Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?(scientificamerican.com)

125 pointsby laybak5 tahun yang lalu286 comments

Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-we-assume-extraterrestrials-might-want-to-visit-us/

299 comments

nend5 tahun yang lalu

>We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path.

Not really the most convincing argument. There are professions that study ants. And I'm sure I'm not the only person on this forum that has a casual interest in observing ants.

Pretty sure aliens would still be interested in us even if we were as primitive as ants.

hans17295 tahun yang lalu

Ants are interesting because of the complex behavioral systems emerging from their comparatively simple biological systems, reminiscent of the game of life.

Seeing the insane complexity of the human condition (look at the amount of scientific disciplines we come up with) and thinking "nay, this won't be interesting to a higher mind" feels awfully dismissive.

sure, depending on the leap of sophistication we may appear like... rocks, I guess? But I can't even begin to conceptualize to what in comparison we'd appear like rocks. Anything of that complexity probably is multiple magnitudes beyond our comprehension anyway, and therefore not really part of the discussion

op035 tahun yang lalu

Recently I had a bunch of snails appear out of nowhere all over the garden. And I spent a whole lot of time, trying to figure out what they were feeding on, cuz some were getting really big. The whole thing was quite fascinating...like how the hell were they producing these huge ass shells without tearing all the plants apart? So I call a good buddy over (PhD in bio something or the other) thinking he would be as fascinated. And guess what...he shows up and all he wanted to do was cook them. So much for higher minds. (we didn't btw)

joshspankit5 tahun yang lalu

“Listen: I’m fascinated 23 hours a day. When I go over to a buddy’s house I just wanna eat things. Yaknow?”

65105 tahun yang lalu

Did you try talk with them? They are probably much more like us than we are like 100 billion year old civilizations. They might find us interesting to look at but the proverbial bird watcher doesn't try to sit in the nest.

7thaccount5 tahun yang lalu

How did you know they were edible? I mean, I know people eat snails in certain parts, but how did you know these were safe?

Archelaos5 tahun yang lalu

In Germany I only ever eat helix pomatia[1]. Nowadays, they are under nature protection. Only the consumption of cultivated snails is allowed. They are related to mussels and taste similar. I can especially recommend snail cream soup.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_pomatia

randycupertino5 tahun yang lalu

I used to think I loved escargot but it turns out I actually just loved them as a delivery vessel for garlic, butter and cheese.

evilsetg5 tahun yang lalu

That is what you have the bio something PhD for :-)

franknine5 tahun yang lalu

Snails might host Angiostrongylus cantonensis (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiostrongylus_cantonensis) which can kill people

whatshisface5 tahun yang lalu

Maybe he already knew about how the snails did their thing.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

TheOtherHobbes5 tahun yang lalu

I seriously doubt the human condition seems complex to a species that went through this stage a billion years ago.

Or even a million years ago.

If we ever invent a time machine I doubt we'd learn much from humans of 10,000 years ago. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals.

So the horizon of interest where an encounter would be fascinating and worth the time and effort but not devastatingly disruptive to either side is probably only a few millennia.

But let's call it +/- 10k years, to be generous.

Compare with the age of the universe, or even of the galaxy. It's really not a big proportion of the available time.

soufron5 tahun yang lalu

"If we ever invent a time machine I doubt we'd learn much from humans of 10,000 years ago. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals."

That's only your opinion, and it's most probably wrong. These guys were capable of feats you can only dream of. And you could be very surprised at their level of sophistication, which might appear higher than us on many levels - if not on all levels.

OnlyMortal5 tahun yang lalu

Quite. It’s an insult to our ancestors to dismiss their ability to use their technology.

The ruins we find around the world from previous civilisations tell us they were very smart.

at-fates-hands5 tahun yang lalu

> There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals.

Generally speaking, about once a year, archeologists find something that completely challenges their theories on human evolution.

https://www.livescience.com/biggest-archaeology-discoveries-...

Just the amount of engineering the Egyptians did is enough to warrant our continued fascination with their culture, some 5,000 years later.

PartiallyTyped5 tahun yang lalu

To be fair to rocks, we also study them ...

guerrilla5 tahun yang lalu

Is astrogeology (as etymologically oxymoronic as that is) already a subject?

Denvercoder95 tahun yang lalu

That's basically what asteroid science is. It's such a big field that we're even sending probes to collect rocks.

kridsdale15 tahun yang lalu

Maybe aliens will be interested in Earth for Astrogastronomy.

liotier5 tahun yang lalu

Sorry, no - only the consumption of cultivated humans is allowed.

madia_leva5 tahun yang lalu

How would you know that you are being cultivated?

jrd2595 tahun yang lalu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man

ballenf5 tahun yang lalu

The point is that we're one of (large number) of ant colonies and there's nothing particularly interesting about us vs. any other ant colony.

Even if ETs study ants generally, there's nothing unique about us to give us a greater than 1/(large number) chance of being studied.

b1125 tahun yang lalu

This. And to add my own expansion to this, the number of ants studied by humans is effectively zero.

First, out of all the ant biomass, humans have only seen a very, very tiny amount. Ants are so numerous, and so ubiquitous, Google claims 10 billion billion. Yet this number seems incredibly low, for apparently (wikipedia) some ant colonies have 100s of millions of workers.

Regardless, as a human, can you imagine trying to visit each ant colony? How about if you lived just as long as an ant, or thereabouts? Say, a few years?

How about ant colonies which appear, die off? And how about the fact that ants have been around since the dinosaurs, and our modern civilisation has been around for a few hundred?

And how about if you are a researcher? Let's say you stand back, and watch the ants. Do the ants even notice? Especially the main colony?

Or are you looking at a few out of endless numbers? What do they report when they get back. Do you even need to be near the ant colony to watching them?

And after you've looked at 100 ant colonies, do you need to look at another 1000? Million? We keep discovering subtle branches of insects, so why would a.. I dunno, being comprised of energy, find different (after the first 1000) in a species with a bunch of meaty limbs?

akiselev5 tahun yang lalu

You just made me feel a little sorry for all those millions of ants who get back to their colonies and get ostracized for wild stories of giant aliens stomping on their brothers and lighting them on fire with concentrated beams of light.

On the bright side, their version of "Ancient Aliens" is probably a lot more factual and based in reality.

Caprinicus5 tahun yang lalu

We have devoted large amounts of time and resources to studying the differences between seemingly similar ant colonies, and we have lived alongside ants for our entire existence as a species.

Imagine now that we had never seen an ant, had a totally different biological origin to the ants, and had no idea why they did what they do because we had no cultural conception of them as an entity.

We’d only be more interested in ants.

TheOtherHobbes5 tahun yang lalu

This is missing the point. We might be interested in ants, but the ants would not be interested in us, because ants cannot understand us.

We can prod and research ant hills all we want. But all ants will ever see are some unexpected occurrences - maybe a very unusual scent which they can't place, or some food which wasn't there earlier, or an unexpected plague of ant death - which they will forget almost instantly.

It will never occur to ant-kind that they're even being studied, because ants have no concept of what "being studied" means.

There is nothing at all in the ant (hill) mind capable of understanding that a creature like a human might exist, never mind how to communicate with it.

So we can do what we like, and we will remain not just invisible, but unthinkable - forever.

munk-a5 tahun yang lalu

I don't know about that - we don't have any real scale equivalence in actual life forms so I'll use celestial objects as an example. The movement of other planets has almost no impact on our daily lives - the moon may impact the tides and the sun leads to our day night cycle but we can't effectively impact that and so, for the average person, life goes on without more than a momentary thought given to how things are going on up there. Though, we are all vaguely aware that we could suddenly and arbitrarily be killed by an asteroid impact (much like a colony being arbitrarily chosen to become some kid's ant-farm - or being run over by a truck) it isn't in the front of our minds because we need to get back to filling out that TPS report.

Still, as a society, we have a number of dedicated individuals that do study celestial movements and would try and prevent a sudden asteroid impact, and we all do remain vaguely aware of what's going on up there. So I'm not certain how much I agree with the fact that ants cannot understand us. Sure we can't sit down and have tea with an ant and talk about the weather, but if the moon was a gigantic dragon that just moved really slowly in a mostly predictable manner then how we interact with it might not be particularly distinguishable from how we interact with it when it's just a chunk of rock.

A good parallel to think of here is probably Discworld, I might suggest reading The Light Fantastic if you never had to get a bit of a sense of how we might interact with celestially sized lifeforms and just how one-sided that relationship could potentially be.

throwaway3169435 tahun yang lalu

We might not be unique in those senses. If DNA and carbon based life is the standard then we are likely more similar to most life in the universe even if we have small differences in physiology or culture. We don’t share a direct biological origin but we are still made of the same stuff, probably originated under very similar conditions, etc. Unique forms of life likely develop under equally rare conditions in exotic environments. We’re probably just run of the mill meat bags.

baja_blast5 tahun yang lalu

I disagree that Aliens even if we share the exact same building blocks would look similar to us. For example even for planets that would be habitable for us would have minor differences in atmospheric pressure, gravity, the types of radiation their star produces would result in drastically different evolutionary paths. Also even if there was a clone of our solar system evolution would be random and the life would look different from each other, I mean look at Australia, or even look at Earth's history the fauna during the Jurassic looks way different than what we have today.

throwaway3169435 tahun yang lalu

Small differences here means within the realm of what’s possible to build out of organic molecules. We’re talking about averaging life across the span of a galaxy. By unique and exotic I meant unlikely life forms like Boltzmann brains or sentient planets. We are probably one out of a million sentient, organic, sexually reproducing species. Once you’ve seen a few thousands of these you’re probably bored.

egsmi5 tahun yang lalu

Every snowflake is unique [1]. That doesn't mean you study every snowflake that means you study the system that makes snowflakes.

[1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atm...

yoz-y5 tahun yang lalu

Last time a new mammal was discovered here it was international news.

If an alien civilisation has trillions of trillions individuals, there must be quite a bit of them interested in any possible niche. This assumes that an interstellar species would be naturally curious.

rbanffy5 tahun yang lalu

There are, literally, millions of planets that can sustain life as we know it. Assuming a human-like mind, that alone is enough to reduce the interest in alien life as something mundane.

ryanmercer5 tahun yang lalu

>There are, literally, millions of planets that can sustain life as we know it.

There are probably x amount of planets that can sustain life as we know it. We haven't even verified the existence of millions of planets.

https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/counts_detail... shows only 4331 confirmed exoplanets, of those we've visited 0 and are still largely guessing as to their atmospheres, weather, temperatures, seismic activity, etc. Not to mention some we've found in the "goldilocks" zone are likely regularly sterilized due to the conditions of their orbit and their stars.

alisonkisk5 tahun yang lalu

There are literally millions of species on Earth, and each one has a scientist interested in it.

account425 tahun yang lalu

That would imply that there are also lots of alien worlds that are similarly developed to us and those might be interested.

Retric5 tahun yang lalu

We don’t seem likely to leave the solar system any time soon, so that could easily be the case. Especially if there is any lag between detecting say radio waves or whatever they find interesting and a ship showing up.

The other consideration is visiting other stars may be possible and extremely expensive. Colonizing at say 0.001c is possible, but very slow and likely requires generation ships. Hardly worth it so your descendent can visit some primitive culture who might not be around when they get there.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

taneq5 tahun yang lalu

> There's nothing particularly interesting about us vs. any other ant colony.

I'd hope not. 'Interesting' ant colonies sometimes get molten aluminium poured down them to make a cast of the nest.

RandallBrown5 tahun yang lalu

But if there are so many ant colonies like us (and I would say we're very interested in alien life) then I would assume at least some of them would be interested in us too.

em-bee5 tahun yang lalu

we are an ant colony on our own island.

we may not study all ant colonies on the planet, but we certainly check all islands, and if there are ants, we will at least check if those ants are the same as other ants we have already seen.

King-Aaron5 tahun yang lalu

Our ant colony might be sitting inside a terrarium on some aliens desk...

throwaway22455 tahun yang lalu

> I'm sure I'm not the only person on this forum that has a casual interest in observing ants

From Wikipedia for "ant": "More than 12,500 of an estimated total of 22,000 species have been classified."

From our human perspective, we are interested in ants. Everybody has seen ants. Everybody is curious about ants.

From an ant perspective, humans scarcely exist. There are 10,000 ant species that don't have a relationship with humans sufficient to deserve classification, let alone a name.

(I also want to wonder aloud why extra-terrestrials would be more interested in humans than in ants)

nend5 tahun yang lalu

Yes but there's a difference between being unable to study all ant species due to a lack of resources, and being uninterested in doing so.

I expect we'll continue studying ant species with the goal of studying all of them we can (assuming we don't wipe ourselves out or ant species out before we have a chance to).

Similarly I also expect we (or an advanced alien species) would attempt to study as many other alien species as they can as well, and wouldn't stop simply because they don't want to.

We've studied 12,500 out of an estimated 22,000 so far. It's not like we've stopped and said "ok we're good, no need to study other ant species."

throwaway22455 tahun yang lalu

> being unable to study all ant species due to a lack of resources, and being uninterested in doing so.

Of course! That's my point.

Back to the alien analogy: if we believe that human-like life is as common across the universe as ants are on earth, then more-advanced aliens might well be philosophically interested in studying us, but not have yet bothered to reach us.

