Talk:Fermi paradox

SETI - Radiology as the Way Forward - Signatures of Brains (just like New York City from the Satellites)

Some people turn it the other way: they suggest using Radiology to look for brain signatures out there in Outer Space. Furthermore, given that this proposal has been communicated 20 years ago, about 1000 such signatures have been found outside our Solar system. Debate? Add to the article? 81.191.200.197 (talk) 07:43, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure I'm following you exactly, but on Wikipedia it's best to cite your reliable sources so that your assertions could be verified (especially to ensure that they do not constitute original research or synthesis). El_C 07:49, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Details of conversation should not be in the lead paragraph.

The lead paragraph should have only the most essential information about a topic. The Fermi Paradox is an important question of science, to which the details of the lunchtime conversation are irrelevant. A line or two to explain why Fermi's name is associated is reasonable - any more is not.

Especially in the lead, we should be sure to be only include the essentials. The page is read 4300 times per day, and most people will read the lead paragraph. If people read at 250 words per minute, for *EVERY WORD* in the lead, that's 17 minutes per day, or two work-weeks per year of reader's time. This is why we should only put the most essential facts in the lead, especially when the details are spelled out in the article for those who want them. LouScheffer (talk) 19:23, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

I'm all in favor of short and sweet. However, there really are different remembrances -- "Where are they?" (Teller), and "Don't you ever wonder where everybody is?" (York), and "But where is everybody?" (Konopinski). And there's no reason for privileging one over another.

I have a couple of ideas. Let me see what I can put together. FriendlyRiverOtter (talk) 22:42, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

Plus, people are often keenly interested in how something got its name. FriendlyRiverOtter (talk) 17:15, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

How it got its name "Fermi paradox" is from a conversation involving Fermi, already in the lead. The details do not add to why this is the case. And if a reader is keenly interested in the details, they are right there near the beginning. Furthermore, there is a link that jumps directly to "Original Conversations". LouScheffer (talk) 02:17, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Now that we've both made our opinions known. I'd love to hear what other editors think. Anyone else care to comment? LouScheffer (talk) 02:17, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Agreed with LouScheffer on this one. The lunch conversation should only be touched on very briefly in the lead; the details of the varying accounts can be lower down. That stuff is really tangential to the paradox itself. -Crossroads- (talk) 07:05, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Actually, I'm warming to "But where is everybody?," as we currently have. It's medium in length, and all three are pretty close.

And plus, we may have bigger fish to fry. For example, the following. FriendlyRiverOtter (talk) 02:22, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Is it our job to clean up a narrative?

Herbert York doesn't remember a prior conversation. And Edward Teller may be remembering a different conversation since he wrote, " . . . and maybe approximately eight of us sat down together for lunch," whereas the other two distinctly remember just the three of them plus Fermi. At the very least, there is considerable doubt whether Teller is remembering the same occasion.

And considerable doubt should influence how we cover something. We can ask, is it our job to clean up a narrative? And I tend to answer, no, we do our readers a disservice if we do.

(York wrote that a prior conversation made sense; he simply didn't remember it.)

"Where is everybody?": An account of Fermi's question", Dr. Eric M. Jones, Los Alamos technical report, March 1985. Jones wrote to Teller on July 13, 1984, York on Sept. 4, and Konopinski on Sept. 24, 1984.

I really encourage the two of you, and anyone else who is interested, read any two of the three letters. See the differences, the gaps, etc, etc. FriendlyRiverOtter (talk) 01:51, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Aliens might detect our electromagnetic leakage, though we cannot.

I added this point to "electromagnetic emissions". The only reason I'm discussing it here is that it's a self reference. I think this is OK since (a) it's directly on topic, (b) it's cited elsewhere, and (c) I don't know of another reference for how good alien receiving technology might be. More circumstantially, I've written other peer-reviewed papers in this field, I'm an editor of a book on SETI (SETI 2020) published by the SETI Institute, and was on the review board for the Allen Telescope Array, so hopefully I'm not a complete crank.

