Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work? | Hacker News Reader

Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?

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102 pointsD_Guidi74 comments

This is a duplicate of Wolfram's original blog post:

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-a...

The previous discussion (about two months ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940364

The problem with interstellar travel in general is that it is so expensive, in terms of energy usage. I speculate that even for Kardashev type 3 civilizations, shipping matter around will be impractical.

The future is software. For entities that live purely as software, and aren't so picky as us meatbags are about continuity of consciousness, "traveling" from place to place by sending data is the most practical method.

All that is needed is that the destination be prepared appropriately. So that means firing off a kilogram (or so) of self-replicating molecular nanotechnology which can build the infrastructure you'd want to live in (compute on) at the destination.

I haven't seen any indications yet with physics that something more practical is in the offing. There's still a lot we don't understand (GUFT, dark matter / energy), but there doesn't seem to be much hope for life as we know it to flit around the universe faster than light.

> The future is software. For entities that live purely as software, and aren't so picky as us meatbags are about continuity of consciousness, "traveling" from place to place by sending data is the most practical method.

Sure, but for entities that live purely as software the concept of "being" in a "place" is probably completely unimportant.

There's no reason to assume that software entities would have any reason to want to interact with meatspace, especially when they can conjure every possible world (and every impossible world) out of nothing.

Once you've maxed out your abilities with the resources available in one place, then you'd probably start specializing for different abilities in different places to the extent you can gain additional value through comparative advantage. With that in mind sharing the unique results of the different specializations means location is still important in the absence of instantaneous communication over arbitrary distance.

P.S. Your name seems strangely familiar. /s

I'm the evolved-into-a-software-being version of you, of course

Well, at some point the local system will run out of unclaimed matter and energy (Dyson swarm consuming all output of the local sun, built using all available matter in the system). So if you want to expand, you will have to leave.

There would also be some astronomical phenomenon that aren't easily reproducible locally, so it might be useful to travel to them instead.

That is a fair point. Exploration for resources (including non-consumables like hard-to-reproduce phenomena) certainly would still make sense

I wonder if such software civilization couldn't automate the exploration process away, so that the beings themselves don't care about it day to day. From the outside perspective, the whole thing will look like a weird blob of something, expanding in the direction of usable resources at speeds close to c. And beings inside may not even be aware they're consuming some "real world" around them.

I guess I've just sketched a sci-fi story. I wonder if someone wrote it already.

_Accelerando_ by Charles Stross: one of the stories is about a civilization that grew so much in complexity that it couldn't afford the physical cost to leave its system, but its star was being consumed so it couldn't afford to stay either.

They could colonize not to actually interact with the environment there, but for computing resources and redundancy.

Where you are affects the latency of your communications, and less crowded areas may have more computing power available.

There's no need to do faster than light, or even all that fast. The diameter of the Milky Way is at most 200k light years, with technology we could develop today we could populate the entirety of it with generation ships in the span of less than 100 million years, which isn't all that big in the scale of the universe.

I read this, and about ideas like the Von Neumann probe[0] all the time, and it really fills my head with concrete to try and reconcile those ideas with the fact that we haven't found any signs of extraterrestrial life yet. If it's so feasible in a "short" time relative to the age of the universe, where are all the probes?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Vo...

That's exactly right, nuclear pulse propulsion is all you really need, and that was studied in the 60s with project Orion. The lack of probes is paradoxical i.e. Fermi's paradox (yuk yuk).

A great book that explores this topic (and is pretty funny) is "We are Legion, We are Bob" [1].

Well that and Spin [2], which probably addresses your point - maybe they're out there and they're already messing with us?

Ultimately, whenever I think about Fermi's Paradox, I am reminded of xkcd [3]. Maybe we just can't tell they're right in front of us.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse-Book-ebook/d... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Spin-Robert-Charles-Wilson/dp/0765348... [3] https://xkcd.com/638/

Also Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds for a more sinister solution to the Fermi problem.

