This. (Also what @catposter is saying). The only way any species is ever getting to the technological level of being able to facilitate interstellar travel, which may even be literally impossible for very real limits on the laws of physics, is if that species has the ability to cooperate on massive, likely species-wide levels. We aren't getting to Mars via Elon Musk, let alone the stars. It will take global communism for us to be able to have a hope of interstellar travel. And global communism requires cooperation (read some Kropotkin, damnit!) Cooperation at that scale and with intelligence almost certainly requires empathy as well. Perhaps that's a little bit presumptive, but I think most would agree that empathy and cooperation facilitate one another and one is far less likely without the other. Anyway, it's much more likely any species that advanced would also be empathetic. And thus it wouldn't go around wiping out other places where intelligence has arisen but instead fostering it, or perhaps just letting it do it's own thing.
It's probably a moot point anyway, because the Rare Earth Hypothesis is probably correct, but that's already been discussed to death in this thread. (It's just that the number of things that had to line up just right for intelligent life to emerge on this planet are so statistically unlikely that intelligent life could be as rare as happening once per galaxy or less, and if that's the case, we will never see other intelligent life period).
Edit: Also what @wantToViewEmojis said just below. The scenario @riley is talking about in The Three Body Problem, while an awesome scifi thought experiment, is ultimately just more Capitalist Realism.
I'd posit that that the only other methods of reaching such a high level of cooperation would still make it far more appealing to absorb intelligent life into their civilization rather then eradicating it if they ever took interest.
[OT, but sorry if it's bad form to tag everybody. ? It's just I'm trying to address things brought up by multiple people and wanted to give credit for who was saying what.]
Gah. There's so much to address here, but let me just take the last bit as a means to getting at the rest:
the galaxy looks oddly empty.
No, it doesn't. It looks predictably void of civilizations that are capable of interstellar travel or communication. It actually looks like simple life may be very common in the universe. We simply don't know if that tends to even reach multicellularity or then "intelligence," as that could be so uncommon as to only happen once or less per galaxy as I said above. It's predictably void of interstellar travelers because that requires a level of complexity that may not even be possible. It could very well could literally be a physical impossibility, but even if it's not, it would require such extreme specialization, knowledge, and complexity, that it makes perfect sense it would be extremely rare if it existed at all.
I think we should take this seriously,
I do and I am.
and not try to project our ideas of stages of history
I feel like if anyone is doing that, you are. No offense, but I really do see your concerns as resting on a capitalist realism kind of mindset. It's not about stages of our history, it's about how complexity works and how you can't just jump from one level of complexity to vastly more complex shit without any transitional stages. You don't get society without cooperation. And you don't get interstellar [IS] travel without an extremely advanced society. While I admit this piece is opinion, I think it's ridiculous to think that a species that has reached a level capable of IS travel would not have necessarily developed to the extent of being post-scarcity and in full recognition of the benefits of complete cooperation. All this scifi we consume likes to assume we're just a hop skip and a jump away from being able to do IS, but we're not. Like not even close. As someone else mentioned in this thread, if you have the capacity for IS, you pretty much have to have FTL. If you have FTL, you not only get IS, you quite literally have time travel too.
on something we know nothing about
There are many assumptions that not only we can make, but that we'd be ridiculous not to. For example, we know you need chemical self-replication for life to exist. We know that life increases in complexity by a very specific mechanism: evolution by natural selection. There are even reasons to think that there are certain traits life on other planets would almost certainly share with us. Like life that makes the leap to eukaryotic multicellularity will also almost for sure at some point evolve eyes because of the sheer usefulness of eyes in this universe and the fact that eyes did evolve independently many times here on this planet. There are absolutely assumptions that should be made, or we may as well be arguing about magic wands and unicorns as being possible.
The thing I see people missing a lot in the discussion of "where the aliens at" is:
you couldn't do complex chemistry until Population I stars formed, so there's a floor on when life appears
the conditions for life might be rare
life might be rare
eukaryotic life might be really rare
multicellular life could be even more rare
complex multicellular life might not appear in the lifetime of the planet (we were mostly soup until the Cambrian explosion)
Life tends to settle in local maxima. If there's no big reset like the mass extinctions of Earth, something in the intelligence local maxima might never appear
speaking of, mass extinctions might be too rare to provide useful shuffles or too frequent to develop something in a similar niche as humans, or they might kill 100% of life instead of 95%
back to local maxima: tool using requires a dummy amount of things to go right. Passing down tool use culturally requires even more things to go right
there's no particular evolutionary guarantee for highly social, highly cooperative, intelligent, tool using, knowledge passing species to evolve
even if there is, there's no drive to industrial revolution. Modern humans existed 250k years before we figured out agriculture
and again, too much instability wipes out whatever progress you make. Humanity bottlenecked to less than 10k people at some point. What if we hadn't recovered?
and once a species is technological, what ensures it won't blow itself up?
ok, it's made it this far, and it turns out space can't be conquered, or the species simply doesn't have a wanderlust drive
And all this is against the fact that, cosmically speaking, the universe is really young and complex chemistry wasn't possible until somewhat recently because there wasn't enough of those elements. Maybe we're the first to get to this point.
There's no real reason for intelligent, technological species to occur.
