How Many Aliens Are There?

I've been waiting for this for years.... I can finally plug numbers into the Drake Equation and get some meaningful answers about whether or not Aliens are visiting earth.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120821-how-many-alien-worlds-exist

My best guess, there are 34 technological Alien species currently active in the Milky Way galaxy. How many do you come up with?

Big, Long, and Pointless... An Ode to Pagelism

Disclaimer: This post is long and pointless. It’s to answer points brought up by Briane Pagel in a comment to something I had posted elsewhere on the internet. Yes, a post so self-referential only I, and maybe Briane, will be able to follow. Do yourselves a favor and stop reading. It’s really that boring. You won’t hurt my feelings.

Enrico Fermi was considered by many contemporaries as, perhaps, the smartest man alive during his time as a citizen of earth. He certainly had a reputation as being the quickest wit in the western world. The guy was no dummy.

Briane Pagel is also no dummy. And he and Fermi are is a disagreement regarding what, ironically, might end up being Fermi’s lasting contribution to pop culture (Not many folks can name off Fermi’s scientific contributions). It’s a shame, but that’s just how it works.

So, since that mega-mind of insight can no longer defend himself, I have to take it upon myself to do so in his behalf. That’s a little like Lois Lane protecting Superman I suppose. But, she must have been doing something right because she did have her very own comic book for a while, so if I were to stretch this analogy well beyond its breaking point, that means I might not be capable of a real defense but that won’t stop me from being in the middle of things anyway. I hope my time spent in the 90’s as a semi-professional internet debater will allow me to out argue Briane, the ever famous lawyer who has successfully sued to have more blue M&M’s per package (he didn’t actually do that, but he could have). I plan to mask my ignorance with name calling and subtle misdirections.

Where are all the humans?

I made my peace with that part of me a long time ago. It’s how I win disagreements. It’s all I’ve got.

Anyhow, about a year ago I wrote a brief blog post about the Fermi Paradox for author Stephen Tremp’s blog. Last week he reposted it on the A-Z challenge blog as part of his ongoing series about aliens. When Mr Briane Pagel, esquire, mentioned to me on Twitter that he is scared of my super spider of doom that I put up last week, I told him to please check out my post over at the A-Z blog.

And boy, he sure did. After reading, he went on to look at each of my points made there to try to explain why there is no paradox. Which, whether he means to or not, indicates that I’ve wasted a whole lot of my brainpower over the years (*ahem* decades) thinking about a paradox that doesn’t exist.

In case you’re wonder what that paradox is we’re discussing, it’s the conundrum surrounding the lack of alien invasions humanity has experienced… you’ll just have to go find my original post if you really want more.

So, according to Braine, I could have been putting my not-so-considerable mental might towards combating disease, or thinking about the mystery of the circle… instead, it’s all wasted – much like that time I wasted the better part of a year exploring this riddle:

Three weary travelers stop by an inn one night, looking for lodging. They ask the innkeeper for a room to share. The innkeeper charges them $30 for the room. Each man contributes $10.

Then men make their way to their single room, and the innkeeper chuckles because he’s made money off the imbeciles, the room was supposed to be $25 dollars.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one… anyone?

Anyone?

Well, the innkeep’s wife discovered his deceit, and forced her wicked husband to return the $5 dollars he stole. The innkeeper, as well as being a crook, was also bad with math, and didn’t know how he could split the five dollars three ways.

So the wicked, greedy man, slipped $2 into his pocket and knocked on the men’s room. He proudly told them that they received the group rate and the cost of the room was only $9 per person. He hands them each a dollar refund and walks away, happy that he’s made them happy, and happy that he’s made his wife happy, and happy that he’s made himself happy.

Except, there was just one little thing.

Each man ended up paying $9 for their share – for a total of $27.

He had $2 in his pocket.

That’s $29… There is a dollar missing. Where did that missing dollar go?

Okay, now where was I? Oh yes, Briane thinks I’m wasting my time thinking about the mysteries of the universe. He made many, many points, several of which I’m sure are red herrings, intended to wear me out should I go through them one at a time. Of course, that makes me want to do just that.

