Quoted
“I personally think that SETI is looking in the wrong direction. If, for example, we’re walking down a country road and we see an anthill, do we go down to the ant and say, “I bring you trinkets, I bring you beads, I bring you knowledge, I bring you medicine, I bring you nuclear technology, take me to your leader”? Or, do we simply step on them? Any civilization capable of reaching the planet Earth would be perhaps a Type III civilization. And the difference between you and the ant is comparable to the distance between you and a Type III civilization. Therefore, for the most part, a Type III civilization would operate with a completely different agenda and message than our civilization.
“Let’s say that a ten-lane superhighway is being built next to the anthill. The question is: would the ants even know what a ten-lane superhighway is, or what it’s used for, or how to communicate with the workers who are just feet away? And the answer is no. One question that we sometimes ask is if there is a Type III civilization in our backyard, in the Milky Way galaxy, would we even know its presence? And if you think about it, you realize that there’s a good chance that we, like ants in an anthill, would not understand or be able to make sense of a ten-lane superhighway next door.”
– Dr. Michio Kaku, physicist and author, in an interview at KurzweilAI.net that ranges from the Multiverse to “The Matrix.” (Equally entertaining in its own way is the classic geek fight in the comments attached to the interview.)
This sounds a whole lot like… oh I don’t know… Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.”
SETI isn’t looking for civilizations capable of “reaching” the Earth. It’s looking for civilizations at roughly the same level as us. That’s why it’s looking in the electromagnetic spectrum. Presumably there are more lower-technology civilizations than higher-technology ones, plus we know what to look for.
OH, COME ON. I strongly disagree with the SETI criticism - presumably Type III civilizations will still use the electromagnetic spectrum or gravitational waves or something in the universe we know - if they use dark energy and dark matter then we are ships passing in the night, otherwise there will be points of technical contact. Further when we can in some sense relate to chimps, gorillas, dolphins, parrots, etc. there is some level of possibly communication. Whether Type IIIs would be interested in us is another argument - I think we will need to send at least probes to some nearby stars to get any interest as a potential player in the local bubble. Ants VS human nervous systems is not a useful comparison. Especially as we are only one or two generations away from useable direct man/computer / sensor network interfaces and two to three generations away from mind downloads to solid state processor/logic/memories.
Unless a type III civilization is composed of non-biological life forms there won’t be anywhere near as great a distance between us and them as between ants and us. I suspect that life forms will always at some point become a “mature technology” and evoloutionary change will slow. A civilization composed of machines is not so constrained, and might develop both much faster and much further. But a civilization of machines is still likely to bleed massive amounts of electromagnetic radiation into the environment just as a side effect of its existence, and thus make itself known to us. Just as Earth radiates a massive 60 HZ sine wave.
Dr. Kaku makes some silly statements when asked when SETI might be successful.
Start with the ants analogy. Ants are not a more primitive or less evolved version of our own civilization. Ants (like all life on this planet) have had exactly the same time to evolve to their current state as we have. Only by our own arbitrary yardsticks are ants behind us. Ants have lived in “civilized” colonies since long before humans came along, and they will probably still be around after we’re gone.
Would an ant understand a superhighway built next to their colony? Most likely not in the sense we understand it, but they would most definitely sense the change in their environment and take the highway into account when looking for food or places to build new colonies. The problems Dr. Kaku describes derive from the difference in scale between us and ants, and our inability to find a way to communicate with other species; that’s not the same thing as two intelligent civilizations meeting up.
Would we ignore an anthill when building a superhighway on earth? Of course. Would we ignore an anthill when exploring Mars? No. Why should we assume that an alien civilization would ignore life while it explores or colonizes other planets?
Dr. Kaku seems to forget that the so-called Type 0 and Type I and Type III civilizations are classifications that humans have made up to describe aliens that are so far imaginary. All of the scientific speculation around SETI is based on a sample of one civilization. Is it likely that the universe is teeming with advanced civilizations that ignore us altogether, and we’re too primitive to notice them or be noticed by them? That is not how human explorers and naturalists work. Is it possible we have failed to notice the trillions of “Von Neumann probes” flying around replicating themselves all over the place? They would be traveling through our solar system all the time, and presumably kicking up dust on at least some of the moons in our own solar system.
How does Dr Kaku go from stating that our civilization is too primitive to notice or be noticed by “Type III” civilizations to explaining in detail how those civilization go about colonizing the galaxy? He’s like an ant imagining the existence of trucks and front-end loaders because the “Type III” aliens would of course build superhighways.
I don’t know if alien civilizations are out there or not, and I don’t know what form they might take or what they might be doing. No one does, not even Dr. Kaku. It’s all guessing. But why base the guesses on statements like “We’re type 0, we’re not very interesting.” We would find it very interesting to discover a bacterium, to say nothing of an ant colony, on another planet, and I think it’s just as likely the aliens would be very interested in us.
Run the numbers: there are so many earth-like stars in our own little segment of the universe that it’s for certain that thousands of of them support human-like populations–some more advanced, some less and some roughly the same as earth.
But all of this Si-Fi speculation is meaningless given the limiting speed of light.
Which means what we some day detect has already ceased to exist AND/OR, if “they” see our 60 Mhz, we’ll be outta here.
Maybe it’s God’s final joke on us–since we are all so very smart….
This guy is a moron.
His sole attribute is to pontificate on matters from a tired academics view.
I don’t know if he has had an original thought.
Kerzweil in his tome “The Singularity is Near” wholly dismisses this ant-like perspective. We are more like protean giants who are beginning the upsweep into a transcendental existence.
If a Type III or even IV civilization has an ounce of sense they would be concerned about us. Why? We will be joining them in a blink of of the Galactic Lense’s eye.
Within 500 years our civilization will be nudging them in their creches. Our technological, spiritual and mental capacities will deploy a formidable prescence which they (if still corporeal enough to have superhighways of any type) must deal with and shortly. The question then will be should they be a concern of ours?
This transition will be of near immediate impact to them and their ilk. If they want this to be a smooth interaction I propose that they want to aid us in our ascension rather than have a bunch of rubes irritating them.
If other developing civilations are moving along the same track with the attendant logarithmic accelerations of their cultures, we shouldn’t be wasting any resources on finding them. We’ll meet, either figuratively or physically, in the near future. It would be incumbent upon us to plan on that and a better usage of our time.
If the conspiratists are correct in the “Black Ops” of our governments and the burying of transformative technologies, then those aliens may already be attemting to instruct us. There are enough examples in the lower tech world to show that those who control us are willing to use their powers to continue the policy of keeping us in our current harness.
This will also pass and we need to not consider the roadblocks imposed as we will as a race fly over them. The Chinese have shown us how their leaders fear unmitigated change. Their authorities fear (rightly so) that the underlings are becoming too informed, too self-improving and are attemting to staunch their migration into the new.
Why suspect ours doesn’t do the same? Re; Iraq.
So dismiss M.I.’s musings as witless. I’ve read a couple of his books and have had to listen him articulate nonsense and repeating other’s work on popularized science shows. I hate the fact that he is used as reference.
So should you. He is an elementary level instrutor at best.
Sorry about the mis-spellings. I’m hurrying to my son’s.
It was interesting the biz aboot anthills…I often believe we (humanoids here on Earth)are nothing but a rat-maze experiment gone horribly wrong…LOL…”Scotty beam me up! This Planet is only type three and we are for-sure type four types…”Hmmm???