[HN Gopher] Astrobiologists have released the preliminary result...
___________________________________________________________________
Astrobiologists have released the preliminary results of a SETI
survey
Author : spamalot159
Score : 87 points
Date : 2021-05-10 02:35 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Talking about SETI, have there been any publications related to
| SETI@home which ended last year?
| mxcrossb wrote:
| > The galactic center, according to the scientists, "provides an
| ideal" central location for "advanced civilizations to place a
| powerful transmitter to efficiently send beacons across the
| entire Milky Way," in what is yet another advantage to this
| strategy.
|
| Can anyone comment on this? What is the idea of such a beacon?
| trutannus wrote:
| Whenever I hear about putting beacons in space I'm always
| reminded of the plot of the book The Dark Forest. I remember
| too about a decade ago that it was decided the idea of
| broadcasting our location in deep space might be a bad idea.
| Balgair wrote:
| The _Three Body Problem_ trilogy also leans heavily into that
| theme.
|
| It's a good series at first, but gets very woo-woo by the
| end.
|
| Spoilers:
|
| All aliens are actively hostile to others. Any civilizations
| they find, they destroy.
| lgl wrote:
| Again, spoiler alert:
|
| The books don't really specify that *all* civilizations are
| actively hostile to each other but hints that the best
| chance for survival is basically being quiet since there
| are unknown civilizations that yield tremendous power and
| are in fact actively hostile to any signs of other
| intelligent life which they can destroy with relative and
| terrifying ease. It's that sort of status-quo that makes
| the dark forest theory so scary and why everybody that
| eventually reaches that conclusion would want to remain
| hidden and/or silent. Throughout the story we only ever get
| to see from the point of view of two civilizations so who
| knows if there wasn't something like a star-trekian
| federation at some place or time since we do eventually get
| to know that there were many many civilizations in the end.
|
| It does get really crazy, but I personally found the whole
| trilogy really awesome. It would be hard to build such a
| story relying only on our current understanding of physics
| and technology and even some of the crazier parts are still
| kind of based out of real theories and hypothetical
| developments or discoveries.
|
| I still highly recommend this trilogy to any sci-fi/first
| contact fan.
| bostik wrote:
| I had an even darker interpretation.
|
| _Because_ there is a non-zero probability that some
| civilizations are, or will become, hostile predators, the
| most effective survival strategy is to:
|
| 1) avoid detection at all costs, and
|
| 2) exterminate any civilisation you detect before they
| can invite the attention of these predators, or worse,
| evolve into one; meaning
|
| 3) become the predator
| hoseja wrote:
| See also: history, evolution of the state. The system we
| live in has self-preservation as it's main interest and
| it's _absolutely terrified of dying_.
| elefanten wrote:
| The Dark Forest is book 2 of Three Body Trilogy
| Balgair wrote:
| Crumbs! Not enough coffee this morning, sorry!
| cdelsolar wrote:
| I thought Death's End was incredible myself, although The
| Dark Forest just edges it out.
| piyh wrote:
| The Dark Forest is the sequel to the Three Body Problem
| which is part of the trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Path
| squarefoot wrote:
| A book that could reinforce this idea is "Those Gentle
| Voices" by Gorge Alec Effinger.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| If a civilization has sufficiently advanced technology, then I
| would imagine they would be scouring the cosmos for more
| resources.
|
| Ultimately, every species is biologically trained to propagate
| itself, consuming resources and expanding presence, unless
| there are other external factors governing (for example, long
| gestation periods, limited offspring, etc)
|
| So, advanced civilizations might put communication mechanisms
| in convenient places to contact inferior species.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >If a civilization has sufficiently advanced technology, then
| I would imagine they would be scouring the cosmos for more
| resources.
|
| Stable elements are not scare, _life_ is scarce. I would hope
| that any civilization advanced enough to travel the verse
| would be able to strip mine the elements it needs from
| lifeless rocks and leave planets with life alone.
|
| Bezos is right that we should ultimately move resource
| extraction to space.
| baja_blast wrote:
| Also extracting resources from astroids avoids the problem
| of getting them out of the gravity well. Sure they could
| mine Earth, but they would have to haul it off Earth too.
| teachingassist wrote:
| > every species is biologically trained to propagate itself,
| consuming resources and expanding presence
|
| It's not obvious to me that this would apply to xenobiology.
|
| (It's not even totally obvious that it applies on Earth -
| other species live a much more synergistic lifestyle than
| humans do)
| FiReaNG3L wrote:
| Or an advanced enough civilization might on the contrary use
| their resources efficiently with long term planning and
| population control and stay on their planet / solar system -
| "advanced" and "ever-expanding" don't have to come together.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| INT and WIS are different stats, and sadly, one does not
| imply the other, at least in the only being we can yet
| study
| toomanybeersies wrote:
| > Ultimately, every species is biologically trained to
| propagate itself
|
| Grouped by planet, we have a sample size of 1.
| gaoshan wrote:
| I should think any civilization capable of producing, operating
| and placing such a beacon would be able to detect us on their
| own and might have the same interest in communicating with us
| that we have with ant colonies. WE think everyone wants to find
| and communicate with us but there is no reason that we should
| assume THEY feel the same way.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Given that It's easier to search in quieter wavelengths like 0.7
| and 93 GHz. But is there anything on Earth 1) transmitting unique
| signals 2) in that range with 3) the kind of power that would
| survive the rigors of the journey through hundreds of light
| years?
|
| What is _our_ interstellar beaming frequency? At what power? _Why
| else_ would there be any signals between 0.7 and 93 that aren 't
| -300dB down? _Radio waves spread_. And _scatter_.
|
| You're going to travel in the mountains in a remote region of a
| planet with no ionosphere. You want to eat your meals while
| listening to music. Do you take a shortwave radio or an FM radio?
|
| Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We're looking for
| the lost keys under the streetlight.
| d_silin wrote:
| Not to start a massive flame war, but just a personal opinion: I
| rather prefer humans to be the only intelligent species in the
| observable Universe - that means it will be all ours to play
| with.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Even if today humanity is the only sentient life, it is
| unlikely to remain so.
