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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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.

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.

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