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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

I've always loved the thing about solar eclipses and auroras: in order to see an aurora during an eclipse, the moon has to be the exact same size as the sun (when viewed from the planet). Earth has this (for a while at least - the moon is slowly moving away from us), and it makes us special.

So if you want to find aliens, look during a solar eclipse. It's a rare phenomenon and if there are alien tourists, they'll want to see it.

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What makes you think it is a rare phenomenon to them, or that they have the same conceptualizations of "needs and wants" as we do? What if they view these events the same way we view watching paint dry or grass grow? Just as we have to be careful not to anthropomorphize animals and other species, we must also not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing alien species until there's an actual encounter and we get to 'know' them, once again, assuming their concept of 'knowing' even remotely resembles ours.

For as far as we know, they've observed us, and have long moved on, finding us entirely uninteresting, which seems to be the one explanation we love to overlook, but given we are humans with big egos, love to make ourselves out to be more important than we actually are.

Sure, but where do you stop with this line of thinking? What if the aliens are giant gas clouds that have trouble with the whole idea of planets? What if the aliens are fluctuations in plasma flows inside a star and don't realise there's anything outside their environment?

As far as we know, there's nothing out there. As far as we know, we're the most advanced life form in the entire universe (for a given definition of "advanced"). As far as we know, every exoplanet is teeming with civilisations. We know nothing. So if we are engaged in speculating about aliens, then speculating that they're probably like us, while allowing that they may not be, seems to me to be the only sensible thing to do.

Yeah if you park your UFO at the right angle, or even better, keep it flying at the right speed and place you can have a perpetual solar eclipse. Pretty mundane stuff when you aren’t planet bound.

or that they have the same conceptualizations of "needs and wants" as we do?

Availability heuristic. We are the only example of "human level or greater" intelligent life we know of, so we assign "human like" needs and wants to these hypothesized aliens because it's all we have. I think the key thing is just to remember that this is just a heuristic and not to be overly rigid about it. Your point, IMO, absolutely stands that there is no particular reason to assume that "aliens" must be similar to us in this regard.

Everyone always argues “the universe is so big there must be aliens”. But as soon as you ask why aliens don’t act like us, it becomes “the universe is too small to have that kind”! I think the heuristic is just fine.

Pretty specist to assume they have eyes :)

True. Or that their eyes see the same spectrum as ours.

I wonder if it's even more spectacular in different wavelengths?

This is in Iain Banks's book Transition. Did anyone else come up with this before him?

I was struggling to remember where I'd read it :) Thanks :)

No idea if it was his idea or not.

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