They might be busy "contacting" their local human-ish specieses who they see everywhere, all the time, and not think it is important to spend time contacting similar planet #12358 on the list, that's a bit further out of the way, and could take them a million years of dedicated effort.

notahacker5 tahun yang lalu

The lack of resources devoted to the counting of ant species is a reflection of it being very uninteresting to most people. Relative to the entire universe, our world really doesn't have many places to look for ants, and we don't need to travel faster than the speed of light to find them.

throwaway3169435 tahun yang lalu

This is a good supporting point. If you actually quantified the effort and resources it would take to study every species of ant it would likely be quite small although not trivially so. Yet it is still left up to the personal interests of professional biologists to lobby for research programs. It could play out similarly on a galactic scale in which case our first point of contact might be a grad student from the biology department of the local Uni.

ruined5 tahun yang lalu

and not only this, even among classified species, most colonies will never interact directly with a human. when ants do come into contact with things we have made, they do not comprehend it. and when they interact with us directly, even in a mode where we are identifiable to them as an entity, they can't identify much about us beyond the practical facts that we are dangerous or perhaps edible.

patcon5 tahun yang lalu

And further, to the extent that we might say "a lot of ants experience people now", it's perhaps more a function of us being way overextended beyond the sustainable carrying capacity of our system.

In a world where humans somehow kept themselves from risking their own existence through limitless growth (which I'm assuming wiser intelligences would navigate better), the vast majority of ants colonies would never have any human take notice of them through their whole existence.

mcbits5 tahun yang lalu

Even as we expand our presence and every random ant has a better and better chance of encountering some kind of evidence of human existence, it still has to know how to evaluate what it's seeing.

An ant finds a peanut. Being a smart ant, it recognizes that something is strange about this peanut. It appears to be roasted. After thinking for a while, it develops a theory to explain how lightning can ignite fires capable of roasting peanuts. Simple and obvious explanation in hand, no further inquiry or speculation about the existence of "advanced peanut roasting technology" is needed.

I mean, why would supposedly advanced creatures intentionally reduce the nutritional quality of the peanut by roasting it, anyway? Yes, definitely lightning.

smelter5 tahun yang lalu

To an ant, I am a mountain/ thunderstorm/earthquake/quasar.

behnamoh5 tahun yang lalu

Chances are ETs have transformed into a physical form that is undistinguishable from, say, planets, energy, even stars. After all, the ultimate level of technology design and sophistication is when it is not distinguishable from its surroundings.

smelter5 tahun yang lalu

Agreed - we do not even possess the instruments to define the nature of dark matter, and it is only by inference that we can suppose it exists.

It is amazing that Fermi, Einstein, et al were able to predict what they did without readily available modern computing hardware and search engines.

Some things are out of the realm of our perception.

simonh5 tahun yang lalu

It's hard to be sure what a 10 or 100 million year old civilisation might still find interesting. I certainly wouldn't think a few hundred years of industrialisation, and a few decades of the information technology age gives us any real idea.

behnamoh5 tahun yang lalu

This. Plus, who says those ETs are of biological form anyway? Even we are thinking about AI doing most of the work, transhumanism and uploading our minds to machines, and finally, integrating with technology. Why think that a 10 million year old civilization still has flesh bodies, needs, and curiosities?

Another comment also mentioned that ETs don't necessarily share the same interests and thought process as we do, and I agree. For an insanely sophisticated civilization, mental representations and the abstract concepts they can think about are just unimaginable for us.

inDigiNeous5 tahun yang lalu

This. The assumption that these ETs would appear in the same form as us, or even in the same dimension, shows us how limited our thinking is.

If a lifeform has gone through let's say million times the evolving that we have, wouldn't their consciousness and expression of life have developed probably into something alltogether different.

Maybe even something that we cannot see or hear with just our physical senses or instruments. There are many theories about this if you read on the subject, people being in contact with different species, but explaining that they came from between dimensions from example.

grahamburger5 tahun yang lalu

I think the argument is that while ants are indeed interesting to us as a subject, not every single anthill gets our attention. There are probably lots of anytime anthills in out of the way places that have never had human interaction.

psadri5 tahun yang lalu

Maybe not humans, but they probably do get visits from other insects and animals.

volkk5 tahun yang lalu

an interesting point which begs the question of what is a threshold of intelligence required to lose interest in a species. and if intelligence isn't the only parameter, what are the others? predation is an obvious one, curiosity comes with a form of intelligence, what else is there?

psadri5 tahun yang lalu

I think a sense of curiosity is a pre-requisite or perhaps co-emergent with technological advancement.

They also need to be advanced enough to be send an interstellar probe or ship to visit other disntant planets.

throwaway0a5e5 tahun yang lalu

Do the ants in your example know they're being studied?

When the European powers explored the pacific they wrote off a lot of islands as being devoid of anything useful. Now a few hundred years later these islands, mostly untouched by humans, are a gold mine for various niches of biology. Human presence is still infrequent enough that the seagulls don't seem to notice.

s_dev5 tahun yang lalu

>There are professions that study ants.

Not only that we've incorporated armies of scientists in to the public realm to advise on such envoirnmental/biodiversity policy issues. It's possible an Interstate Freeway project may not happen because an bunch of endangered ants live along its planned route.

addicted5 tahun yang lalu

This makes me think that one possible reason we havent observed any alien life is that similar to how we may avoid any sort of development or encroachment in an area containing an endangered species, we may have been marked off as too fragile to interact.

And humans are an incredibly fragile species from the perspective of a space faring civilization. If a meteor hits our planet, we are basically done. And even if that doesn't happen, we can only acquire raw materials and energy from our own planet, so we may basically just tap out all our resources before we learn to acquire it from somewhere else.

And then there is the fact that we love blowing each other up, which may not be a common trait amongst intelligent species.

throwaway22455 tahun yang lalu

> an bunch of endangered ants

As best as I can tell, there are no ant species on any endangered list, so this is a hyperbolic point.

(In general, we don't even study ant species enough to know whether they are endangered)

s_dev5 tahun yang lalu

Theres a few species classified as endangered ants on the IUCN Red List.

However didn't aliens crush humanity to make space for a Intergalactic Super Highway in Hithchikers Guide to the Galaxy? We aren't even endangered according to those ruling fictional aliens who epitomise the "not interested in humanity" aspect.

kypro5 tahun yang lalu

It's also not true that the only time ants come into contact with humans is when they're being observed. Even if aliens were uninterested in us, it wouldn't necessarily mean we'd expect not to see any signs of alien life.

In the same way an ant might stumble across a human building or notice a human above the grass, you would think if life was so prevalent in our galaxy that there would be some sign of their technology.

ryanmercer5 tahun yang lalu

>you would think if life was so prevalent in our galaxy that there would be some sign of their technology.

There's a big problem though, I've written about it here https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2014/11/30/this-jus...

Basically time + the vastness of space = an insanely low probability that any two intelligent civilizations would overlap within a detectible sphere, especially with our current level of technology.

If we assume 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets exist in 100 billion galaxies and that 1 in 100 of those host single cellular life, that 1 in 1000 of those host multi-cellular life, that 1 in 1000 of those have animal life, that 1 in 10 of those has sentient tool-building species you then have 10 trillion planets with tool-building species.

If we assume an even distribution that's 100 tool-building species per galaxy spread out over 12-13 billion years.

Oof.

Even if you make far more generous assumptions, and that 1 in 2 planets has single cellular life and that 1 in 2 of those have tool-building life. That gives you an average of 25,000 tool-building worlds per galaxy, something like a 1 in 20 million change any star in our galaxy has a tool-building civilization.

If you remove the first billion years of the galaxy you get 12.21-12.51 billion years.

Again if we assume an even distribution and assume 140,000 light-years in diameter for a galaxy, that gives you something like 1 tool building civilization per 600,000 square light-years spread out over 12 billion years.

:( :( :(

rbanffy5 tahun yang lalu

I wouldn't expect any given alien culture to be easily detectable and/or willing to make large scale objects we could detect.

I would, however, expect at least one such civilization would develop within our detection range. As our range increases, both in distance and in breadth, chances should get increasingly better.

jjk1665 tahun yang lalu

You look at ants, you don't look at every ant.

It would be absurd to conclude the absence of entomologists just because most individual ants go unobserved.

donatj5 tahun yang lalu

Let’s say though it took several generations to travel to the ants, would we bother?

Cthulhu_5 tahun yang lalu

I think so. Not that long ago, humans spread across the world, first organically, then intentionally. We're at the infancy of spaceflight at the moment, the equivalent of putting food and water in a raft to go to the next island over.

We'll see humans on Mars in our lifetime, like the previous generation saw humans on the moon. Assuming the development and interest in spaceflight continues, we'll be seeing generation ships departing for the next solar system within the next 500 or so years (rough armchair prediction based on nothing at all). Of course, we have some massive problems to solve first, like biology, self-sustenance in deep space, cultural, financial, etc.

Anyway, my theory that we haven't seen other species yet is that space is vast and science fiction tech for light speed and beyond does not exist. If you have technology that can reach 1% of light speed, it'll take 10 million years to fly across just our galaxy. Humans evolved somewhere within that bracket. Even if the technology is there, you're seeing not just generations but entire species develop in the timescales of traveling the milky way.

me_me_me5 tahun yang lalu

There are also people that pour liquid metal into ant colony to cast its internal structure.

It doesn't end well for ants.

teekert5 tahun yang lalu

Indeed, Ants do some pretty fascinating stuff, TIL we have stuff like "Ant colony optimization algorithms" [0].

Even if we are as the aliens were 2 millions years ago, there must be something of interest in what we do? I mean, we'd be interested in life 2 billion years ago. I find it more likely that they just don't want to interfere.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algori...

bluGill5 tahun yang lalu

Perhaps, but I think it is far more likely they can't overcome the limits of the speed of light to do any useful observing. They can't cross the distance to observe us, even robots take so long to arrive that their star dies before it gets here (not to mention our star was still forming when they sent the probe out...)

They cannot observe us directly, light just doesn't have that resolution at the distance. They can't observe our radio waves because our radio waves are only 100 light years out, not to mention the signal strength fades with distance.

sliken5 tahun yang lalu

Quite a few stars and usable solar systems started out 1 billion years ahead of ours. The sun is relatively late to the game. If a race was curious it could well seed the galaxy with small, smart probes, that could watch for certain signs life, record, and report back to the galaxy wide cloud, sure speed of light means that takes a long time. Sure that may take 50k years for light speed communications to reach a central location, but it would collect whatever was of interest.

Might even just be a few 100 bytes of info along the lines of somewhat evolved bipedal warm blooded beings with a basic grasp of electronics, quantum, chemistry, and atomic sciences. Haven't transitions to artificial life forms, and unlikely to succeed because of short sighted environmental policies that are systemically causing a extinction event by destroying the food chain and decreasing fertility world wide. Check back in 10,000 years and see if they surprise us.

carusooneliner5 tahun yang lalu

Avi Loeb's technical work is commendable but I'm left wondering if some of the reasoning in this article counts for thoughtful contemplation.

>"We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path." Is it helpful to ascribe human-like motives to an alien species? Projecting our thought patterns on an alien species will not get us anywhere. There could be numerous reasons or no reason in particular why an alien lifeform might visit us: they are cataloging lifeforms, they are interested in 'ants' like EO Wilson, they might want to harvest resources on our planet, etc.

> "But better yet, we could get in touch with Proxima b and entice the locals to visit and share a water-based drink with us." There's humor mixed in this statement, so I'm not sure if Avi Loeb is being entirely serious. I take the opposite stand of "don't broadcast our presence to aliens". It's common sense that if you're out in the wild, you don't draw attention to yourself.

harryf5 tahun yang lalu

We like to assume they are many orders of magnitude more intelligent than us. But it might be that the human brain represents the optimum size and capability possible for a living organism to sustain, based on requirements for energy consumption and evolutionary competitiveness.

We know that Neanderthals may have had bigger brains, and may have been pushed to extinction by homo sapiens. A bigger brain will require more food and take longer to develop, potentially putting Neanderthals at an evolutionary disadvantage to humans.

Assuming the laws of Physics do not vary throughout the universe and that evolution, if "run more than once" will eventually lead to similar outcomes, that could mean aliens capable of space travel are not significantly more intelligent than us, they've just had longer to develop technology.

And given their apparent tendency to crash their spaceships while visiting earth, you might have a reasonable case for "alien idiots"...

theli0nheart5 tahun yang lalu

> We know that Neanderthals may have had bigger brains, and may have been pushed to extinction by homo sapiens. A bigger brain will require more food and take longer to develop, potentially putting Neanderthals at an evolutionary disadvantage to humans.

Where are you getting this data?

Per Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal), Neanderthal brains were similar to those of modern humans:

> The braincases of Neanderthal men and women averaged about 1,600 cm3 (98 cu in) and 1,300 cm3 (79 cu in) respectively, which is within the range of the values for modern humans.

alisonkisk5 tahun yang lalu

Evolution has been a mostly unimportant part of human development since at least 2 centuries ago. An intelligent species engineers itself, not evolves itself.

nkrisc5 tahun yang lalu

If there are aliens as advanced compared to us as we are to ants, that would imply to me that life is actually fairly abundant in the universe. However just as not every anthill gets studied by entomologists, perhaps there are simply too many planets with life for a galaxy-traversing civilization to study.

rixrax5 tahun yang lalu

I also casually deploy diatomaceous earth and other methods to exterminate ants when I come across them in or around the house. I’m glad the wandering aliens have not yet decided to use this strategy. Especially if they would find earth a desirable location for some colonial purposes.