I leave it up to other editors whether this reference should stay in. If it is removed, however, I hope it can be replaced with another reference that makes the same point. Thanks, LouScheffer (talk) 01:43, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

You sound like a thoroughly alright individual, and I think it's fine to self-reference occasionally.

but . . .

"The Covert World of People Trying to Edit Wikipedia—for Pay", The Atlantic, Joe Pinsker, Aug. 11, 2015.

This illustrates why you might run into some opposition. For example, a medical device company tried to boost their sales by changing a Wiki article so that a procedure went from controversial to mainstream, which of course is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more! So, yes, you might run into some knee-jerk opposition. Please just respond as patiently and matter-of-factly as you have here.

On unrelated topic . . . I have wondered how unlikely the Cambrian Explosion is (and/or precursors). But maybe the possibility of multicellular life needed oxygen to build up to certain levels, so the whole thing might not be as unlikely as it appears. And, Wow, if there's a good reference that dives into this, I for one would be interested! FriendlyRiverOtter (talk) 15:59, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

@FriendlyRiverOtter: You may enjoy the book The Cosmic Zoo, by Dirk Schulze-Makuch and William Bains. [1] It may be useful to this article as well, as it talks about the Fermi Paradox and is largely about the likelihood of various transitions in the history of life (e.g. multicellularity). -Crossroads- (talk) 04:42, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the recommendation! :-) FriendlyRiverOtter (talk) 23:58, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

the "Fancy" version of a reference actually conveys less useful information

For example,

Krauthammer, C. (December 29, 2011). "Are We Alone in the Universe?". The Washington Post. Retrieved January 6, 2015.

For some reason, we obscure the guy's first name. Whereas, if we included 'Charles,' some readers might realize, Oh, yeah, Charles Krauthammer, the big time political columnist for the Washington Post, and author of four or five books (the late columnist, for he died in 2018).

And we flash two dates at our readers? And I can hear it now, well, it makes it easier for editors. Yes, but our goal is to make it easier for readers, even if it's a little harder for our editors. It's normal and healthy for readers to skim quickly through references, and I think we should embrace this and make it so that it works smoothly and well. And plus, we nowhere say that this is an opinion piece (!), which it certainly is.

I'm going to change this one reference.

I'm not going to go hog wild and change a bunch a references all at once. But I might change a couple from time to time. And I'd ask you to maybe also change a couple from time to time. FriendlyRiverOtter (talk) 16:39, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

Good to include both abstract principles and specific examples.

Paleontological Tests: Human Intelligence is Not a Convergent Feature of Evolution., Charles Lineweaver, Australian National University, Canberra, published in From Fossils to Astrobiology, edited by J. Seckbach and M. Walsh, Springer, 2009.

For example, on page 5, he includes a graph of both brain size and nose size among different species and groups of species, to illustrate his point that neither one is "inevitable," or convergent. And in general, I think it's a good idea to include both abstract and specific, especially when the source itself puts a lot of weight on a specific example.

He also writes, "Thus, dolphins have had ~20 million years to build a radio telescope and have not done so," (page 10), which I think is very succinct and to the point, and perhaps worth a whole paragraph of longer, more abstract explanation. FriendlyRiverOtter (talk) 16:43, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Verbiage on music album, TV show, etc.

And smack dab at the beginning of our article. We clearly need a disambiguation page.

The page Upstairs Downstairs might provide a good model and template of what we could do.

Or, better yet, Jesse James (disambiguation). I hate to use an outlaw, but this is a good example of a main usage and then lesser known usages. FriendlyRiverOtter (talk) 19:33, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

That's just how WP:HATNOTEs work. This is the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for "Fermi paradox", so this should not become a disambiguation page. For "Where is everybody", I Googled it without quotes and all the results were Twilight Zone related. So that primary topic appears to be the episode, and I will retarget that redirect and remove the hatnote here. There is already a hatnote there for here, and article links and searches on Wikipedia are very unlikely to use that phrase anyway. As for the production company, that article could likely be sent to AfD. -Crossroads- (talk) 05:11, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. It looks like your change was a definite improvement. FriendlyRiverOtter (talk) 18:45, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Adding aliens might be utilizing encryption as Hypothetical explanations for the paradox

this Hypothetical explanation has been covered and discussed extensively by different papers and media including live Science , Scientific American , Huffington Post , The Intercept , The Guardian , etc. I tried to add it to the article twice, it gets completely remove by people who do not understand encryption and radio communication. even due i am giving up, i hope one of you picks this up and add it to the article. SimulatedZero (talk) 07:47, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

