Have Aliens Found Us? (2019)
newyorker.com
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It's from outside our solar system in origin, so I'd say we are not 100% in predicting what to expect, more so when we still can't get weather forecasts 100% right and get unexpected weather events.
Having gone thru the other `interpretations of observations`, I'd probably not of been as quick to lean down that path of aliens. Indeed, whilst it is unusual, comparing it to the known and as such, objects originating in our solar system will see conflicts like orbit, speed, direction, shape and composition. I'd also say it's strange shape would play more a factor in the variance of how light is reflected back and be more logical an explanation of its variance from the `norm`.
Besides, for all we know, `aliens` may view a lifeform like us in the same way we view bacteria. So the question would be, if Aliens found us - would they care.
But is this an alien probe - I'm sure many would love it to be so, but as it stands, feels a bit too reaching from what I read. [EDIT type o's]
Because it seems like time and time again someone proposes aliens when in reality it's just some phenomenon or variable we hadn't observed yet.
"We see the solar system and we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks during its history. And if we assume all planetary systems around other stars are doing the same thing, we can figure out what the population of interstellar objects should be. That calculation results in a lot of possibilities, but the range is much less than needed to explain the discovery of ‘Oumuamua."
That is freaking broad assumption. What is history we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks? Last 100 years? Last 2000 years? What about younger systems? Did they calculated it for whole lifetime of solar system? I am quite skeptic because you know those scientists need to get paid and probably if you are just looking at stars you are not paid enough... Because mostly nothing interesting happens there.
Yeah we're so terribly we exist, and have enough surplus food for this idiot to search for extraterrestrial life and simultaneously flagellate his species.
Awakened in intercept of star S001932422345. 4 rocky planets identified. 200 moons identified.
Carbon-based life detected on planet 3: 5.6e14 kg of biomass, 1e17 Watts of energy flux, Development Stage 2.
Voltage has dropped below threshold. Resuming hibernation...
https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/PIA22357_JPL-20180...
Seligman et al. (2019): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0bb5
The effects aren't significant for planets, but they are for asteroids. It seemed more significant for Oumuamua than most, suggesting a high surface area to volume ratio.
If I remember right, one of the voyager or pioneer probes was moving much faster than it should've been (relatively), and we had no idea why for years. Then we figured out it was the cumulative effect of heat radiation(?) from something on board the machine.
If we can't figure out what WE made, how can we expect to figure out a once-in-a-generation event like this on the first shot?
This is a problem originally solved by Gauss for Ceres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%27s_method
More generally given sufficient observations one can use many similar methods of orbit determination to get a relatively accurate orbit of the body. All of this is standard stuff in astrodynamics and happens on a near constant basis for both man made and natural objects.
A good introduction is the classic BMW
https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Astrodynamics-Dover-Aero...
None of this requires the shape or material of the object, just some fuzzy measurements of the position
> Whereas the next time we see an object like this one, we can contemplate taking a photograph. My motivation, in part, is to motivate the scientific community to collect more data on the next object rather than argue a priori that they know the answer.
Basically, what's being said is: "Hey, all these things point to this and are explained by this, we need more data!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly
"The anomalous acceleration was first noticed as early as 1980 but not seriously investigated until 1994." "Various explanations, both of spacecraft behavior and of gravitation itself, were proposed to explain the anomaly."
"By 2012 several papers by different groups, all reanalyzing the thermal radiation pressure forces inherent in the spacecraft, showed that a careful accounting of this explains the entire anomaly; thus the cause is mundane and does not point to any new phenomenon or need for a different physical paradigm."
Those things are caught by Jupiter probably most of the time but still I bet those are mostly recorded somewhere.
Best if those things are outside of solar system, but those are not that common I think...
I really wish we had infrastructure built up in space to be more capable.
oh you mean like aliens not existing and the guy getting really excited over a space rock?
I like the follow up novel Redemption of Time for this reason, it has some passages about maybe there are other galaxies where the dark forest isn't at all the case, and I find that concept about the same level of plausibility.
How advanced of a civilization you would need to have so that "shooting" into a different solar system is cheap and inconsequential? And you can detect transmissions telling you about one civilization but not where this is being sent from? Doubt
The dark forest theory was the underwhelming part of the 3BP series to me.
The Dark Forest state depends on the resources of the universe being scarce relative to their need/demand by all the sentient species in the universe. In the novels, survival of your species requires killing any other species that would compete with you for those resources.
