Astrobiologists have released the preliminary results of a SETI survey
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
What better way to keep an intelligent species from escaping than limiting the velocity of information transfer and putting everything interesting at distances that are large multiples of the maximum velocity.
In other words, maybe the simulation architect doesn't want us to escape and find (contaminate) the other experiments? :)
In time, as the expansion of the universe accelerates fast enough, not even light will keep up to get across.
Perfect total airgap.
I can't explain why, but ants are some of my favourite animals.
Is humanity even generating enough radio signals that may be even remotely possible to detect on Alpha Centauri (4.367 light years away)?
It's funny how movies always show a telescope operator falling asleep listening to deep space as if that's what he does every day and every night....
... and then the reality of these papers showing that SETI does very brief checks for a handful of hours (11hrs in this case) maybe once per year, and only looking in one direction, and only at a narrow frequency band.
I love it, because the silly fantastic odds of the system finding anything, much less of that thing showing up while a person happens to have the headphones on and not be distracted, are just Indiana Jones level entertaining to me. I’ll buy in every time. :D
(Feel free to downvote me, flag, etc., for speaking heresy.)
Saying that we're alone because we haven't heard back after emitting radio waves for only 130 years is like being at a point in space, looking half an inch around us (1.3 cm) in all directions and declaring that Occam's Razor says there's probably nothing within a radius of 2,900 miles (4,650 km).
Does that seem reasonable? :-)
Attaching 'specialness' to the default assumption is just your emotional reaction and unwarranted.
Uniquely sentient across time and distance, impossible.
So,
> Occam’s Razor also says all planets orbit the earth
yes
> because we are God’s finest creation
no
What is our interstellar beaming frequency? At what power? Why else would there be any signals between 0.7 and 93 that aren't -300dB down? Radio waves spread. And scatter.
You're going to travel in the mountains in a remote region of a planet with no ionosphere. You want to eat your meals while listening to music. Do you take a shortwave radio or an FM radio?
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We're looking for the lost keys under the streetlight.
Can anyone comment on this? What is the idea of such a beacon?
It's a good series at first, but gets very woo-woo by the end.
Spoilers:
All aliens are actively hostile to others. Any civilizations they find, they destroy.
The books don't really specify that *all* civilizations are actively hostile to each other but hints that the best chance for survival is basically being quiet since there are unknown civilizations that yield tremendous power and are in fact actively hostile to any signs of other intelligent life which they can destroy with relative and terrifying ease. It's that sort of status-quo that makes the dark forest theory so scary and why everybody that eventually reaches that conclusion would want to remain hidden and/or silent. Throughout the story we only ever get to see from the point of view of two civilizations so who knows if there wasn't something like a star-trekian federation at some place or time since we do eventually get to know that there were many many civilizations in the end.
It does get really crazy, but I personally found the whole trilogy really awesome. It would be hard to build such a story relying only on our current understanding of physics and technology and even some of the crazier parts are still kind of based out of real theories and hypothetical developments or discoveries.
I still highly recommend this trilogy to any sci-fi/first contact fan.
Because there is a non-zero probability that some civilizations are, or will become, hostile predators, the most effective survival strategy is to:
1) avoid detection at all costs, and
2) exterminate any civilisation you detect before they can invite the attention of these predators, or worse, evolve into one; meaning
3) become the predator
Ultimately, every species is biologically trained to propagate itself, consuming resources and expanding presence, unless there are other external factors governing (for example, long gestation periods, limited offspring, etc)
So, advanced civilizations might put communication mechanisms in convenient places to contact inferior species.
Stable elements are not scare, life is scarce. I would hope that any civilization advanced enough to travel the verse would be able to strip mine the elements it needs from lifeless rocks and leave planets with life alone.
Bezos is right that we should ultimately move resource extraction to space.
Grouped by planet, we have a sample size of 1.
It's not obvious to me that this would apply to xenobiology.
(It's not even totally obvious that it applies on Earth - other species live a much more synergistic lifestyle than humans do)
To me it seems plausibile that other life forms that are probably not even based on dna are very likely to be imperceptible to us, the same way we are to ants.
