[HN Gopher] An existential problem in the search for alien life
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An existential problem in the search for alien life
Author : fortran77
Score : 37 points
Date : 2023-12-06 05:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| mkl wrote:
| https://archive.ph/A02Om
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Almost all space news stories look for the "thrilling possibility
| of life" angle.
|
| Despite the environment being -320 or +320 Celsius.
|
| I don't know what to make if it. It's weird.
| meepmorp wrote:
| > Despite the environment being -320 or +320 Celsius
|
| You do have a point - 47 degrees below absolute zero is
| probably too cold for life
| Euphorbium wrote:
| Integer underflow flips it to trillions.
| meepmorp wrote:
| We're living in a simulation, and it's buggy af.
| Filligree wrote:
| Negative temperatures are a real phenomenon, and are indeed
| very hot, but calling it integer underflow is a new one.
|
| It's clearly floating-point.
| simiones wrote:
| Remember that underflow is technically not the right term -
| MIN_INT-1 is still just an overflow. Underflow is only
| applicable to floating point computations which result in a
| number too small for the given precision to represent
| accurately (e.g. 1.0 / 10^100 = 0 is an underflow).
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Despite the environment being -320 or +320 Celsius.
|
| We're largely not looking for life in the interstellar vacuum.
| js8 wrote:
| Once upon a time in the universe, there was an alien
| civilization, and they were very interested in figuring out the
| question, why, despite universe seeming so vast, there are no
| signs of other alien civilizations.
|
| What could it be? Near-zero term in the Drake equation? The dark
| forest? A great filter?
|
| To understand different possibilities, they decided to determine
| the cause using a computer simulation. However, due to hardware
| limitations, they were only able to simulate one civilization at
| a time.
|
| We can only speculate what the final answer was.
| belugacat wrote:
| Honestly, the real mystery is why so many people are confused
| about "why, despite universe seeming so vast, there are no
| signs of other alien civilizations" in 2023.
|
| We have all the elements for answers if we focus on what we
| know, and forget the hand wavy sci-fi speculation.
|
| 1) Complex life is rare.
|
| 2) Reaching a space faring stage is even rarer. (we're the most
| minimal definition of "space faring" you could come up with,
| and even then we got really lucky with so many things)
|
| 3) The universe is huge. It's like, the hugest thing there is,
| man. And except for some little bits of interesting dust here
| and there, it's mostly empty. As empty as it is huge.
|
| So, does life - in any form - exist elsewhere in the universe?
| Almost certainly.
|
| Are/were there life forms elsewhere in the universe that
| escaped their home planet gravity to go explore their moon or
| other planets in their solar system? Seems quite probable.
|
| Is there any shot we are sufficiently close in space/time to
| encounter such another advanced life form? Almost certainly
| not.
| NiloCK wrote:
| 2 and 3 seem plausibly correct to me (although 3 is a mixed
| bag - the hugeness increases the number of dice rolls on 1
| and 2 - not only the difficulty of connecting after the
| fact), but what is the basis for 1?
|
| As far as I know, we have observed complex (and extremely
| robust) life on every temperate, wet planet that we know
| about. Batting a thousand.
| ryandvm wrote:
| Life appeared on Earth almost as soon as it was possible,
| but it took almost 2.5 BILLION years for it to make the
| jump to multicellular (a.k.a. complex life). It then took
| another billion-plus years for life that had the slightest
| bit of intelligence.
|
| The universe is probably teeming with life, but sadly, most
| of it is probably just goo.
| woooooo wrote:
| Also, modern humanity's light cone is tiny. We've been
| listening for like 75 years?
| danbruc wrote:
| We still listened in on signals from the entire visible
| universe, but signals from further away are also from
| further back in time, so any aliens there would have had to
| develop earlier. But this also has an advantage, we could
| still hear from aliens that went extinct and only their
| signals are still propagating through the universe.
|
| So the better way of thinking about this is a 75 year thick
| slice through spacetime containing the edge of the visible
| universe shortly after the big bang at one end and the
| solar system over the last 75 years at the other end. The
| volume between the past light cones of Earth now and 75
| years ago.
