How does Fermi's Paradox and a (possible) abundance of earth-like worlds lead to the belief that civilizations are doomed before getting to the Singularity?

Perhaps aliens simply aren't curious in the way we are. Perhaps post-singularity entities have no interest in us. Perhaps they do and we simply can't perceive them. Who knows! There are a lot of potential explanations for Fermi's Paradox that don't involve doomsday -- and if we're talking post-singularity we shouldn't expect that we would be able to recognize the truth even if it was right in front of us.

I find it disturbing that people try and box the possibilities in like they do.  It is either that the galaxy should be teeming with life or it dies on the vine at some point before it proliferates exponentially into the stars.  But what if we are the first successful consciousness in this galaxy?  This whole thing with aliens strikes me as another means by which people are trying to conceive of some higher power that offers salvation to us from the problems of our world just by the nature of itself.  Is it so hard to believe that we are the ONLY gods at the moment and that there is no help or model we can use to measure ourselves against?

I think we are all jumping to conclusions. All we know is that there is a planet of 5 Earth masses in the goldilock's zone around this star. We also know that this star has about half the metallicity as does our sun.

This planet could be anything. It could be a Venus-like hell-hole. It could be a water world, with oceans hundreds of kilometers deep. It is actually not likely to be a Mars-like planet, because the gravity would have held on to the atmosphere over the eons. We won't know what kind of planet it is for a long time to come, because our telescopes simply do not have the resolution to do the spectro-analysis to determine these things.

Untill we know these things, we cannot say that the Rare Earth Hypothesis has been disproven. There is one theory about star systems that has been disproven. This star system has only half the metallicity as does our own. This means that terrestrial planets (and smaller gas giants) do indeed exists in systems of relatively low metallicity. This increases the number of stars likely to have planets by about a factor of 5 over that predicted by the Rare Earth Hypothesis. No other aspect of the REH has been disproven at this time.

Does this planet have plate tectonics? This is believed to be essential for the formation of multi-cellular life by the REH. The current theory is that a large moon is necessary for the initiation and the continuation of plate tectonics. Venus has no plate tectonics.

My pet theory is that, without plate tectonics, you get a venus. My thinking is that plate tectonics allows for vulcanism and what not that allows for all of the heat and gas to leak out of the planet in a controlled fashion. If there are no plate tectonics, all of this energy remains trapped in the planet and builds up, until you get a global "resurfacing" event. This is an idea I pulled out of my arse and I have no idea how valid it is. If its valid, most "earth-like" planets will turn out to be Venus-like hell-holes.

Even if these does turn out to be a habitable planet, this still does not mean that intelligence is likely. Single-celled organisms have been around since the beginning of the Earth. Multi-cellular life has been around for only around 750 million years. This alone suggests that the majority of habitable planets will have blue-green algae and nothing else. There are a considerable number of evolutionary steps to go from blue-green algae up to us. Even if there are a billion habitable planets in the galaxy (the highest plausible estimate), it could still be the case that we are alone.

I still think we are alone.

I've always liked the idea that we're just an experiment. Perhaps they've set up all sorts of planets just like this one. Just here and there so each culture can be studied without one bleeding into the other. It's a weird idea, one made even wierder with the fact that they'd have to have an incredibly long lifespan and would have had to do so an absurd trillions of years before life on our little mudball.

Perhaps it is just as simple as this.

In the 1960's, at the rate of population doubling that was occuring at the time, our own race would have consumed all the matter in the Hubble volume within 6,500 years. The fear was out of control population growth.

Today, Japan, South Korea, Tiawan, almost all of old Warsaw Pac Europe, Western Europe, or in short, all the advanced civilization on Earth now may actually need super-longevity to prevent a massive decline of native populations by the end of this century.

The rest of the world may well be just a few decades away from the same point.

The best news on Earth in 4 billion years.

With superlongevity, we may slowly go into the solar system and level off at a comfortable 15 or 20 billion, maybe, which would still be several million times fewer people than the energy and resource base of the solar system could support in far greater comfort than we enjoy in the First World today.

Nice little cylinders and/or ring worlds (much smaller than Larry Niven's Ring World built by the Pak Protectors LOL!) made from astroids and watered by comets and materials from the Oort clouds.

Birth rates may approach almost zero in the future and with millions of times the resource base near Sol than we need, than the idea of spreading like a virus to consume the whole galaxy and than the universe becomes absurd.

Good news!