DeusExMachina5 tahun yang lalu

And, after that, the article proceeds listing all the reasons why our sun, planet, and species might be very different from what you might find in other parts of the universe.

Which is actually what would make us more interesting, not less.

bostonsre5 tahun yang lalu

I think the important part of that statement is "examine _every_ ant". I don't think our ant professors have the bandwidth to investigate every ant hill on earth. We could very well be one of millions or billions of inhabited planets. Also if there are millions or billions of inhabited planets, then chances are a large proportion would have more advanced inhabitants than us. I would guess that just like here on earth, scientists would gravitate more towards investigating the more advanced species with very few interested in ants like us.

BlueTie5 tahun yang lalu

A better version of that argument might be: "if ants evolved to have higher than human intellect and technology - would they be interested in studying us humans?"

I think the answer is far less clear in that scenario.

alisonkisk5 tahun yang lalu

Why wouldn't they?

BlueTie5 tahun yang lalu

It's possible they would, possible they wouldn't. The point is that if you project things about human intelligence i.e. "but humans like ants so why wouldn't the reverse be true? "or "most humans don't pay attention to ants so why would aliens care?"on to other types of intelligence, you're making a big assumption.

A superintelligent ant colony with an "of ant" intellect is going to be so alien to our kind of intellect that the goals are just impossible to compare. Probably same for aliens unless there are many humanoid ones for some reason.

lhorie5 tahun yang lalu

I also think the argument isn't put forward in the best logical way, but for a different reason: another potential reason why aliens might not choose to come to visit us is that they physically can't: imagine a lifeform whose chemistry is based on liquid methane instead of water. They'd literally vaporize in Earth's atmosphere!

They could also operate on a completely different timescale. For example, shrews' metabolism is way faster than ours. Sequoias are way slower. There's no reason an alien should perceive time on the same scale we do.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

2OEH8eoCRo05 tahun yang lalu

Would you visit every single anthill? What if an advanced alien civilization just doesn't care after passing by thousands or millions of primitive civilizations?

Dumblydorr5 tahun yang lalu

Even more common than those who study ants? Exterminators, ant eaters, and kids who stomp on ants for fun. I don't like our chances...

devoutsalsa5 tahun yang lalu

Look how excited scientists get when they discover organic compounds in a comet or something that looks like microorganisms in a Mars rock. I'm pretty sure aliens would be interested in studying why I drink Diet Coke instead of water & what consuming 4L a day does to me. Maybe I should also be wondering what it does to me...

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

vuciv15 tahun yang lalu

I find this point weak because we literally study ants and sell ant colonies for interested parties

thotsBgone5 tahun yang lalu

But what percentage of ants find themselves the subject of human curiosity? We look at a few ants, but not most of them. Maybe it's the same with aliens. We're just another mound of monkeys; nothing they haven't seen before.

xwdv5 tahun yang lalu

Even if we study ants, that doesn’t mean aliens will be able to secure enough funding to launch an expedition across the gulf of space to study humans up close. Telescopes and radio waves may be the most they could invest in.

philliphaydon5 tahun yang lalu

I subscribe to Ant Canada on YouTube. Fascinating stuff.

https://youtube.com/user/AntsCanada

bryanrasmussen5 tahun yang lalu

it is sort of funny that the argument for lack of intellectual curiosity in aliens is being made in Scientific American.

px435 tahun yang lalu

Maybe there's a much more interesting colony of ants nearby and we're just boring?

drbojingle5 tahun yang lalu

Do you think the ants notice it much?

jkingsbery5 tahun yang lalu

Agreed. Taking the "ant" argument to it's logical conclusion and based on https://xkcd.com/1610/, there very well might be some alien who is part of a very advanced society and struggling in grad school, and that alien's advisor (unhelpfully) is suggesting how cool it is that we earthlings manage to do what we're able to do despite how primitive we are.

mrmonkeyman5 tahun yang lalu

devilduck5 tahun yang lalu

drclau5 tahun yang lalu

What bothers me quite a bit, both in more-or-less scientific conversations and in Science Fiction, is that we virtually always assume a human-like psychology for aliens, and we judge what they may want or not based on our thinking. Even when we think about potentially highly advanced aliens, we still assume they'll have a psychology similar to ours, and they'll just be more advanced technologically (ie. the aliens and ants analogy).

Eventually, I did find some cases in Science Fiction, and one in particular stands out as far as I am concerned: the alien entity named Rorschach and the smaller entities named Scramblers, in Firefall, by Peter Watts. If you are a (Hard) SF fan, you must read this one.

Another case I would mention off the top of my head would be the Formics, in Scott Orson's Card "Ender's Game" and sequels, but I think the whole idea was left mostly unexplored.

If you have other examples, please do mention them!

chii5 tahun yang lalu

The "Three Body Problem" trilogy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel) ) makes an argument for why the behaviour of an intelligent species is going to mimic humans (or more accurately, humans' behaviour converge towards a universal set of behaviour - one of survival of the fittest). I don't want to spoil the books so i won't discuss any further, but worth a think about if you have read the books.

patcon5 tahun yang lalu

I've only read book 1, but I'm inclined to believe this as well.

This video provides a neat complexity science view of intelligence: https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_...

I'm intrigued that it points toward a "curiosity" at the heart of all intelligences, that we will recognize.

kyriakos5 tahun yang lalu

Great books. Apparently they ate being turned into a Netflix TV series.

drclau5 tahun yang lalu

Thanks, I had it on my list. I will pick it up sooner, then.

alistairSH5 tahun yang lalu

Children of Time & Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The first chronicles the development of sentient, space-capable spiders. The sequel follows the development of octopuses. I found both to be quick, easy reads - perfect for vacation or a rainy weekend. In both, the psychology of the species, and how humans can relate, is a plot point.

burlesona5 tahun yang lalu

I agree with you, but I think it's worth remembering/noting that this happens mostly because it's very difficult if not impossible to imagine what a sentient being with a psychology entirely unlike our own would be like.

I think that most people (who think about such things) realize that extraterrestrials, if they exist, may well be more alien than we can even imagine.

But it's fun to imagine things, so we try anyway :)

Balgair5 tahun yang lalu

For instance, try to imagine a new emotion that is not a composite of the emotions you have.

We know animals have emotions, and they mostly map to our emotions. With less related animals likely having less related emotions to ours (like the emotions of a tuna fish compared to a chimpanzee).

Now, try to map the emotions of life-form that from a completely different tree of life from ours. Their version of emotions may not even be mappable to anything like we can ever experience or imagine.

Emotions are pretty core to our understanding of the universe and ET may have emotions so radically different to ours that their view of the universe is not understandable to us.

behnamoh5 tahun yang lalu

I agree. But at the same time, some things can be quite common across the universe. For example, evolutionary processes that arise due to competition in an ecosystem lead to certain traits (conservativism, being vigilant all the time, etc.) which could be common across life-forms that have very dissimilar trees of life. For instance, think of how birds, deers, and butterflies react to dangers around them. We as humans can relate better to deers and birds, but not so much to butterflies. Nonetheless, all of us share the same "fear" about surrounding movements and that has influence on our emotions and character.

f6v5 tahun yang lalu

Might be closer to “Solaris”, where we just won’t get it regardless how hard we try.

leokennis5 tahun yang lalu

I always think, why should any alien resemble us in any way? Couldn’t an alien be a sentient cloud of gas that feeds on sulfur? A 20km sentient wide floating rock that doesn’t feed at all?

Sort of like the premise of “They’re made of meat”: https://web.archive.org/web/20190501130711/http://www.terryb...

tjalfi5 tahun yang lalu

John Varley's Eight Worlds series has an alien species called the Invaders. They invaded Earth to protect cetaceans from the effects of human civilization.

The Invaders divide sentient life into three tiers - species like themselves that evolve in gas giants, cetaceans, and vermin; we're in the third category.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Worlds

patcon5 tahun yang lalu

Not sure if it's non-human enough, but A Fire Upon the Deep had central characters that had a very non-human way of thinking, though perhaps it could be said that they still "thought" like humans in the end. (I recall the specifics were a slow reveal, so I'm reluctant to say much more.)

spaetzleesser5 tahun yang lalu

LWhat bothers me quite a bit, both in more-or-less scientific conversations and in Science Fiction, is that we virtually always assume a human-like psychology for aliens, and we judge what they may want or not based on our thinking. Even when we think about potentially highly advanced aliens, we still assume they'll have a psychology similar to ours, and they'll just be more advanced technologically (ie. the aliens and ants analogy).”

Very true. A lot of our behaviors and instincts are based on how we procreate and the environment we live in. For example if you live forever or don’t have the pressure to procreate you will have a totally different perspective on the universe.

Lifeforms that have developed differently most likely would have motivations we can’t even fathom to understand.

duopixel5 tahun yang lalu

> When weighing the risks involved in interactions with less-developed cultures such as ours, these advanced civilizations may choose to refrain from contact.

I think establishing communication with a more advanced civilization would be deeply disrupting to our culture. We would ascribe their cultural practices to their advancement, and get a bunch of people doing "alien cargo culting". Imagine they were strict vegetarians, or peaceful and kind meat eaters for that matter. It would completely disrupt our own evolution by injecting foreign memes into our culture.

You can also reverse the situation and suppose we are able to visit an alien planet where we find a rudimentary civilization which has customs that appear exotic to us. What would the experts recommend? The cynic would say we would go at war with them to take over their planet, but being realistic it is much more advantageous to study them without interfering. I think the evolution of conscious life in different conditions than our own planet must be of tremendous interest to other conscious life.

zionic5 tahun yang lalu

The aliens could also have morals we find repulsive, for example how would society react to aliens that said hitler was right etc etc?

whatshisface5 tahun yang lalu

We can feel pretty safe that they would not say that, because if they liked Hitler, they would be invading, not chatting about history.

drummer5 tahun yang lalu

Read the book "Hitler's Table Talk" by Trevor Roper.

ardy425 tahun yang lalu

> Imagine they were strict vegetarians, or peaceful and kind meat eaters for that matter. It would completely disrupt our own evolution by injecting foreign memes into our culture.

Or imagine they were psychopathic sadists, like the Affront in that Ian Banks novel.

MajorBee5 tahun yang lalu

I have full faith (some pun intended) that as soon as an alien civilization shows up (however slightly more advanced they might apparently be), there will be entire religions based around them as the gods. Hell, I'm sure there will be a few existing ones that will claim these are the gods that they were talking about all this while, the Great Reckoning is here, etc.

coding1235 tahun yang lalu

> "alien cargo culting"

As it is right now we're doing human cargo culting, most of which is indoctrinating people into believing things that are not true - sooo YMMV?

karteum5 tahun yang lalu

There are also aspects that should be considered in my opinion

1°/ individual intelligence and technological innovation is not necessary an ultimate achivement that enables competitive advantage : human beings may be individually smart (compared to some other species) yet the collective intelligence of humanity is rather poor (which translates to the unability to solve collective problems such as sustainable management of our finite natural resources (e.g. oil) or of the consequences of our activity (e.g. biodiversity fall and climate change)). I suspect humanity will experience in a few decades a major regression (if not extinction) which could be interpreted as natural selection because of lack of collective intelligence. The same could also happen to other civilizations and maybe technological innovation the way we see it today is not necessary a ultimate achievement !

2°/ even if some other intelligent species would exist, maybe they would not have the same need to communicate, the same need or will to travel, the same need or will to innovate, etc.

3°/ even if some civilizations could be infinitely smart both individually and collectively and have enough genius to implement all engineering allowed by the laws of physics and have the will to implement it, maybe the laws of physics together with the nature/amount of natural resources on a typical planet do not enable such intergalactic space travels ! Sure, we were able to fly to the moon and we can make 5nm transistors while our ancestors would never have believed it could be done and it might make us dream that "everything is possible because genius and engineering have no limits", yet I would still be careful and such claims sounds more like religious faith than science. People need to understand the enormous distances we are talking about here and we need to remain humble that maybe it is and will remain forever an obstacle :)

lisper5 tahun yang lalu

It is important to remember when analyzing such things that evolution does not optimize the reproductive fitness of organisms, it optimizes the reproductive fitness of genes. Organisms are a side-effect, a result of the fact that cooperation often provides a competitive advantage [1]. But evolution neither knows nor cares about civilization. It just so happens that, at the moment here on earth, genes that build brains that build civilizations reproduce better than genes that don't. But that has not always been the case, and there is no guarantee that it will continue to be the case. It is entirely possible that this whole civilization thing is just a transient.

IMHO a prerequisite to the survival of civilization is the recognition that the interests of civilizations can be, and often are, at odds with the interests of genes, and so we are necessarily in active conflict with the genes that made us. The best example of this is birth control, which is an obvious existential threat to the reproductive fitness of our genes. So genes that build brains that have an instinctive revulsion to birth control will, all else being equal, reproduce better than genes that build brains that don't have this revulsion. In the absence of active intervention, the result will be overpopulation.

For a civilization to succeed long-term it has to recognize that it is necessarily in conflict with the genes that produced its individual members, because otherwise the genes will win.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

whatshisface5 tahun yang lalu

I'm not sure if birth control is the greatest example of our genes being the enemy. Birth control is popular because raising a child is horrifyingly net-negative in the 21st century (unlike most prior centuries, where it made you richer and secured your future), and also because birth is incredibly painful for humans specifically. Both of those are unpleasant facts, and many people would consider our civilization better if they changed.

lisper5 tahun yang lalu

Birth control is not an example of genes being our enemy, it is an example of us being our genes' enemy.