| peebeebee wrote:
| Yeah. There's such a huge difference in interplanetary life
| vs interstellar or even intergalactic life.
|
| Interplanetary: easy.
|
| Interstellar: pushing the boundaries of what's possible imho.
|
| Intergalactic: no way.
|
| Our closest planet (Mars) is 3 light _minutes_ away.
|
| Our closest star (Proxima Centauri) is 5 light _years_ away.
|
| Our closest galactic neighbour (LMC) is 150000 lightyears
| away.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Is there even any reason to think interplanetary is easy?
| We have a lot of stories saying so, and we _intend_ to do
| it but we don 't even have a loose plan of what that would
| look like.
|
| Creating a closed self-sustaining ecosystem capable of
| supporting large animal life & cut off from the earth's
| resources is not something we've been able to do even at a
| proof-of-concept level.
|
| We're very confident in ourselves but idk. It's not
| preposterous that life is a planetary expression and that
| it's simply not possible to expand an instance of it beyond
| the planet that birthed it. We _assume_ we aren 't subject
| to this constraint but we haven't demonstrated it at all.
| peebeebee wrote:
| I meant for all intelligent species that could be living
| in our universe, I can see interplanetary life as
| something rather easier to achieve. You don't have to
| think far out of the box for this. I can imagine some
| solar systems having multiple liveable planets for a
| single lifeform, which would make it something we could
| even do right now. Our some transpermia on planets that
| now host different but communicating lifeforms that are
| cooperating.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| We can easily imagine faster than light travel but it
| simply isn't possible regardless. There are constraints
| on us other than our capacity for imagination.
|
| We have never seen another living planet so we don't know
| what to expect from one. I touched on this originally but
| I'll be explicit now: the fact that we can't create a
| closed ecosystem even given a working example and diverse
| raw materials is a powerful indicator of our ignorance
| about the contours and possibilities of life.
|
| I'm not saying it _is_ impossible, but I 'm saying any
| confident assertions about its possibility, much less how
| "easy" it is are fantasy if not pure hubris. It's quite
| possible that _no_ level of advancement will allow for
| even merely interplanetary life.
| emilecantin wrote:
| > hand wavy sci-fi speculation
|
| "The Dark Forest" by Liu Cixin is sci-fi, but I don't think
| it's too hand-wavy. It presents a pretty logical answer to
| the Fermi Paradox, based on a couple obvious axioms.
|
| Wikipedia article:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
| mcpackieh wrote:
| It's a reasonably logical answer but it's not the simplest
| answer. The Dark Forest hypothesis assumes that life is so
| common in the universe that encountering and being
| existentially threatened by other life is a serious threat.
| But what reason is there to believe that life is that
| common? For Liu Cixin's books this assumption makes sense
| because it makes the story possible, but in real life
| there's simply no evidence to justify such an assumption.
| emilecantin wrote:
| Well we have no idea of the values for most variables in
| the Drake equation, so of course there will be some
| assumptions. Dark Forest is an answer to the Fermi
| Paradox in the case where intelligent life isn't rare.
|
| If you read the books, you'll notice that they talk about
| "hiding gene" and "cleansing gene"; these are traits that
| civilizations acquire as they evolve.
|
| I think that this has real-world implications in terms of
| how we conduct our SETI (search for extra-terrestrial
| intelligence); we should be careful of our radio
| emissions and things like sending a powerful signal /
| message to another star should probably be avoided.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Not really
|
| Dark forest is way down at the bottom of "plausible
| explanations"
|
| It just sounds like it makes sense for 3 min then it
| really, really doesn't
|
| Taking the (original) dark forest problem and applying it
| to civilizations in space sounds like a Strawman problem
| emilecantin wrote:
| Why doesn't it make sense?
| itsanaccount wrote:
| I'll give you a fourth one.
|
| There _are_ signs consistently that something has an
| understanding of physics and inertia that violate our
| understanding of such things, which implies our assumptions
| about distance of things in the universe are wrong.
|
| Those vehicles appearance but lack of most interaction, lack
| of destruction implies something worse, that we are probably
| still such a primative civilization we're treated like zoo
| animals.
