Star Trek's Prime Directive and the Fermi Paradox

[Rhykker]

Star Trek's Prime Directive and the Fermi Paradox

From the Drake Equation to the Fermi Paradox, we look at some reasons why we may not have been contacted by some of the intelligent life forms that supposedly exist in the universe.

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[Kieve]

The biggest problem with trying to analyze the question of "Why haven't they contacted us?" is trying to ascribe human logic, perspective, and rationality to an entity or collective that may not conform to any of those things.
Just to pose one example - suppose they're of a cold-blooded or insect-like nature and regard us with the same mindset we might look upon a termite mound? "Sure they can build, but that doesn't make them sentient."

Ultimately, I don't think we'll ever know for certain unless we can make contact and establish clear lines of communication. Given that our species has a few thousand languages and dialects on this mud-ball alone, getting a straight answer may prove the more challenging obstacle.

 

[Anachronism]

Interesting stuff. Although, I would counter that Kirk, Picard et al tended to treat the Prime Directive as a guideline at best, not the first and most important rule of Starfleet. I'm relatively certain that if you went through Star Trek and worked out a ratio of times the Prime Directive was ignored versus times the Prime Directive was obeyed, the former would massively outweigh the latter.

Now, aliens might well be rather more professional than the various captains of the Enterprise, but if they're out exploring space they're bound to be at least a little curious.

 

[RA92]

Maybe a sentient pulsating star has been trying to communicate with us for years...

Maybe a few black holes or any other massive bodies that emits no radiation (dark matter?) are actual stars covered in a Dyson Spheres...

 

[Keith K]

'The zoo hypothesis' is a standing theorized resolution to the Fermi Paradox and is included in the Wikipedia article on the Fermi Paradox, specifically referencing the Prime Directive from Star Trek as an example. It even has its own separate wikipedia page.

 

[Tohron]

Charles Stross gave another interesting answer to the Fermi Paradox in Accelerando: moving is too inconvenient. In that book, the successors to humanity were converting matter in the Solar System into a giant, solar-powered Dyson Sphere/supercomputer, on which all of their intelligences were running.

However, inside the supercomputer, communication is extremely fast, and lots of power is readily available. Yet, any attempt to send out a colonization mission elsewhere would involve outside communication slowing down by several orders of magnitude - and at that point, the AIs had become adapted to the high-bandwidth environment. Thus, advanced civilizations were predisposed to remain in their own solar system.

 

[Something Amyss]

Weird timing, since this just came up in conversation yesterday.

Maybe other civilizations exist, but there are technological or economical hurdles to galaxy-wide expansion that cannot be overcome.

This is usually my first thought on the matter. We don't even know that interstellar travel is reliably possible, let alone feasible. And space is big. Really big.

The biggest problem with trying to analyze the question of "Why haven't they contacted us?" is trying to ascribe human logic, perspective, and rationality to an entity or collective that may not conform to any of those things.

And that's another bit. Hell, even the Prime Directive is based on our own historical and anthropological studies. A culture without that baggage might view things differently, for better or worse. On top of your termite example, a species might simply not have compunctions with interfering, but might choose to hinder us. If so, they might not be overt. Or they may not care about other civilisations, which isn't entirely divorced from humanity as we do have isolationist groups. Maybe there are cultural or even religious taboos. Maybe they're just too alien for us to understand them. Hell, maybe that goes both ways. Wouldn't that be funny?

Now, aliens might well be rather more professional than the various captains of the Enterprise, but if they're out exploring space they're bound to be at least a little curious.

Or they might lack the compassion that leads to most of Kirk and Picard's interference. Even on the shows, these are labeled as very "human" elements.

Or they just don't care what happens to a bunch of naked apes. We spent hundreds of years dehumanising people simply because of our varied skin pigments, so imagine what you could do with a species that was more significantly different, like a bunch of fleshy monkeys who still think mobile phones are a pretty neat idea.

 

[Thunderous Cacophony]

Interesting stuff. Although, I would counter that Kirk, Picard et al tended to treat the Prime Directive as a guideline at best, not the first and most important rule of Starfleet. I'm relatively certain that if you went through Star Trek and worked out a ratio of times the Prime Directive was ignored versus times the Prime Directive was obeyed, the former would massively outweigh the latter.

Now, aliens might well be rather more professional than the various captains of the Enterprise, but if they're out exploring space they're bound to be at least a little curious.

That might because of the rule of good TV: Having the Enterprise passively watch events unfold on the planets below would be a very different show (although I'd love to see a Kirk\Spock version of MST3K riffing on developing civilizations). If you went through all the canon of Star Trek and tracked every time that any ship followed the Prime Directive, the numbers would be a little more representative of the original idea.