And "us" is not really the right way to characterize this because our genes are part of "us". It is more like "the part of us that sees value in technological civilization in its own right" vs "the part of us that sees value in being the biological creatures we call humans". The fact that these concepts don't have names is one indication of just how far off the radar this idea is.

blueblisters5 tahun yang lalu

Isn't all of modern healthcare an example of civilization being in active conflict with evolution? If "weaker" genes are not eliminated as often, we have effectively ruled out natural selection of survivalist traits.

lisper5 tahun yang lalu

It's a little more complicated than that. "Strong" and "weak" is not the right way to characterize genes. There is only "better and worse at reproducing in a particular environment." At the moment, our genes are in an environment where health care is available, so there are genes that are able to reproduce in that environment which might not be so good in a different environment.

Also, we are not entirely at odds with our genes. Obviously the relationship is symbiotic to a large extent, because we can't exist without our genes and vice versa. But our brains can want things that are bad for our genes, and vice versa.

fiftyfifty5 tahun yang lalu

I think the assumption by many that we are being visited by aliens was based on the idea that the universe must be just teeming with intelligent life. Over time we are gathering more and more data that shows that may just not be the case. As we've built better and better telescopes we've found no evidence of Type III Civilizations. We've intercepted no interstellar communications or even errant radio waves. As we learn more about other stars we find that many of them probably create hostile environments for life on nearby planets due to solar activity. On top of that a number of studies have come out recently like these two:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-020-00057-8

https://phys.org/news/2018-06-advanced-civilization-universe...

that, through the use of models and simulations, come to the conclusion that we are dang lucky to have evolved on the Earth at all.

While I don't know that I was ever a believer in the Earth being visited by ETs, I always thought that we wound find evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy any day now. For the reasons above, I'm less and less convinced of that with every passing year.

AnIdiotOnTheNet5 tahun yang lalu

> even if some other intelligent species would exist, maybe they would not have the same need to communicate, the same need or will to travel, the same need or will to innovate, etc.

I think this is unlikely. It seems to me that some amount of curiosity would be a prerequisite for being able to make discoveries that lead to technological progress. Although I suppose it is possible such progress could be made through some kind of evolutionary mechanism as opposed to individual intellect.

whatshisface5 tahun yang lalu

But why would an intelligent species have to make any discoveries, or progress in any way? Maybe they spend all of their intelligence designing birdsongs, until some random natural event drives them extinct. Far from an alien psychology, humanity would be like that if you took away a fraction of the people with the greatest curiosity.

tachyonbeam5 tahun yang lalu

The way I see it, our curiosity and desire to explore is a reflection through our instincts of basic biological imperatives. Even bacteria "want" to explore, find new territories where there might be undiscovered resources, etc. Exploration is what helps a species survive long-term. We're smart, but the things we instinctively want are still a reflection of the basic things that any life form wants and needs.

I don't think you could have a super-advanced species that didn't want to explore, reproduce, wasn't curious. You couldn't have an advanced species that just went about doing the same thing forever. They wouldn't be an advanced species. They'd be some dead branch of the evolutionary tree that got pruned long ago, in all likelihood. Intelligence is fundamentally curious, just like lifeforms, even bacteria, if you squint hard enough, are "curious".

whatshisface5 tahun yang lalu

Bacteria don't want to explore, they float around, and occasionally do gradient climbing to navigate to good chemicals. That's an example of a pro-survival technique that works very well, but is not going to lead to anything better. Every living thing on Earth except for people is an example of a living thing with some degree of intelligence, or at least beneficial control, but that does not have scientific progress.

tachyonbeam5 tahun yang lalu

Amoebas can propel themselves, and if you drop them in one corner of a lake, I can guarantee you that they will explore it to find food and reproduce.

Bacteria don't have scientific progress, but because they reproduce rapidly, they also evolve very fast compared to us. Some of them can even exchange genetic material with each other (!). This is a way for them to exchange "knowledge" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilus).

I can guarantee you that if you observed amoebas under a microscope for a while, you would realize that these are more sophisticated little machines than you think.

> "largest genomes belongs to a very small creature, Amoeba dubia. This protozoan genome has 670 billion units of DNA, or base pairs. The genome of a cousin, Amoeba proteus, has a mere 290 billion base pairs, making it 100 times larger than the human genome."

f6v5 tahun yang lalu

> But why would an intelligent species have to make any discoveries

Intelligence seems to be rather expensive thing to evolve and maintain. In biology, something that’s expensive has to translate to fitness advantage. Human mind gave humans an ultimate advantage when it comes to survival. All doom and gloom aside, we’re the only species that could potentially survive total annihilation of the planet. It’s not inconceivable that people could design the technology to sustain a civilization in space.

That’s why I think any intelligent species use their mind to build things and expand their knowledge about the universe. That’s the “purpose” of having intelligence.

klmadfejno5 tahun yang lalu

Because discoveries are useful. If the collective reason for your species' existence is writing birdsong, you're going to want agriculture to ensure people can eat, medicine to prevent them from dying, and electricity to make rad synthetic birdsong dubstep remixes. Tech solves problems, and everyone has problems. Doesn't mean you need to leave the solar system though.

whatshisface5 tahun yang lalu

How is this hypothetical species going to discover any medicine if they spend all their time writing birdsongs? Any individual with a slightly lower proclivity to write birdsongs will be evicted from the gene pool with great prejudice, so there is no chance that anyone will ever be born with the desire to spend a whole hour thinking about something else. Again, if this seems unrealistic, just imagine humanity with the mean "art vs. programming" balance of desires shifted a little bit towards art. There are many people who do not care at all about doing the kinds of things that lead to solving problems, and it is easy to imagine a species that is just them.

klmadfejno5 tahun yang lalu

Because at some point you run out of food, and if you write birdsong in spite of that you just die out. It may be possible but its not much an effective long term strategy. Too stupid to survive doesn't earn a lot of marks towards being an intelligent species.

Individuals with a desire to improve their survivability being evicted from the gene pool is the opposite of how natural selection works. Humans would still invent things even if painting gave everyone erotic pleasure.

whatshisface5 tahun yang lalu

I am suggesting that intelligent populations may often die out. Evolution doesn't look ahead to avoid dead ends.

klmadfejno5 tahun yang lalu

An I'm suggesting that a population that dies out before accomplishing any intellectual achievements wasn't all that intelligent or make sense as a species. How a species would appear that decides to forego its basic needs in favor of making art is beyond me.

A species that spends its time making birdsongs is effectively just a dumber version of birds.

> Evolution doesn't look ahead to avoid dead ends.

It does though, by many metrics. Many steps of evolution are not just the outright outcomes, but traits that make it easier for competitive adaptations to develop later on. That is, natural selection works on multiple levels of derivatives of fitness scores. Humanity's intelligence is built on top of everything else, and is often overruled, by base survival instincts.

dcolkitt5 tahun yang lalu

> even if some other intelligent species would exist, maybe they would not have the same need to communicate, the same need or will to travel, the same need or will to innovate, etc.

This is true. But even if just a small fraction of civilizations engaged in interstellar expansion, they'd quickly subsume the galaxy on geological timescales. Darwin applies just as much across the stars as it does in a tide pool. As long as there's even a small amount of competition, it will push every player to aggressively expand.

The only way out is either 1) technological civilization almost never evolve anywhere. 2) Virtually every technological civilization winds up eschewing interstellar expansion. Or 3) a single player previously won the game, and used its dominant position to benevolently stop the game.

SV_BubbleTime5 tahun yang lalu

> and used its dominant position to benevolently stop the game.

Why benevolently? Why not maliciously?

bryananderson5 tahun yang lalu

> human beings may be individually smart (compared to some other species) yet the collective intelligence of humanity is rather poor (which translates to the unability to solve collective problems such as sustainable management of our finite natural resources (e.g. oil) or of the consequences of our activity (e.g. biodiversity fall and climate change)).

This makes a big assumption: that our inability to solve these problems is rooted in a lack of intelligence (collectively or individually). I don't think that's the case at all. Solutions to these problems are widely known, and most educated people support them, at least in theory.

The problem isn't with our intelligence, it's with our incentives. Climate change is a tragedy of the commons (as are other environmental degradation issues, such as loss of biodiversity). Each of us would benefit if everyone cooperated (a nice environment for each of us), but each of us also benefits when we individually defect (cheaper energy for our various needs). As a result, we predictably end up with the suboptimal outcome of (almost-)everybody-defects.

What's the way out of the dilemma? It's clearly not a matter of getting smarter. I don't think it's an issue we can solve with moral pleading either: we've been trying that for decades. But what if we could change the game and remove the incentives to defect? * We could implement a carbon tax, incentivizing firms and consumers to use carbon-neural energy sources. * We could subsidize clean energy, incentivizing the same. * We could invest as much money as possible in reducing the cost of clean energy sources, eventually removing the need for ongoing tax/subsidy policies.

If non-polluting energy sources are cheaper, more widely available, and easier to use than polluting sources, no one would ever choose the latter. No heightened intelligence required.

gonehome5 tahun yang lalu

AGI seems like a likely option and under discussed for what could be met first.

It’d be easier for it to travel great distances than organic life, it’d be possible for a variety of organic life to arrive at creating it, it may be hard for organic life to solve the control problem to limit it, etc.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

whatshisface5 tahun yang lalu

>maybe the laws of physics together with the nature/amount of natural resources on a typical planet do not enable such intergalactic space travels

This is already known not to be the case, the Breakthrough Starshot project is expensive, but merely expensive.

marcus_holmes5 tahun yang lalu

I've always loved the thing about solar eclipses and auroras: in order to see an aurora during an eclipse, the moon has to be the exact same size as the sun (when viewed from the planet). Earth has this (for a while at least - the moon is slowly moving away from us), and it makes us special.

So if you want to find aliens, look during a solar eclipse. It's a rare phenomenon and if there are alien tourists, they'll want to see it.

dimitrios15 tahun yang lalu

What makes you think it is a rare phenomenon to them, or that they have the same conceptualizations of "needs and wants" as we do? What if they view these events the same way we view watching paint dry or grass grow? Just as we have to be careful not to anthropomorphize animals and other species, we must also not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing alien species until there's an actual encounter and we get to 'know' them, once again, assuming their concept of 'knowing' even remotely resembles ours.

For as far as we know, they've observed us, and have long moved on, finding us entirely uninteresting, which seems to be the one explanation we love to overlook, but given we are humans with big egos, love to make ourselves out to be more important than we actually are.

marcus_holmes5 tahun yang lalu

Sure, but where do you stop with this line of thinking? What if the aliens are giant gas clouds that have trouble with the whole idea of planets? What if the aliens are fluctuations in plasma flows inside a star and don't realise there's anything outside their environment?

As far as we know, there's nothing out there. As far as we know, we're the most advanced life form in the entire universe (for a given definition of "advanced"). As far as we know, every exoplanet is teeming with civilisations. We know nothing. So if we are engaged in speculating about aliens, then speculating that they're probably like us, while allowing that they may not be, seems to me to be the only sensible thing to do.

dstick5 tahun yang lalu

Yeah if you park your UFO at the right angle, or even better, keep it flying at the right speed and place you can have a perpetual solar eclipse. Pretty mundane stuff when you aren’t planet bound.

mindcrime5 tahun yang lalu

or that they have the same conceptualizations of "needs and wants" as we do?

Availability heuristic. We are the only example of "human level or greater" intelligent life we know of, so we assign "human like" needs and wants to these hypothesized aliens because it's all we have. I think the key thing is just to remember that this is just a heuristic and not to be overly rigid about it. Your point, IMO, absolutely stands that there is no particular reason to assume that "aliens" must be similar to us in this regard.

mxcrossb5 tahun yang lalu

Everyone always argues “the universe is so big there must be aliens”. But as soon as you ask why aliens don’t act like us, it becomes “the universe is too small to have that kind”! I think the heuristic is just fine.

torben-friis5 tahun yang lalu

Pretty specist to assume they have eyes :)

marcus_holmes5 tahun yang lalu

True. Or that their eyes see the same spectrum as ours.

I wonder if it's even more spectacular in different wavelengths?

xioxox5 tahun yang lalu

This is in Iain Banks's book Transition. Did anyone else come up with this before him?

marcus_holmes5 tahun yang lalu

I was struggling to remember where I'd read it :) Thanks :)

No idea if it was his idea or not.

scj5 tahun yang lalu

Scientists thinking like scientists!

I'd presume an advanced culture that can traverse the galaxy has many resources. Like humanity, I'd assume that with abundance, entertainment would be prioritized.

We might be nothing more than a new source of fashion and novelty to them! They may like Rock & Roll, our food, our clothing, or even pogs.

We might even be boring to them for the moment, but they're hoping for a future payoff.

Or they could just look at us as a future source of diversity in their society. The different methods of creating sentient beings might be of great importance to a post-biological society (maybe there's charm in our resource inefficiency).

Determining the motivations of a post-singularity society is a difficult task. It's fun because it forces you to think beyond your current means. But I wouldn't consider it a productive endeavor.

newsbinator5 tahun yang lalu

It's possible they can simulate many trillions of species realistically, so they wouldn't need to examine us individually. Many of the other trillion would have interesting music or interesting pog slammers. Their machine learning might pick up on it and surface it for them to review.

