Failure to detect aliens does not mean we are doomed to destroy ourselves

I wrote previously (http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2008/06/aliens-are-bountiful-but-unreachable.html) on the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence. I recently found the issue discussed in my daughter's college astronomy textbook. I expected a textbook to have more precise thinking, but I was disappointed.

Starting on p754 of The Cosmic Perspective, by Bennett et al, 5th edition.:

This paradox [of why we have not met any aliens] has many possible solutions but broadly speaking we can group them into three categories:

1. We are alone.

2. Civilizations are common, but no one has colonized the galaxy. There are at least three possible reasons why this might be the case. Perhaps interstellar travel is much harder or vastly more expensive than we have guessed, and civilizations are unable to venture far from their home worlds.

That is by far the most likely possibility. The book earlier sketched the enormous difficulties to interstellar travel imposed by the laws of physics. But in this section it just blithely assumes it will be possible some day. I suspect I know why. Frequently a history of a marvelous technology begins with a quote from some learned person in the past who said it could never happen. We implicitly condemn this person as being closed-minded and insufficiently imaginative. No scientist wants to be cited in the future in such a fashion. There are countless times scientists have claimed that something is impossible, and it in fact turns out to be impossible (faster-than-light travel, practical alchemy, perpetual motion machines), but they do not give rise to quotes that fit into historical narratives.

If the judgment that interstellar travel is effectively impossible is correct, no other explanation is needed as to why the aliens are not here.

Continuing:

Perhaps the desire to explore is unusual, and other societies either never leave their home star systems or stop exploring before they've colonized much of the galaxy. Most ominously, perhaps many civilizations have arisen, but they have all destroyed themselves before achieving the ability to colonize the stars.
...
[This] category of solutions has ... terrifying implications. If thousands of civilizations before us have all failed to achieve interstellar travel on a large scale, what hope do we have? Unless we somehow think differently than all other civilizations, this solution says that we will never go far in space. Because we have always explored when the opportunity arose, this solution almost inevitably leads to the conclusion that failure will come about because we destroy ourselves.

The two alternative explanations lack the aura of inevitability. If there are millions of civilizations, the highly unlikely isn't going to account for the failure of all of them -- only the impossible will do. Why would we think that self-destruction is inevitable? Even if there are strong forces leading towards that outcome, there are plenty of opportunities for things to be slightly different: some variation in intelligent species' psychology or sociology, or local ecologies, or local geology. It's hard for me to see why a desire to explore would peter out most of the time, and far harder to believe it would happen in all cases.

We don't have any realistic hope of colonizing the galaxy. But there is room to hope for a long future right here on earth. We might in one way or another come up with a civilization in balance with nature, probably with fewer people than we have now. It might embody a high standard of living, social justice, and intellectual and artistic accomplishments which constitute progress over what we have today. Perhaps such a civilization would view an attempt at interstellar colonization as we today view an attempt to jump across the English Channel carrying bricks (http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Series_1/67.htm.) Maybe a harmonious and pleasant future stretching millions of years into the future is incredibly unlikely. But the absence of aliens doesn't figure in that discussion.

Perhaps we should interpret "If thousands of civilizations before us have all failed to achieve interstellar travel on a large scale, what hope do we have?" differently. Perhaps the author assumes interstellar travel is so important that failure to achieve it is equivalent to catastrophic failure of the entire civilization. That is a very narrow set of values that would be foreign to most people.

The absence of aliens or evidence of past alien visits implies that we will not engage in exponential colonization. That's all.

3. There is a galactic civilization, but it has not yet revealed its existence to us.

That is an intriguing possibility. A common theme in arguments about other planets, life forms, and civilizations is that what happens on any planet has no effect on what happens on any other one. We have millions of independent observations, as a scientist might put it. Once we assume easy space travel, the independence assumption disappears. The dominant one can influence events on other planets, and the galactic civilization could in statistical terms be a single data point. If its values call for not revealing itself, maybe that is why we aren't detecting aliens.

But as mundane and uninspiring as it may be, my educated guess is that you simply can't (economically) get there from here.

Evolution explains why happiness is elusive

Happiness is what we strive for. We imagine that if we get what we want, we will be happier -- permanently. But psychology has determined that for the most part people's happiness level gradually adapts to changed circumstances. People think that if they can buy the bigger house or make more money they will be happier, but if they achieve their goal, within months they will take that into account and report themselves no happier than before. Similarly, people may feel that losing a job or being forced to give up a home will make them miserable, but once again they take that into account before too long and report themselves just as happy as before.

