[Arch2008]

But again, it only takes one. Your point is that no one in a half million galaxies decided to do this over a period of billions of years.
In less than 4 million years we could be a type III. Why wouldn't we? Why wouldn't we colonize other galaxies? Why would we stop growing and not use energy?

[Sisyphus]

Arch2008 said:

But again, it only takes one. Your point is that no one in a half million galaxies decided to do this over a period of billions of years.

No, that is not what I said. Maybe they can't, at least not over, yes, billions of years. Maybe they did and we don't know.

Quote

In less than 4 million years we could be a type III.

That's a hell of an assumption.

Quote

Why wouldn't we? Why wouldn't we colonize other galaxies? Why would we stop growing and not use energy?

Why would we?

[Arch2008]

If a Type II was anywhere, then they would grow to a Type IV and be right here. That's how it works if interstellar travel is possible. That is the FP.

Page 9 of Cirkovic's paper shows the Milky Way being colonized in 3.75 million years, with technology that we could develop in the next 250,000 years. So it is not just my hellatious assumption that the MW is ours in less than 4 million years.

http://arxiv.org/PS_...0907.3432v1.pdf

I already posted that a civilization that chose not to expand would doom itself to a SN or GRB or at best be stuck in the minute HZ of a dying White Dwarf Star for trillions of years. That is why they would expand. I get your rhetorical question, but what is your reasoning behind your question? Why would any intelligent species choose death or a bleak, confined future over exploration and survival?

[Sisyphus]

Arch2008 said:

If a Type II was anywhere, then they would grow to a Type IV and be right here. That's how it works if interstellar travel is possible. That is the FP.

Statements like "that's how it works" are the problem. We're flying blind, here. But you're talking as if these entirely hypothetical, extreme extrapolations from static analysis of a single sample are inevitable laws of nature.

Quote

Page 9 of Cirkovic's paper shows the Milky Way being colonized in 3.75 million years, with technology that we could develop in the next 250,000 years. So it is not just my hellatious assumption that the MW is ours in less than 4 million years.

http://arxiv.org/PS_...0907.3432v1.pdf

I didn't say it was just your assumption, just that it was a huge one. I wouldn't dare predict technology, goals, or cultural values even 100 years from now.

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I already posted that a civilization that chose not to expand would doom itself to a SN or GRB or at best be stuck in the minute HZ of a dying White Dwarf Star for trillions of years. That is why they would expand. I get your rhetorical question, but what is your reasoning behind your question? Why would any intelligent species choose death or a bleak, confined future over exploration and survival?

Exploration and survival /= limitless, exponential growth. You don't have to be even a "type 1" to escape being tied to one star. And even that only becomes an actual problem on the scale of many, many orders of magnitude longer than we've been thinking about what to do about it.

[Arch2008]

Let's review. Dyson, Kardeshev and I are simply saying that an advanced civilization would use the enormous energy of their star and the abundant resources of their star system to create a living space for trillions of their inhabitants. I suppose that not every advanced civilization has to do this. It's even possible that most of the members of any advanced civilization would not want to do this. However, if only one of the advanced civilizations had just a few members do this, then what would happen? The same end result. These members of that civilization would eventually grow to use the entire energy of their star (type II). If even a small percentage of these beings continued to expand to prevent extinction or because they prefer unlimited growth, then they could conceivably grow to colonize their whole galaxy (Type III). Of course, they would stop right there, or continue to expand for the same reasons to Type IV eventually and most likely within billions of years. Even the blind can see that.
You are daring to predict exactly any future technology, goals or cultural values that exclude this.

[Sisyphus]

(Just a note. I don't know what you're talking about when you say "type 4 civilization." I'm restricting myself to the familiar Kardashev scale.)

Anyway, there are a couple things going on here. First, your argument is that "it only takes one." I don't know that that is true. Your statement is that if there was anybody on this track within the ten million nearest galaxies, we would be aware of it without even looking. This, to me, is an extraordinary claim. Why would be aware of it?

Second, there is the question of the natural progression of these things, and in the timeframes you suggest. Each step would have to follow from the last, but suppose each successive step is extremely unlikely? The orders of magnitude of improbability add up quickly. Suppose there is life possessing human-like intelligence, curiosity, and something like "culture" and technology in an average of one out of every ten galaxies. That's a pessimistic but plausible rarity, considering the multiplying unknowns of the Drake Equation. And suppose 99.9% of them go extinct without even developing space travel. And 99.99% of those never approach type 2, though some eventually do create interstellar civilizations. And then "type 3," which in my mind is the truly credibility-stretching one, since the timescales involved dwarf anything we know about civilizations to insignificance, and even if it's technically possible there's no real evidence that there would be any point to it, for anyone. So you get the idea - yes, I think it really could be that rare.

[whap2005]

SH3RL0CK said:

I'd like to point out that at an age of the universe of 3 billion years old, the galaxies were considerably closer together than they are now. So a civilization at this time would have less trouble crossing between galaxies.

So, I tend to ask as Arch does, where are they?

We are right here..?

It is possible humans have been engineered. Especially when you look at the Intellegence gap between humans and other animals on Earth.

[iNow]

whap2005 said:

It is possible humans have been engineered. Especially when you look at the Intellegence gap between humans and other animals on Earth.

