Just about every ancient tradition has some form of non-human intelligent beings who are not god(s). Polls suggests almost 50% of Americans believe in ghosts[0]. I don't see why any belief system would change too much given what people already believe.
The only people who perhaps should worry are the aliens - surely a significant portion of humanity will find some way of blaming all our problems on them.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/more-45-percent-americans-believe-d...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/style/do-you-believe-in-g...
Why? An advanced civilization wouldn't have cultural curiosity? They wouldn't want to study us from all the different perspectives we study people and literature and philosophy and even biology and neurology etc etc?
https://www.livescience.com/8035-slime-mold-beats-humans-per...
So we put some humans on this planet. Now, keep in mind, they don’t possess any group consciousness — they have some limited ability to communicate information by vibrating the air around them, but they don’t have anything like the globalmindnetwork that we experience. But look: over many generations they create these little pathways, to ship goods from population center to population center. It isn’t obvious how, somehow despite lacking any overall coordination, they manage to perform these complex emergent behaviors…
"Meat?"
"Meat?"
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
Birds may communicate complex things to each other, they may construct homes, feel emotions, dream, and even do some things we can't, like fly -- but they don't have Shakespeare or the Primes so if it comes down to us or them, it's us. A lot of humans believe only humans possess "souls".
To fully go into the argument: an alien species may well hold their own form of self-exceptionalism, and they'll have their own practices and history which we can't compete with. It is perfectly possible that there is nothing we could accomplish which would make us read as peers, as opposed to birds, gorillas, or... mold.
(edit: I do think the "at best" above may be unreasonably gloomy -- at best in this outlook, aliens might regard us with compassionate curiosity, as some humans do toward the species we share the earth with. That would be pretty lucky, but not impossible!)
Absent the same environmental pressures driving selection for these traits, its possible that higher life forms could evolve without these behaviors that we humans seem to be biased enough to assume all other intelligent life must have.
Perhaps an advanced form of life/intelligence that has survived contact with various others would be guided by some form of wisdom/disgust/caution/discretion. It would not be surprising if they noticed little clues like our rapid deforestation, rising temperatures, shrinking ice caps, nuclear detonations… which would make us seem slovenly or likely to have “poor friendship skills.”
It's hard to imagine it would be uninteresting for an alien civilization to discover a 10,001th civilization, on a planet teaming with other lifeforms. If they were bothering to send probes, this would be a jackpot.
All these discoveries and inventions would be part of the history of an advanced civilization. It does not matter how "advanced" they were, making contact with humans would be a completely different prospect for them than even contacting chimp-like animals would be for us.
If we found any of those things living on another planet (or moon), even if it was intelligent and had language, some of us would certainly be utterly fascinated. Others of us would see those beings as obstacles to the valuable almost-unobtainable natural resources under them, and would be happy to use military force to exterminate them.
I don't see why a "higher" life form might not be any different.
Besides, E.Ts can probably do ok in deep space or underground on lifeless planets if they can do interstellar travel.
They could all be just like us. A few space probes manage to escape the energy well but they are so small that no one else ever detects them again. I mean, it is not uncommon to sight life ending asteroids days after they have passed earth, the odds of us detecting any sort probe/device the size of a fridge - is nearly zero.
Best analogy I heard came from Stephen Harrod Bruhner. Civilizations are just like plants. A plant is at its fullest just as it is about to produce seed and die off. During the peak of our energy use, we have been sending probes into space. It is a neat thought experiment.
Because of this no life outside of the solar system exists.
But if you do accept that premise, isn't it reasonable to say that there would be many simulated realities compared to a single "real" reality, and that therefore any given consciousness is a lot more likely to be experiencing a simulation than experiencing the base reality?
Not at all. This is a category error - you can't place simulated realities on the same 'level' even among themselves, much less with the realities 'above' them.*
Let me put it this way: Most of our 'simulations' involve 'realities' with laws which have at best a weak relation to our reality and little relation between themselves. You can't deduce the situation of a higher reality - or even correct laws of logic - from a simulated reality. You can't know from a simulation n levels deep, how many simulations the n-1 level supports, so you can't assume there are many other possible simulations of same complexity level (which is critical for the statistical argument). You may not be able to even make a logical argument in the first place. For all we know, the 'true' reality is 1+1=5. The simulation argument is ergo incoherent.