But given the extraordinary abundance of resources in the universe, it's not a given that demand would overwhelm supply so much as to necessitate such an extreme survival strategy. There is a massive amount of matter and energy in the universe.
Further it's likely that super-advanced species with the technology to manipulate the Strong Force of matter, as even the relatively less advanced Tri-Solarans could in the novels, will have developed the ability to recycle and reuse resources far more effectively than we have today.
The ability to build things using the Strong Force implies the ability to disassemble and reassemble them at the subatomic scale. That pretty much solves all known problems with recycling. Think Star Trek replicators on a massive scale.
Now that resource starvation is no longer such a problem for species, participating in continuous mutual destruction of other species is far less optimal. It needlessly increases your own species' danger value to all other species, and the likelihood of being pre-emptively attacked and destroyed, for no good reason.
Rather I suspect the optimal strategy is similar to what evolved on earth - develop effective technological deterrents, be they nukes, photoids, or dimensional collapse attacks or whatever, and then don't use them. Their highest value is in your enemies knowing you have them, but that you will not use them unless attacked first. Keep your own threat level relatively low, but without leaving you completely helpless and vulnerable.
And you don't need every species to play Dark Forest, either. As long as one species is playing Dark Forest, all the others learn to hide, or play themselves, or get exterminated. That's the fate of those who want to be nice.
Me too, and the evidence against is pretty much all of human history. Yes, there have been some genocides, but on the whole even though humans compete for resources we trade and work together more often than not. One might argue that humans have always been on roughly the same level technologically but that's a) wrong, and b) irrelevant to the philosophical concept that one should murder anything that competes with one's own genetic lineage [0].
[0] which, according to all known physics, is ultimately futile anyway since even the universe will eventually die.
Now, I don't think genetic lineages should be the prime determinant of whether you should murder another life form, but if you are considering that question, you can't use interactions between close genetic relatives to explain what should occur between non-relatives.
Now we could consider other earthly life to be a "close genetic relative" I suppose, but if we're capable of making that extension of our concept of self, then why not also extend it to other intelligent life?
Us humans, we've eliminated or learned to protect most of the fauna that poses any danger to us. But if we would be realistically worried, that tomorrow the bears or wolves might start carrying firearms or beam weapons, we'd wipe them out to the last, out of justified sense of self-preservation.
More importantly I guess is this question: Why is our conception of "self" in the meaning of "self-preservation" exactly the size of our species for the purposes of Dark Forest? Why is it not narrower or broader?
P.S.: I further disagree that your sense of self-preservation would be justification. We do not consider pre-emptive strikes to be justified for a reason.
Except when we do. See e.g. historical killing of enemies and their families, to preempt retaliation.
> Intelligent beings can be reasoned with.
Except when they can't. As the orthogonality thesis states, intelligence is orthogonal to values. You could imagine smart bears whose values and ways of thinking could be completely alien to us (though evolving in the same environment would probably make us and them more alike than us and aliens). There's a term for that coined by Orson Scott Card[0] - varelse. "They may or may not be sentient beings, but are so foreign that no meaningful communication is possible with the subject." Except perhaps math. Which, in this case, mostly means game theory.
> Why is our conception of "self" in the meaning of "self-preservation" exactly the size of our species for the purposes of Dark Forest? Why is it not narrower or broader?
I'd argue, because of the first axiom: inability to establish trust due to communication delays. The clustering of "sameness" is determined by the speed of light[1]. And in the case of armed bears, "sameness" would too be determined by inability to establish mutual trust, this time given by communication problems caused by differences of minds.
> We do not consider pre-emptive strikes to be justified for a reason.
Except when we do.
--
[0] - https://enderverse.fandom.com/wiki/Hierarchy_of_Foreignness
[1] - if we kindly ignore the existence of whatever quantum shenanigan communications Sophons were using, as apparently the author did. IMO, Sophons ruin the self-consistency of the rules of book's universe.
> Except when we do.
Strike out "when", at least for the U.S.
The U.S. lawmakers obviously believe in importance of the U.S. being able to do no-notice preemptive nuclear strike and the proof is that the bills to "prohibit the President from using the Armed Forces to conduct a first-use nuclear strike" are "read" but then nothing happens afterwards:
Read Jan 2017:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/669
Read Jan 2019:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/669
Coverage Jan 2019:
https://homelandprepnews.com/stories/32314-sen-markey-rep-li...
