China's Race to Find Aliens First
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Finally, the recent situation with rescuing last living vaquita dolphins in Mexico once again demonstrated that humans have hard time imagining umwelt of other species. The plan was to capture remaining vaquitas and to put them in protected sea pens. Without any doubt, human intentions are good here, but as we often do, we go full steam, brute force into the situation. As a result, captured vaquita died from capture myopathy. This animal is shy, cryptic, and it cannot handle being surrounded by scary , noisy giants, touching it, grabbing it with its appendages, despite the fact that "giants" have all good intentions. This example is very relevant to thinking how we should interact with possible "others" or handle the signal, if it will be received one day. Even with all good intentions, we can still create chaos and danger, simply because we cannot understand "others" and how they see, experience the world.
> But like all cetaceans, the vaquita breathes air, making the gillnets deadly. The nets are set to trap another endangered species, the totoaba. This fish’s swim bladder is used in Chinese medicine to make a soup believed to boost fertility—and demand has skyrocketed in recent years.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/navy-use-dolphins-...
In his books he explicitly compares this to the prisoner's dilemma - maybe you yourself don't want to expand beyond your own star system, but as soon as you know another species exists, you know that if they are hostile and do find you, they will destroy you before you know there's any threat. And so you are incentivized to attack when the other civilization has not yet been alerted to your presence.
> it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival.
How about
> it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of another. The hunters are strangers who do not trust each other (or even have a language in common), so can respond with long dangerous negotiations to establish good intent, or with a swift bullet. Everyone knows this, and acts accordingly. The stable state is pre-emptive strikes, zero trust, maximum hostility.
In practice we are ant colonies in that dark forest. Unless you can understand enough the rumblings of another civilization, you don't know how far they've expanded. They may have fully functional, fast replicating colonies in one of the trillions of Oort cloud objects and you just pissed them off by trashing their historical sites.
We could go insane hypothesizing destruction on light-years bubble scales, but then you can rest assured other civilizations are now aware of your existence and will take note of your undesirable quality as neighbor.
Yes, across interstellar distances, a single strike with a very high velocity object might take out a planetary civilisation before they could react. But as you say, that might not be enough.
It's even worse than "you don't know how far they've expanded", even a fast strike from nearby on the cosmic scale can take hundreds of years, and you can't know how far they will have expanded by then.
I think it also makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of interstellar warfare - mainly that against a single-system enemy, attacks are quick and destructive enough - and hard enough to defend against - to destroy all ability to retaliate with high certainty. A sort of MAD gone wrong, with an attacker not having to even worry about the possibility of a second strike by the more resilient elements of enemy forces.
Huh? All the other stuff you said is perfectly true, but in addition to that, there's an axiom in his book explicitly stating that "civilization continuously grows and expands."
Previously, you talked about chains of suspicion (Liu's term for it). It was couched in a denial of there being any expansionist nature of civilizations. All the other things you said were exactly right, but, at the same time, Liu did indeed suggest expansionist tendencies of civilizations as an axiom for understanding Dark Forest theory.
And now you're saying expansion is relevant to relative strength or weakness of civilizations? You seem to be clarifying what is meant by expansion. But we can define expansion however. My point was more that expansion, however defined was definitely included among Liu's axioms.
If 100+ people testified to seeing me do something illegal, a court would convict me (barring exceptional counter-evidence).
Having researched things as best I can I am now of the opinion they're already here, based mainly on the number, diversity and credibility of witnesses (e.g. ex-military personnel, former nuclear military personnel, Air Force, etc, not that any I know anything beyond that).
Our memories are terrible, our brains make stuff up when confused, and sleep deprived dreams are very hard to distinguish from reality. Add in the large amount of amphetamines used in the military during that period, the very secretive weapons testing going on, and things like MK-ULTRA and these seem really far fetched.
I'd like to add that it might not be that all events happened under strenuous (personal) situations (and who knows how much evidence like recordings or other stuff might have been buried)
Process, process, process. Or "train as you'll fight" in more bellicose terms. Drill and rote is the only way to get fallible humans to do the correct thing regardless of environment and conditions.
However it's when things occur for which there's no process in place that you need flexible, quick-thinking NCOs and officers. And that's achieved by constantly putting them into those scenarios, as the British Army learned in its 'small conflicts' since WW2. Analyse, assess, plan and react within minutes.