The Three Body Problem trilogy (Cixin Liu) also proposes a fascinating (dark) explanation

If you read about this all the time, then you're probably also familiar with the Fermi Paradox and the possible explanations for it. 2016 may have given us a clue as to which one of them seems most likely.

Please elaborate? What did we learn in 2016?

There is a star we've observed between 1400 and 1500 light years away with odd, non-cyclical light fluctuations. It may be indicative of a megastructure being built or falling apart around a star.

Unfortunately, I think a pulsar type situation is much more likely. There's many things that could potentially cause those fluctuations, especially considering our relative lack of knowledge about extrasolar space. In 1967 when we started detecting regular, precise bursts of EMR from deep space it looked a lot like aliens.

Software entities may experience reality a million times faster than we do now. Do you want to wait a quadrillion years to finish colonizing the galaxy? That is a really long time.

Also, if you okay more StarCraft, you won't be so relaxed about claiming unoccupied resources.

> Also, if you okay more StarCraft, you won't be so relaxed about claiming unoccupied resources.

As long as you build your army fast enough to cover them, there's no problem, and you want to be the first to claim those resources.

Yes. That sentence you quoted makes more sense when you replace 'okay' with 'play'.

I do wonder why we exist at all. In that, why hasn't our solar system been consumed by someone else's resource collection process yet.

Maybe we are very lucky. Maybe intelligent life doesn't arise that often. Or maybe it typically self destructs by the time it gets to this point.

I just recently learned the term "Bracewell probe" for this kind of device: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe

Instead of sending radio signals or etching words or pictures in matter, you send a software agent that is reasonably intelligent in a hardware device into space seeking ETIs. The intelligence aboard the probe can have a conversation with the ETIs and communicate back to home the results.

Or you can just send a freezed brain of a volunteer, hoping that alien civilization will be advanced enough to give it means of communication.

(Yes, there was a book with exactly such a plot point.)

We can't even make bots have a reasonable conversation with us in our own language :)

15 yrs ago we were impressed that an apple computer could turn text into audio. Imagine giving us another 10,000yrs (blink of an eye to a blink of an eye in terms of the scale of the galaxy) before deciding how much we're really capable of there

"...so that means firing off a kilogram (or so) of self-replicating molecular nanotechnology which can build the infrastructure you'd want to live in (compute on) at the destination."

i just got a chill thinking we are living that exact thing in this simulation O_O

My best argument against living in simulation is similar to the argument against the intlelligent design or solipsism - if you could simulate anytning, why would you simulate this?

So many things in universe make sense if they have happened by accident, but make no sense to include in an intentionally created simulation.

If I would have the power and intelligence to create/simulate a universe, there's no way in hell I would make the world to work like this.

"if you could simulate anything, why would you simulate this?"

I want to agree... but then... I look at Youtube and wonder why a large portion of that gets made.

With the computing power we have NOW... look at all the stupid stuff that gets made. Imagine 50 years from now.

Well, making a silly youtube video for no reason is not the same as making a world where millions of sentient beings suffer/die for no reason.

Have you saw those YouTube videos about genetic algorithms teaching a thing to walk of fly? You may think: this thing do not suffer or feel any pain in repeating millions of times the same moviments just to fall on the floor less and less, no problem at all.

Advance a thousand years in the future and someone may happily simulate the world where you live among trillions of another things trying to evolve.

Yes and no. I'll agree that simulating a universe isn't the same as making a stupid video...

But I stand by my assertion that people waste a LOT of time doing stupid stuff.

There are projects that do AMAZING things and are spectacular. Then there is the other 95% of Youtube.

I'm sure there will be some AMAZING simulations... and then there will be the majority of them...

The real question in my mind... is which of those simulations are we in... an Amazing one... or a subpar one used for comparisons.

Simulating a universe like your own except simpler would let you spot-test solutions to problems, and study analogous of issues in your universe to greater depth.

We do economic simulations all the time, with weak-minded agents.

