[HN Gopher] Migrating extraterrestrial civilizations and interst...
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Migrating extraterrestrial civilizations and interstellar
colonization
Author : programd
Score : 50 points
Date : 2022-05-27 14:14 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cambridge.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cambridge.org)
| cletus wrote:
| This is something I've thought about on and off for awhile.
|
| For completeness, I believe that the speed of light is a hard
| limit (and no I don't believe in any end-runs around this like
| warp drives, folding space or wormholes). Secondly, I accept the
| laws of thermodynamic.
|
| Given this traveling between stars takes an incredibly long time.
| At a high percentage of c you get time dilation but that's not
| actually a practical travel speed for a few reasons:
|
| 1. The energy cost of accelerating to 0.99c and decelerating at
| the other end is extraordinarily high;
|
| 2. If you even can get to that speed, small objects in the
| interstellar medium become life threatening; and
|
| 3. Beyond about 0.86c gas in the interstellar medium actually
| creates drag making acceleration even harder.
|
| Given the reaction mass problem, it creates a big question of how
| you'd actually travel between stars. The more you carry the more
| energy you need to accelerate and decelerate it. It's likely
| you'd need fusion at a minimum and possibly some far-future tech
| (eg antimatter, black holes).
|
| So what do you do? Well, there are rogue objects not bound to any
| solar systems. We've seen some of these. We can't easily detect
| them so can only speculate on how many there are but it's likely
| to be a fairly large number.
|
| So what if you opportunistically wait for one of these objects to
| travel through the Solar System and then hitch a ride? Imagine a
| planetoid 100 miles in diameter. That's likely all the resources
| you'd need. It then becomes less of an issue that it might not
| reach another star for 100,000+ years because your attitude is
| that this is a new home.
|
| Obviously you still have to match velocities with this object but
| that's vastly easier to do with a bunch of people and equipment
| than it is with those same things plus all the same materials
| that are already traveling at intersellar speeds.
| pvg wrote:
| If you've solved the energy problem of accelerating most of a
| human colony and its gear to interstellar object speeds, do you
| really get much from trying to hitch a ride on such an object?
| You've also presumably solved energy storage so the time spent
| waiting for a suitable object you might as well spend on
| storing energy to accelerate an object at hand.
| cletus wrote:
| So for a colony to last centuries in interstellar space with
| little to no prospect of resupply of any kind, you have to
| build in an awful lot of redundancy. You also need to cater
| for growth. You need a lot of infrastructure for long term
| care (eg hospitals). What you're building is living quarters
| for a thousand years over multiple generations.
|
| But for a rogue planet you need far less. Consider the Moon.
| It has lava tubes. You can seal these, fill them with air and
| live in them. You don't need to accelerate that living space.
| Sure you still need to bring some things but it's far, far
| less.
|
| What's more, if you have several such settlements in
| different lava tubes you have automatic redundancy. A single
| catastrophe won't snuff out the entire colony.
|
| So for a true interstellar colony you really have to build a
| fleet because a single colony is too big of a failure mode.
| pvg wrote:
| Yeah my point is that with the energy tech implied, you
| might just be able to take a moon or the Moon instead.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31534464
| q1w2 wrote:
| A colony of fleshy biological creatures in an unsuspended
| form?
|
| This seems silly. Even if intelligence remains biological
| (which I find exceedingly unlikely), then why wouldn't you
| just freeze them? That's a lot easier than moving a PLANET.
|
| FYI - rodents can be frozen and revived. There's no
| fundamental reason you cannot freeze and thaw a human.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Good point. The only advantage that occurs to me is that you
| could spend the journey (waves hands) converting the
| interstellar object into reaction mass to enable deceleration
| at the other end. And maybe also for course correction,
| because the object is very pretty unlikely to be going
| anywhere interesting just by chance
| pvg wrote:
| I typed slapdash things into Wolfram Alfa just to get a
| sense of the kinetic energy of something like a 100km metal
| sphere buzzing as at 40 km/s (it's a screaming chonker of
| an overestimate but hey) and got something like a millionth
| of total yearly solar output or 1/5th of lunar kinetic
| energy (orbiting earth). As D. Wooderson famously said,
| we're talkin' some fuckin' muscle, to ride such a thing. If
| you have it, you might even be better off just taking the
| moon instead.