Just remember, my goal isn’t to win - it’s to prove he’s wrong. Wait, that didn’t come out right. I mean, my goal is to demonstrate why I disagree with his logic.

Pagel point #1: Pagel admires me for thinking about ‘this stuff.’

My Rebut: That sounds suspiciously like my mother, who admires me for my willingness to continue to draw pictures of men who wear capes and pirate boots during my spare time, despite the fact that I’m a middle aged man. Yes, quite admirable.

Pagel point #2: Humans arose 2.7 million years ago.

My Rebut: Paul Simon might not be the most rigorously scientific lyricist. I appreciate that he wrote Call me Al and I love that song. So I am all for giving him respect. However, the range of dates for when humans first appear (meaning something like modern humans, that have a cranial capacity that is more or less indistinguishable from our own) is around 200,000- 400,000 years ago. That’s just morphologically indistinguishable from modern humans, things like cave paintings, jewelry, trinkets (like those ugly, headless, fertility goddesses) they all show up between 30k – 50k years ago. Some folks think that’s when we really started developing language and the ability to discuss abstract concepts, a key component in intelligence. Since Briane seems to be basing a lot of his argument on that date… it’s feels like it would be significant to point out that 2.7 million years seems to be pretty arbitrary.

Pagel point #3: Life arose 2.7 million years ago.

My Rebut: Sigh. Paul Simon again? Dammit, quit using his song lyrics like they’re science textbooks.  I didn’t pass calculus by memorizing the lyrics to Wake up, Little Susie. Unless your point is that humans arose at the same moment that life itself did, I’m not sure if I follow here. Did you mean to say that?

Again, the dates for Life on earth go back at least to the oldest rocks we’ve found. The story that most often gets told by sciency types (that means actual scientists, not singer/songwriters) is that as soon as the earth cooled enough for the rocks to solidify, something was living there.

Now that’s interesting, and it does lead to making assumptions.

Like, for just under 4 billion years (that’s billion with a ‘B’ in front, not an ‘M’) of things living on earth and we’ve only been unequivocally human for maybe 40,000. We’ve only had enough understanding of how the universe works in order to send a hunk of metal into orbit in the past 50 years.

So I agree with his larger point. Being toolmakers that are interested in math, science, radio dishes, and spaceships, is not inevitable. Steven J Gould fought hard to fight the common belief that intelligence is the inevitable conclusion of evolution. His take (which I agree with) is that intelligence is more of an experiment (not a guided one, it’s just a form of speech he used). His point that instead of nature investing all of its resources into making us faster, stronger, armor plated, better at hiding, etc., it made us smarter. In our case, it worked. It worked so well that it makes sense to think that if it happened before, at any time, we’d see evidence of that in the fossil record.

But after Briane’s conversation about the Drake equation a few weeks ago, that might be enough of a clue about how the universe works (regarding the emergence of intelligence) to put a tentative number in that part of the equation (if a planet that has life on it, what is the likely hood it will develop technology? Why, that would be once every four billion years).

Pagel point #4: Conditions for life have not been optimal for much of the time of the universe.

This point which actually was made before points 2 and 3, but I skipped this and am coming back to it now.

I do follow, common wisdom is that Sol is a third generation star. That means that the first stars formed, blowed up, then next generation stars formed, which included a lot more stuff than simple hydrogen and a bit of helium. Second gen stars had traces of heavy elements, and third gen stars had way more.

Continuing to follow that old wisdom, first gen stars probably wouldn’t have planets, well, they wouldn’t have rocky planets. Any life that might have arisen during this time wouldn’t have the raw materials they needed to build stuff (well, and there would have been a real lack of much of anything outside of Hydrogen, Helium, and just a touch of Lithium).

But the lifetimes of those first generation stars were relatively short when compared to second and third gen. Second gen stars could have had rocky worlds, and could have something vaguely earthlike arising billions of years before our solar system formed. It wouldn’t have to happen frequently, we’re just talking about it happening at all - anywhere.