@SimulatedZero: right now most of our long and low range wireless communication including Mobile phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth are encrypted, making them indistinguishable form random signals is flat out false and sounds, like most of the rest of the section, like someone just made it up off the cuff. Those signals are modulated and quite distinct to recognize. Each sentence should be taken directly (paraphrased) from a reliable scientific source. A couple of citations at the end won't cut it. You may be on the right track but we need sources not WP:OR and WP:SYNTH.—DIYeditor (talk) 07:57, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

@DIYeditor: i agree that the part where i explain even humanity itself might be on the path to use encryption to make all communication signals indistinguishable from random signals needs polishing, why don't you Just remove the parts that don't meet Wikipedia standard and let the hypothetical explanation get to the article, so someone else can improve it later. Considering alien civilizations might be using encryption is very important when someone is trying to detect alien communication, and it is relevant to an article discussing why we have not detected other civilizations yet.SimulatedZero (talk) 18:05, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

SimulatedZero, I've read both the sources you used. The Intercept source correctly explains that Snowden was wrong and that encrypted communications would still stand out as artificial. Additionally, it wouldn't make sense for a message beamed at us to be encrypted, because the whole point is to communicate. (As for leakage radiation, at present we couldn't even detect Earth-level leakage radiation from Proxima Centauri b. We will get some range when the Square Kilometer Array comes on line though.) Because this proposed solution is flawed, it has no coverage I know of in academic sources, and so is not WP:Due. Media sources are typically not nearly as good as academic ones. -Crossroads- (talk) 07:14, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

@Crossroads: Of course some people will argue against this Hypothetical explanation, there are arguments against almost every other hypothetical explanation in this article, the fact that this explanation been discussed by more than 7 independent well known media sources (listed above) makes it noteworthy. people who argue Snowden is wrong, unlike him don't have a deep understanding of Cryptography and therefore can not predict advancement in our Encryption technologies within next few decades, therefore can not envision what kind of encryption advanced alien civilization might be using. also there is a lack of understanding of Radio waves. back to the points you made, the chances of you receiving a direct clear message form an alien civilization in your lifetime is very very low, lets say you rebroadcast Arecibo message to me that hypothetically live on M13, assuming your message travel at the speed of light, i will receive it after 25,000 years if i am listening on the exact time your message arrives; when should i have sent you my message for you to receive it in your lifetime? we are much more likely to overhear communications originating from alien spaceships and colonized planets.SimulatedZero (talk) 11:14, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

"Lack of understanding of radio waves" is reflected in the sentence I quoted above which you still have not attributed to a reliable source. Also, when you say sources "listed above" it is misleading for third parties following this thread because you added the refs after the responses and originally only asserted it had been covered in those sources. What might be helpful is if we work on a new paragraph with each statement supported by a specific RS and maybe if you would quote what you're basing it on. —DIYeditor (talk) 21:28, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

@DIYeditor:regarding the sentence you quoted above, it is not false, needs polishing, replace "them" with "encrypted content", its not suggesting that our current encrypted wireless communication is indistinguishable from background noise, its suggesting that encrypted content within transmissions are indistinguishable from random signals.SimulatedZero (talk) 03:43, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

This again? Has anything in the sourcing changed since last time it was discussed? Geogene (talk) 23:58, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

I've removed the recently restored encryption section. We discussed it extensively when it was topical, five years ago. I would be more accepting with peer reviewed journal sourcing. Geogene (talk) 00:14, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

you guys delete the whole encryption section because you don't like part of it, lets first shorten it and get the parts that meet Wikipedia standards in the article, then will work on improving it. i am sure Wikipedia allow us to use our common sense, lets understand that we are cataloging hypothetical explanations for a paradox in this article not absolute facts like where a city is located SimulatedZero (talk) 03:41, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

References