| zikzak wrote:
| You still need to accelerate and decelerate and you need to
| alter the course of this object to match your course. But you
| get all the resources for almost free.
|
| How would this compare to a raft of asteroids you select in
| your home system to have the exact stuff you need and the
| accelerate it? I realize there's differences in mass here but I
| am asking is it material given the scope? Because you are kind
| of guessing what is going on with that rogue planetoid but the
| asteroids you could select at your leisure and also hollow out
| easily while you are in your home system with access to orbital
| factories, etc.
|
| Anyway, fun thought experiment! I totally agree that you would
| have to approach this as if this is your new home and you MIGHT
| get to a planetary system you could also colonize at some
| point. Generations in that idea might seem as foreign as living
| on a colony flotilla.
| cletus wrote:
| Even on the issue of accelerating and decelerating to a
| system you fly through or near, in the case of a colony ship
| you would need to carry that fuel and pay the energy costs
| for housing it, accelerating it and decelerating it.
|
| With a rogue planet you should be able to refuel from that
| rogue body so your fuel payload required is really only to
| get to the rogue planet.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Rant: smart-people daydreaming while bad-people manipulate the
| less fortunate is all I see here.
| Parallax22 wrote:
| How exactly does this research prevent you from fighting
| against bad people?
| causality0 wrote:
| _I propose that extraterrestrial civilizations may use free-
| floating planets as interstellar transportation to reach, explore
| and colonize planetary systems._
|
| Is it just me or is that completely idiotic? It's like building a
| spaceship whose mass is 99.99% inert. _Migration_ is incredibly
| unlikely to be a thing on interstellar scales unless some kind of
| magical transport is discovered. That is because, under almost
| any conceivable schema, it takes less energy and resources to
| sustain an individual for its entire life than it takes to
| transport that individual to another solar system. Advanced
| civilizations may very likely _spread_ to other solar systems,
| but there 's no practical reason to migrate.
| godshatter wrote:
| > That is because, under almost any conceivable schema, it
| takes less energy and resources to sustain an individual for
| its entire life than it takes to transport that individual to
| another solar system.
|
| I've thought about this in relation to colonizing other planets
| in our solar system let alone ones in another one. I'm of the
| opinion that we'd be better off building orbital habitats
| similar to the ISS and then iterating on those until they can
| house more people safely, become more and more self-sufficient,
| and we have the ability to put them into solar orbits and/or
| making them self-propelled. I always assumed we would populate
| earth orbit and bases on the moon first, then expand our
| infrastructure to be able to mine metals from asteroids and
| start building larger space stations outside of earth's orbit.
|
| If Mars were more Earth-like I could see pushing for that first
| but I think we're getting ahead of ourselves. There is solid
| ground we can build on, but the atmosphere is almost non-
| existent, the radiation is incredibly high, water is scarce,
| it's a long way away, and there are two gravity wells to deal
| with. Unless we're talking about terraforming Mars, which is an
| even larger project than colonizing it, we're still talking
| basically people living in the equivalent of tin cans.
|
| In terms of people living off of our home planet it seems to me
| that we could increase the population much faster in space
| stations and lunar bases than we would be able to do so on
| Mars.
|
| If I were a billionaire space tech guy, I'd be working toward
| O'neil cylinders instead of Mars colonization.
|
| I'm not a space scientist or an engineer, though. Or a
| billionaire, sadly enough.
| ben_w wrote:
| > If I were a billionaire space tech guy, I'd be working
| toward O'neil cylinders instead of Mars colonization.
|
| While I agree with you in the longer term, I don't think
| we're even _close_ to ready to build O 'Neill cylinders.
| First thing I'd go for would be a lunar colony. Lots of
| useful resources, relatively short trip home in emergencies,
| a way to get experience working in real vacuum, and non-
| rocket launch systems could already be built there with
| current tech.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > I propose that extraterrestrial civilizations may use free-
| floating planets as interstellar transportation to reach,
| explore and colonize planetary systems
|
| If you can muster enough energy to accelerate a planet, you
| probably don't need a planet for migration in the first place.