 

[Skunktrain]

One thing I've never heard anyone say in these discussions before (although I doubt I'm the first to think of it) is biological/habitat based barriers. For instance: imagine a nearby planet with hyper-intelligent dolphins. Space travel, radio, and electronics would all be very difficult technologies to develop. Living, as we do, in an oxygen-rich environment made detecting electrical charges easy; we can be sure the ancient Greeks had and they may not have been the first. Considering that it took us more than 2000 years to understand and use these forces, how much longer would our theoretical dolphin-people take to notice in an environment that would ground out most tests to confirm the existence of such things? Radio waves don't travel well underwater so they would be unlikely to detect them, let alone consider them a technology worth pursuing. Add that radio transmission and visible light are the only things we can detect at this rage and we could look right at them and not notice. Forget space travel, the bodies of aquatic creatures would be insanely hard to accelerate to escape velocity without destroying and imagine if the Apollo program had to be launched from underwater and carry enough water to house three dolphins for two weeks. I'm sure it would take us decades to adapt such a thing from our functioning technology.

However, all of this falls to one important fact: humans are incredibly adapted to using tools. Even infants can grasp the concept of tool use. A species without hands, no matter how intelligent, will fall behind in abstract tool use. Not to suggest that they couldn't or wouldn't have tools but rather that any tools they might have would likely be highly specialized.

Just a thought anyway.

 

[medv4380]

I wonder, where did you get that figure, that 5-50 mil years should be enough to colonize the galaxy?

It comes from Fermi [http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/cosmo/lectures/lec28.html] himself, see the linked lecture. Based on reasonable limits like that the Speed of Light cannot be beaten you should be able to explore with a Von Neumann Probe every single star in our solar system in about 4 million years. From there it's just selecting the best places to go first. At a minimum our galaxy should be cluttered with Von Neumann probes from other intelligent species like ours.

However, we don't see these in our own system. You'd think that the earth would actually be flagged as interesting if these probes existed. This removes the argument that Space is just TOO BIG. Anyone who uses the TOO BIG argument is failing to grasp what the paradox presents.

The basis of the fermi paradox is that one of our base assumptions is completely wrong which presents one of our assumptions is actually a great filter. The assumption which is most likely wrong is that something is Ordinary about the condition of life.

This could be that ...
1) Life might be extremely rare to the point were it boarders unique.
2) Multicellular life might be extremely rare bordering on unique.
3) Intelligent life like ours might be extremely rare bordering on unique.
4) Interstellar travel may have a barrier yet undiscovered making travel impossible.

If we ever find life in our solar system that evolved separately away from the Earth like on Titan and Europa then we can conclude that 1 and 2 are false. If 1 and 2 are false it's easy to see that 3 should also be false, but that would still be an assumption.

Some people are desperate to prove 1 - 3 are false because one of the valid hypothesis solutions to the Fermi Paradox is the God Hypothesis. But even that falls to the simple logic of why make a universe so big and only put one planet with life in it.

4 is the most likely the be the actual issue, but if it's not that then we fall into the Zoo hypothesis which falls pray to other failings.

An off shoot of the Zoo Hypothesis is the Petri Dish experiment. Ether done by God, or by Alien Life. Alien's, or God would be interested in the Earth as an experiment to observe the evolution of life in general. Evidence for this is in the Nemesis Hypothesis. We have a scheduled Mass Extinction event every 26 Million Years. It's part of what Mass Effect was based on but they shrunk the time scale down to thousands of years. Initially it was thought to be a Star but a few years ago it was proven that the periodic nature of the extinctions exceed known limits that would be on a near by star. Even if the star existed it should have had its orbit in the galaxy altered slightly over the last 700 million years.

Yet others claim the extinction events are a miss read of the data, but it's clearly still debatable ether way.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Perhaps we have made contact at the level of MiB status, wherein "The person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it!" - Agent K
Considering how we handle gender relations, sexual orientation, race relations, even culture relations, alien contact would probably be an absolute shitstorm the moment someone from the radical religions decided to insult the extra-terrestrials. So if thats the reason, I support it. We hardly get along with next door neighbors and classmates, roomates, etc. How the hell could we manage not to insult another race of beings?

*-----*

We're 1 planet in a galaxy, a drop in the bucket of water dumped into the ocean. I also read something about our TV/radio signals end up degenerating bad enough not to be heard outside our own system or at least come out garbled. Older transmissions, maybe but we've done a lot of changes in narrowing our broadcast focus so signals don't extend as far as they would have in the fledgling years.

