This is a familiar thought. It even shows up in the novel that popularized the term “Singularity”, Marooned in Real Time by Vernor Vinge.
Its main shortcoming is that the visible universe is still there for the taking, by any civilization or intelligence that doesn’t restrict itself to invisibility. And on Earth, life expands into all the niches it can.
Thanks for the feedback! I haven’t read Marooned in Real Time yet, but I’m looking forward to checking it out.
As for the critique, I’ve certainly heard that argument a lot. It tends to imply something along the lines of: “If there were more advanced civilizations, then they would want to maximize resource/energy exploitation...and we would see the signs of that exploitation” or something of that nature. Therefore we assume that the apparent lack of Dyson Spheres or comparable artifacts proves that other civilizations don’t exist.
However, I tried to present multiple reasons why I don’t believe we can extrapolate our current assumptions about the “signs of civilization” and apply them to a significantly more advanced civilization. That was really the main point of the article. I also tend to think if even contemporary humans can come up with rational arguments for conservationism ideals, then more advanced civilizations probably can too.
As Segan says, “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
‘Segan’ was wrong, in a very typical way for mainstream ‘skeptics’ who hew to dichotomization and status quo bias; absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence. We have enormous opportunities to detect alien signatures, we have used them for many decades at enormous scale (and Sagan was involved in it), and we have come up with absolutely nothing whatsoever. Every time we have pulled a ball out of the urn of observations, it has come up labeled ‘not aliens’, and the odds that there’s any ball left in the urn labeled ‘alien’ goes down. Not a single Dyson sphere, not a single mega-structure, not a single anomalous artifact in the solar system, no traces of alien biospheres with different amino acid codings or chirality, and so on and so forth. Every time someone gets excited about a weird star or a weird comet/asteroid and says “this time it’s aliens!” and it could have been aliens, and yet, it turns out to not be aliens—the ‘alien hypothesis’ fails another test and shrinks in posterior probability a little bit more.
This is a familiar thought. It even shows up in the novel that popularized the term “Singularity”, Marooned in Real Time by Vernor Vinge.
Its main shortcoming is that the visible universe is still there for the taking, by any civilization or intelligence that doesn’t restrict itself to invisibility. And on Earth, life expands into all the niches it can.
Changed the title to reflect my lack of originality. :)
Thanks for the heads up.
Thanks for the feedback! I haven’t read Marooned in Real Time yet, but I’m looking forward to checking it out.
As for the critique, I’ve certainly heard that argument a lot. It tends to imply something along the lines of: “If there were more advanced civilizations, then they would want to maximize resource/energy exploitation...and we would see the signs of that exploitation” or something of that nature. Therefore we assume that the apparent lack of Dyson Spheres or comparable artifacts proves that other civilizations don’t exist.
However, I tried to present multiple reasons why I don’t believe we can extrapolate our current assumptions about the “signs of civilization” and apply them to a significantly more advanced civilization. That was really the main point of the article. I also tend to think if even contemporary humans can come up with rational arguments for conservationism ideals, then more advanced civilizations probably can too.
As Segan says, “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
‘Segan’ was wrong, in a very typical way for mainstream ‘skeptics’ who hew to dichotomization and status quo bias; absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence. We have enormous opportunities to detect alien signatures, we have used them for many decades at enormous scale (and Sagan was involved in it), and we have come up with absolutely nothing whatsoever. Every time we have pulled a ball out of the urn of observations, it has come up labeled ‘not aliens’, and the odds that there’s any ball left in the urn labeled ‘alien’ goes down. Not a single Dyson sphere, not a single mega-structure, not a single anomalous artifact in the solar system, no traces of alien biospheres with different amino acid codings or chirality, and so on and so forth. Every time someone gets excited about a weird star or a weird comet/asteroid and says “this time it’s aliens!” and it could have been aliens, and yet, it turns out to not be aliens—the ‘alien hypothesis’ fails another test and shrinks in posterior probability a little bit more.