And by anywhere, I mean, there are a few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way alone. We know that out of the only solar system we’ve explored (our own) intelligent life showed up at least once. If we start playing a numbers game again that puts the odds of intelligent life showing up at about once for every 8 planets (if we can watch them for 4 billion years).

I’m relatively confident that I’m several orders of magnitude off in that calculation, but whatever. The point is that science makes assumptions, too, assumptions that many people don’t like, but these are just default assumptions that get made when there is a severe lack of data on a subject (for example, if we find microbial life on Venus, Mars, Europa, Titan and Enceladus  - all of which some scientists think is a real possibility, then we have to change our assumptions to match (once in four billion years no longer seems accurate if life has existed in those other places that long and we aren’t seeing their equivalent to Gilligan’s Island reruns, so we have to assume they’re not that smart. So our odds of intelligence emerging on planets with life on them drop to one out of six (per four billion years) – and we could probably note that life only appears on bodies between the sizes of Enceladus and Earth – we can ignore the gas giants, but then we’d have to include moons, figure out if the appearance of water is the common factor, of just a soluble liquid that can serve as a medium for chemistry to take place.

XKCD!!

Or whatever, that’s just with info from our solar system. What about all those extra solar planets that keep turning up? Again, the more data we can collect, the more confidence we can have in our assumptions.

One of those assumptions, and the most important one for us here today, is called the Copernican principal. The reason it’s important is that it makes the assumption that whatever we observe about a phenomena is probably not unusual.

It’s like, if I traveled to northern Arizona and saw a McDonald’s, if I were to order a hamburger there I can assume that it will serve as an indicator of what a hamburger purchased at an Idaho McDonald’s would be like.

It’s an assumption, but that assumption is that when we observe something, like our solar system, that we are not seeing something terribly uncommon. Assumptions aren’t bad things in of themselves; it’s assuming that things are uncommon without bothering to check to see if those assumptions are valid that leads to funky conclusions.

If Briane wanted to dive into my analogy and tear it apart, he could. Analogies only really work as illustrative tools – they tend to fall apart if examined closely. But since we’re talking about McDonalds burgers, he might question why we would assume that there were any other McDonalds anywhere else in the universe if we only know of one. And that is a good point. Or he could argue that other McDonald’s are extremely similar in form and function, and use that to point out his idea about all intelligent life in the cosmos being at the same technological place in their development. And that would be another good point. But again, the idea is for you to see what I want you to see, not what he wants you to. And that also shows why using analogy to explain things isn’t always a good idea.

Why did I go on like that? I forgot what point I was trying to make. So I actually agree with his statement thatthe laws of physics and chemistry are the same throughout the cosmos – But that doesn’t mean that all life in the universe started at the exact same time 2.7 million years ago and all life followed an identical evolutionary path – again, to assume that is the case is surely some sort of logical fallacy. I know that’s the way Star Trek implies it goes, but I don’t buy it. I mean, here on earth, we’ve got people that live in societies that are little changed from what they were like ten thousand years ago. But we also have people that live in outer space too. That’s a great deal of disparity between folks of the same species. It doesn’t follow that an entirely alien society would be on par with us. If fact, that would be surprising in the extreme.

I’d be much more comfortable with some sort of universal law that said once a species discovers quantum theory they blow themselves up in a nuclear disaster, or a nano-bots run amok scenario.

I know there were other points he made, especially the one about the island hopping pacific islanders – and that’s something I’d really like to explore in some detail, but I can’t now, because A) I don’t like arguing analogies for reasons I stated before, and B) because I mostly don’t have the time. Mostly, it’s B. Actually, it’s entirely B. In fact, I’m tempted to say reason A is a lie. But that’s such a strong word, I think I’ll stick to saying that it’s a reason I don’t want to talk about it, but it’s really not.

Hell, working on this post in starts and stops for several days and I’ve ended up skipping over tons of stuff I would have liked to have said – but since they would require me actually looking stuff up I decided to leave them alone. Yes, I would have gone on for much, much longer, had I only had the time/desire/motivation/lack-of-laziness.

