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Comment by millstone | Hacker News Reader

> Humans have, to date, seen no sign of any extraterrestrial civilization.

We do not know that and it may very well be false.

Yeast was known of and observed for thousands of years, but was not discovered to be life until the 1800s. The signs of life were there, but were not recognized.

It is just our human bias to envision complexity as only occurring on earth-like planets, on human-like time and size scales, communicating over the EM spectrum, formed of baryonic matter...

We don't ask what Great Filter prevents the aliens from speaking English. But we might if English was the only language known on Earth. What languages other than DNA are spoken in the universe?

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It is just our human bias to envision complexity as only occurring on earth-like planets, on human-like time and size scales, communicating over the EM spectrum, formed of baryonic matter...

The argument works just as well if you stipulate that it covers only sufficiently human-like complex life. The speculated existence of life composed of galaxy-scale non-baryonic matter or something doesn't affect at all the question of where all the other more prosaic life is.

I vaguely recall an article describing reasons why really exotic (e.g. galaxy scale) life doesn't make a whole lot of sense. One problem is that no matter how it is organized or what it is made of, light speed prevents it from communicating rapidly. If it doesn't communicate rapidly within itself, it can't develop or evolve much in the lifespan of the universe, at least so far. You can deduce various constraints on "intelligent life" without making simplistic assumptions a priori that humans are normal, but rather starting with what we know about physics.

Since we're on the topic of really exotic, how about a complex proton arrangement inside a star having all the properties of intelligent life? This wouldn't suffer from light speed constraints. Would it violate other constraints from fundamental physics?

It reminds me of the Boltzmann brain hypothesis. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain. It's indeed really exotic and I'm not sure how long this intelligence could exist.

Frederik Pohl wrote a novel about just such a creature.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_the_End_of_Time

What if intelligent life exists all around us, but operates on vastly different time scale? For example, being thousand of time slower or faster? It would be almost impossible for us to notice each other either way.

Time lapse photography can make plant behaviour seem intelligent. The way pea plants put out fronds that 'reach out' to attach to nearby structures in order to stabilise the plant as it grows taller.

I think of time lapse photography sequences as how a tree might see the world. The movement of animals too fast for it to react to in a similar, but larger-scale, way that flies are usually too fast and agile for humans to catch or swat.

In one of Terry Pratchett's books an intelligent tree wonders why the sky keeps flickering.

There’s a lot wrong with this “maybe they’re all ascended beings that we can’t detect” line of thought.

Firat, the EM spectrum is radiative energy. Simple as that. It’s everywhere, and postulate that it isn’t detected because the Ascended Ones have moved to woo[0] technology, assume ms that woo tech doesn’t radiate anything in the EM spectrum, not even heat. That’s an even bigger lift.

Furthermore, this transition to woo technology occurred far enough into the past, that no evidence of pre-woo technology exists in the light cone[1] visible to Earth. Keep in mind, even Bronze Age development can be detect in atmospheric samples.[2]

Second, “formed from baryonic matter”? Are you postulating noncoporeal life? If so, I’m running a subscription service to educate people how to communicate these noncoporeal living beings. I take cash and Venmo.

[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Woo

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

[2] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/why-536-was-worst-ye...

You projected this "ascended beings"/ghosts interpretation onto parent post which said nothing of the sort.

All parent was saying is that there could be life that look unlike anything that we currently know to be life. There could be organisms that are the size of solar systems, operating on such long time scales that we might not recognize it for life.

Anyways non-baryonic matter includes: neutrinos and free electrons, dark matter, supersymmetric particles, axions, and black holes.

Suppose there's a life form based on dark matter or black holes.

Neutrinos pretty much don’t interact with anything, including other neutrinos. Black holes are singularities, which arent intelligent, nor meet any definition of life.

Dark matter... well given that we can’t even describe what it is, I’ll pencil that in as “maybe.”

Regardless, all of this is pointless speculation with no evidence to support, nor even inform this line of thought. One might as well be arguing about a pinhead’s carrying capacity of noncoporeal entities, the nutrient value of unicorn meat[0], or flat earth geography.

[0] While the meat itself is superficially similar to horse meat, it’s unfortunately poisonous due to the Unicorns’ Unfortunately, there’s none, due unusual biochemistry involving arsenic, lead, and polonium.