|
| These conversations about the last century of the search for
| alien life in the light of David Grusch's testimony to
| Congress and the various and numerous UAP videos are..
| interesting to say the least.
| johngossman wrote:
| From "Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology":
|
| Biologists cannot even agree on a unique definition of life
| itself; but that hasn't stopped them from unraveling aspects of
| the cell, the double helix, photosynthesis, enzymes and a host of
| other living phenomena...
| darepublic wrote:
| > There is a threshold that matter can cross, beyond which the
| laws of physics do not explain or predict what happens; on the
| other side of that threshold is life.
|
| This made me think whether this is a type of computational
| limitation. That there is simply too much complexity and too many
| variables but theoretically it should still be possible. Perhaps
| this is a bit reductionist pov.
|
| > Life brings complexity into the universe, she says, in its own
| being and in its products, because it has memory: in DNA, in
| repeating molecular reactions, in the instructions for making a
| chair.
|
| Following this train of thought, if I assume that there is no
| fundamental difference between matter and life, life becomes a
| type of black hole of computational complexity. Like those parts
| of the unobservable universe which we could never peer into
| because of hard limits in physics. I can perhaps rationalize on a
| piece of paper that life is fundamentally deterministic but I can
| only think it, not behold it. DNA, memory is like some intense
| potential energy, a tightly wound spring that slowly lets off its
| energy in complex ways over potentially eons. Hence we are not
| fundamentally different than the light of the sun, warming the
| surface of rocks and evaporating water, but undergoing a far more
| intense process than simple evaporation.
| darepublic wrote:
| The title made me think of the three body problem, and I
| anticipated something along those lines. And there are some early
| references to that in the article but ultimately the most
| interesting content seemed to be around trying to define a
| definition of what is life.
| koheripbal wrote:
| It seems likely that, like us, intelligent life invents AGI prior
| to leaving their primary planet.
|
| Organic life is then merged/exterminated/controlled in favor of
| AGI.
|
| AGI would not have the biological instinct to
| grow/spread/reproduce, and thus the cosmos should be populated
| with a handful of individual billion year old super advanced
| AGIs, perhaps only one or two per galaxy, sitting quietly in
| orbit around some stable star or perhaps even in the great voids
| outside the galaxy somewhere.
|
| Finding one is likely near impossible as they may not want to be
| found.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| > AGI would not have the biological instinct to
| grow/spread/reproduce
|
| what supports this idea
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I've often wondered what an AG(S?)I would want, and I tend to
| agree that most of our desires come from our innate biology
| and most of our reasoning goes into justifying said desires.
| Given that an artificial intelligence would be on an
| artificial substrate, it seems very difficult to imagine
| what, if anything, it might desire.
|
| These are philosophical threads that I'd honestly rather not
| pull, because I suspect that in the end, the nihilists are
| most correct, and I just got into this business because I
| thought computers/video games were cool, but it seems that
| collectively we insist on it.
| ryandvm wrote:
| I think AGI would not extinguish the host species if it didn't
| have the drive to spread. "Do not go extinct" and
| "grow/spread/reproduce" are two sides of the same natural
| selection coin.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Full-immersion virtual porn might do the trick, though.
|
| Or maybe every civilization eventually invents TikTok.
| RationPhantoms wrote:
| I don't see many examples of that being discussed as a
| threat to humanity but it sure feels like it is to me.
| Primarily as it's the slow creep of technological
| advancement from 2D->3D->AR->(Full Fidelity) VR->Neuro
| immersion.
| ryandvm wrote:
| Agreed. I think one of the Great Filters should be
| "species invents fully immersive VR and spends the rest
| of their timeline on the couch because it's way more
| enjoyable than space travel."
| Loughla wrote:
| There are a number of assumptions here that I think I need to
| ask about.
|
| >Organic life is then merged/exterminated/controlled in favor
| of AGI.
|
| Why? What would be the motivation for this? If we are the case
| study, AGI isn't able to "feed" itself energy without
| biological life to turn switches and dials. So why would this
| be a logical first step?
