Talk:Fermi paradox/Archive 1

message: I think this article is a prime example of best features of Wiki type encyclopedic entries.  It is by far larger than any entry I've found on the subject in a standard bound book style encyclopedia.  It also presents a number of different points of view on the subject which covers the requirement of NPOV by providing as many (currently) reasonable POV(s) as possible.
The editing is superb and the contributions beautifully executed.  Thanks to Uryian who started this article on January 27, 2002. --Wjbean 01:51, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Kudos

message: Removed from article:
:If you assume that nothing travels faster then the speed of light, and life only began 4000 million years ago with self replicating RNA, intellegent lifeforms with perfect detection equipment (able to detect RNA from 4000 million light years away) would have to be within 4000 million light years away to notice. Now if you assume that humans are the only meaningfully intellegent life forms on the planet, they only appeared 10 thousand years ago. Any signal of this would take 10 thousand light years to reach other intellegent life forms. That is a pretty small area compared to the size of the universe.
:In additon, we may not have heard about them hearing about us yet. It would take at least equal time after discovering us to get back to us if not longer. Plus they may be to far away to feel it is worth it to contact an "intellegent species" such as ourselves.
The general intent of this section is the same as the 'They exist but have not communicated with us' section. I see no need to have a separate section. Furthermore the RNA bit does not make any sense to me; being able to detect RNA from 4 billion light years away??? Humans also appeared long before 10,000 years ago. The ' may not have heard about them' para is already taken care of in this article. --mav 08:04, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: They haven't heard about us yet

message: Do the headings of this aarticle looking a bit odd on purpose, or do they accidentially go from 1-4 at === === level (3=s) and then from 1-7 at 2=s (== ==) level? -- ALoan (Talk) 21:17, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Headings

message: Surely I cannot be the only person in history who's thought of this concept, so there must be theorists with better credentials than I that can be quoted on the idea:
If there are, say, 5,000 intelligent and technologically advanced and xenophilic species in the galaxy at some given point in time (not necessarily now), the chances that they ALL spontaneously popped into existence and advanced at the same rate seems absurdly slim.
Therefore, except for that tiny chance, of those 5,000, one of the species had to evolve and gain technology FIRST.
This has similar arguments to the standard anthropic principle to support it -- the idea in this case being that if a given race IS first, it may not ASSUME it is first -- yet SOMEONE has to be.
Therefore, from this point of view, it's not inconceivable that other intelligent life forms do not, in fact, exist, but that at some point in the future they WILL exist.
I see no mention of this idea, yet it seems sound to me. Maybe I'm missing something, or maybe one of the arguments has just been missed.
----
The problem is that the galaxy has probably been capable of supporting intelligent life for a good few billion years. Of course, we could still be the first - humans have, after all, taken nearly a third the age of the universe to evolve from the primordial soup.
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It seems to me that the Fermi paradox is strong evidence that the galaxy probably hasn't been capable of supporting life very much before the arrival of intelligent life on this planet. I agree
with the person who started this section, that this seems to be the point which is missed in the
whole debate. Indeed, according to current belief life started on earth 4-5 billion years ago,
while the whole universe is just about 15-20 billion years old. This is not a big difference in
orders of magnitude and the most plausibe resolution of the Fermi paradox is simply that now is an early stage in the history of the Galaxy, some time before the colonalisation by intelligent beings.
And who knows, it could be us, we are still in the race.
Thorsten 21:18, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: They do not exist YET?

message: "Some believe that our current knowledge of both chemistry and of biology strongly indicates that life is an exceptionally improbable thing to arise spontaneously." Who believes this again? - Ta bu shi da yu 01:54, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Weasel words 

message: The Drake equation is an example of Fermi's method of estimation, which is like the dimensional analysis taught in freshman physics. Fermi would ask how many piano tuners are there in the city of Chicago?, and then invite computation. His point was that when there are a large number of factors in an estimate, then a miscalculation of one factor is likely to be  compensated for by a miscalculation of another factor, resulting in a fairly good estimate. Ancheta Wis 10:19, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Fermi's method of estimation

message: I'm skeptical about the statement that "the axis of rotation of a sphere is unstable"; can we find a reference for it?  Does it apply to oblate spheroids?  --Doradus 15:14, Jan 13, 2005 (UTC)
It's unstable only in the sense that any external force that isn't perfectly aligned will tilt the axis, and the axis won't return to the former direction without another external force.  In the absence of external force and internal asymmetry, it's not going anywhere; but that's not what stable actually means.  Stable means that the value will return to its original value after the external force is removed (and then you can look up BIBO stability as well).  The statement you're questioning is true under some assumptions, but needs to be qualified with the assumptions to be true always.
Blair P. Houghton 21:48, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Sphere axis of rotation is unstable?

message: Great article folks. Stephen Hawking similarly 'proved' the impossibility of time travel by questioning the lack of tourists from the future. Seabhcán 18:57, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Stephen Hawking]] Paradox? 

