| Home Forums Library Media Gallery Glossary Links |
 |
May 23, 2004
Life, Universe and Everything
There has been a several decades long debate about whether extra-terrestrial intelligence exists. As more data comes in about the nature of our universe, I think the odds are rapidly approaching 100% in the affirmative.
According to this recent story our universe is at least 78 billion light years radius or 156 billion light years across, minimum. The scientists are quick to point out this minimum size is based soley on a lack of instrument sensitivity, and a mild adjustment in instrument accuracy is likely to push this minimum to at least 192 billion light years across. They also point out the actual size of the universe is probably exponentially much larger.
Some people find these figures confusing since the age of our universe has been pinned down to 13.7 Billion years, or 14.7 Billion years according to this article. So they ask how could the universe expand to a size of at least 78 billion light years radius in only 13.7 billion years? The reason for this rapid early expansion is inflation. The speed of light wasn't violated, as it was the expansion of space itself that exceeded the speed of light.
So how big is our universe?
HUGE
So huge in fact that I'm going to have to play around with scales so you can get a better idea.
According to the standard inflationary model of cosmology, the visible portion of our universe; the one mapped by our telescopes is an infinitesimally small speck in a much larger universe of at least a 1035 light-year across! I admit this number is really, really big, and almost impossible to imagine. So lets shrink everything down, WAY down, just so we can get a better grasp of it. Let's imagine that the entire universe that we have seen in all the world telescopes, all the galaxies, all trillion of them, extending out 13 billion light years in every direction is shrunk down to the size of a golf ball. Now you are holding the entire visible universe in the palm of your hand. So how big is the actualy 1035 lightyear universe in comparison? If we do a volume calculation, the actual universe contains 1060 of those golf balls! Wow, I guess we didn't shrink things down far enough, but this will have to do. So how big a volume would 1060 golf balls fill up? Try a sphere 850 light years across! So imagine a mass of golf balls that big, and each one of those golf balls contains all the stars and galaxies that we can see through our telescopes.
This is still almost beyond imagining, so lets take a slightly different approach. Imagine you are travelling so fast that you can go from on end of the galaxy to the other in just one second. That's a speed of 100,000 ly/sec. At this speed the entire galaxy would be in reach before you can say the word "go", and wam, you're there. At this speed, you could travel to the nearest galaxy Andromeda in 22 seconds. And you could cross from end of the visible universe to the other in 72 hours. Continuing on at this speed, it would take 115 days to travel a trillion light years, 315 years to travel a quadrillion, and 315,000 years to travel a quintillion or 1018 light years. And yet you have barely moved at all in comparison to the universe which is 1035 light years across. So, lets speed up our warp vehicals again, so that we can travel a quintllion light years every second. At such a speed we could cross the known universe 100 million times in one second. Ok, so now that we are travelling at a speed that might as well be infinite, how long would it take to cross from one side of the univese to the other?
Some physicists such as Max Tegmark believe the universe is actually infinite in size. If the galactic density of our own neighborhood is typical across this entire domain, and according to the data from the satellite COBE it is, then our bubble-universe should contain at least another 10100 galaxies. This is such a large figure, that it's difficult to explain it. So to give you an idea of how large a number this is, it's far larger the the number of atoms that compose every object in our own visible universe, which as you remember extends out 13.2 billion light years in every direction. This too is very difficult to conceptualize. So we'll have to scale down even further to a grain of sand. The number of atoms composing a gran of sand is about 1023 atoms, or 100 trillion trillion atoms for each grain of sand on a typical beach. And just think how many grains of sand are on your typical beach, let alone something the size of the Sahara. And that's just on the surface of the earth. All the sand in the world composes much less than 0.00001% of the mass of the earth. The number of atoms composing the Earth is about 1060. And the Earth in turn is one tiny planet around a small star in an ordinary galaxy, among hundreds of billions of galaxies in our very local neigborhood, which we call the visible universe. So 10100 is a very very big number of galaxies! Adding it all together and you get more galaxies in our universe than there are atoms composing every object in our visible universe.
Even if intelligent life is very, very rare, a number as large as 10100 is still likely to produce an abundance of life throughout the universe. A place where countless lifeforms evolve beyond their womb planets into highly advanced space-faring civilizations.
