Frontier's Answer To The Drake Equation --

[Jintosh]

Right now, my hauler and I are about 1000ly from Sol space, and there's nothing. I'm exploring: charting suns and planets and....
... I feel like a person at the beach who has decided to inventory and catalog every grain of sand.

Exploring the galaxy in ED is humbling indeed. I'm coming across all sorts of wonders and yet I am never going to be able to see more than a tiny fraction of a percentage of the game's simulation.
.
This tiny blue dot we live on is so small and insignificant in the great scheme of things, it makes you wonder about the arrogance of man believing he is important enough to visit

 

[Hitsuke]

Disappointed.... I thought this would be about a shield tanking missile boat

 

[Frank]

Excellent post!

The Fermi Paradox has fascinated me ever since I first read about it many years ago.

I personally think that there are two answers to the question: 1) FTL travel is impossible and 2) life may be common in the universe, but the development of intelligent life capable of building a civilization (and sending out those robots) is something that happens very, VERY, *VERY* rarely.

Option number three. The aliens have seen how we treat each other. They've dimmed the lights and are shouting "There's nobody here!" from behind a planet.

 

[Parmo]

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." - Arthur C. Clarke

ED made me think about that stuff as well and made me sad. For our only way of experiencing the wonders of the universe is within a video game and VR goggles. There is this vast space and billions of stars and probably also billions of planets and man is bound to that one small blue rock in the outer arm of one of billions of galaxies. What a waste!

Seventy years ago people like Wernher v. Braun and Walter Dornberger started thinking about spacefearing. Von Braun even had first ideas of inhabited orbital and moon stations. About 50 years ago we barely scratched the surface of our moon (which is a lousy 300.000km away) and this was only possible because there was a competitive situation and some sort of dominance had to be proven. Since then we didn't even left orbit, beside of primitive probes.

Coming from a country whos minister of economics called the meagre EUR 800mio spent on space programs "a disposable Peter's Journey to the Moon" but who spent billions to save a bunch of high risk too big too fail banksters and robber barons makes me doubt I will be alive when man sets foot on Mars (and I'm 36yrs only).

I agree with your sentiment. One thing I read recently. Amount of money spent annually on perfumes in Europe and the United States: $12 billion.

I went to the cinema in 1968 to the see film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was 8 years old. It changed my way of thinking. I expected we would have had a presence on the moon by now. I will not live to see humanity visit Mars nor have that presence on the Moon. The thing is, we can do it.

A great shame.

 

[Ulysses_W]

Excellent post!

The Fermi Paradox has fascinated me ever since I first read about it many years ago.

I personally think that there are two answers to the question: 1) FTL travel is impossible and 2) life may be common in the universe, but the development of intelligent life capable of building a civilization (and sending out those robots) is something that happens very, VERY, *VERY* rarely.

I Have to agree with this. In all of the millions of years life has existed on this tiny blue ball, only once has intelligent life capable of technology occurred. And it will probably be the last time too.

I can't help thinking that we are a very very very rare phenomenon.

 

[Rhonda]

The thing is, we can do it.
A great shame.

Exactly, we can do it, but then we decide to sit here and stare at each other in distrust.

 

[CATPAIN KIRK]

One major factor the Drake equation disregards is the duration "intelligent life" manages to exist. Mankind deems itself intelligent, yet as a collective, mankinds behaviour is quite comparable to that of tumor cells in our current stage of development.

 

[Pure_evil]

Exactly, we can do it, but then we decide to sit here and stare at each other in distrust.

More like, half the planet devotes his life to thinking about ways how to murder each other, aren't we an "intelligent" race ...

 

[sutex]

Humans view life in terms they understand... perception by brain function, life will be absurd, and inventively dismissed , by those who can't see the tall ship .


Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

Sir Arthur Eddington English astronomer (1882 - 1944)

 

[Montanejos]

One major factor the Drake equation disregards is the duration "intelligent life" manages to exist. Mankind deems itself intelligent, yet as a collective, mankinds behaviour is quite comparable to that of tumor cells in our current stage of development.

That's just the result of western capitalism being the prevailing economic model. There have been many civilizations that managed to exist sustainably.

 

[robbyp]

Great post. We are orbiting an insignificant sun of which there are billions other's in our galaxy alone. Do we really think we are special. No. Life must be everywhere. And so too intelligence. Its the distance which isolates us

 

[Surly_Badger]

Exactly, we can do it, but then we decide to sit here and stare at each other in distrust.

I think one thing FD simulated very well was human nature. About 250ly from the edge of human space I encountered my last NPC for a while. It was, of course, an interdiction attempt. I'm not naturally a particularly optimistic person, but I just had to laugh: 2 humans a zillion miles from home and the first thing one tries to do is attack the other.

