Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

Ok, so we can explain this plus Dark Matter in one shot. Basically, planets slightly larger than Earth are practically guaranteed to evolve intelligent life. Intelligent life eventually develops technology that allows them to shield the existence of their planet, or even entire stellar system, from the probes of the Evil AI Lifedestroyer. So, all that Dark Matter is just the intelligent life in the universe, using normal prudence to keep out EAILD (see above), more or less like most humans live in houses with walls.

So, any system that is not part of Dark Matter yet is either: 1) unconducive to life (or complex life, anyway) 2) was already zapped by the EAILD 3) like us, is in a transient state where the EAILD hasn't arrived yet, but we haven't learned how to cloak our solar system yet either

Again, the key here is that planets just slightly larger than Earth are the most likely to evolve intelligent life, so they nearly always end up cloaking, and thus we don't see them.

Enjoy.

You heard it here first folks, there's so many Earth-sized planets they add up to many times the mass of the rest of the universe. Just a couple billion per star.

You forget that the cloaking devices have weight too... maybe that's where it's gone.

Or perhaps dark matter is just the cloak itself. It's nice an thick to provide adequate warmth

Well you might want to cloak your star as well, doncha you know.

I'd like to see the math behind the orbital parameters here. The most I've seen is one million Earths in a single system[1], and so I'm curious how you could get a few orders of magnitude more.

[1]: https://planetplanet.net/the-ultimate-solar-system/

Oh I don't know anything about that, I just plugged in the ratio of the mass of the earth to our sun.

Fun fact: in the first hour after I made it, this comment racked up about 25 HN "points", presumably from people who thought, "ha! that's goofy, I like it". Then, in the ten hours or so since then, it has fallen down to 17, presumably because the conversation turned from absurd to, "well, does this theory actually make sense?"

Which, given that HN points don't actually buy you anything, is fine. But, I wonder what it means that the first hour was mostly upvoting and the hours since then mostly downvoting. Maybe people are in a more positive mood in the morning? Or maybe it doesn't seem worth downvoting until a bunch of other people have commented on it.

Or, of course, perhaps the EAILD is attempting to bury it with 'bot downvotes. In which case, I guess we're already doomed...

I have a theory: your initial post, in isolation, is funny and interesting. However as it accretes more replies and becomes the biggest thread in the topic, people downvote it because they find the entire discussion annoying.

The problem with this (very interesting and fun) theory is that Earth would have to somehow be the very last planet to develop such intelligence amongst the large list of planets within detection range, which seems unlikely.

Why unlikely? Someone has to be last

> Someone has to be last

That makes it possible, not likely.

For any population N > 2, it's less likely that you'll be last than that you will not be last.

looking at the data, it’s like we’re trying our damndest to be last. Defunding education, limiting what can be taught (ex: Texas removing critical thinking), etc all seem like we just enjoy tripping on our own shoe laces

You're focusing on the wrong scale. Intelligence has skyrocketed in the past thousand years. Policy decisions in our lifetime, do not matter or they end all human matters at once.

Certain policy decisions matter on a larger scale. Killing off millions of people has to have some meaning on future abilities, right?

I think that generally I agree with you, but I would tend to say you have a small (but >0) number of things that would have huge long term ripples.

> Defunding education, limiting what can be taught

Many people became educated and even advanced science before the government got involved in education.

Indeed who's to say if the current worldview we share is a knowledge maximizing one.

Actually someone has to be latest, and rather each civilization for some time t will have its turn at being the latest.

Well, another option is that it takes - say - 200 years to get from the stage of "we're producing enough radio output to be visible" to "we developed cloaking" or "we switch to other tech that is intentionally or not - not visible".

If that's true, only a very small fraction of planets with intelligent life would land in the window where we can observe them.

Another option is that you might have many civilisations that are just as intelligent, and just as developed, but not in the same fashion - imagine 99% of intelligent species out there are more like dolphins than like humans.

Or their atmosphere is just a bit more hazy than ours, so they are not aware of the night sky filled with sky, so with less curiosity to imagine the world outside of theirs.

Well, if you want to get technical, the major problem with this theory is that MACHOs are not a good candidate for dark matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object#Th... Even if you imagine they were all hiding, their previous effects on the universe are missing.

Aha, you must need to erase yourself from your timeline, else the EAILD will find you from your past traces.

Another problem is that the effectiveness of the cloaking devices would have to be extraordinarily high across an extraordinarily large number of instances.

So they can't be seen visually, but can be detected gravitationally? That doesn't sound like very effective cloaking to me.. especially not against some hypothetically advanced intelligence.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/7afc686e-640b-4fb0-b902-666baad...

Alternative theory: the EALD use said planets as incubation for their offspring. We are a natural progression in the growth of an individual EALD in the same way that cell division and growth of gut bacteria are a natural progression in the growth of a human. A more mature EALD uses all resources available on an Earth-sized planet in order to grow up into a fully mature EALD.

Ooooohhh, this has potential. The EAILD prefers planets that are still rocky (not gas giants), but naturally goes for the bigger ones first. It just hasn't gotten around to planets as small as us yet. I like it.

Such a fun idea!

Just to add to the lore, we can already detect galaxies without dark-matter. Which would be galaxies already scrubbed of intelligent life by the EAILD

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2019/03/ghostly-galaxy-without...

Yes, it adds a kind of creepy ghastliness to that discovery, doesn't it?

And they use Dark Energy to power their houses.

Aha! Good point.

I have a more readily falsifiable idea. My reclusive neighbor is a witch, she sometimes alters data away from expected predictions so that scientists have something to puzzle over.

[removed for spoilers as requested]

Thanks so much :)

This is one of the coolest things I've ever heard :D please let scifi be scinonfi (aside from the EAILD, that bad boy can stay in fi land)

This is great! The Expanse has a similar theme around the EAILD, they have the protomolecule instead.

It's just as likely that dark matter is the byproduct or containment technology of EALID destroying intelligent life's planet, or capturing it in something analogous to how a spider wraps a fly stuck in its web.

Ah! Perhaps it's just sticking all the intelligence-generating planets, and the stellar systems they came from, into a pocket universe, or something. Maybe it's a form of plague quarantine. Lots of possibilities.

That's pretty cool! Is that a reference to a book or a movie ?

Strong vibes of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Chinese writer Liu Cixin.

Definitely! I thought the same thing. Also relevant: https://xkcd.com/1377/

It sounds like something from the last book of the Three Body Problem trilogy

Second book, aptly called “The Dark Forest”

Not as far as I'm aware, but I think Benford did a series with an EAILD, and I'm sure others have done it in some format longer than a HN comment.

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