificial constructions in any solar system, star cluster, or interstellar location in the Milky Way. There is no evidence of any artificial construction in any galaxy we can see. There is no SETI signal, there is nothing.
The overall statistics of these observations lead to the following conclusion: the evolution of sentient space faring species is so rare that we might be the only one in the entire universe. The implications for Darwinism are devastating. While the evolution of bacteria might be trivial, and every solar system in the entire universe might contain primitive life, the evolution of intelligent life appears to be nearly impossible.
For over 10 billion years our Milky Way has been easily capable of supporting space faring explorers. Robotic spacecraft could explore the entire galaxy in about 100 million years. If they aren’t here yet this means they waited at least 99% of the life of the galaxy before starting. Why did they wait? Statistically it’s possible that we are the first, or one of the first, and nobody has been around long enough to explore the entire galaxy: statistically possible, and highly improbable. Either every single species has an impediment to building robotic exploration craft (remember it only takes one) or there aren’t any.
For 10 billion years no extra-galactic species has constructed an object visible from Earth. Perhaps such structures are impossible. I doubt it. This is evidence that there are no aliens in other galaxies.
I claim there aren’t any aliens anywhere in the entire universe, we are alone, and there is no evidence to the contrary. Many people have speculations, deeply held beliefs about Darwinism, Drake equations, planetary search data, … but in the end these speculations are irrelevant. Visual observation is all that counts.
So the implications for Darwinism are this, the rate of evolution of intelligent space faring species is about once per universe per 13 billion years. It appears there are millions or billions of planets/galaxy capable of supporting an evolving ecosystem. So for any given planet in the entire universe the chance of evolution of intelligent life is about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1.
We didn’t beat the odds, we just had the winning lottery ticket. If you bought 100 million lottery tickets you would not be surprised to find that one of them had the winning numbers. Out of billions of planets ours held the winning ticket in the Darwinian lottery.
10 responses so far ↓
1 Marco Munoz // Jun 25, 2009 at 8:10 am
I agree with you when you said that the evolution of intelligent life is a very rare event, buy I think you are wrong when you said that according to darwinism the evolution of intelligent life is very easy. Evolution is about reproduction, continuing the genes, intelligence is a secondary effect of this process and is not the goal of the evolutionary process, just look at how many intelligent species we have on earth.
2 charles // Jun 25, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Firstly, I don’t think you know how big space really is. We just “saw” the first extra-solar planet with a orbiting telescope. It’s larger than Jupiter, which is several hundred times larger than earth. If they are intelligent, why would they destroy many planets just to get the resources to build something you can see?
Secondly, SETI is a passive project. we are sitting here hoping that a radio signal was transmitted in our direction, strong enough to get here without being drowned out in the background noise, and only in the time frame to match when we started listening.
The odds are not against intelligent life (I know of at least three other species here on earth that can unlock your car in tests) , the odds are against detecting alien life. It’s like putting the end of a microscope into the water at the beach and declaring there are no dolphins.
3 Sean // Jun 25, 2009 at 11:02 pm
If you read my post carefully you will see that I am only discussing space faring aliens. I am not interested in discussing animals that can unlock your car.
Out of 10,000 galaxies there is not one single visible structure in the past 10+ billion years. This means that in roughly 1e20 planet years nobody has built a superstructure.
Your optics analogy is wrong. Take a pair of binoculars, sit on a boat for a few weeks, then try to tell me there are no dolphins.
We can see billions of stars, thousands of bright close galaxies, and listen to millions of frequencies. The statistics are on my side, there are no space faring aliens anywhere.
4 Bob // Sep 11, 2009 at 5:51 pm
See you haven’t read much of the ufo lit. Start with Hynek and Ruppert, then move on to Vallee.
5 Colum Paget // Mar 2, 2010 at 10:08 pm
>So here’s the real science. There is no
>evidence that any aliens have ever visited our
>solar system. There is no evidence of artificial
>constructions in any solar system, star cluster,
>or interstellar location in the Milky Way.
>There is no evidence of any artificial
>construction in any galaxy we can see.
There is no evidence of complex life, simple life, or even viruses outside of earth (I think they’ve discounted that rock from mars, haven’t they?) therefore it doesn’t exist. The universe is sterile.
There is no evidence of moons around extrasolar planets. (at least, I don’t think we have the telescope power to resolve these yet?) Therefore these do not exist, moons are a unique abberation of the solar system.
There is no evidence of therefore it doesn’t exist.
However…
There is no evidence of perpetual motion machines, therefore these don’t exist.
The last statement is different. It’s different because, not only is there no evidence of these, but our current theories largely rule them out. As ever, the current theories *could* be wrong, but they are the theories we have.
Colum
6 Colum Paget // Mar 2, 2010 at 10:10 pm
> Secondly, SETI is a passive project.
Personally I hope it damn well stays that way. There are certain types of evidence for alien civilisations that I think we’d be better off not having.
