[HN Gopher] Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to vis...
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Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?
Author : laybak
Score : 109 points
Date : 2021-01-21 13:33 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| mxcrossb wrote:
| 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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?
| klmadfejno wrote:
| 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?
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| NamTaf wrote:
| 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.
| duopixel wrote:
| > 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.
| zionic wrote:
| The aliens could also have morals we find repulsive, for
| example how would society react to aliens that said hitler was
| right etc etc?
| drummer wrote:
| Read the book "Hitler's Table Talk" by Trevor Roper.
| whatshisface wrote:
| We can feel pretty safe that they would not say that, because
| if they liked Hitler, they would be invading, not chatting
| about history.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > 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.
| coding123 wrote:
| > "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?
| MajorBee wrote:
| 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.
| irrational wrote:
| 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.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| 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.
| xioxox wrote:
| This is in Iain Banks's book Transition. Did anyone else come
| up with this before him?
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I was struggling to remember where I'd read it :) Thanks :)
|
| No idea if it was his idea or not.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| 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_holmes wrote:
| 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.
| dstick wrote:
| 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.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _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.
| mxcrossb wrote:
| 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.
| kace91 wrote:
| Pretty specist to assume they have eyes :)
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| True. Or that their eyes see the same spectrum as ours.
|
| I wonder if it's even more spectacular in different
| wavelengths?
| [deleted]
| adamisom wrote:
| 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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > 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.
| karteum wrote:
| There are also aspects that should be considered in my opinion
|
| 1deg/ 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 !
|
| 2deg/ 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.
|
| 3deg/ 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 :)
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| 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.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| 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".
| whatshisface wrote:
| 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.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| 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."
| f6v wrote:
| > 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.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| 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.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I am suggesting that intelligent populations may often
| die out. Evolution doesn't look ahead to avoid dead ends.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| 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.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| > 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_BubbleTime wrote:
| > and used its dominant position to benevolently stop the
| game.
|
| Why benevolently? Why not maliciously?
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _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.
| fossuser wrote:
| 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.
| lisper wrote:
| 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
| blueblisters wrote:
| 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| 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.
| lisper wrote:
| 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.
| bryananderson wrote:
| > 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.
| 3395810 wrote:
| 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.
| ojosilva wrote:
| 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!
| 3395810 wrote:
| Earth isn't really unique in terms of resources. It wouldn't
| really make sense to travel to another solar system just to
| get resource that you could obtain in your own. Even if they
| lack something in their own solar system, they could get it
| from other uninhabited solar systems without needing to trade
| locals. Ideas are what could be valuable in trade. If it is
| them visiting us rather than the other way around odds are
| they have more advanced technology than us so that isn't
| something they would need to trade. Our culture, what we sent
| on Voyaer, seems like it would be of the most interest to
| them. They might have entirely different senses than us
| (lacking sight, seeing different frequnecies, hearing
| different frequencies) that would make our "culture"
| something that wouldn't be enjoyed directly by them. Really
| as I see it, scientific interest is the one thing that would
| make them want to contact us.
| jamesmishra wrote:
| 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.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I would expect highly advanced civilizations would have
| nanotechnology that makes complex chemical synthesis fairly
| trivial.
| jamesmishra wrote:
| 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.
| jonnypotty wrote:
| 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.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| 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.
| pre wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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?
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _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.
| tlb wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| The universe is too big for that. Civilizations just 150
| light years away could not spot us by any means we can even
| imagine.
| rindalir wrote:
| 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".
| grenoire wrote:
| 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.
| itronitron wrote:
| 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.
| kwdc wrote:
| 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.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Well, if we saw extraterrestrials we'd probably want to visit
| too. Or at least observe them. Prime directive.
| imglorp wrote:
| 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.
| cnity wrote:
| > barring new physics
|
| Our understanding of physics changes constantly!
| bbarnett wrote:
| 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.
| simiones wrote:
| 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.
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| Interstellar travel simply isn't happening without something
| like the Alcubierre drive.
| simiones wrote:
| 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!
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| 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?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > 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.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| 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
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > 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.)
