Over 35,000 advanced extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way

[RisingFury]

Kinda doubt that they are warlike, or else they must be a lot like Animals and hence not an advanced civilization, they'd be like us, warlike and aggressive.

My point is.... do they even know what war is... and if they do, is it really something like a massive Sci-Fi war out there

 

[Coolhand]

They could well be warlike. If human like civilisations are common, then you can assume that some if not all alien civilisations are also composed or are descended from that planets dominant predator. A predator must be smarter and more aggressive than its prey so those aggressive traits are passed along with its intelligence from generation to generation.

Basically anything thats evolved in similar way to us, as a predatory species could be very dangerous, just as we are. Which is why some people feel it's foolish to advertise our presence at the moment by sending signals or probes out into space.

Maybe no one would be listening or ever see it, perhaps someone might and percieve us as a threat, and then eliminate us, probably be the logical thing to do... Probably what we'd do to another race.

 

[RisingFury]

The Probe will protect us!!! :lol:

Seriously though, probes aren't a risk. Radio signals are.
But even that isn't much of a risk in my opinion because we've only been sending our radio signals out for 60 years or so, and you have to keep in mind that radiation falls off with inverse r^3, which means that you really need to be listening to pick *anything* up at 60 light year distance. Our antennas from 60 years back weren't really powerful in the first place.

Keep in mind, when Russia first launched it's probe to the Moon, there was only 1 deep space antenna that was sensitive enough for the signal to be picked up. And that was just this short distance to the Moon.

Granted, we now have antennae that can pick up something like a millionth of a billionth of watt... but we're listening specifically in a certain region for a long period of time.

I'm not sure if radio signals get blocked even a bit by interstellar gas, but if they do, even less of a chance that someone can pick us up.


Which brings me to the last point... if there really is a warlike civilization out there, that probably means it's not alone. And if it's not alone, it might just be locked in the middle of a large conflict. I seriously doubt they would want to investigate us or any other undeveloped civilization like us



Really nice debate though

 

[garyw]

Roughly 3% of stars are G2 - Like our Sun. The universe is a dangerous place with all those GRB's and other things. Life on Earth has suffered no less than FIVE major extinction events.
Now, it might be nice to think of some alien species thats struggled against all that and won but it's so unlikely as to be zero.

There are no aliens. We are the first and because of that we have a responsibility to survive.

When we get out to other star systems will WILL find life but it won't be intelligent. It'll be something like boneless fish on some dreary waterworld light years from here.

 

[TSPenguin]

But when you take into account how many 3% are then your zero becomes the opposite.
And there has been a lot of time between extinction events, If we were to become a multiplaneted race, we'd survive that...

 

[Coolhand]

I'm not talking about our tv.

We have already transmitted powerful signals out into space as focused beams, these will travel much further and still be easy to detect from other parts of the galaxy, they will still take hundreds or thousands of years to get there however... Even a probe hurtling through the void might eventually get somewhere in millions of years time... Perhaps the voyager probe from the 1970's will doom whatever civilisation - perhaps the dolphins or the ants, or the cockroaches - that replaced us after we blew outselves up trying to reach type 1 civilisation status.

our probability for us reaching type status btw, is apparently roughly 50%50... a little optimistic perhaps.


-----Posted Added-----

But when you take into account how many 3% are then your zero becomes the opposite.
And there has been a lot of time between extinction events, If we were to become a multiplaneted race, we'd survive that...

Indeed, and once you become a type 2 civilisation, there's no force in nature that can stop you, whatever happens you can control it or simply get out the way, you're not stuck in one place like we are at the moment. There's plenty of time between extinction events for this to happen.

 

[Saturn V]

Anybody else remember the movie "Starman"?

We sent out an invitation to contact us on the side of Voyager, an alien decides to accept the invitation... and we spend the rest of the movie trying to kill him :blink:.

Would YOU contact us?

 

[EJ316]

I'm pretty sure that although we have come a long way in terms of being able to answer this question we are still very far from reaching a conclusion.

There are far too many stars in the Universe to make the very grand assumption that we are the only one of our kind...in my opinion.

 

[TSPenguin]

About the agressiveness of other races:

One could argue that in order to reach type 1 or even type 2 the race will have to abandon the concept of fighting among itself.
That is, of course, only speculative. It might speed up the developement or it might hinder it, depending on the genetical basis of the race.

But it sure would be interesting to observe how long it will take for us (or any other race) to outgrow their genetic heritage. Even more interesting is how you define outgrow...

 

[Jarvitä]

But when you take into account how many 3% are then your zero becomes the opposite.
And there has been a lot of time between extinction events, If we were to become a multiplaneted race, we'd survive that...

Even if we somehow colonise the solar system...even if we manage to establish interstellar travel and colonise the entire local cluster, it would only take one star going supernova to wipe us out. Even if humanity spreads across a large part of our galaxy, a gamma ray burst would be all it takes to make it extinct overnight. Sure, colonisation and decentralisation can help us survive local extinction events, but there's still a large range of cosmic phenomena that we don't even know much about, but what we do know is that we can't do anything about them.