Colum
7 Colum Paget // Mar 2, 2010 at 10:47 pm
I claim there aren’t any aliens anywhere in the entire universe, we are alone, and there is no evidence to the contrary. Many people have speculations, deeply held beliefs about Darwinism, Drake equations, planetary search data, … but in the end these speculations are irrelevant. Visual observation is all that counts.
Then, in order to be consistent, you must have claimed until recently that there were no extra-solar planets. I suspect you must still claim that there are no moons around extra solar planets (As we’ve not seen one yet, I don’t think) you must further accept that the universe is entirely sterile. You must accept that there are no other planets in the outskirts of our own solar system (because they’ve not been seen).
Indeed, going further, if visual evidence is all that matters, than anything that we’ve not seen cannot exist?
If we have to start declaring things non-existent on the basis of observation, then is it not more logical to claim that these incredible structures you are looking for, self-replicating robots, ‘galactic scale structures’ visible from across space, ftl transport, etc, etc, are simply impossible? After all, we’ve no consistent theory of how to do any of these, so it would be the best fit to our current models. After all, we know of NO civilisation that can make replicating nano-bots of dyson spheres, including ours.
This is a little different from saying that dolphins don’t exist, because on our current models we pretty much understand that dolphins can exist, so if someone describes a dolphin to you, you would have to say “That might, or might not exist, but it would fit in with current theories.” If, however, I was to describe something like the energy creatures so beloved of ‘Star Trek’, well, we don’t have any theory of how such lifeforms could exist. They might, but our current understanding doesn’t support them, so it’s best to say they probably don’t.
The same goes for mega-scale structures and self-replicating robots. It might be possible to construct them, particularly the robots (I think we have the best evidence for them, rather than the mega-structures). However, we’ve no idea how this would be done, so perhaps for the time being, we have to say they can’t be done. This is the simplest theory that best fits your observations.
Colum
8 Colum Paget // Mar 2, 2010 at 10:51 pm
> See you haven’t read much of the ufo lit.
> Start with Hynek and Ruppert, then move
> on to Vallee.
On this, I’m with Sean. Alien life my have arisen elsewhere. It may have become intelligent. But I don’t think there’s any evidence that it’s visited us. To do so it would have to overcome fantastic difficulties, difficulties that we ourselves may never overcome. Of course, they may have done so, but until we have good evidence that they have, I’d be inclined to doubt it.
Colum
9 Colum Paget // Mar 2, 2010 at 11:06 pm
> So here’s the real science. There is no
> evidence that any aliens have ever visited
> our solar system.
I have never seen a racoon. Therefore, they do not exist.
> There is no evidence of artificial
> constructions in any solar system, star
> cluster, or interstellar location in the
> Milky Way. There is no evidence of any
> artificial construction in any galaxy we can
> see.
These would have to be huge beyond all imagining, probably requiring the demolition of worlds. This is hokum, such things cannot exist.
> There is no SETI signal,
Soon there will be no signals from earth. Recent spread-spectrum technology will gradually cause earth to go ‘quiet’ to the kind of detection that we are currently using to detect aliens.
> The overall statistics of these observations
> lead to the following conclusion: the
> evolution of sentient space faring species
> is so rare that we might be the only one in
> the entire universe.
No, it leads to the conclusion that the technologies you ascribe to alien societies, technologies that we ourselves do not have, are impossible. We are not space faring in the way required to support your theory. We have never journeyed to even the most nearby star. We have only sent out a very few robot probes to worlds in our own solar system. What the fermi paradox is telling us, is that dreams of dyson spheres and replicating robots are hokum. Intestellar distances are just too much of a problem to be overcome. The stars will always be out of reach, we will never have our galactic empire, and probably our society will not last that much longer. These are the simplest explainations for the fermi paradox, and they require no vast changes to our scientific framework. We do not have to throw out entire theories. We do not have to substitute “A wizard did it” to explain life on Earth. It’s grim, but it’s the truth.
We are not alone, but we might as well be, we are as people lost in an infinite labyrinth. There are others in here with us, but we shall never encounter them.
Still, it’s not all bad. You’ve no guarentee that the others are nice people, so the labyrinth is doing us a favor.
Colum
10 Colum Paget // Mar 2, 2010 at 11:16 pm
>We didn’t beat the odds, we just had the
>winning lottery ticket. If you bought 100
>million lottery tickets you would not be
>surprised to find that one of them had the >winning numbers. Out of billions of planets >ours held the winning ticket in the Darwinian >lottery.
No we didn’t. We do not fulfil your requirements to be recognized as intelligent life. We have no megascale structures, we have no self-replicating nano-explorers. We are not meaningfully ’space faring’ even within our own solar system. After all, how ’sea faring’ is a society that, once, as an experiment, hollowed out a log and floated it down the coast, stuck up a flag, and then abandoned the project?
It’s even questionable that our signals are detectable very far out into space (and let’s keep it that way, huh?).
There are no civilisations of the type you claim, not even ours.
The lottery is still open for its first winner.
Colum
Leave a Comment