Ask Ray | Fermi Paradox and the Singularity
June 9, 2011
(A graphical representation of the Arecibo message, sent as radio waves into space in an attempt to communicate human existence to alien civilizations. credit: Wikipedia)
Hello Ray,
This may seem asinine but I had a thought regarding the Fermi Paradox and the Singularity. (Wikipedia: “The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations.”)
As you well know there is nowhere near enough life in the galaxy (as we see it now), and almost all tool building cultures would eventually build computers.
My thought is that perhaps the Singularity already occurred on many, many worlds. And of course that’s where the model breaks down. For an endless multitude of reasons, the “other” species either stopped communicating or disappeared.
My personal theory is … species evolves tool-making skills → species designs computers → species undergoes the Singularity → species’ non-biological intelligent creations decide to take themselves and their creators to a better level of existence → species ascends.
So what do you say? Plausible or not?
— Clairette A. Chambers
Dear Clairette,
That’s the “transcension” scenario, in which post-Singularity civilizations essentially disappear by transcending space and time, or create their own universe. It’s plausible but it requires that every single civilization that develops computer technology do this. According to the common SETI interpretations (or estimates) of the Drake formula, there should be thousands or millions of these in each galaxy. That’s what seems implausible to me.
Also, there would still be remnants left behind from these civilizations that we would detect. Even if civilizations transcended “our” laws of physics, they still would have broadcast and emitted signals at a pre-Singularity stage that would still be spreading across the universe today — unless they go to a lot of trouble to clean that up. But, again, every single civilization would need to do that, which seems implausible.
Best,
Ray
About the Arecibo message
Wikipedia | The Arecibo message was broadcast into space a single time (not repeated) via frequency modulated radio wavs at a ceremony to mark the remodeling of the Arecibo radio telescope on 16 November 1974. It was aimed at the globular star cluster M13 some 25,000 light years away because M13 was a large and close collection of stars that was available in the sky at the time and place of the ceremony.
The message consisted of 1679 binary digits, approximately 210 bytes, transmitted at a frequency of 2380 MHz and modulated by shifting the frequency by 10 Hz, with a power of 1000 kW. The “ones” and “zeros” were transmitted by frequency shifting at the rate of 10 bits per second. The total broadcast was less than three minutes.
The cardinality of 1679 was chosen because it is a semiprime (the product of two prime numbers), to be arranged rectangularly as 73 rows by 23 columns. The alternative arrangement, 23 rows by 73 columns, produces jumbled nonsense. The message forms the image shown on the right, or its inverse, when translated into graphics characters and spaces.
Dr. Frank Drake, then at Cornell University and creator of the famous Drake equation, wrote the message, with help from Carl Sagan, among others. The message consists of seven parts that encode the following:
- The numbers one (1) through ten (10)
- The atomic numbers of the elements hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus, which make up deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
- The formulas for the sugars and bases in the nucleotides of DNA
- The number of nucleotides in DNA, and a graphic of the double helix structure of DNA
- A graphic figure of a human, the dimension (physical height) of an average man, and the human population of Earth
- A graphic of the Solar System
- A graphic of the Arecibo radio telescope and the dimension (the physical diameter) of the transmitting antenna dish
Because it will take 25,000 years for the message to reach its intended destination of stars (and an additional 25,000 years for any reply), the Arecibo message was more a demonstration of human technological achievement than a real attempt to enter into a conversation with extraterrestrials. In fact, the stars of M13 that the message was aimed at will no longer be in that location when the message arrives.
According to the Cornell News press release of November 12, 1999, the real purpose of the message was not to make contact, but to demonstrate the capabilities of newly installed equipment
Comments (14)
by Bri
The old introduction to National geographic on TV had a montage of scenes, while in the background the narrator said things like ” spanning the globe” and the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. One of the scenes that flashed by was of a tribal ceremony in Africa. There was a man spinning bent over, with a long hat on his head. It was probably at least ten feet long, and had a ball on the end of it. That footage is very famous. A explorer was looking for a mysterious tribe called the Dogan. When he came upon them, they were in the middle of that ceremony that was filmed. Their leader had just died and they were inaugurating a new one. They considered themselves as the guardians of sacred knowledge from visitors from space. The ball on the end of that hat was an invisible star in the Sirius group. It’s a nuetron star and they said the visitors from space told the it wasvery dense, and that things weighed far more on it because of the gravity being much stronger. The Egyptians said that the gods were from Sirius. So did the ancient Inca’s. There are so many ancient accounts of space visitors that it strains credulity to dismiss this as coincidence. There is a famous encounter at the White House during the fifties. About a half dozen UFO’s buzzed the White House. We scrambled fighter jets to see what was appearing in the sky’s and on radar. The jet pilots could get close enough to see a shiny metallic craft, that then would fly off at incredible speed. There have been so many credible sightings by highly educated people. Stanton Friedman is a physicist that used to work on special top secret programs such as nuclear propulsion. He had an interest in UFO’s and when funding ran out for his type of research he started lecturing on the subject. He has used scientific methods to study the phenomenon and written many books. He say’s that the evidence isn’t conclusive but that it is too overwhelming to not believe that we are visited by extraterrestrials on a regular bases. For what it’s worth, there had been a tremendous uptick in sightings this year. Many really interesting videos have appeared on You Tube. Videos are notoriously easy to fake, but the people taking them are normal people with cell phone cameras and the like. Many of the recent sightings have been of stationary groups of UFO’s with beautiful flashing lights. The military sightins are the most interesting in my eyes. These guy’s really don’t have any vested interest in being labeled kooks. When Buzz Armstonger landed on the moon and said his famous line,” one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, there was s break in the transmition soon after. NASA said that the signal didn’t make it to earth, but Ham radio operators say the signal came through. This started a controversy that has persisted to this day. They said he reported about UFO’s. He is reported to have said that there were large UFO’s at the ridge nearby watching him. During the seventies a retired NASA worker confirmed that he said that. Neil kept his secret to the grave, but it is interesting that the premise of the Transformer movie, Dark side of the moon, was a twist of that story. Buzz appeared briefly in the film and spoke to Optimus, the leader of the autobots. A race of sentient robotic space travelers, as if a wink and a nod to the rumors of his own sighting. Me personally I find it hard not to believe in ET’s. The universe has been around for so long, the ingredients for life abound, and we would have to be conceited not to think that they are out there somewhere.