Unfortunately the higher echelons seldom retain that capability after years in stuffy corridors. It would be interesting to study the proportion of UFO "affirmations" originating from sharp-end military personnel versus desk-jockeys. I reckon the latter will be the vast majority.
Strenuous situations just make eyewitness accounts more likely to be terrible, our brain can screw up for no reason at all. Or a mundane reason, like skipping breakfast.
This makes claims of contact with aliens giving us advanced technology. I can imagine all sorts of possibly buried evidence that would make me believe that. Until some of it comes out, the eyewitness accounts are not reliable evidence.
Doesn't look like that's the case for all of those witnesses. A lot of them seem like engineers - people that are paid for their minds (including their memory), rather than their head count.
If witnesses are all talking about a series of separate events all over the globe at different times that aren't associated with each other, those claims are all systematically vulnerable to biases and don't serve to reinforce one another.
And no, secrecy doesn't apply here really. People manage to take pics of secret military hardware, of terrorist leaders, of practically anything anywhere.
It's quite an old documentary so videos are pre-smartphones and pre-widespread availability of CGI software. But that'd be the other problem. If you search for "UFO" on Youtube there's loads of footage, but it could all just be CGId.
If these are real, is it alien or highly advanced Earth tech? It doesn't really matter from the perspective of if these aircraft are able to manoeuvre how they are reported to, the tech is obviously centuries ahead of what is publicly acknowledged and available now.
Now, the bit about chaos on earth if we do find others... Yeah, that's scary.
Not a fan of extrapolating from single data points, but it's the best we've got for now.
Then think about how we human treat much lower life forms. For example, a plant. We have no ethical issue mowing down a paddock of plants because we don’t see them as equal life forms. We have mostly no ethical issue of killing millions of cattle/sheep for mostly the same reasons.
When there’s a large intelligence differential, the smarter one might not even try and communicate
Plenty of humans treat animals with respect. I see people like spiritual leaders as being far more conscious than political leaders or sociopath CEO’s.
I don’t think this increased ethics is some weird quirk of spiritual leaders, but rather a deep feature of true intelligence.
It would take a lot of energy and computional capacity to make it all the way across deep space. I don’t see how a species could do that if it were fighting itself at home.
If it’s not fighting itself at home, why? Dictatorships are unstable because there’s always someone else who wants to be on top. The only way I can imagine a stable societ with that much reach is if the society contains individual members who care ahout each other.
A house divided against itself will not stand, and a social network at war with itself can never reach the stars.
If you imagine how different humanity would have to be for us to get out that far, we’d have to all be concerned with the welfare of all humans. Once empathy reaches critical mass, the bodhisattva vow becomes an obviously correct moral imperative. I think of it like a schelling point for sufficiently introspective intelligent minds.
Once you’ve expanded empathy to all humans, you can’t stop there. He only way to truly care about all humans - in all their myriad forms and oddities - is to care about all beings.
If it ever got to us vs them, we haven't evolved past choosing us first.
I have an easy time buying it.
Look at the intelligent life we know about on earth. Elephants, dolphins, whales, primates, dogs, etc...
How do we treat those life forms? By and large: Like shit.
How are we, as a species, going to handle "new" life forms... intelligent life forms... advanced life forms... that can "bite back" if we try to treat them like our own earth bound life forms?
I would say, as a standard answer, hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
Humanity... has a large contingent that embodies the worst.
“China poured more concrete from 2011 to 2013 than America did during the entire 20th century.“
China appears to not be slowing down.
The USA uses less concrete for opposite reasons: wood is plentiful, skilled workers to build with steel are also plentiful, and anyways, you can’t import cheap Chinese or Indian workers to build in concrete like the Middle East and Singapore does.
If we could harness all the resources available around the solar system and beyond, we wouldn't have an energy crisis at all. The problem is actually getting those resources transported. If an alien had means to mine and transport resources, they'd probably have found plenty of other richer resources besides Earth.
With our current rate of population growth, I think about one or two percent per year if I remember correctly, we would only make it a few percent across the Milkyway before running out of resources even if we could travel at the speed of light. You can search my comment history, there is somewhere a more detailed comment with all the numbers and assumptions.
Bottom line is, if you want to colonialize the universe, you either need a population growth rate very close to zero and a lot of patience or you have to beat Einstein.
