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From: Borax Man <rotflol2@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,alt.space,alt.science,alt.politics,alt.culture
Subject: Re: ET-Detection Chances Downgraded - The "Tech Window" Just Too
 Narrow
Followup-To: talk.politics.misc
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2024 10:38:48 -0000 (UTC)
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["Followup-To:" header set to talk.politics.misc.]
On 2024-08-13, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:
> https://phys.org/news/2024-08-dim-odds-alien-civilizations.html
>
> Are there any advanced alien civilizations elsewhere in our
> galaxy? We don't know. All we do know is that there is at
> least one. Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about
> finding others?
>
> A new paper, appearing on the preprint server arXiv, argues
> that we are unlikely to detect other technological civilizations
> unless the ratio of the birth-to-death rate on other worlds,
> shaped by its carrying capacity, falls within a relatively
> narrow window. The authors refer to this as a "fine-tuning
> problem"—the ratio must be just right in order to detect
> other advanced civilizations. But a priori we have no idea
> what that ratio is.
>
> "The population of advanced civilizations out there is a
> balance of the rate at which they emerge and die," said
> David Kipping, an astrophysicist at Columbia University.
> "This ratio is all that really matters, but we have
> essentially no constraints on these terms.
>
> . . .
>
>    TIMING is EVERYTHING here. We do radio waves ... but
>    radio waves are already too damned SLOW for a lot of
>    our communications needs. Radio waves thus have a
>    limited use for The Future - and will be replaced
>    with Something Else (entanglement-based ?) as soon
>    as possible. So, basically, Earth civ will only be
>    sending out lots of radio signals for maybe just
>    150 years by and large.
>
>    Note that high-power radio/TV is becoming a declining
>    tech already ... replaced by net streaming mostly
>    involving terrestrial fiber/microwave links. Once
>    Old Radio is gone, Earth will go largely "silent".
>    Hawking warned that this MAY be for the best ...
>
>    For any alien civ of roughly our IQ, expect that to
>    be about the same - and note that newer civs that
>    may be embedded near older civs might skip radio
>    waves entirely, go directly to ready-made 'Chinese
>    tech', so to speak. When we find jungle civs we
>    don't give them short-wave sets, but cell/sat phones.
>
>    So ... what does this say about us looking for alien
>    civs using radio waves ? There'd be a EXTREMELY short
>    interval where their tech matched our tech. Pretty
>    much hopeless ... even worse if there aren't nearly
>    as many alien civs out there as Star Trek envisioned.
>
>    We DO know "Goldilocks" planets are pretty damned RARE
>    in this neighborhood - welcome to the trashy arm of the
>    galaxy. May be extremely rare EVERYWHERE and maybe only
>    one in a thousand may develop ANY kind of life. As such,
>    well, we really MAY be the only civ in this galaxy, or
>    at least one of just a few. The sci-tech evolution of
>    said civs might be WAY ahead, or WAY behind, ours also.
>
>    Oh well, at least NOT much chance of Klingons ...
>
>    (heh, heh - my spell-checker doesn't recognize
>    the term "Klingons" even though it's been around
>    widely since the mid-60s  :-)

I think the likelihood of other civilisations like us is quite rare.
There are to many things which needed to fall just right for us to be
here.  That doesn't necessarily mean that other civilisations would have
had to overcome the same improbable events (eukaryotes emerging, planet
which has water that isn't smashed by asteroids, a stable orbit, a
stable star), but the universe does seem quite hostile to life and Earth
is in a rare position.