Scientists find promising hints of life on distant planet K2-18b
Scientists find new but tentative evidence that a faraway world orbiting another star may be home to life.
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Really hope this is true, but to me, this would just create more questions than it answers wrt intelligent life. The Fermi paradox is still in effect, basically. If there is life that close to us (even single-celled), that implies the universe is absolutely lousy with life, and therefore we should be constantly picking up electromagnetic radiation (radio waves) from other advanced life. Yet we're not.
Hot take: There’s no such thing as the Fermi Paradox, the day I learned anything about radio emissions is the day that theory became bunk to me, the radio bubble surrounding earth is only 75-light-years wide, and the furthest signals are weak and undetectable even with sensitive equipment
The theory rests on the assumption that radio is a universal technology and not a short-lived transitional technology, most of this planet already communicates primarily thru microwaves and fiber optics, even if radio is a common “transitional” technology the magnitudes of time implied in trying to find it at the right time in space makes detection nearly impossible
At a certain distance we can’t distinguish between natural and artificial radio signals, the debates over the WOW! Signal and BLC1 show even if you detect “something” it doesn’t mean much to the wider scientific community
We JUST started looking for techno-signatures in an organized fashion during the last four years, and even that method suffers from similar problems to the radio method (debate over Taby’s Star for instance)
We’re a blind, deaf person in the middle of the woods who occasionally whispers Marco Polo every ten years and then wonders where everyone is
Planetary radar from earth emits a 10,000 light year bubble, but yeah, I get what you mean. If anyone were to detect it, would they even interpret it as a valid signal? And would we even still be here by the time they received it? Kinda grim.
Of the 3.8 billion years that life has existed on earth, we've only been making radio waves for a little over a century
Right, and even in that short time that's still (give or take by a couple decades) enough time to be detectable by other life forms if the distances involved between our world and this one is anything to go by. It's real close.
Plus, if we assume we're not first (which I doubt) then life starting somewhere else, say 3.9 billion years ago, could mean ET emitting radio waves for 100 million years by now! A time/distance that makes this really look like you could reach out and touch it.
If this turns out to be an ocean world, that's working toward a partial solution to the Fermi paradox. Life might be common, even around hostile star classes like red dwarfs, but the safest place for life to develop is in a setting where you can't develop fire-based technology. Life could be as intelligent as a dolphin without the ability to do metallurgy or cook food.
Ocean worlds are common + ocean world roughly every 120 light years => billions of ocean worlds with the potential for complex life
An octopus or something should be able to occasionally climb out of the waves and build a radio. Where is my Octopus version of Prairie Home Companion?!? Get on it you slimy weirdos.
It is probable that civilizations are either not a common form of life or that electromagnetic radiation is not used to communicate as we understand it for very long in the lifespan of a civilization.
Right, this result (if confirmed) makes either of those much more likely.
I refuse to believe ET doesn't use radio for something though, even if they're emitting some kind of signature on accident.
I refuse to believe ET doesn't use radio for something though
If ET consists of individuals operating in a society and have competing interests between individuals, they will probably need encryption, secrecy, and tampering resistence. If they need that, the best transmission mechanism will use quantum entanglement instead of radio waves. So radio transmissions are probably a short blip in technological development if used at all.
Think if we discovered fiber optic cables and Wi-Fi before AM/FM radio transmission, we may never use radio for long range transmission. Especially likely if the planet's gravity is too strong for rocketry to develop first to place satellites in orbit.
Even so, our radio bubble is tiny, and EM waves lose power quickly enough that we have little ability to detect most of them, especially lower energy waves. The chances of us noticing a 200 year blip matching a civilization's technological development through the EM noise of the rest of the universe is extremely slim.
I think radio waves are more likely to be specific to our technological development than evidence our universe is nearly devoid of civilizations.
I thought you can't send usable information via quantum entangled particles?
If you are talking about nonlocal (faster than light) communication, you are right. You can't transmit information in the sense of nonlocal communication. Quantum mechanics is an empirically local theory, meaning that it predicts the universe we observe is 100% local. The mathematical formalism describes a universe containing nothing empirically observable to be faster than light. This is proven by the no-communication theorem.
The claims to nonlocality therefore are not physical but metaphysical, because they all arise from certain philosophical assumptions about the relationship between the mathematics of the system and its ontology, which is then used to argue that something unobservable is being transmitted faster than light. The most famous assumption being the EPR criterion which leads you to conclude that there is a sudden unobservable change in the system's ontological status that occurs faster than light.
However, there are different metaphysical criteria where nonlocality doesn't arise, you can see the paper "Relational EPR" on arxiv for example, that has a different philosophical account of the relationship between the mathematical formalism and the ontology of the system, specifically crafted to avoid the kind of seeming invisible nonlocality that shows up from the EPR criterion.
Thanks for the breakdown.