For arguments sake, lets imagine that primitive life happens once in the lifetime of a trillion galaxies, and out of those only one in a trillion ever evolves out of its womb planet into a space-faring civilization. In this example then we are still left with an astounding 1075 advanced societies - more alien cultures than the number of atoms composing planet Earth! Again, for some perspective on such a gargantuan number, there are more advanced civilizations partying it up around the galaxies than there are atoms in every single grain of sand on all the beaches and deserts in the world, and then some. That's more advanced alien civilizations than all the atoms composing our entire solar system!
Assuming life were this rare (and that's very unlikely, even with the Rare Earth Hypothesis), then our nearest star-hopping neighbors would probably be trillions of light-years away. If somehow the speed of light remains a barrier, then we might as well be alone, since we could never make contact with each other before the universe ended. However, I think such barriers will be smashed shortly after the singularity bottleneck. My guess is shortly after a civilization passes through their singularity, the entire universe will be in reach. Already scientists have found loopholes in this light speed barrier. According to Michael Alcubierre, we could hypersurf space-time using exotic matter, allowing the craft to exceed the speed of light by any desirable amount. Then there are traversible wormholes. For an enlightening discussion of some possible scenarios, see Michael C. Price's Some Implications of Traversible Wormholes.
So the problem won't be reaching any part of the universe, that will be childs play. The real challenge will be deciding which parts of the universe to go to. The divide between what is available, and what is conceivable would be enormous! According to Michael Price, the number of civilizations making contact with each other would exceed the ability of any civilization to fathom. According to Price, the implications of such 'Contact' would be staggering, the number of alien cultures would be so large, that it is unlikely anyone could ever catalog all of them, even if they did have computers the size of Jupiter. No historian could encompass the sweep of history, no biologist catalog the species. In a profound sense we'll have returned to a vast ancient world, surrounded by distant lands populated with mythical and fantastic creatures. Construction of a single universal map would be impossible.
trans-species designation code (a seventy digit number!)
she would never, ever find her way home again.
None of her descriptions of where she comes from
would relate to anything anyone else knows."
The culture shock of trying to absorb such a vast amount of new data would take close to eternity... an eternity of never ending expansion, novelty and adventure.
Related Posts
Singularity Exo-Paleontology
Exotic Civilizations: Beyond Kardaschev
Sans-Ceiling Hypothesis
Listening to: Ozric Tentacles - Erpsongs - Tidal Otherness.
Posted by paul at May 23, 2004 11:26 AM | TrackBackYes, I think there's a very very very high chance that there is intelligent life, even life as intelligent as or more intelligent than we are. However, I highly doubt that any of them will be create space-faring civilizations. Here's why.
Civilization, the organizational structures that support it, and the mindframe necessary to actually allow it to happen without realizing that it goes against almost everything that our brains and bodies are programmed for, happened because of a long string of accidents, drastic climatological changes, and other such situations. Civilization wasn't a natural offshoot of human history, quite the opposite.
Homo Sapiens has been around a few hundred thousand years, and human ancestors have been around for millions, but civilization, government, organized religion, and agriculture have only been around for 8-10,000 years - the evolutionary blink of an eye - and we didn't evolve into it. We are, physically and psychocemically, exactly the same as our ancestors of 300,000 years ago.
Therefore, even though a humanlike species (or something much much more intelligent) could possibly living very happily on another planet or a million other planets, I highly doubt that they have or will ever reach the "civilized" point that allows for something like space travel.
At least, I hope they don't. One is enough.
Posted by: george at May 22, 2004 09:34 PMGeorge,
Your arguments don't hold sway under the onslaught of extremely large hyper-exponential numbers. You do understand the magnitude of such a number do you not? :)
Using combinatoric probability statistics there are more chances for space faring ET's than there are molecular systemic combinations on a planetary surface. This means the odds of there being a space faring civilization is far greater than you being alive to finish reading this sentence.
Posted by: Paul Hughes at May 23, 2004 12:02 AMhey, I completely understand that there's a POSSIBILITY that it's happened.
I'm just saying that according to what we know so far (which, I'll grant, isn't actually alot)
in order to have civilization, you have to have the human race, as it was at that time, in the situation it was in then, in that part of the planet, in those climatological conditions, with just the right number of people, and just the right amount of intelligence, just the right crops that can be stored correctly and for the right amount of time in order to allow stratification of society...
well, you get my point.
