There is a lot of complicated math that I don't understand, but some of the points made are interesting.
They calculate, based on the number of stars and estimated planets, that there are/were likely 36 intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way. The number actually ranges between 4 and over 200, but 36 is the number they settled on.
The catch is that based on the age of the galaxy, it is likely that the peak for intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way was 5 billion years ago. They also suggest that from the time that an intelligent species begins exploring the stars, it would take on average 3000 years to locate another civilization and another 2000 years after that to set up 2-way communications. Just not practical given our life spans. Basically, if ancient Egyptians started exploring the stars when the pyramids were constructed, we would be lucky to have finally established contact today. It would be a project that would take 150 generations to complete.
It's based on some assumptions, like the time from when genesis occurs to how long evolution takes to produce complex life, and then intelligent life. These assumptions are obviously Earth-centric, but there are reasons to believe certain biological principles would be universal as they are based on chemistry and physics principles that are universal. It also assumes that a planet where complex life evolves, there will be at least one species that evolves to be human-like intelligent life. Given the number of species that have ever existed on Earth and only one has evolved to that point, it might be a stretch to think that it is likely to occur on another planet. Evolution doesn't have a goal for higher intelligence, it's all about surviving in your habitat. It could be extremely lucky that the habitat here facilitated that once.
I wonder how many of those races would be considered delicious
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That indicates there must have been more than a just a little mixing. If it's 1-4% now, you could imagine it may have been higher in the further past.
If all humans were hybrids, the percentage of their DNA remaining wouldn't decrease that notably over time. This is an indication of only select specific populations were ever "hybrids", and those have long since been subsumed by regular homo sapiens over successive generations.
If all humans were hybrids, the percentage of their DNA remaining wouldn't decrease that notably over time. This is an indication of only select specific populations were ever "hybrids", and those have long since been subsumed by regular homo sapiens over successive generations.
Why wouldn't it decrease? You start at 50/50. Then if that hybrid and a homosapien reproduce, that's 25%, gradually it reduces, but you'd always have some level of mixing maintaining a low level of DNA. Obvious exception would be for people where they never overlapped. So not everyone would have it.
So technically we have hybrids and pure homosapiens now.
I'm no evolutionary biologist, so I could have this wrong, but I'm not sure it's entirely true only one intelligent species evolved on earth. Neanderthals and humans share a common ancestor, but if you imagine that they stayed separate for longer, to the point where mating didn't produce viable offspring, we could have had 2 intelligent species. Since they successfully mated, it all blended back to one.
Wandering a bit here comma but I just came across an article in my three year backlog
What if a civilization evolved on earth not tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, but hundreds of millions of years ago and there is simply no trace?
"[..]When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization—things like cities, factories, and roads—the geologic record doesn’t go back past what’s called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. [...]"
I must watch this movie, just for the triumphant Alien near fist pump at the end.
I think that's from The Twilight Zone, from the episode To Serve Man in the early 60's. IIRC, that was Richard Keil, pre-Jaws fame, as the alien. Man that show used to scare the #### out of me. Not as bad as Night Gallery, but scary as hell.
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Wandering a bit here comma but I just came across an article in my three year backlog
What if a civilization evolved on earth not tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, but hundreds of millions of years ago and there is simply no trace?
I love this theory so much .
There's a star trek episode about this. Dinosaurs wandering the stars.
They didn't develop or use plastics if they did though, we'd be able to detect that. And there's no evidence of climate impact like that humans have created in short periods of time.
Plus lack of artifacts. If they used metal we'd probably have found something wildly chronologically out of place.
I wouldn't be too shocked if there were Sumerian level civilizations existing beyond 10,000 years ago, but there is no way an advanced civilization wouldn't have left at least a fossil record when even simple organisms do that without even trying.
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I wouldn't be too shocked if there were Sumerian level civilizations existing beyond 10,000 years ago, but there is no way an advanced civilization wouldn't have left at least a fossil record when even simple organisms do that without even trying.
Even if an advanced civilization died on river beds like dinosaurs in order to be fossilized the chances of finding one and identifying it would be slim to none, we have found less than 0.000001% fossils of the trillions of dinosaurs that dominated this planet for 170 million years, science says it would take less than a million years for the earth to naturally destroy 99.99% of any evidence that humans ever existed.