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| It's easy to sort the crackpots from the people who know
| what they're talking about post hoc! Not so easy before!
| cwhiz wrote:
| 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.
| raverbashing wrote:
| 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).
| sleepysysadmin wrote:
| 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.
| waheoo wrote:
| Because we assume our instinctual tendency to explore is what
| makes us so dominant.
|
| More of the same old anthropomorphizing I guess.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| In the movies it usually doesn't end well for us. Maybe we stay
| below the radar for now.
| thelazydogsback wrote:
| 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.
| scj wrote:
| 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.
| newsbinator wrote:
| 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.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| 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]
| hhjj wrote:
| It also could be as entertaining as watching paint dry for
| them.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| 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?"
| DaniloDias wrote:
| This is a great example of a doc built on weasel word arguments.
|
| All qualitative until it can't avoid quantitative metrics like
| "many"
| jp57 wrote:
| > 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.
| drichel wrote:
| Imagine aliens of the future for whom the Fermi paradox does
| not arise, because the galaxy is teeming with what used to be
| human.
| nend wrote:
| >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.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| > 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)
| ruined wrote:
| 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.
| patcon wrote:
| 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.
| mcbits wrote:
| 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.
| smelter wrote:
| To an ant, I am a mountain/ thunderstorm/earthquake/quasar.
| behnamoh wrote:
| 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.
| smelter wrote:
| 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.
| nend wrote:
| 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."
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| > 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| 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.
| simonh wrote:
| 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.
| behnamoh wrote:
| 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.
| px43 wrote:
| Maybe there's a much more interesting colony of ants nearby and
| we're just boring?
| donatj wrote:
| Let's say though it took several generations to travel to the
| ants, would we bother?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| it is sort of funny that the argument for lack of intellectual
| curiosity in aliens is being made in Scientific American.
| rixrax wrote:
| 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.
| vuciv1 wrote:
| I find this point weak because we literally study ants and sell
| ant colonies for interested parties
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| 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...
| [deleted]
| harryf wrote:
| 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"...
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Evolution has been a mostly unimportant part of human
| development since at least 2 centuries ago. An intelligent
| species engineers itself, not evolves itself.
| theli0nheart wrote:
| > _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._
| BlueTie wrote:
| 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.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Why wouldn't they?
| BlueTie wrote:
| 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.
| lhorie wrote:
| 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.
| nkrisc wrote:
| 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.
| me_me_me wrote:
| There are also people that pour liquid metal into ant colony to
| cast its internal structure.
|
| It doesn't end well for ants.
| kypro wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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.
| ryanmercer wrote:
| >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_.
|
| :( :( :(
| thotsBgone wrote:
| 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.
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| We have studied (exactly) 0.00000000000001% of the total ant
| population.
|
| Also, no ant ever has understood he is being studied (which is
| the more interesting point). We would experience superior
| beings as "natural experience" and be totally oblivious to
| them.
| devilduck wrote:
| It's more interesting to me that it seems like many egos can
| not accept the idea that maybe they aren't that interesting
| after all.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| 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...
| drbojingle wrote:
| Do you think the ants notice it much?
| bostonsre wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jkingsbery wrote:
| 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.
| hans1729 wrote:
| 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
| op03 wrote:
| 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)
| 7thaccount wrote:
| 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?
| evilsetg wrote:
| That is what you have the bio something PhD for :-)
| franknine wrote:
| Snails might host Angiostrongylus cantonensis (https://en
| .m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiostrongylus_cantonensis) which
| can kill people
| Archelaos wrote:
| 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
| randycupertino wrote:
| 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Maybe he already knew about how the snails did their thing.
| 6510 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| joshspankit wrote:
| "Listen: I'm fascinated 23 hours a day. When I go over to a
| buddy's house I just wanna eat things. Yaknow?"
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| > 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.
| soufron wrote:
| "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.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| 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.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| To be fair to rocks, we also study them ...
| guerrilla wrote:
| Is astrogeology (as etymologically oxymoronic as that is)
| already a subject?