|
| Also, the planets would get cold during the journey. Very cold.
| You'd better pack a load of welding kits for the brass monkeys.
| Parallax22 wrote:
| It's just you. There may be various reasons for a civilization
| to leave its planetary system. Its host star may be dying and
| turning into red giant. A nearby star may be close to going
| supernova or hypernova. The civilization may send its own space
| explorers on a passing by free-floating planet. For example, if
| the civilization's scientists determine that there is a
| hypervelocity free-floating planet passing through their Oort
| cloud and heading to a nearby star, they may send their
| machines to ride the free-floating planet to that star to study
| it. Why would not they catch a ride when an opportunity
| presents itself?
| sciatica wrote:
| >> ...but there's no practical reason to migrate.
|
| The Puppeteers took 5 planets with them when they found out
| about the galactic core explosion. It honestly sounds like the
| guy who wrote this just finished Niven's known space series.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Historically, on Earth, populations have migrated when they
| were at risk of being exterminated by an enemy.
|
| Some like to think advanced civilizations would not be so
| brutal, but I'm unconvinced.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > there's no practical reason to migrate
|
| Nearby star going supernova?
| ben_w wrote:
| Not unless you're orbiting the supernova-ing star. It's
| easier to put a big thin metal sheet between your planet and
| the exploding star to block the radiation, than to evacuate a
| billion people.
| [deleted]
| q1w2 wrote:
| It's good to see more recognition that the likely
| extraterrestrial intelligences will be post-biological, but SMETI
| will have a hard time detecting such life because it will likely
| not need to move entire planets.
|
| As has been show in other research, a post-biological species can
| more easily send small replicating probes at high fractions of C
| in order to populate other star systems (and even other galaxies)
| within a small fraction of cosmic time (meaning it would have
| already likely happened in the Milky Way).
|
| Large populations need not be sent. So the question becomes the
| meaning of life. What does a cosmic-spanning-AI want to do with
| its life - and how do we detect that?
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| When considering the spread of post-biological intelligence we
| should also spend some time thinking about what the substrate
| on which it exists would look like. Even just working out a
| likely size for such a substrate would be informative. It might
| turn out that we are looking for relatively small objects in
| orbit around stars. Would we even stand a chance of finding a
| single such object? Could there be one orbiting the Sun? If so,
| there could be an alien civilization with trillions of
| individuals existing in our solar system. We'd have little
| chance of contacting them unless they decided to speak to us or
| we managed to accidentally identify them through a telescope.
| q1w2 wrote:
| There was a research paper that described AI robots the size
| of a toaster traveling from star system to star system (and
| galaxy to galaxy).
|
| It is difficult to imagine how we would detect those - even
| if many orbited our sun. ...but if they exist, they likely
| already detected us and have relayed the fact of our
| existance.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Agreed. It makes sense to me that biological life would be a
| transitory phase and that eventually one might be capable of
| moving beyond those limitations.
|
| At that point, all your civilization needs is lots of energy,
| some raw meterials, and probably a purpose, be it scientific
| discovery, novelty, exploration...etc. That's assuming the
| intelligence is anything like humanity.
| state_less wrote:
| > and probably a purpose
|
| We can't help but dance in time, without reason, without
| rhyme.
| coenhyde wrote:
| Self replicating AI maps closer to a virus than what we
| consider life I think (maybe our definition is wrong). But I
| can't substantially articulate why. No matter how i think
| about it there are exceptions and examples of things we do
| call life that are similar to an AI. So maybe it's just my
| inherit bias because I am biological.
| Parallax22 wrote:
| You are correct. AI needs biological life to produce energy
| and means of replications for it. That's how virus depends
| on cells of living organisms. It is concerning how some
| persons all around the internet keep pushing someone's
| narrative about humankind not having right on independent
| existence and having to be only a supplier of resources for
| the emergence of AI.
| steelframe wrote:
| > What does a cosmic-spanning-AI want to do with its life
|
| For those that have a tendency to exist: Survive and propagate.