However, I'll unfairly end with this - the pacific islander analogy was the right one to use - Fermi didn't use that one, I did. Although I'm sure I stole it from somebody. But I've totally ran out of gas... I would love to go over this in more detail, so Briane, feel free to call start a series on these... I'll give you a guest post if you want.

In conclusion, I disagree with Briane’s disagreement of my original post, but I choose not to truly articulate why because of the $29 dollar riddle I mentioned earlier. Because, the point of that riddle is that if you read it and you don’t think it’s a paradox, then you need to go back and read it over and over until it stops making sense.

The Big Questions

Right now, actually, for the past several years, my absolute favorite author, no exceptions, has been Alastair Reynolds. He's a British (well, Welsh) science fiction author of notable popularity. In case all have forgotten, he signed a $1,000,000 deal a year or so ago (actually, I think that should be in British pounds, which is significantly more than USD right now) and generally writes great tales with very deep science fictional themes. The guy, in a word, is awesome.

He also was a speaker at TEDx, I don't know what the 'x' stands for, but whatever. Ted talks are one of the things that makes the internet awesome.The reason I find him so compelling is because all his fiction, or most of it anyway, deals with a lot of the same questions most of have asked when we're sitting around and pondering the universe in all of its vastness. Of course, he was a working scientist with the ESA for a number of years and was writing his first several novels while working on some pretty cool science at the same time.

If I were a master of my craft in my own mind, I would probably be churning out books quite similar to what he does. If you have 20 minutes or so to kill, please sit back, relax, and have your mind blown by my writing hero, discussing my philosophical hero, as he discusses my favorite conundrum of all: The Fermi Paradox.




Now, if that just got a bit 'too real' for you, then please enjoy a new feature I'm going to include from time to time, which I will call my comment of the week, or month, or year, whatever. Because let's all be honest. Most of us just blow into a blog, skim the post, make a short, sweet, comment and move on. I get it, I really do. I wish I could spend more time interacting with everyone, but there just isn't enough hours in the day. It usually makes me sad. But I do what I can, as we all do.

But every once in a while, something happens and that comment is beautiful in a way no one could have expected.

Unfortunately, my first comment of the week comes from an anonymous user. Too bad, as I'd like to meet this person and hear more of their thoughts. Check it out:

"Pretty section of content. I just stumbled upon your web site and in accession capital to assert that I acquire in fact enjoyed account your blog posts. Anyway I will be subscribing to your feeds and even I achievement you access consistently rapidly. <link deleted>"

Wow. That's all I've got, wow. Thank you good sir, I'll be clicking those links you provided right away, just after I forward them to all my friends.

The Grand Tour

For the first time ever, I fooled someone into thinking I have something worth talking about. I've got a post up over at Stephen Tremp's blog, Breakthrough Blogs, where I talk a bit about the Fermi Paradox. So please go over and check it out.  If you don't visit his site already, he is a SF author that posts several times a week, almost always on Science or Science related posts.

In other news, I've been sick. It sucks. I would pray for death if I wasn't such a wimpy soul.

Where The Hell is Everyone?

I read this great paper today on the Fermi Paradox. Everyone please do yourselves a favor and go read it. It may help your nerd cred out some telling folks you've read stuff from arXiv.

I've posted about the Fermi Paradox before. Several times actually (click for my take or click for a better explanation). I've read several books on the subject, I've read sci fi novels about the topic. I'm something of a Fermi Paradox junkie. My unpublished novel is sort of a take on the subject as well. Or, in other words, I've heard every possible explanation and considered it, gaged its truthiness, and moved on.

What the paper postulated for our consideration, was that a cosmic natural selection process was at work. Those that went about exploring the galaxy, broadcasting their whereabouts (Like us, in other words) were getting systematically wiped out. By what? Predator species that prey on the naive civilizations that let everyone know where their at.

The paper continues to point out that if earth analogues can be used - and assuming natural selection is the only possible means for any species to evolve - then any intelligent species probably was a predator anyway. That isn't new, but further makes his point that what we meet out there would probably be more like Alien than E.T.