Thus I’d like to think the universe is probably our cage and we’ll never possess the mental capacity to distinguish alien beings from actual natural phenomena.
So if we are like ants in the universe, then the reality we are in is probably insanely complex - we are just interacting with the little slice of it we can interpret, just like the ants.
In the story, a character proposes that humans are effectively like frightened forest critters with no ability to understand the nature of the seemingly magical rubbish that extraterrestrial picnickers could have left behind after a brief stop on Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic#Plot_introduct...
In that case if you wanted to colonize another planet you’d have to look for an empty one, or you’d have to erase the whole native ecosystem and start over. Looking for an empty planet might be a lot easier, therefore expansionist civilizations might be specifically avoiding inhabited planets. Maybe?
IMHO that's how we will detect the aliens, by spotting one of their megastructures or their side effects (waste heat, gravitational effects, light blocking, stray directional coms traffic, etc.), not by getting any targeted message handed to us on a platter.
Could be we are seeing some of that now, thinking it's a some kind of a weird but natural phenomenon.
Satellite data? What Satellite data? What do you define as "close enough radius"? Why?
[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/how-far-from-earth-could-...
P ?= NP is IMO way more significant for a start, to say nothing of questions about consciousness, fusion energy, ways to explore and colonise space, ...
This tells you nothing unless you also know the probability of (intelligent) life emerging on a planet. As far as we can tell it could be very low, and earth could very well be a unique combination of factors that allows it. Remember, there are many more possible deck of 52 cards than there are planets in the universe.
In that case we can't treat our existence as independent of the existence of other nearby civilizations.
If a civilization doesn't have FTL then expansion beyond their solar system seems unlikely. Yes, it is still possible with sub-light travel, but then you run into the problem of motivation.
When limited to sub-light speed trade between colonies and the home system is so slow that you probably can't usefully import resources from the colony systems.
When you are stuck with sub-light, colonizing another system (unless perhaps you are in a place with a lot of stars close together) is more accurately described as spending a whole lot of effort to establish another system that then won't really have much interaction with or effect on your system.
Even the old classic of kicking out your undesirables who then go on to start a new civilization doesn't really work, because it is so expensive. If you dislike them so much that exile is the only answer and you don't have someplace in your system to exile them to you are far more likely to just kill them.
> When limited to sub-light speed trade between colonies and the home system is so slow that you probably can't usefully import resources from the colony systems.
I mean this seems to disregard our entire history as a species. There have always been "others" within a population that seek, above anything else, to find a new place to go in order to live life they way they want to.
We are also moving into an age where data and knowledge are raising to supreme importance. Both of these things can be transported at the speed of light, so a multi-solar system civilization that is able to increase is total resources available to acquire new information and knowledge will be at an advantage. Then, of course, there is the desire to preserve the human species as a whole by "spreading our seeds" so to speak.
Sure, but those who have successfully done that have either went to a place near enough that they could take all the food and other supplies they would need during the trip there with them, or have went to a place where food and other resources were available on the way.
I can't think of any human group that did a migration that had to cross a span that provided no food or drinkable water and was too long for them to cross on what food and water they could carry with them.
With sub-light migration to other solar systems we are talking about crossing empty spans that will take several lifetimes to cross. There are ways to deal with that, but they are likely to be major undertakings that require a heck of a lot of resources so that to do it you need widespread support from the people who aren't going.
My guess is that you'll need a pitch much stronger than "We want to go someplace to live our way" (especially since the people who leave won't be the ones who arrive at their destination--it will be their descendants).
If the energy and time requirements are great enough, space between solar systems will work as the same sort of barrier space does for the rest of life on Earth.
Interesting. That's a point I haven't heard before. Or perhaps it's my lucky 10,000 day. :-)
Although our path through the galaxy is somewhat unique. Stars don't really move in unison in the greater timescales, but more like slip past each other. Assuming Sol was born as a binary star, its sibling could be other side of the galaxy by now.
Another thought is that if WE do expand to the stars, how long until our distant ancestors aren't really the same civilization anymore, but something completely alien to each other? Evolution could take some rather unexpected steps in the long run.