 

[CATPAIN KIRK]

That's just the result of western capitalism being the prevailing economic model. There have been many civilizations that managed to exist sustainably.

Then why did it become the prevalent model? And it's rather obvious that not too many civilizations that "managed to exist sustainably" still do, so that's a bit self-contradictory.

(please disregard and keep the thread on topic, I was just nitpicking in my previous post.)

 

[Uncertain]

If we assume 'prevalent' equates to 'biggest' then it's self-explanatory. The bigger civ eats the smaller civ, and prevails regardless of its other properties.

 

[Negative Entropy]

I think the real explanation of the Fermi paradox is the Fermi paradox itself.

Every civilisation looks out and sees no-one despite logic tells then there should be. so they think either they are alone, or something bad is out there. In one case there is no need to advertise, in the other best not to.

Another favourite:
every species sooner or later reaches the stage where they invent reality TV and virtual reality, at which point they start devolving and soon lose all interest in space.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." - Arthur C. Clarke

ED made me think about that stuff as well and made me sad. For our only way of experiencing the wonders of the universe is within a video game and VR goggles. There is this vast space and billions of stars and probably also billions of planets and man is bound to that one small blue rock in the outer arm of one of billions of galaxies. What a waste!

Seventy years ago people like Wernher v. Braun and Walter Dornberger started thinking about spacefearing. Von Braun even had first ideas of inhabited orbital and moon stations. About 50 years ago we barely scratched the surface of our moon (which is a lousy 300.000km away) and this was only possible because there was a competitive situation and some sort of dominance had to be proven. Since then we didn't even left orbit, beside of primitive probes.

Coming from a country whos minister of economics called the meagre EUR 800mio spent on space programs "a disposable Peter's Journey to the Moon" but who spent billions to save a bunch of high risk too big too fail banksters and robber barons makes me doubt I will be alive when man sets foot on Mars (and I'm 36yrs only).

You think *you're* depressed? We have Congress...

 

[Zplintz]

It's large in terms of anything humans can understand.

It's about 400 billion (10^11) stars. There are some that are 10^12 and larger. There's ESO 146-IG 005 2.7 billion light years from us. I can't do the math on that but even if there were stars you could frame-shift between it'd probably take a few hundred thousand years to get there in my hauler... Plus stops to go to the bathroom and eat.

In doing a bit of fact-checking on this response I learn that Andromeda (our nearest neighbor) and the Milky Way are going to collide in a few billion years. We'd better get busy exploring before that happens!

Granted I wasn't suggesting that the Milky Way is among the largest but only that it is considered large when compared to the Universal average.

I think the spaces between the stars in Andromeda and the Milk Way (and indeed any galaxy) are so large that very few stars would collide. More they would pass through each other distorting each others shape by gravitational effects ib the process.

Which in itself is rather mind boggling.

 

[Shads]

Whenever this comes up I have an analogy to impress upon people the fact that the galaxy could be teaming with life but we may still never meet it because as well as space being huge the time periods are also huge. How long does a civilisation typically last? Well we only have one to go on. Not a big enough sample size, but we've only had a few thousand yours of recorded history. Even if our civilisation were to last a million years it would still only be the blink of an eye.

So.....lie on your back looking up at the stars on a clear nigh. Imagine whole night as the expanse of the whole of time. During that night you will probably see a few shooting stars. Theres a much smaller chance you will see more than one in the sky at the same time. But what are the chances you will see two collide? This is the same chance as us being able to contact another civilisation.

 

[AsukaZ]

I would suggest there is more than one filter.

I suspect wherever life can be, it will be, and it will be recognizable as such.

I'm thinking of the idea of bits of single cell and viral life transported around the universe within drifting debris of planetary collisions. It may have arisen once and spread out ever since. Or it may be inevitable given the chemistry and the physics and the right conditions.

One filter surely is the symbioses of two different single celled organisms into one single 'Super' cell, The basis of all multicellular life on Earth, which some theorists speculate may only have happened once on Earth.

Single celled life may be common but multi-cellular life may be much much rarer.

Never mind intelligence and all of other things that need to happen to produce a being we could even to attempt to communicate with.

Just my 2 cents anyway.

 

[Cmdr Pli55ken]

Regarding the Drake equation: Please note that this is not meant to be taken as a serious equation. It was a (humorous) attempt at formulating an agenda for the Green Bank convention (in equation form).

From a predictive point of view any probabilistic equation that contains at least one parameter that is pure speculation is useless. The Drake equation contains several such parameters.
It was meant as a joke among scientists to break up the monotony of agenda driven meetings. Nothing more, nothing less.