If Aliens Exist, Here’s How We’ll Find Them | Hacker News Reader

If Aliens Exist, Here’s How We’ll Find Them

m.nautil.us

OT but: If you're interested in first contact stories, you might check out Peter Cawdron. For a quick writer of pop-sci-fi, he's pretty good. He's taken on first-contact from 20+ different starting points and has a bunch of books on Kindle Unlimited. To the lay-person, his fiction seems well researched and real-as-possible (given the requirements of the story). Sort of Peter Watt's "Blindsight" without the fireworks/flourishes

Non-affiliate links...: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MXCG244 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07W2WP5F3

One I have not seen explored anywhere else:

http://cantrip.org/slow.pdf

The perspective that we will likely explore the universe using artificial beings is on the right track.

Our species is at the stage of flinging hunks of metal and meat at nearby rocks and planets, whereas the problem of space exploration means ultimately that we are trying to cohere information across distances measured in light years. The former problem is interesting and exciting, but the latter problem is the one that we can probably find solutions for in the span of a couple of lifetimes.

How it could plausibly have been solved by other civilizations is they figured out a way to transmit information to set off the operations that would resolve to the building of the other end of a communications channel.

It reminds me of how relative time was fictionalized in the movie Interstellar, where hundreds of thousands of years here pass over a relatively very short period far enough away, to where (inverting that perspective) if we came up with a quantum device that entangled with some distant photons to set off the reactions that would yield a civilization in 100m of its years, if it were far away enough, we might even hear back from them in a few lifetimes. That's sci-fi speculation, and someone can correct my misunderstanding of general relativity, but I'm saying it might be more plausible to in-effect compute with distant parts of the universe than to solve the problem of preserving meat in cans and how we propel them through it.

Reminds me of the three body problem where the aliens can exert some kind of influence over a long distance but their own personal interstellar travel is a multigenerational process. They basically send a zip file to earth that opens up into a virus once it gets here

I think the Protomolecule is the Expanse is a physical analogue of the same idea. An organism-like nanomachine that can bootstrap itself into a sophisticated artefact given access to enough resources.

Maybe rather that colonise the galaxy personally, we should concentrate on making panspermia real by just seeding it with life.

There are more people out there talking about how, where and why we should be looking for aliens than there are people actually looking for them. All the energy and money of such could be better spent on acquiring telescope time to do real looking. The BLC-1 signal was found not by a telescope looking for ET but through processing of data from a non-seti study. If we are serious about looking we should make looking a priority rather than an afterthought. When a possible signal is found we shouldn't be scrambling for a few minutes on some other telescope to maybe perhaps check in hope that it magically repeats at some random time years afterwards. We should have dedicated facilities ready and able to stare solidly for days/weeks/months. If we are ever going to find anything it will only come through persistence.

On a related note, I wonder, what would it take to have 100% continuous observational coverage capable of detecting planet-killer asteroids a few years in advance? How big the optics would have to be? Could we put them on a satellite? How many would we need? If and when SuperHeavy/Starship cuts another zero off launch costs, could we afford to run such a system?

If on a satellite not that big. Not even Hubble-big. Wide field of view would be more important. Depending on how wide the field of view is, about a dozen to a few dozen of them to get full all around coverage? Maybe even less if you go 'super fisheye'.

edit: For having full coverage of every sector of the sky at all times, to enable automatic detection of change by whichever means.

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_camera

It's easier to talk about things or try to be internet famous (or at least known) than to do the work (which often doesn't get to be well known).

So, are folks goals to do interesting work and put in the time or to be seen?

> All the energy and money of such could be better spent

What money? It costs nothing to talk about it. It's not like anyone is wasting millions of dollars into writing a nautilus article.

The issue is a budget assignment issue, SETI is currently considered low priority vs other subjects in NASA and other orgs budget. If you want a bigger budget for SETI, then people need to talk about it and a make a lot of noise, and citizens need to vote for representative that will pledge support for that.