|
| AI will advance faster than we can evolve and it will be their
| universe to play with, not ours.
| irrational wrote:
| Only if we construct that AI. Nothing says we have to.
| officialjunk wrote:
| do you think there are enough sufficiently interest groups
| that will continue to work toward an AI?
| codeulike wrote:
| I find the responsibiltiy of that somewhat terrifying. If we
| snuff outselves out then all that is left is a universe of
| stars shining on barren rocks.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| I have always believed the human race will end eventually. So
| why "If we snuff ourselves out..."?
| pfdietz wrote:
| If intelligent life were common then the Great Filter would
| likely be ahead of us, not behind us. Finding that ETI would be
| the worst news humanity ever receives.
| jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote:
| I don't believe in The Great Filter, as I disagree with it's
| basic premise, i.e. the Fermi paradox. The Prime Directive is
| the most plausible explanation.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That would require a uniformity of purpose over billions of
| years, not only in our galaxy but in galaxies at
| cosmological distances (where we could detect K3
| civilizations).
| jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote:
| It would only require such uniformity for some millennia,
| that is how long civilization has existed. A hundred
| thousand years tops, if you're to believe traditional
| tales and mythology ;)
|
| We don't know if alien civilizations interfered a million
| years ago.
| m4rtink wrote:
| That's a good point & divergent evolution once enough systems
| get settled should produce many interesting alien cultures
| anyway, so not a huge problem. :)
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Being the only intelligent life means that it's far more likely
| that we have a long and promising future. If there is other
| intelligent life out there... we have to ask why they aren't
| _everywhere_.
|
| Because unless we're missing something big, it would be clear
| that intelligence is either perpetually stuck in their own tiny
| tiny corner of the universe, or kill themselves off before they
| can reach the rest of the visible universe.
| hazeii wrote:
| ...or because they're out there, and when they notice us
| they'll splat us like we'd splat an ant nest with no more
| thought than that.
| nly wrote:
| ...or the intelligent life in the universe is so beyond us
| that, even though they have the capability to communicate,
| or even visit, they don't see us as worth contacting.
| Perhaps them talking to us would be like us talking to a
| tree stump or a bucket of plankton.
|
| Perhaps it's not even a conscious decision on their part.
| Perhaps all our achievements, everything we are, isn't
| recognized amongst alien-kind beyond a short 1 line entry
| in an alien log file,. Perhaps their monitoring system
| detects and discards a thousand worthless blips like us
| every day.
|
| What if we're just not that special
| wiz21c wrote:
| Let's just count the number of movies where we kill the
| aliens versus where we get to live with them.
| bluGill wrote:
| The speed of light is too slow for them to pull that off.
| They are limited by the same physics as us. There are some
| possible loopholes like wormholes, but even they are
| limited.
| taberiand wrote:
| I vaguely recall a story to that effect? Scientists finally
| receive a brief interstellar message of intelligent origin.
| After painstaking study, a breakthrough and finally they
| decipher it:
|
| Be quiet! They'll hear you.
| lgl wrote:
| I was about to comment that it's somewhat similar to The
| Three Body Problem that's often discussed on hn's
| comments sections from time to time but decided to search
| for that last phrase and apparently it's from a
| /r/nosleep story:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/2j3nxz/radio_si
| len...
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| dark matter is like 96% of the universe by mass...
| garmaine wrote:
| This is incorrect.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Expand please? I read a book that also proposed this. If
| science has moved on I'd like rto know.
| garmaine wrote:
| It is conflating dark matter with dark energy, and
| counting them both together.
| lgl wrote:
| It's pretty close.
|
| Only 5% of all matter is "regular" matter, and ~27% is
| dark matter which makes it be 85% of all mass but not of
| mass-energy since there is ~68% of dark energy.
|
| It's the combination of dark matter + dark energy that
| makes for ~95% of the universe's total mass-energy.
|
| Source:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#:~:text=In%20th
| e%2....
| baja_blast wrote:
| Dark matter may not exist, in fact many observations
| conflict with our dark matter models. IMO I just think our
| understanding of physics is incomplete.
| causality0 wrote:
| Yes, that is the least scary. If species like us are stuck in
| our own solar system, we're eventually doomed. If we're not,
| it would only take a few million years to colonize the
| galaxy. If two non-stuck colonizing species exist at the same
| time they have to arise within a few million years of each
| other, in a galaxy thirteen billion years old.
|
| Frankly, us being the only/first sapient species is by far
| the most optimistic possibility.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Basically, for us to colonize another star system I think
| we have to be a space native species that no longer needs
| to.
|
| I think by the time we colonize anything beyond alpha
| centuri, there are more of humanity living on o'neil
| cylinders than on any planet, and the people living on
| planet are the ones that desire to live somewhere 'wild'
| sib301 wrote:
| Or we're early... How is that not an obvious possibility?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Sure, but given that humans are only about 500k years old,
| that makes us the only intelligent life so far.
|
| The lack of any other intelligent life so far means that we
| have no evidence one way or another that we will succeed or
| fail. Better than if 100 million civilizations already
| tried and died.
| jandrese wrote:
| Or they are everywhere, but our technology is too primitive
| to see them. Or we just have not collected enough data yet to
| make out the patterns.
| d_silin wrote:
| One of the explanations for Fermi paradox is that we just got
| lucky to be one of the first civilizations to the party. A
| few billions years from now Universe will be filled to the
| brim with life and sentience.
| argvargc wrote:
| Given a premise that perfect evolution is possible:
|
| The following is dependent on the unknown likely duration to
| perfect evolution, and how it overlaps with unknown (but
| widely-assumed to be light-speed) travelling limits.
|
| Given appropriate overlap distance of the two, there will
| inevitably arise the first civilisation to perform the
| following steps in order:
|
| 1) Attain self-mastery of internal planetary conflict and
| resource management. (Permanently sustainable peace and
| sustenance.)
|
| 2) Use their now abundance of time to perfect mastery of
| physics as is physically possible (something we know to have
| barely-conceivable limits in terms of size/scale etc).