Stephen Hawking is on board with the idea, as he mentioned in his mini series that aired last year on the science channel. At the time I disagreed, I still think I do, but it got me thinking. The whole idea of some sort of cosmic natural selection is at work, culling outgoing species and fostering intensely secretive ones I think is flawed, it's like social Darwinism writ large.

Still. it's interesting.

Oh What a Crapfest

Christmas is a difficult time for me. It doesn't help that my lovely wife had an opportunity to go home for the first time in 20 years or so and just couldn't pass up the chance. Therefore she has gone and the house feels really empty.

The weather sucks. It's snowed, sleeted, iced over, and we've had record low temperatures for this time of year. The kids haven't been going to school because of it and its wreaked havoc with my work schedule.

Dammit!

Even my poor dog has been depressed. At the time my wife was trying to say goodbye to her our beloved dog was too caught up in licking her crotch to notice. Now she wonders the house looking sad and trying to find my wife. Look who's sorry now.

But life goes on. I stood in line at the grocery store today for 10 minutes, watching in utter fascination as a young lady went through the self-checkout line and acted like each article must be carefully inspected before attempting to scan it. She bagged each can of ravioli like it was precious glassware that needed cushioned support before it could be placed in a bag for transport. I certainly appreciated her thoroughness, but the whole thing was surreal.

But when I'm not noting the idiosyncrasies of strangers I'm trying to cope with my own issues. I was thinking that while the missus was away I'd get to read and write much more than usual. So far I've written nothing. I'm too tired to muster up anything more than a passing thought of trying to produce some prose. Of course I am reading, currently I'm working my way through a short story collection that has as its theme the Fermi Paradox. One of my favorite distractions in life is to ponder the mystery and try to come up with my own solution. So far my best possible solution is that Alien civilizations are actively trying to hide from us. They've seen the whupass we can unleash when we feel like it.



But so far the book has been a pretty big disappointment. I'm nearly done and only a few of the stories stand out as exceptional. There was even one or two that I thought were embarrassingly bad  - how does stuff like that get published?

Anyway, I'll try to shake that melancholy mood and get back to my chipper self. I think it'll take me a few days to get in the mindset of being alone and then I'll start feeling all creative again.

Cheerio

An Eerie, Spinning Ark

May has been a great month for me. Among the highlights are the momentous news that I read 4 amazing books... in a row!

I read a lot, I try to be as selective as I can though, ensuring that I pick books that offer me the maximum of enjoyment when I read them. Still though, I often wade though stinker after stinker before I hit on one I really like. But man, I started getting nervous after I'd read the third in a row - there is no way my luck could continue.

Yet it did.

It started with a new book by Paul Davies, I heard about it from one of the blogs I follow (Mish Sci-fi Musings if you must know) and just had to get it.  It offers us another look at the Fermi Paradox. Damn, I'm a sucker for anything that offers any sort of hope of letting me believe what I want to regarding intelligent life in the universe that at the same time has the ring of intellectual honesty.

I've read pretty extensively on the subject and can say that I've heard most of the credible ideas that are out there on the topic. The conundrum that the author is pondering in this book is this: We've been actively listening to the cosmos for 50 years now looking for any sign of Aliens and so far have nothing to show for it. Nada.

Why this is a paradox at all might strike some as odd, but if intelligence arises at all in the galaxy and said intelligence begins to explore, it is inevitable that the universe should be literally bursting at the seams with colonized planets and intergalactic civilizations. So where is everybody?

This is simply the best book on the subject I've ever come across. The author's conclusion is somewhat shocking to me - I won't spoil it if any decide to read - but again, it just feels like he is being very honest here, not promoting an agenda. Highly recommended.

Stephen Baxter also released a new book, in the states at least, A sequel to last years Flood, this one entitled Ark. I don't know why I've always been so sucked into the novels that Stephen Baxter writes, but his stories speak to me in ways that few other works do. Even when I feel like he's not doing his best work, I cannot ever accuse him of not putting for something well thought out.

