Where Are The Aliens (2)?

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WHERE ARE THE ALIENS (2)?

If you haven't already read my first speculations on this subject, you should probably do so now. The gist of my argument is as follows (and I have justified it mathematically):

(1) Assume extraterrestrial civilizations, sufficiently advanced to have space travel, can be technologically ahead of us, anywhere from zero years to many millions of years;

(2) These civilizations are evenly distributed in years of technological advancement;

(3) An extraterrestrial civilization, if it is more advanced than we are, by more than a few thousand years, will be unwilling or unable to communicate with us.

(4) It then immediately follows that it is extremely unlikely an extraterrestrial civilization willing and able to communicate with us is nearby. This is true even if every solar system has an extraterrestrial civilization (which I consider a ridiculous assumption).

So now the question becomes, why am I so sure that advanced aliens will be unwilling or unable to communicate with us?

(By the way, I make no claim that these ideas are original with me. I just haven't seen them written up this way. If you are aware of some source which does a better job of explaining this, let me know.)

Let's start with the Star Trek movie and TV franchises. How likely is that to happen? Not now, I'm talking about how likely is that EVER to happen? In other words, how likely is it that a bunch of intelligent races, in the Milky Way galaxy, are at about the same level of technological development? It so happens that the level of technological development is that which allows faster-than-light travel, but that isn't important. And it isn't important whether or not you think such travel will ever be possible.

How likely is it, given that it's taken 4.5 billion years for intelligence to evolve on our planet, that several such intelligent races, which have evolved independently, on different solar systems, will be within a few decades of each other technologically?

It's pretty clear the answer is essentially zero. So the world of Star Trek, as exciting and interesting as it is, can never happen. But the situation is (much) worse than this.

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Next, let's think for a minute about the last century of medicine, medical technology, and technology in general.

Around 1900, automobiles were few and far between. Airplanes didn't exist. Neither did antibiotics. Vaccines against most ailments (except for smallpox and a few others) were also absent. Medical science knew nothing about vitamins. If you were unfortunate enough to lose a leg, you had to use crutches or a wheelchair, or a peg. If you lost a hand, you could wear something that looked kind of like a hand – from a distance – that was useless. And most people made a living doing things that involved a fair amount of manual labor.

Now most people use technology in their jobs and everyday lives. Many of us have travelled extensively, on business or for pleasure, using jet airplanes. The television set, in 1955, would have been quite a shock to someone from 1900. TV now – with VCRs and DVDs and streaming of programs – would be quite a shock to someone from 1955. Or even 1985. Most people in advanced nations know how to use computers – a device that was as far removed from the typical resident of 1955 as spaceflight is today. And the World Wide Web, which has been around since about 1990, and which most of us are very comfortable with, would seem like science fiction to someone from 1955. (Actually, more so. While science fiction from the 1950s and 1960s talked about moon flights and space colonies – no one foresaw the internet or the web.)

Captain Kirk would often say, "computer . . . . " and then ask it virtually any question. We can now do the same.

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And I haven't even started discussing medicine. We can do so much more to help people who have lost limbs than in 1900, or even 1950. And most of us probably know someone who has had a hip or knee replaced. And people like Oscar Pistorius have artificial limbs which are close to having the function (if not the appearance – yet) of the real thing.

Vaccinations have reduced disease to the point that people take the eradication of smallpox and (in most of the Northern Hemisphere) polio for granted. There are medications to lower cholesterol and blood pressure, to replace chemicals that the body doesn't produce enough of (for diabetes and Parkinson's, for example).

In 1900, if you were unfortunate enough to get diabetes, you had to accept that you would soon die from it. Now you can live for decades with the disease. In 1900, if you were unfortunate enough to get Parkinson's, you had to accept that you would soon be crippled and helpless. Now you can live for decades with the disease. The development of levodopa, along with the knowledge of appropriate dosing, is one of the great achievements of modern medicine.

In 1900 people thought diseases such as diabetes or Parkinson's or Multiple Sclerosis or ALS were crosses people had to bear – the same way people had thought of these diseases throughout all of human history. Now they seriously talk about curing them.