|
| 3) Traverse the universe looking for any others, who - by not
| being the first - will therefore likely be behind them in
| terms of any conceivable aspect.
|
| 4) Immediately upon finding them, imprison them virtually in
| a seemingly "empty" but otherwise identical universe. This
| forces the same conditions upon them that were known to cause
| success, and also eliminates all risk of contamination of the
| existing peaceful equilibrium.
|
| 6) Wait.
|
| 7) The found species either:
|
| a) achieves mastery of peace and sustainability, at which
| point contact is initiated as peaceful equals.
|
| b) the species fails and dies.
|
| 8) Permanent universal peace is the only possible outcome, no
| matter how many times the above process is repeated.
|
| Given the age of the universe, and how far we have come in
| such a short time, to me the above seems a likely resolution
| to the paradox.
|
| With slight modification, it also explain various unexplained
| "contacts".
|
| Perhaps the "virtual imprisonment period" does not ideally
| have a definitive binary on/off, instead is progressive in a
| reversible way (hence the lack of believability and proof for
| many "encounters"). Such non-invasive contact events may
| serve as research/assessment, and non-polluting "helping
| hands" for those who may be watching and waiting.
|
| It would certainly appear we are very near (relatively
| speaking), to the point mastery of the physical world, making
| us likely virtual imprisonment and observation targets.
|
| Whether we can do the peace and sustainability bit remains to
| be seen.
| pndy wrote:
| > that means it will be all ours to play with
|
| That also means we need to survive here on Earth, and perhaps
| change as a species in various aspects in order to even make a
| small step of becoming an interplanetary and then, in long the
| run maybe even interstellar species.
| podiki wrote:
| The speed of light (or compensated with very long travel time)
| is limiting, though. Much less volume within reasonable, for
| your definition of reasonable, reach both for ourselves and
| others. The universe, to put it mildly, is ginormous.
| jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote:
| > The speed of light (or compensated with very long travel
| time) is limiting
|
| It's only limiting if you're trying to reach C when
| traversing the spacetime. But if you're bending spacetime
| instead, there's no such limitation!
| podiki wrote:
| Certainly there may be loopholes ;-) Anything I've seen
| with things like wormholes would require massive amounts of
| energy and/or exotic matter, as well as difficulties in
| things like stability and actually traversing with non-
| negligible mass. No free lunches!
| taurath wrote:
| The speed of light is an insurmountable barrier to us now and
| as far out as we can see, but we can't really see that far
| out :p
| kruasan wrote:
| This is true, we can travel only up to 8.2 billion light
| years (radius of the affectable universe/2) which is the
| largest completely causally connected region, in the sense
| that every point can observe and reach every other. 8.2
| billion light years is the furthest distance that we could
| reach and then return from at the speed of light. And it is
| much smaller than the radius of the observable universe (46.4
| billion light years)
| Cookingboy wrote:
| On one hand I see where you are coming from, but on the other
| hand I really, _really_ want to witness First Contact and the
| subsequent reaction from the world.
|
| It will be the single most monumental moment in human history.
| nly wrote:
| It could also be our last moment.
| irrational wrote:
| I doubt it. Based on the past year, many/most people would
| think it is fake news or some conspiracy to control them that
| they are too smart to fall for.
|
| For others, they've seen so many aliens in video games, TV
| shows, movies, etc. that they will be blase about it and
| complain that the aliens in video game X looked more
| realistic than the real thing.
|
| Others will be interested for a day or two, then will move
| onto the next new thing on the news cycle.
|
| Others will be so self absorbed by social media that they
| will only care if they can use footage to make TikTok memes.
|
| Others will be know it all's that will want to point out to
| everyone that they always said there was extra terrestrial
| life and everyone should acknowledge how smart they are.
|
| Others will see this as a great opportunity to write a book
| in the hopes of striking it rich.
|
| Others are just trying to scrape by and are too worn down,
| tired, depressed, etc. to pay any attention.
|
| Many people live subsistent lifestyles and don't have access
| to news feed to even know it happened.
|
| I would expect exceedingly few to really give this sort of
| event the acknowledgement it deserves.
| hulitu wrote:
| We will all be monuments afterwards.
| hulitu wrote:
| "And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
| 'Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth! "
|
| Monthy Python
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| I've prefer this as well. If humans do ever cross the vastness
| of space to other solar systems, the travelers would eventually
| become a separate species anyway - wouldn't they? It would be a
| split, unless there is regular travel between star systems, but
| I can't see that happening without Star Trek like technology.
| rriepe wrote:
| They totally would. And anyone we meet will probably already
| be related to us, if life is panspermic.
| natch wrote:
| Enjoy it while it lasts...
| podiki wrote:
| Link to actual paper (preprint, that is):
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.14148
| koheripbal wrote:
| fyi, Preliminary result is that they didn't find anything.
|
| It's funny how movies always show a telescope operator falling
| asleep listening to deep space as if that's what he does every
| day and every night....
|
| ... and then the reality of these papers showing that SETI does
| very brief checks for a handful of hours (11hrs in this case)
| maybe once per year, and only looking in one direction, and
| only at a narrow frequency band.
| aksss wrote:
| I think that trope is often of "the earnest researcher" who
| has so much hope and faith that he/she does it in their spare
| time. So rather than a job to listen, it's their hobby to
| listen.
|
| I love it, because the silly fantastic odds of the _system_
| finding anything, much less of that thing showing up while a
| person happens to have the headphones on _and_ not be
| distracted, are just Indiana Jones level entertaining to me.
| I'll buy in every time. :D
| podiki wrote:
| These days I imagine it would be getting an email alert
| from the analysis system. Or maybe more realistically the
| unveil of the true result after doing blind analysis on
| both junk and real data, not sure what is what (as is
| becoming common in some areas of physics, to help prevent
| biases seeping in). Still some drama to be had :-)
| fogihujy wrote:
| How far away would one have to be before human radio signals
| would simply blend in with the background noise?
| topspin wrote:
| This[1] page claims that cold war military radar systems would
| be prominent for "hundreds" of light years, as opposed to
| earlier, lower power signals. Since these have only been
| running for approximately 60 years the diameter of the sphere
| in which these signals exist is only about 0.1% of our galaxy.
