Why aren't we all dead? A clue to SETI - the search for extra-terrestrial life

I was thinking today about SETI -- the "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,"   I think SETI has it all wrong and that's why it's not finding anything or anyone out there despite an enormous search effort.

It's not that there's no one besides us to find -- it's that the entire premise, the mental model of the world, on which SETI is based is wrong.

Because we are talking about a civilization that is a billion years more advanced than we are,    not something like 200 years more advanced than us,  there is no reason I can think of to assume that we would even recognize what an artifact of such a civilization would look like. 

Well, golly,   if we cannot find signs of an advanced civilization that way how should we look? 

Maybe to them we are a diversion, a garden,   a pretty thing to watch grow.

Or maybe, they are doing more than just watching -- maybe like good gardeners the world round, the are actively intervening in Life here to assist it reaching some sort of completion.

If they were hostile, we'd already be dead.  But we're not, so they're not. But maybe they're not neutral either -- maybe they actually are more like loving gardeners, tending to the evolving Earth.

That's just speculation but it leads to a good solid Scientific question --

If they were intervening here,  would we know it? 

There are two reasons we might not see it:

(1)     US anthropologists visiting old cultures try to take great care not to mess them  up by studying them.   It may be they are watching but not intervening because they are careful.

(2)    There are perfectly functional  devices, which I described before such as siphons and magnetrons, that do the job but have zero moving parts.    See my post "Amazing devices to impress your friends". Maybe they are advanced enough to know how to steer without pushing.  And we tend to believe that managing and manipulating something must involve pushing on it. On the other hand we are a clumsy and primitive race -- and our "art of management" and "art of government" leaves a lot to be desired.

Just as an example -- Say Joe drives his car into a ditch and needs help getting it out.  How would ET help without force?  Well,  they could see this coming, and back when Joe was deciding which route to take, they could nudge him slightly into feeling frisky and taking a different route today.  It violates no law of Physics, but it gets the car out of the ditch -- by seeing it coming and avoiding it.

The semi-miracle is that the event is dealt with by causing it to un-happen-in-the-first-place.

Actually, on a smaller scale, packets of light called photons have a similar creepy behavior where they seem to see something coming and react to it to avoid it coming.  There is the famous Young experiment -- light comes up to a wall with 2 slits in it, and has to pick a slit.  If it were a wave, it would generate an interference pattern on the far side ( see picture below ) but as a particle it can only go through one slit.  It does that, and yet only picks a direction to go that it would if it had gone through both slits, which it hasn't and yet which it sort of has.

So the revisited SETI question isn't how to detect radio waves from them -- it's to figure out where to look to find unmistakable and unambiguous signs that someone not from here is, in fact here now, messing about with things but in a very low key fashion.  Near zero, but not zero.

You see, it's relatively easy to design an experiment to notice unexpected forces lifting Joe's car out of a ditch, and we would have noticed those by now, but it's quite another matter, and a tricky one, to detect something causing mild nudges from time to time in Joe's mood or preferences, even though the physical result is the same.

This brings to mind an old Chinese story about how the best doctors use the least visible intervention. This is from Thomas Cleary's introduction to the ancient book The Art of War

 A Chinese lord once asked his physician, a member of a family of healers, which of them was the most skilled in the art.

The physician, whose name was such that his name became synonymous with medical science in China, replied, "My eldest brother sees the spirit of sickness and removes it before it takes shape, so his name does not get out of the house.

My elder brother cures sickness when it is still minute, so his name does not get out of the neighborhood."

"As for me, I puncture veins, prescribe potions, and massage skin, so from time to time my name gets out and is heard among the lords."

So how could we tease such an effect out of the ambiguous zone??   What I'm looking for here is the right question to ask, a simple question like the the question asked by the astronomer Olber once upon a time, namely,

Why is the sky dark at night?

Well, duh,  because the sun has set dummy!  No, it turns out in an infinite universe,  regardless which direction you point, in that direction sooner or later there will be a star. And together, they should all add up so that the sky should be as bright, in any direction, as the surface of the sun.

Here's a better full description of what turned out to be a great question:  Olber's Paradox.
The paradox resulted in Astronomers realizing that the universe must be expanding, so that the red-shift from stars moving faster and faster away from us in the distance cancelled out the fact that the volume of space for stars got larger and larger as you drew a larger sphere around the earth.

Well in our observation of life on Earth, I'm asking my echo of Olber's Paradox, namely

Why are we not all dead?

This seems like a neutral, fair, scientific question.

It's of interest because it might turn out to be an indicator that there is some kind of outside intervention in outcomes occurring here.  Here's my reasoning.

We are in a battle with microbes and viruses, right? They are perfectly capable of killing us, at least on an individual basis.   Heck, the Spanish Flu in 1918 killed more people than the number who died in all of World War I.   Wikipedia describes The Black Death in Europe

The Black Death, also known as the Pestilence, the Great Plague or the Plague, or less commonly the Black Plague, was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia and peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351...The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population.

Deadly viruses today have the huge advantage over 1350 of more cities on Earth densely packed with tens of millions of vulnerable poor people with no health care to act as sort of gasoline-soaked rags in the basement just looking for a spark,  idiot scientists experimenting with recombinant-DNA,  and lately, jet aircraft travel world-wide.

And, all of our magical antibiotics are running out of steam.   This is a huge known problem.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is worried about pandemics. Shouldn't we?

But back to our larger time scale and the question I asked above. Why haven't viruses already won? Why aren't we all dead?  If viruses can mutate far faster than Drug Companies can generate vaccines,and if we are in a life-or-death race against them, then it seems the outcome is a certainty that we will lose, or should have already lost.  It's like opening the faucet wide into a bath to fill it with water ( the viruses ) while we also open a much smaller drain ( the Drug Companies ).  The outcome is clear, sooner or later that tub is going to overflow.

 It seems like something we should build a simulation model of and try to tweak it to fit the reality we see around us.

One possibility is that there is some mathematical law that determines such outcomes and, if i understood that law, I'd see that out of 100,000 simulation runs,  almost all don't die: maybe death is statistically very unlikely.  Ok, that's one.

Another  possibility is that by modeling this we would discover that yes, with 99% certainty we can state that there must be some other factor in play because given all the empirical parameter we have, and our model of how things work ( basic pandemic model, etc.) we should indeed all be dead.   This is pretty important to address because it might be some factor that industry in its insatiable greed,   is at the current time undermining and destroying.   It would be good to know that.

In my mind this is the kind of question that Computational Public Health could and should be asking.

Unlike the risk of planetary extinction by being hit by an asteroid,  the death by virus risk is one that isn't stable over time, but one that is growing rapidly in our time,  aided by the trends of urbanization and growing inequality that are generating larger and larger dense pools of vulnerable people. 

This trend cannot continue.  It's like putting more and more people on a bridge.  Sooner or later the bridge will simply collapse.  Unless -- there is something else going on to make that not happen,

Sidebar -- Don't get me wrong.  Rich people are just as vulnerable.  A pandemic anywhere is a pandemic everywhere.   There is no safe place to hide.   In the US, with a huge hospital system, for example, there is also no "slack" -- there are essentially no empty beds in which to put a sudden rush of new sick people.   I used to work at a Hospital and we did a desk-top simulation of how the hospital would respond to a sudden influx of patients, and it was not pretty.   All the lobbies and corridors and then the parking lots would fill up with patients or those afraid they might be sick, and all new admissions would cease.   Your odds of seeing a doctor would be slim to none.  If you did manage to see one they would have no drugs left for you anyway.

Anyway, that's my thought for the day.  Your thoughts? Comment below!