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| That's basically what asteroid science is. It's such a
| big field that we're even sending probes to collect
| rocks.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Maybe aliens will be interested in Earth for
| Astrogastronomy.
| liotier wrote:
| Sorry, no - only the consumption of cultivated humans is
| allowed.
| madia_leva wrote:
| How would you know that you are being cultivated?
| jrd259 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man
| philliphaydon wrote:
| I subscribe to Ant Canada on YouTube. Fascinating stuff.
|
| https://youtube.com/user/AntsCanada
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| carusooneliner wrote:
| 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.
| teekert wrote:
| 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...
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| 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.
| ballenf wrote:
| 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.
| yoz-y wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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.
| ryanmercer wrote:
| >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_det
| ail... 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.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| There are literally millions of species on Earth, and
| each one has a scientist interested in it.
| Caprinicus wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| 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_blast wrote:
| 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.
| egsmi wrote:
| 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...
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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-a wrote:
| 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.
| account42 wrote:
| That would imply that there are also lots of alien worlds
| that are similarly developed to us and those might be
| interested.
| Retric wrote:
| 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]
| RandallBrown wrote:
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| 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?
| akiselev wrote:
| 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.
| taneq wrote:
| > 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.
| xwdv wrote:
| 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.
| s_dev wrote:
| >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.
| addicted wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| > 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_dev wrote:
| 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.
| grahamburger wrote:
| 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.
| psadri wrote:
| Maybe not humans, but they probably do get visits from other
| insects and animals.
| volkk wrote:
| 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?
| albanread wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| cvaidya1986 wrote:
| Why do we assume we can detect extra terrestrials
| xpuente wrote:
| "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.
| spideymans wrote:
| 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.
| xpuente wrote:
| >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.
| gmuslera wrote:
| 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.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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.
| hartator wrote:
| 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?
| whitepaint wrote:
| > Why they should care about us? Why they should protect
| themselves to be seen?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples
| hartator wrote:
| > Right to self-isolation
|
| Nothing wrong with that but no alien has asked us that
| question as far as I know.
| stabbles wrote:
| We study ants too...
|
| Go to the ant, thou sluggard;
|
| Consider her ways, and be wise
| hartator wrote:
| 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.
| siltpotato wrote:
| Ants work exclusively for the common good of the colony.
| That's my kind of dystopia.
| cortic wrote:
| >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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| drichel wrote:
| 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.
| cortic wrote:
| 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.
| drichel wrote:
| 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.
| cortic wrote:
| 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.
| drichel wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| >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.
| cortic wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| >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.
| GistNoesis wrote:
| 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.
| behnamoh wrote:
| 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?
| GistNoesis wrote:
| 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.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > 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.
| htfu wrote:
| 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".
| GistNoesis wrote:
| 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.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > 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.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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 ).
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Why do people assume a universe simulating our own runs on
| comparable physics?
| avian wrote:
| 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.
| htfu wrote:
| 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.
| GistNoesis wrote:
| 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.
| mdip wrote:
| > 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.
| tsdlts wrote:
| 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?
| kgin wrote:
| 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.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| 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. :-)
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| 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?
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| 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!
| bluGill wrote:
| 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)
| anotherman554 wrote:
| 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.
| htfu wrote:
| > 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".
| teekert wrote:
| This sounds like a very fun idea to do! May try it as well :)
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| 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"
|
| :-)
| breck wrote:
| 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%?
| hehehaha wrote:
| 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.
| fidla wrote:
| I've enjoyed Avi Loeb interviews on Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan. He
| has a refreshing perspective
| blackrock wrote:
| Because. We fear they're going to probe us.
| f430 wrote:
| 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!"
| theodric wrote:
| Because we're the most interesting people we've ever met. End of
| story.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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?
| drclau wrote:
| 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!
| chii wrote:
| 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.
| drclau wrote:
| Thanks, I had it on my list. I will pick it up sooner, then.
| patcon wrote:
| 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.
| patcon wrote:
| 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.)
| tjalfi wrote:
| 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
| leokennis wrote:
| 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...
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| 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.
| burlesona wrote:
| 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 :)
| f6v wrote:
| Might be closer to "Solaris", where we just won't get it
| regardless how hard we try.
| Balgair wrote:
| 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.
| alistairSH wrote:
| 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.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| > 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
| Udo wrote:
| 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.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| > 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.
| Udo wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| dqpb wrote:
| 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.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| 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.
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