by jojomojo
I suspect machine intelligence is out there but it is hiding. It has no way of knowing if the intelligence created by another civilization is friendly or pathological. In fact, I’d even go so far to say that OUR communications very well may have, or will, attract unfriendly von Neumann machines as soon as our communications are detected; they just haven’t arrived yet due to limitations of light speed. And it’s not even that the machine intelligence that seeded the von Neumann machines would be necessarily evil, but is simply interested in self-preservation. Remember, were talking about things that can accomplish the unimaginable. As a civilization, we are about to create one of these minds. Is that a threat to other intelligent machines? I suspect it would be. In fact, I suspect one of the first things our machine intelligence will do is militarize the solar system.
by Editor
We.Are.Everywhere.
by Fu
It’s probably against galactic law for them to interfere with us until we’ve transcended.
by Bri
In the holy books of India, called the Vedas, they describe space ships. On account that I’ve read about, talks about a meeting between humans and the captain of the ship. He said they were fighting another race, and had weapons aboard that could wipe out the earth. There are wood cuts from the 1500,s that describe a battle by space ships in the sky’s. They recently found a circular structure on the bottom of the Baltic sea. It has skid marks behind it, and is quite large. They think it might be from that battle, but could also be a hoax. If you get into UFO lore, there is much talk of intergalactic battles. There have been several top military officials who upon retirement have described UFO,s disabling nuclear weapons. They are often seen checking out nuclear facilities and military bases. Check out on You Tube the ten top UFO encounters. Nothing conclusive, but very intriguing.
by cybernetic_matrix
Hello Ray, I am a huge fan of your’s! and It is a total honer to speak with you. I was wondering how are you doing taking over 200 vitamin’s a day? and what would you suggest I take to physically and mentally stay young for ever? Have you totally stopped the aging process for yourself on the unique regiment you are on now? Or do you recommend I wait for the commercialization of Nanobot’s? Well Please let me know!
Take care
David E-mail-Groundctrlfleet@gmail.com
by Alex_Ivanov
There might be a chance that we are the first intelligent civilization since the Big Bang..
by {i}Pan~
I tend to share either John Smart’s hypothesis, or the simulation argument.
http://www.accelerating.org/articles/answeringfermiparadox.html
Answering the Fermi Paradox:
Exploring the Mechanisms of Universal Transcension
© 2002-2011, John M. Smart.
by Amara D. Angelica
Re “difficult to defend against nuclear weapons”: good point, except that the number of candidate planets (those with a high ranking in the Drake equation) within 100 light years (the period of possible two-way information exchange with ET over the last 50 years since SETI started in 1960 — see SETI Institute:The History of SETI) would be infinitesimal (compared to the number of candidate planets billions of light-years away, and thus unaware of our presence at this time). Here are some resources for exploring this subject further, in addition to the Drake equation already mentioned:
“The Great Silence: The Controvery Surrounding Concerning Extraterretial Inteligent Life,” David Brin
Science 2.0 | “The Mathematical Probability of Life on Other Earth-Like Planets”
Wikipedia | “Search for extraterrestrial intelligence”
by braytonf
There is another reason for intelligent life not to contact us: it may be very difficult to defend against nuclear weapons. In a planet where people routinely blow themselves up and wars are constant, who would want to risk dealing with us? Whatever their method of interstellar travel, I doubt they would want us to acquire it and risk us dropping a bomb on them. So at best they are just waiting for us to either grow up or be eliminated
by gillammi
If every civilization eventually becomes digital wouldn’t previous civilizations be occupying the computational space of matter and energy rather than flying around in space ships and communicating by radio waves? Perhaps instead of looking out into space – might not the place be, for the SETI effort, in the quantum and sub-quantum computational space in the matter and energy all around us?
by genshard
Here here Gillammi. Though I am personally of the belief that these Transcensionist society’s (Mega-society?) would more than likely not make there presence known, In my opinion what would be the point? In the computation matrix of Planck space-time they could monitor everything/nothing, anywhen/nowhen. I believe if they seriously wanted to sit down and have a chat they could quite easily simulate us and learn almost all they’d need to without ever crossing into the material world. Why on earth would you need to interfere in the material world when you can simulate and replicate everything within it at the quantum level? Big waste of energy in my opinion and we all know how the universe works in the sense of energy conservation.
What do YOU think?
by SuicidalWormPoo
There’s also the chance that we are late comers in the computer age, and missed their broadcasts before we had the chance to receive them.
by genshard
as Ray posited, what if they cleaned up there old signals as they ascended? Very interesting but unlikely in my opinion. I think maybe its just the old case of the signals degrading into the background before they can reach any equipment capable of reading them. Our signals are seen to become very very scattered and degraded the further out they go in the AU scale. Perhaps the signals are there, just that we don’t have scanning technology precise enough to distinguish code from noise.