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Comment by evanlivingston | Hacker News Reader

My amature take on intelligent alien life is that humans as a technological society have developed extremely quickly, if other intelligent species exist and have a focus on technics, then I think it's safe to assume they've developed with as much speed. Continuing with that assumption, it seems extremely unlikely to me that other technological civilizations are at the same point in the timeline as we are, or slightly further ahead. I would imagine them to be massively further ahead. As such, they would surely know about us, but haven't made contact. Why not? I think this is a very important question to ask in the search for other advanced cultures.

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All our current physics says that the speed of light is a real limit to travel, and to get close to that requires far more energy that a society is likely to have. I can well believe that aliens if they exist may conclude leaving their solar system is not worth the cost. Sure they could do it, but many will die when their spaceship on the way. Even robot spaceships are unlikely to make it very far (on the scale of the galaxy) before suffering a critical failure.

Thus I can well believe that aliens have colonized the other habitable planets in their solar system and failed at all attempts to do anything more. They might have got one robot to a different star, but that is it.

Of course this assumes they are there before us by a significant amount. Maybe humans are first to reach our level - it is an arrogant idea but we cannot completely discard it until proven wrong.

Even robot spaceships are unlikely to make it very far (on the scale of the galaxy) before suffering a critical failure.

That seems like a limited vision of the possibilities of spaceships. Remember that we're now traveling through space ourselves, and barring self-inflicted problems, we're not in great danger of suffering critical failure.

Given enough time an asteroid impact presents the possibility of non self inflicted critical failure.

Maybe other life forms have other life spans. If they get 100000 years old the speed of light limit may not be a big issue for them - at least when only traveling around their own galaxy.

Once genetic manipulation advances enough we will probably have much longer lifespans. I haven't completely given up hope that I'm part of the first generation to live forever.

I think humanity as a species is only just beginning to advance technologically. I grew up right when the world wide web was taking off, and at some point in my adult life realized that my generation is the first of its kind. The first for which a chatroom containing American, Japanese, French and Nigerian participants engaging in a realtime conversation from all corners of the globe is not only possible, it's normal.

I had to step back for a moment and realize that just 10 years before I was born, such a feat was technically possible, but required massive planning and a high degree of skill involved in all participants.

100 years prior, it was impossible.

The rapid exchange of information afforded by this technological advance is utterly disruptive, and our society is still figuring out what to do with ourselves now that we're no longer separated from each other by huge stretches of travel time and long delays in information exchange. I must wonder, then, if this is the turning point in any global civilization? The part where the intelligent beings on a world can actually work together to solve problems at such a larger scale than any individual can observe.

I argue humanity has never left the stone age, when you think about it we are still digging things out of the ground and banging them together. Once we have consumers using biological machines (beyond yeast and horses but things we have written the genetic code for) or manipulating matter at the atomic level then we will have truly passed into a new age.

we are doing both of these things, e.g. CRISPR and LHC

edit: and by "we" I mean some few genious scientists not including myself except by association

We are on the cusp I agree but those techniques haven't been found in end user products yet. I think the future of automation will look a lot less mechanical and a lot more biological.

unless you propose how that's useful to the enduser, I don't see the difference. In most cases the technical capability to achieve that would seem like a far higher achievement on it's own, perhaps.

Massively further ahead or massively further behind.

Additionally, I would assume that any "first contact" with an alien entity won't be a face-to-face, lifeform-to-lifeform meet; We're more likely to meet the robotic creations of an advanced alien civilization well before actual living beings.. unless said alien had an extraordinarily long lifespan compared to us.

I can think of loads of reasons they haven't made contact, from the altruistic (something like the prime directive) to self-preservation interests.

Even if they're massively more advanced, why invite trouble? We're much more intelligent than fire ants but I for one know I'm not in the habit of sitting on fire ant mounds.

These two can go together. If they contact us and we become belligerent, they may be forced to annihilate us. That would be morally reprehensible to them, so the solution is not to make contact.

"altruistic (something like the prime directive)"

Related to the solutions to the Fermi paradox, explanations for why the putatively abundant aliens have not contacted us need to cover all the aliens. And the "Prime Directive" is a very, very, very particular definition of "altruistic". I, for one, don't even agree that it's altruistic. Even Star Trek, where it has basically magical dramatic force severed from real concerns, couldn't really argue consistently that it was altruistic: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Pen_Pals_(episode)

Why wouldn't there be a species that looks at us, concludes we're ultimately irrelevant, and just converts our solar system into computronium anyhow? Why wouldn't that be the cosmic evolutionary winner?

(They could even altruistically upload us into an equivalent simulation; while I don't particularly "believe" it, my favorite pet solution to the Fermi paradox is that Earth was uploaded an arbitrary amount of time ago and we've just been simulated ever since out of ethical concerns, a simulation which for simplicity and perhaps even ethical reasons has no other civilizations in it. For all we know they actually digitized Earth in the dinosaur era and in realtime it may in fact still be "millions of years ago" if our simulation runs faster than real time.)