If you think out of the box, a million years is nothing.
Does science say that? I'm not sure I believe that. In the past 100 years we have rapidly becoming the dominant species on Earth, molding all facets of the environment to our needs. And you are saying there would be zero evidence of that, despite us finding all manner of fossils from far far less dominant species?
Does science say that? I'm not sure I believe that. In the past 100 years we have rapidly becoming the dominant species on Earth, molding all facets of the environment to our needs. And you are saying there would be zero evidence of that, despite us finding all manner of fossils from far far less dominant species?
There would almost certainly be evidence of plastics use in geological layers, and likely runaway unexplained climate change. Other impacts that may be found are fossils, evidence of machine working or excavation in the form of deep mines. But, geologically speaking, we would very likely have seen some extremely confusing sedimentary layers SOMEWHERE on earth by now that would give us an inkling that we were not the first big thinkers on the planet.
Interestingly, there are several mass extinction/ climate change events that have no definite known cause. The largest in earth's history, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permia...tinction_event
~250 million years ago, it is quite far removed from us geologically, and was even ~20 million years prior to Dinosaurs existing.
There would almost certainly be evidence of plastics use in geological layers, and likely runaway unexplained climate change. Other impacts that may be found are fossils, evidence of machine working or excavation in the form of deep mines. But, geologically speaking, we would very likely have seen some extremely confusing sedimentary layers SOMEWHERE on earth by now that would give us an inkling that we were not the first big thinkers on the planet.
The problem with what you are suggesting is your reliance on your framing of what advanced technology would look like. You are reliant on thinking that advanced technology would be in forms similar to what we use today. I would counter that advanced technology from millennia ago would have a very different take on technology.
As was outlined in the Rogan discussion with Lazar, if we had gone down the technological branch that Tesla had envisioned (transmission of electricity through the atmosphere) our current world never would have had opportunity to exist. Microprocessors and cellular technology would never developed because of the disruptive/destructive nature of the free energy in the atmosphere. That is a recent example of technology branches that would have completely changed our world.
If you go back to the Lazar interview he even goes as far as admitting there was only one thing on the alien craft they immediately were able to comprehend how it worked, and it was a rudimentary hatch to a different level of the vehicle. Everything else was beyond them. There were no wires, no computers, no anything from our context of understanding technology. So if an older civilization took a different branch in technological development, we may not even recognize it if we were staring it in the face, because our context does not allow us to understand it. If an ancient civilization relied on similar technology it would slip right past us. We wouldn't understand the tech we were looking at. It also wouldn't show up in the climate record as the technology doesn't pollute or leave traces of its use. You would also have to take into consideration the numbers of humans at that time, the small populations, and the limited number of sites where technology like this would develop or be be created. We would be looking for a needle in a haystack, and not knowing what a needle looked like.
The same goes to your comments of not seeing anything in the geologic record. Do we know what we are looking for? Would the technology developed and used at the time impact the geologic record? If that civilization was tens of thousands of years before the Sumerians, would we really be able to find remnants of their civilization, especially if we have no context of their culture or how they worked with/against nature? It is amazing at how quickly nature can consume man made objects in our current context. If the context was different, we wouldn't know what to look for. We may also not even be looking in the right locations. Anyone who has seen the ruins of the Mayan or Inca empires will tell you how impressive they are. But anyone who has traveled the jungles of Central America will tell you that you could be feet from an unexcavated ruin and you wouldn't even know it. Nature does an incredibly good job of consuming what we build, even some of our most impressive structures.
I would also add that you do make it sound like we have excavated the whole planet and discovered all this is to know about the history of man and this planet itself. I would suggest that we haven't even scratched the surface. The civilizations we may be looking for may be under a hundred feet of water. That would make the discovery highly unlikely, especially with the context we rely upon.
Longtime SETI scientist and advocate Jill Tarter, for instance, wondered if the signatures of intelligent civilizations could be imprinted on neutrinos. She said that a leak of the radioactive isotope tritium, which has a short 12-year half-life, could also signal the presence of advanced life because (unless it’s near a supernova) it would have to come quite recently from a nuclear reactor.