Basically there are innumerable reasons we haven't made contact, and just as many reasons why they may not have, and just as many against us ever making contact. *shrug*

 

[DrOswald]

Some people are desperate to prove 1 - 3 are false because one of the valid hypothesis solutions to the Fermi Paradox is the God Hypothesis. But even that falls to the simple logic of why make a universe so big and only put one planet with life in it.

To be fair, the god hypothesis does not necessarily require that only 1 planet have life. Many religions believe that there will be an end of the world scenario and very soon (within hundreds of years.) If this is the case we could have intelligent life in many many systems without any of them ever able to communicate with us. Basically, god made many systems many instances of intelligent life and the rest of the systems are buffer systems meant specifically to prevent interaction between civilizations. All civilizations are scheduled to end before they can really get going on space travel.

Also, the logic that god would not make an entire universe to put only one sentient species in it is problematic because it is ascribing human values of efficiency to a being that is supposed to be omnipotent. Human limits on something that has no limitations. Efficiency doesn't really come into play for an omnipotent individual. If there is a god and that god is truly omnipotent then it is entirely possible he created the vast universe just so we would be able to see something pretty when we look at the sky. For an omnipotent individual it would be no more difficult that not creating the universe.

 

[zumbledum]

the huge sucking chest wound in the fermi paradox is assuming intelligent life could of existed for that long. it cant. you need to go through a lot of generations of stars to build up the more complex elements to make complex life. even though it took us 14bn years to get here we might be the first or among them.

the other big issue is "intelligent life" however much of a misnomer that is, is not usually a good evolutionary option. it took some pretty specific conditions to pay off in us.


i think we will find a galaxy with life all over it. i just dont think the odds on any intelligent life evolving is going to be high.

 

[Scorpid]

To me the question isn't are we alone but is there life out there that is as sentient as humans. I mean in the entire history of Earth there has only been one humanity. Raptors didn't contemplate mathmatics, chimpanzees don't sit around communicating their philosophies back and forth, crabs and jellyfish don't make tools or hyper complex structures. Is there even another species in earths history that was ever so ungifted in physical advantages but rose to the very top of the food chain?

 

[mirage202]

The idea that in everything 'out there' we may be alone terrifies me far more than the idea that we are not alone.

No matter what happens, whatever perceptions keep shifting or scientific discovers made/proven/disproved, my brain just can't accept that fact that in the entire universe we could be the only existing life.

 

[medv4380]

Some people are desperate to prove 1 - 3 are false because one of the valid hypothesis solutions to the Fermi Paradox is the God Hypothesis. But even that falls to the simple logic of why make a universe so big and only put one planet with life in it.

To be fair, the god hypothesis does not necessarily require that only 1 planet have life.

You miss understand. It's not that the God Hypothesis has the requirement. If life is ordinary and the evolutionary process can occur without external intervention then the universe must have many planets with life. If the universe only has one then it is much more likely that the God Hypothesis is true no matter how unlikely it may seem. It would be strong evidence of God even though the opposite would not be strong evidence against God.

 

[kurupt87]

I didn't end up posting in the Drake Equation thread but did anyone else oppose or at least mention the absurdly long estimated lifetime of civilisation the article gave? I remember it being in the millions, which caused me to spit out my tea at the time (considering the relatively grounded nature of the rest of the article).

But yeah, the first response couldn't say it better in my opinion. Aliens be aliens; we have enough trouble trying to predict or even understand what China is going to do, let alone an entirely different sentient/sapient/whateverthefuck-ient species.

 

[DrOswald]

Some people are desperate to prove 1 - 3 are false because one of the valid hypothesis solutions to the Fermi Paradox is the God Hypothesis. But even that falls to the simple logic of why make a universe so big and only put one planet with life in it.

To be fair, the god hypothesis does not necessarily require that only 1 planet have life.

You miss understand. It's not that the God Hypothesis has the requirement. If life is ordinary and the evolutionary process can occur without external intervention then the universe must have many planets with life. If the universe only has one then it is much more likely that the God Hypothesis is true no matter how unlikely it may seem. It would be strong evidence of God even though the opposite would not be strong evidence against God.

So the theory is that extreme rareness of life indicates a god? Eh, seems suspect to me. Even if the conditions to form life were so unlikely that it only happened once in our galaxy that is no good indication of god. There are enough galaxies out there that it could still be a freak chance sort of thing.

Edit: to be clear, I am familiar with a different god hypothesis, maybe it is named something else, but it is basically that all civilizations are kept apart by god. If life is common but never interacts it would indicate that something is preventing interaction. The hypothesis is that something is a god.