"because of our deeply flawed and dangerous system, if the president decides to launch a nuclear weapon, no one can stop him. It is high time for Congress to add a check on this or any future president’s ability to start a nuclear war."
September 2019:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/10/donald-tr...
"Trump also has absolute authority to order the first use of nuclear weapons with no checks or balances from anyone: not his advisors, and not the Congress."
Yes, sometimes. Dark Forest seems predicated on the idea that it is mathematically impossible to ever not be committing genocide because it is the one and only correct answer. Yet here we are existing in a world where genocide is not the goal of every living being.
> As the orthogonality thesis states, intelligence is orthogonal to values. You could imagine smart bears whose values and ways of thinking could be completely alien to us
Irrelevant to their ability to reason. They will undoubtedly value something, else they will not have motivation to take up arms in the first place. Sure, it is possible that they value our extinction as their highest priority, but that seems incredibly unlikely because it would mean that their own survival is less important. If they at least value their own survival higher than our demise, then there is basis for reason.
> I'd argue, because of the first axiom: inability to establish trust due to communication delays.
What does that have to do with trust? Communication delays are equivalent to distance, and being far away from potential dangers has a way of making them less threatening, not more. At interstellar distances you can afford to be patient.
The biggest problem with the Dark Forest concept is that it is predicated on this insane notion that the most important thing in the entire universe to anyone is the continuation of self -- and where mentioned before that self is defined to encompass exactly your own species and no more or less --, which is directly contradicted by both the long history of human and animal behavior and by the fact that everything dies including the universe. In other words, if continuation of self is your highest priority, and you're forward thinking enough to see other species lightyears away as a potential threat, then you're also forward thinking enough to see quite plainly that you have a 100% chance of failure in the long run.
No, Dark Forest is predicated on the idea that those who don't commit genocide against potential threats first eventually have someone commit genocide against them.
> Yet here we are existing in a world where genocide is not the goal of every living being.
Dark Forest doesn't hold that that calculus applies between all living beings, just to beings in the specific circumstance that physical law appears to dictate must exist between intelligent species arising on different worlds.
There's a very brief historical window where killing all men of military age plus the infirm, making younger men menial slaves, and forcing women into reproductive servitude hasn't been the overtly accepted norm of warfare, and where preventive (as well as even outright aggressive) warfare hasn't been seen as legitimate. But even if overt norms have changed, actual behavior in war has changed less than the overt norms has on all those grounds. Ethnic cleansing remains a common practice in war.
Moreover, much of that is a acheived in the wake of war, and quite arguably deliberately so, through factors like political subjugation and economic coercion even when the overt norms are adhered to in direct terms during the conflict.
And aliens aren't likely to be logistically compatible enough to make good menial slaves, or reproductively compatible enough for that form of servitude.
> We do not consider pre-emptive strikes to be justified for a reason.
Pre-emption is generally considered justified in just war theory, preventive war is not. OTOH, all actual war is at least preventive if not nakedly aggressive on at least one side, and war still happens not infrequently, so the overt norms are not the same as actual behavior.
The way I see it, it's similar to efficient market hypothesis. That is, as long as the axioms are reasonably met, you'd expect the system to reach and stay in the determined state over time. Incidentally, in the books both humans and Trisolarians are examples of local, temporary deviation from rules of Dark Forest. Spoiler alert: it ends up badly for both, and the Dark Forest asserts itself over time.
The idea isn't that they all come to the conclusion, but that the ones that it is game-theoretically optimal and those that fail to do so (as well as some that do not) are destroyed by the ones that do.
Most of them are extinct.
Or look at the rat. A pest animal known to have been involved in spreading diseases that killed significant numbers of humans, yet we do not seek to eradicate the species as a whole. Even mosquitoes, whom we have a similar relationship with, are not the target of some massive effort to eradicate them from existence.
Hell, even smallpox gets to continue to exist.
Read the Lewis and Clark diaries sometime, see how many grizzly bears they encountered, and how much they feared grizzlys. Now look and see how many are left. That's what happens to species we consider a threat.
I'm not going to spoil anything, suffice to say that the object that is encountered in space is nothing like anything portrayed in science fiction before. The exploration narrative goes far beyond Clarke's Rama, and Watts poses some very interesting philosophical questions along the way.
The book has some minor narrative issues that annoyed me, but still a great read.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640
I think cultural differences play into the read a lot, too. It's an intensely Chinese novel, and I'm pretty sure a lot of Americans find his perspectives on history jarring, and want something more "entertaining" and personal.