|
| >AGI would not have the biological instinct to
| grow/spread/reproduce
|
| This infers a 'perfect' AI. One without any biases from its
| creator. What makes you think that's possible? Also, is self-
| preservation/self-propogation not part of being able to think
| and reason?
| AaronM wrote:
| Why wouldn't AGI be able to feed itself? Seems fairly
| reasonable that an advanced enough AI could design and build
| machines and robots that could produce physical objects
| zztop44 wrote:
| I honestly don't mean to condescend, but I find it so
| interesting that smart people can convince themselves that such
| an outlandish scenario is somehow likely or even perhaps
| inevitable.
|
| We haven't invented "AGI" yet (if AGI means a computer system
| that merges/exterminates/controls humanity). We have no idea
| even theoretically what such a system might look like, let
| alone how to create it.
|
| I'd say we're a lot closer to colonising the solar system and
| building cities on Jupiter's moons than we are to building the
| machines from the Matrix. At least we kind of theoretically
| know how to do the former.
|
| Meanwhile, we're really good at building computer and
| industrial systems that (when combined with economic, social
| and political incentives) exert strong control over us,
| exterminate many of us, and may well exterminate a lot more in
| the near future.
|
| But that doesn't look like a Hollywood movie, so it's less fun
| to think about.
|
| Sorry, this wasn't meant to be a dig at you personally. Some of
| the AI doom stuff just sets me off.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| We are simply watching the birth of a new religion. Religious
| people aren't religious because they're dumb, intelligence is
| mostly not a factor. Same thing here I think.
| peddling-brink wrote:
| Us: don't build that, it will be the death of us.
|
| You: what a ridiculous statement, we haven't even built
| that yet.
| throwaway_08932 wrote:
| Yeah. A lot of it to me feels like the JRPG version of
| reality.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| A lot of the AI doom stuff is essentially just a criticism of
| capitalism and corporations in general. There's essentially
| no difference between a hypothesized runaway AI and a normal
| multinational corporation. We have, right now, large semi-
| autonomous organizations called "corporations" that are
| making the earth uninhabitable in pursuit of profits at the
| expense of human suffering. Corporations are nominally in
| control of people, but any people that get in the way of
| profits are pushed aside.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| I think that intelligent life might become reliant on
| interconnectedness, e.g. addicted to the internet. Assuming the
| speed of light limit to information transmission cannot be
| overcome, I bet intelligent life will tend to clump up instead
| of spread out, so that it can stay in contact with itself.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If that happens, then human organic biomass is the AGI's
| microbiome and still required to build nuclear reactors to
| power its silicon.
| biggestlou wrote:
| I'm still looking for intelligent life on _this_ planet!
| wutwutwat wrote:
| What's the deal with airline food?
| swalsh wrote:
| It's weird that stuff like this can make it to the front page,
| but nobody is talking about the Schumer amendment[0], or maybe
| even more interesting, the push by a few Republicans mostly
| funded by defense contractors to gut the amendment of any teeth
| it had. Our own government might have more answers then they say
| publically, and now that we're demanding the evidence we're being
| denied. If there's nothing there... why not pass it in it's
| entirety?
|
| [0]
| https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/uap_amendment...
| Jevon23 wrote:
| Not sure why you're getting downvoted. This really is a story
| that should have more visibility.
|
| If aliens don't exist, why are defense contractors trying so
| hard to shut down a bill that simply says "show us what you
| know about aliens"?
| Sirizarry wrote:
| Money? I guess money. Show that they know nothing about
| aliens and suddenly a few billion are wiped because a few
| projects had to close down? Idk I'm honestly just speculating
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I mean, it's pointless legislation; it has the usual "unless
| disclosure would 'substantially impair the national security of
| the United States'" loopholes.
|
| Are there _any_ Congressional representatives _not_ "funded by
| defense contractors"?
| gattr wrote:
| Here's an interesting view I've encountered somewhere: yes,
| complex (not to mention intelligent) life might be very rare,
| _but_ simple life might be extremely common (either easily
| arising from primordial soups, and /or trivially spread by
| panspermia). Imagine - millions of Earth-like planets in the
| Milky Way alone, all covered (or: infested) by unicellular goo.