An argument from personal incredulity is still a logical fallacy. It's easy to see why this line of reasoning doesn't make sense.

If we're living in a simulation the thing most likely to running the simulation is ourselves, in the future.

It's easy to see why that would be valuable, e.g. this could be a simulation to see what happens if a war broke out in 1914, and all the downstream effects on that happening.

I think simulations will be used to help people live more productive / happy lives in the future. Imagine having many "lives" worth of experience, perhaps from many different periods throughout history, and you're still only 16 years old.

Not just the "matrix" flavor where the goal is to learn specific skills. I'm talking about being born, growing old, and dying in a simulation many times in a matter of hours? / days? / weeks? and being able to recall those experiences / decisions and their rewards and/or consequences once you're back to living your "real" life.

do you know the series "Rick and Morty"? reminds me exactly of this part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szzVlQ653as

None of that was original, but I read the very best (Vinge, Drexler, Stross, Schroeder).

There is plenty of hope, even with standard physics. "Faster than light" has lots of wiggle room. Sleeper ships are certainly an option. So too are near-lighspeed ships that, from the perspective of those on board, could get between stars in reasonable times. Even then, what is "reasonable" is a function of human lifespan, a number that could easily grow exponentially without breaking any physical laws.

To a sufficiently advanced civilization matter and energy are just flip sides of the same coin. Why make the distinction?

It always seems to involve mastering gravity yet gravity is so incredibly weak compared to magnetism. Plus "alien spacecraft" aka UFOs always seem to output a huge amount of light so maybe gravity and light are linked in the process or mechanism for whatever makes the thing operate.

I like the article how it mentions getting the science believable or at least not terrible wrong. But what I dislike as much as that is whenever the science parts are dismissed. Usually a scientist in a movie or TV show tries to explain something the lead character rolls their eyes as if it were boring everyone laughs.

How can we encourage kids that science is interesting if it's treated as a bore or a joke and ridiculed? I know it's meant as a writing method to make the lead person seem dumb compared to the smart scientist but it sends a bad message that science is boring.

There's a short story by Harry Turtledove about aliens that have mastered gravity (because, as it turns out, it isn't that difficult to do) but all of their other technology is pre-industrial revolution level. They try to invade Earth in 2039 - I won't spoil what happens next. It's a fun read.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_st...

I loved that story, but couldn't remember what it was called. Thanks!

Using gravity as a propulsive force may be silly given its relative strength, but having a way of blocking gravity would make a tremendous difference in getting out of our gravity well. It's not so much help for achieving orbit, but if you want to go beyond the Earth or even beyond the Solar System it would be a whole new game.

If you can block gravity you can achieve orbit at walking speeds if you turn of your anti-gravity machine some tiny fraction of the time you're spending in orbit.

Similarly with going outside the solar system, you could just jump on the planet Earth and press the "anti-grav" button, and in a few hundred thousand years you'd be outside the solar system.

I think you can dispense with the "jump". Just press the "gravity off" switch at midnight. You will be on the far side of the earth from the sun, as the earth is pulled to the sun in its orbit, you will drift away on a tangent line at 30km/s relative to the sun.

Google says "9 billion miles divided by 30km/s" is a little over 15 years and you are out of the solar system.

(I'm ignoring the milky way here, The sun is whizzing around the milky way at 230km/s, but it isn't very near the center so the "chord near the center is simplified to radius" which I snuck by you in the previous paragraph isn't valid. But you should definitely work this out before flicking the switch. Depending on the relative gravity/velocity magnitudes and the time of year, you could drive yourself through the sun on your way out of the solar system, which voids your warrantee.)

Thanks, I didn't do any of the math, but I should have remembered better from this counteractive fact: You're already at 30km/s, it takes more energy to fall into the Sun than escape the Solar System.

Even if you press the "gravity off" button at some random time during the day the odds of you hitting anything are tiny, even if you fly towards the sun most of the time you'll just fly right past it and be no worse off. Except for the part where there's no oxygen and you can't breathe of course.

"gravity off" is a lofty term to toss around so freely. Consider an omnipresent force or curvature vanishing one spot. I can't imagine gravity but the effects in an ocean would obviously be to fill the hole with massive force.

Orbit isn't about getting 160km over the surface of the Earth, it's about accelerating to 7.8km/s so you don't fall back down to Earth. Your anti-gravity pump won't help you in that regard.

Getting to orbit isn't hard because you have to go so high, it's hard because you have to go so fast.

Gravity is just spacetime curvature. You can "turn off" gravity by just accelerating in the opposite direction at 1g.

The problem with magnetism is that we do not know how to make a magnetic monopole (if it is possible at all), let alone a powerful one.

Perhaps it's because gravity is relatively less well understood than is magnetism?

>Plus "alien spacecraft" aka UFOs always seem to output a huge amount of light ...

That aspect in particular is interesting because it's central to most UFO sightings, and subsequently adds to the collective mythology.

For the sake of argument, imagine you operate a joint USAF/CIA psyops program charged with protecting the secrecy of entirely-terrestrial aerospace black programs.

Personally, the first thing I'd do is take existing airframes, coat them in a matte or even light-absorbing material, put a blindingly-bright layer of lights on top of that, and conduct missions at night, in a profile that minimizes noise. The lights serve to draw attention, conceal the airframe's actual shape, and suggest some extraterrestrial origin all at the same time.

At the risk of sounding like a nutter spouting the usual "black helicopters" cliché, it's worth noting that during the Vietnam War, the US operated a modified Hughes 500-series helicopter reconfigured for extremely quiet operation.[0]

Likewise, Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad was raided in 2011 using stealth helicopters. During interviews, neighbors present at the time of the raid said they weren't able to hear the aircraft until they were almost directly overhead.[1] Compared to a normal helicopter, that's extremely quiet.

The Phoenix Lights[2] was a very famous UFO sighting, and in my opinion was almost certainly man-made. The technology was there to build long-endurance unmanned VTOL aircraft at the time, especially when all you need is some struts, lights, a control system, maybe a balloon, and some propulsion. Complexity comparable to what hobbyists face when building small quadcopter drones today, just scaled up in size.

At further risk of sounding like a complete nutter, I think it's probable that the rash of cattle mutilations[3] throughout the United States were a result of something similar. If you're already tooling around with quiet aircraft lit up like Christmas trees, dissecting cattle in the process for whatever legitimate ancillary reason will only further solidify the belief it's aliens.

The bright light we often associate with UFOs is likely just a terrestrial invention.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_OH-6_Cayuse#.22The_Quie...

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/top-secret-stealth-helicopter-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_mutilation#Government_o...

Yesterday, I watched Bruno Vassel fly his glider in the Rocky Mountains for nearly 2 hours on Youtube. I hypothesize someday we will be able to extract energy from the Ether to power our own spaceships in a similar way to gliding. That's not to say we won't need to add our own energy to get somewhere specific!

How curious you mention Bruno Vassel... I watched a number of his videos this week (and yes, @ fullscreen HD 1080 video it is mesmerizing!!). My goal was preparation for taking a new R/C model plane out for a maiden flight (a 3 meter ASW28). My hope was to glean some slope soaring tips. While I learned a lot and it helped me with my soaring, let me just say, he is highly skilled and makes it all look very easy and relaxing.

Soaring 100 miles without engine power is impressive. Doing so while literally feet away from a craggy mountain slope without freaking out, and taking the time to share some of the most beautiful scenery and sky one's ever likely to see with us is a real gift.

The part where he does loops to entertain some boy scout troops hiking along a mountain was joyful.

Either this a really bizarre coincidence, or YouTube is promoting his videos. I too discovered his channel this week, it's surprisingly relaxing watching him mess around for hours. Especially if you've had any experience soaring, it's interesting to watch his technique and hear him talk through his thought process as he's flying.

