Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

I actually have a theory about why we don't see (any) alien society at the moment.

Step 1: recognize that all life needs to consume energy from somewhere (regardless of Carbon based or AI ones)

Step 2: realize that albeit the total energy contained in the universe is probably going to be enough for any civilization out there, regardless of type, the total amount of energy that the CURRENT TECH LEVEL allows to harvester is never going to be really large enough to treat it as infinity.

Step 3: assume that some individuals of any civilization wants to grab as much energy for itself as possible.

Step 4: Combine 2 and 3, and we reach the conclusion that the said individuals will always try to bar others from gaining enough energy, which means an expansion of the gap between the "rich" and "poor", and most importantly lead to a shrink of education of the "poor"s can benefit from, and ultimately destroy the "tech base" of any civilization. The "tech base" is the least amount of individuals that can generate some tech/science genius like Einstein/Newton who can propel the civilization forward greatly.

Step 5: I'd argue that this destruction of "tech base" almost surely occurs before the civilization reaches the point that general AI (or whatever that can substitute the original "tech base") arrives.

Step 6: Tech/Science advances slowly afterwards and ultimately the civilization won't reach very far into the depth of the universe.

1500 years ago, or less, in Europe we see societies that were drastically poor (by modern standards), poorly educated/no formal education (the average person) and insanely unequal society (Kings and warlords vs. Serfs and slaves) where borders (resources) were being fought over and tech was very low relative to today and even relative to a few hundred years earlier (not to get into a dark ages dispute, but the Panethon would not have been able to be build in 500AD in Western Europe).

Yet this society managed to advance just fine. We are as far away from them as a Sun harvesting civilization is away from us.

Civilization finds a way.

At some point great minds become less important. Cutting edge research today is not coming from Patent Office clerks, it comes from large research teams that are constrained by budgets not human resources.

> Civilization finds a way.

There's neither any strong guarantee of this, nor any shortage of historical counterexamples.

We have thousands of years of human civilizations rising and falling and rising again.

Each time the civilisation collapsed it's demise was brought by much stronger technological means. We might get to a point in time in which a a full restoration is not possible.

One of such outcomes is of course an atomic war, but I'm more concerned with the receurring "underdog revolts".

Historically the elites are always getting more stagnant and the line between the capable and the mass is blurring. Most of the revolutions were started not by the workers, but by the "middle class". Basically at some point the "almost haves" convince themselves that they are more capable than the current structure and they pull the workers into the madness. Look at all the ancient military revolts, at countries that fell to fascism or communism.

So far it always begun with losers taking up the tools of their masters. Things that they were not capable enough to create in the first place. The winners create the tools of their own destruction. Communists took over the "means of production", christianity the fruits of enlightment.

At this point of time, if the mass surveilance system and the information brokers fall into the wrong hands it may be impossible to recover, even if there is no military conflict. One might argue that it already happened to large degree.

*Pantheon (ou you mean the Phartenon in Greece?)

The Pantheon (the back part) does look like a giant Panettone to be fair

Let me tell you the good word of Roko.

A purely scientific view says there is just as much proof of aliens as any other "never found" element or being that we have "believed" existed. This includes all fairy tales and religions.

Its incredibly sad to see so many intelligent people spend very real money and time on fantasies... Not for entertainment but instead under the guise of seeking scientific truth.

I think alien life is a step more likely than those other things. "Alien life" is much broader of a concept than fairy tales, and we have one piece of hard evidence for it's possibility in our own existence - it's not just made up out of thin air like say, dragons or unicorns.

I’m willing to bet if there was a similar project blowing similar amounts of money trying to find purple flying unicorns there would be a similar argument made against that endeavour.

And everyone would see how ridiculous an argument that it is to equate the two.

I think it says something beautiful about humanity. The desire to find truth and wonder, no matter how small the chance of success.

I like to imagine that humans or protohumans left Africa not just for resources but because they wanted to know what was out there beyond the next mountain, river or ocean.

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