A Brief Thought About the Fermi Paradox

When I looked into some of the ancient astronauts stuff a few weeks ago, I came across a lot of discussions of the Fermi paradox. I think I've come up with a possible explanation that I haven't seen before.

The argument made by Enrico Fermi was that while it would take millions of years for a technologically advanced civilization to explore the entire Milky Way galaxy, this is not very long compared to the billions of years that the galaxy has existed. Therefore, if a technologically advanced civilization existed in the Milky Way galaxy, then they should be here by now.

A number of suggestions have been put forward to explain why we see no evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations. This range from, we are the first and only civilization to they are hiding from us. You can read about some more proposals on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

A few days ago I came up with another explanation. Some time ago I came across an article that suggested that there could well be planets that are more suited to life than Earth (see: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/01/140117-exoplanets-superhabitable-planets-space-astronomy-science/). I thought, if extraterrestrial civilizations arose on a planet more suited to life than Earth, they might very well look at Earth as uninhabitable and pass it by.

Our space programs have sent probes to planets that we don't think are inhabitable. But, would a civilization that had visited many solar systems still want to explore uninhabited planets? I suspect that if we explored other solar systems, that after a period where we did explore uninhabitable planets, we would come to see that as a waste of time. I've made the assumption that life on an Earth-like planet is sufficiently rare that an extraterrestrial civilization is unlikely to find a case before they give up on Earth-like planets.

An extraterrestrial civilization could have explored many Earth-like planets and never found one that was inhabited. If they saw Earth from a nearby solar system, they might well conclude that there wasn't any point to actually visit. They might think: if you've seen one Earth, you've seen them all.

The main objection I see to this idea is that it assumes that the civilization had a low level of curiosity. For a civilization that had decided to undertake interstellar travel, this seems unlikely. I'm not sure we can discard the idea based on this objection, especially since, as of now, we can't prove it one way or another.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

My Own Conflicts

My wife's health has taken a turn for the worse and making her life the best it can be is my primary goal. I still want to work on my films and stories.

My feelings about my work are conflicted. On one hand, I feel like any work I do takes time and effort away from my wife. On the other hand, I feel it is important to have a focus on positive things. I do gain satisfaction from my work that I believe will give me more strength when my wife needs it. Nevertheless, I still feel guilty when I work on my projects.

I have decided that I will try to do some work on my projects. Naturally, with my main focus on my wife, I will need to interrupt my projects frequently. I will have to choose my projects carefully, so that they are projects I can drop and pick up again. I already have many unfinished projects.

Many artists use the trials in their lives as fodder for their work. I can't do that now; maybe I never will. My post last week generated a higher than normal level of interest, so maybe I can take direction from that.

The important thing is to seek happiness and contentment as much as we can. In the past when I had troubled times I used to say to myself, "Find an excuse to be happy everyday, even if it was only for a minute."

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

New Ideas for Transportation Planning Stories

Although "The Barrier" is still a work in progress, I have started to think about other transportation planning stories. I have two ideas that I want to consider. Do either of them appeal to you?

Defending What You Don't Agree With

The first is about a transportation planner who is assigned to develop a project he sees as unnecessary. At first he tries to convince people it is the wrong idea, but he is forced to continue. Because he isn't sold on the project himself, he doesn't try hard to make it work. This gets him in trouble with his bosses.

Threatened with dismissal, he makes a more concerted effort. His new approach is more effective at selling the idea. Unfortunately, others start to see the proposal as his pet project. This leads to personal attacks on his character. Ultimately the politicians reject the project. He sees this as a personal failure. Perversely, he also sees it as a personal success, since he was opposed to the project.

The essence of story is conflict and I think this idea does provide several levels of conflict. The protagonist has internal conflicts with conflicting goals. The protagonist faces a conflict between self preservation and professionalism. The protagonist faces interpersonal conflicts on two side; proponents of the projects and critics of the project. The situation would force the protagonist into some personal growth to deal with the conflicts.

Monitoring Program

This idea isn't as well developed as the previous one. It comes from my personal experiences. The last major project I worked before I left the field was to develop a program to monitor the implementation of the transportation plan. This generated a lot of conflict.

