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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

The first alien we will ever encounter is likely a neural network we built with our hands.

I think the first alien we ever encounter will be something like a bacterium or virus, it will spur a debate as to whether it's really life, and it might already have happened.

If something visits us from another star system it's also likely to be an AI.

Hibernation for thousands of years to travel between stars would be almost trivial for machine intelligence. Just turn yourself off. It'd be easy to tie this directly to solar power. Have an array of solar panels that powers you near a star and in interstellar space you just naturally go to sleep. When you approach the next star system the light generates power and wakes you up.

Star travel is easy if you don't have a fixed life span or are able to just deactivate. No need for crazy physicists' nightmare propulsion systems to travel close to the speed of light or wormholes or any of that far-out stuff. Chemical propulsion will do just fine.

For humans or any other biological entities to travel between stars they'd need to be able to basically die and be resurrected like tardigrades. We can imagine an alien biology that would make this easier, but for humans we have no idea how to do this and survive.

What's hard to comprehend is how there could be a possible way to preserve our consciousness through a hibernation state. Like, our cells might not die, and we might be technically revived, but we'd still be brain-dead.

And if we figure it out, does the original "experiencer of consciousness" in that body return to life? Or is it a new consciousness, with the same memories, but the original person who went to sleep would never experience waking up again? And how would we be able to test that?

If we asked the "new experiencer of consciousness" if they are the original, they would say yes, as they'd have all the same memories as the experiencer who initially went under. Kind of like the color blind problem, but much harder to objectively test, if not impossible.

Consciousness, behind a unified theory of everything, is one thing I hope is answered in my life time. Probably won't be. But it's such a mystery.

It’s the same problem as surviving cryonic suspension. If we can do that we could go to the stars.

That sounds like a non-issue. Our conscience already "pauses" when we go to sleep or get hit in the head, we already have people being resuscitated...

What if consciousness is something that can only be revived, with the revival of the body, a short period of time after the body "shuts down"? Like its own non-physical life form, for lack of better description.

We focus on the preservation of the body when talking about this stuff. But maybe the pattern of "waking up from normal sleep" doesn't hold true over such a time span?

Of course there's no scientific rebuttal for this fairly unscientific question, yet, but it's interesting to think about.

I don't find it interesting at all. Other than wishful thinking I don't see any reason to suppose that consciousness is special or non-physical. I think it will become like the assumptions that the Earth was the center of the Universe or humans were different from other animals.

I often find myself wondering if the same is true from simply going to sleep at night.

You woke up this morning, and you are likely pretty confident that you’re the same entity that went to sleep yesterday. Are you?

A pause in continuous consciousness is a convenient way to think of a discrete “before” and “after” entity, but why shouldn’t it generalize further? Is the person who occupied your body and saw through your eyes five minutes ago alive in a meaningful way right now?

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/is-beaming-down-in-st...

Do you ask yourself the same questions before undergoing anesthesia, or even going to sleep each night? The experience would be identical (unless you believe in some kind of life after death) - since consciousness just stops, and you can only hope it will pick back up later on. Whether it actually will or not doesn't affect the experience you have right now though.

If we're talking about galactic distances and timescales I don't see why we couldn't safely assume enough technological advancement for either aliens or humans to modify their own biology to the point where centuries would be a small fraction of your total lifespan. I think the bigger question is why any significant number of people would travel to more than a few star systems if you had to do it slowly. If the system is uninhabited then you would be isolating yourself from the rest of society for a long time. If it's inhabited then you would have the excitement of discovery and contact but it would still be difficult being separated from your own civilization and you would want to return at some point even if just to share what you've learnt.

How many people today travel to places that are completely uninhabited and have no infrastructure in place for getting there? I'm talking end of the road, getting on a bush plane and landing in the middle of an open field kind of isolated. How long do they stay? Same for contacting the few remaining hunter gatherers on the planet. What if those trips took thousands of years instead of a few weeks?

I think there's a big stretch of time for the development of any technological civilization where they spend most of their effort on developing their own solar system and only send small flyby probes to their nearest neighbours. After that there may be an even longer period during which they colonize those near by stars but each colony likely takes an extremely long time to fully develop. The civilization may send out automated probes to look and listen and maybe the occasional explorer or anthropologist but I doubt there are any galaxy conquering civilizations out there.

So I think I do agree that if anything visits us it is likely to be an automated probe. Bracewell probes would be well suited to any chatty civilization that is seeking contact. Von Neumann probes are more suited to brute force exploration.

This is all assuming that the speed of light is the fastest you can travel and communicate. If it isn't, then I'd say all bets are off.

If the Internet has told us anything, it's that as soon as the production of a self-replicating probe becomes accessible to a hobbyist, some people will do it even if there's no benefit to them. And it only takes one. The far future human colonists won't be landing on unspoilt wilderness; they'll be reclaiming systems from some 25th century script kiddy.

http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/tethics

> If something visits us from another star system it's also likely to be an AI.

Let's hope it's not programmed to make paperclips ;)

Even for an AI, you'd need storage media that are stable for thousands of years, and hardware that will still turn on after thousands of years, and solar panels that are still functional after thousands of years. Oh, yeah, and a fair amount of those thousands of years will be exposed to radiation, including relativistic iron nuclei (fun stuff).

Your AI may not quite be itself when it arrives.

Things last longer at <100 degrees kelvin, which is what you'd be talking about in interstellar space unless you are running a hot reactor.

Nothing clever error detection and correction could not fix. Eq. fountain codes and many many copies on top.

Also you could have some simple repair bots wake up once in a while and fixup stuff (and themselves).

But that wouldn't technically be an alien, since it's not extra-terrestrial.

"Alien" doesn't only mean "extra-terrestrial", for example: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...

And: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/dec/12/gender-segre...

Ok, but right here, in this context, everybody else in the thread is quite obviously referring to extra-terrestrials.

We might not know enough about what intelligence is to recognize it in any other form than the human form we’re familiar with. It could be that we start recognizing several other forms of intelligence around the same time, not necessarily because of new observations becoming available to us, but because we learn more about what intelligence looks like.

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