Rather, it refers to those stars which are within reach of us, now, in a timescale that is short relative to the typical interval between births of civilizations that distance apart. That could be anything from a corner of a galaxy to a galactic supercluster, depending on the speed with which civilizations can expand and the frequency with which new ones arise in the universe.
Note that if civilizations expand at sufficiently close to the speed of light, then there is only a tiny window of time between when their light arrives and when their colony ships do. So under this model, it is quite unlikely that a new civilization waking up for the first time would look around and see anyone. Most likely, either the light from those other civilizations hasn't yet gotten here, in which case we see nothing, or their colony ships have already gotten here, in which case we wouldn't be born in the first place.
1) The idea is that we will do it, not that we have done it already. (How does something we will do in the future affect what we see today? It doesn't, at least not causally. It's just that some civilization had to be first in the neighboorhod, and that civilization will be the one to preempt the others, at least according to this model. So it's more of a probabilistic conditioning effect than a causal effect: conditional on existing, that means no one preempted us, which means we're the first, which means we'll preempt everyone else.)
2) The preemption happens well before the other civilizations come into existence. For example, we might deplete their stars of energy so that evolution doesn't happen at all on their planet.
That said, it only takes a tiny fraction of their civilization to do it, for it to happen.
So then.. maybe only the civilizations that aren't expansionist survive? Or everyone changes their mind and no one is expansionist by the time they get the right tech? Or maybe it's physically impossible to build von Neumann probes for some reason we don't yet understand? Or who knows what else. In any case, it's got to be zero in the history of our galaxy.
Also don't forget that the purpose of the probes is exploration and/or resource harvesting. For exploration you only need a handful of probes at each star system and they may depart after completing their survey which would result in a very small footprint. For resource extraction you need some means of transporting the resources back to where they will be used in a timely manner which puts limits on the effective distance at which they can operate.
A civilization may even decide that it's pointless to explore the entire galaxy this way since it would take millions of years to gather and transmit the information, what government do you know of that's capable of planning over that kind of timescale?
Life is not only probable, it's inevitable. Given the proper conditions, it's just a matter of time. And the same happens with intelligent life, it just needs more time without being hit by a meteor.
Given the proper conditions, that is. A planet that is just a ball of magma won't see life (as we know it) until it cools down.
The Rare Earth solution to the Fermi Paradox is as good a guess as any. Life of some kind might be relatively common, but intelligent life could still be really rare. We are the only species on Earth in 3.5 billion years to make radio telescopes and spacecraft.
On other worlds, it might never happen because of the thousand different factors that led to hominid evolution which might be different elsewhere. For example, If the non-avian dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct from a large meteor impact, who knows whether any technological civilization would have ever formed. At any rate, mammalian evolution would have gone differently, and it's anyone's guess whether some non-hominid intelligent species would have evolved instead. They didn't during the age of the dinosaurs.
We don't even know whether multicellular life is a low probability event. Maybe Cambrian explosions don't happen very often.
There's no inevitability here, only unknown probabilities.
But the region we can observe is definitely finite.
What we can causally affect (light cone) is a subset of that.
And where we can travel given the Ultimate Technology is a small subset of the previous.
FWIW, the actual paper does not put it like that. It instead calls it "one of the most profound and fundamental questions posed to science". That seems reasonable.
> Given the number of stars out there, it seems wildly improbable that we are alone, and if we're not then it's anyway going to be basically impossible to communicate with them due to speed of light limitations.
Don't you find it fascinating that we think it's wildly improbable that we are alone, yet have not been able to find other life? I certainly do.
Ignoring the huge philosophical implications intelligent life elsewhere would have, it would also provide some very useful bounds on a bunch of the quantities involved in e.g. Drake's estimate. It would also offer some clues as to whether or not a great filter is likely, and wheter or not it lies ahead of us or behind us. Surely massively important!
> P ?= NP is IMO way more significant for a start
Important, yes, but not a scientific question (it is a mathematical one).
> to say nothing of questions about consciousness, fusion energy, ways to explore and colonise space, ...
A complete understanding of consciousness would also be monumentally important, I agree. But fusion and space exploration? Great, but surely "just" (huge and important) technological advances, rather than fundamental scientific questions?
