/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12265618
>I chose 10 million light years somewhat arbitrarily
Obviously.
A more realistic expectation would be a few hundred light years.
Did you really think a star-faring civilization would spend tens (hundreds? thousands?) of MILLIONS of years searching trillions of solar systems just to find us and say "hi"?

> but also small enough to permit signals to be from the relatively recent past

Jesus, NO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#We_haven't_listened_properly
>with a radio telescope as sensitive as the Arecibo Observatory, Earth's television and radio broadcasts would only be detectable at distances up to 0.3 light-years, less than 1/10 the distance to the nearest star.
Even if someone were broadcasting loud enough for us to hear from a VERY nearby star, they'd have to been doing so from within a very specific time frame.
As you point out ten million years is short on a cosmic timescale, but it's probably an incredibly long time for a civilization to be doing such broadcasts.
Even if you (wildly) assume the average star-civilization lasts millions of years, remember planets enjoy "goldilocks" status for BILLIONS of years, so 99.9 percent of such civilizations don't exist at any particular moment.

>>11301335
>we still haven’t detected any tech signatures, interstellar propulsion engines, megastructures, signals, etc
I'm not sure what you're expecting to detect.
Just ask Kardashev, anybody broadcasting their existence would have to be using something with as much power output as a star. Not sure how you'd modulate the output of such a device, but we do see interesting interstellar signals (pulsars and FRBs).
We don't have the ability to detect even nearby megastructures for certain, but we've still got 17 "ambiguous" and 4 "amusing" candidates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Search_for_megastructures
>Identifying one of the many infrared sources as a Dyson sphere would require improved techniques for discriminating between a Dyson sphere and natural sources.
>Fermilab discovered 17 potential "ambiguous" candidates, of which four have been named "amusing but still questionable".
And since we've never built an interstellar drive, I'm not sure why you'd assume we'd be able to detect nearby star-travelers. And if c IS a hard limit, there probably isn't a lot of interstellar traffic.
There's plenty of unanswered questions: Haumea, Tabby's star, the aforementioned FRBs. We don't know nearly enough to assume we'd notice any intelligent life out there, even if they are out flitting around the galaxy.

>>11082501
Oops, forgot pic.

>>10875751
>https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/

The Huffington Post does not have a public comment section on for their articles.

I have found that news sites that do this are almost 100% feminist liberal progressive run and REFUSE to read any criticism of their works.

So I tend not to go to such sites.

>>10693790

In the end, we are ALL just grave stuffings.

>>10547014
>The theory we've outlined here provides a plausible explanation for the so-called Fermi Paradox.
Sorry, I just don't like the "Great Filter", surely not every world would fall prey to the same fate.
And this specific scenario suffers from the fact that a space-faring race wouldn't LIKE losing their home world, but they wouldn't REQUIRE it, either.
Anyone capable of showing up here could surely survive the death of their home planet.

>there should be numerous planets on which technologically advanced civilizations have evolved, and which are not so remote from us that we could not by this time have detected their radio transmissions.
Sorry, but that's just wrong (and pointlessly wordy).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#We_are_not_listening_properly
> with a radio telescope as sensitive as the Arecibo Observatory, Earth's television and radio broadcasts would only be detectable at distances up to 0.3 light-years, less than 1/10 the distance to the nearest star.
...and then there's the inverse-square law.
There COULD be a planet broadcasting 100 times as loud as us orbiting every star in the sky, and we still wouldn't hear a thing.

Please help me resolve this cognitive dissonance I’m having that is philoshophical and scientific.

On one hand, I believe that the individual has virtually unlimited rights so far as their actions don’t harm others.

On the other hand, I believe that human beings have an intrinsic, unalienable right to decide the health care for their own body.

I don’t think either of these are controversial concepts. Where I get in a bind is with the idea of mandatory vaccinations. Every person gets to decide what medicine they consume. No doctor or board or government can force medicine inside your body. At the same time if you refuse certain vaccinations you can put others at risk for some diseases.

How can this be resolved? I want to say the answer is eduction. You should want to get certain vaccines to help yourself and others, but no one can force you to take a medicine. If someone doesn’t want to take a vaccine, they could be given education that would make them see the importance of that medicine; or vice versa - they could educate you why they don’t want a particular vaccine and if their argument is correct, a change needs to be made to a medicine before one willingly consumes it. For example, I don’t want to consume medicine that contains mercury or aluminum. I can’t think of any good reason to consume medicines that contain neurotoxins. Other, safer substances should fill those roles that do not carry the small risk of nerve damage.

>>10538717
>Again, the argument is moot. Humanity will already be the death of this world.
Are you the vegan douche from the overpopulation thread?
CALM DOWN, junior.
We're already at peak child, world population is doing OK, and per-capita resource use is declining in 1st world countries.
Sure it's sad that there are more tigers in captivity that the wild, and the same may soon be true of polar bears.
I'm sure there are other sad consequences of our current impact, but we aren't going to do anything worse than the biosphere has already lived through.
Worst case, we'll wipe our own species out, so that should work out in the long run.
More importantly, what were you hoping some alien race would do?
Wiping out the human race seems a little like throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Short of that, I guess they could create a a world-wide nanny state, forcing humans to live in a more Earth-friendly fashion, but is that really a good idea?
Better technology might help, but we're already pursuing that path.
I guess there's also some potential for a social fix, but that's also likely to be something we could do on our own.
Aside from waving a magic wand, just what are you hoping your aliens would do?

>>10472258
>The absence of alien signals is evidence of their absence
Not even close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#We_are_not_listening_properly
>a radio telescope as sensitive as the Arecibo Observatory, Earth's television and radio broadcasts would
>only be detectable at distances up to 0.3 light-years, less than 1/10 the distance to the nearest star.

>>9846299
>>N-No they are just hiding
>is a stupid argument.
>141 replies
OK, it's late, and I'm not going to read 141 posts, so here goes:
The Fermi "paradox" is pure hubris.
There are dozens of exhalations that don't involve aliens "hiding", but even running through them implies we are advanced enough to notice aliens at all.
We've never looked anywhere besides our own solar system, and even there we've barely peeked under the first rock or two.
We can't receive radio signals similar to our own at interstellar distances (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#We_are_not_listening_properly).).
The Earth has been here for 4.6 billion years, but we've only been writing stuff down (recorded history) for 6-7 thousand years.
During most of that time we would have remembered an alien visit as gods descending from the heavens.
But somehow, because aliens haven't showed their faces in the last 2-300 years (0.0000066% of the time the Earth has been here), we must surely be alone, because our exact moment in history is just that fucking important.
Opie, you're one arrogant cocksucker.

>>9768246
>most plausible solution
This really shouldn't be the question at hand.
The real question should be: "why were you expecting to meet/find aliens?"
We occupy a tiny spec of dust in a vast cosmos, and it's only been the last century or two that we would recognize aliens as such.
Who knows how many genuine "take me to your leader" style visits have been remembered as a god descending from the heavens?
We can't even find all the "dwarf planets" in our own solar system.
_Something_ passed through our solar system in October, and we couldn't get a decent look at it. We don't even know if it was a single object or some kind of debris field.
We don't have a radio telescope sensitive enough to detect broadcast signals like our own from even the nearest star.
We've barely scratched the surface of exploring our own home system, and we've NEVER gone anywhere else.
The universe could be crawling with E.T.s and we just wouldn't have any way to know.
Nah, the Fermi "paradox" is just an excercise in hubris. The belief that modern society is somehow the center of the universe, and it's supposed to be surprising the aliens aren't jumping through hoops to let us know we're not alone.

>>9758203
I sure hope you're trolling.