Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

TheOtherHobbes

Which assumes that we know what "colonised" looks like.

The entire premise is rather bizarre.

"Let's send out probes that make probes that send out more probes until we've covered the galaxy!"

"But... why would anyone do that?"

It seems obvious until you think about it - and then it stops being obvious.

So you cover your galaxy with probes that keep sending probes back and forth. So what? What have you actually achieved?

If you assume massively superhuman intelligence, what are the odds there are more interesting goals for a civilisation to aim for?

View on HN

>Which assumes that we know what "colonised" looks like.

100% my problem with this. We're applying a human-centric lens to this. Remember that these theories are based on a life-form that evolved completely separate from anything we have ever known. That doesn't just mean separate body structures, but an entirely novel and completely unknowable circumstance.

This is why these theories all upset me - they should all say things like "we should have seen (an alien species that is similar to us) in this amount of time.

Because fuck only knows what an alien who evolved in a system based on helium or some other gas would think. We certainly can't try to figure it out. The most creative minds in this area are those writing hard sci-fi, I would argue. And most of them only treat that subject with a hand-waving and 'we can never know those mysterious aliens' sort of thing.

The Fermi paradox isn't that there are no aliens, it's that there aren't billions of them, and if there are billions of them not a single one is as expansionist as humanity.

Humanity is not expansionist on a galactic level. Once we are in a position we could make it to the stars, maybe we wouln't do it either, since it might take too much resources that can be spent more efficiently in ensuring our own survival here in this system.

> Humanity is not expansionist on a galactic level

The sun will go boom soon enough, so survival is also temporal. We understand distributed systems are more reliable and require 1+n

>> The sun will go boom soon enough

Depends on your definition of 'soon enough'. The sun will have exhausted its hydrogen supply in about 5 billion years. In about 1 billion years, the temperature on this planet will probably become unsustainable for life.

Your right of course, but that event is so far in the future, I doubt we can speak of anything even resembling humanity by that time. I was thinking in timeframes of about a ten to hundred thousand years, not billions.

Do you expect an alien species that is intelligent enough to create the technology to travel through space will understand math in a way that is at least in principle intelligible to humans?

If yes, is it possible that there are also other ideas that all intelligences are likely to almost necessarily converge on?

But a civilization doesn't have to 'aim for' that. If you can create the first probe, it does the rest. The right question is, what are the chances that nobody in any civilization ever, thought to create that first probe?

If we can think of it (and here we are, thinking of it) then why wouldn't any other civilization contain a member that thinks of it? Because humans are the greatest smartest species in the galaxy? Now that would be a far-fetched idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com