While I was only assigned to the project in the last few years of my transportation planning career, I had advocated for the idea from very early in my career. My earlier efforts were not very effective.

I wanted to put this all behind me, but I recently saw an article by Bent Flyvbjerg ( see: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/community/people/bent-flyvbjerg and http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/ ). While I was still at work, I read some of his work that criticised transportation planning and forecasting.  The article, "How Planners Deal With Uncomfortable Knowledge" (see http://eureka.sbs.ox.ac.uk/4662/ ), touches on some of the conflicts that I ran into.

The problem with this idea is that I find it "too close for comfort." Many people would see this as a good reason to pursue it. I feel it would be dangerous because I would lose sight of my goal to tell an entertaining story.

When I made "Line of Taxis" (see  http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/filmlist/line-of-taxis ), I drew from personal experience as well. In that case I chose to focus on the emotions that I felt and place them in a different context. I think this made it a much better project. It forced me to focus on the emotions of the characters and not just on the plot.

The essential conflict of the story is that some people don't want to have their work monitored. They see that as a personal attack. I never saw it that way and didn't really appreciate why they were so resistant. The sad fact is that all too often attempts to monitor people's work are a thinly veiled attempt to blame them for the failures of the system.

This has been a big issue in the education field, where standardized tests are often used to blame teachers. This only diverts attention from other problems where the effort would be much more effective. I think the effect of this approach has been to punish honesty and reward dishonesty.

W. Edwards Deming (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming ) is often cited as the source for this approach. This is a misunderstanding of what he said. In his books he says that it is the system that is the cause of most problems. It is rarely the individual that is the problem.

The challenge for the protagonist of the story is to overcome the fear people have. Internally the protagonist would need to resist the idea that the resistance he faces is grounded in evil intent. Of course, in the real world I wasn't able to accomplish this, so it is hard for me to see how to do it in a realistic way in fiction.

Now, how I would create a situation in a transportation planning context that addressed these issues, but not deal with a monitoring program, is a challenge in itself. The only thing I can think of is to have the protagonist be assigned to review another person's work. The emotional interaction and attitudes would be similar.

This requires further thought.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Do Ancient Alien Probes Watch Earth?

In the last couple of posts I talked about the possibility of aliens visiting Earth in the past. One of the reasons is that I had not found any serious discussion of the possibility. I found some this week.

I came across Robert A. Freitas Jr. (www.rfreitas.com), who in the late 1970s and early 1980s produced a number of studies on the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). One line of inquiry was the possibility of alien probes within the Solar System. Although he did not, strictly speaking, focus on ancient alien visits, the discovery of alien probes would be proof of visitation.

The list of articles he wrote can be found at http://www.rfreitas.com/AstroPubls.htm. In addition he produced a book on the subject "Xenology" more information and a link to portions of this book can be found at http://www.xenology.info/.

The article "The Search for Extraterrestrial Artifacts (SETA)", (which can be found here: http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/SETAJBISNov1983.htm), gives an introduction to Freitas' ideas.

I haven't read all of the material he wrote, but I have found some ideas that are relevant to the question I started with: If There Really Were Ancient Astronauts, What Kind of Evidence Would We Find?

• In his articles Freitas focuses on observational probes. He concludes that these would be small, in the 1 meter to 10 meter range.

• He identified three broad categories of probes: probes that didn't want to be found, probes that wanted to be found, and probes that didn't care if they were found.  He suggests that a any technology capable of sending an interstellar probe would be able to successfully hide from us.

• He concluded that any probes would be located in stable orbits close to Earth. He identified five such orbits.

• He conducted a preliminary search for alien probes. This did not identify any potential probe, but was not of sufficient detail to eliminate the possibility that alien probes existed close to Earth.

Freitas has restricted himself to a more limited range that I have so far. I do think that any definitive proof of alien visitations will be found in space.

I would think there would have been some follow up work along these lines more recently, but other than doubtful claims of cities, space ships and monuments found on the Moon or mars, I haven't found anything more recent that the early 1990s yet. It appears that since about 1985 Freitas has moved onto other research projects, specifically nanotechnology.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog