Comment by akkartik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akkartik | Hacker News Reader

"I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

Gahd, to hear Stephen Hawking regurgitating the most vapid of pop culture[1] is extremely disappointing. I don't disagree with his point, and it's nice to hear him say it, but come on, he's arguably the greatest physicist of our time. Feed us some sort of argument on par with the Fermi paradox. Or at least something more than just 'this could happen, or that could happen.' Failing that, if you think us normals can't comprehend complexities, at least regurgitate Greg Egan.

[1] ID4 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116629

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Here's what I think. Despite the optimism of early sci-fi authors I see no reason to assume any alien we meet will be friendly, or indeed anything but ruthlessly self-centered. When we meet aliens we want to see them before they see us. We want to find out where they live and never let them find out where we live. This is a game of 'True names' on a cosmic scale, where our true name is our location in space. To play this game you need to ante up with the technology to spread your eggs far from the gravity well of origin. That's the bare minimum.

To think in terms of 'single-cellular life, multi-cellular life, and intelligence' does humanity's space program a huge disservice. It helps us remain fat and complacent in the sense that we're at the top of the food chain. Intelligence isn't a state to be reached; it is a continuance of evolution. And there's an unknown number of rungs for us to climb to break out of our niche, starting with basic space travel.

That's what I think; have at it. But at least it's more thought provoking than Hawking.

I actually submitted this because I thought it was amusing how naive Hawking's view was. Personally I think Terence McKenna's take on aliens is much more likely to be correct, that if they exist they are probably 'not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.' His favorite example was the idea of non-material non-local aliens made from pure information, likely inspired by his DMT experience.

I upvoted the submission. I upvote anything that gets over a hundred words out of me.

Two of my favorite explanations for the fermi paradox:

a) The space of possible ways to perceive the universe is far larger than we can imagine. If this is true, the good scenario is that we never see each other. The bad scenario is that they can perceive us, but we can't perceive them. ('Perceive' could mean 'detect', or 'have an optimized visual cortex to recognize'.)

b) They turn inward: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1224741

But I suspect the most likely reason is just that they've all learned to be silent. Not because there's an uber-predator, but just because that's the nash equilibrium.

True. We are tied to our few perceptive faculties, understanding, and what we can measure from physical instruments. Science seems to be more open to the idea of parallel realities and universes these days, which is good, even if it isn't very pragmatic now. It is very likely inorganic life is the more ubiquitous manifestation of intelligence simply because of all the energy present, physical mass is the least common form. It is conceivable that inorganic life coexists with organic life without either entity being cognizant of the fact. Humans could even have the capacity to perceive such an entity if there were a survival incentive to do so or if our conscious minds were not so self-involved.

Personally, I think any civilization advanced enough to conduct interstellar travel would be a cooperative life form (organic life that is). Is it a coincidence that the most intelligent forms of life on earth are social and cooperative? Really once you think about it, pretty much all war on earth was rooted in not sharing resources, artificial boundaries, nationalism, religion, and poor resource allocation (i.e. the price system). These are all solvable problems that all to often get blamed on the "human nature," which I think is a convenient excuse fabricated by our minds in a petty attempt to rationalize our ages of suffering. Greed is environmental, not biological. Believe it or not nomads are pretty resourceful and respectful to one another and the environment; "modern" civilization seems to have an incentive to trade accountability for convenience--never really living within our means (crappy economies cut spending on space programs). We live on a small planet, and in even smaller paradigms restricted by all the arbitrary lines we draw on stuff we don't really understand for the sake of calling it our own. Exploring the empty, silent void of space, if not good for anything else, should be a humbling experience to truly discover how petty, yet fascinating our inner space really is.

I was just thinking that cooperative behavior seems to have pretty good survival value, at least for the life we can find. That, of course, says very little about life we can't find, since we don't know how different things might be. But it makes sense to me that a cooperative form, where different members of the species can have different but complimentary roles, is likely to be useful even in circumstances we can't predict. And once a species can cooperate with itself, my belief is that it can cooperate with another. All it takes is the insertion of a member of each species into the trust hierarchy of the other species. (Of course, the possibility is far removed from the realization.)

So refreshing to read about McKenna's take. I recall in college astronomy learning about the Drake equation and finding many of coefficients needlessly restrictive. I wrote off astronomy because of that.

Gahd, to hear Stephen Hawking regurgitating the most vapid of pop culture[1] is extremely disappointing. I don't disagree with his point, and it's nice to hear him say it, but come on, he's arguably the greatest physicist of our time. Feed us some sort of argument on par with the Fermi paradox.

My theory: Stephen Hawking lost the last of his movement about eighteen months ago. Rather than put themselves out of a job (a completely paralyzed Hawking would only need one nurse) his entourage have been running his chair via remote control ever since. This is why he's given up talking about relativistic quantum mechanics and started talking about little green men.

A more serious possibility: Hawking's just not aware of Independence Day. It's so hard to read books and watch movies that he just isn't aware of pop culture in the last 20 years. So he's coming up with ideas without being aware of 'related work'.

This is a profoundly saddening prospect, but I'm probably wrong.

Comment on "Feed us some sort of argument on par with the Fermi paradox."

The only paradox in Fermi's paradox is the unjustified exclusion of UFOs as signs of ET existence and visit of earth.

is he regurgitating crap or is he trying to make the most simplistic negative scenario possible so as to draw the attention of people who might not otherwise follow? mitigating existential risk requires quite a bit of talking down to policy makers and purse-string holders who do not understand statistics, game theory, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com