Could Advanced Technological Civilizations Exist at the Edge of the Milky Way? -A Galaxy Classic

Milan Cirkovic  of the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, and one of the world's leading authorities on astrobiology and SETI studies, thinks they might.

Cirkovic's approach is similar to the one favored by Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, who suggests searching for distant extrterrestrial artifacts of the Solar System (and other planetary systems).

In Crikovic's view, truly advanced technological civilizations (ATCs: those who survive the bottleneck presented by the threat of self-destruction through warfare or asteroid impact or other accidents) will tend to be located at the outskirts of the Milky Way. The very traits that make  ATCs capable of migrating and utilizing resources with high efficiency will tend to make them systematically hard to detect from afar.

Jamin Zuckerman proposed in 1985 that stellar evolution of stars far older than our Sun is an important motivation for civilizations to undertake interstellar migrations.  It seems implausible that any but the most extreme conservative societies would opt to wait to be forced to migration by slow and easily predictable process like their star leaving the Main Sequence.

As you would expect, some of these ideas form the story lines of some great science fiction, most vividly in the work of computer scientist Vernor Vinge.

In Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep the idea of ATCs inhabiting low-temperature regions at the boundary of the Milky Way disk and high above the Galactic plane is played out traveling through 'zones of thought.' Faster-than-light travel remains impossible near Earth, deep in the galaxy's Slow Zone--but physical laws relax in the surrounding Beyond, where most of the action takes place and faster-than-light travel is possible but transcendence beyond the Singularity to superhuman intelligence is not. Beyond the Beyond is the Transcend, full of unknowable, godlike "Powers." When human meddling wakes an old Power, the Blight, this spreads like a wildfire mind virus that turns whole civilizations into its unthinking tools.

Is this cool, or what!

Posted by Casey Kazan. Art Credit:  Jon Lomberg is one of the world's most distinguished artists inspired by astronomy.

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Astro-Engineering Artifacts as Evidence of Extraterrestrial Life
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James Cameron & Arthur C Clarke on 2001 A Space Odyssey
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Cruising the Goldilocks Zone -The Search for "Super-Earths"
The Milky Way Enigma -How Galactic Forces May Control Life on Earth

Milan Cirkovic's Website

Comments

[Link]

just saw film , weak! unimagnative cg, boreing story , lame nanobots i still think the origanal wins

[claudio]

The Drake equation (SETI institute) shows that other forms of life can indeed exist in our galaxy...and this fact is NOT so unlikely.

'Worm 'and 'faster than light' are more than just theory even if we are still centuries far away from such technologies...
These could help 'contacts' among civilized species.

Habitable planets are being discovered NOT far from our star with occultation and star light cancelation methods...apparently abitable....

All the rest is just inference......WHY we should be alone in this galaxy ??? It wold be a 'Waste of space'...

Also the 'Occam razor theory' helps : the most likely solution is the most simple among a set of possible infered solutions...WHY we should be alone in a galaxy (our) that accounts some 200 Billions stars or more ??

WHY ??

If anybody can say and prove that this with simple question...'is wrong' ....that would be fine.

Contacts (radio or laser intelligent signals) are somewhat difficult due to the limited speed of light....Physics....Physics...

Regards

[Saudi]

The outer galaxy arms live and stay longer than the inner ones, the inner ones are in their way to be eaten first by the main black hole in the center, the outer will follow but at much much later times, therefore the chance for successful evolution process is more at the outer arms to develop intelligent life.

[Saudi]

More to the above post, the inner regions of the galaxies are too crowded and rotate at faster speed, the inner region is also more violent where collisions are common, also sun sizes and weights are bigger and that make them burn at faster rate and die early.

Outer regions of the galaxies are quitter and contains smaller sun sizes to make them burn at slower rate so they live longer; they travel quietly and safely in more spacious orbits, so the very outer arm is where should listen to the radio signals coming from the developed and advanced civilizations.