"You can run, but you can't hide", I believe it goes.

 

[dougkeenan]

That's gonna be a lot of addons.

No, wait! If they're really advanced they'll already have one ready for us to install.

 

[Coolhand]

About the agressiveness of other races:

One could argue that in order to reach type 1 or even type 2 the race will have to abandon the concept of fighting among itself.
That is, of course, only speculative. It might speed up the developement or it might hinder it, depending on the genetical basis of the race.

But it sure would be interesting to observe how long it will take for us (or any other race) to outgrow their genetic heritage. Even more interesting is how you define outgrow...

Part of being a Type 1 and beyond means that you have abandoned those infighting, tribal warfare like ways, this is true, we would be global culture with no sense of nationality as we see it now. This does not mean that you're automatically the 'good guys' and your good will toward each other will be extended to those from other worlds who may potentially be in competition with you. Like the old relativistic rocket standoff, you have to secure your own future and its probably best that you shoot first since any other action results in at least your own destruction.

 

[TSPenguin]

You should read up on stellar physics...
And besides that, if we had colonized the galaxy, we would have adequate shielding for most common radiations at hand.

 

[EJ316]

we would be global culture with no sense of nationality as we see it now.

I honestly cannot see this happening to us anytime in the near future

 

[Hielor]

Roughly 3% of stars are G2 - Like our Sun. The universe is a dangerous place with all those GRB's and other things. Life on Earth has suffered no less than FIVE major extinction events.
Now, it might be nice to think of some alien species thats struggled against all that and won but it's so unlikely as to be zero.

There are no aliens. We are the first and because of that we have a responsibility to survive.

When we get out to other star systems will WILL find life but it won't be intelligent. It'll be something like boneless fish on some dreary waterworld light years from here.

This type of thinking is ridiculous, and sounds a whole lot like the "white man's burden" of a century ago. People who claim this have absolutely no understanding of the incredible scale of things in the galaxy.

3% of the stars in the galaxy amounts for about 3 BILLION stars. Even if we assume that life could not possibly develop on a system that doesn't have a G2 star (doubtless an invalid assumption) that's still a whole lot of chances for life to develop.

Yes, Earth has had at least 5 "major extinction events." Guess what? We're still here. Plenty of species survived all of the events, notably our ancestors, because if they hadn't, we wouldn't be here. If anything, the fact that life on Earth has survived those major extinction events suggests that life is, in fact, quite hardy, and more than capable of surviving a major extinction event. The huge variety of animals we have now--all of whom are descended from ancestors that survived the extinctions--stands as living proof to the large number of species that can "struggle against all that and win."

If it's "so unlikely as to be zero" then how do you explain humans? Clearly, the odds of a civilization surviving to our level can't be zero, because if it were zero, then we wouldn't be here.

 

[Coolhand]

I honestly cannot see this happening to us anytime in the near future

We are slowly getting there... Perhaps too slowly, but it's essentially what conspiracists call the "new world order" and plently of people, nationalists, terrorists, people who might have something to lose (the wealthy or even the regular joes of developed countries perhaps) want to resist it. Perhaps with good reason along with selfish concerns - we're not good at making those kinds of transitions and theres plenty of room for it all to go horribly wrong, it will take many generations i'm sure. We can't yet support our lifestyle for everyone on the planet.

The EU, NAFTA and the various other trade federations are all the roots of such a system however and the internet is basically a type one telecommunications system - National barriers are not present on the internet and we can all talk freely with one another, aside from some countries that are blocked by their extremely nationalistic governments, like China.

How things have been going in the 'post 911' years though (the world of the '90's seemed an alltogether more cheery, hopefull place as i recall) , war, oil / energy crisis, along with global warming, nuclear proliferation, germ warfare and all the environmental concerns we have, and now an economic collapse, we may well beat an extinction event to the draw... economic and energy supply problems, increasing cost of oil & peak oil production meaning its never going to be as cheap as it was before, for example may well tip humanity over the edge.

 

[SiberianTiger]

Or maybe we are the first. Assuming that an extra terrestrial intelligence follows the same path as us we should still be able to detect radio waves from the time the culture was using radio. We haven't.

Out of the 35,000, SOME would certainly have taken a path of development similar to ours.

 

[EJ316]

How things have been going in the 'post 911' years though (the world of the '90's seemed an alltogether more cheery, hopefull place as i recall)

You're right, I think the Orbiter community should build a space ship and leave before things go crazy! I reckon we have enough combined knowledge

 

[ar81]

Politics is the art of making cheap things in the expensive way.
ISS is the proof. Its orbit is useless for planetary transfer and it may require an expensive engine and lots of fuel to align planes.
ISS is technically inside atmosphere. So we are still trapped inside of Earth, with politicians who worry about the videogame of economy and make cheap things expensive.

 

[cjp]

http://science.slashdot.org/science/08/10/20/1230207.shtml

Disagreements about these figures leads to estimates for the number of advanced civilizations ranging from 10^-5 to 10^6.

I think it's 10^-5 :rofl: