Hiding in plain sight? The argument for invisible aliens (2020)
now.northropgrumman.com
now.northropgrumman.com
I suspect there's probably intelligent life out there and some may be a lot more advanced than us. But I think it's not unreasonable to think that no life in the milky way quite made it to galactic domination yet. If that's even feasible. It's just very hard to find anything short of that right now. And, even if such life exists in other galaxies, it would be very hard to detect that as well. Plus, they are really far away, so their influence didn't quite have the time to reach here.
1 million years ago is 1/14,000th (0.007%) of the lifespan of the universe, so almost trivially miniscule in cosmological sense. If some sentient alien civilisation got 1 million years head-start on us wouldn't they basically already have achieved any technological advancement possible?
Imagine some other planet in the universe (or even our galaxy) that went through similar geological processes as Earth and at roughly the same time, but on which the first species to evolve did not go extinct and instead went on to develop intelligence. That species would have a roughly ~200+ million year head start on humanity.
Further, consider the planets at the far edge of the observable universe from Earth, whose light emitted billions of years ago is only just now reaching us, and which are much older than the Milky Way. What if any of those planets went through a similar evolutionary process and developed intelligent life, but billions of years ago.
Such species would now be using science and technology completely incomprehensible to, and likely undetectable by, humanity. We're scanning for electromagnetic transmissions, while they're communicating via subspace, superstrings, ninth membrane, or whatever other exotic means. Everything we currently know about physics and the nature of reality would be useless in detecting and analyzing such advanced species. If they happened to detect and visit us, we wouldn't know unless they wanted us to.
It's possible there are many planets in the universe on which life evolved, and the subsequent emergence of intelligent life follows some distribution of trial and error. Most planets evolved intelligent life after one or more errors (dinosaurs and the like), but some small percent developed intelligent life first, ahead of the curve.
They are undetectable by us, but this isn't because of how good their technology is (though it may well also be that good), but simply because the universe is so large and the speed of light so slow. Even if their first "person" to create a powerful enough radio had the idea to beam a signal directly to earth, it still wouldn't have arrived. That signal would have been sent before I sun even started forming, so there is no reason for them to have had the idea, but even if they did anyway.
“Any technological advancement possible” (my emphasis) might exclude technological advances that would make us aware of intelligent life in other star systems.
Just because we can imagine things does not mean they are actually possible, even with lots of time to try.
If I knew all that I could go back to my physics textbooks and calculate. Without though, who knows.
Universe begins
| 9.2 billion years
Earth formed
| 0.5 billion years
First life
| 0.5 billion years
First photosynthesis
| 3.0 billion years
Enough oxygen in air for macroscopic life
| 0.5 billion years
Now
(1) Supernovas creating heavy elements. At first, the universe is all hydrogen (and helium). It takes some generations of stars forming, and exploding as supernovas to create and spread around heavier elements, so that a planet like Earth can form, with all the minerals we have. Do we need 9 billion years for this, or could there have been planets with heavy elements, how much earlier? Is Earth among the first possible?
(2) It took 3 billion years of photosynthesis, by single-cell microbial life, to produce and accumulate enough oxygen. First the oxygen released into air would go and oxidize the minerals on Earth's surface. Only after the whole rocky surface was oxidized, would oxygen start to accumulate into the atmosphere. Somewhere around 10% or 13% atmospheric oxygen, it was enough that also other than flat, single-cell-layer multicellular macroscopic life could start to form, without the inner cells being starved of oxygen. 3 billion years of repetitive, grunt work by the microbes. (Then it took 0.5 billion years of evolution from the Cambrian evolutionary explosion, to humans.)
Compared to these two, the other steps took much less time.
Interesting thought experiment but my 2c is physics limits space travel such that it can never be what we see in sci-fi. Any civilizations elsewhere - phosphorus based or otherwise- have just as hard a time getting off their rock as we do, if not harder (larger gravity wells). If they do, they have an even harder time getting off their star. Certainly getting beyond their galaxy is physically impossible. Makes lousy sci-fi but fits observations.
I think that Ringworld had that part right - any species that is sufficiently advanced to be interstellar travelers would absolutely have to be able to identify, and nullify, naturally selected traits about themselves.
Maybe there's another way to create consciousness, but we'll probably never find out.
Yes, there is a reason why this can't happen. Dark matter doesn't clump.
Why do physicists, when confronted with the lack of observational evidence for the "dark matter" that their models predict, assume that "dark matter must exist?" Couldn't the model be wrong? At what point does the unproven prediction of dark matter call into question the many otherwise proven predictions of the Standard Model? How much of the experimental evidence supporting those predictions has an implicit dependency on the same invalid assumptions leading to the prediction of dark matter?
I remember reading an HN comment that described the Standard Model as a sort of legacy codebase with technical debt and strange abstractions to fix earlier errors. That resonates with me, and in fact seems applicable to the entirety of the human epistemological "tech tree." I sometimes wonder, what secrets might we uncover if we could start fresh, speed running different paths through the tech tree?
"Tangible" might be the wrong word since our regular-matter senses and sensors could not "touch" it. Theories do exist that our model of gravity is just wrong at large scales. This falls under Modified Newtonian Dynamics, but has problems that don't match observation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics#Ou...
(PS: Here, the universe behaves like a path search for first possible observers and, thus, causality. Posing the question, if there is no possible observer in a given universe, does it even exist or is the search exhausted in what isn't even an instant? Anyway, let's call it the "race to causality" hypothesis.)
Talking about coherence and [decoherence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence) is IMO a lot more intuitive. Always keep in mind, if you're reading about quantum physics and there's anything in there about consciousness or subjective experience or whatever, then you're either reading something very fringe, or you've misunderstood what the paper is saying. Quantum physics is weird, but it's not that weird.
We're having a contest in who can string more meaningless physics-sounding words together, right?
To be less snarky: the word "observer" in physics has nothing to do with a self-aware brain. Photons are about as good at causing decoherence as you are.
(Conventional meaning: this is irony/a joke and the author doesn't actually believe in this.)
This is like a scifi story maybe, but none of what you've said has any rigorous meaning. "sphere of causality" would be a cool band name, though.
Aside, I really wish we were already building the successor to JWST. And multiples of them for surety of success. For verification but also the universe is literally the largest thing we know. Lots of science to learn just by careful watching. It’s also work (astronomy) that does add to human knowledge with few negative externalities. So create jobs for astronomers!!
A working VN probe literally has to reproduce a significant part of an entire civilisation's industrial capacity - mining, refining, all levels of assembly - while improvising with a mix of raw materials which may not be similar to those available at source.
And it has to do it in a way that is 100% guaranteed free from software bugs, hardware failures, and general space wear and tear. Over millions of years. (Assuming FTL isn't possible.)
You may as well as just seed viruses everywhere and see what they evolve into. (What if we are the VN probe?)
Edit-not that life is anyone in particulars VN probe. But it’s clearly self replicating and can evolve to various conditions. Kind of the obvious example to prove the existence of VN probes as a logical concept.
What you're describing is something like the protomolecule from the Expanse books, which is a nice concept, but it required its creators to have the technology to locally alter the laws of physics as we know them to work, making it possible to use an asteroid with no propulsion system as a carrier vehicle, with energy sucked out of a different universe they figured out how to gain access to (not something that is likely to actually be possible).
Of course since we are talking about unknowns, I can't say for sure that life elsewhere isn't made of something else, but our current knowledge of chemistry makes the idea unlikely.
On this scale, 10 MT of industrial equipment and 100k people that self-replicates in 35 years, isn't particularly different from a fancy hypothetical atomic 3D printer that masses 1kg, needs another 1kg of support equipment, and which self-replicates in 6 months.
Greg Bear had a series on this. I think this concept may depend on FTL travel/communication, though, at least in order to work well. Or at least on communication being much faster than travel. (In other words, if the speed of light is the limit, if VN probes are restricted to much slower speeds, the "Police" may be able to contain them, but if they're too fast, the probles will spread faster than the "Police" may stop the spread).
And if the Policing is not done by a single civ, but is something that was set up by a coalition of civs that may exists 100s of thousands of light years apart, I think FTL communication is basically required to be able to even create such a coalition in the first place.
My personal gut feeling, is that we're simply first in this area of Space.
A virus needs a host cell to replicate, so they likey would not get far. But bacteria survive in space quite well, and I would just send them. Or like you said, maybe some asteroid with bacterias was send to us on purpose and got successful.
The optimization target here is a minimum-complexity design that's able to reproduce itself using in-situ materials. This is still an unsolved problem, but I don't see a reason the probe would have to "reproduce a significant part of an entire civilsation's industrial capacity" - it doesn't have to build anything else other than its own copy (and whatever it needs for that). It has to do one thing, and thus we could cut corners in the design.
> And it has to do it in a way that is 100% guaranteed free from software bugs, hardware failures, and general space wear and tear. Over millions of years. (Assuming FTL isn't possible.)
This is not a hard requirement. You don't need 100% reliability - you only need enough so that, on average, one probe turns into more than one. Beyond that, more reliability only speeds things up. This is how biology does it: reliability is achieved by doing more things than necessary and rejecting (recycling) failures.
https://now.northropgrumman.com/aliens-in-the-ocean-is-sea-i...
https://now.northropgrumman.com/proof-of-mermaids-science-te...
https://www.monolake.org/today/mono-lakes-arsenic-tolerant-m...
With the relatively new "Space Force" spinning up, it's in their best interests to have the American public talking about these things mainstream. They want money. How else to get money? Terrestrial terrors are sort of played out. So why not dip some low-cost toes into the wacky alien technology theories?
Alternate option; they know more than we do and are preparing for something.
Either way.
Sometimes the stupidest reason is the reason. Especially when it comes to money.
I did/do really enjoy the thought experiments posited in these comments. For more than a few minutes my mind's eye forgot that my finances have been a slow-motion trainwreck these last 3 years.
The pinnacle of trustable and verified information.
This is anthropomorphizing at its best because we humans have largely decided that capitalist is the best "*ism". Alien intelligence could have basically unimaginable governments, societal norms, morals and/or motivations.
> (...) then why another intelligent form of life hasn’t developed here on earth other than human species?
The answer here is probably just evolution. Other intelligent species have developed on Earth thorough its history (e.g.: Neanderthals, Denisovans). They're not here anymore because we (Homo-Sapiens) killed them.
> Great apes have capitalism.
Extrapolating from our current understanding of civilization and assuming that it will still be capitalism that rules a 1 million year old civilization is not (imho) a valid assumption.
Even now, a mere fraction of that time, we're already kind of predicting a time where, if not for some type of semi-utopian Star Trek'ian society with stuff like basic income, the future of many many jobs (if we agree that jobs/labor are at the core of a capitalistic society) are already at risk with automation and AI.
There could be a couple of elephants in Africa right now who are the ancestors of a future intelligent species on Earth!
> why another intelligent form of life hasn’t developed here on earth other than human species?
i guess the earth has a few billion years left to find out...
Actually I think you got that backwards. It’s not fantasy, considering that the only evidence that we have that life exists at all are ourselves and what we have on this planet. Of course it’s logical to assume that life exists elsewhere because the math and universe’s scale is staggering and it’s reasonable to assume that if there is life elsewhere some could be more advanced than us. However, until we find someone or something else, all the evidence we have is on this blue marble of ours…so if we are only going to believe what the evidence currently tells us…it’s that we are the only or first emergence of life.
All the rest—conjecture and faith. In essence other civilizations are the fantasy until more evidence is provided to the contrary.
Given that we believe the universe to be infinite, we could be 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 3 billionth, etc. But one thing is for sure, we're on the list, but our likelihood of correctly guessing our position on the list is 1/Infinity.
However, if we assume that there is SOME constraint, then that list is no longer infinite. Instead of our 'guess accuracy' being effectively 0, it's 1/<list length>.