EDIT: Here [1] is the mentioned comment.
For others who like this sort of thing, I highly recommend Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel:
Not disagreeing with your conclusion, but assuming the current rate of population growth is relatively meaningless seeing as no reasonable model assumes current growth rates will continue (as it's been steadily changing).
Unfortunately that is still way too large, to colonialize the Milky Way before hitting resource limits you need it down at one one-thousandth of a percent or so, for the entire universe you need to decrease it several orders of magnitude more. At least on average, if you could use something like cryostasis while travelling through the vast emptiness between stars you could afford times with higher growth rates.
The first drop basically comes because we have a massive population bulge in the post-war years. The growth the resumes because the drop in population growth worldwide is not yet enough to offset the steady growth in life expectancy in the third world.
But longer term that is likely to end up as another bulge.
In terms of developed countries, most have birth rates below replacement.
Once life expectancy growth worldwide has flattened out enough, and birth rates have declined to e.g. European levels, we can expect the bigger problem to be preventing terminal decline. This map [1] is quite interesting. The blue/light blue parts represents birth rates below replacement. In 2015 France too was below replacement.
About half of the worlds population lived in countries with sub-replacement birth rates as of 2010, and despite the fact that the population growth tilts that towards high population growth countries on a continuous basis, the birth rates of those countries is dropping pretty much across the board, meaning it is likely that the proportion of the worlds population living in sub-replacement countries will actually increase.
E.g. India is expected to drop below replacement this century too, and actually experience population decline (decline lags birth rates, of course, because you need to wait for the generation that's dying off to be larger than the one being born).
So I don't think population growth is a realistic concern when it comes to interstellar exploration. On the contrary.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/med...
Our population isn't expanding exponentially. World population grew at 2%/yr in 1960, 1.55% in 1995, 1.25% in 2005, 1.18% in 2015, 1.14% in 2016, and 1.12% this year.
Soon every person we send off the planet will just reduce earth population by 1. We'll be lucky if people reproduce enough to keep the population steady.
But current projections is a population in the region of 10bn first by the end of the century, with some projections suggesting population decline from as early as 2040 (though that's an outlier). More scenarios predict a peak in the 2070-2100 timeframe; some predict continued, but much reduced growth beyond 2100. As far as I'm aware, though, all reasonable scenarios suggest that the rate of growth will at the very least continue to slow for a long time.
That looks pretty exponential to me. If it no longer looks exponential when looking at the last few years perhaps it's because we're running into resource limits.
It's true that animal populations peak (s-curve) when they hit resource limits (ie: carrying capacity of the environment). But our population has slowed because of education (in particular, education of women)... it's an effect thats been repeated all over the world.
If it were resource limits, we would see things like famine (killing the excess members of the population), rampant disease (which becomes easier to spread when people are closer to each other), etc. We're definitely not there in the developed world; and the 3rd world isnt there either, since they have some of the highest reproductive rates.
The universe is a big place. Looking around, it seems that the endless-exponential-expansion route hasn’t proven popular with anyone yet. There may just be enough to go around.
It doesn't need to be rational. All it takes is one sufficiently powerful species to decide "better safe than sorry" and lobbing suitable planet killers at any new upstarts they notice.
Now that you know it's there, don't you feel like expending the time, energy, and resources necessary to travel there so you can step on it?
Even arguably less aggressive and more successful (in terms of longevity) entities such as the British or the Spanish Empire weren't particularly long-lived on a large timescale.
It is very unlikely that there is anything out there that is capable of actually coming here, for the same reason it's very unlikely we can ever leave the solar system. A radio "conversation" over many generations - if that's even possible - would be the high point of our civilisation.
I think you're over-extrapolating. One obvious difference is that colonizers have been exposed to other humans of all kinds, even before colonization. There was nothing about (e.g.) Native American society that you couldn't find in Eurasia + Africa that's even remotely on the same scale as the differences between us and a theoretical alien civilization.
But your comment sounds like you are concerned about broadcasting. The chinese (like SETI) are just listening. Of course, we're all broadcasting all the time but, so what? What do we have to fear from being heard?
Massive spoilers of the second and first books: https://books.google.com/books?id=ThKrDgAAQBAJ&pg=PT163&lpg=...
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/18127/dark-fo...