It's possible we are one of those trillion species being simulated, and our pogs are currently being scrutinized.

RodgerTheGreat5 tahun yang lalu

Rather presupposes that alien life is similar enough to humanity for culture and art to be more-or-less mutually intelligible.

Would extraterrestrials who communicate with pheremones, or touch, or don't communicate at all (ala "Blindsight") have any concept of music? If they can "hear", does their sensory range overlap ours? Is it compatible with our notion of musical scales? Does whatever passes for a nervous system operate at a similar timescale to ours?

Food and clothing seem like more of a stretch- even within earth's biosphere many substances humans can eat are poisonous to other animals, and vice versa. Vast differences in bodyplan would almost certainly make our clothing useless to an alien race, and the materials we use could easily be incompatible with their biology.

Even if aliens were substantially similar psychologically, minor changes in biology could result in completely different societies. What would our world look like with humans who reproduced asexually, or in triads? Where we produce our own food via photosynthesis or symbiosis? Where we didn't sleep, or different populations hibernated in their own cycles?

Overall I'm inclined to believe that cultural exchange with an intelligent extraterrestrial species would be harder and less productive than cultural exchange with parrots.

whatshisface5 tahun yang lalu

We are beginning to approach a point in our technological development where we can beam information into our brains to be perceived as sensory input. Maybe someday we will be able to subjectively experience things not provided by our natural senses. At that point, alien art may become a lot more interesting.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

hhjj5 tahun yang lalu

It also could be as entertaining as watching paint dry for them.

pasquinelli5 tahun yang lalu

i think the reason people assume aliens would want to visit us is because they are vaguely aware of human history, which is characterized by more advanced societies, driven by a need to expand, subjugating or destroying less advanced societies. the very idea that aliens might exist and that they might be more advanced than us leads directly to the question, "would they do us like, say, europe did the americas?"

karaterobot5 tahun yang lalu

I disagree with the author's statement that the Fermi paradox is "pretentious" because it assumes we have cosmic significance. I think a better word for that is "presumptuous", but pedantry aside, I don't believe the Fermi paradox ever says anything about what aliens think of humans.

It asks why there isn't more evidence of aliens anywhere we've ever looked, not about why aliens haven't come to ask us for our wisdom on philosophical matters. It's not asking why they haven't contacted us, it's asking why we can't see them, or any evidence of them. In other words, it's about the statistical likelihood of seeing evidence that should be commonplace, given the age of the universe.

He brings up the point that we might be too primitive to even notice them. Fair enough, but you could just as easily say that it's "pretentious" to say elves don't exist, because we might just be too primitive and narrow-minded to see that there is evidence of them everywhere. We have to start somewhere, and we're doing our best.

The Fermi paradox may have a built in assumption that aliens affect their world through technology, and even that they are scientifically advanced and curious enough to send probes or ships out to explore. An attack on that point would be fair. It's possible that the answer to the paradox is that humans are extremely rare in having developed any level of technology, science, or curiosity. But, that seems more pretentious to me than the alternative.

mxcrossb5 tahun yang lalu

I would also like to add that Fermi’s paradox doesn’t assume humans are interesting, it just assumed probes are cheap. If probes can easily and cheaply be made to cover the galaxy (and we know that this is possible even without major breakthroughs), aliens don’t need to be excited about us to visit the neighborhood.

jjk1665 tahun yang lalu

If aliens sent a probe to earth 1 million years ago, we'd have no way of knowing. Even if such a probe weren't destroyed or buried over that immense time span, it could be anywhere and we would have no way of knowing what to look for. Even if we were probed just a few centuries ago we'd likely be unaware - it would be quite serendipitous for an alien civilization to just happen to launch a probe such that it arrives within decades of us becoming capable of global monitoring.

It's not enough to probe every planet in the galaxy, they would have to repeatedly probe every planet in the galaxy every few centuries for us to expect to find such a probe. For how many millenia would you keep sending probes to the same backwater before you knew all you needed to know?

klmadfejno5 tahun yang lalu

Hmm... If there was an earth 2, with the exact same properties, and a population of human lookalikes at the exact same level of tech as us, how far away would they need to be for us to have not detected them by now assuming we rolled a 10 for our perception check?

jjk1665 tahun yang lalu

The Very Large Array (VLA) could pick up a broadcast from a geostationary communications satellite at a distance of 0.14 lightyears. The planned Square Kilometer Array (SKA) would be able to pick up the same signal within 500 lightyears. A radio telescope with detectors on opposite sides of the earth could pick such signals up from 2000 light years away. The nearest 2000 lightyears make up 0.16% of the milky way galaxy.

klmadfejno5 tahun yang lalu

Hmm that's an interesting way to think of it. At 0.16%, assuming uniform distribution of detectable aliens and none detected in that range, that would estimate an upper bound of 625 alien species in the milky way. That does feel kind of lonely.

jjk1665 tahun yang lalu

That would be 625 species with radio technology at approximately the same level as ours. Presumably as technology progresses, their transmitters and receivers improve whereas the distance over which they communicate stays relatively constant and thus their output power should decrease. It's also possible a more advanced civilization uses other communication methods, for example optical fiber might render satellite communications totally obsolete.

Further the 0.16% is the fraction of the galactic disk area, not stars. Also note that the 0.16% is the region we could sweep with a theoretical telescope that we might be able to build in the near future, not the region we've actually surveyed thus far.

jjk1665 tahun yang lalu

> It's not asking why they haven't contacted us, it's asking why we can't see them

Space is vast. The strength of communication signals drops off quickly with distance. All life is subject to the laws of thermodynamics.

The Fermi paradox was proposed in 1950 during a time of rapid growth and empire. At that time, radio communications were powerful, and it seemed like they would only get more powerful as our civilization advanced. But that's not what happened. The key to better communication is not more power, but better noise reduction. Since WW2, our radio signals have become weaker and weaker and our receivers smaller as we transmit information more efficiently. Ideally we would transmit signals with the bare minimum amount of energy needed for them to be reliably received by the intended receiver. Any civilization that wants to not waste energy (read all of them) would do the same.

Because power drops off with distance, a more sensitive receiver is required to receive a message at a greater distance than the one intended, and this required improvement to sensitivity increases rapidly with greater distance.

Your cellphone communicates with an antenna approximately 2 meters in length with a maximum range of about 70 kilometers. An antenna of the same technological capability able to pick up your cellphone signal at 1 lightyear would need to be 2900 km in length. At 100 lightyears, you would need an antenna over 37,000 km long.

If you can bounce a signal off satellites, you can communicate with any point on earth - thus the most powerful radio transmissions we need to send for our own utility need to be detectable by a 4 meter dish 30000 km away in geostationary orbit. To detect such a transmission at 1 lightyear requires a receiver 203 km in diameter, at 100 lightyears a dish 2600 km in diameter. Beyond 2000 light years, you need a dish larger than Earth. If you need to communicate any further away than that, you're using highly directional beamed communication between planets which won't be detectable unless the receiver just happens to also be along that beam line.

Thus to detect a radio signal from another civilization using a telescope we could conceivably fit on our planet, one of the following must be true: the transmission must be from a relatively nearby world (0.16% of the milky way in range if they are our technological peers, less if they are more advanced than us), the transmission must use orders of magnitude more power than is necessary for communication (either they are using dramatically less advanced technology or intentional broadcast), or we need to detect highly focused beamed communication (either we get incredibly lucky or its an intentional message directed at us). It would be presumptuous to assume that aliens would set up a colony conveniently close to us, that in our mere 100 years of radio use have already greatly surpassed them, that they have maintained an active beacon for long enough that we would happen to see it, or that they would be trying to communicate with us specifically (especially given that any civilization more than a few dozen light years away would have no way of knowing that there is intelligent life on Earth.

There are of course other means of detecting life besides radio communication. Perhaps we may see pollutants in another world's atmosphere - but we have only directly detected a few thousand exoplanets thus far and observed the atmospheres of only a tiny fraction of those. Perhaps we could detect megastructures like dyson spheres - but to know what we are looking for requires a lot of assumptions about how they are built and we don't even know if they can be built. Really any sign of intelligence detectable over interstellar distances other than radio waves is purely speculative.

The assumption that evidence should be commonplace is poorly founded. Unless the universe were teeming with civilizations at a similar technology level to our own, we shouldn't expect to see anything at all.

karaterobot5 tahun yang lalu

Upvoted for a thoughtful response, but I want to be clear that I'm not saying the Fermi paradox is valid or even useful. What I'm saying is that the author of the original article argued that the paradox assumes humans are fascinating to other species, when it makes no such assumption. There may be many reasons to dismiss the Fermi paraxox, but the one he leans on the most heavily is a non sequitor.

jjk1665 tahun yang lalu

But the whole point is that it does implicitly make that assumption. The fermi paradox is a paradox if and only if we would actually expect to see evidence of aliens. We would only expect to see evidence of aliens if they are actively trying to communicate with us. All other scenarios would require us to be extremely lucky (in which case there is no conflict with our lack of observation and thus no paradox).

If we assume that humans are fascinating, the fermi paradox is valid, if there is no interest in interacting with humans than the fermi paradox is invalid. The discussion is not a non-sequitur, it is the crux of the issue.

karaterobot5 tahun yang lalu

> All other scenarios would require us to be extremely lucky

I think I understand your position now, but I don't agree with this part. The paradox is asking "if intelligent life is common, and intelligent species invented space travel billions of years ago, wouldn't we have seen some evidence of them?"

It seems like you may disagree with the premise that it's likely we'd see evidence of them in any case. And that may be so. It's completely reasonable to say the Fermi paradox is invalid, for this or many other reasons. I don't think it was all that serious to begin with.

My objection isn't to dismissing the question, it's to the author presenting it as though it was fundamentally about human or Earth exceptionalism. I see no reason to assume that's the case.

As an illustration, does it change the nature of the question to remove Earth entirely and ask "given the age of the universe, etc., why haven't we seen evidence of alien civilizations visiting Mars? Or Titan? Or Kepler-16b?" I think it's the same paradox, it's just harder to make the point that way, since we've never been there ourselves. Asking it about Earth doesn't necessarily presume Earth is special, as the linked article suggests.

jjk1665 tahun yang lalu

The problem is there is no way to remove earth and earth exceptionalism. The question "why haven't we seen aliens visiting mars" presupposes that we ourselves have observed mars so thoroughly that we should have expected to see such evidence. Given that we have only been closely observing mars for a few decades, either we'd have to get very lucky to see an alien visiting mars right when we just happen to be looking, or they would have to visit mars on an extremely regular basis. The fermi paradox is fundamentally about our specific lack of observation, for all we know the martians have already made contact and thus there is no paradox for them.

GistNoesis5 tahun yang lalu

It's all about computation.

The computer running universe-simulations needs to be able to run fast. Regularities can be integrated quickly. Life not so much.

Life can make computers which can ask computations which can't be reduced.

Therefore as soon as a big enough computer is built somewhere in the universe, the whole simulation-time starts crawling to an halt because the inner computer use all the resources, and future times in the universe where there are many of those computers never get to be materialized.

Alternatively, solutions using time-travel allows to run simulations of longer simulation-time, by introducing a time-coherence force which prevent such computer (aka biological-numerical instabilities) to ever emerge.

avian5 tahun yang lalu

You give life and computers some special place in the universe for being to able "ask computations which can't be reduced". I don't think that's warranted. In the end, it's all fundamental particles and forces and interactions. I don't see why life would be special in that regard. A small part of material in the core of a star "asks" many more questions each second than a piece of brain tissue or a silicon chip.

GistNoesis5 tahun yang lalu

I give computation and consistency a special place once you assume you are in a simulation.

If a computer inside the universe runs some proof of work computation like in BlockChain, (aka finding a mathematical one-way function that when iterated is terminated by a big enough trail of zeros), this computation has to be done in the higher plane universe, or a witness from inside the universe could deem the universe not consistent.

The alternative are time-travel explanations where you substitute questions, by replacing questions for which you can have already an answer.

You can approximate a star or any collection of particle by while preserving its observable statistics aka effective-super-particle and get huge computational speed-up. Life are run-away processes for which you can't define statistics.

htfu5 tahun yang lalu

But their very point was that the simulation wouldn't have to compute every single individual particle, only the "interesting" ones. The rest would be approximated to whatever level required.

I basically agree with you but I can't see how your argument applies here.

behnamoh5 tahun yang lalu

It's a very interesting point that I hadn't noticed before. Of course, this relies on assuming (believing?) the universe is a giant simulation run on a computer with limited resources.

I did not get your last sentence though. Could you elaborate?

GistNoesis5 tahun yang lalu

Rules of the universe appear to us relatively simple. But the question of numerical stability is not solved specially for later times.

In physics it is natural to start from an initial state and integrate through time, starting from initial time and evolving by time-stepping.

Physics helps but this doesn't prevent the emergence of numerical instabilities like a big-computer being built.

So if you were running a universe simulation, when a life form start to emerge and starts building a big computer you can "erase" them from existence by approximating them away.

When your simulation starts crawling to an halt, you modify locally the current phases at the time of the modification so that the alien go extinct, and you propagate backwards in time towards the origin of the universe, to find the initial parameters of the simulation that when inputted make the alien never be a problem in the first place while not modifying too much the rest of the universe at current time.

From the perspective of a being inside the universe, the only thing we could observe by such a parameter search on the spaces of possible universe, are being amazed at how some constants of the universe seem to be fine-tuned.

htfu5 tahun yang lalu

And why exactly would someone go to all this trouble instead of just throttling that region of space? Surely you don't mean to say it would all run on a single chip?