I have resigned myself to the idea that making contact with a technologically advanced alien civilization is unlikely to ever happen, and even less likely to happen during my lifetime and the lifetime of most of us.

It doesn't help that NASA teases a "ground-breaking discovery" once in a while, which always ends being up being something mundane. The Internet has caught up to it now. These announcements don't generate much excitement outside of niche scientific circles anymore.

I almost don't care if we're visited by an alien invasion bent on destroying us, as long as some form of contact is made. Lol.

I tell you how we find them: We are looking for an entropy source.

It may be in fact the meaning of live for humans to dissipate energy (Got this idea here: https://www.amazon.com/What-Your-Dangerous-Idea-Unthinkable/... )

It could also be an argument for bitcoin if criticized for too high energy consumption.

I thought the meaning of life was negentropy. We seem to habitually build little corners of order in the eddies of the waves of entropy sloshing around. Even just by observing things.

If using entropy emission as the indicator, how would we distinguish the exhaust of life from any other energy source? Wouldn't it make sense to look for pockets of negative entropy or would those be hidden by all the opposite reactions?

Not a physicist obviously!

You can only decrease entropy locally by increasing total entropy, hence look for an entropy source.

Stars are the most productive entropy sources in our Universe.

I see some. Now, what?

I don't think you would look for life in a star. Neither would you look for life in a black hole (that is, as far as I know with basically no understanding, also an entropy source)

Yet, the only life we know of, in the whole Universe, is so close to a star as to depend upon heat from it.

>We would argue that inspirationally led private companies should front all missions involving humans as cut-price high-risk ventures.

definitely we must make allowances for the profit motive - I mean just two specimens of Aliens would be worth millions to the bioweapons division.

Unless you mean Aliens as in the film, any ET life, while interesting, is a-priori no more likely to be useful for bioweapon research than random new life on Earth. Possibly less so, as the environment it evolved for may be radically different. What good is kevlar skin (or whatever microbial equivalent of you want that sort of biowarfare) if the proteins which make it require a 130 C body temperature? They’d freeze to death here. Heck, even just a few degrees is enough to have people worried about crops, and until we find other examples of life that is here on Earth, we can’t actually be sure what the real limits are.

It's a quote from the movie.

in response to the quote from the article which really reminded me of the corporate world of Aliens.

> is a-priori no more likely to be useful for bioweapon research than random new life on Earth.

I don't know. It's not about kevlar skins per se, but the interactions between terrestrial and alien life at the cellular level will be interesting. Terrestrial life is all the same stuff, with same fundamentals, and it all banged against each other long enough to be able to coexist in predictable ways. But what happens if a completely separate evolutionary tree is introduced? What happens if a DNA-based cell merges with a alien-whatever-based cell, gains two different coding systems (possibly made of different elements) competing for the same energy budgets? I think we'd very quickly progress biotechnology if we could witness such situation.

There's one feature they forgot to mention in terms of SETI detection:

Even working under the assumption that alien civilizations have generated signals we can recognize as artificial, we've still got the ultimate needle-in-a-haystack problem: Any such signal will be millions of years distant from us in both time AND space. Even if an alien civilization lasts 100,000 years before collapsing, we probably won't ever receive any of their signals because our overlapping windows of capability are so small (even if we also survived 100,000 years). They'd have to be close enough to us both in terms of distance (in light years) and in time (years we've had our capability and they've had theirs). Think of it like a Venn diagram with circles the size of your fist and a workspace the size of our galaxy.

Because of this, even if we're not alone in the universe, the chances of us detecting a guaranteed-to-exist alien signal is almost nonexistent, and the chances of actually meeting an alien are exponentially smaller than even that.

The only way around this problem would be a civilization that seeds the universe with robots that can lie dormant for billions of years, and activate upon detection of a signal-capable species.

> The only way around this problem would be a civilization that seeds the universe with robots that can lie dormant for billions of years, and activate upon detection of a signal-capable species.

Yes, I too have read 2001!

They ticked all the boxes until they mentioned Dyson Spheres. Then it all started to read like GPT-3.

There are very few certainties about the future of technological development, but one we can hold onto is that nobody will be building Dyson Spheres. Dyson himself has said the notion is wholly absurd, and is not in fact what he meant at all.

Cosmic microwave background is already below liquid-helium temperature, and is anyway easy to shield against. Almost all of the universe is at cosmic-microwave temperature; you just need to get some distance between yourself and stars; or galaxies, if you don't trust magnetars in the vicinity. Bring along a Jupiter if you will want protons later.

One of my favourite Iain Banks ideas: If aliens exist, you'll find them watching a solar eclipse on Earth.

"What an incredible coincidence it is that our moon fits exactly over our sun. Talk to astronomers and they’ll tell you that Earth’s moon is relatively much bigger than any other moon round any other planet. Most planets, like Jupiter and Saturn and so on, have moons that are tiny in comparison to themselves. Earth’s moon is enormous, and very close to us. If it was smaller or further away you’d only ever get partial eclipses; bigger or closer and it hide the sun completely and there’d be no halo of light round the moon at totality. This is an astounding coincidence, an incredible piece of luck. And for all we know, eclipses like this are unique. This could be a phenomenon that happens on Earth and nowhere else.

"So, hold that thought, okay?

"Now, supposing there are aliens. Not E.T. aliens – not that cute or alone. Not Independence Day aliens – not that crazily aggressive – but, well, regular aliens. Yeah? Regular aliens. It’s perfectly possible, when you think of it. We’re here, after all, and Earth is just one small planet circling one regular-size sun in one galaxy. There are a quarter of a billion suns in this one galaxy and quarter of a billion galaxies in the universe; maybe more. We already know of hundreds of other planets around other suns, and we’ve only just started looking for them. Scientists tell us that almost every star might have planets. How many of those might harbour life? The Earth is ancient, but the universe is even more ancient. Who knows how many civilisations were around before Earth came into existence, or existed while we were growing up, or exist now?

"So, if there are civilised aliens, you’d guess they can travel between stars. You’d guess their power sources and technology would be as far beyond ours as supersonic jets, nuclear submarines and space shuttles are beyond some tribe in the Amazon still making dugout canoes. And if they’re curious enough to do the science and invent the technology, they’ll be curious enough to use it to go exploring. “Now, most jet travel on Earth is for tourism. Not business; tourism. Would our smart, curious aliens really be that different from us? I don’t think so. Most of them would be tourists. Like us, they’d go on cruise ships. And would they want to actually come to a place like Earth, set foot – or tentacle, or whatever – here? Rather than visit via some sort of virtual reality set-up? Well, some would settle for second-best, yes. Maybe the majority of people would.

"But the high rollers, the super-wealthy, the elite, they’d want the real thing. They’d want the bragging rights, they’d want to be able to say they’d really been to whatever exotic destinations would be on a Galactic Grand Tour. And who knows what splendours they’d want to fit in; their equivalent of the Grand Canyon, or Venice, Italy, or the Great Wall of China or Yosemite or the Pyramids?

"But what I want to propose to you is that, as well as all those other wonders, they would definitely want to see that one precious thing that we have and probably nobody else does. They’d want to see our eclipse. They’d want to look through the Earth’s atmosphere with their own eyes and see the moon fit over the sun, watch the light fade down to almost nothing, listen to the animals nearby fall silent and feel with their own skins the sudden chill in the air that comes with totality. Even if they can’t survive in our atmosphere, even if they need a spacesuit to keep them alive, they’d still want to get as close as they possibly could to seeing it in the raw, in as close to natural conditions as it’s possible to arrange. They’d want to be here, amongst us, when the shadow passes. “So that’s where you look for aliens. In the course of an eclipse totality track. When everybody else is looking awestruck at the sky, you need to be looking round for anybody who looks weird or overdressed, or who isn’t coming out of their RV or their moored yacht with the heavily smoked glass."