Taking it further, she and others argued that artifacts of intelligent life would include many atmospheric and planetary changes that could only be accomplished by intelligent beings. For instance, the presence of unnatural pollutants such as chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) or sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) in an exoplanet atmosphere would, in this view, be an “artifact” of civilization.
“[Evidence of past] mining or quarrying could show up in gravimetry or magnetic surveys, even if an ancient mine was buried under the lunar regolith,” said Davies. “We could detect [alien] nuclear waste perhaps from a lunar satellite by looking for localized gamma ray sources from the lunar surface.”
“In searching for artifacts, one is looking for ‘something fishy’," said Davies. “But ‘fishiness’ requires a human decision in advance about a signature of artificiality. There are some simple examples, like right angle edges. But we have little idea what million year-old technology might look like.”
The problem with what you are suggesting is your reliance on your framing of what advanced technology would look like. You are reliant on thinking that advanced technology would be in forms similar to what we use today. I would counter that advanced technology from millennia ago would have a very different take on technology.
As was outlined in the Rogan discussion with Lazar, if we had gone down the technological branch that Tesla had envisioned (transmission of electricity through the atmosphere) our current world never would have had opportunity to exist. Microprocessors and cellular technology would never developed because of the disruptive/destructive nature of the free energy in the atmosphere. That is a recent example of technology branches that would have completely changed our world.
If you go back to the Lazar interview he even goes as far as admitting there was only one thing on the alien craft they immediately were able to comprehend how it worked, and it was a rudimentary hatch to a different level of the vehicle. Everything else was beyond them. There were no wires, no computers, no anything from our context of understanding technology. So if an older civilization took a different branch in technological development, we may not even recognize it if we were staring it in the face, because our context does not allow us to understand it. If an ancient civilization relied on similar technology it would slip right past us. We wouldn't understand the tech we were looking at. It also wouldn't show up in the climate record as the technology doesn't pollute or leave traces of its use. You would also have to take into consideration the numbers of humans at that time, the small populations, and the limited number of sites where technology like this would develop or be be created. We would be looking for a needle in a haystack, and not knowing what a needle looked like.
The same goes to your comments of not seeing anything in the geologic record. Do we know what we are looking for? Would the technology developed and used at the time impact the geologic record? If that civilization was tens of thousands of years before the Sumerians, would we really be able to find remnants of their civilization, especially if we have no context of their culture or how they worked with/against nature? It is amazing at how quickly nature can consume man made objects in our current context. If the context was different, we wouldn't know what to look for. We may also not even be looking in the right locations. Anyone who has seen the ruins of the Mayan or Inca empires will tell you how impressive they are. But anyone who has traveled the jungles of Central America will tell you that you could be feet from an unexcavated ruin and you wouldn't even know it. Nature does an incredibly good job of consuming what we build, even some of our most impressive structures.
I would also add that you do make it sound like we have excavated the whole planet and discovered all this is to know about the history of man and this planet itself. I would suggest that we haven't even scratched the surface. The civilizations we may be looking for may be under a hundred feet of water. That would make the discovery highly unlikely, especially with the context we rely upon.
The assumptions that an advanced society also wouldn't have been global in scale doesn't make much sense.
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The assumptions that an advanced society also wouldn't have been global in scale doesn't make much sense.
I don't recall saying they weren't global or had a global presence? We should consider that maybe they had no desire to be global? The technology may have existed to allow for them to have a global presence, but that same tech may have allowed them to stay in the same region where family units resided? Again, you're looking at this through a modern context and not the context of the time or that society's cultural norms. A culture may have traditions where they are in tune with their environment, so then choose to use technology in as non-destructive means as possible. I would expect this of agrarian cultures. I would think that truly "advanced" civilizations would be more cognizant of the impact they have to the world around them and do as much as possible to limit their impact and damage to the environment around them. I suspect that in the future, people will look back at how we treated our planet the past hundred to two hundred years and shake their heads, thinking we were no better than cavemen with iPhones. It is the height of our arrogance to think we are the apex anything and living at the pinnacle of civilization.