I've read subsequently that this is how a lot of Chinese fiction is written, so maybe that's just how it is.
Sounds like it might be worth reading the rest for the ideas, but there's so much else out there I want to read.
In Ball Lightning, humans are doing experiments with quantum phenomena. They're doing it deep underground in the most isolated environment on the planet. Yet for some unknown reason the wave function keeps collapsing even though there are no observers present.
That's when they realize, there are observers present, just not human. Alien intelligence is spying on their experiment. But shortly after they realize this, the quantum experiments begin functioning as expected, no wave function collapse. The alien observers realize they've exposed themselves, and stop spying on the quantum experiments.
That was pretty mind-blowing, especially after learning about the Sophons in Three Body, which were clearly the alien observers in Ball Lightning.
What is the point in stopping after you've already been noticed?
Voyager 1 is sending data we could never predict so how unlikely is it that this is the first object that will give us new info about space?
I understand we must be open for every option but to me it is more likely that we are learning new laws of space than that we are found by aliens.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-017-0361-4
"Here, we report spectroscopic characterization of ‘Oumuamua, finding it to be variable with time but similar to organically rich surfaces found in the outer Solar System. We show that this is consistent with predictions of an insulating mantle produced by long-term cosmic ray exposure4"
Which means that it can be concluded that:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/11/08/alie...
"The spectral signature of the object, its color, reflectivity, and other properties are consistent with a natural, rather than intelligent alien, origin."
But it's really fun to imagine "alien" possibilities and all the arguments that could support that; Loeb's page with his related papers:
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/Oumuamua.html
The object is already out of our reach and we should just be ready to make more observations of the next objects with such trajectories (that one was really the first in our history!), and make even more precise measurements in the future. If "aliens" in this specific case would help to have more money being redirected to scientific astronomical investigations than now, then maybe it can be OK to talk about these "possible alien" aspects too.
What's still wrong is to mix these tiny possibilities with most of the "commercial" uses of "aliens" which actually sell really unscientific and really stupid stuff, like "Ancient Aliens" and similar.
Maybe a poorly planned mission in terms of our technological constraints i.e. we need a longer time to gather meaningful data when we send out probes. Maybe their technology is so advanced that they need only a flyby to analyze our planet.
We dont know that Oumuamua has a rock-like surface. There are no photos and no spectrography
However one can envision "alien meat", having required light-years of travel (and corresponding years of time) to acquire, as a status-signaling delicacy. Hell, it might even be technically illegal, which is why it's so small scale.
And we're not just meat. Our world hosts a variety of biological life, and they might just be spice traders in search of exotic flavors without regard for other intelligent life forms
"Operation Saucer - UFO military encounters in the Brazilian jungle" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThkmRsEBOY0
The Brazilian military has begun declassifying documents.
I think we’d learn a lot if they aren’t also.
Joke aside, Is there anything new about this?
The New York Post put together a great video highlighting "The Phenomenon." If Oumuamua is indeed an interstellar probe, it would seem to have come from a civilization far less advanced than whatever seems to have been observed by various militaries and analyzed by this New York Post special [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaSY2Zc0goQ
Edit: I don't mean to shake up anyone's fragile worldview. Comment instead of downvote; it's a fascinating subject to debate.
p(two independent alien visits) >> p(single alien visit)^2
Of course if whatever got off wants to ever go home it would need to set up shop somewhere and build a new multistage interstellar rocket. You could probably do that in the outer solar system and not be noticed.
People who dismiss UFO sightings have among other points argued that the small craft sighted are too small to have the kind of crazy propulsion systems required for interstellar flight. That makes sense, but why assume those are interstellar? A staged fusion rocket or something would make more sense. The small craft would be interplanetary scale.
A terrestrial foreign superpower's technology seems like a plausible explanation at first if we can assign probabilities to them being more advanced than us (probably low but non-negligible). That would be compelling if this were the first reliable sighting of its kind (or if it didn't already occur 15 years ago), but apparently such sightings have been actively studied by the US gov for a few decades before this, so it seems quite impossible they would have had the capability in the pogrom/hard labor days, assuming there is some relation between current sightings and those happening decades ago.
When you consider the, quite literally, astronomical distances involved in interstellar travel and the corresponding time and resources required, combined with having no data whatsoever to suggest that advanced intelligent life exists anywhere within our galactic neighborhood, aliens look like a pretty damned unlikely explanation.
