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Comment by cush | Hacker News Reader

Aliens are looking down on us right now thinking, "we'll make contact as soon as they advance past the steam engine"

I like to think they're saying "We'll make contact when they realize they don't have to build a fusion reactor because there's already one in their sky."

It's interesting how you're assuming that a species which obviously has been navigating way past the point where any useful power can be extracted from their star would not see the utility of developing fusion power

depending on the tech our hypothetical aliens employ, we might argue they solved hyperefficient power storage before fusion?

Fusion sounds like hyper effective power storage/retrieval to me.

> past the point where any useful power can be extracted from their star

I guess, if a species used a Dyson sphere for so long, they will certainly have colonized other solar systems, which each have their own star to milk.

I'm assuming that such a species would themselves have fully exploited the energy output of their local star(s) before they embarked on building an artificial one. And that they would view any species trying this in reverse order as unintelligent.

That's assuming a lot I think. Having the ability to create a large amount of power on demand is a lot more useful than it's popular to think these days.

Have you come up with some cheap form of electricity storage or are you advocating geosynchronous orbital solar?

I think the human race is about 100x closer to cheap electricity storage than we are to building a useful fusion plant.

On a lower end medium time scale maybe.. but the kind of power we're talking about here and needed by society, is still a few discoveries and a few decades away from actually being, let alone being practical on a large scale. And the worst part is that only then does the discussion even begin about adopting, using and manufacturing/installing it at scale.

Large scale HUGE capacity electricity storage is a LOT further away than a lot of people and interests are willing to... well.. as we see in europe.. allow for. We are going ahead with the first half of a system that isn't even complete in theory.

Large scale electricity storage is just waiting for the economic conditions that would justify rolling it out. Once those conditions arise, storage will pop up like mushrooms after a hard rain, and will move down experience curves, and become cheap.

The biggest open question with grid storage is which of the many competing technologies will come out on top.

In a way hydro, solar and wind put us past this hurdle. I guess they’re coming!

Hydro is just a steam engine at non-steam temperatures.

And wind is just a steam engine with less steam.

And Solar is just a steam engine with less steam, and less engine.

No, hydro is mostly solar - the water wouldn't be flowing downwards to the sea if it wasn't for weather caused by the sun.

Solar isn't less steam and less engine, it's literally just solar, whereas everything else but geothermal and nuclear is solar with more steps. Natural gas and oil is just solar stored in paleo compost.

If that's true than, then your body is mostly solar with a bit of food chain, therefore making your comment above... Also... Solar.....

I need to go hug my wife and children

I don't disagree.

Isn't hydro more like gravity ?

Yeah it’s useful to have gravity on your side if your steam is liquid.

Hydro just uses gravity to make the pressure for the turbine instead of heat + phase change.

solar is the only one that doesn’t spin a magnet next to copper wires

It could if we would let it.

There's nothing wrong with spinning magnets.

i could totally see solar simply being an array of mirrors to point sunlight at some water to heat it up so the steam turns a turbine

https://www.seia.org/initiatives/concentrating-solar-power

Also known as Solar thermal power plants. Which in cases of some implementations even have option for limited storage.

If it were only that easy to keep them from invading earth!

If aliens have the capacity to interact with us, they've probably been doing it for a long time.

We're their pet project, why would they invade?

“Mostly harmless”

The cosmos is not startrek -one doesn’t travel vast multigenerational distances in space and time to “just observe”. If we could travel to an extra-solar habitable planet. Do you think we’d be like, huh, nice carbon based life, just like us. Awesome now let’s go back “home”.

Or if we let off some earth mammals the beasts would be like, you know what, humans, take me and my descendants ten/a thousand generations down back to earth.

> The cosmos is not startrek -one doesn’t travel vast multigenerational distances in space and time to “just observe”. If we could travel to an extra-solar habitable planet. Do you think we’d be like, huh, nice carbon based life, just like us. Awesome now let’s go back “home”.

This sounds awfully knowledgeable about travel over multi-generational distances when neither you, nor I, nor any other human has ever done it. Maybe you're right that it's not what we would do, but how can you, I, or any human possibly know whether it's what an alien species would do?

Neither people, nor animals, nor plants travelled long distances to habitable places to then be satisfied and turn back. It doesn't happen on a continental scale so it's even much less likely to happen on an interstellar scale. If it's half habitable, you're gonna make that place a "home".

It's a nice fantasy to think you can zip back to the home planet after prancing around the galaxy making discoveries and reporting consequential and timely information back home.

Yep, and we are humans with a track record of breaking the prime directive everywhere we went on earth, so why not other worlds? If there is microbal life on mars, we will kill it soonish.

First - there’s plenty of evidence of intercontinental trade prior to colonization/ migration in Humanity’s past.

Second, you have a very anthropomorphic perspective built in to your thinking. What if they had lifespans measured in centuries or longer? What if they had radically different views of life and death and generational cooperation? Alien life is, by definition, alien. It’s hard to say what would/wouldn’t be true.

>there’s plenty of evidence of intercontinental trade prior to colonization/ migration in Humanity’s past.

What? How is it possible to trade intercontinentally without there being a colony to trade with first? that makes no sense. One does not go to a deserted island to do trade, with whom, the birds?

With the inhabitants who are already there, of course. Your contention is that intelligent life wouldn’t travel long distances without the intent of colonization. Human history sort of argues against that to a point. Europeans were trading broadly before developing colonial empires. Travel wasn’t the thing that ensured colonization.

