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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

I'm reminded of the argument[0] that conscious beings that evolved on worlds like this will be very freaked by the discovery of stuff above the ice. Seeing planets and stars, we humans have always had some sense that there's more to the Universe than Earth.

0) The Killing Star by George Zebrowski and Charles Pellegrino

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Is there any light down there? Would they have eyes?

Stars etc. might be more like totally abstract theoretical concepts like quantum physics is to us, or at least X-rays.

They might not be able to literally look up and see things, having mostly only sonar, hearing, and touch senses; handfuls of surface-explorers wearing special environment suits report the utterly strange sensation that space seems almost totally two-dimensional on the surface and there seems to be total emptiness above. Except that heat sometimes seems to be coming from above in strange repeating patterns.

OTOH they might wonder how a species like us could possibly survive, being unable to see through our own bodies using sonar it must be extremely difficult to develop internal medicine. We would probably just get wiped out by some disease early on.

The sun isn't the only source of radiant energy (visible light, IR, UV, etc) in a planetary system. Chemoluminescence and indeed heat itself (infrared (IR) emission) are other sources. I would think that living in a thermal environment closed off from the sun, creatures would be likely to evolve bioluminescent emitters/receptors or even fully developed IR Eyes in order to gain survival advantage.

1.) https://voices.nationalgeographic.org/2014/03/14/from-night-...

Indeed, deep ocean life is very strange.

I always loved this portion of The Ellimist Chronicles, one of the companion books to the Animorph Series. If I remember correctly, these god-like beings play simulated games where they develop species over eons and during one game, the catalyst the main character needed to advance his civilization was parting the perpetual clouds so his species could witness the stars and for the first time, look up.

I remember that one. The game is that you can make one single change to species/environment, and he parts the clouds. His opponent ups aggression, and his opponent's species wipes his out. They send their game out into space, and another species gets the game, thinks the game is altering real species causing drama.

It is in fact the opening chapter, and the vignette sets the tone of idealism versus pragmatism for the rest of the book, a theme that surely resonates for any beleaguered programmer with a deadline...

-----

I sighed. "What was your move?"

"Oh, a very small one," Inidar said. "I increased their rate of reproduction by a very small percentage. This heightened their natural aggression. And guessed that your move would be to open the Pangaban skies. Population growth pressures, a limited food supply, and the ability to see the Pangaban surface very clearly ... my Gunja Wave wanted to eat your species."

"Yes, and they did," I said. "I call the game."

"You have to learn to avoid naïveté, Ellimist. It's not the good and worthy who prosper. It's just the motivated."

http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Krikkit

Life, the Universe, and Everything (1982)

Who knows the mind of an alien. I mean maybe some individuals get freaked out, or there's some initial shock. But you'd kind of expect any intelligent or sufficiently advanced species to be able to handle the new and unexpected, it's kind of a pre-requisite. Those that can't tend to go extinct eventually.

I don’t think that’s true since we have only recently figured out what stars really are (last 2 thousand years) .

Yeah, I doubt upon discovering a wider universe most beings are going to follow the path of the Krikket in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Otherwise every discovery would have the potential to discombobulate them under the right circumstances.

Humanity often has periods of instability following major discoveries that unseat orthodox ideals. An argument can be made that much of the cultural instability in the modern US and its animosity to science can be rooted in an "allergic" reaction to the ideas of evolution and a greater understanding of just how old and vast our universe actually is.

Personally, such an argument would be a bit simplistic, but you'd be a fool to ignore how discombobulating evolution has been to much of Evangelical America. People who believe they are the center of universe tend to find it difficult to accept evidence to the contrary. To use another literary reference, there are a lot of warty bliggens in the world.

Well going even beyond that. There's entire populations of people barely living above the stone age, not to mention uncontacted tribes still out there in the world. It provides a fascinating spectrum of experiences.

I guess my point is any large enough group of beings will have a variety of responses ranging from embracing new ideas and information wholeheartedly or rejecting them out of fear and ignorance and every possible combination of response in between. And it can be tricky to figure out which sub-group should represent the whole in these sort of blanket statements about how "they" would "feel" about an arbitrary bit of knowledge that they couldn't have foreseen discovering.

Well, that is rather the idea in The Killing Star. Also The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin.

Also the classic 1941 short story “Nightfall” by Asimov. Aliens live on a world that is part of a complex solar system orbiting multiple stars, so it’s only nighttime once every two thousand years. At that point, the civilizations look up at the dark sky, perceive that there are many other stars, which shocks them with the enormity of the universe and how small and insignificant they are, and...well, it doesn’t go very well.

EDIT: It’s online! http://www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/AST389/TEXTS/Nightfall.h...

Wasn't that an allegory for the spread of Nazism?

Whether it be the sun, the moon, or the stars and regardless of what we thought we were seeing, when we looked up in the sky we saw things we could not reach that fueled our imagination and our desire for exploration.

A subsurface dweller would always see and feel physical bounds and would probably assume that's all there was to it.

It blows my mind that we didn't confirm the existence of other galaxies until the 1920s.

It was less than a century ago that we learned that the universe was a hundred billion times more complex than we thought it was.

Imagine what we don't know now.

Or perhaps below the ice, from their perspective.

http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/downandout.html

It should be "above" due to the gravity imparted by the planet. Unless the species doesn't develop something analogous to our vestibular apparatus and can't actually tell up from down.

Although I'm going to have to read this book it seems like.

Yes, I do recommend it highly. And then the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Liu Cixin.

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