Per an article by Nick Bostrum in MIT's "Technology Review" (April-May 2008):
In the late 1940s, when the UFO craze was just starting, Enrico Fermi of the Manhattan Project was asked whether he credited UFOs as driven by extraterrestrial intelligence. Fermi was not interested in UFOs as such. Instead he asked, if Visitors are with us, "then where are they?"
The real question is, Where have they been? Martian microbes, huge creatures plumbing 50-mile deep oceans on Enceladus are one thing-- high-tech extraterrestrial civilizations are another. By Clarke's Law, sufficiently advanced technologies are "indistinguishable from magic". What matters is a scientific/technological culture, not whether it evolved from (say) giant squid or insectivorous arthropods.
Our Milky Way Galaxy is some 100-thousand light years in diameter, comprising 100-billion stars. But Virgo, the great galaxy centering our Local Group, contains 3-trillion stars, thirty times the Milky Way's, with billions of large globular clusters disposed around a disk ten times our size (one billion LY diameter). Virgo is 65-million LYs away, so what we see coincides with the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) boundary, when the Chicxulub meteor-strike in Yucatan extinguished the dinosaurs forever. On a scale of 1-inch = 100,000 LYs, Virgo is some 54 feet (650 inches) beyond the Milky Way... the (visible) Universe itself extends some 2.25 miles, to 45th Street from the base of Washington Square Arch in Greenwich Village.
Anyhow, to answer Fermi, we assume that "stars like dust" are veritable swamps of (by definition) extraterrestrial life. But by the statistical "principle of mediocrity", whereby any given sample or even set of samples tends to cluster around a mean, high-tech alien civilizations will likely rise and fall in isolation: Separated by 25,000 LYs in space, easily 100-million years of time.
Even should instantaneous teleportation or some quantum-physical effect render such a culture capable of journeying anywhere, at any time, chances are that, first, exploration would be defeated by sheer number [Carl Sagan]; or second, that no contact could occur because within that space/time reference-frame there would be nothing to contact.
Suppose the Black Ships did land in Central Park tomorrow. Our first question should not be "Who are you?" or "Where are you from?" but "Why are you here?"
When Captain James Cook landed in Hawaii in 1776, native cultures perished; by 1890, 80% of the aboriginal habitants were gone. In 1944, Admiral Chester Nimitz's fast-carrier fleet touched stone-age Fiji: Within a generation, the islands had joined the UN, prospered under Australian territorial administration-- from cannibalism to Big Macs by 1970s.
Who then are our Starfarers? Frankly, we'd rather wait another 500 years or so before we have to ask the question.
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4 comments:
Odds greatly favor the likelihood that a civilization from outer space would visit Earth as explorers, not as conquerors. To galactic rangers we are backward, small potatoes. An advanced civilization would have the power to "terra-form" any planet they choose, and the time and effort required to take us over would not be worth their while. They could probably wipe us out at the touch of a button but are almost certain to respect life, even as zoological exhibits.
Teir reason for coming won't matter, because there will be nothing we can do about it.
Advanced technology need not entail gentler, kinder appreciation of alien life-forms (us). Since 1945, there may well be something we could do to deter murderous attack, even unintentional: Quarantine the Solar System against microbial infection, by 100-megaton or other off-planet means.
If not, helpless Hawaiians and Fijians discovered that Capt. Cook was not the same as Admiral Nimitz. Exploration vs. a Pacific War, fleets made landfall; but to the impacted native cultures, 80% mortality was less desirable than the Fijian outcome.
Mayhap at a certain level, Earth will become eligible to join the Galactic Federation. Or perhaps interstellar civilizations just seed 3-trillion suns with cyber-bots, that hasten Emergent Order in some form. Brother, where art thou, when we need to know.
By the "Fijian outcome" we guess Prythroes means that the islanders survived but their Stone Age culture perished, which was better than having 80% of the Fijians die off. Why yes. Good point. People are better off alive than dead.
Is this obscure, or is it just me?
Growth and change is Nature's sole discernible reality. When natives fell prey to drainage and logging in Brazil's Mato Grosso, stone-age tribesmen migrated to Rio, where they evolved a subculture of cabdrivers.
Guilt-ridden authorities tried every means to lure them back to aboriginal habitats, to no avail. In Rio they lived healthier and longer, partied, sent first-generation kids to school.
This contrasts with yak-herding tribesmen in Tibet, who admit "It obviously takes little effort to survive." So probably there is no general rule. But once Cook or Nimitz bursts your bubble, it's adapt or die. Aside from "nostalgia de la bue", what's wrong with Big Macs anyway?
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