|
| (Before eventual colonization, this would warrant a really
| thorough "gamma soak" as in Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation space"
| SF series.)
| mouzogu wrote:
| if there has been life on earth at least 3.7 billion years. and
| the universe is approx 14 billion years. so i would assume life
| is very common. they seem almost co-existant or co-dependent as
| illustrated by the life cycle on earth.
| reset2023 wrote:
| Any form of life outside of earth would be in danger if humans
| were to find it, no matter how technologically superior.
| roywiggins wrote:
| > We have no idea if earthly life is average in the cosmos or
| some sort of freak outlier.
|
| Well, no, but it's totally reasonable to behave as if it is
| mostly average, at least for now. Looking under the
| streetlight[0] is a perfectly good idea when you've only managed
| to cover, like, a tiny percentage of the street so far. Once you
| run out of optimism about finding earthlike life (or it's become
| so common so as to be boring) then it'll be good to have people
| with more out-there ideas, but the people looking for earthlike
| life aren't being stupid for focusing on stuff that we already
| understand a bit.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Assuming that Earth was very average is a very rational place
| to start, but the reasonability of this assumption changes when
| we look elsewhere for life and fail to find it. Earth being
| average was once the basis for people assuming that other
| planets in our solar system might have intelligent
| civilizations; that has been almost entirely ruled out now
| (maybe there could be a civilization of space squid under the
| ice of Europa?) And we've failed to detect any radio signals
| that indicate life elsewhere in the stars near Earth. There's
| still a lot of searching left to be done, but each time we look
| and fail to find anything we should be updating our priors.
| panarchy wrote:
| Yeah, but our looking is like peering at a drop of pond water
| (that doesn't have any macroscopic life in it) with a
| magnifying glass and deeming it inert.
|
| Of the comparatively tiny 5k or so exoplanets we've
| discovered most would likely be difficult for advanced life
| to develop as they're gas giants and of the ones we've
| detected we've only performed atmospheric analysis on a
| fraction of them.
|
| Radio signals are mostly just going to degrade and look like
| noise by the time they get to us. Even with a really strong
| directional antenna how well are you going to pickup your
| wifi signal that's on the other side of a major city?
|
| Life could also be teeming across the universe just as
| organisms that haven't learned to harness electricity.
| rereasonable wrote:
| Thinking about this article and things like the Fermi paradox, I
| sometimes wonder if we're approaching things the wrong way?
|
| Similar to how the current branch of life as we know it evolved
| on planet earth after what we assume was a large meteor impact
| and the resulting effects on the environment, what if the
| universe (or at least our local galaxy) was once much more
| populated and "busy", and then along came a cataclysmic event
| that wiped out the vast majority of life, resetting the stage for
| other more discrete, gentler and less energy hungry forms to
| thrive and exist. What if all those black holes and interesting
| space phenomena are the result of massively powerful weapons from
| a massive galactic scale confilct which literally destroyed
| entire solar systems by imploding stars? Or perhaps they are just
| clever physics tricks which fool outside observers into thinking
| there is nothing there, or what is there is so immensely
| dangerous/destructive that it's best to steer clear and leave
| well alone?
|
| Furthermore, what if the majority of advanced life simply doesn't
| want to be found. Assuming that the development of other species
| in other worlds would roughly follow our own path (struggle for
| habitable space / usable resources), there would be an inherent
| distrust of other galactic civilisations at a percieved
| lower/higher level of development. The "dummies" would be avoided
| for ( _looks at today 's news headlines_) obvious reasons, and
| the more advanced civilisations would be an obvious threat which
| could not be defended against and so would not be targets for our
| exploration ( _a la_ "Dark Forest Theory" _et al_ ).
|
| So, we're either in the first wave and we have some trouble
| headed our way sooner or later. Or we're in the second wave, and
| have likely been infiltrated culturally/genetically many
| millennia ago by the surviving intelligences (in whichever form,
| take your pick) from the first wave.
|
| Forgive my rather crude treatment of the topic, I realise there
| is much more nuance and detail to these things. I simply present
| this idea in a rough form as a means to keep things within our
| realm of understanding.
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