| So the real limit for the foreseeable future is the speed of
| light.
|
| [1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/how-far-from-earth-
| could-...
| clankyclanker wrote:
| Those Cold War systems have since been replaced with much
| more efficient systems that don't just spew signals into
| space, so there's only a ten or twenty year window during
| which another civilization could have looked to see those
| signals. Since then, we've become much quieter because
| signals that can be detected hundreds of light years away are
| expensive and not necessary for a specie that lives within an
| 8 minute light radius.
| fogihujy wrote:
| Right, so if another species does what we do, then we'd be
| lucky if we were inside the 200 ly radius of them at a time
| where they sent enough signals for us to notice?
| pixelpoet wrote:
| I've never understood the position that the greatest scientific
| question is whether or not we're alone in the universe. Given the
| number of stars out there, it seems wildly improbable that we are
| alone, and if we're not then it's anyway going to be basically
| impossible to communicate with them due to speed of light
| limitations.
|
| P ?= NP is IMO way more significant for a start, to say nothing
| of questions about consciousness, fusion energy, ways to explore
| and colonise space, ...
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Given that we haven't even done a thorough search of a single
| planet in our own solar system yet(we're only beginning to
| scratch the surface on Mars), these sort of articles should be
| taken with a giant grain of salt. They failed to detect
| megastructures and radio waves on certain frequencies. Given
| these metrics life on earth would have been entirely undetected
| until the last ~100 years despite life having existed here for
| billions of years. What if aquatic life is the norm in the
| universe, and we are outliers? Perhaps there are millions of
| super-intelligent whale-like species out there. Our current
| search methods would detect nothing.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| I'm afraid that whales are precisely as smart as they need to
| be to strain krill, navigate, and reproduce.
| Razengan wrote:
| What about humans? What ultimately have we achieved beyond
| reproducing?
| Razengan wrote:
| No really, what have we done that will outlast us or
| matters to anyone but us? (on geological scales let alone
| cosmic)
| RalfWausE wrote:
| We are f...ing good at killing ;-)
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| How smart could whales become if they had a billion more
| years to evolve without having their environment destroyed
| by humans or some other "smart" species?
| vardump wrote:
| Not smarter at all, if there's no evolutionary pressure
| for it.
|
| On the contrary, bigger brains can be a hindrance,
| consuming energy for no reproductive benefit.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| There are really really good reasons why our status in the
| universe matters so much and they all have to do with what is
| next for us as a species.
|
| In part this has to do with the Fermi Paradox. Are we alone
| because we're in a protected garden? Alone because the half-
| life of civilizations is very low? Alone because there is a
| firewall that takes out all civilizations at a particular level
| of development (like say climate change)? Maybe if we learn
| about the firewall we can do something about it? The list of
| answers to the Fermi Paradox is immense and many of those
| answers could make a concrete difference to us.
|
| Who is to say that we can't communicate? Some theories of
| physics might allow for wormholes or something like that (this
| is not likely at all due to time travel paradoxes, but who
| knows).
|
| Even just learning about another civilization and measuring the
| rough properties of the atmosphere of their planet could be a
| revolution. If we discover that the atmosphere is totally
| unlike what we have, that a totally new kind of life is
| possible, we could open up entire new fields of science.
|
| The most obvious way to communicate is to put out basic facts
| about the universe, like say the energy states of your favorite
| atoms or something like that. What if their version of the
| basic facts is thousands of years ahead of ours? Physics works
| off of very little evidence, a small nudge toward the right
| answer is all that it would take to change everything.
|
| Even if we can't communicate in a lifetime or two, maybe we can
| communicate over the span of 200 years. Imagine what could be
| learned through an exchange with a culture that has followed a
| totally technological and scientific arc. We could be in a
| local minima missing really important things about the
| universe.
|
| We're in a pretty crappy place when it comes to AI. We know how
| to do some things, but the overall picture of figuring out what
| intelligence is, we're in the dark about that. We don't even
| know how to ask the right questions. Access to a totally
| different intelligence would change that completely.
|
| I could go on from fields like linguistics, to psychology,
| everything that communicating with an alien species touches
| upon would be revolutionized. Imagine how chemistry would
| change if we knew for sure that ammonia-based life was
| possible? We would invest massive sums and figure it all out,
| and all it would take is a bit of knowledge about the gross
| statistics of their atmosphere.
|
| And we're just scratching the surface.
| ironmagma wrote:
| Most of that can be said about whales, but we still don't see
| many whales-motivated scientific research being carried out
| even if there's a possibility we could communicate. Who's to
| say aliens would be any different?
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| I'm not sure what to say to this. Whales are obviously not
| intelligent in the way humans are? They have no technology,
| no language, and don't engage in any scientific inquiries.
| So.. no. None of this can be said about whales.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Whales have at least a rudimentary form of language.
| There is evidence for syntactic structure, even if the
| information density is an order of magnitude (or more)
| less dense than human speech.
|
| Whales also teach each other new hunting techniques and
| have other complicated social behaviors.
|
| Without a better understanding of whale language and
| cognition, I don't think you can safely say they don't
| engage in a form of scientific inquiry.
| ironmagma wrote:
| Right, so they are intelligent in a different way, which
| I would argue is going to be no different with the aliens
| we discover. Their language will be intractable. As for
| scientific inquiries, that's kind of unknowable and
| dubious considering that whales can get quite inventive
| with their hunting techniques, involving experimentation
| and cunning in a way that's pretty similar to the
| scientific method of inquiry with hypothesis testing.
| Technology, I will grant that's an exception.
| adrianN wrote:
| Whales have language. Most animals have some forms of
| language, even plants communicate with each other. Whales
| have a pretty complex one.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Whale share a significant part of their developmental
| history, genetics and brain chemistry with us humans. They
| don't really qualify as alien in any of the interesting
| ways that were mentioned.
| ironmagma wrote:
| They're biologically related to us, and yet we still
| can't communicate with them. That should show how
| motivated or able we are to figure out language with
| other species.