And if this was a simulation there'd presumably be a purpose to it and once heavy computation emerges the entity running the sim would throw more resources at this interesting phenomenon, not try to get rid of it.

It'd be like "each time the neural net achieved AGI, the humans tore it down to refocus on the real goal, bombproof traffic sign recognition".

GistNoesis5 tahun yang lalu

It's not so easy to contain life. Potentially it can send information at light-speed and your whole universe become infested with a boring paper-clip AGI. Throttling will create problems at the boundaries for the conserved quantities, and for reproducibility.

But the mechanism I suggest, is a rather elegant (chaos resistant) way to allow to give control over a deterministic universe simulation without having to restart from the beginning, it is akin to re-rolling the dices if you don't like the result.

It is a somewhat natural way to search for the initial configuration of the universe. It present some nice properties. For example you can archive a whole universe by its seed. Which allows many more interesting search strategies. Like in chess you can create variations to guide the search towards region which are of interests for you.

I'd like to entertain the idea, that Bottled Universe Inc. , has to ship some Tera-Year old universes by Xmas. They have created plenty of variations in the universes and selected one just for you. You plug the seed, and you are guaranteed to see the emergence of beautiful universe when you run it inside your less powerful computer-brain.

behnamoh5 tahun yang lalu

> It'd be like "each time the neural net achieved AGI, the humans tore it down to refocus on the real goal, bombproof traffic sign recognition".

Except that if the entity who's running the simulation is itself AGI, it really does not have interest in discovering yet another AGI in its own simulation.

behnamoh5 tahun yang lalu

> From the perspective of a being inside the universe, the only thing we could observe by such a parameter search on the spaces of possible universe, are being amazed at how some constants of the universe seem to be fine-tuned.

That's a good point, and I've also always wondered how fine-tuned those constants are. One problem though, is that changing the initial parameters would most likely have chaotic effects as the system (the whole universe) seems unstable and fragile. For example, it would be extremely difficult to fine-tune the parameters such that billions of years later at this moment, I don't write this comment.

GistNoesis5 tahun yang lalu

One advantage of QM is that from outside the universe you still have some degrees of freedom : you can modify the phases without impacting the observable of the world.

You can make a pretty strong local change like flipping a coin, at any point in space-time without impacting the rest of the phases elsewhere too much, because the farther away in time and space from your modification, the more decoherent the phases would be and therefore their impact would be minimum.

And because the QM equations are time-reversible, you can propagate them backwards through time up to the origin of time. And you now have a new almost identical initial configuration, which when simulated forward will give rise to a universe that behave the same way until the time of the modification but then bifurcate.

Cthulhu_5 tahun yang lalu

I dig the universe-is-a-simulation theory, given how we live in an era where our own computation power and simulation accuracy has only continued to increase for the past 70-odd years. Which is a tiny amount of time on a galactic scale.

I wish suspended animation and the like was a thing, I'm super curious about the future and development of humans. I can imagine that within a thousand years, assuming we don't hit a cataclysmic event that wipes everything out, I could no longer understand anything that's going on anymore. (I mean I'm starting to struggle with the younger generations' stuff already... is this it? :o ).

klmadfejno5 tahun yang lalu

Why do people assume a universe simulating our own runs on comparable physics?

sandworm1015 tahun yang lalu

Is there a single animal on planet earth that doesn't get the occasional visit from an interested human? From deep sea squid to albatross, someone eventually arrives for a chat. There must be the extraterrestrial equivalent of Attenborough out there somewhere.

Cthulhu_5 tahun yang lalu

Oh there must be, but that's assuming they have means of actually finding and reaching us.

At the moment, the only thing I can imagine that would be like that would be a deep space probe that has been traveling for thousands of years, moving so fast it can't actually slow down and make contact. What if Oumuamua was one of those, or the melted slag remains of that? We'll never know.

gmuslera5 tahun yang lalu

Assuming how a different species, with different biology and a far more advanced technology than us, should think is naive.

There is another approach for it. Or what we know about the universe is basically true (and we can't travel faster than ligth, nor do something that, I don't know, turns all our galaxy into 2D or triggering the big rip) or if we keep advancing we could do something that threatens something that is very far away. In the latter case close enough civilizations may worry about what we do, and be in a dark forest universe (ok, here I'm assuming how they should think here too). But for that to have any meaning we should be in an universe where the speed of light is not the ultimate limit in any meaningful way, and so far we know, we don't.

crazydoggers5 tahun yang lalu

> Fermi’s paradox is pretentious in that it assumes we humans have some sort of cosmic significance.

I don’t at all think this is the issue with Fermi’s paradox. I think sentience is an interesting enough phenomenon that others with sentience will be interested. As soon as you understand the mind of the other, there’s a basic interest in meeting other minds.

The real issue is simply the vastness of time and space, and perhaps an underestimation of the difficulties involved in bridging those. Especially economic costs of space travel.

And it’s kind of like the point made in this clip about the silliness of Fermi’s paradox... it’s like assuming if no lobster shows up to your dinner party, lobsters don’t exist.

https://youtu.be/TK0vmOCHiDs

Udo5 tahun yang lalu

In general we don't assume that of everyone. What we do assume is that at least some aliens would be interested, because we assume intellect comes with innate curiosity. In an advanced culture, even a small number of individuals exhibiting an interest would be enough to form a field of study, just as it is here on Earth.

Asserting that nobody us studying is because we're uninteresting to every single alien creature is a baffling statement, given the odds. The odds are far greater in my opinion that we're alone or at least functionally alone, even though I must admit I hate the notion.

We also don't assume everyone builds megastructures or emits huge technosignatures, but it throws us off that apparently nobody does.

bluGill5 tahun yang lalu

I would assume curiosity is a requirement for an advanced civilization. You can be a cow eating grass on the plains avoiding the tiger trying to catch you by instinct alone, and it might work. However one of the early steps to advanced civilizations is figuring out if there is a better way - maybe you avoid the tiger better, maybe you store up grass for winter, but curiosity is at the root of advanced civilization.

bluetomcat5 tahun yang lalu

> We also don't assume everyone builds megastructures or emits huge technosignatures

Popular culture skews our expectations towards two-legged creatures flying on saucers, roughly our size, but forms of intelligent life can manifest in radically different ways at micro and macro levels.

Perhaps, what looks like a sand particle to us might be a complex microorganism, in a complex interconnected self-regulating network, with no physical artifacts of "civilisation". Those microorganisms would also be able to form "mega-structures" by mutating the environment around them, just not at the pace and scale we are accustomed to.

Udo5 tahun yang lalu

Unless every single civilization out there is made up of inert sand particles, that's not a solution for why we don't see anyone. You're right of course that we tend to assume somewhat similar properties to ourselves, because that's what we know, and we tend to assume that we're at least in some ways "normal" - or at least not unique.

> with no physical artifacts of "civilisation"

I would not be surprised if there are quite a few intelligent organisms out there that are not tool users. Earth itself has a few, as well. These would potentially make great candidates for a visit, if we could detect their biome from afar.

> just not at the pace and scale we are accustomed to

I don't disagree that these are probably out there. But that's not the same as asserting that every single culture besides our own is on a completely different and imperceptible scale than us. We'd expect at least some organisms to build tools that we can detect, that is unless we're one of the first civilizations in the universe. Another solution would be that FTL travel is possible and/or thermodynamics can be at least partially circumvented, but even if such techology existed, it would have to be ubiquitous in order to explain why we don't see anyone.

cortic5 tahun yang lalu

>The silence implied by Fermi's paradox (“Where is everybody?”) may mean that we are not the most attention-worthy cookies in the jar.

I've always thought of Fermi's paradox as ultimately a math problem, assuming a conservative amount of time between a civilization in one star system colonizing a neighboring star system, over billions of years every star system in the galaxy should be colonized by now.

The fact that we are not getting signals from the considerable number of stars that are within a reasonable distance is concerning. It does point to a great filter that we are not seeing or understanding. Or at least an enormous misconception about our universe.

krapp5 tahun yang lalu

>I've always thought of Fermi's paradox as ultimately a math problem, assuming a conservative amount of time between a civilization in one star system colonizing a neighboring star system, over billions of years every star system in the galaxy should be colonized by now.

I've never found this argument particularly compelling, as it seems too simplistic and ignores a vast number of possible confounding variables such as stars not being equally amenable to colonization, or even equidistant to each other, and the likely stability of civilizations over such timescales.

It seems far more likely to me that any civilization that colonizes another star sees diminishing returns given the risk and reaches some limit rather than seeking infinite, exponential expansion.

>The fact that we are not getting signals from the considerable number of stars that are within a reasonable distance is concerning. It does point to a great filter that we are not seeing or understanding. Or at least an enormous misconception about our universe.

For one thing, the observable universe contains billions of galaxies, which means the vast majority of stars are unreasonably distant.

cortic5 tahun yang lalu

What you are proposing is a great filter of confounding variable and diminishing returns. You really think these limitations are so overwhelming that practically no civilization could expand exponentially? Cause that's what you need to be saying, if even one in a trillion could then they should be everywhere by now.

krapp5 tahun yang lalu

>You really think these limitations are so overwhelming that practically no civilization could expand exponentially?

Yes, including the set of all civilizations that chose not to continue to expand exponentially as well as those that tried and eventually failed, due to any number of factors.

I think interstellar expansion (to say nothing of infinite exponential expansion) turns out to be just that hard and, for the relatively few civilizations that may actually advance to the point of even being capable of considering the effort, not worth the effort.

bluGill5 tahun yang lalu

I just assume that space is filled with enough junk that you cannot actually get between stars without getting hit by random chance and destroyed.

drichel5 tahun yang lalu

We might as well be among the first ones. I find the idea quite fascinating, it kind of puts the Earth back into the center and makes us special in a way.

cortic5 tahun yang lalu

If we are the first, then its likely the 'great filter' is behind us. And it means we will never find life that isn't related to us.

drichel5 tahun yang lalu

I can't quite follow how the "early bloomers" theory would imply either of those two conclusions. What I meant is the concept that our galaxy is young and the conditions just became right for ingelligent life to form, and here we are.

cortic5 tahun yang lalu

I've never heard of any theories that earth like conditions are new or unique, in fact half of all stars like ours are over 9 billion years old. And the universe has almost stopped making new stars.

If you believe it takes, on average 9 billion years X 100 billion star systems to create 1 civilization, then you believe in some kind of 'filter' that stops life almost completely. A filter that we have passed to be the first.

And by the time any other life statistically emerges we will have colonized the galaxy many times over.

drichel5 tahun yang lalu

There is indeed as far as I know some evidence that we are early bloomers https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2015/news-2015... Half of the stars might be 9 billion years old, but for heavy emelents fo form, you need already certain conditions like neutron star mergers need to have occured. Our galaxy might be just old enough for that.

cortic5 tahun yang lalu

That is interesting, and it changes my math a bit, though not to your favor;

>Based on the survey, scientists predict that there should be 1 billion Earth-sized worlds in the Milky Way galaxy at present, a good portion of them presumed to be rocky. That estimate skyrockets when you include the other 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

So for us to be near the first, near enough not to trip on Fermi's paradox, and allowing a short 5 billions years for these planets to have existed on average; we are (1000 billion X 5 billion) to 1. Which still needs one hell of a filter to explain.

drichel5 tahun yang lalu

Well actually you are starting to convince me of the opposite.

My horizon is limited to the galaxy. The hypothesis here is that the Earth is an early bloomer in the Milky Way. Then we are dealing with 1 billion Earth-sized planets, only a fraction of which is orbiting stars capable of sustaining life, only a fraction of which in the habitable hone around their stars... They also need to be in the right region of the galaxy in which heavy stars were formed and died with the right conditions to produce heavy elements. Candidate planets also need to be far enough from sources of gamma ray bursts. And finally, even if they have life, it still needs to develop in the right direction for it to be complex enough and interested in reaching out and colonizing the galaxy.

So, the odds are a billion times a tiny fraction to one, a sustainable hypothesis as far as I am concerned.

I believe I saw a model somewhere, predicting that most habitable planets are yet to form in our galaxy, but I did not bother to look hard enough for references.

lifeisstillgood5 tahun yang lalu

I'm writing a kids story (with my son, its quite fun to discuss the story and plan the laser fights) about an alien that is visiting earth to complete his Alien PhD - I am going to get some sarcastic jibe about backwaters and wasting years away from any decent fun etc.

I think we might consider that level of interest lucky. :-)

bluGill5 tahun yang lalu

With the speed of light being as slow as it is, that Alien must be very long lived to consider such a trip. The PhD should start observing the dinosaurs and for lack of enough data continue on to humans.

b1125 tahun yang lalu

The presumption that "today we know precisely how the universe works, and therefore, all stories must follow this mindset", is odd here.

Would you insist that Newtonian physics was the Only Way to Think of Things, prior to Einsteinian? Why, then, do you presume this will remain static forever? And therefore, suggest that a story should follow this logic?

bluGill5 tahun yang lalu

While it is possible relativity is wrong, anything that replaces it must fit all the observations we have about the universe that we currently use to prove relativity. That leaves very little room for the replacement for relativity to be different.

Newtonian physics is a special case of relativity when you keep relative speeds slow.

We don't know how quantum mechanics fits in. There is a known hole in current physics. However the size of the hole is small.

b1125 tahun yang lalu

I find it difficult to respond without emotion, to such a comment. We likely know very very little about physics right now.