What are you basing this on? I'd like to see your Drake equation variables.
It's not likely that any civilization will reach such a technological level. If one does, it's not likely that spreading around the galaxy colonizing planets will be a priority. If one does that anyway, it's not likely that they will use unencrypted radio signals for communications.
But, no, not impossible.
From De Casas: Destruction of the Indies
The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty, as is premention'd, like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv'd, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher'd and harass'd with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard (of which you shall have some account in the following Discourse) that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred. Nay the Isle of Cuba, which extends as far, as Valledolid in Spain is distant from Rome, lies now uncultivated, like a Desert, and intomb'd in its own Ruins. You may also find the Isles of St. John, and Jamaica, both large and fruitful places, unpeopled and desolate. The Lucayan Islands on the North Side, adjacent to Hispaniola and Cuba, which are Sixty in number, or thereabout, together with with those, vulgarly known by the name of the Gigantic Isles, and others, the most infertile whereof, exceeds the Royal Garden of Sevil in fruitfulness, a most Healthful and pleasant Climat, is now laid waste and uninhabited; and whereas, when the Spaniards first arriv'd here, about Five Hundred Thousand Men dwelt in it, they are now cut off, some by slaughter, and others ravished away by Force and Violence, to work in the Mines of Hispanioloa, which was destitute of Native Inhabitants
Whenever "explorers" from distant parts have "discovered" new areas, throughout history the indigenous peoples get badly screwed over. See the history of post-Columbus native Americans. Look at India and China to see what even very advanced civilizations with large populations still get screwed by the invaders.
But those diseases went through evolution in an environment that's similar to America -- it had the same atmosphere, similar soil, plant life, etc. Even the hosts were similar.
But an alien virus would have none of those things. Chances are it would find earth inhospitable and be completely unable to survive much less spread.
It would be truly remarkable if an alien virus found earth/humans compatible.
The vast majority was caused by an ill-timed native viral hemorrhagic fever, not European diseases.
I don’t know what native virus you are referring to (citation?), but it is estimated that in many parts of the Americas population collapsed by about 90% in the course of a century or two (sometimes faster), and the scholarly consensus is that this was largely due to Eurasian diseases to which people had no immunity.
The societal collapse brought on by disease also led to internecine war, helping depopulation along. And obviously the numerous instances of genocidal slaughter by Europeans and forced migration later contributed to the final native depopulation of many areas.
Assuming that the resources of the universe are vast, earth will be more valuable as a DNA resource than for gold and slaves. Up until the industrial revolution, the rapidly growing populations of Europe were straining against their resources and were always looking for new gold and slaves plunder to sustain themselves.
The universe has been around for billions of years. Humans are a flash in the pan. We're gnats. Pond scum. Fungus. We're no more interesting than your average gas cloud. We're like tree bark.
I really love a good sci-fi movie about aliens, but the vast majority of them have humans and earth as being something special. To me that looks preposterously unlikely.
It's all speculative, of course, but I tend to think we vastly overestimate how special, unique, important, intelligent, and so forth we actually are. The numbers just don't look like they support it.
An ant is objectively an inferior lifeform compared to us. Smaller, weaker, less intelligent.
But there are still human beings that dedicate their life to study them. And we find unique and interesting features in them. I don't think this would be different if a more developed life form would study.
Supposing, that this life form still has some curiosity left. But if they lived so long that everything is boring to them, it's not our fault that they wouldn't find us interesting. :-)
Doesn't tell you much at all about how much we value rocks.
I disagreed and said that even in the eye of much more powerful or advanced species, we would still be considered a curiosity.
At least to some. It's entirely possible that we could be blown away by the next being. But at least some members of the same species would regret that.
Where else would we be sentient?
Uh, no. I'm pretty sure we qualify as sentient.
Why do we need so much land? Don't we have enough? But our numbers have grown exponentially. And even though we don't need that much land at the moment, there's still some small positive economic value to more land. And so the natives lose.
A similar thing applies to civilizations. The universe only seems big until you factor in exponential growth. Even if humanity could travel a fraction of the speed of light. Give us a few hundred thousand years, and we would settle and overpopulate every planet in this galaxy. And be on our way to the next one.
There are other reasons aliens would want to stop us. If they value human life at all, they might have completely alien moral systems and want to impose them on us. Human society is pretty awful with lots of suffering. No moral aliens would leave us alone to our own devices. But do we really want to get stuck being ruled over by them forever with no autonomy?