(from the novel "Transition")

Huh, the fact our moon can almost perfectly line up with and eclipse our sun is very odd, but something I had never thought about before.

What if the solution to the Fermi paradox is that Einstein was right and nothing can travel faster than light and intelligent life is spread too far apart to notice one another?

Our galaxy alone is 100,000 light years across, and we've been able to emit "we're here!" for ~100 years. If someone wanted to respond "neat, us too!" they'd have to be less than ~50 light years from us.

That's certainly one of the hypothesized solutions to it.

Two-way communication certainly has this issue, but it's less of an issue for one-way detection. The galaxy should be awash in "we're here" pings of this nature.

Perhaps people only use radio for a while, and it's supplanted by a better communication method we're awash in but unaware.

Perhaps everyone collapses after a hundred years or so; maybe when they invent the internet and VR and everyone hops on to waste time and spread disinformation.

The general problem with these kinds of proposed solutions is the unlikely requirement that every single civilization out there would follow such a path (i.e. everyone switches from radio, everyone collapses, everyone goes to VR, etc).

The galaxy is only 100,000 light years across. It's been here for 14 billion years. If it's possible for a planetary civilization to go interstellar, even if they only spread at 0.1C, they would have colonized any place with useful resources thousands of times over.

Fermi paradox already assumes "that Einstein was right and nothing can travel faster than light" - it's mostly based on the fact that while the distances are huge, the involved time scales are much, much larger compared to the distances.

If an inhabited planet sends out a single successful colony ship every 10000 years to a relatively nearby star system (one that's reachable within a century or so at speeds much lower than speed of light) and it takes 10000 years for that colony to develop sufficiently to send out ships on its own, then the whole galaxy would get completely filled in, say, mere 100 million years, a time period that's relatively small compared to the age of planets and speed of evolution. Obviously, that has not happened, since that should be very noticeable even if it would have happened hundreds of millions of years ago - and Fermi paradox is about that.

I never thought about it like that. Learn something new every day. Thanks!

The counterargument to that I have heard is that if any civilization ever managed to unleash self-replicating probes in the past couple of million years, we should be able to see those, or their effects on our galaxy. And such probes seem to be not that hard to build, even at our current technology level.

we're nowhere close to building anything sophisticated that's mechanically self-replicating. Imagine how much infrastructure we would need on Mars say, in order to have a self sufficient civilisation capable of building robot probes. They'd need ore extraction and refining, smelting, chemical synthesis for a huge range of materials, silicon chip fabrication. Now package all of that into a single vehicle. The management system alone for all of that under automatic control would likely have to be a functional strong AI and we're a very long way from knowing how to build one of those.

But why should we find them? And are we really sure we want them to know us? There are so many more pressing challenges on earth, I don't see why we should invest money in searching for life in space.

Just speculating here, but what if they might have some solutions for our problems here on Earth? Perhaps they passed our evolutionary stage and have some insights into our possible futures.

And what if we're just intelligent enough to be useful slaves?

I think I'd prefer we don't broadcast our home world location. If we ever get to the point we're settling the galaxy we can start our search from somewhere far away from the entirety of our species.

> And what if we're just intelligent enough to be useful slaves?

Humans would probably survive longer as alien slaves, livestock or pets than we would in the wild on a planet we've already pushed to the brink of habitability. I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords.

It seems unlikely to me that any species capable of crossing the interstellar void has much use for slaves.

>It seems unlikely to me that any species capable of crossing the interstellar void has much use for slaves.

Based on what? There's literally no reason for there to be slaves in the human race in 2021, but there are. Why do you think that suddenly changes just because you can get to another planet?

Hell, aliens may enslave other intelligent beings for the sheer enjoyment of it. Assuming their actions in any way reflect humans and our societal morality is a pretty arrogant and dangerous way to think IMO.

You're right, they might just find us tasty.

It's okay for people to not agree with you on how they spend their time and money. Some people are more interested in the questions and answers we would get from knowing about aliens than banging their heads against intractable problems like climate change or mentally ill homelessness.

