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Comment by arbitrage | Hacker News Reader

> We estimate that loud alien civilizations now control 40-50% of universe volume, each will later control ~10^5 - 3x10^7 galaxies, and we could meet them in ~200Myr - 2Gyr.

This is utter nonsense.

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Feel free to post your own estimate. Please include your reasoning.

You don’t need your own estimates to call BS on theirs. Including simply on the premise of the volume of the universe, most of the universe is an empty void. Even if you allow somehow for the traversal of intergalactic void in your local clusters this alone should put a much more serious dampening effect on the expansion of any given species.

It also assumes that species can even get to the technological level required for galactic and then intergalactic expansion and maintain that level pretty much indefinitely.

But then again this isn’t a research paper or even a particularly serious statement.

You need energy mastery. Ability to harness infinite or practically infinite energy available freely. With this understanding and power you can innovate further, perhaps gaining the ability to create matter and one day transport it along the fabric of space outside the constraints of existing matter (time).

Then again, maybe true advancement means losing interest in manipulating matter, turning inward and finding or developing enhanced mental states that let us see things clearly without understanding everything empirically.

Perhaps the ultimate goal is to be at peace and even joyful at living and dying. Humans are still very believe-y, angry, outward and confused.

If you attain that level of technology why do you need to go anywhere? If you gain access to infinite or near infinite energy source it seems like it would be a waste to use that energy to cross the intergalactic void or even outside your solar system or star cluster since you could simply use it to build w/e you need anywhere in space so you might as well stay put.

Resilience. Being multi-planetary means your species is fundamentally protected from almost all catastrophic events. Having presence among multiple stars systems would mean not even planetary level destruction would be a threat to a species. As it currently stands humans are still very much in a precarious situation as an errant asteroid, even a decade away, could mean game over for all of humanity.

You missed my point, if you can attain that level of technology you don’t really care about your planet at that point either.

The amount of energy required for to cross the intergalactic void is insane.

Our local group is about 3 megaparsecs in diameter the Milky Way is around 32 kiloparsecs in diameter.

Asteroids aren’t a problem if you can expand to other solar systems yet alone across galaxies.

> this isn’t a research paper

It's the host organization's announcement for https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.01522.pdf

In what way is it nonsense?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This statement, with absolutely no hard evidence, is asserting that aliens exist and in fact control 40-50% of the universe. Furthermore it is also fundamentally untestable as it includes the convenient disclaimer that "we will meet them in 200 Myr - 2 Gyr."

"I have never seen a unicorn nor do I have any evidence they exist. However, their existence seems logical, and therefore I estimate that they control 40-50% of the universe volume, each will control ~10^5 - 3x10^7 galaxies, and we could meet them in ~200 Myr - 2 Gyr."

The preceding sentences explain the model that generates that estimate, including the 200 Myr - 2 Gyr number; that's not a case of hand-waving.

Is your issue with some aspects of the model or with the idea of trying to model this at all?

It's certainly early days for this theory, but it's worth not dismissing out-of-hand.

My issue is: can this model make testable predictions within our lifetimes? It doesn’t seem that way.

Even models of the far future and the distance past of the universe are held to standards of evidence and testability. Why shouldn’t this one be?

The idea that only testable predictions are valid is... short sighted. Seriously considering extraordinary ideas with as much rigor as possible, with the tools available, is something that has propelled science. If not then ideas about the moon would have been dead in the water.

If anything this kind of "rationalism" only conceals dogmatic ideas about what is or isn't possible..

That's not true. It's a basic tenet of science. Even astronomical theories (for which no experiments are possible) are backed up by observation.

Scientific theories must be testable. It must be possible to prove them wrong with experiments or observation.

Except in many cases, we didn't have the tools or technology to be able to test theories that eventually turned out to match real-world measurements. But the theories existed beforehand anyway and weren't any less science.

Yeah, that's an important point, but that seems to be an issue with the subject of study rather than this particular theory. At least their model has very concrete and explicit premises that could be used to reject it. Particularly the 'hard steps' model of evolution: I don't know how widely accepted that is (genuinely don't, it may be accepted) and, if it is in time rejected by the scientific community then that would discredit--if not falsify--the theory.

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