Aliens Cause Global Warming
http://www.crichton-official.com:80/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html

I highly recommend that one AND his speech (nothing to do with this thread, it’s just a great speech),
Complexity Theory and Environmental Management
http://www.crichton-official.com:80/speech-complexity.html

As such, humanity is a marvelous, yet natural, inevitable outgrowth of the universe’s functioning. This is so much of an improvement over the environmentalist attitude that humanity is a cancer plaguing the planet and the world would probably be better off without us.

In “The Singularity is Near” Kurzweill revisits the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox then argues humanity may well be the first species to achieve sufficiently advanced technology to reach the stars. He argues that technology advances not linearly but exponentially. Thus advances come faster and faster until the possibilities are beyond our current understanding, i.e. the Singularity.

So his argument is once we reach lift-off, we will explore our galaxy rather quickly in a matter of a few hundred-thousand years. To Kurzweill the Fermi Paradox means we are probably the first.

Kurzweill is worth reading. I think he is overly optimistic about the speed of advancement but I can’t discount him entirely.

And a good discussion that points out similar problems with the Fermi Paradox points out that

“Moving forward, we have no choice but to get completely speculative.”

is “The Fermi Paradox,” at

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

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Rufus, plenty to chew on there.

The tyranny of numbers tells one, probabilistically intelligent life MUST exist elsewhere in the Universe (as others have pointed out), but nature and chance are not slaves to probability.

I’m very open to the idea, but I also think it’s entirely possible Earth is the only planet where living things evolved to build machines that escape their planet’s gravity, or send communication to space via radiation. So many things had to happen to get us here, and many of them are of no interest, or even antithetical to natural selection. Biology doesn’t particularly view intelligence as a great advantage. Thinking takes a lot of energy.

Electrity has been in the natural world long before homo sapiens evolved, yet 99.9999% of our ancestors made no attempt to understand its nature. So even if a planet evolves life with an intelligence to comprehend the natural world and a physique to manipulate nature (porpoises are smart, but they’ll never build a simple telegraph, or even mine copper to transmit the signals), it’s very possible the innovation to get to space travel may never take place.

Pharoah’s Generals in 3,000 B.C. knew everything Washington did about moving men and horses in 1776. You could send either in a time machine in either direction and almost nothing would be different. 5,000 years of civilizations, cultures, religions, monarchs, republics, wars, famines, pandemics.. and no science approaching anything capable of leaving our atmosphere. Then we started down that path. For no obvious reason. To quote Faraday, “Of what use is a newborn child?”

I’m not convinced that if life evolves it’s an inexorable march towards intelligence and discovery. If you take a pure, statistical approach one would have to conclude trilobites have done much better on Earth than humans. Nature, Evolution, God?… loved trilobites.

https://xkcd.com/384/

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The Drake Equation and Fermi’s paradox both use probabilities — that is, “probabilities” in the mathematical sense — that are whatever anybody wants to plug into them, basically.

Forbes has an article, “The Drake Equation Is Broken; Here’s How To Fix It,” that’s interesting and does point out some of the parameters that with improved technology might be a little narrower than just “whatever X pulled out of his hat,” but in its conclusion it still relies on probabilities, which at best only suggest leads to follow in investigations of realities — of what is or is not.

And a good discussion that points out similar problems with the Fermi Paradox points out that

Moving forward, we have no choice but to get completely speculative.

is “The Fermi Paradox,” at

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

He wrote several books on UFOs. It’s tough to summarize Vallee or pick a best book. As a start I would recommend “Messengers of Deception,” which goes into psychological/political angles.

The flying-saucer UFO community didn’t appreciate Vallee had gone off message on the aliens-spacecraft narrative they preferred.

I met Vallee in 1983 when I worked at my first software startup. Vallee had an office down the hall. His Ph.D was in computers and he had morphed from an astronomer to UFO researcher to venture capitalist. I told him I appreciated his work, shook his hand and that was it.