If there are 3 billion, we might be 3 billionth, but if there are 2 billion, we are definitely not 3 billionth. The same follows all the way down to if there are only two, we may be either first or second. We know that there is at LEAST one, so if we guess first, we're at least certainly not guessing out of range.
The probability, without any other information to the contrary, of us being 'first' is higher than the probability of us being 'second' or any other possible point on the list.
Therefore it is a more logical conclusion—although clearly it should not be parroted as a fact.
I'd say we do:
- we have plenty of evidence that at a given point of time, our knowledge/evidence is incomplete (consider the history of science) - so, since we are at a given point in time, it seems reasonable to consider the possibility that we may still be in a position of non-omniscience.
- we have plenty of evidence that how things appear to people (say: no evidence) is very often other than how it really is
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...
> The probability, without any other information to the contrary, of us being 'first' is higher than the probability of us being 'second' or any other possible point on the list.
This seems very unintuitive to me, is it possible to demonstrate this in some sort of a mathematical form (And: is the only possible probabilistic calculation one could do)?
Not even reasonable, in fact, this is one of the premises of my statement.
If we knew for sure how many intelligent species have spread intergalactically, we would not need to be making estimates.
For the clarification of doubt, where I say 'no evidence', I am referring purely to the absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.
I am not sure about representing it formally mathematically, and I am certain that it is not the only probabilistic calculation possible, there may well be better models, but consider the following:
I reach into a bag, and I pull out a die. The die has a one on it.
We have the following assumptions:
- The bag contains at least 1 die
- Dice can have 1 or more sides (let's call them 4D dice)
- All dice have at least one face with a 1 on it
The specific number drawn represents humanity's place in the sequence.
Let's initially start with 1, single sided die.
- What is my probability of drawing a 1 sided die? 1 out of 1.
- What is my probability of being position number 1 on the die? 1 out of 1.
Now let's imagine adding dice. We add one more.
- What is my probability of drawing a 1 sided die? 1/2
- What is my overall probability of drawing a 1? There are two 'ones' and one 'two', so 2/3
- What is my probability of drawing a 1 sided die? 1/3
- What is my overall probability of drawing a 1? There are three 'ones', two twos, and one three, so 3/6
We can throw 10 000 dice into the bag. There will be 10 000 opportunities to be 'first', 9 999 opportunities to be 'second' and so on.
Because we don't know how many dice are in the bag, 'one' is a better guess than 'ten thousand'.
[0]: It's worth noting we're not travelling intergalactically (or even interstellarly) just yet.
Technically, you are referring to your model:
a) it is possible that evidence can exist but a human does not have knowledge of it
b) it is possible that people have differences of opinions on what constitutes evidence, because that is largely a subjective matter, and humans are famous for being unable to reliably distinguish between objective and subjective matters
> I am not sure about representing it formally mathematically, and I am certain that it is not the only probabilistic calculation possible, there may well be better models, but consider the following...
I think my (highly unusual) point of contention here is other than you intuit - your earlier comment ([emphasis] mine):
>> [The] probability, [without any other information to the contrary], of us being 'first' [is] higher than [the] probability of us being 'second' or any other possible point on the list.
You have made a prediction about reality based on "a" model, but speak (and perhaps believed, at runtime) that it is "the" model.
As for your argument, while it's all true, I cannot see how this can cause reality itself to be a particular way. Statistics and thought experiments (~~propaganda~~ journalism, ideologies and ideology ~marketing, etc) can (and do[1]) certainly cause reality to appear a certain way, but that is something very different.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
[1] https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-heuristic-2795235
That's a bit post-hoc. If I observe 10 coin tosses, and all ten come up heads, and based on that I devise a model that coin tosses always come up heads, then my model will be incorrect, the correct model is still 1/2. Unless of course, the universe is deterministic, in which case the correct model will actually be a list. Or in case it turns out that coins land heads due to a fluctuation in the coin-toss field which we are not currently aware of, so the correct model would involve first observing the coin-toss field.
Obviously a model does not cause reality to be any particular way. A model merely tries to describe and predict. Models get refined as new evidence or data is added to them.
