Alien Intelligence

tomBitonti said:

Also, "400 billion" isn't all that big when you compare to the size of the universe, which something like 10^70 orders of magnitude.

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That'll be what the second half of the short sentence mentioning "400 billion" refers to.

A curious argument which ties evolution and teleology: The universe seems to by physically constructed to give rise to intelligence as a side effect of systems such as the earth-moon-sun environment, where you have energy pushed into an iterative system (the chemical goo on the earth's surface), which is allowed to accumulate structure then pushed across region boundaries (say, climate change in old Africa). Intelligence may be a probable outcome given the right physical circumstances. Or course, that takes us back to a question of the likely hood of the circumstances.

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That's called the Anthropic Principle. I'm a believer in the weak anthropic principle, which is a classic example of selection bias. Everyone who wins the lottery thinks something special has happened, but it hasn't.

tomBitonti said:

We seem to get back to the more basic question of whether life (as we know it, or not far from it) exists elsewhere in the universe.

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Whether there is other life in "the universe" is probably moot. Unless something very exotic turns out to be true, most of the universe is forever closed to us, as expansion will take it out of our reach before we could reach it.

The only meaningful question is whether there is life in our galaxy, as that's the only life we have a snowball's chance in heck of contacting.

Umbran said:

Whether there is other life in "the universe" is probably moot. Unless something very exotic turns out to be true, most of the universe is forever closed to us, as expansion will take it out of our reach before we could reach it.

The only meaningful question is whether there is life in our galaxy, as that's the only life we have a snowball's chance in heck of contacting.

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It's interesting how most scifi shows are very limited in their scope. Most are this galaxy, or a single galaxy. Fewer span multiple galaxies.

Morrus said:

It's interesting how most scifi shows are very limited in their scope. Most are this galaxy, or a single galaxy. Fewer span multiple galaxies.

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The harder the Sci-Fi, the smaller the scope.

FWIW, one of my recent favorites was Ben Bova's Grand Tour novel series, which details man's explorations of the solar system. Awesome stuff. Would make excellent TV.

Morrus said:

It's interesting how most scifi shows are very limited in their scope. Most are this galaxy, or a single galaxy. Fewer span multiple galaxies.

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I'm thinking the universe "at large", meaning, stuff outside of our galaxy, is far out of mind for a lot folks. And there seems to be a lot of confusion over the meaning of "galaxy" and "universe", even from science fiction. And lots of folks really don't understand the scale of things.

Consider the voice over from Firefly, and the distribution of planets, which is a fair bit of nonsense. Or the tiny geography of Babylon 5.

But there are stories which deal with either the structure of our galaxy, or that span galaxies. Star Trek, Niven's Known Space, the Marvel universe, Brin's Uplift novels, the Star Gate: Universe, and Warhammer 40K, to name a few.

I'm thinking, though, that to involve that scale and have events be approachable or meaningful on a human scale, and to have the scale provide a relevant part of the store, is difficult. I think it shows up more in the background: In the WH40K universe, with its vast imponderable empire of a million start systems, or in Star Trek, with the time to reach to gamma quadrant. Or Asimov's Foundation series. In only a few story lines does intergalactic geography show up as a strong story element. Say, Reynolds Revelation Space or Brin's Uplift Universe.

Of course, there are other extremes, say, "Bright of the Sky", by Kay Kenyon, which presents a parallel universe which spans our own. Or Egan's "Diaspora", which presents a mind-boggling big ensemble of parallel universes. However, while these are enormous in scope, they don't make use of intergalactic geography as a story element.

The only story that I can think of that strongly uses intergalactic features to drive the story (in this case, the billion year hence collision of galaxies) is Revelation space. Anyone have other good examples?

Thx!

TomB

Morrus said:

It's interesting how most scifi shows are very limited in their scope. Most are this galaxy, or a single galaxy. Fewer span multiple galaxies.

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There's a couple of reasons for that:

1) There's no actual purpose to invoking multiple galaxies. Having multiple galaxies doesn't get you things you don't already have in a single galaxy. You get all the types of stars and planets you need in one galaxy, or even a subset of one galaxy. You have huge spaces, and huge numbers of possible worlds, and total population sizes impossible for the human mind to really grasp, all within the one galaxy.

2) The scales of distances involved. Our galaxy is 100K to 180K light years across. The *nearest* major galaxy (Andromeda) is 2,500,000 million light years away - an order of magnitude and more farther away. The ability to travel between galaxies in anything like a reasonable time (from a human perspective) implies near-teleportation within our own galaxy. If it takes a week to get to Andromeda, you can get across our galaxy in 8 hours, and getting to Alpha Centauri takes about one second. That wreaks havoc with some of your worldbuilding, or requires you to start imposing some pretty arbitrary limitations on the travel methods to support the society you're trying to represent.

Star Trek is pretty much a tiny, tiny part of our galaxy. They expanded it in DS9 and Voyager.

Then you get the opposite end, like Doctor Who, which casually spans multiple universes.

tomBitonti said:

Brin's Uplift novels

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If I recall correctly, Brin, being smart, didn't name the galaxies in question. It is just "the five galaxies". When you start looking at maps of galaxies, it starts becoming difficult to justify this image, so Brin makes it easy to not bother

Are there any sci-fi (or sci-fantasy) novels where the characters are never actually identified as humans?

Bullgrit

Bullgrit said:

Are there any sci-fi (or sci-fantasy) novels where the characters are never actually identified as humans?

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Star Wars. The word is never used.