| sidlls wrote:
| So? Whales are (relative to humans) quite dumb.
| Communicating with an intelligent alien species isn't the
| same--in any way.
| ironmagma wrote:
| That's going to need a citation, because it's not what a
| lot of researchers say.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16270270
|
| [2] https://www.orcanation.org/2019/10/10/the-social-
| intelligenc...
| sidlls wrote:
| It's a bit of a stretch to go from basic imitation of
| simple words to intelligence on par with homo sapiens.
| ironmagma wrote:
| It's not basic imitation if they can communicate using
| the language of another species [1] nor is it that big of
| a stretch when they have larger brains than us.
|
| [1] https://www.zmescience.com/science/biology/killer-
| whale-dolp...
| newsbinator wrote:
| Several additional possibilities for why we might be alone:
|
| * alone because there was no _need_ to simulate a second
| intelligent species
|
| * alone because there was no _desire_ to simulate a second
| intelligent species
|
| * alone because there were not enough resources to simulate a
| second intelligent species
| gspr wrote:
| > I've never understood the position that the greatest
| scientific question is whether or not we're alone in the
| universe.
|
| FWIW, the actual paper does not put it like that. It instead
| calls it "one of the most profound and fundamental questions
| posed to science". That seems reasonable.
|
| > Given the number of stars out there, it seems wildly
| improbable that we are alone, and if we're not then it's anyway
| going to be basically impossible to communicate with them due
| to speed of light limitations.
|
| Don't you find it fascinating that we think it's wildly
| improbable that we are alone, yet have not been able to find
| other life? I certainly do.
|
| Ignoring the _huge_ philosophical implications intelligent life
| elsewhere would have, it would also provide some very useful
| bounds on a bunch of the quantities involved in e.g. Drake 's
| estimate. It would also offer some clues as to whether or not a
| great filter is likely, and wheter or not it lies ahead of us
| or behind us. Surely massively important!
|
| > P ?= NP is IMO way more significant for a start
|
| Important, yes, but not a scientific question (it is a
| mathematical one).
|
| > to say nothing of questions about consciousness, fusion
| energy, ways to explore and colonise space, ...
|
| A complete understanding of consciousness would also be
| monumentally important, I agree. But fusion and space
| exploration? Great, but surely "just" (huge and important)
| technological advances, rather than fundamental scientific
| questions?
| teachingassist wrote:
| > Don't you find it fascinating that we think it's wildly
| improbable that we are alone, yet have not been able to find
| other life? I certainly do.
|
| Given that we can scarcely communicate with a chimpanzee, our
| nearest living relative, nor fully comprehend how any other
| species on Earth communicates (those which evolved under the
| same conditions that we did), I find it totally unsurprising
| that we're unable to communicate with aliens.
| aksss wrote:
| Humans have determined that chimpanzees and other species
| _do_ communicate, and in many cases _how_ they communicate,
| even if those who study such things don 't understand the
| communications in anything but the broadest sense. Being
| able to communicate _with_ aliens isn 't really what we're
| asking for, but merely detecting that communications are
| happening at all.
| teachingassist wrote:
| Right!
|
| That's as much as we can manage with chimpanzees - our
| immediate relatives, who we have physical contact with.
|
| Humans scarcely care how other earth-bound species
| communicate enough to identify it as communication - how
| do insects and plants and fungi communicate? What
| information is whale song (mammal) transmitting? Is the
| 52 Hz whale communicating, or not?
|
| Alien communication will look far more different even
| than that.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Don't you find it fascinating that we think it's wildly
| improbable that we are alone, yet have not been able to find
| other life?"_
|
| We haven't been looking for very long, and out searches have
| been very very limited.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| "the greatest scientific question" is a bit pointless
| distinction, but it is certainly an interesting question.
|
| And putting some resources into that research is a good idea,
| even just for what we learned about our own planet thanks to
| having a different context.
|
| Or having an interesting question for people to become
| interested in adjacent research at least.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| >I've never understood the position that the greatest
| scientific question is whether or not we're alone in the
| universe.
|
| That is an odd thing. The one that I'm curious about is the
| drum-banging for spotting (probably highly simple) lifeforms on
| places like Mars. Given the ability of rocks to hop planets,
| it's a totally reasonable thing to find I think as you don't
| even need from-scratch bootstrapping.
|
| I expect it's partly a product of PR departments as you have to
| keep the public engaged, not unlike the occasional production
| of aesthetically pleasing images.
|
| It seems to me that it's enough to push for off-planet
| permanent human settlement. Heck, given the long-term
| possibilities of AI and von Neumann probes, distance isn't even
| an unassailable problem, you just have to change your time
| horizons.
| bnegreve wrote:
| > Given the number of stars out there, it seems wildly
| improbable that we are alone
|
| This tells you nothing unless you also know the probability of
| (intelligent) life emerging on a planet. As far as we can tell
| it could be very low, and earth could very well be a unique
| combination of factors that allows it. Remember, there are many
| more possible deck of 52 cards than there are planets in the
| universe.
| DavidSJ wrote:
| There's also the possibility that the existence of one
| civilization in a cosmic neighborhood tends to preclude the
| emergence of other civilizations in that same neighborhood,
| due to the tendency of civilizations to rapidly expand and
| take resources that might have been used by others, before
| those others even get a chance to emerge.
|
| In that case we can't treat our existence as independent of
| the existence of other nearby civilizations.
| hokumguru wrote:
| What makes you think other civilizations would be focused
| on rapid expansion like humanity?
| sidlls wrote:
| What evidence have we that they would not? Life on earth
| certainly expands as rapidly as the environment can
| support, or even faster than it can, in many cases. Also
| "rapid" is a relative term, right? If we humans start
| expanding to other planets even within 10,000 years that
| would be quite rapid relative to the length of time it
| took for us to evolve.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| You don't have to assume that they all do. You can assume
| that .1% of them do, and it works out precisely the same.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| Worse. von Neumann probes show that none of them can be
| expansionist, otherwise the galaxy would have been
| overrun in half a million years.