Posted by: george at May 23, 2004 12:09 AMI get your point, however the idea that any intelligent species on another planet would have to pass through something almost or nearly identical to homo sapiens is extremely anthropocentric. The space of possible intelligent life forms is exponentially greater than the numner of lifeforms on this planet, including the millions of varieties micro-organisms.
Posted by: Paul Hughes at May 23, 2004 12:16 AMYeah, but I think it' sjust the opposite of anthropocentric.
I don't think that there's no way any other species can be intelligent enough to create civilization - I think civilization is what's wrong with our species, and I think it was a huge random mistake predicated by so many factors that the chances of it happening again (though not zero) are very very very very low.
I just pray that I'm right, because if another species has mastered space travel, we're probably on the way to being destroyed.
Posted by: george at May 23, 2004 10:57 AMGeorge,
If another species has mastered space travel, there is almost no chance at all that we will be destroyed, quite the contrary actually. Why? Because how could any civilization surpass the singularity bottleneck and retain any degree of malevolence? It would be almost impossible, as such a malevolent technological singularity would self-destruct. That's the beauty of it, if a singularity is reached and the species passes through it safely, the odds are highly in favor of it being benevolent, much more benevolent in fact that we can even conceive. See Eli Yudokowsky's Friendly AI, and the Hedonistic Imperative.
Posted by: Paul Hughes at May 23, 2004 11:10 PMAh... the vastness of space. I have fond memories of when I was around 13 years old, hanging out with friends in the hills under the night sky, beginning to ponder the imponderable physicality of space. My favorite was "If there is an edge to space, what's on the other side?"
Considering space travel over incomprehensible distances, I like Grant Morrison's notion of what the singularity might entail. He envisions our current 4D, linear time reality as a larval stage. The singularity brings the mutation into 5+ Dimensional space when we step outside of time, free to view history as an open line set before us. We can re-enter at any point in spacetime. If spacetime is illusory, then we should be free to move within the plenum as we will. Distance would be inconsequential.
Posted by: lvx23 at May 23, 2004 11:14 PMLVX23,
Yes, of course! I was leaving the idea open as to HOW we might traverse such distances. As I mentioned getting from one place to another will be childs play for a sufficiently advanced intelligence. The challenge will be deciding where to go, as the space of choices will be almost infinite, compared to our relatively finite minds, even if they are super-dense jupiter brains. I agree with you about the 5D thing. My conjecture has always been that shortly after a technological singularity said activities of such intelligence will rapidly proceed into a higher ontological domain - what I have called, Ontological Transcendence, rendering them both invisible and incomprehensible to any species still in the previous domain.
Posted by: Paul Hughes at May 23, 2004 11:19 PMYahoo artivle: "Universe Measured: We're 156 Billion Light-years Wide!"
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=96&e=1&u=/space/20040524/sc_space/universemeasuredwere156billionlightyearswide
Paul,
I understand that if they've passed through the singularity they'll likely be benevolent, but who says they have to pass through the singularity to master space travel?
Either way, I stand by my point.
Posted by: george at May 24, 2004 12:28 PMHow could they master space travel without passing through a singularity, defined as self-augmenting intelligence?
Even at current technology we can barely keep tin cans in orbit. Without something like nanotechnology the space frontier will remain a bastion of large, expensive government sponsored boondoggles with no sustainable infrastructure.
And what about traveresing interstellar distances? The shear scale of engineering required to pull that off would be astounding. There is no way they could exercise such a level of technological sophistication without also having the abilty to create hyperbolic bootstrapping intelligence.
Therefore, interstellar travel means they have survived a technological singularity, which is the natural outcome of rising intelligence and molecular/atomic control via nanotechnology. And unless they have figured out the malevolence problem that we currently suffer with, there is no way they could survive proliferating nanotech.
Posted by: Paul Hughes at May 24, 2004 02:22 PMThe article makes sense to me. However, I still think that we are alone in our galaxy.
The nearest ETIs are probably in that galaxy about 10-20million LY away.
You're going to need one hell of a warp-drive or traversable wormhole to get to them.
At least it means we have several galaxies-worth of real-estate all to ourselves.