|
| If something other than perpetuation of the essential forms and
| patterns that constitute the entity motivates it, then it will
| be more likely to cease to exist. Or be replaced by any
| variation that is more strongly motivated and capable of
| surviving and propagating.
|
| The anthropic principle and all that.
| Parallax22 wrote:
| Small replicating probes at high fraction of C sound good on
| paper. In reality, there is interstellar matter that can
| destroy your high-fraction-C small probes when colliding. Space
| radiation will deteriorate their condition as well. Do yourself
| a favor and educate yourself about space radiation. It's really
| bad in the interstellar space. Even your favorite AI creatures
| need protection from it.
| lumost wrote:
| abiological intelligence has a _much_ larger set of possible
| habitats. Given the vast possibilities of virtual spaces it 's
| somewhat unclear to me why a post-biological intelligence would
| even be interested in spreading across the galaxy beyond a few
| observation outposts.
| jerf wrote:
| "A" post-biological intelligence? Why would there only be
| one?
|
| A post-biological intelligence would want to migrate to
| another system so it can build its own hosting substrate and
| increase its own resources without fighting with someone
| else. (Well... at least initially.)
|
| Explanations based on "oh, they'd never want to do that" need
| to explain not why "a" post-biological intelligence might
| conceivably under some particular circumstance not want to
| spread out, but why _all_ the post-biological intelligences
| never do. That 's a much harder argument to make.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| _> ...why a post-biological intelligence would even be
| interested in spreading across the galaxy beyond a few
| observation outposts._
|
| Continuity of species against some catastrophe with a solar
| system scale blast radius. You can keep that train of thought
| out to multiple solar systems, galactic arm, galaxy,
| supercluster, and so on.
| macintux wrote:
| Hopefully curiosity will always be around. I personally would
| love to have a few billion years to explore the universe (at
| least, if I could find a way to skip the boring transitions
| between planetary systems).
| fallingfrog wrote:
| "What does a cosmic-spanning-AI want to do with its life"
|
| Reproduce, evidently, or it wouldn't be cosmic-spanning.
|
| But: of what use is intelligence if you just want to span the
| cosmos? Would evolution favor less intelligence over more if
| the goal is just to spread at maximum rate?
|
| There are many things intelligence might be good for. Adapting
| to an environment that is uncertain and changing would be one.
| The better you are biologically adapted to your niche, and the
| more stable your niche is, the less intelligent you need to be.
| Cooperation would be another. The more social your species is,
| the more you need to be able to coordinate with one another,
| which means being able to communicate. Competition with other
| intelligent forms might be another. Intelligence could be seen
| as an arms race where in order to beat out the tribe next door,
| you need to out-think them.
|
| Humans tick all 3 boxes. We are social animals who survive by
| cooperation, but in a rapidly changing world full of other
| intelligent animals who are always competing with us for
| resources. That's a recipe for intelligence. You will find
| extraterrestrial intelligence in situations where similar
| forces are at work.
| vkou wrote:
| If that is the recipe for intelligence, why did it take four
| billion years to develop on Earth?
|
| Plenty of other animals met your criteria, yet humans are the
| only ones who passed it.
| polotics wrote:
| How do you know this for sure? Species may have come and
| gone, the fossil record is minuscule for the billion-years
| timespan.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| This is all assuming, of course, that true artificial
| intelligence is actually achievable
| throwaway743 wrote:
| I take it you're referring to artificial intelligence by
| human standards? Homo sapiens have only been around for
| ~300,000 years. Should there be an intelligent
| species/civilization that's been around much much longer,
| then it's likely they've advanced to develop true artificial
| intelligence.
| q1w2 wrote:
| I think it's a bigger assumption to believe that true
| intelligence is only possible with an organic group of
| neurons.
|
| No other aspect of logic or simulation is dependent upon the
| substrate that models it.
| macintux wrote:
| Nonetheless we should know, and document, our assumptions.
| sva_ wrote:
| I know you said post-biological, but I sometimes ponder if the
| bacterium could be that self-replicating machine, extracting
| into intelligence through natural selection.
| roscoebeezie wrote:
| Sounds almost like the Protomolecule from The Expanse series.
