It seems unlikely that any water-based life would develop technology. Just too difficult. But maybe the bigger issue is that technological intelligence in a biological life form is just so fragile. Perhaps technological biological animals are quickly replaced with "artificial" ones. We're not far from that capability ourselves.I think the distinct lack of evidence for advanced civilizations suggests they occur rarely in the universe. It’s an interesting but (probably) unanswerable question because there are so many variables we have yet to quantify.
I’d start by asking a series of nested questions: how rare is life in the universe? If life is common, how often does it evolve to become complex? If complex life is common, how often does intelligence emerge? If intelligent life is common, how often does it form complex societies? And how many of these societies advance far enough to build radio transceivers?
More questions: what if life is common in the universe but most of it simple / single-celled? What if intelligent life is common but rarely moves past the intelligence of mammals or birds? What if early societies are common but rarely develop beyond hunter-gathering or agriculture?
The “dream scenario” would be interplanetary interaction between advanced societies. However, in order for this to happen you’d need two advanced societies in close proximity, both in space and time. Continuing with my initial line of questions, what are the odds that two nearby societies would reach “maturity” within the same epoch of time? A quick Google search returns a value for the age of homo sapiens at around 160,000 years. What percentage of that time has homo sapiens been listening to interstellar radio transmissions - compared to the time we’ve spent banging rocks against other rocks?
One thing I’ve considered is the idea that perhaps technology only develops from “unlikely survivors.” Whales and porpoises are roughly 10 million years old. They have larger brains than we do. They form complex social bonds/groups. However, they are so well adapted to their environment there would be no pressure to “try anything” to help their survival. They move easily and as fast as they need. They can use sound to communicate vast distances, echo-locate and even attack prey (see: dolphin sound pulses). Homo sapiens on the other hand - not particularly fast or strong, no big teeth or claws, no thick hides or blubber to stay warm. Perhaps need is what pushed us toward the eventual use of clothes, fire, rudimentary tools. From there agriculture, complex society, and (roughly) continuous technological advance. The point is that you could have complex intelligent life forming on other planets that never develop into technological societies. But then, could a species reach agrarian status and stay there for vast periods - never developing industry or what we would call modern technology? Once again, you’d never get a radio transmission, but you might detect indications of such a society in the planet’s atmosphere such as an overabundance of methane and O2.
Ann, you point out that we “count ours as a technological society.” I think a reasonable litmus test to signify “technological status” would be radio (perhaps more reasonable than "warp-capable" ala Star Trek). There could be many civilizations that never reach the point of radio and thus we’d never know about each other. For our part, we’ve only been transmitting and listening to radio for a little more than 100 years. Therefore, only societies that have developed within a tiny bubble around Sol could be aware of us (yet). If my initial assertion is accurate and advanced societies are in fact rare - and we assume societies are fairly evenly spread across the universe - the odds are infinitesimally small that a second radio-capable society would develop in our galaxy, let alone within close proximity (in both time and location) to our own.
My feeling is that either advanced societies are extremely rare and thus perpetually alone; or they are numerous but short-lived, galactically-speaking, and as such it is unlikely that any one society would detect another. It is reasonable to me that the only evidence we’ll ever detect indicating the existence of another civilization will be ancient, feeble radio transmissions of long-dead societies or a few photons in a spectrometer indicating traces of gasses that may or may not have been produced by a developing society blissfully unaware of radio.
Spreading across a galaxy is not hard. It can be done in a few million years, which should not be a problem for a stable "civilization". But what would be the motivation? It's not like these different "colonies" are going to interact significantly with each other, so no great galactic empire of some sort. Each one will be pretty isolated (or together with a fairly small handful of nearby systems). Academic interest? How many other stars do you need to visit before curiosity is satisfied? Population management? Why would non-biological beings with extremely long lifetimes necessarily have any imperative to breed?
Statistics: Posted by Chris Peterson — Sat Jul 27, 2024 7:02 pm — Replies 2 — Views 370