Ask HN: Do you believe we'll ever encounter aliens? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you believe we'll ever encounter aliens?

25 pointsuptown35 comments

A topic of conversation that colleagues and I frequently revisit questions whether humankind will ever encounter what's typically referred to as "aliens", and if so ... the implications of such an encounter. We've generally concluded that if such an encounter were to occur, it could change almost every aspect of our lives (science,religion,technology, etc.). With that said, we have no consensus of belief as to whether it will ever happen nor an agreement of exactly how our society would be impacted.

I'm curious what the members of the Hacker News community believe .... both whether it will ever happen, and how it would affect the world we know.

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IMO the only 'aliens' we'll ever meet will be humans who had left Earth for distant planets sometime in the future and whom Earth inhabitants have forgotten or fail to recognize for some reason(environmental adaptation causing inhuman features). A chance encounter in space will then be the 'meeting with the aliens' that many fantasize about.

As far as meeting intelligent species completely alien to our planet and our ecosystem, like the ones shown in Hollywood movies, I don't believe that's gonna to happen. Not now. Not ever.

The logic usually is that since space is vast, there's gotta be a planet somewhere that has similar environment like Earth and thus similar life forms inhabiting it. That's sound logic. My problem with that logic is... out of the 100 million+ species of life that are estimated to exist today and the countless ones that used to thrive over the last 4.5 billion years since the birth of our planet, only one... just one out of all those billions of species that existed over billions of years has developed far enough to type these words.

That's why when people say 'hey there are billions of galaxies out there, so we can't be the only ones' I ask them then that by the same logic, out of the billions of species that have existed on this planet there's gotta be more species like us doing the same things that we do? But there isn't. We are the only ones capable of doing things we keep hoping the aliens would do.

That's why I believe we are the only ones, on our planet as well as outside of it.

I pretty much agree with what you've said. Although, regarding "I ask them then that by the same logic, out of the billions of species that have existed on this planet there's gotta be more species like us doing the same things that we do?" My answer would be - sound logic but flawed line of thought. Since all billion species here on earth are confined in this well connected area it means, all billion species pretty much have been and still are competing with each others and amongst themselves. Meaning there can in the end only be one winner (following some sort of law of the jungle). The winner gets to type these words.

If we assume "since space is vast, there's gotta be a planet somewhere that has similar environment like Earth and thus similar life forms inhabiting it" we can regard each of those planets as completely separate competitions and thus there can be as many winners as there are "similar environments"

Interesting perspective. But another possibility is that ecosystems can only support one species like ours per planet.

It's see it like this:

Observe that historical trends show communication technology advancing much faster than transportation technology. In the 20th century we got cars, planes, helicopters, rockets... and now we still have cars, planes, helicopters and rockets (do they make hovercraft anymore?). No major advance for decades. Compare to communication, which seems to change beyond recognition every ten years.

What then is bound to happen is that we develop some sort of theoretically inter-stellar range communication technology. Of course by the time we do that, we'll be lucky if humanity has so much as a moon base. But the chances are we are not the first intelligent race, and a number of intelligent races will already exist, and will have already have implemented this technology.

In effect, we will switch on one day and find a galactic internet (the Intergalacticnet?) of forever isolated planetary nodes. Once we figure out how to decode and communicate etc., we will exchange/trade information and progress will increase exponentially. But no field trips (maybe some sort of VR/avatar tour of alien worlds though).

IMO sci-fi writers get it wrong when they show spaceships bumping into alien civilizations etc. Regardless of whether that sort of transportation is even feasible, communication will have been established much sooner.

> What then is bound to happen is that we develop some sort of theoretically inter-stellar range communication technology.

'Bound to happen' is quite a bold statement for something that, according to current scientific understanding, is not really possible. That is, if you mean faster-than-light communication, which I think you allude to in the next paragraphs.

You're right of course but I believe science already has some inroads in FTL communication (quantum entanglement, some exploit I read in New Scientist about a sweeping beam traveling faster at the the ends than the pivoting centre) whereas from what I've gathered FTL space travel is still a non-starter.

That's not how I interpret it. The light-speed constraint isn't just about preventing matter to move faster than light, it's about information traveling faster than light. Picturing it like FTL communication being just an engineering problem (sorry for the exaggeration) and FTL travel being near-impossible in contrast is rather strange.

Quantum entanglement doesn't allow faster-than light information transfer (though it is pretty mysterious in its own right). The sweeping beam thing doesn't either. These things aren't in any way pushing the frontier with regards to FTL communication.

Do note that I hope with all my heart that I'm wrong here. We're all geeks, right.

Encounter is a pretty vague term. Do I think we'll have meaningful conversation with Aliens any time in the next thousand years? Probably not. Hubble can see billions of light years out at this point meaning if something was within a couple hundred light years of us we'd probably know about it.

There could be societies far more advanced than ours since our sun didn't show up for about 10 billion years into the Universe's life. Those societies may be able to travel faster than light. But even if that is true they'd need to find us and I consider that unlikely. Because while traveling faster than light may be possible it doesn't change the facts that (a) the universe is huge and (b) light still only travels at light speed so you can't see things in real time. So even if they could get to us they wouldn't know where to look.

What's interesting to me is we might get to see the beginnings of one of these civilizations. Since we're basically looking billions of years into their past we might see another civilization long before we can do anything about it.