Can evolution shed light on this state of affairs?

The evolutionary advantage to pleasure or happiness does not come in the moment it is experienced, but in anticipation. When we consider alternative courses of action, we prefer the actions that will bring us to happier futures. The things that bring us happiness are (or were in the environment we evolved in) conducive to reproductive success, such as eating better, being safer and more comfortable, having higher status, and of course sex.

Now, our sensory systems are based on habituation. If we come into a room with a distinctive smell, we will soon get accustomed to it and only experience new smells. If we go from sunlight into a dark cave, our visual system adapts so that what was dim before will seem very bright. This makes sense, since our senses benefit us by getting new information, and whatever is a constant background does not convey information any more. We could imagine an organism wired so that it always experiences sunlight as very bright but can make small distinctions among what looks very bright, as well as seeing dark areas as very dark but able to make small distinctions in what seems very dark. But for whatever reason we are not wired that way. From that perspective, it is not surprising that we also habituate to happiness.

If the average outcome for a man in our environment of evolution is to have one mate, he could imagine himself happier having two or three and less happy if he had none. But if he does have three mates, evolution has no desire in having him rest content there -- it is very much to the advantage of his genes if he can have four or five mates*. Similarly, if he has no mate at all, a permanent funk is not adaptive -- contributing to the success of nephews and nieces might be his new standard of happiness. (The situation with women is somewhat more complicated). Both sexes could also recalibrate in other aspects of their lives. For instance, improving a very poor diet to a merely poor one would bring happiness, but it is advantageous to recalibrate and then go on to seek a rich diet or a very rich one.

It is also to our evolutionary advantage to not easily understand our recalibration of happiness. If we did, it would undercut the motivation we get from bettering our current condition, whatever it may be.

There are ways to be happier at any given level of life circumstances by meditation, exercise, and thinking about things differently, but I imagine these were not relevant in the environment we evolved in.

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*This is not a defense of polygamy or philandering. We can and should and usually do transcend such innate inclinations.

Deciding where to give money

Some of us feel morally compelled to look beyond our own well-being to try to make the world a better place. The variety of needs is far greater than any one person could address. How should a person choose? Donations of time and labor can be very valuable, but to simplify the question, I will discuss only the aspect of financial donations, since there is some organization that will accept checks to address just about any issue. I recognize that many of us do not have the means to give much money away; not all of us have the luxury of confronting this issue.

I exclude from consideration donations made for a service received, even though the payment is not required. This could include the "suggested donation" at a concert, giving to a public radio station because one enjoys the programming, or giving to one's religious organization. Some of us have money to give for which we get only the most indirect return, such as feeling we have done a good thing.

One general approach to giving is what I might call reactive. We consider the issues that come to our attention while we are doing other things. We give to what our friends and neighbors are giving to. We respond to mailings asking for help. We give to help the victims of disasters we see on TV news.

Another approach might be called inner-directed. We would consider what within ourselves we value most and find ways to give money to carry forward those values. We would not give to organizations that sent the most numerous and most eloquent fundraising letters. We might not give to what our friends give to if, on reflection, it isn't so important to us.

A cerebral version of this might be to first allocate a fixed amount of money and then divide it according to our values. That is my tendency.

A more emotional approach can be reactive but it can also be inner-directed if we make a point of not making decisions when biased by immediate exposure to a particular cause.

It is hard to write much about where feelings lead us -- people's feelings are individual and personal. Strong feelings could lead us to dig into money we would have spent on ourselves.

So, returning to the cerebral side, how could we decide?

One consideration might be giving as part of a community effort. If someone asks to be sponsored for a "Walk For X", giving to that cause is part of a social relationship with the person.

Another way to decide would be to find the greatest need. This might lead us to send all our discretionary money to Africa. Though some moral philosophers might look down on us, I think for most of us there is an irresistible tendency to want to give to causes we identify with personally and people who are more like us.

It is surely natural to give to blood relations, especially our children. This is so strongly ingrained that to me it falls more in the category of money spent personally than for the greater good.

The categories and dimensions we might use for determining who is worthy of our money are certainly numerous: geography, language, race, religion, nationality, social class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic heritage, intimate experience with any particular disease, interest (such as a hobby), educational institution, or species (humanity). There is an interesting complication, however: When we fall on the privileged side of any categorization of people, there is a tension between giving to people like ourselves and giving to those more in need. For instance, a person with a home might give to the homeless (different) but to the homeless of the US rather than other countries (same).