|
| So then.. maybe only the civilizations that aren't
| expansionist survive? Or everyone changes their mind and
| no one is expansionist by the time they get the right
| tech? Or maybe it's physically impossible to build von
| Neumann probes for some reason we don't yet understand?
| Or who knows what else. In any case, it's got to be zero
| in the history of our galaxy.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| I mean, let's try to build a von Neumann probe. How? I
| don't believe that our knowledge will continue to
| increase exponentially. Hard AI may never be achievable
| (although von Neumann probes don't necessarily need it).
| In order to build a von Neumann probe, once you need the
| very first microchip or anything resembling one, you're
| screwed. Will the von Neumann probes also be able to
| build an entire fabrication lab?
| pharke wrote:
| There could be good reasons we wouldn't see von Neumann
| probes. They could be extremely dangerous to deploy
| similar to the arguments that are currently being made
| against autonomous weapons systems. That might result in
| them having many built in limitations such as needing to
| phone back periodically or being saddled with multiple
| redundant systems or safeguards that would prevent them
| from mutating into something that could harm the
| originating civilization.
|
| Also don't forget that the purpose of the probes is
| exploration and/or resource harvesting. For exploration
| you only need a handful of probes at each star system and
| they may depart after completing their survey which would
| result in a very small footprint. For resource extraction
| you need some means of transporting the resources back to
| where they will be used in a timely manner which puts
| limits on the effective distance at which they can
| operate.
|
| A civilization may even decide that it's pointless to
| explore the entire galaxy this way since it would take
| millions of years to gather and transmit the information,
| what government do you know of that's capable of planning
| over that kind of timescale?
| DavidSJ wrote:
| I'm only suggesting a possibility, not a certainty.
|
| That said, it only takes a tiny fraction of their
| civilization to do it, for it to happen.
| addicted wrote:
| But if we had precluded the emergence of other
| civilizations in our neighborhood, wouldn't we have known
| about it when we were taking resources away from those
| other living creatures? Based on that theory, a
| prerequisite to preventing the arising of other
| civilizations is the knowledge of the existence of other
| living beings at the very least.
| blueblisters wrote:
| I think the argument is that if there's an advanced
| enough civilisation in our neighbourhood, it would have
| precluded us from evolving.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| The other end of the argument is also interesting. It is
| possible that this has already happened before the age of
| _Homo Sapiens_ , and we lack the one crucial thing that
| makes fusion power possible, say, deuterium oxide (heavy
| water) in sufficient quantities. It's a 'you don't know
| what you don't know' situation -- we could be living on a
| stellar neighbourhood that is already tapped out of that
| crucial resource, forever doomed to travel the slow way,
| never able to go more than knee deep into the vast ocean
| beside us.
| DavidSJ wrote:
| No, for two reasons:
|
| 1) The idea is that we _will_ do it, not that we have
| done it already. (How does something we _will_ do in the
| future affect what we see today? It doesn 't, at least
| not causally. It's just that some civilization had to be
| first in the neighboorhod, and that civilization will be
| the one to preempt the others, at least according to this
| model. So it's more of a probabilistic conditioning
| effect than a causal effect: _conditional_ on existing,
| that means no one preempted us, which means we 're the
| first, which means we'll preempt everyone else.)
|
| 2) The preemption happens well before the other
| civilizations come into existence. For example, we might
| deplete their stars of energy so that evolution doesn't
| happen at all on their planet.
| tzs wrote:
| Are you assuming FTL travel?
|
| If a civilization doesn't have FTL then expansion beyond
| their solar system seems unlikely. Yes, it is still
| possible with sub-light travel, but then you run into the
| problem of motivation.
|
| When limited to sub-light speed trade between colonies and
| the home system is so slow that you probably can't usefully
| import resources from the colony systems.
|
| When you are stuck with sub-light, colonizing another
| system (unless perhaps you are in a place with a lot of
| stars close together) is more accurately described as
| spending a whole lot of effort to establish another system
| that then won't really have much interaction with or effect
| on your system.
|
| Even the old classic of kicking out your undesirables who
| then go on to start a new civilization doesn't really work,
| because it is so expensive. If you dislike them so much
| that exile is the only answer and you don't have someplace
| in your system to exile them to you are far more likely to
| just kill them.
| deeviant wrote:
| > If a civilization doesn't have FTL then expansion
| beyond their solar system seems unlikely. Yes, it is
| still possible with sub-light travel, but then you run
| into the problem of motivation.
|
| > When limited to sub-light speed trade between colonies
| and the home system is so slow that you probably can't
| usefully import resources from the colony systems.
|
| I mean this seems to disregard our entire history as a
| species. There have always been "others" within a
| population that seek, above anything else, to find a new
| place to go in order to live life they way they want to.
|
| We are also moving into an age where data and knowledge
| are raising to supreme importance. Both of these things
| _can_ be transported at the speed of light, so a multi-
| solar system civilization that is able to increase is
| total resources available to acquire new information and
| knowledge will be at an advantage. Then, of course, there
| is the desire to preserve the human species as a whole by
| "spreading our seeds" so to speak.
| goatlover wrote:
| > I mean this seems to disregard our entire history as a
| species. There have always been "others" within a
| population that seek, above anything else, to find a new
| place to go in order to live life they way they want to.
|
| If the energy and time requirements are great enough,
| space between solar systems will work as the same sort of
| barrier space does for the rest of life on Earth.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| This assumes that the expanding intelligence isn't
| machine-based.
| vardump wrote:
| "There's also the possibility that the existence of one
| civilization in a cosmic neighborhood tends to preclude the
| emergence of other civilizations in that same neighborhood"
|
| Interesting. That's a point I haven't heard before. Or
| perhaps it's my lucky 10,000 day. :-)
|
| Although our path through the galaxy is somewhat unique.
| Stars don't really move in unison in the greater
| timescales, but more like slip past each other. Assuming
| Sol was born as a binary star, its sibling could be other
| side of the galaxy by now.
|
| Another thought is that if WE do expand to the stars, how
| long until our distant ancestors aren't really the same
| civilization anymore, but something completely alien to
| each other? Evolution could take some rather unexpected
| steps in the long run.
