agontechne

N = R * Fp * Ne * Fl * Fi * Fc * L
(or Why do we seem to be alone?)

I've often wondered whether intelligent life survives long enough to make much of a difference in the large-scale structure of galaxies. Large engineering projects, like the hypothetical possible Dyson spheres or high bandwidth communications, likely to be lasers or something similar, should be visible at significant fractions of our galaxy's diameter and yet we see nothing. There must be a reason for this. Either the basic assumption of continual technological expansion is incorrect, the galaxy is populated with a small number of stealthy aggressive species who exterminate newcomers upon detection or there isn't anybody out there.

We have one example of technological life forms developing, us, but for reasons I will get into later, we are probably near the bottom in survival times for intelligent life. I think the first idea, that massive technological civilizations have short lifetimes, is likely as the data available from our situation points to exactly this fate, and as such would lead irreversibly to the present data of no evidence for technological civilization flourishing. To match the current data the lifetime of such civilizations would likely be on the order of four hundred years after first radio transmission.

Since radio is the first stage of change to the large scale structure of the galaxy, and it requires both a sender and a receiver, an upper limit can be placed on the average (assuming what we have is an average situation, which is reasonable) distribution of such combinations.

The actual lifetime of a technological civilization would at least give us a best guess of our extinction date. We have enough data to do this now, so I will cover this first. Later, I will explore some possibilities for increasing the last term of Drake's famous equation and this is the most interesting thing our species could be involved in right now as it is our most pressing problem. Buying time is the name of the game right now...we just have to figure out how.

posted by R. B. Murphy @ 9:39 AM