If they don't value human life, we are really screwed. In the future we could expand and advance and become a threat to them. It costs them nothing to exterminate us and prevents any future conflicts or costs we might cause them. So why not?
I mean, a human could spend their entire life locating and exterminating ant colonies, and ants would fear that about us if they could conceive it, but we generally have better things to do with our time. (Of course if we're in the way...)
Also good point to remember is maybe the aliens are nothing like we imagine they are, maybe they are already here and we just as a agreed collective don't yet have the capacity to sense this. There are many stories of people communicating with ETs already, if people did some research and had the capacity to understand more of the spiritual nature of things we would already see this on a global scale I believe.
Why "must?" That just sounds like an assumption based on what you want to be true. It is just as likely that a civilization you describe exists but has the exact same type and frequency of internal squabbles that humans do.
Nothing costs nothing. Interstellar travel has to be expensive in any kind of form, whether resources or time. There's no free lunch for anyone.
Things that overcome and eat other things stay alive to reproduce and propagate. Those that can't, cease to exist. This very fundamental aspect of nature implies that there will always exist some selection bias towards aggressive predatory behavior among the most successful products of evolution. It's interesting to consider that the 'morality' of herbivore vs carnivore is an entirely human conception. Go back far enough and humans and grass share a common ancestor. We just evolved in different directions.
In any case the development of higher intelligence enables us to overcome and suppress or evolutionary instincts. But I imagine these instincts will always be a part of us. I see no reasonable way a highly advanced species could have ever evolved without them. And while the media and other players sensationalize violence, the reality is we live in what is likely the single most peaceful era of civilization - ever.
Try to imagine that in WW2 around 70 million people died from a world population of 2.3 billion. That's more than 3% of the entire world's population killed. Scaled up to present day population that would be more than 231,000,000 killed. Since we suck at understanding such huge numbers. Let's convert that in 9/11s. That would be more than 77,000 9/11 scale events. In other words imagine we had a 9/11 scale event every single day for 211 years. That's how many people died in WW2. Today we in the developed western world freak out about 60 people dying, and a single 9/11 is a world shaking event. And go back to things like the Mongol invasions - they were on the order of 300% more deadly the world's population than WW2 was. One can only imagine the actions within prehistory among isolated populations. Perspective.
It is our assumption that all "life" has to "eat" and "reproduce."
Life could get energy from stars or other ambient sources.
Life could be an entire "species" consisting of just a single individual.
Life could be an species whose members are spontaneously "born" or "created" at a single source, without requiring any action from each other.
Life could come in the form of a ..thing.. that converts other unrelated living creatures to become a part of it. Say, something like a virus, that imparts intelligence and a common goal to any organism it "infects."
Keyword being Western - if the killings don't happen there they somehow don't count. Around 400,000 people died in Syrian war - that's 2% dead count out of 20 million of pre-war population; pretty close to what you mentioned is WW2 level.
>Scaled up to present day population that would be more than 231,000,000 killed
The fact that we by random chance managed to avoid a global war in the last 70 years doesn't mean that when it finally hits the death tally won't be 231,000,000. In fact, I'd say it's going to be much higher.
Even if we had been broadcasting a very strong signal from the first radio experiment in all directions into space, that would still be less than 0.1% of the galaxy.
We're fine. Aliens aren't watching The Honeymooners.
- Blindsight by Peter Watts (cannot recommend this strongly enough)
- The Forge of God and sequel Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear
- Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
- Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
I appreciated getting a non-Western take on one of the most durable SF tropes in the Three Body Problem, but I didn't much enjoy it overall, and didn't read the sequels. It didn't hang together logically for me. The aliens could have built orbital habitats in their home system faster and easier than finding a replacement planet, even if they couldn't directly fix the problems of their home planet. Also I had a hard time squaring the aliens' (believable, hard-SF) colony ship capabilities with their magical, completely-beyond-known-physics "sophons" that they sent ahead.
Gateway by Frederic Pohl is also a great brush-with-aliens book although technically not first contact.
As far as recommendations go, Mote in God's Eye is hard to beat.
EDIT: oh, did you perhaps misread "cannot recommend this strongly enough" as "cannot recommend this"? That would make sense.