[ExI] Von Neumann Probes

[Ben Zaiboc]

John K Clark wrote:

> remember the more distant a galaxy we're looking at is, the closer to the Big Bang it is, and the less time Evolution would have to produce even primitive life, much less intelligent life capable of building a Dyson Sphere around every star in a galaxy.


Good point.

This means that we can only see recent events in a very small volume of space local to us.

So for the vast majority of space, we can only see the increasingly distant past, so we have absolutely no idea what is happening in most of the cosmos at the present time (or more accurately at any time after the time that we can see, seeing as 'the present time' doesn't really mean anything on a cosmic scale).

Perhaps this alone is enough to explain the apparent lack of any others. Life takes a couple of billennia (is that a word?) to produce advanced civilisations, and we simply can't see them yet because their light hasn't reached us yet. The farther away they are, the more true this is, and of course the vast majority of everything is very, very far away.

Perhaps in another billion years, the sky will be chock-full of Dyson swarm signatures. Assuming, as you say, that they will present intense infrared sources. I'm not convinced of that, but I'm no expert.

Another point is that we might not have thought of all the different ways that advanced civilisations might organise themselves, and what they might look like from a distance. We tend to assume that Dyson swarms, or something similar, are an inevitable preferred end-point. We may not be right.

In a sense, it might be true to say that we are the only intelligent life in the universe (or at least the 'first'). And it might be equally true of all the other intelligent civilisations that might be out there at this moment. There's simply no way to know.

Relativity is a funny thing.

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Ben