message: The conclusion paragraph as written is woefully brief and too full of uncritical assertions, imho. The statement of Occam's razor does not illustrate the example assumptions to show that the preferred conclusion has in fact the minimum set of assumptions, as well as ignoring whether it is the quantity of assumptions that is the issue, or the relative magnitude of the assumptions.  As, taking the assumption behind the preferred conclusion, that we are alone, is rather large as everything else about the solar system has been shown to be non-unique.  
The phrase "as a technologically advanced species we are alone in our part of the Cosmos" also has an unconscious bias that our technology is a-priori 'advanced', when the above discussion refers to cultures more advanced that might have progressed beyond electromagnetic technology for communication.  A less biased phrase would just state that "as a species whose communication technology is based on electromagnetism, we are alone in our local region of the galaxy whose limits are defined approximately by the detection threshold of the Arecibo telescope".
:I don't agree with the above. This premise has already been accomodated in Drake's equation. We're not searching for civilizations that either can't or won't communicate with us. We are, in fact, in search for extraterrestrial 'us'.SvenPB 09:39, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Conclusion

message: A wonderful article; it subsumes and extends my own personal page on the topic. I do agree though that the conclusion is relatively weak and seems out of keeping with the quality of the overall article. The DMT sections are a bit funny.
The article omits an important explanation however. It is one that humanists/secularists like myself usually omit. It is the Designer hypothesis; the core of which is that the universe was designed so that humans would be alone.
There are two variations of the Designer Hypothesis:
1. The simulation variation. (See my personal page for links). The purposes of the simulation may require that technological civilizations are rare or singluar.
2. The Genesis variation. A Deity created the universe and specified that technological civilizations are rare and rarely intersect.
The Designer hypothesis of course intersects with some of the "alien zoo" variations, but I think it's novel enough to have its own category. Personally I favor the 'inevitable singularity' explanation (technological civilizations go Singular so quickly none of them have time to travel or make much of a footprint); but honesty obliges me to note that the Fermi Paradox can be used as part of an Argument from Design. 
PS. I must note that as I wrote this Wikipedia went offline. Hmmm. :-)
:I don't agree with the Designer solution either. Designer solutions never have been seen to be of any contribution to any advancements in science. SvenPB 09:39, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Your disagreement is noted ,Yet this idea is pivotal enough to be noted also.--Procrastinating@talk2me 23:34, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Designer solution 

message: I knew this was a featured article before I read the intro.
How did I manage that astonishing feat? Easy. I saw a rather contrived picture illustrating it and knew only a featured article could have had a thing like that foisted on it by the conservatives. 
The radio telescope picture is of the "if you must have a picture, it should probably be this" variety. Though arguably little green men would have been even better. 82.92.119.11 18:53, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  You know you're about to read an FA when... 

message: I'm inclined to remove the following edit by User:68.230.191.83 as being too POV:
"Nonetheless, the realities of the vast distances between stars, let alone between galaxies, and the relativistic speed-limit, would seem to render the entire question of intelligent life elswhere very nearly moot."
His other edits were quite helpful, but I suspect many, if not most people would find proof of intelligent life elswhere to be one of the major moments in human history and consider the search to date a worthy, if disappointing, exercise. --agr 00:42, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The "very nearly moot" comment makes me think about travel between Eurasia and the Americas before about the year 1500. Even if it were never possible for short-lived individual organic life forms to travel between the stars, there might still be other modes of contact such as low speed interstellar travel by robotic devices. --JWSchmidt 01:57, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: POV Conclusion

message: I'm reverting the "the may go to another universe" comment out. This is because all other possibilities - while being very speculative and possible improbable, are still within the realms of possibility - or there at least is nothing in known science that rules the possibility out.
This doesn't apply to the "pocket universe" or "leaving for an alternate universe". Not only is this idea so speculative that there isn't even the faintest trace of theory on how to do it (unlike some very far-fetched ideas presented here like mind transfers and a technological singularity which we at least have a theoretical/speculative "toe-hold" on) but our current understanding of alternate universes (as seen in M-theory) says the transmission of information between such structures is impossible.
To my mind, this puts the idea completely in the science-fiction category - not even the science-faction category of the other fringe ideas in this article.
Unless you can point to a new wrinkle in M-theory that at least suggests that transmission of coherent information between "branes", I'll rolling this back out as "sheer fantasy".  - User:Beowulf314159
:Ok, I didn't know better.  I know that Orion's Arm, which generally aims for scientific plausibility, has AIs that make use of pocket universes.  -- Pakaran 03:56, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: No problem. I don't know everything by a long shot, which is why I stuck in there "unless you can point to changes in M-theory...". Maybe my physics is behind the times. And it's hard to tell where to draw the line when the article is discussing technological singularity and Von Neumann probes all over the place - which are still science fiction - but they at least have a basis in our current understanding of science. If we all knew everything, we wouldn't be tinkering with Wikipedia and learning, right? :) Beowulf314159 04:25, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pocket Universes? 

message: I'm not sure why these were swapped out to begin with. The progression seemed quite logical
# Theory
# Observation
# Explanation
Whoever moved it has it Theory, Explanation, Observations - which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
66.82.9.82 18:24, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Swapping Observations BACK