But (b) assumes that they use light to know about us.. That may be false :)

The most boring thing about these speculations about beings from other planets is the absolute lack of imagination. Most times people imagine something like a vertebrate with human-like appearance.

Why assume that the evolution of any form of life in a different environment would repeat so closely the evolution of life on earth? It could and should be completely different. In Cosmos, Carl Sagan speculated about life in other planets based in nitrogen and sulfur, with huge bubbles gathering nutrients and other smaller ones preying on them. Now this is what I call imagination.

I agree. Whenever I witness such an utter lack of imagination, I console myself by thinking that line from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide that has the phrase "super-intelligent shades of blue". Just imagine colors being intelligent! That's the best alien life-form I've heard of.

True but there are actually pretty good reasons to think some traits will be universal. How many different ways to swim are there really, beyond what we see on earth. Hawking talks about this point. Eyes are another example of a hugely useful trait that may be universal.

The chance of it existing somewhere is pretty big. However, our galaxy is huge so the chance of ever encountering them is pretty slim for now. I don't really expect us to find something until we develop a working sort of FTL technology. Since achieving this is probably still a few hundred years off I'm personally a bit sceptic whether we'll ever reach this point with all the problems we're facing here on earth.

I really believe we should focus on development of technology and infrastructure that would allow a large amount of people to go live on for instance Mars. This would allow us to focus on the development of FTL technology without the chance of dying before we complete it and it would probably boost additional development in space technology as well.

The chance of it existing somewhere is pretty big. However, our galaxy is huge so the chance of ever encountering them is pretty slim for now

Just 500 years ago, Europeans didn't know about America. It may turn out that aliens bump into us by accident and we find out that they were right around the corner the whole time. Or it is possible that the aliens have the FTL technology to get to us from a point far enough away that our satellites can't see them yet.

I was mainly referring to the fact of us bumping into them.

I think they'll find us first though. Isn't that what Stephen Hawking has said also?

Perhaps.

If they're smart, they'll wait until we annihilate ourselves or destroy our planet, and then walk right in. Less resources will be expended on their side.

If they do come, and don't have an ability to morph into beings like ourselves, people will crap all over themselves and the government will probably try to nab them.

Who knows what would happen. If they are out there, and I believe they are, and they do come, I hope they're cool and don't just wipe everyone out and start over. I also don't fancy being a pet.

> If they're smart, they'll wait until we annihilate ourselves or destroy our planet, and then walk right in. Less resources will be expended on their side.

That's assuming they have time on their side. By the time they are searching other galaxies for resources, I'd imagine they wouldn't be so patient if we neglect to be hasty... ;-)

So then, you're presuming it hasn't already happened?

I am sure that intelligent life exists out there. It's just a numbers game. However, if they are intelligent, based on how long we have been around, chances are they have been so much much longer. Millions of years would be more likely than thousands.

So, I don't think we would even recognize them, or they us. I am pretty sure they would have cast off their biological bodies long ago, and probably have gotten to a point where time and space aren't as limiting either. I could see us doing this in a few thousand years. As any given intelligent life in the universe would likely be ahead of us by much more than that, I think we are akin to fleas on a dog wondering if there are other dogs with other fleas on them. Where in fact, there is much more going on all around us, and we aren't yet capable of being a party to that conversation.

Forget stuff you watched on Stargate. Probably first encounters would be much less interesting. Like we find a few bacterias there. Or with best luck, an animal or something like that.

Really, encountering inteligence life on other planets would be very damn interesting, but IMHO, highly unlikely.

Still, even finding non-intelligent alien life would make it much more likely that intelligent alien life exists somewhere.

(Basically there are 2 probabilities we can't estimate now, other that they are != 0: the probability of life appearing on a given planet (P1), and the probability of intelligence evolving once life is present (P2). The probability of intelligent life then is P1 x P2)

Finding non-intelligent alien life would not make it more likely that intelligent alien life exists. It either exists or it doesn't. :)

I think he meant that finding non-intelligent alien life might make the possibility that there is also intelligent alien life more believable.

This is semantics.

Finding non-intelligent alien life would raise our current estimate for the likelihood that intelligent non-human life exists.

Is that better? :P

Yes, much better, I was just having a little fun.

It seems it mostly depends on whether FTL travel turns out to be possible or not. If not, contact between alien inteligences is going to be highly unlikely even in a universe relatively filled with life.

Things are not looking very good at this point...

People typically say "the galaxy is big, so it's unlikely", which is not necessarily true. You need no more than a few tens of thousands of years to colonize a significant part of the galaxy, and it's not unthinkable many societies have had that kind of head start.

The real expanse that separates civilizations is time. It takes only slightly more than 1000 years to travel a thousand light years, but the gaps in time can be much bigger. It's possible that over the course of a billion years, many thousands of civilizations rise and fall, but at any given time only a handful are in existance concurrently.

Check out this video from the American Museum of Natural History: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U

- It makes me think that we cannot be the only society in the universe

- But it also makes be think that it is unlikely that we will find them in the near future or vice versa

I worked on http://quest-for-life.org for the Rails Rumble last year.

It's basically an online Drake Equation calculator, with some educational material and references to help inform the parameters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

If we do, I just hope they aren't hungry.

http://thecuriousbrain.com/?p=2629

I think it's more of a when than a how question. As long as an asteroid doesn't come and wipe us all out before we master planetary space travel, I think it's pretty safe to say at some point we will encounter alien life. With all the planets that exist...too much potential for their not to be.

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