| DavidSJ wrote:
| The concept of "cosmic neighborhood" is deliberately left
| a bit vague in my description, but it definitely doesn't
| mean the stars that were near the sun when the sun was
| born.
|
| Rather, it refers to those stars which are within reach
| of us, now, in a timescale that is short relative to the
| typical interval between births of civilizations that
| distance apart. That could be anything from a corner of a
| galaxy to a galactic supercluster, depending on the speed
| with which civilizations can expand and the frequency
| with which new ones arise in the universe.
|
| Note that if civilizations expand at sufficiently close
| to the speed of light, then there is only a tiny window
| of time between when their light arrives and when their
| colony ships do. So under this model, it is quite
| unlikely that a new civilization waking up for the first
| time would look around and see anyone. Most likely,
| either the light from those other civilizations hasn't
| yet gotten here, in which case we see nothing, or their
| colony ships have already gotten here, in which case we
| wouldn't be born in the first place.
| jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote:
| > This tells you nothing unless you also know the probability
| of (intelligent) life emerging on a planet
|
| Life is not only probable, it's inevitable. Given the proper
| conditions, it's just a matter of time. And the same happens
| with intelligent life, it just needs more time without being
| hit by a meteor.
| goatlover wrote:
| Where do you get that intelligent life is inevitable from a
| sample size of one?
| splistud wrote:
| Because we're not working from a sample size of one. But
| if we were, then what other possible conclusion would
| there be?
| goatlover wrote:
| We are, since Earth has the only life known in the
| universe to date. The other possible conclusions are any
| probability < 1, which means not inevitable.
| jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote:
| Life is inevitable + Evolution is a universal law =
| Intelligent life is inevitable
|
| Given the proper conditions, that is. A planet that is
| just a ball of magma won't see life (as we know it) until
| it cools down.
| crazypython wrote:
| A bunch of self-replicating patterns in a physics simulation
| believe other self-replicating patterns must exist elsewhere.
| randerson wrote:
| Isn't the universe potentially infinite?
| vardump wrote:
| We don't really know. It might be.
|
| But the region we can _observe_ is definitely finite.
|
| What we can causally affect (light cone) is a subset of
| that.
|
| And where we can travel given the Ultimate Technology is a
| small subset of the previous.
| jack-bodine wrote:
| I think the question isn't whether or not we are alone, but why
| don't we know the answer. As you said, it's 'wildly improbable
| that we are alone.' So the great question is, why is the
| universe so quiet?
| roywiggins wrote:
| To quote Fermi, "Where is everybody?"
| splistud wrote:
| Not as frequently asked, "when was everybody?"
| jandrese wrote:
| Fermi was operating under the assumption that travel
| between solar systems would not only be possible, but it
| would be desirable. The answer to the Fermi paradox might
| be as simple as "solar systems are too far apart".
| goatlover wrote:
| That's Frank Drake's answer to the Fermi Paradox. He
| doesn't think it is a paradox, because he thinks it's
| just a matter of time before SETI makes a detection. It's
| just that the search needs to be thorough enough since
| the aliens stick to their solar systems.
|
| Jill Tartar has talked about how we would need to think
| about investing in a powerful radio beacon for 60,000
| years if we wanted other aliens to know about us. That
| gives one an ideal of the scale of time and distance SETI
| is dealing with, assuming their assumptions are more
| realistic than Fermi's was.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| Or we're in a simulation, and everything we perceive as
| "out there in the expanse of space" is just fake data
| like a background on a website...from a processing
| standpoint it'd be much easier to feed/render certain
| views only under observation, otherwise just nothing
| exists there...it's save resources for a simulation from
| a computing standpoint...
|
| Like in a video game where new areas are rendered as you
| discover them....
| koheripbal wrote:
| A counter-question might be : What makes you think they want
| to talk to US?
| sktrdie wrote:
| To me a plausibile answer is that we can at least observe
| specific dynamics within our own life based world where we keep
| ants (based on dna like us) in a cage and they're totally unaware
| they even are in a cage. For them that's their universe. They go
| along and discover new things thinking in their own way why no
| other life form has contacted them. Even though we literally lift
| them using our hands. They simply think that's a natural
| phenomenon.
|
| To me it seems plausibile that other life forms that are probably
| not even based on dna are very likely to be imperceptible to us,
| the same way we are to ants.
|
| Thus I'd like to think the universe is probably our cage and
| we'll never possess the mental capacity to distinguish alien
| beings from actual natural phenomena.
| scomelirag wrote:
| If anyone finds this perspective intriguing, you may be
| interested in the novel "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris
| Strugatsky.
|
| In the story, a character proposes that humans are effectively
| like frightened forest critters with no ability to understand
| the nature of the seemingly magical rubbish that
| extraterrestrial picnickers could have left behind after a
| brief stop on Earth.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic#Plot_introduct...
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| Even worse than that, the ants know nothing about the ocean and
| fish nor space and the moon. Those things are not even near
| their scope, even if they are aware of us. What about math? And
| time (time keeping and calendars, tenses)? What about music and
| art? The ants are simply not able to comprehend any of it.
|
| So if we are like ants in the universe, then the reality we are
| in is probably insanely complex - we are just interacting with
| the little slice of it we can interpret, just like the ants.
| squarefoot wrote:
| In the old days of USENET there was this signature saying
| something like "The proof that there is intelligent life
| elsewhere in the Universe is that they didn't attempt to contact
| us".
| rbanffy wrote:
| Not only that, but they seem to be taking extra precautions to
| prevent detection.
| bluGill wrote:
| They are probably moving to harder to detect high frequency,
| low power, encrypted transmissions just like earth, for the
| same reasons. There is likely only a short window when they
| are detectable.
| ddalex wrote:
| See the Three Body Problem
| imglorp wrote:
| Or maybe they don't fill their atmosphere with pollution for
| us to detect and have no need to spray E&M into space.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Occam's Razor says that we are alone in the universe.
|
| (Feel free to downvote me, flag, etc., for speaking heresy.)