In all probability, civilizations just around the neighborhood that reached the Singularity, and the top of the population "s" curve thousands, millions, or billions of years ago, may know we exist, but are living in thier solar systems with advanced technology and comfort, with resources (based on super technology) that may be trillions of times greater than they would need to live well!

What we see developing may be just the curve that all intelligent life follows. No "taking over" and gobbling up all the "raw materials" of the universe.

Oh, I read the Singularity and loved it, but Kirzweil forgot about quantum computers, which makes me think that rather than going out in a singularity wave to convert all matter into computers, we may just go way inward, as in Feymans' "There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom!" theorum. After all, the time it takes signals to move from one part of the universe to another would slow down the super computer.

We make computers smaller all the time for that reason, and after they get small enough, than we can use the processing power of the multi-verse for our computers.

That, in a nutshell might be the reason that our nearest next door neighbor might be a few hundred light years away, but we don't see them and they have no interest in "making contact" or "taking over".

And, they might watch us with probes but they never have "crash landings".

I think it's drawing a very long bow to go from the discovery of planet that is, by one definition, "Eath-like" to the conjecture that our galaxy is teeming with life. There may be zillions of such planets in the galaxy, but the conditions required for life to appear may still need to be so fnely tuned that there is no life on any of them. Also, we have good reason to think (independently of the Fermi paradox) that, even when life does appear, the path to an intelligent species and a technological civilisation is highly sensitive to contingencies. If things had been a little different, the Earth might still be ruled by dumb dinosaurs. If it comes to that, if things had been a bit different in a different way, we might still be stuck with medieval-level technology, or even with stone-age technology. I'm still betting, on grounds independent of the observations that give us the Fermi paradox, that we are the most technologically advanced species in the galaxy.

The universe is a big place. There's probably one or more technologically-advanced species than us out there somewhere, but it may be so far away that we'll never come in contact with it.

I also question the assumption that a species like us with consciousness and the ability to rebel against its selfish replicators will end up colonising the universe at an exponential rate. That scenario sounds most unlikely to me. We are more likely to stay home, consciously matching our population size to the carrying capacity of our home planet and the resources available in the local solar system. I don't doubt that we'll eventually explore space, and I certainly hope there'll be some off-Earth colonisation in the mix, but the whole exponential colonisation of the universe thing always just sounds massively improbable, and I can't understand why anyone would ever consider it desirable, or why the species as a whole would ever decide to go down that path. Even if there is a more technologically-advanced species than us somewhere in the local galaxy, I don't see why it should have chosen that option.

( Crossposted from Metamagician and the Hellfire Club .) There's been a lot of fuss over the past week

As I keep saying: silence isn't proof of an empty universe. I think it is still very premature to draw any conclusions on SETI yet. We've only been doing SETI investigation for about 40 years right? The merest blink of a gnat's eyelash on the scale of cosmic time.

We've found indirect evidence of a nearby terrestrial planet. This will help us to revise Drake's Equation but we are still dealing with a tiny number of data points:

In our solar system, N(sub)p is 1 hit (Earth) two near misses (Venus and Mars). And this excludes possibilities like life on gas giant moons with tidal heating like Titan or Europa.

In terms of large brained, cultured intelligence (And I think George will dig this.) Earth gave us a surprisingly large number of near misses, the great apes, the cetaceans, elephants, the cats, the canines, etc. Heck, maybe even the cephalopods. This gives us a large estimate of N(sub)i the fraction of planets with intelligent life.

But this is only one planet. We still don't know enough to set that fraction reliably. It might be that our solar system was especially fecund or maybe especially sparse and barren.  We just don't know what the average should be yet.

And in terms of terms of advanced technology and sustainability, we only have one data point: Us. This is the big mystery. Just because we might screw up and do the big firework doesn't mean that the rest of the tool using cultures out there are so stupid.

We've only had 40 years of silence. This could be due to so many things that it's ridiculous to draw conclusions. The silence isn't meaningful yet.

And as we here at this site can well imagine. It would only take a tiny number of nanobots scattered throughout our biosphere for them to watch us. They could be extremely subtle in their spying. They might have left graffiti on the Moon and we just don't know it yet.

Patience! We need to keep looking!

I'm in favor of all those who hate it here taking off immediately. We don't need them here bringing us down and interfering with progress. So what if generations of them are swallowed up in interstellar travel? The survivors will have only their remote ancestors to blame.

Besides, what are those idiots going to do if the place has a complex biosphere of its own? Kill the indigenous life so they can take over? Probably. Not that those who left Earth weren't claiming that was being done here and they wanted to escape that immorality....Instead of correct it.