Given that we can scarcely communicate with a chimpanzee, our nearest living relative, nor fully comprehend how any other species on Earth communicates (those which evolved under the same conditions that we did), I find it totally unsurprising that we're unable to communicate with aliens.
That's as much as we can manage with chimpanzees - our immediate relatives, who we have physical contact with.
Humans scarcely care how other earth-bound species communicate enough to identify it as communication - how do insects and plants and fungi communicate? What information is whale song (mammal) transmitting? Is the 52 Hz whale communicating, or not?
Alien communication will look far more different even than that.
We haven't been looking for very long, and out searches have been very very limited.
In part this has to do with the Fermi Paradox. Are we alone because we're in a protected garden? Alone because the half-life of civilizations is very low? Alone because there is a firewall that takes out all civilizations at a particular level of development (like say climate change)? Maybe if we learn about the firewall we can do something about it? The list of answers to the Fermi Paradox is immense and many of those answers could make a concrete difference to us.
Who is to say that we can't communicate? Some theories of physics might allow for wormholes or something like that (this is not likely at all due to time travel paradoxes, but who knows).
Even just learning about another civilization and measuring the rough properties of the atmosphere of their planet could be a revolution. If we discover that the atmosphere is totally unlike what we have, that a totally new kind of life is possible, we could open up entire new fields of science.
The most obvious way to communicate is to put out basic facts about the universe, like say the energy states of your favorite atoms or something like that. What if their version of the basic facts is thousands of years ahead of ours? Physics works off of very little evidence, a small nudge toward the right answer is all that it would take to change everything.
Even if we can't communicate in a lifetime or two, maybe we can communicate over the span of 200 years. Imagine what could be learned through an exchange with a culture that has followed a totally technological and scientific arc. We could be in a local minima missing really important things about the universe.
We're in a pretty crappy place when it comes to AI. We know how to do some things, but the overall picture of figuring out what intelligence is, we're in the dark about that. We don't even know how to ask the right questions. Access to a totally different intelligence would change that completely.
I could go on from fields like linguistics, to psychology, everything that communicating with an alien species touches upon would be revolutionized. Imagine how chemistry would change if we knew for sure that ammonia-based life was possible? We would invest massive sums and figure it all out, and all it would take is a bit of knowledge about the gross statistics of their atmosphere.
And we're just scratching the surface.
* alone because there was no need to simulate a second intelligent species
* alone because there was no desire to simulate a second intelligent species
* alone because there were not enough resources to simulate a second intelligent species
Whales also teach each other new hunting techniques and have other complicated social behaviors.
Without a better understanding of whale language and cognition, I don't think you can safely say they don't engage in a form of scientific inquiry.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16270270
[2] https://www.orcanation.org/2019/10/10/the-social-intelligenc...
[1] https://www.zmescience.com/science/biology/killer-whale-dolp...
However, it might give us a clue about how hard cross species translation can be.
On the contrary, bigger brains can be a hindrance, consuming energy for no reproductive benefit.
That is an odd thing. The one that I'm curious about is the drum-banging for spotting (probably highly simple) lifeforms on places like Mars. Given the ability of rocks to hop planets, it's a totally reasonable thing to find I think as you don't even need from-scratch bootstrapping.
I expect it's partly a product of PR departments as you have to keep the public engaged, not unlike the occasional production of aesthetically pleasing images.
It seems to me that it's enough to push for off-planet permanent human settlement. Heck, given the long-term possibilities of AI and von Neumann probes, distance isn't even an unassailable problem, you just have to change your time horizons.
Jill Tartar has talked about how we would need to think about investing in a powerful radio beacon for 60,000 years if we wanted other aliens to know about us. That gives one an ideal of the scale of time and distance SETI is dealing with, assuming their assumptions are more realistic than Fermi's was.
Like in a video game where new areas are rendered as you discover them....
And putting some resources into that research is a good idea, even just for what we learned about our own planet thanks to having a different context.
Or having an interesting question for people to become interested in adjacent research at least.
It's only limiting if you're trying to reach C when traversing the spacetime. But if you're bending spacetime instead, there's no such limitation!
