Where Are All The Extra-Terrestrials??? Don't Fear The Paradox!!!

The multiverse interpretation of QM has been pretty thoroughly debunked - it just leads to more contradictions. Carlo Rocelli is one of the prime movers behind quantum loop gravity and his latest book is “Helgoland”. It’s named for the barren North Sea island where Werner Heisenberg spent a month recovering from a burnout. While he was there, the 23 year-old invented and formalized the mathematical framework of Quantum Mechanics that is still the foundation today. It remains the most exhaustively tested part of modern Physics that has never been contradicted, even in what seems to be completely irrational. Rovelli traces the evolution of QM through the people who worked to prove its validity and explain it. In the process, he gently lays the groundwork for a third fundamental interpretation of QM, one that arose from Loop Quantum Gravity which is itself a brilliant extension of General Relativity. This leads to the Relational Model. It states that “objects”, the things we know and love, can be known *only* by their relations to other things. More importantly, The relation I’m measuring wrt a certain electron is not required to yield the same answer when you measure it because we aren’t mewasuring the same relation! Objects have *no* intrinsic characteristics other than they anchor one end of a relationship with another featureless node in the relation graph. I found the parallel with category theory astonishing. CT sez that of you have all the maps, you can discard the objects because they cam be recovered from the maps. The Relational Interpretation says the same thing, except except the object are already discarded, but what we call objects can be constructed of that’s what you want for some reason. This all matters because all the woo-woo spookiness and irrational contradictions turn out to be illusions. No magic mirrors required. No metastable cats suffering in boxes. No infinitely forking world lines. The biggest leap for me was the “spin foam” that carries the relations between quanta of *space*. It turns out that delta-x doesn’t quite get to zero - Planck’s constant rules. 4D spacetime is quantized into leeeetle tiny hypercubes 1 Planck’s constant on an edge. So the volume is circa (10^-34)^4 or circa 10^-136 cubic meters. But if you are remotely interested in all this, read Rovelli’s latest book and then read the book “Quantum Space”. It is superbly written and Rovelli’s introduction will grease the skids significantly.

Mike O'Dell

They are called cephalopods - octopus, cuttlefish, squid, nautiloids.

Mike O'Dell

I feel like this one, grounded as it is in (somewhat speculative) theoretical physics, won't be quite as disruptive as your last video on the topic of UFOs and ETs.

Dave Land

I agree with your point, and was going to mention Oklo, but you beat me to it! However there is another issue which might be more relevant, and that is the radiation emitted by an air burst fission explosion. I haven't read up on it recently, but I am pretty sure that this would be seen as an artificial event, and would be much brighter than any natural event. The Oklo reactors only reached around 150KW output, even though they may have run for 10s if not 100s of thousands of years. So far we haven't found any others. There have been suggestions that we should look in Colorado, but the US Government won't allow it. I just don't know how far away you would be able to see the flash from a fission bomb even though it would be very bright at wavelengths right up to Gamma rays.

Sadiq Mohamed

Unfortunately our real world is crazies with nukes. And people with feelings entangled with their physical belongings driving gas guzzlers. We don't need Drakes equation to be afraid of that...

Jasper

There is pretty much no evidence there are actually extra dimensions like that. _Speculative_ theoretical physicists propose extra dimensions sometimes, but they're almost always not suitable for travel or to live in or anything like that. I think there is not much advanced civilizations out there. If you take account the developments that could take place _after_ the stage we're in, a lot of the things you might expect from that, like Dyson spheres make them easier to see. Conservative estimates of Drake equation parameters may not be conservative enough. They'd probably also see us well in advance. For instance at 300nm a 1AU telescope(probably a synthetic aperture) Might be able to resolve ~1m at 100 light years.. If a square meter receives 300W in sunlight it's only 5.3e-35W/m² i guess. Slightly less than a photon/m²/s The numbers.. they're big and small.. This equipment is also, many orders of magnitudes more than all equipment we have right now. I hope i didn't screw any of it up... (Edit: probably a mistake to do back of the envelope calculations determining what physical limitations are, and then incorrectly assume they can actually be reached) This is not part of our world, really. Just remember that.

Jasper

If some other civilisation on another planet was that advanced to be able to break the speed of light, they'd also have the knowledge to find us, understand our technology level and then communicate with us in a way we'd understand, they wouldn't wait around for us to build a receiver and leave it all to chance surely? Even mankind has considered the problem of communication with other intelligent species and probes are sent out with drawings and diagrams using the universal language of physics and maths. We seem to make excuses why no contact has been made yet, but perhaps we are alone, and this answer needs no excuses or elaborate reasons to explain why we've heard from no one else in the universe. We’ve heard nothing because there is nothing.

Leigh

Fran, You have echoed my exact thoughts about the rise and fall of radio and it’s current state today. Although wireless technology definitely has a future, that future is low power. We are now getting so much more information and entertainment via the Internet which is for the most part earthbound by coaxial cable and fiber optics because it is more reliable than radio based technologies our earth has become much quieter radio-wise. In theory, intelligent beings who followed a similar progression to us may have made some or many of the same choices. But if those beings also figured out how to travel across the universe in a short time or even no time at all, they may have also developed a communication technology that allowed long distance communication to be broadcast in a way we can’t imagine and therefore we have not created a receiver for it yet. In theory we could be getting bombarded by extraterrestrial communications but we just don’t have the right ears to hear or see them yet… IN THEORY. Please note that my theories are not my beliefs they are “what if’s” and thought experiments. Time will prove them right or wrong.

I am only just beginning to explore further dimensions, I agree that herein lies the key to discovering more about the universe.