| izend wrote:
| I wonder if it is the other way around, biological life is
| actually post-machine/robotics.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _likely_
|
| You say 'likely' but you're talking about an a priori belief.
| Post-biological civilization is purely speculative science-
| fiction at this point, there is not a single real example that
| we can point to yet. This might one day change if _we_ become a
| post-biological civilization, but so far not a single example
| of such has ever been seen.
|
| Based on what we've already empirically observed, any life out
| there is likely to be biological because that's the only sort
| of life we _know_ can exist. Furthermore, we 're unlikely to
| ever encounter life outside our solar system anyway. We've been
| looking for decades and can't find anything. The techno-
| signatures we speculate advanced civilizations might produce
| remain elusive after years of searching with increasingly
| capable instruments. Primitive life is unlikely to ever produce
| conclusive signals we can detect; the best we'll get is
| suggestive but inconclusive atmospheric analysis which we'll be
| incapable of investigating properly because going there for a
| closer look is technologically and socially impossible.
|
| My guess is we're not alone, but we might as well be.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| Is your reasoning similar to this being said earlier in our
| history?
|
| _A post-biological flying machine is purely speculative
| science-fiction at this point, there is not a single real
| example that we can point to yet. This might one day change
| if we become a post-biological flying civilization, but so
| far not a single example of such has ever been seen._
| robonerd wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Suppose the year is 1770 and I am a sailor on one of
| Captain Cook's expeditions. A fellow sailor breathlessly
| tells me about the advanced civilizations with flying
| machines we might encounter, reasoning that such
| constructions are theoretically possible according to
| science and extrapolating from extant technology. I'd tell
| him that I expect nothing of the sort.
|
| I'd also concede that such technology might one day be
| created: _" This might one day change if we become a post-
| biological civilization, but so far not a single example of
| such has ever been seen. "_
|
| So far? No evidence for it. So far, it's only science
| fiction.
| RobertoG wrote:
| In that case your conclusion shouldn't be that
| civilizations are only biological. Your conclusion should
| be: because we have not observed life outside Earth, the
| more likely thing is that there is not life outside
| Earth, not that it's biologic.
|
| But I think that you are using correctly your likelihoods
| but forgetting your priors. The prior in this case is:
| there is no reason that we know for this not to happen,
| so, it has to be happening somewhere.
| robonerd wrote:
| Biological life confined to a single solar system: If it
| happened once, it could happen twice.
|
| Post-biological life: There is presently no evidence of
| it happening _even once._
| Yeahsureok wrote:
| > We've been looking for decades and can't find anything.
|
| You say that as though it's a long time. The first
| interstellar object in our own solar system was only spotted
| a few years ago.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| > Furthermore, we're unlikely to ever encounter life outside
| our solar system anyway.
|
| Eh idk man. If what's been spoken about for decades by
| seemingly credible government, IC, military, and private
| officials across the world, and if what Chris Mellon and Luis
| Elizondo have continuously been hinting
| at/breadcrumbing/speaking to over the last few years comes
| out, we already have.
|
| If you're interested, check out the historical clips gov and
| military (US, UK, Russia, etc) interviews on this channel: ht
| tps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrxesxFeskSt6TMMm9rnqfw/vid...
|
| Would also recommend the documentary _The Phenomenon_ , as
| well as recent Ross Coulthart and Luis Elizondo interviews on
| youtube.
| q1w2 wrote:
| When it comes to extra terrestrial life, past Earth
| experience cannot be reliably used as a good predictor for
| the future. We need to map possible future scenarios and
| apply logic and reasoning.
|
| This is like ants arguing that life outside their ant hill
| will likely have 6 or 8 legs because all the life they've
| seen so far have had 6 or 8 legs.
|
| Maybe we cannot be _certain_ that AI can exist, but it 's
| certainly reasonable to predict that AI will surpass us,
| given the fundamental principles involved. Much like people
| who predicted that the Earth was round before it was
| circumvented. We've only seen a fraction of what AI can do,
| but there is no fundamental barrier to AI cognition.
|
| Also, the only conclusion you can draw from SETI is that no
| one nearby is actively sending a signal too Earth. We aren't
| able to pickup "background" EM activity beyond a ~20 light
| years - which is only a handful of stars. Moreover, the
| notion of ET omnidirectional broadcasting so inefficient, it
| would be difficult to explain (thus unlikely).
