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Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

I like the Zoo hypothesis. We do that to North Sentinel Island[1]. It is populated by 50-400 stone age tribes people. India does not prosecute them for murdering anyone who happens to land on their island. Previous contacts with these people led to them rapidly dying of diseases they didn't have immunity to, so staying uncontacted is literally a life or death issue for them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island

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I think it's bizarre that the fact that we have absolutely zero evidence for aliens actually gives a little weight to things like the zoo hypothesis.

Technically every hypothesis that fits our data should get a little weight, plus our best available models of the universe show there should be billions of planets as habitable as ours.

That is evidence in the abstract sense and we currently lack the technology to observe these candidate planets in enough detail to test the models further.

We're like a person sitting in the desert at night with nothing but a candle concluding that the planet is completely deserted because they can't see anyone else.

> Technically every hypothesis that fits our data should get a little weight

This sounds superficially right, but unfortunately there are too infinitely many possibilities to assign more than 0 weight to them just because they're compatible with the data. It's the same fallacy as "the sun either will rise tomorrow, or it won't. Two possibilities mean a 50-50 chance."

A more practical approach will only assign weight to possibilities that might influence your decisions about what to do.

The problem is that we have basically no data, in general people (including pilots) are horrible bad at observing and recounting a situation like these and we have no other types of evidence either...

Honestly if you were put on a random desert on a random world you'd be more often right than not about how many people were on the rest of the world.

I don't think I've ever been in a desert where just by waiting a short time, visual evidence of an advanced civilization wasn't available (or in most cases, immediately).

If there's type II civilizations in our galaxy, we don't need to observe things in any more detail than we are now. If type III civilizations exist in other galaxies, we should be able to detect them as well.

What about the Dyson dilemma? We've indeed detected "voids", but we're unable to confirm their origin.

If you have a dyson sphere, it glows very brightly in lower wavelengths, such as IR. We don't see that in voids. Additionally, looking back into cosmic history, we can see the formation of voids in the very early universe and their expected expansion.

I find the assumption that any advanced civilization is going to emit external electromagnetic radiation and/or be warm quite curious. Most quantum computing work is at low temperatures, and work on photonics (for example : http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6397/57 )is coming along nicely. If we assume an extropian approach of uploading into a more advanced substrate, I find it more likely that they would be quite cold in nature.

Pretty difficult to beat the laws of thermodynamics.

QC is a meme.

ok, fine, then they are blazing in the microwave region. The Dyson sphere will always output the same amount of energy as the original star, just at a lower frequency. Otherwise the temperature would increase continuously.

There's also the Dark Forest Theory. Any civ advanced enough knows better than to broadcast information that could potentially help other advanced civs spot their location.

Yup, a number of possible solutions. Dark Forest doesn't lead to the likelyhood of us seeing UFOs in Ireland tho.

One gloriously eldritch way to look at that issue is: can an ant see us? Are they aware of our existence?

Not really the same unless ants have mapped out their universe with little left out. Unless it's just that we can't see far enough or into dark matter.

Looking at the wiki page, it seems the population on the island is decreasing. Hopefully they will either all die, thus relieving us of the ethical dilemma, or India will come to its senses and stop the abuse of these poor people and actually help them. Its criminal that they are allowed to carry on without access to any of the modern world's technology or services. And of course the islanders that killed those fishermen should also be forcibly removed and punished - murder is murder, and the fact that someone is pretending they are still in the stone age has never been a recognised defense...

On the punishment for murder end of things, they neither know or accept Indian sovereignty, so applying Indian law on them doesn't make sense. As far as the Sentinelese are concerned they're being invaded. This is more similar to a case where a soldier that doesn't know the war is over kills someone. It doesn't make sense and isn't fair to prosecute them because they're working on old information that would make the murder they committed okay legally.

I completely disagree that it's wrong to not introduce them to modern technology. To do that it would require one of us to go visit them which would probably kill them because of our diseases. I would argue it's more wrong to kill them than to not give them access to modern technology.

As far as the Sentinelese are concerned, war is not over. Every time someone visits them, the invasion begins anew.

Meanwhile, we do have the technology to contact them without giving them lethal diseases. It doesn't have to be like the Americas all over again. We can screen potential visitors for a wide range of pathogens, make them wear protective suits, vaccinate the local population, and treat them if they get ill nonetheless. The problem is that they want none of it, so any attempt to vaccinate or treat them will end up being forceful.

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