Dr Andy Hill

Clearly I was wrong, I'm watching it now!

Dr Andy Hill

I agree with the idea that we shouldn't expect to detect "inadvertent" radio transmissions from other civilizations (meaning radio transmissions that are intended for consumption by that civilization but which escapes into space). But if other civilizations wanted to make their presence known, they would likely sent out deliberate radio transmissions, on the theory that they're the easiest for other civilizations to detect (well, if it was high powered enough, as Fran points out). However, even then, we are faced with the question: how many civilizations would bother? The human race sure isn't bothering to broadcast a message to outer space right now. We seem more interested in listening in than transmitting. Furthermore, there may not be a huge overlap in when civilizations actually exist. Depending on when a civilization arises and how long they last before they die out, there may not be a lot of overlap in which transmissions can be sent out and detected. A civilization would probably have to transmit a very high power signal for centuries or millennia before they get a signal back from another civilization that detected them.

Philip Stephens

Video removed Fran, fear of the Trolls?

Dr Andy Hill

We do have “technology” to confirm “them”. They’re called eyeballs. Galileo, Newton, Tombaugh had them and so do - apparently - millions of others. Are millions of people hoaxing and hallucinating? Possibly. But it only takes ONE sighting to be verified to be the proof we need to start the next level of conversation. There are still people who don’t believe Galileo’s lying eyes.

James

You just identified yourself as an intelligent being. Not that common on this planet!

William Alsing

Staying as far away from humanity as possible, if they've got any sense.

Chris Crowther

The other dimension theory to explain how aliens might know about us or be able to visit or contact us is just wishful thinking in my opinion, trying to suggest something could be possible (alien contact) by bringing into the argument something that is also just an unproven possibility (other strange dimensions) isn’t compelling, a possibility multiply by possibility = even less likely 😊. If they are in some other dimension, then the same may hold true for them in that they can’t detect us or interact with us either. Another possibility that should be discussed is that there is no life on any other planets. Maybe life is such a unique thing and is so very new to the Universe, and like the big bang from one point in space and time, maybe life starts in one single place, and that happens to be us on Earth. Life has evolved humans, made us intelligent so that we can leave our planet to spread life elsewhere, whether that is some bacteria or complex organic molecules that hitched a ride on probes and rovers we’ve landed on other planets, to maybe an eventual exodus from the Earth of humans to other planets in our solar system and then beyond. So life may reach other planets, but it could be we are here first at the start of that process. There is strong evidence for no life on other planets as we need to look no further than our own solar system. Mars is the best candidate for a planet other than Earth to have had life evolve independently, it once had liquid water and oceans and perfect temperatures, just a hop away in Universe distance terms from Earth so that we can send robots and probes to it. Yet if it had life, it was nowhere near the same time frame as us on Earth and certainly never overlapped with us, and despite us looking very hard, no evidence has been found (yet anyway) that Mars ever had life evolve on it, let alone intelligent life. If Mars, that was very Earth like in its past, didn’t develop any life forms, that shows what a very rare event life is, and so it has to be a possibility there may be no life anywhere else in the Universe at the same brief moment of time we are here.

Leigh

Hi all, just one point on nuclear fission. Fission can happen in nature if the concentration of fissile elements is high enough, although it was probably a start-stop process that cycled again and again driven by water influx and evaporation. Take a look at the Oklo "reactor" in Gabon.

Although I have in the past supported SETI via the Planetary Society, I always felt the thinking behind it to be flawed. As you say, it first requires a powerful directional radio beam to be aimed directly at us. And, due to limits in technology, we can only listen to a narrow frequency band, the frequency picked, that of neutral interstellar hydrogen, may have been the logical frequency for humans, but a totally illogical one for ETs. Meaning the chance of success was always going to be small, even if there are many civilisations out there.

David Peaker

The first pulsar was initially, unofficially named LGM-01 for "little green men".

David Peaker

We are a prisoned Planet....since the end of the last ice age (check out the Sumerian tablets, 1st post ice age civilization) Only recently are we being freed, slowly...very slowly.

21:12, how fitting. (1122) x o

I agree with you, Fran. But in addition to the thinking of extra dimensions we must think about our mental condition. Now we have global consumer cult. We don’t care about our planet, we don’t care about good human relations. I think, to make next step in our technology we must radically change our worldview from predatory to harmonized with nature and each other.

Fran, I think you're right. We thought radio was the de-facto universe standard simply because it was new to us and represented our best communication technology at the time. I feel strongly that there is definitely a lot of life out there. Probably more than we can count. The problem is that we're not advanced enough to ask the right questions. Radio, as we know it, seems very limited because it's such a small part of the overall spectrum and the period in which were were transmitting the strongest represents such a minute period in galactic time. Easy to miss if another life form has a completely different concept of time. I'm no Carl Sagan, so I'm not qualified to quantify the universe and the life within it. It just seems to me that we keep trying to conform the universe to our best current technology at any given time and our understanding of matter and energy. I know they have designed a replacement for the Hubble telescope and if we keep improving our eyes on the universe, we may some day be able to ask the right questions.

Matt Wietlispach

I'm currently reading a novel ("Glorious", Gregory Benford and Larry Niven) where advanced civilizations communicate via gravity waves. If you can't do that, you aren't advanced enough to join the club. Go away kid, you bother us.

Steven Ruhl

Assuming a K2 civilization, this article (and the paper it discusses) suggest galactic civilizations can happen without light-speed transport: https://gizmodo.com/aliens-wouldnt-need-warp-drives-to-take-over-an-entire-1847101242

BobC