Well said. This is what always gets me when people talk about the Fermi Paradox and ponder at all the possible answers. Well, the answer seems overwhelmingly clear, and it's exactly what you just laid it out. Well, that and that there's a general misunderstanding of the distances and therefore time involved, even if technological life were common.
well. i still disagree, but if what you're saying is true, then we need to get off our asses and build communism as soon as possible because the only thing that can stop an evil space empire with a gun is a good space FLAGSPC with a gun
from certain perspectives it is morally necessary that we do so, because any number of civilizations could be being destroyed or enslaved and the suffering could be anywhere from nothing to nearly limitless.
This. (Also what @catposter is saying). The only way any species is ever getting to the technological level of being able to facilitate interstellar travel, which may even be literally impossible for very real limits on the laws of physics, is if that species has the ability to cooperate on massive, likely species-wide levels. We aren't getting to Mars via Elon Musk, let alone the stars. It will take global communism for us to be able to have a hope of interstellar travel. And global communism requires cooperation (read some Kropotkin, damnit!) Cooperation at that scale and with intelligence almost certainly requires empathy as well. Perhaps that's a little bit presumptive, but I think most would agree that empathy and cooperation facilitate one another and one is far less likely without the other. Anyway, it's much more likely any species that advanced would also be empathetic. And thus it wouldn't go around wiping out other places where intelligence has arisen but instead fostering it, or perhaps just letting it do it's own thing.
It's probably a moot point anyway, because the Rare Earth Hypothesis is probably correct, but that's already been discussed to death in this thread. (It's just that the number of things that had to line up just right for intelligent life to emerge on this planet are so statistically unlikely that intelligent life could be as rare as happening once per galaxy or less, and if that's the case, we will never see other intelligent life period).
Edit: Also what @wantToViewEmojis said just below. The scenario @riley is talking about in The Three Body Problem, while an awesome scifi thought experiment, is ultimately just more Capitalist Realism.
I'd posit that that the only other methods of reaching such a high level of cooperation would still make it far more appealing to absorb intelligent life into their civilization rather then eradicating it if they ever took interest.
Yeah, there are things we know that is possible that even an ancient species might not know. Knowing things is pretty useful
[OT, but sorry if it's bad form to tag everybody. ? It's just I'm trying to address things brought up by multiple people and wanted to give credit for who was saying what.]
deleted by creator
Gah. There's so much to address here, but let me just take the last bit as a means to getting at the rest:
No, it doesn't. It looks predictably void of civilizations that are capable of interstellar travel or communication. It actually looks like simple life may be very common in the universe. We simply don't know if that tends to even reach multicellularity or then "intelligence," as that could be so uncommon as to only happen once or less per galaxy as I said above. It's predictably void of interstellar travelers because that requires a level of complexity that may not even be possible. It could very well could literally be a physical impossibility, but even if it's not, it would require such extreme specialization, knowledge, and complexity, that it makes perfect sense it would be extremely rare if it existed at all.
I do and I am.
I feel like if anyone is doing that, you are. No offense, but I really do see your concerns as resting on a capitalist realism kind of mindset. It's not about stages of our history, it's about how complexity works and how you can't just jump from one level of complexity to vastly more complex shit without any transitional stages. You don't get society without cooperation. And you don't get interstellar [IS] travel without an extremely advanced society. While I admit this piece is opinion, I think it's ridiculous to think that a species that has reached a level capable of IS travel would not have necessarily developed to the extent of being post-scarcity and in full recognition of the benefits of complete cooperation. All this scifi we consume likes to assume we're just a hop skip and a jump away from being able to do IS, but we're not. Like not even close. As someone else mentioned in this thread, if you have the capacity for IS, you pretty much have to have FTL. If you have FTL, you not only get IS, you quite literally have time travel too.
There are many assumptions that not only we can make, but that we'd be ridiculous not to. For example, we know you need chemical self-replication for life to exist. We know that life increases in complexity by a very specific mechanism: evolution by natural selection. There are even reasons to think that there are certain traits life on other planets would almost certainly share with us. Like life that makes the leap to eukaryotic multicellularity will also almost for sure at some point evolve eyes because of the sheer usefulness of eyes in this universe and the fact that eyes did evolve independently many times here on this planet. There are absolutely assumptions that should be made, or we may as well be arguing about magic wands and unicorns as being possible.
The thing I see people missing a lot in the discussion of "where the aliens at" is:
And all this is against the fact that, cosmically speaking, the universe is really young and complex chemistry wasn't possible until somewhat recently because there wasn't enough of those elements. Maybe we're the first to get to this point.
There's no real reason for intelligent, technological species to occur.
Well said. This is what always gets me when people talk about the Fermi Paradox and ponder at all the possible answers. Well, the answer seems overwhelmingly clear, and it's exactly what you just laid it out. Well, that and that there's a general misunderstanding of the distances and therefore time involved, even if technological life were common.
well. i still disagree, but if what you're saying is true, then we need to get off our asses and build communism as soon as possible because the only thing that can stop an evil space empire with a gun is a good space FLAGSPC with a gun
from certain perspectives it is morally necessary that we do so, because any number of civilizations could be being destroyed or enslaved and the suffering could be anywhere from nothing to nearly limitless.
deleted by creator
finally something to convince star trek nerds to like communism