Until we come across intelligent life in the universe, our model is incredibly basic, and yet we have nothing better.
Not quite - I am noting that you speak as if you are not working from a model.
"For the clarification of doubt, where I say 'no evidence', I am referring purely to the absence of evidence, not evidence of absence."
As I noted, you do not actually know if there is no evidence absolutely, you are describing the absence of evidence in your possession/knowledge.
> That's a bit post-hoc. If I observe 10 coin tosses, and all ten come up heads, and based on that I devise a model that coin tosses always come up heads, then my model will be incorrect, the correct model is still 1/2.
Sure, but in this case we are not discussing a well known domain (coins), we are discussing a not known at all domain (aliens).
And even here in your simple thought experiment, there are facts that you do not have knowledge of (a rigged coin, that you do not realize is rigged (according to your description) because "based on that I devise a model that coin tosses always come up heads").
> Unless of course, the universe is deterministic...
Another matter that is not known, but broadly believed to be known.
> Obviously a model does not cause reality to be any particular way.
Generally agree, but even here it's not that simple. Models can cause reality to appear a certain way (consistent with the model), and perceptions of reality are a very important component of reality (very often more important than "actual" reality, in that belief > truth when it comes to human action, which is what determines the end state of physical reality).
> A model merely tries to describe and predict. Models get refined as new evidence or data is added to them.
Disagree. Some models are built to deceive - see: propaganda/journalism/etc.
> Until we come across intelligent life in the universe, our model is incredibly basic, and yet we have nothing better.
Better models are possible: for example, it is possible to make epistemic status(es) a first class concept. Early 21st century humans tend to very much not like epistemology and logic, but it is there for our usage if we should ever change our ways.
You are of course correct that our models are incomplete, and that models can intentionally or otherwise mislead.
For the sake of discussion, what would an epistemological model look like?
That doesn’t make sense to me. It seems like, assuming we’re not the only ones and we’re randomly likely to appear in the list, we’re far more likely to appear in any other position than the first.
There’s also a separate interesting thing where “first” is kind of non sensical when you’re talking about the universe. There’s no global ordering of events.
If the universe is mathematically infinite, then it’s guaranteed we’re not the only ones because any low probability event will still happen infinitely many times in that case. So let’s say the universe is very very large but not mathematically infinite.
So then the question is a) what percentage of planets develop life b) what percentage of life develops a species capable of building technology c) what is the likelihood that species has access to resources on the planet to build that technology. We don’t know what a) is (just non-0) but using your equivalent argument for that of “we haven’t found any” I can counter by saying well, as far as we know b and c are 100% as the only planet we know to have life developed a intelligent technology-building species and the likelihood that that just happened by luck seems astronomically low (ie you’d need life to be extremely common and intelligent life not so but the odds seem against you if life is rare AND intelligent life is rarer still). I would argue that when life develops intelligent life is almost assured because pf evolutionary pressures. Now whether the right circumstances exist for them to evolve from basic tools to space ships, who knows. But that’s secondary.
So does life exist? Given the size of the universe it would be hard to bet against the argument that life has evolved somewhere out there in the universe. And given that it has, what are the odds that intelligent life came about? Again I’d say high because the same evolutionary pressures would exist to fill in niches that intelligence wins at.
So I don’t think it’s all that heavy a lift. Note that I’m not claiming they are space faring, have developed advanced mathematics, can communicate in any way that we’d understand each other or anything like that. I’m simply noting there’s multiple species even here on Earth who at a minimum come close to humans, which means the probability seems quite good unless our Earth is a magical place in the universe that is particularly special somehow at generating sentience. Thus the odds of there being intelligent sentient life out there seems to be the same as whether or not there’s any life out there. And since we know that’s non-0 and the universe is very very big, then it stands to reason there’s very likely intelligent life out there. Note even the observable universe itself is big enough that there’s likely other intelligent life within it. The total universe is much much larger than that and we’d never ever see evidence of life from there because we’ll never see anything from it because it’s forever outside of the expansion of the universe.