Helps that the thermals where he is are so good you can blast up to 13k feet from a 2k aerotow.

Well, our space crafts do "glide" on gravity.

Also see the Interplanetary Transport Network, a network of routes through the solar system that take the lowest energy paths, using Lagrange points to change direction. They aren't the fastest routes, but if you want to glide around the solar system this is where you travel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Net...

I suspect one of the best ways to travel around the solar system is to find an asteroid with a very eccentric orbit. Land on the asteroid, and while it won't save energy, the asteroid will offer a radiation shield and raw materials to use on the journey. The asteroid can be slowly transformed into a "cruise ship" for the journey and subsequent ones.

You could say that is what happened to earth.

Well this article kills my pet theory, but I'll inflict it on the world anyway because this sort of stuff is fun to think about.

Before I go on, a couple of key points.

Also, spoilers ahead.

1. We don't see the space craft arrive. 2. Their choice of locations on Earth goes unexplained. 3. We don't actually see them leave. They just disappear.

I posit that the "aliens" aren't actually from "outer space". They're higher dimensional beings that exist in our 3D space (or 4D if you count time), but we simply cant perceive them in the same way a two dimensional being would not be able to perceive anything in the third dimension.

The "ships" aren't ships. They're something the "aliens" have created to project themselves into a 3D dimensional space so that we can perceive them. They're basically windows. When Amy Adams' character goes behind the "window", she can do this because her brain has acquired the capacity to perceive the higher dimension, and she no longer needs the window.

Their locations on Earth may mean nothing to us, but they are convenient places for them as they perceive the universe. A 2D being would not be able to fathom the reason 3D being makes marks on a 2d plane unless they could perceive the 2D plane form a 3D perspective.

Anyway, that was my theory. This article blows pretty much destroys it, but I like it anyway.

Asking someone with better understanding of physics. Wolfram talks about space as a network. But would not that mean that there is an absolute reference frame? Relativity theory does not need it (not sure if it disproves that there is no such thing), and from what I know no such frame was found. How does that reconcile?

Until some people for whom theoretical physics is more than just a hobby start to take seriously Wolfram's crazy theories, you and I would be well served to ignore them.

They mostly ignore them too.

> The movie-makers were giving Christopher raw data, just like in real life, and he was trying to analyze it. ... > In the final movie, the screen visuals are a mixture of ones Christopher created, ones derived from what he created, and ones that were put in separately.

I wonder -- did he synthesize the handwriting samples under analysis or was that from the film's conventional creative team? I read Chiang's story after having seen "The Arrival" and IIRC the descriptions weren't anywhere near as clear about the circular nature of the sentences.

> Gauss suggested back around 1820 that one could carve a picture of the standard visual for the Pythagorean theorem out of the Siberian forest, for aliens to see.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss's_Pythagorean_right_tria...

Radio waves? Golden discs? Nah son, colossal geometric wheatfields and a few big hedges is what you want!

There have been a number of posts about this movie on HN, many of them interesting https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Arrival&sort=byDate&prefix=fal...

Some of them address the linguistic side of the movie.

I like the blog post's window title better than the article caption: "I had one night to invent interstellar travel".

Has anyone looked at the CIA declassified documents that appeared a few days ago?

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/search/site/ufo%20ph...

It does have pictures of UFO for reference

Edit: added details

CIA does not want the CIA or former CIA talking about UFOs to the public.

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP68-00046...

The CIA wants to keep UFOs out of public discussions, to not cause people to panic. Or alternatively, there is a conspiracy or collusion with the aliens to keep the government from panicking the public about UFOs ;)

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005517565....

Infinite Improbability Drive, of course!

Direct reality manipulation. A chorus of magicians dictating the next millisecond, then the next and so on.

As with any technology there are easy ways and hard ways. Thus the spaceship.

Why not create worm holes to travel through? How it does this? Old God knows.

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