Let's also not paint it as either or. A lot of economic activity these days has little to do with aliens, preventing climate change, healthcare, housing or feeding people.

No kidding, crazy what people do with their freedom.

Us knowing about their existence can hardly be of any disadvantage?

We might try to meet them someday. Oh, you mean a disadvantage for us.

Half the people will want to meet them, the other half will prepare for an invasion, and we'll end up killing each other over it.

I feel the justification for exploring space despite the challenges on earth is similar to the justification for poetry, art, and other "non-productive" activity.

Personally, I find "wasteful" uses of our energy to be an essential part of what makes us human. Lifting our eyes from time to time beyond the mere prosaic necessities of survival is something I find nourishing and necessary, and I suspect ultimately also makes it more possible for us to more effectively address things like the pressing challenges on earth.

This always seems to come up when space exploration is discussed. The US spends more than $14bn a year on plastic surgery, more than $134bn on computer games, $48bn on tobbacco, $11bn on ice cream. But you want to cut space exploration?

Total global spending on space technology and orbital infrastructure is over $400bn, dominated by the US, and the vast majority of that is commercial activity that directly contributes to improving life on Earth. Mostly Earth observation satellites and communications systems.

The NASA budget is less than 10% of that but is a vital investment that catalysed this whole industry that has reaped massive rewards for the US and mankind. If space resource utilisation such as Asteroid capture do end up being economically viable NASA will have catalysed another industry potentially worth hundreds of billions. Jeff Bezos wants to move industry into space and zone Earth for residential and recreational use only.

Just cigarettes would pay for the entire NASA budget, but you'd rather cut NASA than cancer sticks?

Aliens? Why look? There's two options really.

Either they are there, or they aren't.

If they're there, either they're dumber than us, in which case I don't want to meet them, and otherwise--if they're smarter--they'll find us before we find them.

According to your logic, wouldn't an alien species smarter than us have the same reflexive attitude toward us: "In which case I don't want to meet them (humans)"?

To be fair when Columbus made contact with the original residents of the Americas, it didn't turn out so great for them.

It's not necessarily so binary.

I read a fun novel where the rest of the universe had discovered antigrav before internal combustion - that humans basically missed a typically easy, early discovery in physics - and the implications of that for technology transfer in both directions due to wildly different technology trees.

There's also the possibility that "they'll find us before we find them" means "they're reaching out and we have to listen if want the download for the ansible and FTL schematics".

Hey now you can’t tease a premise for a novel like that without telling us the title and author :)

Holy shit, I managed to find it (I read it many years ago). Having good Google fu feels like magic at times; "sci fi novel humans missed technology breakthrough".

Harry Turtledove; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor...

"The Road Not Taken", a short story by Harry Turtledove.

https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf

> Why look?

Because it will answer if we're alone or not in the Universe, and maybe explain a bit more of how we reached this place, how life evolves in other places than Earth and who knows what other questions can open the fact of answering that question...

At the end, this is just the search of more knowledge

I understand and agree. I was merely making a silly joke :)

I failed to humor my audience it seems judging by the responses. The internet needs a sarcasm smiley badly.

Yeah, I did not get it as a joke :) For sarcasm, you probably know, but people put a /s indicating it's sarcasm ;)

Intelligence isn’t so simple. Imagine this hypothetical example, an alien copy of us identical in every way save two: (1) the average IQ is 115 on our scale*, and (2) every biological process from metabolism to synaptic speed is 95% of ours. As a species Homo sapiens been around for 0.3 Megayears. This other species would be 15,000 years behind us in subjective years, which may or may not be something a one standard deviation IQ boost could overcome.

* IQ adjusted only for the subjective speed difference caused by (2)

According to 5000 years of mystical investigation, we have a The Matrix type situation going on here. The aliens are to be found by traversing a dimension that we cannot see, taste or touch.

But there is much literature on how to go there. Meditation and psychedelics and such.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com