Where are they?

Fermi Paradox and Drake Equation are - depending on where you stand - fun or really un-fun thought experiments. Latter tells us us that probability of life is so high that it is almost completely certain that there are other intelligent species out there. But we haven't heard even a hint of anyone. Why is that?

What if almost civilizations rise to point where we are now, and higher - and then fall, never to be able to climb back up again? (well, I guess this would fall into "transmitting only briefly" category, in a fashion).

At this point, we, the humankind, have utilized almost every easily accessible source of raw materials (minerals and oil, primarily) that there are, and only by using fairly advanced tech we are able to extract more inaccessible resources right now.

We have managed to dodge a proverbial bullet with nuclear holocaust so far (but that story isn't at end yet), as well as biological pathogens and weapons (ditto there). Climate change is one of major issues at this point, and I can only guess how bad it could get. What if, say, 100 million people find their current location inhabitable and choose to move to better location -- say, North America or Europe? That scenario looks right now way too plausible for comfort, and would quite certainly trigger a major wars - in plural, all over the world.

This isn't the only scenario. Our globally high level of civilization is built on very fragile framework of technology where majority of people are very narrowly defined specialists, and any major disaster might bring it crashing down. If large enough number of these people are gone, the remaining population could very easily find their knowledge lacking in every field there is, from basic agriculture to ... well, anything. In just generation or two there could be huge monuments of high tech behind that we could no longer use (lack of knowledge or [electrical or chemical] power), care (lack of maintenance) or build (technology is always build on just slightly less advanced tech).

Again, easily available resources are now gone, and we no longer have tech to get to the hard-to-get ones. Could we ever rise up again as technological power? I am not certain that we could. Mankind might be doomed to live here, on this earth, never being able to get past the orbit or reach out for anyone.

How many civilizations have fallen like this, and will it be our destiny too?


“Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes .. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars.”
(in Babylon 5, written by J. Michael Straczynski,)

CFL lifetime

When the ban of incandescent light bulbs came into effect, common argument against that was the lifetime if CFLs (and later, LEDs) that were to replace them were as short as incandescents, or even shorter.

It took a while (a long while), but now I got some anecdotal evidence on that argument.

We've lived in this house for over 10 years now, and we have never changed the outside lights (four of them in total). Until now. One of them had gone bad. A 11-watt CFL. The glass tube seems that have neatly broken at one point and let magic smoke out, or something to that effect. Other three identical CFLs are still going strong.

So these things have been out there for at least 10 years, in varying weather from -40 degrees C to +30 degrees C. Possibly over 20 years, even. During that time we've had some half dozen other CFLs in the house that, granted, have been used more, but so far none of them has broken.

Going back even more, I got my first larger apartment around 2003 or so. At that time I bought a light fixture to kitchen that I still have (some plastic parts have gone bad since, though). For that fixture I bought a CFL bulb that is still in use. So that would be 15 years, and that one has been used a lot during that time, considering that is has been in the kitchen, and lately, in my office kitchen/break room where it gets easily 6+ hours of use a day in winter (much less in summer, of course). I'd say that I've gotten far more "bang for a buck" out of CFLs, all in all, than ever from incandescents.

Now, that being said, CFLs have other issues, like some brightening very slowly, but lifetime certainly isn't one of their weak aspects.

Now, LEDs, so far, seem to be be falling in middle. At the moment we have maybe 10 LED bulbs around here, with maybe half being dimmable and oldest being somewhere between 5 and 8 years old (no firm anchor point on time for those like for CFL examples above, you see). So far one has failed (and I did open it and post here too, and once again semi-clever topic names bite me in the back as I can't find the post right now). Still, quite many hours of use we've gotten out of those, too.

I, for one, won't be missing incandescent lights, except maybe in color rendering purposes for photography. For that I'll keep some in spare. But I wouldn't be surprised even if that situation were to change in near future too.