My point with Newtonian physics is that at the time, it was The Physics. According to observation capable at the time, it seemed to make sense, with a few little oddities.

To them, they thought they had a small hole in current physics. Does that sound like your "small hole" in current physics today?

You believe we are knowledgeable, for we posses knowledge our ancestors do not. You believe we are right, for our observations tell us so. Yet how will we observe the universe 1000 years from now? 100? What tools will we have?

Place yourself 1000 years hence. Our ancestors will look back, and see our current physics as we view Romans babbling on about The Elements and aethers. Yes, to our descendants, our science is absurdly simple, filled with holes, broken, the list goes on.

We are not even remotely sure if space/time is consistent outside of our local region of space!

Back to your Newtonian statement, what if all of our current physics was thus? A viewpoint which only worked under certain circumstances. From where I sit, this is the reality.

We work with what we have, but must keep the knowledge of our massive ignorance in play too!

bluGill5 tahun yang lalu

The reality is newtonian physics is still taught in college because for the vast majority of what people need physics for it is close enough to correct as to not matter.

I come back to this: even if we are wrong, whatever is correct still needs to fit all the observations that we have done to date. I don't know what we will know in 1000 years. Euclidean geometry is over 2000 years old and still considered correct (though we have expanded on it a lot - see in particular non-euclidean geometry)

b1125 tahun yang lalu

There's not a lot to discuss here I guess, when your world view is so bracketed by infallibles.

htfu5 tahun yang lalu

> According to observation capable at the time, it seemed to make sense, with a few little oddities.

As bluGill says, according to observation right now it _still_ makes sense. With a few little oddities.

Your view appears to be one of relativity refuting, rather than further confirming (as far as the scales studied at that time) classical physics.

You cannot compare it to something allowing FTL. There's a major difference between "we don't know everything" and "everything we know is wrong".

anotherman5545 tahun yang lalu

That fact that we are ignorant doesn't imply FTL is possible- that's optimism on your part. The universe doesn't care about your optimism and has no obligation to contain the physics that can make Star Trek a real thing.

teekert5 tahun yang lalu

This sounds like a very fun idea to do! May try it as well :)

lifeisstillgood5 tahun yang lalu

If you do drop me a DM - having "fun" fighting conversion to pdf etc - the plan is eventually to self publish and then actually have a book in our hands written by "us"

:-)

imglorp5 tahun yang lalu

The hard fact is there are no shortcuts to interstellar travel, barring new physics. Any trip will consume vast amounts of energy and it will take decades if not centuries or longer. Advanced tech may reduce the expense to your civilization but the fact won't change.

While all life, ants or not, may be universally worthy of study, is it worth that much sacrifice? Also, if the ants talk, exchanging messages would make more sense for study.

PartiallyTyped5 tahun yang lalu

There is a paper that suggests we could, in theory, direct the sun itself towards something while we continued to live as we normally do with little to no change in our lives until we arrived at our destination. This does not effectively cost as much, but it will take a lot of time.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...

Cthulhu_5 tahun yang lalu

At those time scales though, the whole world's population would not only have forgotten, but probably gone extinct and re-evolved multiple times over. Humans have only been a thing for a few million years, if that.

b1125 tahun yang lalu

Interesting. Wan-to did such things, a plasmatic being which lives ib a star, via author Fredrick Pohl. The World at the End of Time.

I wonder, did the author of the study read, then postulate?

cnity5 tahun yang lalu

> barring new physics

Our understanding of physics changes constantly!

b1125 tahun yang lalu

Indeed.

So many seem to exude the concept that "today we know precisely how the universe works".

Would one insist that Newtonian physics was the Only Way to Think of Things, prior to Einsteinian? While the speed of light may remain a barrier, it may not. Presuming the ability to be reached by a society which likely possesses scientific knowledge beyond ours, is to be a Roman, and presume the sun travels around the Earth, that the 4 aethers exist, and become angered otherwise.

simiones5 tahun yang lalu

The problem with this train of thought is that it fails to account for the observations so far. We know that the amount of energy required to accelerate an object increases as its speed approaches the speed of light. We have observed this effect. New physics will never contradict this - they may just put it in a new light, or perhaps discover a new dimension. But they will not invalidate the measurements we have so far.

Note that the observations done in Newton's time were never proved wrong - we just discovered that with better measurement precision and in different regimes of speed, they turn out to have additional small terms.

It is perfectly possible that we'll discover additional extremely weak forces and effects, and they may completely contradict our interpretations of the physical theories we've discovered, but they are unlikely to prove that the facts (measurements themselves) we know now are wrong, at least in the regimes we've noticed them.

cnity5 tahun yang lalu

> Note that the observations done in Newton's time were never proved wrong - we just discovered that with better measurement precision and in different regimes of speed, they turn out to have additional small terms.

This is not quite the right way to look at it. The general theory of relativity isn't just some unmeasurable difference in the margins of the calculations. There are _real_ situations (e.g. near a black hole) where the predicted properties of relativity totally overwhelm the predicted movements under newtonian physics.

It's not insane to think that there equally are not-yet-predicted situations in which FTL speed is possible, under conditions that have never been possible in the natural universe but are possible with human intervention.

If you don't believe that humans are capable of achieving such situations, look simply at our creation of anti-matter despite ~essentially being unable to find~ rarely finding any in the natural universe.

simiones5 tahun yang lalu

> The general theory of relativity isn't just some unmeasurable difference in the margins of the calculations. There are _real_ situations (e.g. near a black hole) where the predicted properties of relativity totally overwhelm the predicted movements under newtonian physics.

A much better example of the practical consequences is special relativity's adjustments of the laws of motion, which are necessary for example to synchronize GPS. However, my point is that no such observations had been done in Newton's time (they had no satellites in orbit, nor any black holes to study).

> It's not insane to think that there equally are not-yet-predicted situations in which FTL speed is possible, under conditions that have never been possible in the natural universe but are possible with human intervention.

I do think that imagining we could create conditions that have never happened in the natural universe before in such a way that we overcome what seem to be fundamental constants is a bit insane. Remember that our current understanding is essentially that all objects constantly move with speed c in 4D Minkowsky space time, and that acceleration can only switch the direction of this movement, not the actual length of the movement vector. Moving faster than c in any of the space directions would then require negative speed in the time direction.

It's of course not impossible that this theory is wrong. But there is also no reason to believe that it isn't wrong and that c is just a fundamental constant of the universe that is impossible to go past. The fact that the maximum speed we can travel or measure has increased constantly over humanity's evolution is much, much weaker evidence than all of the data that have led to the theory of special relativity and our understanding of the fundamental limits of speed.

In other words, while it is of course impossible to predict how our science will evolve, my money would be firmly on the c limit being fundamental. I would bet that 5000 years from now, there will be no change in this observation (though the exact nature of the equations of motion, gravity, its relation to particle physics and so on will likely all be significantly different).

King-Aaron5 tahun yang lalu

> no shortcuts to interstellar travel

Wormholes tho

Dirlewanger5 tahun yang lalu

Interstellar travel simply isn't happening without something like the Alcubierre drive.

simiones5 tahun yang lalu

Even the Alcubierre drive may not actually work:

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/11/warp-drive-news-se...

> As I explained earlier, the relevant question is then, what does the wall of the passenger area have to be made of? Is this a physically possible distribution of mass and energy? Bobrick and Martire explain that if you want superluminal motion, you need negative energy densities. If you want acceleration, you need to feed energy and momentum into the system. And the only reason the Alcubierre Drive moves faster than the speed of light is that one simply assumed it does. Suddenly it all makes sense!

chrisseaton5 tahun yang lalu

> The hard fact is there are no shortcuts to interstellar travel, barring new physics.

Do you know that early in the development of trains people were sure it would be physically impossible for humans to travel over 30 mph or so? They thought something would happen with the air pressure or something.

Our understanding of physics changes.

jkingsbery5 tahun yang lalu

Given that horses run faster than 30 mph [1], and people have been riding on horses for a while before trains were developed [2], this seems unlikely.

[1] https://horseandrider.com/western-horse-life/fastest-a-quart...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_horse

chrisseaton5 tahun yang lalu

> this seems unlikely

Well duh nobody thinks it's likely now! Obviously I don't believe it so don't explain it to me, explain it to people at the time!

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67806/early-trains-were-...

(This article says 50, which is still slower than a horse in your link, but I've read 30 in books.)

jkingsbery5 tahun yang lalu

No, the claim "early in the development of trains people were sure it would be physically impossible for humans to travel over 30 mph or so" cannot be correct, because people had been traveling faster than 30 mph on horse back for at least centuries. There's no way anyone can think was true given that they had many counterexamples.

The article you sited says that some people thought there might be issues at 50 mph. Evidently there were some people who thought this, but that doesn't say anything about how wide-spread that thinking was.

sandworm1015 tahun yang lalu

Only the crackpots thought train travel impossible. Anyone with experience of air moving at such speeds, ie the everyone in the navy, knew there wouldn't be a problem.

chrisseaton5 tahun yang lalu

It's easy to sort the crackpots from the people who know what they're talking about post hoc! Not so easy before!

mdip5 tahun yang lalu

   > Why Do We Assume Extraterrestrials Might Want to Visit Us?

I'm not trying to be sarcastic, though it'll be hard to write this without the tone seeming that way, but the question alone has a pretty simple set of answers and their own problems:

  (1) Our only way to study how an *intelligent* extraterrestrial would behave would be to study the behavior of other intelligent[0] beings.  Our data set consists of one species.  Enough of this species wants to visit an extraterrestrial civilization, and given no other examples, we assume it's probably the same.
  (2) Related to (1), we have exactly zero evidence of the existence of *any* extraterrestrial life, let alone life that understands that they live on "something in space", that there is other life on a planet orbiting a sun amongst an infinite number of stars, etc.

Maybe I'm not the article's target audience, but this is so far down the list of questions that need to be answered at this point that I had a hard time being motivated to read the whole thing.

The first, and a more interesting question is: "Is there any life, intelligent or otherwise, outside of this planet?[1]" If we found, say, that samples from Mars or some other planet/asteroid had a diversity of different bacteria/single-celled organisms, etc, it would increase the probability that there is intelligent life out there "somewhere". If everything comes back empty, there's probably better things to focus research energy on.

[0] The title is missing that important piece. If they are unaware that life could exist they won't be all that interested in visiting. The mattresses (from the planet "where mattresses are grown") likely haven't pondered any of the big questions of life, the universe and... everything.

[1] Tricky problem: you sent something up from a planet teaming with all kinds of bacteria/life; I've read about how they sanitize/handle things but it still amazes me that they can say with any confidence that there was no cross-contamination, but IANARS.

adamisom5 tahun yang lalu

It only takes one.

If you assume that the real hurdle is there being any aliens, such that many advanced alien species are almost as likely to exist as one, then indeed the majority may not want to study us 'ants'... but it only takes one.

A similar argument applies to many other things, like nuclear weapons, or any other future superweapons.

It also applies to worries around AGI or artificial general intelligence. The majority of research facilities may sign on to and implement very good ethics around releasing the software, or halting it if X happens. But it only takes one.

rindalir5 tahun yang lalu

Maybe it's not a technological problem or a sheer-numbers problem of why we haven't been "visited". Maybe, after billions of years, aliens have gotten so weary and emotionally drained from watching primitive species (some with potential) torture and kill one another into extinction, and now they just are not even looking. "Call us if you grow up".

cwhiz5 tahun yang lalu

Of all the potential Fermi outcomes, I find the “uninterested aliens” to be the silliest.

More likely is the universe is massive, and the aliens have already visited. Millions or billions of years ago.

raverbashing5 tahun yang lalu

Yes. Or don't need to visit "in person" to see what's going on (or visited in the past thousands of years and has seen "enough" for now).

albanread5 tahun yang lalu

I think we would want to visit them; and that's the reason we hope they might like to visit us. And we hope there is some easy shortcut through space; that we might figure out in the next few centuries; so we can visit people while we are still human and still have this motivation.

pre5 tahun yang lalu

Fermi's paradox says nothing about how likely aliens are to visit earth. It notes that we can't see any sign of them when we look into the sky.

Perhaps the humans don't care about the ants, but the ants damn well can see signs of human activity.

notahacker5 tahun yang lalu

Would an intelligent ant species living on an uninhabited island identify global warming and driftwood as conclusive evidence of the existence of a higher intelligence causing it?

pre5 tahun yang lalu

If they have telescopes then the trails from star-link satellites would probably give it away.

The ants in the article were in driveways though.

jonnypotty5 tahun yang lalu

We went to visit the whales. We did not try and find out who their leader was, learn their language or attempt to introduce ourselves before habitually invading their environment and studying them. our problem with thinking about et is that we don't actually think seriously, we just start imagining star trek.

jp575 tahun yang lalu

> Fermi’s paradox is pretentious in that it assumes we humans have some sort of cosmic significance.

Our significance as a species is actually irrelevant to the question of why we might or might not be visited. Even if we turn out to be somehow extraordinary, the aliens would have to visit first before they could know that.

drichel5 tahun yang lalu

Imagine aliens of the future for whom the Fermi paradox does not arise, because the galaxy is teeming with what used to be human.

Blikkentrekker5 tahun yang lalu

> Fermi’s paradox is pretentious in that it assumes we humans have some sort of cosmic significance.