| thamer wrote:
| In the tiny bubble of radius ~130 light-years that we've
| managed to send radio waves to, maybe. The radius of the
| observable universe is about 46.5 billion light-years, who
| knows what else is in there. The ratio between these two
| numbers is about 1 in 358 million.
|
| Saying that we're alone because we haven't heard back after
| emitting radio waves for only 130 years is like being at a
| point in space, looking half an inch around us (1.3 cm) in
| all directions and declaring that Occam's Razor says there's
| probably nothing within a radius of 2,900 miles (4,650 km).
|
| Does that seem reasonable? :-)
| tantalor wrote:
| I dunno, "we are special and unique" doesn't sound like the
| simplest possible explanation.
| bhelkey wrote:
| We are alone doesn't necessarily imply that we are special,
| we could be the first.
| tantalor wrote:
| Being first is special. Only one can be first.
| nr2x wrote:
| Fermi would like a word.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| Currently alone in time and distance, most likely.
|
| Uniquely sentient across time and distance, impossible.
| aksss wrote:
| Adding infinite resources enables absolutism.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Occam's Razor also says all planets orbit the earth because
| we are God's finest creation and what other way would it be?
| lebuffon wrote:
| I don't know if this is an original thought but it occurred to me
| that we might be in a cosmic proportioned "terrarium".
|
| What better way to keep an intelligent species from escaping than
| limiting the velocity of information transfer and putting
| everything interesting at distances that are large multiples of
| the maximum velocity.
|
| In other words, maybe the simulation architect doesn't want us to
| escape and find (contaminate) the other experiments? :)
| deeviant wrote:
| It's a really common theme actually, almost a trope in sci fi.
| Jiocus wrote:
| That's some serious _security by isolation_ , not even Qubes OS
| comes close.
|
| In time, as the expansion of the universe accelerates fast
| enough, not even light will keep up to get across.
|
| Perfect total airgap.
| hoseja wrote:
| Perception of time is relative. Not the universe's fault we
| live like mayflies.
| franek wrote:
| This is pretty similar to what is described in Stanislaw Lem's
| "The New Cosmogony" (a work of fiction, included in the book "A
| Perfect Vacuum"). Only there the terrarium-like isolation of
| intelligent species is a self-imposed restriction: The earliest
| civilisations of the cosmos engineered the laws of physics that
| way.
| [deleted]
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| Totally original and excellent thought but just have to throw
| it out there... Three Body Problem... Liu Cixin is trying to
| tell us something...
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| The fact that we exist as carbon based life forms makes it
| somewhat likely other life forms exist. We're made of the most
| common elements, whose signatures we observe in other stars.
| But in order to exist, we needed time for first and second
| generation stars to create heavier elements. So, space is only
| part of the limitation, time may be the more key reason we
| don't hear alien contact.
| nly wrote:
| Seems a little inconvenient for the architect to have to
| account for all the laws of physics and allocate millions of
| cubic light years of space just for our tiny rock when they
| could just squish those of us that escape, or at least discover
| the true nature of our environment, like we would ants on a
| kitchen work top.
| w0de0 wrote:
| Ants don't have a pernicious ability to build progressively
| better technology in an attempt to escape the kitchen work
| top and conquer the refrigerator. Or, rather, they do, in the
| sense that they are life and life has this tendency, at least
| in the one case study we have access to.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I don't know, I like to gently brush them into a dustpan and
| dump them back into their anthill.
|
| I can't explain why, but ants are some of my favourite
| animals.
| aksss wrote:
| What do you think happens to those ants, sir? Coming back
| with tales of being brought up in a flash of light, anally
| probed, seeing mosquitoes spontaneously exploded, giant
| ships transporting them to earth.. socially ostracized, is
| what. Made fun of on the front page of Ant Times.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Isn't it what we would do as humans if we were designing
| this?
|
| I don't want to have to constantly monitor an experiment to
| kill any stragglers.
|
| Preventing the stragglers from ever getting to anything
| interesting is easier if you do it at the beginning, then you
| free up the time you would have been monitoring them.
|
| I realize all these concepts "easier" / "time" /
| "convenience" etc. don't apply in this hypothetical, but it's
| still fun to think about
| simonh wrote:
| What better way to study an intelligent species behaviour that
| to put it in a dense rich easily traversed environment it could
| spread through and populate, generating lots of data.
| colordrops wrote:
| We are the control group
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Result: nothing found yet
| paulpauper wrote:
| nothing will ever be found. the experiment was flawed/doomed to
| begin with due to the huge galactic distances involved.
| satellite data has ruled out any habitable planets in a close
| enough radius to ever be detectable by seti even if they did
| have intelligent life
| deeviant wrote:
| > satellite data has ruled out any habitable planets in a
| close enough radius to ever be detectable by seti even if
| they did have intelligent life
|
| Satellite data? What Satellite data? What do you define as
| "close enough radius"? Why?
| ripper1138 wrote:
| Not OP, but "close enough radius" alludes to the fact that
| earths current radio output would only be detectable in a
| radius some hundreds of light years away (signal would
| become too weak past that). And I'm pretty sure our radio
| signal output is now decreasing in energy. So it becomes
| increasingly less likely with distance that a radio source
| would exist that we could currently detect. But I guess
| this study states that it could detect a theoretical
| "beacon" that is intentionally incredibly powerful.
| m4rtink wrote:
| As if planets were still a necessity for advanced enough
| civilization once they get their megascale engineering going
| to fix all their resource and energy problems.
|
| IMHO that's how we will detect the aliens, by spotting one of
| their megastructures or their side effects (waste heat,
| gravitational effects, light blocking, stray directional coms
| traffic, etc.), not by getting any targeted message handed to
| us on a platter.
|
| Could be we are seeing some of that now, thinking it's a some
| kind of a weird but natural phenomenon.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| How did satellite data rule that out? We've seen a variety of
| earth-like exoplanets, and we're sending up satellites to
| study their atmospheres. Seems to me like they haven't ruled
| it out, why else send up the James webb?
| irrational wrote:
| Isn't the mission of the James Webb to study the earliest
| galaxies in the universe? I've never heard of it being used
| for SETI work.
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