This isn't really true in any meaningful sense.
What is the probability of me tossing a coin immediately after writing this comment, and it landing heads? As I write now, it is 1/2. However, it's clear that only one outcome is possible. EDIT: it was tails. It didn't come up heads, however infinite the universe may be, it just didn't.
(Note: there is a non-zero probability that a similar being sits in front of his computer in a similar shirt, having a similar online discussion, who tosses a similar circular disk which comes up a different way, but that being is not me).
> the likelihood that that just happened by luck seems astronomically low
It seems that way, but as you are arguing elsewhere, unlikely things can and do happen in the universe.
> Note that I’m not claiming they are space faring
That's part of OPs premise, but I don't mind leaving it out of the discussion.
I actually like your formulation:
a. what percentage of planets develop life
b. what percentage of life develops a species capable of building technology
c. what is the likelihood that species has access to resources on the planet to build that technology
The crux of my argument is really a). We don't know what percentage of planets develop life. But as yet, we are unique.
On a personal level, by the way, I do actually suspect that we are not alone in the universe, but that's a gut feeling, and I don't believe there's maths to support it.
EDIT: FWIW, it was tails.
It does certainly seem from our limited evidence that abiogenesis (or going from not alive to alive) is at best extremely uncommon, or at worst, an isolated anomaly.
If you assume life spreads very fast, the first duration being much much longer than the second, and the third duration has no room for independent life to exist, it means in most universes most observers are the first. Only if a second life somehow develops during the second time window despite the expectation time being the first time window, you'll have a chance of not being the first. The time for a critical fluctuation to arise is much much longer than the time it takes for it to dominate, so most critical fluctuations are the first.
Universe isn't infinite because we know it started with the big bang. We're likely the first in whatever scale it is likely that life can spread to faster than develop independently. So we're likely be the first anywhere we'll ever be able to reach.
We don't know that whatever was created then was not infinitely large. Also, we don't know how large it is now, due to inflation phase of the big bang creating a space so large that we're still receiving light/signals today that were outside our visible space yesterday.
Anything that can store data in Planck lengths, that's going to be completely imperceptible, something built into the structure of the universe. Might as well listen to digits of Pi like in Contact.
Woman forces emergency landing after biting passenger and claiming Jesus told her to open plane door mid-flight
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/woman-bites-passenger-thigh-tries-...
A victim of electromagnetic weaponry used by terrorists for covert crime. Religious figures don't talk to people "telepathically" to make them kill others, criminals posing as them do.
By using these same weapons and methods, they have managed to coerce people working in semiconductor industries into inserting backdoors into all your CPUs - albeit they would rather not be known that this is the case and prefer resorting to making people do what that woman did so killings look like human error instead of malicious sabotage.
"Aliens" is just one of the false narratives propped up so people keep looking up to the skies while weaponry buried on Earth's core (maybe by a previous civilization, "Silurian hypothesis") is used for total electromagnetic surveillance of this planet and sabotage of our science - like in the Three Body Trilogy.
In fact, many religions accept a kind of shadow-world as part of their orthodoxy.
Perhaps it’s all superstition emerging from our biology but it is at least possible that someone knew something meaningful about a shadow-world and encoded that knowledge into religion.
Consider pre-scientific times: little did people know at the time that there was a whole world or "level of reality" all around them that could be seen, but only to those who knew how (which had to be discovered and developed). Consider also some of the reactions (powered by intuition) people would have back then if someone from the future ran some of the things we now know and take for granted by them, and compare that to how modern people react when propositions regarding unknown matters are presented to them.
It seems at least plausible that humanity in 2022 has not reached the pinnacle of potential knowledge and capability.
missing pieces (as we now understand the world) show up only when the puzzle reaches cosmological scales. of-course it would be extremely exciting if something "invisible" had a faint trace in our lowly spacetime neighborhood. but as Feynman might have said, the Universe is what it is and it is not hear to entertain us (nor drive clicks onto aerospace company blogs)
Maybe that's us.
[1] My Uncle Larry