This novel tells the story of the abandonment of earth after an ecological disaster ruins our home. With the caveat of FTL thrown in, the rest of the story unfolds with what amounts to technology just barely ahead of what we have today being used to build a massive ship to shuttle the remnants of humanity to the stars.

And it's a great ride, one of the best novels I feel that I've read from Stephen Baxter in several years. At this point I'm unsure what his plans are for the future, but with his recent proclivity for writing trilogies and quadrilogies I'm assuming that more is coming. Nonetheless, this story is self contained and reading the previous novel isn't necessary to enjoy this one. Well done.

The next book I read may have been my favorite of the bunch, and I'm tempted to place it in a future top 10 list, but I'll hold off on that for now. It's too new to me and I need to let it percolate on it for a bit before I make any proclamations about its all time greatness for now.

Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson.

This is a literary novel disguised as SF. It's a bit short on action but awesome in almost every way imaginable. I fell so hard for the characters that I was horrified that the book had to end.

Imagine what would happen if all the stars went out. The moon, the planets, all gone. a generation of people born and living in a world where the night sky has nothing in it.

An ominous tale that has enigmatic aliens that are known only through their actions and nothing else. Their purposes aloof and unconcerned with the affairs of man.

God, this book was amazing.


So what of this 4th book? I'll have to let you know in the near future. But it too was a doozy.

The End of All Things (except for this blog)

As a refresher for anyone who might have jumped on the bandwagon too late, and is too unmotivated to go back and read my history here, I am a wannabe writer.

A science fiction wannabe to be exact. I have deep love of the genre and I think that in some ways, science fiction, or at least the sub-genre that I most frequently ascribe to, is attempting to answer the most fundamental questions that exist.

Why are we even here? Are we alone in the universe?

All that sort of stuff. Science in general is an attempt to answer those same questions. The dream of answering life's great mysteries with definitive and provable methods is a dream that teeters in the back of the mind of many a researcher I'm sure.

With that being said, one of my personal enjoyments during my quiet time is to ponder one of the great mysteries of the modern era. Why aren't there aliens already here?

The Fermi paradox is so named because Dr. Fermi is the first person articulate the delimma. Thinking about the age of the universe, the probablity of intelligent life arising even once in a great while in a galaxy leads to the inevitable conclusion that the entire galaxy should have been colonized a dozen times over already - we should be living in a universe more like Star Wars than we do. So where is everybody?

I won't waste anyone's time trying to outline the line of reasoning for reaching that conclusion. But some of the smartest folks that have ever lived have tried their best to come up with a possible reason we don't see aliens popping up around every corner and their answers generally never satisfy (which is why I love science fiction, there is still plenty of room to speculate about such things)

Please take 10 minutes or so and check out my heros at The Daily Galaxy. They have a short article about the conundrum and do a brilliant job of outlining the possible reasons we can't find any evidence of super civilizations of planet hopping citizens.

Anyhow, I do enjoy thinking about the topic, I don't see myself ever being able to contribute to the conversation in any meaningful way, but I at least know some possible reasons why it may be so. We may just be alone, or so separated from out nearest neighbor that we might as well be. The implications of that are profound.

Or we may be the first, or last to arise. Did others before us rise and fall already? What does that say about our chances? I've read some folks that have predicted the end of humanity based on nothing more than mathmatical models... Sounds stupid, until I read that just after the Berlin wall was built, this same model was used to predict when it would come down. The prediction was eerily close to being dead on.

So how was it done? What sort of crazy math is used to get those sorts of answers? And is it applicable to humanity at large? I don't know. I'll find a link for the reader to check out and post it later (I'm doing a "stream of consciousness" blog post at the moment).

My larger point being that science fiction is a gold mine for exploring these and other ideas without fear of anyone taking you too seriously. I don't think I can really have a serious conversation with most most folks about why I haven' t been abducted and probed by aliens yet, but a writer can wax on about just that topic all he or she wants within the genre.

It is just fiction after all.