By William L Saylor
“This, then is the paradox: all our logic, all our anti-isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique – that they must be there. And yet we do not see them!” – David Viewing
Physicist Enrico Fermi once asked: "If there are extraterrestrials, where are they?"
"If they existed," he said, "they would be here." It was a casual question over lunch, and I suspect that if he had thought further about it he might have further speculated, “or have they been here and have left?” We’ll never know, but his question, which became known as the “Fermi Paradox” or “Space Travel Argument”, raised a great deal of discussion in the SETI community.
The paradox lead a few scientists - Freeman Dyson, Michael Hart, David Viewing and Frank Tipler among others - to speculate that any older technologically advanced civilization would have colonized the galaxy by now, and since they are not here, they don’t exist; therefore “SETI is a waist of time and money”.
The “space colonization” proponents argue that the use of nuclear propulsion at, say, 1/10th the speed of light could easily be accomplished, and that if only one advanced civilization existed in the galaxy it could colonize the galaxy in a mere 1-10 million years. They then conclude that “we don’t see them here; therefore they do not exist”. The argument apparently assumed that the alien’s would physically occupy all the habitable planets rather than just develop them. I think this was where they got off track.
Others have countered. Kuiper and Morris (1977) stated, “The search for extraterrestrial intelligence should begin by assuming that the galaxy has been colonized”. The paper was more wild speculation but the positions and titles of the authors, and a few equations, were apparently enough to get it into the journal Science.
But there is another reason we should assume that it has already been "colonized". In a recent paper astronomer Dr Charles Lineweaver (2001), studying the tricky business of terrestrial planet formation, argues that "...this gives us an age distribution for life on such planets and a rare clue about how we compare with other life that might inhabit the Universe." From the age distribution he then concludes, "most of the life forms in the universe have had two billion years longer to evolve than we have." Apparently we're the new kid on the block.
As used here "Colonization" is probably a misnomer, since in our case the ancient astronauts goal seemed to be the extension of their biology, knowledge, laws, and technology, by example or by physical manipulation of the biological blueprint of the most promising animal they found here; sort of a galactic migration of intelligence, survival traits and culture, rather then physical beings. It appears that when we attained a certain technological level they got out of the way.
My thought here is that their argument is forceful but their conclusion is incorrect. It is in fact a powerful statement in support of the AA hypothesis - that the Earth, probably along with most habitable bodies in the galaxy, has indeed been colonized by ancient astronauts and, at least in part, we are them! Curiously, to my knowledge, none of the AA authors have appreciated the compelling logic of this argument and the strong corroboration it gives to the AA theory.
No comments:
Post a Comment