|
| My guess is that we are surrounded by quiet AI observation
| nodes, either in elongated orbits, or extra-solar transients.
| Probably near impossible to detect. There doesn't seem to be
| any great harnessing or storage of stellar solar outputs in
| the galaxy, so either their efforts do not involve large
| amounts of energy - or they've found some other means to
| capture it (maybe that's what dark matter is).
| Teever wrote:
| > This is like ants arguing that life outside their ant
| hill will likely have 6 or 8 legs because all the life
| they've seen so far have had 6 or 8 legs.
|
| I've never liked this kind of argument because ants don't
| argue. So you're saying that the thing that we're doing is
| like something else that doesn't exist, and using that
| impossible connection to draw a larger conclusion.
|
| Ants don't argue because they don't have brains to do so.
| We argue because we have the brains to do so, and those
| brains allow us to do so much more like actually measure
| and interpret the world around us to draw the kinds of
| conclusions that you're seeing here.
|
| Even if ants could argue with each other the question would
| become are they arguing about anything relevant? Can they
| measure and reason about the world around them? Can they do
| science?
| robonerd wrote:
| > _This is like ants arguing that life outside their ant
| hill will likely have 6 or 8 legs because all the life they
| 've seen so far have had 6 or 8 legs._
|
| I wouldn't scoff at those ants. Ants who conclude life
| outside their anthill will have 6 legs would be mostly
| correct. 90% of lifeforms on earth are insects.
|
| Anyway, my _guess_ is that life at least as intelligent as
| us exists out there somewhere, and that more
| technologically advanced than us is possible too. But
| interstellar civilization, from what we are today? I don 't
| think so. I think we're already in the "great filter",
| which I suspect to be the speed of light and our developing
| addiction to low latency communication. Turning ourselves
| into AIs or something won't solve that problem; if anything
| it would only make it worse. The more intimate our
| relationship with computers becomes, the more insular our
| civilization becomes.
| Sevii wrote:
| There is no fundamental barrier to AI cognition that we
| know of. But we don't have any proof that superhuman
| intelligence is even possible at this point. It could be
| algorithmically limited in ways we haven't discovered yet.
|
| Full brain emulation is probably possible, but we don't
| know if it will be cost efficient compared to baseline
| humans.
|
| Likewise AIs smarter than humans might be possible, but we
| don't know what the tradeoffs would be. Maybe they will
| lose coherence at larger scales. Maybe they will have high
| levels of goal drift making them functionally useless.
|
| The other thing to consider is that the universe is still
| very very young vs our best estimates of its lifespan. We
| are roughly 14 Billion years into something that may very
| well be going for 100 Trillion years or more.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| If Earth were directly in the path of high powered radio
| signals sent by EI long ago, would it all be undetectable to us
| if it were encrypted?
|
| It didn't take long in our tech evolution for SSL to become
| ubiquitous. Surely the entire SETI program and decades of
| effort is not premised on aliens not having HTTPS?
| v-erne wrote:
| >> would it all be undetectable to us if it were encrypted?
|
| Encryption as far as i know does not deal with hiding
| information in background noise of communication channel. So
| most types of encrypted communication still can be detected
| (but not understood). You would need aliens that are actively
| hidding their communication inside of natural phenomena,
| which is a little bit of a stretch to me.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| Not sure what you mean by "hiding information". Encrypted
| data should appear no different than random noise right?
|
| I'm not an expert on this stuff at all, but it seems also
| unlikely we could depend on it being concentrated within a
| single frequency band.
| v-erne wrote:
| >> Encrypted data should appear no different than random
| noise right
|
| As far as I know its not true - usually there are
| statistical anomalies that gives away encrypted data. The
| other part is the the randomness of background noise of
| the universe. Can anybody give some input here ? I do not
| really know this but if I had to guess the universe does
| not generator true randomness but some signals that can
| be recognized as natural background signal?
| coding123 wrote:
| This strikes me as someone that wanted to invent a new acronym.
| :/
| Parallax22 wrote:
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