LINK study-milky-way-may-be-full-of-dead-alien-civilizations
Yes, and it looks like we are on the way to joining them.
Not my field, but it would be good to know how and why any successful civilisations manage to survive.
My guess would be:
- They abandon religion.
- They embrace science and reason
- They pursue social and economic justice.
But, I could be wrong. Maybe the successful ones are like the Borg, or the Krill (for Orville fans).
12
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.There are many potential causes for the end of civilizations. Climate change has been a major cause of such changes in human history. Climate change may nudge a society into civil war, as it did recently in Syria.
On longer time scales, we see that on average, species only last about 2 or 3 million years before going extinct. It could be that their branch on the evolutionary tree withers and dies, or it might be that they evolve into a new and distinct form. In any case, most species do not last long on cosmic time scales.
The Drake equation has many factors whose values we can only guess at. Lately (the last couple of decades) we have started to get a better understanding of how many planets are out there, and how many of those might have conditions that could sustain life as we know it. But we are still only at the rough-estimate stage. As for how many if those life-supporting planets produce technological civilizations, or how long such civilizations may persist on average, we only have one example we can observe, and that experiment is not yet concluded.
But if current trends continue, we may have an answer all too soon.
Flyingsaucesir
Level 8
Dec 24, 2020
0
Nature gets rid of any impediment to natural order of things.
Mofo1953
Level 9
Dec 23, 2020
1
Is the natural order of things a universe of extinct species? Can't see that. I gather the Newtonian clockwork universe model has been replaced by a universe of chaos. If so, some species surviving and many not seems reasonable to me, again purely from pure speculation.
@David1955
Don't forget that no species exists in a vacuum. Extinction of one ir a few keystone species may lead to ecological collapse and mass extinction. And species like ours, at or near the top if the food web, are in the most precarious position of all. Knock out enough species below us, and we go too. Some species may survive, but they are likely to be ones that have far simpler needs.
@Flyingsaucesir i don't see how the analogy works here. Species in an interconnected environment, like a planet, might collapse due to that interconnectedness. Species in worlds spread across a universe don't have a interconnectedness that I can see, unless one starts to engage in sci fi type 'the force' or some other pseudo religion thinking.
@David1955
I was talking about only one planet (ours). But what happens here can happen elsewhere. Isn't that a useful assumption when working out potential solutions to the Drake equation? And what we see here (admitting that the end of the story is not yet written) is that people do not en masse abandon religion, do not
embrace science and reason, and do not
pursue social and economic justice. So it may not be unreasonable to think that the universe is full if dead civilizations. This one is only a few hundred years old and appears headed for a cliff. But who knows? Maybe those others were/are populated by beings that were/are better than us.
@Flyingsaucesir yes, which brings us back to the idea of cosmic evolution -- lots civilisations evolve but only a few make it. I once heard Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krause discussing it, again only as an interesting idea. I'm attracted to the idea of it, but who knows.
@David1955
Yes it us an interesting idea.
Of course there are other life forms out there. It is ridiculous to assume we are it. That would be an unimaginable waste of space. We haven't even discovered all of the life forms on this planet.
Sticks48
Level 9
Dec 23, 2020
4
"It is ridiculous to assume we are it. That would be an unimaginable waste of space."
The universe doesn't care about wasted space ... it actually seems to embrace it, if you look closely enough.
@AtheistInNC It is still an arrogant and ridiculous notion we are it in a universe with billions of galaxies and a gazillion stars. That is just silly.
@Sticks48 Silly and arrogant are human constructs. The universe cares not one whit about arrogant or silly.
Show me another life form not from earth, then I'll believe we are not alone.
My hypothesis that we are the only life in this galaxy will still be correct for many hundreds, if not thousands of years from now. Yours? Unproven for just as long.
And before you spout "lack of evidence is not evidence of lack", a hypothesis with no proof is just one of many different ideas which may or not be true. I can point to hundreds of planets we have discovered that can't harbor life as my proof that we are alone here. Earth is an anomaly; and we are going to kill it.
I agree that the probability of ours being the only planet with life on it is vanishingly small. But until we have proof, we simply cannot say for sure one way or the other. However, I think it is reasonable to operate under the assumption that there is extraterrestrial life. We just need to remember that this is only a working assumption. Thus we protect and maintain our only reliable pathway to enlightenment: the scientific method.
I was listening to a talk by Krauss and Dawkins and they said that there is probably life on Enceladus. Apparently, they have determined that the outer ring of Saturn is made of ice from this world and there is organic matter there. So this world has an ocean that has organic matter within it. They will have to go there to check for sure but there is a good chance of this.
@dalefvictor I have read this to.
It may be that most civilizations don't survive their own technology advances. For instance nuclear wars, or if they manage to avoid that, then there is the release of greenhouse gasses and which climate change and eventually changing the planet to where it is no longer hospitable to the "intelligent" life that created the technologies that brign about their own destruction.
snytiger6
Level 9
Dec 23, 2020
2
maybe some of them go directly to photosynthesis for an energy production, eschewing fossil fuels and nuclear?
But it is an interesting question isn't it. 
Interesting article up to a point, but a bit short on detail.
Fernapple
Level 9
Dec 23, 2020
3
agreed. Perhaps something more will follow. I took the title with a grain of salt anyway. Not long ago I came across an article that said a study suggested that we are alone in the universe. OK.
Salo:
If you follow the link in the article to the actual study you'll find a pdf download of the source paper. An abundance of details, formulae, conclusions etc. More than this particular TI is able to fully comprehend 
It seems like an interesting question, does life exist elsewhere, but I posit that it's really not. Whatever happened, or is happening, with them really doesn't tell humans boo about us. We see that, when faced with possible extinction of our species, humans largely shrug. That tells us things and we should invest heavily in what might have caused that. Addressing it. If a day comes when they say hello then we will have an answer. Let it be.
rainmanjr
Level 8
Dec 23, 2020
1
Not necessarily. There may be some kind of cosmic evolution whereby some species survive the self- destruction phase and progress. I've heard scientists discuss this, as a purely hypothetical issue of course. We may never know, but it would be good to know if some do. I'm not optimistic about our species, however. Sad to say. I don't think our wisdom collectively can catch up to our technology.
Of course there's intelligent life elsewhere. Our existence is the blink of an eye, so is theirs. The chance of two civilizations existing at the same time and solving space time continuum are not likely. The chance of alien life coming here is so unlikely, it's like a quadrillion to one.
barjoe
Level 9
Dec 23, 2020
5
I read this idea before and indeed may be right. The universe is just so damned big.
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