It's irrelevant anyway: the argument is specifically about the conditions required for "...an Earth‐like planet to produce an intelligent civilization of a type that would be visible to us with our current observation technology".

Intelligent clouds of dark matter just don't bear on the argument, whether they exist or not.

Right, and the author glosses over UFOs but the evidence is undeniable.

The evidence that there is something happening in the skies is pretty strong, but the evidence that it's extraterrestrial visitors is weak.

They're a complete mystery. There is extensive evidence that US and international militaries and space programs have released. That evidence points to physical objects in the sky that respond to our aircraft and behave in a way that physicists have said is not possible given our level of technology.

Maybe they're from a small African nation that's hiding their technology in plain sight. Maybe they're time travelers. Maybe they're the result of some distortion in the earth's magnetic field. Maybe they're aliens.

It's a scientific mystery but it doesn't get the proper funding and respect because of the stigma. This is a huge loss.

Do me a favor and stop right here before going further and defend this position.

I didn't say they were aliens. Militaries have released footage UFOs and physicists have poured over the footage and ruled out every other possible explanation.

> physicists have poured over the footage and ruled out every other possible explanation.

This seems unlikely, to put it mildly.

I should rephrase, scientists have ruled out natural phenomenon and the result of human technology. There are other explanations but they are further on the fringes than alien civilizations.

See my other comments with credible sources and the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16002771

Do you have any sources for that?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-military-keeps-en...

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos/

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/why-we-should-take-ufo-sigh...

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/ufos-fact...

Credible sources, if I may add. As in, what is the scientific consensus?

I am often asked by friends and colleagues, “Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?” The fact is that they do. In 1977, Peter Sturrock, a professor of space science and astrophysics at Stanford University, mailed 2,611 questionnaires about UFO sightings to members of the American Astronomical Society. He received 1,356 responses from which 62 astronomers – 4.6 percent – reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena. This rate is similar to the approximately 5 percent of UFO sightings that are never explained.

As expected, Sturrock found that astronomers who witnessed UFOs were more likely to be night sky observers. Over 80 percent of Sturrock’s respondents were willing to study the UFO phenomenon if there was a way to do so. More than half of them felt that the topic deserves to be studied versus 20 percent who felt that it should not. The survey also revealed that younger scientists were more likely to support the study of UFOs.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/why-we-should-take-ufo-sigh...

> Over 80 percent of Sturrock’s respondents were willing to study the UFO phenomenon if there was a way to do so

Over 80% say that they would study them, but there's no way to do that (in a scientific way). More than 50% say they should be studied. The majority did not conclude that they are extraterrestrial.

There are plenty of non reproducible phenomena that are studied scientifically and UFOs wouldn't be any different. Funding can be allocated to deploying observation devices with instruments specifically for this purpose. Evidence can be cataloged and analyzed to find patterns. Unfortunately no prestigious scientific institute is going to allocate the proper focus.

This isn't happening to the extent that it should because of the stigma involved, not because of the lack of evidence or lack of capability to investigate that evidence. There are no good hypothesis that fit within the framework any conventional scientific theory but that doesn't make the evidence any less reliable.

Let's stick to the facts, because you're speculating here:

- There are UNIDENTIFIED flying objects

- (it would seem that) the scientific consensus is "we would like to investigate this, however we cannot"

- a small percentage of these UFOS are not explainable in conventional ways.

The rest are conjectures and speculations. Non-reproducibility is not the biggest issue, non-falsifiability is a bigger problem.

Scientists are saying: "we don't know, we should investigate, but we can't". You are saying: "they can't investigate, then it's obviously aliens"! I say they are Santa's little elves using camouflaged reindeer (this also explain the "flying lights": it's Rudolph's nose): prove my theory wrong.

TL;DR: if you can't scientifically study a phenomenon, or if no studies are done, science is not telling you what the phenomenon is. You can believe you know what that is, but it still just your belief.

> You are saying: "they can't investigate, then it's obviously aliens"!

You're putting words into my mouth. Nowhere have I said that scientists should investigate the extraterrestrial explanation of UFOs, they should investigate the phenomena without any preconceptions.

> Scientists are saying: "we don't know, we should investigate, but we can't".

They aren't saying that. They are saying there's a lack of funding and will. Take the time to read that article that I quoted:

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/why-we-should-take-ufo-sigh...

What does the 'U' stand for again?

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