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What does all this mean? And what does it have to do with advanced alien beings that might exist in other solar systems? We can summarize the previous Section as follows:

(5) Most people are very familiar with, and comfortable with, technology;

(6) They use this technology in their work, traveling to work, in their leisure activities, in staying healthy;

(7) This technology has advanced dramatically in the lifetime of most adults;

(8) The advances have been so dramatic, and so rapid, that most adults now routinely use technology that would have been science fiction fifty years ago;

(9) The pace of technological change is accelerating;

(10) Because of accelerating change, the residents of 2100 may be as far removed from the technology of 2000 as residents of 2000 were from the technology of 1800, maybe even of 1700 or 1600.

If you don't want to wade through the rest of my arguments, you can just go to the final parts of my reasoning (?). But if you need further convincing, here they are:

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Medical science now routinely replaces hips and knees. Within a few decades, certainly a few centuries, it will replace kidneys, livers, hearts, any body part.

Most people are familiar with the concept of combining a living being with a machine, such as took place in the Terminator movies. Far from being science fiction, this is already happening. (Although don't expect to see Skynet anytime soon.) People with artificial hips and knees are cyborgs, although they are nothing like Arnold Schwarzenegger's character. And there is already some debate about whether prosthetic limbs are better, in some respects, than the real thing. Again, it seems only a matter of time before medical science can produce prosthetics that are superior – in every way – to real limbs.

Currently, someone who is missing a leg has to have several prostheses. One might look a lot like a regular leg but have very little function; another might be very good for walking or running but not look very much like a real leg. One can imagine a day, several decades from now, when an athlete would have a set of prosthetic legs – one for sprinting, one for jumping, one for distance running, one for swimming . . . You might think that, the same way that steroids are now banned for competitive athletes, that prosthetic legs superior to the natural variety would also be banned. But what if prostheses (or chemicals or drugs) are available to average people, that enable them to vastly exceed what are now athletic milestones?

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The average (young) person has little problem running fifteen miles an hour. They just can't keep it up for a mile (which would take four minutes at that rate). But what if a drug or chemical allowed an average person to get enough oxygen to their working muscles, to allow them to run a four-minute mile? Or allow a fairly athletic person to run a mile in three minutes? If a moderately athletic person could vastly outperform a "clean" (meaning no steroids, no drugs, no "artificial" help) Olympic-caliber athlete, who would care to see competitions held between clean athletes? If an amputee could get a leg far better than a natural one, wouldn't a lot of non-amputees want one too? Especially if you get one using drugs or chemicals, without messy surgery.

This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. As part of the "normal" aging process, people lose dopamine-producing brain cells. That's why older people tend to have shaky hands, and tend to shuffle their feet. If you lose those brain cells at a higher rate, you get Parkinson's disease. When Parkinson's disease is eventually cured, people will get back all of the cells they lost. (That's what "cure" means.) So older people with Parkinson's, that are cured, will have more dopamine-producing cells than "normal" old people, with much steadier hands and much smoother walking (or running) form. Older athletes, who never had Parkinson's, may not be able to keep up with those of the same age who had it and were cured. How would you make a ban work?

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Similarly, as part of the same "normal" aging process, people lose motor neurons as they get older. The muscle fibers associated with these neurons die, which is part of the reason people lose strength as they age. Lose too many motor neurons, and you get ALS. When ALS is eventually cured (can't come too soon as far as I'm concerned), older people who had it and were cured could be stronger than people of the same age who never had it. Again, how could a ban work? Can you imagine someone who had Parkinson's or ALS being cured, and then be banned from athletic competition?

I'd like to live another fifty years just to see how all of these changes in medicine affected athletics. It's easy to imagine other changes having dramatic effects on other parts of people's lives. What if you could hold your breath for an hour? What if you could tolerate -80 degree temperatures for half a day? Or temperatures of +300 degrees? What if you could swim at a depth of a thousand feet? What if you could walk around, normally, without oxygen, for a couple of hours at an altitude of ten miles? What if you could tolerate fifty g's for ten minutes?

The examples above relate to physical abilities. What about mental ones?

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One example is telepathy. We communicate with others via speech of writing. But what if we could communicate directly via thought? Again, this isn't that far-fetched. Researchers are working to have severely disabled people control limbs or computers via thought; a logical next step would be for people to communicate directly this way.