No, it assumes that of all the incalculable advanced civilizations it hypothesizes to exist, at least some would be interested, not all, not the majority, not a significant number, but at least one in a million.

vidarh5 tahun yang lalu

It doesn't even assume that. There are a whole lot of scenarios where we'd still assume we'd spot signs of aliens even if they're all totally disinterested in us.

bluGill5 tahun yang lalu

The universe is too big for that. Civilizations just 150 light years away could not spot us by any means we can even imagine.

tlb5 tahun yang lalu

But if alien life is common, a reasonably likely outcome is that one species gains dominance and eliminates all other potential threats in the galaxy. In that case, we wouldn't see visitors if just that one species was incurious.

thelazydogsback5 tahun yang lalu

Our species is at the most interesting point (now + coming few generations) in its evolution I'd think (creation of WMDs, genetic engineering, effecting plant-scale changes, artificial intelligence/life, spacefaring, etc.) - a tipping point that makes us most "interesting" at the moment -- so if there's a civilization that's been around for millions (if not billions) of years, I'd expect that they are here now, and that they are in a form (tiny, distributed, etc.) that isn't recognizable to us unless they decided to manifest in a specific form. I'd wager that if we are not the lone civ in the galaxy, that this is probably the case.

gwbas1c5 tahun yang lalu

> Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

Because it makes good sci-fi!

But in all seriousness, we have so little tangible evidence of extraterrestrial life that there's no way to answer this question. It always comes down to opinion and speculation.

33958105 tahun yang lalu

I assume that any culture that is capable of developing interstellar flight will have a high degree of curiosity. We humans study even the most "mundane" life forms on our planet and try to study the rest of the universe outside of our planet. That is why I think extraterrestrials would want to make contact with us.

> We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path.

However, there are people who do study ants.

I think Roadside Picnic is a good novel but not indicative of how extraterrestrials who are capable of visiting Earth would actually behave.

ojosilva5 tahun yang lalu

Interstellar flight alone is not of interest. OTOH, it would allow earthlings to become visitors.

Commerce. If we use our experience as a basis here, this is the #1 interest that would lure alien explorers to this neck of the woods. Commerce is what got us to cross the Atlantic: looking for routes, buyers, suppliers, riches and land. All science-first approach ("they should come to study us") is so 20th century utopism.

But without really being sure what matters to aliens the most, commerce, tourism or science, makes it hard to lure them. We sent Voyager with curiosity in mind: songs, poems, language samples, pictures... But we could have sent instead a list/sample of our prime minerals, water supplies, preferred payment methods and our "1-800 number" for contact. Scientists can be so un-enterpreneurial sometimes!

Now, what then could get their attention and provoke a visit?

Become a menace.

Without really being sure what matters to aliens makes it tough to envision a way to get them really interested on the 3rd rock enough to launch a mission or send signals. So the most effective (and reckless...) is to become a menace, or at least a nuisance, to them. Fiction has played around with that idea, nuclear capability being the trigger that got them to notice or outraged enough to wipe us out...

Let's say we develop a gravitational wave cannon capable of making Sirius shoot over as a billiard ball into Procyon. Oh, now that would get their attention!

33958105 tahun yang lalu

tsdlts5 tahun yang lalu

Perhaps a super intelligent civilization would not put up with the limitations of our physical reality and instead upload their collective consciousness into an artificial one. This has the added benefit in that they are no longer dependent on natural resource extraction to expand their population at least beyond the energy requirements to sustain their giant consciousness server. I'm sure I can't be the only one to have thought of this but I'm not well read on the subject. Why go through pain and suffering and various zero sum games when you could open up the possibilities to the infinite?

kgin5 tahun yang lalu

If you assume that there is a civilization that has gone to the trouble of developing interstellar transportation, I think you can assume they value the differences between different parts of the universe. Considering that inhabited planets or even solar systems seem to be much more rare than uninhabited ones, I don't think it's unreasonable to think these difference-interested beings would want to stop by to at least map out an inhabited planet.

stereoabuse5 tahun yang lalu

This author has also proposed that the solar system has already been visited:

"‘Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization."[0] The rest of the paper covers the possibility that the ‘Oumuamua object was sent unintentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.11490.pdf

0xbadcafebee5 tahun yang lalu

The most depressing thought I had recently was that there aren't any extraterrestrials with the capability of space flight. Pretty sure they exist, but just imagine if we're the most advanced ones? Kind of embarrassing/sad. Can you imagine traveling to another planet? The aliens gaze at us expecting some technological geniuses, and who walks out but Frank Dunce in his MAGA hat and "I'm with stupid" t-shirt?

kwdc5 tahun yang lalu

When a species finally figures out how to create a suitable container to put on the top of a pile of explosives in order to travel I think they are worth further investigation.

That and our current ability to create nuclear weapons and then (mostly) not use them. For now at least. This skill hasn't been mastered yet. But we're still young.

Worth taking a look at.

jamesmishra5 tahun yang lalu

I think multicellular life on Earth has likely created complex molecules and other interesting matter that doesn't exist anywhere else in the galaxy. I imagine an alien race would be interested in discovering what is out there--but they may not recognize human life as being any more intelligent than a grove of trees.

cwkoss5 tahun yang lalu

I would expect highly advanced civilizations would have nanotechnology that makes complex chemical synthesis fairly trivial.

jamesmishra5 tahun yang lalu

Sure, but they still wouldn't even be able to imagine some of the things that they could find in a glass of milk.

Presumably a spacefaring civilization would be limited by discovery, not production.

xpuente5 tahun yang lalu

"Chemical" based intelligence/life is only the bootstrap to "electron" based intelligence/life. Most likely we might be unable to understand that until ourselves cross that line. They will wait for it.

spideymans5 tahun yang lalu

This seems so... obvious, that I'm surprised this potential isn't talked about more. Our own species probably isn't all that far away from generating some variety of machine consciousness. I'd say give it a few hundred years at most.

Heck, this begs the question of why the hell would an intelligent alien species even send their meat bags into space, when they can just upload their consciousness into a machine and have it do their bidding, without any of the limitations of biological systems.

xpuente5 tahun yang lalu

>it a few hundred years at most.

We will not wait for that long. When the fundamental "piece" comes out, all our current knowledge in neuroscience will fall into place very quickly.

hartator5 tahun yang lalu

Yes, it’s exactly why we should be septic regarding ufo sightings and such. If aliens are so advanced, we are probably no different than ants for them. Why they should care about us? Why they should protect themselves to be seen?

whitepaint5 tahun yang lalu

> Why they should care about us? Why they should protect themselves to be seen?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples

hartator5 tahun yang lalu

> Right to self-isolation

Nothing wrong with that but no alien has asked us that question as far as I know.

stabbles5 tahun yang lalu

We study ants too...

Go to the ant, thou sluggard;

Consider her ways, and be wise

hartator5 tahun yang lalu

99.99% of ant colonies are not been studied. And for 0.01% we do study, we don't care of them seeing us.

> Consider her ways, and be wise

There is no philosophy to extract from ant society. Pretty dystopian, totalitarian, and despotic.

siltpotato5 tahun yang lalu

johannes12343215 tahun yang lalu

The question is, I guess, whether we are the first species they find inhabiting a planet in some form of intelligent life, or whether we are Species 5618. Species 5618 is interesting to few experts only.

NamTaf5 tahun yang lalu

I'm increasingly of the completely unresearched, lay- and baseless opinion that the great filter explanation has a fair bit of merit. Not so much from the idea that civilisations create their own destruction before they get off their rocks because of a technological race condition, but rather that intelligence as we see it is a knife-edge balancing act, and humankind is near to the maxima of ability as a result of intelligence.

If humans were a little less intelligent or a little less social, I don't think we'd have seen nearly the same the scientific advancement we have achieved. We'd either be unable to come up with the advancements, or too tribal to come together to benefit from collaboration. This would have a knock-on effect and I don't think we would've ended up in a situation where we're capable of rocketing out of our gravity well.

Conversely, it wouldn't surprise me at all if a hypothetical creature with more intelligence than us found itself too burdened by its intelligence - by way of wrestling with the philosophical challenges of existence - and ended up wiping itself out. Alternatively, I could easily believe that the biological foundations of what produces intellect quickly end up producing side-effects that inhibit achieving outcomes.

For example, we all-too-often see incredibly bright people struggle with depression, etc. due to their intellect. It feels like intellect itself might lead to additional struggles that are self-defeating. Moreover, neurodevelopmental conditions such as ASD seem to correlate to some degree with intelligence, with more extreme cases quickly become limiting. It sort of seems like intellect itself could become too overwhelming and quickly begin to put a handbrake on a species' development.

Additionally, human brains are incredibly expensive. We use about 20% of our total energy intake to power them. These days that's easy to handle, but a super-brain with even a bit higher energy requirement might quickly cause a species to struggle to find enough energy in its early era, before it's had a chance to really develop all of that scientific advancement that leads the surplus of to modern food production.

I mean, I am pretty much entirely talking out of my arse here and have no formal or informal education by which to really lend any credence to this hypothesis. Additionally, I totally realise that evolutionary pressures would tend towards these outcomes over time. However, evolution isn't exactly a precision tool, and so it would not surprise me that among many rolls of the 'intelligent life' dice, many burn themselves out due to not striking that balance well enough.

I'd love to hear from anyone who has a more informed take on this.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

irrational5 tahun yang lalu

Why do we assume extraterrestrials can visit us? As far as we know there is no way to travel even close to the speed of light, much less faster. It simply takes too long to get anywhere.

jkingsbery5 tahun yang lalu

I have no way to verify the author's claim, but it strikes me as likely self-refuting to argue that life seems so rare because actually it's super common.

breck5 tahun yang lalu

One thing that worries me if you look at history.

Given that someone is willing to leave their entire family and life to embark on a long quest to an unknown land, while many do it for love to get help or knowledge or resources to bring back home to their people, others are doing it because they are looking for a place where they can get away with hate.

Even if an alien civilization were 99% peaceful and good, what is the probability that the members of that civilization who would want to venture out, leave their families behind, and come meet us are the good ones or the ones in the other 1%?

jdlyga5 tahun yang lalu

Well, if we saw extraterrestrials we'd probably want to visit too. Or at least observe them. Prime directive.

DaniloDias5 tahun yang lalu

This is a great example of a doc built on weasel word arguments.

All qualitative until it can’t avoid quantitative metrics like “many”

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

fidla5 tahun yang lalu

I've enjoyed Avi Loeb interviews on Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan. He has a refreshing perspective

sys_647385 tahun yang lalu

In the movies it usually doesn't end well for us. Maybe we stay below the radar for now.

theodric5 tahun yang lalu

Because we're the most interesting people we've ever met. End of story.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

grenoire5 tahun yang lalu

Obligatory "They're Made out of Meat": https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

A brilliant sci-fi short story about not necessarily how we're uninteresting, but instead a bit too interesting.

itronitron5 tahun yang lalu

Or maybe alien civilizations stopped visiting Earth after the dinosaurs got wiped out because their convenient big body small brain meat supply got wiped out. Would be interesting to find out if the same aliens seeded multiple systems with dinosaurs.

hehehaha5 tahun yang lalu

I am certain there are many more planets inhabited by carbon based intelligence similar to ours. In fact, I believe they look very similar to homo sapiens and that they too are in search of extraterrestrials. Based on rough math we are nowhere near making contacts but I get goosebumps just thinking about the very first contact.

sleepysysadmin5 tahun yang lalu

In my scifi book(s), the only reason aliens have to come to earth than say any other planet is to party. There's no reason to dominate or steal our resources. Go to any other system and you have infinite amounts of resources. In fact most star systems will have planets with life but not necessarily intelligent life.

So fundamentally it's just tourism. They come to Earth to drink beer and have fun. Though tourism is very rare because we have been so violent to previous tourists at roswell.

Obviously there are antagonists who do want to destroy humanity but generally speaking its about tourism.

waheoo5 tahun yang lalu

Because we assume our instinctual tendency to explore is what makes us so dominant.

More of the same old anthropomorphizing I guess.

dqpb5 tahun yang lalu

Well, let’s unpack this:

Let x = Extraterrestrials

Let y = want to visit us

x might y = x might y or x might not y

True = True or False

Boolean logic suggests this statement is indeed True.

blackrock5 tahun yang lalu

Because. We fear they’re going to probe us.

f4305 tahun yang lalu

It's accepted in some scientific circles that ETs are transdimensional or have mastered the ability to project, materialize to cover the vast distances. It's impossible to become an intergalatic type 2 civilization using physics in the 3D.

Much like the fish in the koi pond can only move on a 2D plane, they wouldn't find us any more or less interesting. To us it looks like they are moving super fast (tic tac video via USN) or teleporting (common UFO sighting characteristic) but all they are doing is exploiting the dimensions beyond the 3D.

I follow the stoned ape theory in that fungi, one of the oldest compound on earth, specifically the psilocybe variety that has a unique chemical formulation that can't be found anywhere else on earth except recently similar chemistry was discovered on the Venus atmosphere (as proof of life) as a form of "self replication" software that increases visual acuity, formation of concepts and language in those that ingest it.

    Psilocybin is the only 4-phosphorylated indole on this planet.

I'm thinking they might check on the apes that consumed their biological software and see how far they progressed with the same amusement (?) or banality that one would express towards fish tank.

Perhaps they like to show off their technology like dangling a carrot in front of us. "You are getting close yet still far, keep going, and one day you can be just like us!"