I find it bizarre that you would jump in here to caution about the limitations of our knowledge, and not jump in in response to the previous commenter who proposed that visitors would just be observing.

If anything, this is the commenter that is being more careful not to entertain familiar science fiction presumptions and is exhibiting the discipline that you're asking for.

The previous commenter was being silly, in response to mc32 being silly, then mc32 switched to making a serious claim in response.

> If anything, this is the commenter that is being more careful not to entertain familiar science fiction presumptions and is exhibiting the discipline that you're asking for.

I really don't understand why you think this.

It's just a version of the Dark Forest problem. It is possibly much safer to drop an asteroid on any newfound civilization's head than to travel hundreds or thousands of years (at light speed) just to observe someone and try to figure out if they are going to drop an asteroid on your civilization's head first. IOW, the first-mover, the one who pulls the trigger first, the side that pushes the doomsday button first, etc ... the surprise attacker has a better chance of victory.

(Good thing ʻOumuamua missed. Better luck next time, chumps!)

If thats the case they probably send drones every once in a while to see how things are progressing.

We may not actually be all that interesting.

What if the alien civilization is so advanced that a jump across the cosmos takes about as much effort as driving a couple of miles down to the mall for us?

The physics that would allow that does not exist.

The physics that we currently understand does not allow that.

Our current model of physics is barely a few hundred years old. We’re talking about a civilization that’s potentially hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us.

We're millions of years ahead of slugs never the less our advanced intelligence is incapable of changing physics. I doubt alien intelligence even if further advanced can change the nature of physics.

Yes, there is a possibility we will learn more and there are other pathways, but at the moment, that is fantasy, so it would all be speculative.

This does make the assumption of aliens having similar lifespans. A life form that might live 500 or 10k years would view the personal cost of those distances much differently than humans, who view it as suicide.

It also assumes similar moral and cognitive processes of what to do when encountering another planet's life, neither of which must hold true for a society or species to become spacefaring. Likewise, an alien's AI probe could be effectively immortal and that would drastically shape its opinions on a return trip.

Or maybe they're intergalactic mayflies with innate knowledge for reaching orbit or relativistic speeds but they die each day and a new generation takes over tomorrow. All distances are suicide missions, even trips across their own planet. It would totally normalize multigenerational trips.

I think it's short sighted to make any assumptions of human similarities when it comes to first contact. Cephalopods have independently developed significant intelligence in parallel here on Earth and they might as well be aliens to us despite a common evolutionary ancestor way back. A completely independent evolutionary path leading to intelligence could be incredibly counter to our expectations.

We only know what we know. This is what we build off of. Also there are physics limits. We cannot go FTL and even getting to light speed would mean vast quantities of energy. Could there be new physics? We can’t make decisions on something so far seems quite unlikely.

Speaking of cephalopods, do they seem less aggressive than other species? Have they gone vegan?

Is it more or less likely the species that goes vegan wins the race? And even if they did it would mean that they had to subdue a more aggressive species. In other words, pacifists cannot unilaterally (en)force peace.

You don't need FTL or even near C speeds to traverse a galaxy. We only pursue those ideas because it's the only way for humans to send off a request for information and get something back before our great great great great grandchildren die of old age.

For the traveler's frame of reference interstellar travel with current technology is within reach of single human lifespans if you're fine with a one way trip (and extreme cost without an expected payoff). If a species lucked out with some right-sized planets and orbital arrangements they could end up with a great gravity slingshot by happenstance that drastically reduces their energy needs in space.

The awareness of the tyranny of the rocket equation again assumes human sized likeness of aliens. If human-like intelligence arises in ping-pong ball sized beings on a low gravity planet they could have a much easier time than we do escaping their planet and physics would be on their side for extreme-G launches that would otherwise be fatal to us.

So much discussion about aliens is hinged on them just being a copy of us but located somewhere else. It doesn't take a ton of imagination to envision plausible and entirely different starting scenarios that enable greater success in space travel without inventing new physics or exotic engineering.

They may not think of it as an invasion if they are exponentially more advanced than we are. Any more than I worry about bugs I might step on and kill walking across the lawn.

It’s irrelevant what they think. We care about us and our well-being.

Invasion does not mean prejudiced extermination. If they ignored us as we might ignore insects when we discover new habitat then, yeah, I’d want to keep them from coming.

What would you do if you can across an array of ants that were spelling out simple mathematical formula on the ground?

I don't know that would be representative of the potential gap between us and them. We seem pretty far from faster-than-light travel or whatever other thing would allow them to visit.

To clean the Petri dish? ;-)

Interestingly, the authenticity and legitimacy of UFO disclosures has been ramping up recently, right as we come closer to the cusp of fusion, AI and quantum computing breakthroughs. We’ve gone from stories in pulp magazines to reports in NYT and the Congress.

Interesting times ahead

These are the super-advanced aliens, that can travel all the way to Earth and secretly observe us, but accidentally come into the field of view of a random jet plane?

While I do not follow these discussions I'd argue that the advent of drones plays a major role in that. Additionally as long as our space tec remains as primitives we are quite boring as a civilisation

Add self replicating nano material with competing biology to the mix! (Viruses). Self replicants for everyone&

Aliens may exist, but the phenomena people are reporting as UAP are not from aliens. There is money to be made by selling the idea of aliens and alien visitors to the public and to government (who go along with the idea because it can lead to more funding).

It's quite easy to keep aliens from invading Earth, by cleverly exploiting their nonexistence.

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