Off-Topic: Against Tribalism

I'm trying to avoid rants in this blog, but this entry is pretty close to one.  In a rant, you allow the lines between reasoning and value judgments to blur, and the tendency is to offer no apologies for this. However, I would like to apologize for just that in the mostly off-topic post that follows: I'm not making much of an effort here to distinguish my emotional aversions from my evaluation of fact.

Please Join our G+ community

Just a quick note for those of you on Google Plus that a Wow! Signal podcast community has been created.   Feel free to join. 

The Fermi Paradox - Part 1

This post is intended for those unfamiliar with the Fermi paradox. If you've already read a thing or two about it, I invite you to skip this one and wait until Part 2.

This is a companion post to Episode 2 of the Wow! Signal Podcast.  You can go over there and get the audio version with cool music.

For the purpose of this post, we are going to take as a given the null hypothesis about alien visitors to Earth - that this has never happened.  This is what the controversial astrophysicist Michael Hart called Fact A.

It turns out that accepting Fact A presents an interesting dilemma; first recognized by the distinguished physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950.  The unsolved problem is, that we would expect alien visitors on our planet, given a set of very reasonable assumptions. It’s really not such an extraordinary claim, after all. Assuming Fact A, this presents us with a puzzle. Either one or more assumptions have to go, or something really weird is going on.

Douglas Adams once famously wrote:

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

But space is also hugely old The entire history of Homo Sapiens is only about one twenty-thousandth the age of the Earth, and the age of the Earth is less than a third the age of the universe. What would seem to be likely is that at least local to our galaxy, time eventually overwhelms space with respect to galactic colonization.

Searching for Bracewell Probes - part 2

In the first part, we talked about some of the variables that I think could control the observables of a Bracewell Probe.  This is essentially a first, crude move toward mapping our ignorance of these hypothetical machines.  We can't know what Bracewell probes are yet, or even if they exist at all, but perhaps we can constrain or at least make some reasonable assumptions about what they could be.

Advanced Civilizations in Decline - part 1

If something can't go on forever, it won't.  Simple, right?  And yet, the notion that things will always continue to trend as they are is a common fallacy, and leads to real estate bubbles and the collapse of monetary systems.

Moore's Law

In our times, we tend to think of technological progress as something that only accelerates forward.  First we master materials, then energy (thanks to our improved materials), then information (thanks to cheap, abundant, widely distributed energy), and then, possibly something beyond information. We now casually toss around references to Moore's Law, which isn't a law at all, but simply an observation of how our technology continues to improve by some fairly simple metrics: the number of transistors on a chip, the cost of a gigabyte of data storage, and so on. We expect these trends to continue until we have reached a point beyond which no prediction is even theoretically possible.

However, this is a relatively recent trend, and we forget how many ancient civilizations had sophisticated capabilities that have been lost to us, or that we have had to recreate from scratch. They rose, they fell, they lost the recipe. Historians continue to analyze why the great civilizations declined, but once large, complex internal structures form, they begin to differentiate into interest groups that no longer have it as their principal goal to perform their greater function, but rather to maintain or grow their share of the resources flowing through the machinery. When a system fails this way, we call this "collapsing under its own weight."