And it would be much faster than speech. When we speak, we have to take the time to form the words with our lips and tongue. Not to mention the time required to think of the right words. Direct communication would bypass both these limits.

And we are limited by our biology. The speed by which our nerve impulses travel is roughly a hundred meters per second; the speed of light is roughly three hundred million meters per second – three million times faster. If there were some kind of drug or surgery or implant which would allow people to think at a speed of just one percent of the speed of light, this would enable them to think 30,000 times faster than they do now.

It's pretty obvious that aliens with the ability to think hundreds or thousands of times faster than we can, who communicated by telepathy, would be unable to communicate with us. Suppose two people, A and B, have what we think of as a normal conversation. A speaks for five or ten seconds, then B speaks for about the same length of time, then A speaks again, and so on. Maybe the conversation lasts for five minutes. Now suppose B thinks at normal speed, but A is sixty times faster. Then A speaks for five or ten seconds, B takes five or ten minutes to respond, A speaks for five or ten seconds, B takes five or ten minutes to respond, and so on. Instead of five minutes, the conversation takes five hours. That's what a conversation would seem like to an alien A who could think sixty times as fast as B, who is one of us.

Make the speed difference 3,600 and A speaks for five or ten seconds, B replies in five or six hours, and the conversation takes two weeks to a month. If the speed difference is 30,000 (one percent of the speed of light), A speaks for five or ten seconds, B replies in a couple of days, and the conversation takes six months to a year.

Some people might compare this to communicating with someone over a channel with a long delay – such as astronauts on Mars communicating with Earth with a delay due to the speed of light. But it's not the same. The delay is not due to data transmission; it's due to data absorption.

I've mentioned speed of communication. But speed of thought would also be improved, particularly in the case of an E-Person. That would presumably increase intelligence. Continue this process for a few millenia, and such individuals could no more communicate with us than we can communicate with mice or rats.

This is a very interesting subject on which to speculate, but I'm not going to do so now. I just note that within 500 to 1000 years, it's quite possible our descendants will be unable to communicate with us even if they wanted to.

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Let's go back to some of the speculation about physical changes. People who are augmented to be able to withstand two or three g's full-time, for example, would look radically different from humans today. Those augmented to have ten or twenty times the strength of today's humans would as well. The blood of normal humans boils at an altitude of 63,000 feet (about 20 km). Humans augmented to tolerate altitudes in excess of this would probably have to look radically different.

And there's no reason to believe you couldn't have combinations of these things. A person enhanced to be twenty times as strong as normal, able to run 40 miles an hour, and able to tolerate three g's full time, would be almost unrecognizable.

If I were to live long enough to see the beginning of such possibilities (probably a minimum of fifty years – just a wild guess), I would probably take advantage of many enhancements, as long as I didn't look too different. But others, much younger, might not mind. Remember how quickly social attitudes can change. If you're much under fifty, you probably can't recall a time when interracial marriage was a big deal. And gay marriage at that time was unthinkable. It's hard to believe, but the FBI once spent two years investigating the lyrics to the song Louie, Louie. Be sure to check out the last link for something that WAS obscene under standards of the time, but that the FBI missed! And all of this has happened within my lifetime. It's not hard to imagine that attitudes could change dramatically within a few centuries. And in the time spans we're considering (billions of years) a few centuries is nothing.

When I mentioned speed of communication, I suggested an implant could perhaps enable people to think faster. A computer chip implanted in one's brain, for example. Of course, nerve impulses traveling elsewhere in one's body (besides the brain) would not move any faster than they do now – unless there were some kind of modification of the rest of the nervous system.

The exception would be if we could reduce the distance traveled. One way to accomplish this would be to make people a lot smaller. Not three or four feet tall – a LOT smaller. Say, the size of a fruit fly.

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Doubtless you've read speculation that eventually humans could be nothing more than memories stored on microchips. This seems unlikely. There is no way such a person could interact with the world. They could not move around, could not build anything, could not operate any devices, could not perform any types of experiments. They would need some kind of interface to do these things.