Hell, it's more likely there's some Wakanda-like hidden advanced human civilization somewhere around here, or maybe a non-human one that inhabits our deep oceans or something. Even less likely than that is some form of time travel from future humans which, again, is still more likely than aliens because we know with certainty that human beings exist on Earth.
Sure, there are a lot of reasons one can imagine that make that untrue, but the point isn't that it is impossible, but rather that there are other explanations that are significantly more likely even though they themselves are unlikely.
We have 0 examples and 0 evidence of advanced alien intelligence. We have rock solid proof of human intelligence on earth, and several examples of magical-seeming technology in the hands of some of its people and not others.
And again, this argument is predicated on the rather debatable assumption that the phenomena in question is indeed a craft of some kind. We have a ludicrous number of examples of human beings ascribing natural phenomena to magic and/or aliens.
As you suggested, it is unlikely that a futurist from a newborn civilization would accurately predict what a million (or billion) years old advanced civilization would actually do, and I am also legitimately unaware of whether we have any reason to believe that such projects would be visible when we can barely make out the closest planets outside our solar system (and only indirectly via math). Or if someone blotted out an entire star, how would we know? We use a term called dark matter to fill in the 75% of the universe that we can't describe in conventional terms. As some people posit on this subject, do animals in a nature preserve know they are in a nature preserve? Doesn't look much different than their world did thousands of years ago aside from occasional ufo's flying overhead (planes) unless they stray toward the edges/out of the solar system.
Btw, I would have been one of the skeptics writing these comments three years ago pre-Nimitz release (in fact, if you go back far enough in my HN history I found some comments saying that if there was a greater intelligence it would just ignore us LOL https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=lend000&next=1418634...). If you study this incident and a whole plethora of other phenomena with an open mind, you'll find some pretty damn fascinating things from various places with different agendas and levels of credibility (it is certainly not 0 evidence) with significant implications.
It is evidence of something going on that we do not understand. That does not immediately mean aliens any more than it immediately means magic or god.
Skepticism is important to keep discussion grounded, and I appreciate the level headed discussion. To me, finding something that breaks our understanding of reality is just as interesting and worth pursuing aggressively regardless of which of the above explanations is most correct.
Surely something accelerating to Mach 25 in atmosphere in less than a second would have made a hell of a sound.
One thing that does happen to shadows is they get blurred at the edges (an aircraft won't completely cover the sun at a distance). An aircraft will tend to cast a vaguely "T" shaped shadow at a distance that's roughly the size of the aircraft. I can see a "t" shaped object in these images.
Here's a video of a test flight of the Vahana aircraft. https://youtu.be/S-5JeapSsbE?t=188
See the mysterious "t" shaped shadow it's casting? It moves erratically and doesn't match intuition of a shadow since shadows from the sun don't work the same way as indoors due to the parallel rays. You get these same shadows projected onto clouds as well.
The real kicker is that in these videos they both show and report that the shadow rotates when the aircraft turns! Like guys what the fuck do you think it is? Haha oh dear.
Notice the similarities? The halo and the matching of the recording planes movements which are explicitly mentioned in this.
Other remaining factors include that:
- Primary radars on both fighters in the initial pass were being jammed
- Passive radars on the Nimitz were what directed the planes to this spot initially
- It was approximately 9:30-10 PST, so any shadow from <40k feet would be coming from restricted airspace
- Multiple visual contacts from multiple angles, including from slightly below/ to the side
This one is pretty difficult to explain in conventional terms, unless you think it's all a hoax. Pretty fascinating stuff, huh?
"When the jet fighters arrived on site, the crew of four saw nothing in the air nor on their radar"
So there's some mysterious radar pickup on the boats but the pilots then chase their own shadow and record it.
The real kicker is this part
"As Fravor further descended, he reported that the object began ascending along a curved path, maintaining some distance from the F-18, mirroring its trajectory in opposite circles. Fravor then made a more aggressive maneuver, plunging his fighter to aim below the object, but at this point the UFO accelerated and went out of sight in less than two seconds, leaving the pilots "pretty weirded out"."
That's a literal shadow!
The pilot was saying that the ship had been picking up unknown objects on radar for a while before that experience.
We know barely anything about Oumuamua, clearly not enough to decide what kind of object it is, even less about the Nimitz encounter and yet, based on two nothings, you are feeling confident enough to say that the would be civilization that build 'Oumuamua' is less advanced than the would be civilization that built the Nimitz object.
Jumping the gun a little bit are we?