Monthy Python
Because unless we're missing something big, it would be clear that intelligence is either perpetually stuck in their own tiny tiny corner of the universe, or kill themselves off before they can reach the rest of the visible universe.
The following is dependent on the unknown likely duration to perfect evolution, and how it overlaps with unknown (but widely-assumed to be light-speed) travelling limits.
Given appropriate overlap distance of the two, there will inevitably arise the first civilisation to perform the following steps in order:
1) Attain self-mastery of internal planetary conflict and resource management. (Permanently sustainable peace and sustenance.)
2) Use their now abundance of time to perfect mastery of physics as is physically possible (something we know to have barely-conceivable limits in terms of size/scale etc).
3) Traverse the universe looking for any others, who - by not being the first - will therefore likely be behind them in terms of any conceivable aspect.
4) Immediately upon finding them, imprison them virtually in a seemingly "empty" but otherwise identical universe. This forces the same conditions upon them that were known to cause success, and also eliminates all risk of contamination of the existing peaceful equilibrium.
6) Wait.
7) The found species either:
a) achieves mastery of peace and sustainability, at which point contact is initiated as peaceful equals.
b) the species fails and dies.
8) Permanent universal peace is the only possible outcome, no matter how many times the above process is repeated.
Given the age of the universe, and how far we have come in such a short time, to me the above seems a likely resolution to the paradox.
With slight modification, it also explain various unexplained "contacts".
Perhaps the "virtual imprisonment period" does not ideally have a definitive binary on/off, instead is progressive in a reversible way (hence the lack of believability and proof for many "encounters"). Such non-invasive contact events may serve as research/assessment, and non-polluting "helping hands" for those who may be watching and waiting.
It would certainly appear we are very near (relatively speaking), to the point mastery of the physical world, making us likely virtual imprisonment and observation targets.
Whether we can do the peace and sustainability bit remains to be seen.
Frankly, us being the only/first sapient species is by far the most optimistic possibility.
I think by the time we colonize anything beyond alpha centuri, there are more of humanity living on o'neil cylinders than on any planet, and the people living on planet are the ones that desire to live somewhere 'wild'
The lack of any other intelligent life so far means that we have no evidence one way or another that we will succeed or fail. Better than if 100 million civilizations already tried and died.
Be quiet! They'll hear you.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/2j3nxz/radio_silen...
Perhaps it's not even a conscious decision on their part. Perhaps all our achievements, everything we are, isn't recognized amongst alien-kind beyond a short 1 line entry in an alien log file,. Perhaps their monitoring system detects and discards a thousand worthless blips like us every day.
What if we're just not that special
Only 5% of all matter is "regular" matter, and ~27% is dark matter which makes it be 85% of all mass but not of mass-energy since there is ~68% of dark energy.
It's the combination of dark matter + dark energy that makes for ~95% of the universe's total mass-energy.
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#:~:text=In%20the%2....
It will be the single most monumental moment in human history.
For others, they’ve seen so many aliens in video games, TV shows, movies, etc. that they will be blasé about it and complain that the aliens in video game X looked more realistic than the real thing.
Others will be interested for a day or two, then will move onto the next new thing on the news cycle.
Others will be so self absorbed by social media that they will only care if they can use footage to make TikTok memes.
Others will be know it all’s that will want to point out to everyone that they always said there was extra terrestrial life and everyone should acknowledge how smart they are.
Others will see this as a great opportunity to write a book in the hopes of striking it rich.
Others are just trying to scrape by and are too worn down, tired, depressed, etc. to pay any attention.
Many people live subsistent lifestyles and don’t have access to news feed to even know it happened.
I would expect exceedingly few to really give this sort of event the acknowledgement it deserves.
If they share their technology, it could allow us to leap hundreds or thousands of years in the future within decades.
AI will advance faster than we can evolve and it will be their universe to play with, not ours.
That also means we need to survive here on Earth, and perhaps change as a species in various aspects in order to even make a small step of becoming an interplanetary and then, in long the run maybe even interstellar species.
We don't know if alien civilizations interfered a million years ago.