Some causes are not linked directly to particular people. Preservation of nature and the environment is in this category, and historical preservation to some extent.

Another dimension is short-term relief as opposed to longer-term. Feeding people at a homeless shelter is shorter-term, while working for affordable housing is longer-term.

There is a tradeoff between spreading money across many organizations or giving more to a few. Limiting the organizations saves overhead costs and reduces somewhat the flood of fundraising letters. On the other hand, one way used for gauging the strength of an organization is how many people contribute to it, not just the total value of the contributions.

I have little to say about where these criteria lead me. I find it a hard problem. But I present the framework for wider consideration. Perhaps other people have other ways of thinking about it.

Calling for an "I'm sorry" handsign

I think someone needs to invent a handsign, most urgently for use by drivers.

There are many signs we already have available:

The finger. Needs no comment.
Raising hand. Acknowledgment of someone who has yielded right of way.
Thumbs up. Approval.
Thumbs down. Disapproval.
Fluttering flat hand. Ambivalence.
Thumb and finger in a circle with others wide (finger spelling "f"): Perfect.
Waving "hi". Generic friendly gesture.
Peace sign. Nearly as generic friendly gesture.

What about a sign that says "I am sorry, I apologize"? I have sometimes wished I had such a sign when I inadvertently make a mistake while driving. In response to a horn blast, waving "hi" or the peace sign or thumbs up can indicate friendly intentions, but they can also be interpreted as dismissal of the situation, as in "Don't have a cow, man". Even if few drivers ever gave the "I'm sorry" signal, it still might have a noticeable effect. Occasional validation could quiet the sort of person who might go over the edge to road rage.

There are some possibilities, but none is a simple hand sign and all are hard to observe: A facial wince or mouthing the words "I'm sorry" could serve the purpose, as could scrunching one's head down to convey the "guilty" concept. Putting palm to forehead as in "doh!" might serve but is also lacking in visibility.

Aliens are bountiful but unreachable

It is common to wonder about whether there are intelligent civilizations elsewhere in the universe, and if so, why we haven't heard from them. Here is one link that discusses the issue:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Here is how I see it:

It is overwhelmingly likely that intelligent life has arisen elsewhere in the universe millions of times. We believe we are on an average star in an average galaxy, with nothing from the realm of astronomy indicating we are special. Any time in the past we have considered ourselves to be special, we have been wrong (our culture fundamentally greater than other cultures, our species fundamentally different from other species, our planet the center of the universe). Among gazillions of possible stars and planets, it is conservative to estimate millions of instances of intelligent life.

The failure to detect such other civilizations casts no doubt on this conclusion. Of all the possibilities that have been put forth for why we have not detected aliens, one observation suffices: Relative to the density and longevity of technological civilizations, the laws of physics prevent economically feasible ways of moving among the stars.

If there were a truly easy way of moving among the stars as simple as some sort of instantaneous jump from one point to another, some one of the millions of other civilizations would have discovered it and taken advantage of it. They would be here already. If the effort required were substantial, then it would be less likely and depend heavily on how dense civilizations are.

Those who are sanguine about the possibilities of interstellar exploration and colonization remind us that our world is full of technological marvels that earlier generations could not have predicted. They are correct that we should not rule out interstellar-enabling technologies based on what we understand of science and technology today. But it would be a worse folly to claim that it is only our limited mindset that makes us doubt the discovery of every technology we find appealing. We cannot say that any future technology that excites our imagination is impossible, but we certainly cannot say that it is inevitable. The persuasive evidence that easy interstellar travel cannot be achieved is that none of the millions of other civilizations has achieved it.

Life on earth has a tendency to spread into all available niches, and people reasonably expect that the same process would apply to the colonization of space. If we assume humans discovered the requisite technology, exponential expansion requires the discovery of planets that not only can support human life but where it can thrive to the point of serving as a basis for a further round of exploration and colonization. Planets that would allow human life to thrive might be considerably less common than planets with other intelligent life forms, which might evolve in considerably different environments. Human-friendly planets might also be inhabited by civilizations that, whatever their initial friendliness, would not be so friendly to the idea of being colonized, and could use their huge advantages in local resources to prevent it.

Detecting an alien presence in the electromagnetic spectrum seems much more likely. It is a function of how dense intelligent life is in the universe, how long it lasts in a detectable form, and how sensitive our detection technologies are. Failure to detect other civilizations will not cast doubt on their existence. As our technologies increase and we find no aliens, our estimate of the density of life in the universe will simply go down.