That's a bit of a misnomer. When viewed objectively, there really isn't much of an intelligence gap at all. The only gap is really one of technology, not intelligence.

[Arch2008]

Whap2005, I suppose you mean humans were engineered by aliens? The minor variations between humans and other primates can really be explained without aliens.
http://en.wikipedia....ionary_genetics
I think that Cirkovic is attempting to separate science from this kind of fiction. Let's find some aliens before we ascribe our existence to their handiwork. At some point SETI must be more than an X File.

[rockman]

iNOW wrote:

"That's a bit of a misnomer. When viewed objectively, there really isn't much of an intelligence gap at all. The only gap is really one of technology, not intelligence."

So I can give a monkey technology and he'll become intelligent? Can I introduce to the monkey fire? Will he know what to do with it? Seems to me intelligence came before the technology. No intelligence, no technology. This is why monkeys don't build pyramids.

I'm open to being corrected.

[iNow]

rockman said:

iNOW wrote:

"That's a bit of a misnomer. When viewed objectively, there really isn't much of an intelligence gap at all. The only gap is really one of technology, not intelligence."

So I can give a monkey technology and he'll become intelligent?

I think you missed my point. I'm saying the monkey is already intelligent, as are countless other non-human animals.

rockman said:

Seems to me intelligence came before the technology. No intelligence, no technology.

I agree, and I never once suggested otherwise.

[Airbrush]

Technology requires more than just intelligence. It also requires hand-eye coordination and an opposable thumb. Dolphins may never develop any technology. Maybe technology is rare in the universe. It requires animals that evolved from creatures living in trees that evolved digital dexterity, before they can make tools and other things, and conduct physical experiments necessary for their knowledge to grow exponentially, the way it did for humans.

Success as a species does not require technology, only adaptation, such as with cockroaches and sharks.

This post has been edited by Airbrush: 21 August 2009 - 03:05 PM
Reason for edit: Consecutive posts merged.

[insane_alien]

many animals are tool users. and however you look at it tools are technology. some birds even MAKE the tools they use by stripping bits off the stick they are using to get at insects inside a tree.

this is an obvious display of intelligence and technology while not having hands (and hence no hand-eye coordination, which humans are actually quite bad at anyway) or opposable thumbs.

[Airbrush]

...if you can find a bird that can build a space-ship by stripping bark off a twig using its' beak.

[insane_alien]

i hope you realise that there are different levels of technology. it wasn't so many thousands of years ago that stripping bark off sticks and chucking rocks at each other was our frontier of technology.

just because technology is less advanced than our own does not mean that it is not technology.

[Airbrush]

I have an opposable thumb bias. Maybe on other planets there are a myriad of ways intelligent creatures can evolve to find more effective ways of manipulating their environment. There could be unimaginable kinds of environments that foster creatures that get around in different ways.

Spiders spins very strong fibers, bees build hives. We cannot produce building materials from our own bodies. But spiders and bees don't have the intelligence to make space ships or transmit signals into space.

[Severian]

I would go for "rare Earth" but in a slightly different form to how he decribes it.

We have only ever seen one creation event, where the building blocks of life actually become life. With one data sample it is actually impossible to say how rare it is. Sometimes people say things like "It can't be that rare because it happened quite quickly after the ingredients for life were available on Earth" but this is a bogus argument, since we wouldn't be here to observe if it hadn't happened.

It is a sort of anti-anthropic principle. You can't place a lower bound on the probability from the fact of our own existence.

So, given that we know pretty well how planets form and evolve, it seems sensible to use the data (the fact that we have no observed life) to restrict the unknown parameter (the probability of abiogenesis). Which leads me to believe that the probability of abiogenesis (when the ingredients are already present) is extremely low.

Maybe it has only happened once in the entire universe, or perhaps, the combination of a small abiogenesis probability and a small probability for the evolution to intelligent life is enough to ensure that we are truly alone.

[iNow]

So if it's just us... seems like an awful waste of space.

[J.C.MacSwell]

There is no reason to believe that we are that rare at this point. If the nearest "somewhat like ours" solar system had some species that had advanced to our level, would they know we exist?

We have a long way to go just to get in the game, to be considered one of the "they" in someone else's "where are they?".

This post has been edited by J.C.MacSwell: 22 August 2009 - 02:30 AM

[Moontanman]

I see no reason to assume super civilizations. Type II type IV or what ever. A civilization not much more advanced than our own could in theory colonize pretty much the entire Galaxy and never touch an earth like planet or even make any beings living on those planets aware of their existence. Orbiting artificial colonies in the shape of a torus or other form that allows rotation for artificial gravity could be reproduced in the millions from the material around one star. Such structures could spread slowly at a small fraction of the speed of light, possibly making the trip between stars in a few centuries or maybe decades depending on the technology or distance. Within about 250,000,000 years such a civilization could have a presence around pretty much all the suitable stars in the galaxy. Groups of objects like the asteroids at Jupiter's Lagrange points could support millions of aliens without humanity ever knowing it unless we go there and look. Planets and their gravity wells would be avoided by such a civilization and they would have no need to worry about "Earth" like planets and stars with huge clouds of asteroids instead of planets would be preferred to stars with lots of planets. No need for FTL or using the energy of whole galaxies. Just good solid technology and time, the galaxy would be theirs and might very well be, we wouldn't know it.