You should read The Three Body Problem series. In the second book, The Dark Forest, it has an extremely plausible answer to the Fermi Paradox: Basically every intelligent civilization is hiding, because Game Theory states if you find aliens, you have to kill them. ( No way of knowing if they are friendly or not, when survival of species is at stake, the smartest move is to kill them immediately just to be safe)

That's the prisoner's dilemma, but the maximum value there is in cooperation, if riskier. To defect still means to rely on the associate to cooperate, which is ratner disenginious and assymetric. Ghere's power in symmetry, but as others pointed out, the existence of a symmetric, ie. comparibly advanced planetary system is unlikely.

having read up on it again I noticed I was a little amis with the values. Still, the total prison time is least for cooperation.

I can only wonder what game theory would have to say about setting the punishments as in the original. Certainly the whole thing is rigged to begin with. Both serve time if none of them admits to the crime? You'd have to be uncooperative with law enforcement out of principle, never mind nature is probably not generally as sinister and draconicly enforcing morally biased laws. The void of deep space rather doesn't care to set traps like that on purpose. But it could randomly. If weights are set arbitrarilly in the thought experiment, what would probabilty theory say then? Nothing, as there are no priors. But what would attacking and extinguishing an unexpecting existence about our own chances to be terminated at once without aprehension?

I think intelligent alien life is extremely rare. Even with everything right ...: - Non binary star system - stable sun - non gravitational locked planet (thanks moon impact) - hospitable planet (goldilox zone) - inner solar system not populated with super giants - continents and oceans (not a water world) - magnetic field protecting us from radiation - planet the right size and the right amount of atmosphere. (i could keep going on)

... we were still owe are existence to an asteroid (among many other things) that wiped out the dinosaurs.

On top of everything, star time scales in the billions of years, evolution hundreds of millions of years, and semi intelligent life within the tens of thousands of years.

if there is other intelligent life out there near by, it either happened billions of years ago or will happen billions of years in the future.

If there are 3 billion out of the 300 billion star systems in the galaxy that have habitable planets, then there should be at least 10,000-100,000 star systems that harbor currently brodcasting species, no?

Why would anyone be stupid enough to broadcast location? Ever see independence day? Might be better off not knowing... though .. I think i'd be almost willing to give up life on earth to know... just because I'm curious as hell.

So aliens are going to build city sized ships to travel light years so they can steal the resources of one planet in a star system?

One would guess that aliens with Independence Day technology could figure out how to terraform or build space colonies in their own star system. Even if they ran out of raw material there, surely the next closest one would do.

Given the population growth rates, and struggle for resources, eventually all alien species will realized its them vs others.

More than mining resources from planets, its generally 'We need to finish them off, before they finish us off'.

in the movie, they were after the earths molten core, in the movie thats something rare

We already do it, so... :D

the situation of our planet, all the things i said above (in particular non-gravitational locked, magnetic field, water & continents) is a 1/N event.

I feel like N is very large. When you factor out all the stars of the 100 billion in the milky way, I think you get something unlikely, let alone on a planet in the habitable zone.

also, something on the other side of the milky way (100,000 light years), is also far away, so its not like we have the entire milky way to choose from.

Using average values in the drake equation, there have been have been 18 million broadcastable civilizations in the milky way.

If we take an average lifespan of 1,000 years and say those cilizations have formed over the last 5 billion years (where planets mostly cooled down throghout the universe) then there are currently only 4-5 broadcastable civilizations in the milky way. Is that correct?

IMO intelligence is merely a by product of time, evolution and survival so I don't think it would be that unlikely.

If that were true, why aren't sharks the most intelligent beings on the planet? They've been around in more-or-less their current form since the dinosaurs were around.

Intelligence (as far as we know) requires a brain, which requires a lot of calories to work correctly. Increasing calorie intake requirements is not something that survival-selecting evolution would select for.

Evolution selects for survival, not intelligence. Sharks and other animals have survived very well for millions of years without ever developing a higher level of intelligence. If anything, intelligence seems like it might be a happy mistake of evolution, and potentially very rare since evolution doesn't select for it explicitly.

It's probably the right combination of a body, intelligence, social structure and environmental pressures that lead to sophisticated tool making societies that pass their knowledge on down so it accumulates.

So far, we're the only species on Earth to have enough of the right combination to get this far. So maybe it only happens 1 in 1000 worlds with multicellular life.

How many planets does that leave in the Milky Way? That's the sort of calculation SETI does.

you answered your own question in the sentence that followed it. sharks face little pressure to evolve, so they aren’t changing very much

But dinosaurs were around for hundreds of millions of years longer than us.. and there’s no indication they were intelligent or ever built anything

some more, the dinosaurs weren't just stupid (small brained), I believe they were so by design.

I began thinking about it by finding out alligators/crocodiles lived during that time, and they have larger brains. I then wondered why, until I considered the fact that they came from laid eggs, and their 'thing' was the ability to get big when evolution supported it. brains require lots of oxygen and egg shells have limits to how much they can allow through them.

my theory is that they were dumb by design, so that genes could activate and allow them to get really big if it suited them.

Do you have proof they did not build anything? What can resist millions of years?

No, that's what he's saying. There's no indication that they did.

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