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Comment by magicMonkeyPaw | Hacker News Reader

are you looking forward to reading all the crazy people's takes on why it's actually aliens that you found?

Always!

I think astronomers often make it worse. I mean, we like thinking about why things are actually aliens as much as anyone else (LGM1 was already mentioned), and while we mostly try to restrain ourselves, every now and again a famous astronomer breaks and lets out a paper about it.

That's great to hear! If some credible evidence of aliens did appear, where do you think it would come from? Tabby's Star like data? atmospheric spectra? FRB's? other? Would absolutely love to hear your thoughts :)

My guess is a nanotech slug impacting earth and turning us into grey goo/a matrioshka brain factory.

That already happened. Living cells are nanotechnology. Something loaded with them impacted billions of years ago, and we're currently working on AI and rockets.

Source, please.

It was intended as a joke, like the parent.

Was the parent intended as a joke? Plenty of answers didn't take it as such.

This seems a reasonable and straightforward scenario and I'll prepare accordingly

Make yourself intra-universally interesting enough that the alien construction management AI might instantiate a simulation of you from the cached info at some point. It's a strange sort of Darwinism, but it's all we've got.

An instantiation of me from a backup, however accurate, would be no use to my sense of having survived as I would have ceased to exist and not even be aware of the copy.

That's fine! People with your philosophy of self will just cease to exist, as they presumably will refuse to optimize for likelihood of being simulated, and those with a more permissive notion of self-identity will be the ones willing to adapt to the hellish computational circumstances.

(Of course, you could say that everyone's ceasing to exist, here, because your rules of what counts as a person and what's their copy applies to everyone. But please realize that, from the point of view of those who think having a copy survive is better than all of them dying, and is partial survival in some sense, that being simulated is a form of winning, even if you think both the person and the copy are deluding themselves.)

(Though I do wonder how you go about the day without having a nervous breakdown, given that your evolving state is probably quantized, or at least sliceable, meaning there's no great physical difference between your pattern shifting from one [smallfractionofa]second to the next, destroying the old one and replacing it with a new one, and your old pattern being destroyed and replaced somewhere else. It's not like your past self is aware of your future copy in normal life, either!)

(I'm not saying you're wrong; just that the situation is a lot worse than you think it is, and that we should all be living (and repeatedly dying) in absolute existential terror.)

If you haven't read Greg Egan's "Permutation City," it seems it might be right up your alley.

For an exploration of the perception of self by a digital copy I can recommend The Old Axolotl by Jacek Dukaj.

Have you read it in English? Dukaj is my favorite modern sci-fi author and I'm wondering how well he's translated.

I wonder if that's the case with "putting people on ice" if they ever manage to revive them.

Of course, one could argue that me having a past is a complete illusion anyway, as I am just some atoms.

Perhaps we are an instance created by an alien construction management AI that is wondering if we will become self aware before the timeout.

I think there was a HN thread not that long ago about speculation that (at least some) viruses come to earth from space, so perhaps it is happening all the time.

This seems such a "flat earth" type of hypothesis. I mean viruses depend on their hosts 100% so them coming from somewhere with no hosts and successfully slotting in with new hosts just seems immeasurably unlikely.

I think it makes more sense if you think of a virus as a software update for a genome. The question is not how a virus made it here--fashioning a delivery mechanism should be easy for a civilization advanced enough to hack into the genetics of a species on a distant planet--but who are it's authors and what new features or bug fixes does it provide?

Flu-like symptoms are probably just an unfortunate side effect. Things break during updates, it's an unfortunate fact of life. Maybe when a critical mass of people accept the update, they'll start building a giant transmitter for FRB's to let the sender know that the update was accepted.

But viruses don't edit our genome do they?

Well, you assume there are no hosts.

I'm sure others have written more, and more intelligent things, but my general thinking about panspermia is:

- it seems like a universal rule there are more small things than large things

- there are more small red stars than stars like our sun

- there should probably be more brown dwarfs than small stars

- there are more small planets than large ones

- planets can and do form without stars

- planets should outnumber stars, and planets without stars should outnumber planets with stars

- there are probably more oceans below the surface of objects in our solar system than on the surface

- the universe existed for a long time before the solar system

...so it kind of seems intuitive to me that life should have developed underground where there's warmth from radioactivity and water, on countless free floating planets over billions of years and occasionally one of those gets blown to bits and something like that seeded our unusual planet.

...and it doesn't seem entirely implausible to me that there should be so much biological material in space that we get a certain amount all the time like micrometeoroids.

I was recently browsing my uni's master's projects, having to pick one. One of the projects was titled "did COVID-19 come from space?"

I sort of regret not picking it; it's too funny. I'll definitely be reading it when whoever got it's done.

Earth is perfectly capable to do it at home. Has created things more bizarre than viruses.

Can you say more about these nanotech slugs please?

Imagine you're arbitrarily close to the physical limits of technology. You do or could understand how living things work, down to the molecular level, for example, and know how to engineer self-replicating machinery analogous to DNA. At the very least, you could build a 'spaceship' that can grow something at least as efficient as people, who can replicate however and disassemble earth for raw materials. Presumably, you can do much better, and you end up with something like a self-packaged deployable technological superintelligent ecosystem.

I believe they are referencing James S. A. Corey The Expanse [0] series

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)

Haha, nah, it was more the general idea. An amalgam of sci-fi. Greg Egan had a story where an advanced civ sends a gram-sized slug into the gas giant of a solar system, which bootstraps to machinery that 3d prints people and machinery, which is a plausible enough inspiration that I can give it here. Just remove the implausible 'nobody just decides to go bacteria-mode' aspect from Egan's far-future stories.

Do you happen to remember which story? I like Greg Egan and that one sounds interesting.

Found it eventually: https://outofthiseos.typepad.com/blog/files/GregEganGlory.pd...

All his stories are listed here, whether they be published on his website or elsewhere: https://www.gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Online.html

Thanks!

It's not the Egan book but Accelerando by Charles Stross is my favorite near-current day up to post-singularity book and it covers topics like this in a fantastic and fun way.

I haven't seen the original paper (maybe that should've been linked instead?), but the MIT press release is dripping with "Not it's saying aliens..." innuendo.

It's kind of hypocritical to use nod-wink-aliens-clickbait to drum up media attention, then ridicule the first rube who asks if aliens could possibly be involved.

That's a fair comment. I mostly think the MIT press release is pretty good and doesn't go down that route, except for the title, which is definitely hinting at it.

Also agree that it would make sense to replace the link with the actual paper, or an article about it. University press releases are mostly there to play up their own contribution.

> It's kind of hypocritical ... ridicule the first rube

That's why I always ridicule the mars colonization and alien contact scifi fanbois on HN, who actually believe in that nonsense.

Here's a question for them. The History channel used to have documentaries, but now it has alien fiction videos. Is that your fault?

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