It is overwhelmingly likely that intelligent life abounds elsewhere in the universe, and overwhelmingly unlikely that we will ever communicate with any of it.

The missing grandchildren

It has been known for some time that the population in most of the industrialized world is not reproducing sufficiently to replace itself. (The national populations may be growing, but that is due to immigration from the non-industrialized nations.) Almost all children survive to adulthood, but women and men have on average less than one child each (the demographers always measure this as children per woman, not children per person, but that makes a low birthrate sound like women's fault alone, or, if one favors a low birthrate, their accomplishment alone).

Progressive thinkers on the subject of population growth note that when people achieve some measure of security and prosperity, birth rates drop. They have now dropped below replacement rate. One major reason is that as reliable birth control becomes more widely available, people can plan their family size. Why do people want fewer children?

I suggest that one reason is that there are more interesting things to do. As all parents know, children are a source of great joy, but also of great exasperation and drudgery. For the poor where life itself is largely drudgery, the joy might stand out more than some extra drudgery. For those who are better off, life in general is more pleasant. Interesting careers are available to many people -- even ones we consider dull may be far more interesting than back-breaking agricultural labor. Labor-saving devices make housework far less demanding. There is leisure time and vacation time and many interesting ways to spend it. How does parenthood look against that background? At an emotional level, children are just as exasperating as ever, and the need for constant supervision remains the domain of people, not labor-saving devices. Without children, there is far more time for plain old fun, and more money to pay for the fun too. Occasional visits with a niece or nephew can allow a sampling of the fun part of parenthood.

Exacerbating this problem is America's highly child-centered culture. It is the norm for parents to spend as much time with their children each day as other commitments allow, or to drive them to out-of-home enriching experiences. When today's children reach the point of deciding whether or not to have children, what will they recall? They will recall that their parents' lives were consumed by taking care of children, and it may not be a commitment they want to take on.

People growing up in the 1950s or 1960s may remember a childhood where it was up to them to find their own toys and their own amusement. They were on their own after school until supper without parental intervention. The parents were doing their own activities in the evenings, albeit with occasional interruptions. That allowed far more time for the parents to pursue their own personal pleasures. That version of parenthood may be one that anyone, notably today's young adults, would be more likely to embark on. But it is not an option they can easily choose. If they did, they would be censured for neglecting their children.

It is true that if a person has poor memories of their own childhood, they may not want to have children either. But the main benefits of the child-centered culture to children are in their accomplishments and their safety, not their happiness. I speculate that in moving from 1950s childrearing to 2000s childrearing, parents have lost far more in autonomy than children have gained in happiness.

The counterintuitive result may be that the more effort we put into enriching our children's lives, the less likely we are to have grandchildren.

Contests of power and contests of discrimination

In World War II, we often knew where the German troops were located, but it was difficult and dangerous and a chancy matter to defeat them. Our power has grown to the point that in the initial stages of the Iraq war, we had no difficulty defeating Saddam Hussein’s armed forces. Any military target we could locate, we could destroy. We had a far more difficult time defeating them once they gave up their tanks and started using far less sophisticated weapons*. The problem has changed from one of a contest of power to a question of discrimination, in the original sense of “telling things apart”. We cannot easily defeat Iraqi fighters because we cannot easily distinguish them from the Iraqi population, which we do not want to destroy. The situation was almost the same in Vietnam.

The same progression has happened with our nonhuman foes. It has been some time since we had a raw contest of power with lions, tigers and bears. We have no trouble defeating them (so little, indeed, that such animals became endangered species). We can exterminate smaller foes such as rats and bugs in our houses, and the main difficulty is how to avoid poisoning the human residents at the same time. In the wild, the problem is how to avoid poisoning the rest of the ecosystem. Our most serious foes today are bacteria and viruses. It is easy enough to destroy them, as we do every time we sterilize medical instruments. The problem is destroying them while preserving the human bodies they live within. The most difficult discrimination problem is cancer, tissue that is so similar to us that it IS us, a small part run amok.

*This is a description of how things are, not how they should be. In writing dispassionately about how to destroy targets in Iraq, I am not addressing directly the question of whether that is a good idea. I do not intend this essay as a prescription for doing anything differently, just perhaps a slightly differently way of looking at things. But this perspective can be brought to bear on various other human conflicts too.