Posted by: Kurt at May 26, 2004 11:47 AMThey say life formed on Earth almost as soon as the Earth itself formed, about 4 billion years ago. This tells us that life is common and will form in any evironment that it possibly can. Complex life formed about 650 million years ago, and climbed up onto the land about 400 million years ago.
Anythin resembling human civilization has been around for about 10,000 years.
Lets say that there are 1 million Earth-like planets running around goldilocks orbits in our galaxy. Almost all of these will have some form of life. About 150,000 of them will have complex life, 100,000 with complex life on land. Only 2-3 of these planets will anything resembling the Greeks or Romans on them. We are the only ones to have technology, and we still have not made it into space in a big way.
Either way you look at it. 1 out of 400,000 Earthlike worlds; with the large moon (this is important) and the gas giants in the right orbits and of the right size (this is also important); is likely to have anything remembling civilization. The chance of a dual Earth-moon system is, at best, one in a thousand.
This means that one in every 400 million Earth-like worlds is going to have an alien civilization.
I think garden worlds are common. I think ETI is rare (but DOES exist).
We are alone in the galaxy.
Maybe those UFOs are from the galaxy somewhere past Andromeda.
Posted by: Kurt at May 26, 2004 12:02 PMFirst, I don't think that ANYONE should be using the word "can't." If the universe is as vast as this article suggests, then ANYTHING is possible ONCE. To say that there CAN'T be space faring civilizations BEFORE the singularity, is as small minded as saying there CAN'T be space faring civilizations at all. In a universe as vast as ours, there could be monkeys opening worm holes for all we know. So just as a suggestion, don't use the word "can't."
Posted by: Scott at May 26, 2004 12:24 PMMilan M. Cirkovic the cosmologist has responded to this article courtesy of George P. Dvorsky
~~~
Well, in my view the seriousness of FP is large in all cosmological models and only weakly dependent on the spatial size of the universe. The reason is, of course, that the Milky Way is, imho, sufficiently large for the paradox to be very serious, even if no other galaxy existed in the universe. Of course, the larger the universe is, the problem does become somewhat more serious, but this is just a pedantic reasoning: in my view the difference between 95% and 99% is really not very important... Thus, from my personal viewpoint ironically (since I was trained as cosmologist, and did my PhD in cosmology), the link of astrobiology and cosmology is very weak one, indeed.
(Of course, if you believe the sort of "rare Earth" arguments of Ward and Brownlee, than it becomes somewhat more important, but I personally don't buy that. Opportunities for life and increase in diversity and disparity are so big even in the history of the Solar System, that it is by far premature, not to mention epistemologically unsound, to speculate that we're unique in any reasonable sense.)
Posted by: Milan M. Cirkovic at May 27, 2004 08:33 PMI agree with Milan. I was using the rarity hypothesis to demonstrate that the universe is so big, that even the most CONSERVATIVE astrobiologist theories of the non-existance of ET's are weak. So Fermi's Paradox is a serious issue. I'm sticking with my ontological transcendence model for now.
Posted by: Paul Hughes at May 27, 2004 08:37 PMAnd I still believe the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42....The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Posted by: Magik at May 28, 2004 07:34 AMCould not "civilization" been given to us?
PLEASE GIVE ME THE NAME ETC OF THE AUTHOR OF THIS ARTICLE. I WANT TO USE SOME OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED AND I WISH TO PAY CREDIT TO THE AUTHOR!
JOHN HADJIMINAS, MD
PROFESSOR EMERITUS (PHYSIOLOGY)
ATHENS' UNIVERSITY MEDICAL SCHOOL
ATHENS, GREECE
Posted by: PROF. JOHN HADJIMINAS, MD at June 12, 2004 01:49 AMCitation details: me too! I first read this post on another message board (fermi parydox www.tribe.net with link back)and its a great piece... the author has definate put the whole issue into perspective and in plain English.. well done!
If your the author Paul could you supply your citation details.
Posted by: malcolm mcewen at July 22, 2004 03:53 PMMalcolm,
The article is based on several articles, all with links above. The rest of it is my own calculations and me tieing it all together in a hopefully novel way. If there is any specific fact that you would like a citation or more background I would be all too happy to provide it for you. :)
Paul
Posted by: Paul Hughes at July 22, 2004 06:37 PMur crazy people!
Posted by: xryxzmmn3390 at August 3, 2004 07:33 PMu are vall going to die!