Now suppose such an individual (a brain or a memory on a chip – call it an E-Person, in contrast to a B-Person, which everyone is today) would have an interface that would allow them to connect to a variety of bodies. Some bodies would be suitable for diving deep into the ocean, some would tolerate high altitudes or the vacuum of space, some would be able to go into a volcano and measure concentrations of toxic gasses. Some would be capable of subjecting samples to high temperatures and pressures, and making measurements of the resulting material properties. So performing an experiment would be much more efficient than today. Rather than read data from gauges on an instrument, one could get data directly from the instrument. Rather than send data to a computer for analysis, the E-Person could analyze it directly.

This could be done much faster than today. The various E-Persons could share data and analyses, argue about interpretations and results, and do all of the things a scientific conference takes weeks to do – they could do all of these things in hours, perhaps minutes. This would make technological progress much faster.

Now imagine those bodies being the size of a gnat. It would be much easier to manufacture them, and much easier for them to withstand temperature, or pressure, or g-force, extremes if they were that size.

I've discussed how such bodies could speed science, engineering, and technology. But they could also be used for exploration, or just for fun.

And the "bodies" necessary to do these things could be disconnected, and replaced with others, when the conference was done. The bodies, when not in use, would not use any food, or water, or energy. Unlike our bodies today, which require a minimum amount of resources even when not being used, the bodies of the future would save an enormous amount of energy, space (currently used for farmland), water, and other valuable commodities. [Again, the cynic in me notes that those infamous words "as our population increases" are usually followed by some exhortation to make more sacrifices because PEOPLE WON'T STOP BREEDING.]

One could even foresee a time when, in order to save space and resources, people would be encouraged to – if they had not already done so – convert themselves into an E-Person with interfaces to a number of possible bodies.

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People would not even need to be encouraged. Everyone eventually dies. When people's natural bodies die – when their kidneys and livers and hearts wear out – why spend the resources to duplicate these inefficient systems? Why not just give people a simple (stark) choice:

You can live a lot longer (perhaps indefinitely) by converting yourself into a E-Person (the size of an ant?) with interfaces to an incredible number of possible bodies

OR
YOU CAN DIE

This would ensure that no one would be forced to become a E-Person, if they didn't want to. But eventually everyone (who was left alive) would be. And they would communicate in a vastly different way than we do.

Now I'm going to go off on a (short) tangent. I mentioned in the previous file that apparently no aliens had ever visited us. Well, if every civilization eventually becomes electronic, rather than biological (if, in every civilization, everyone eventually becomes an E-Person), those civilizations who had visited us would probably leave no trace.

Now I'll go back. The last part of my argument boils down to this:

(11) Technology will allow such dramatic changes to people's capabilities and appearance that people who take advantage of such technologies will be unrecognizable as people to us today;

(12) While it may not be acceptable for people to change so drastically today (such technologies don't currently exist anyway), it will rapidly become acceptable – perhaps mandatory – once they exist;

(13) Multiply such changes over decades or centuries or millenia, and the individuals who result will truly be unrecognizable. And they won't just look different. Their culture, attitudes, intellect – everyone about them – will be so radically unfamiliar to us – I don't need to finish the sentence.

And this is the most unrealistic part of the Star Trek franchise. It's not the faster-than-light travel; it's not the economy (where no one has to work, but instead people pursue their dreams, which may actually happen in a century or so – even sooner if we can clean up our act politically); it's not that most of the alien races look humanoid (due to the limitations of makeup and CGI, not Gene Roddenberry's imagination); it's not even that all these races are roughly at the same level of technological development.

It's that the humans in the franchise look and act (despite the writers' heroic attempts to make them more peaceful and less aggessive than today's humans) much like today's. Imagine if the writers of Star Trek actually had the imagination (and the network execs would accept the resulting stories) to guess how humans could change within two or three centuries. And how different they would be from us. That's enough to explain Fermi's paradox.

(14) Any aliens out there are much more likely to be the result of developments (8) through (13), and as a result will not look like us, act like us, or have the slightest bit in common with us, and therefore will have no interest in communicating with us, and probaby would not even be able to.

If you believe it inevitable that any technological civiliation eventually ceases to be bioloigcal, and instead becomes electronic, there is no Fermi Paradox.

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