* Aside, this argument fails statistically even if we do accept the category error. As Sean Caroll pointed out, most simulations will simulate below them, and therefore most simulations will not be able to support life. Our situation must be atypical in any event.
Are you really saying this has no bearing on whether the ‘base’ reality is also a simulation? I think once we see these sims happening in the n reality (as you put it), we have to also assume it’s possible in a hypothetical n-1 reality.
Another way to say it: once we have incontrovertible physical proof of the existence of a simulated multiverse, why should we assume that our reality is the base reality? Isn’t that akin to assuming that the earth must be the center of the universe simply because it’s where we live?
I'll posit that a complete simulation of our universe is very likely equivalent to the universe. Quantum mechanics suggests it can't be emulated by anything less complicated, so a complete simulation is merely a different substrate. It's an interesting implementation detail, but how much does it matter?
It might be possible there's a significant simplification if the actual universe worked by different rules, but there's no known theory which could accomplish this.
Now we have a cheating simulation. Your example is a cheating simulation. It doesn't actually create a simulation of a universe, it emulates the perceptions you'd have, but I don't think it will or can bother calculating the correct cosmic gamma-ray radiation intensity (for example).
A cheating simulation can have very different rules than the base. For example, many of our current 'simulations' have some form of magic system. We (in reality N) could today write a game where the N+1 NPCs have the v100 Neuralink. By carefully 'editing' them and the world, they'll never notice. Or maybe we allow them to notice - and they presume we also have a Neuralink - but we in the N reality are not yet able to build a real Neuralink!
We could have presumed the N-1 reality could also do the complete simulations that the N level v100 Neuralink could do (since it must be able to calculate the Neuralink simulation), but v100 cheats, and cheating creates simplifications which mean we can't really tell much at all about N-1.
The statistical argument for simulation rests on aggregating 1..N...X? levels together and doing some universal logic, but cheating makes them inconmensurable (does the same logic even apply?) and uncountable, and I don't see how we can do any statistics on that.
I don't think it's the best formulation. Let me formulate this in IMHO a better way:
If a simulation is of an equivalent complexity level to the 'true' thing, it's essentially equivalent and might as well be true. There's an argument from quantum mechanics that this reality cannot be properly simulated with anything simpler. If true, the conclusion is that since we exist we are real.
I don't see "the simulation created the universe" as any different from "god created the universe" in any significant way.
Scott Adams believes in the simulation. He says he's been able to, by thinking certain thoughts, influence the simulation. There's a word for that - "praying".
While the speed of light may prevent us from going to most of the universe physically (given our current understanding of physics), that's still a vast amount of compute just to give us the high fidelity impression that all this exists. What's the point? The sky could have just been simulated as dark and empty, or the universe could have contained a single galaxy.
Imagine how massive a "universe" the size of just the Earth would be, from the perspective of a proton.
Space is is just so astoundingly empty. Here in Melbourne, Australia we have a scale model of the solar system.
https://stkildamelbourne.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/S...
The Sun is about the size of a Fridge. Pluto is 9KM (5.6 miles) away and the size of a pea. Walking that really puts it all into a tangible scale. And that is merely 5.5 Light hours at full scale. Space is HUGE!
- Douglas Adams.
Interstellar civilizations made of people recognizably like us won't. But any that do won't be interested in us or in our planet.
If you have the technology to reach other habitable planets then you don’t need habitable planets.
There is much more useful mass of material in a planet than even a pile of asteroids... In fact, until you start gathering up the entire Oort Cloud (current best estimates put the entire Oort Cloud as x5 earth masses). From the inner solar system you don't even have as much mass in asteroids and comets to equal the mass of smaller "planets". It's not a stretch to imagine that you want concentrated mass to facilitate efficient industrial scale operations. It takes time and energy to drag lots of small mass together to build a big interstellar ship. So your hypothetical interstellar civilisation might want to break up large rocky planets into smaller "low gravity" chunks for processing, which if your an interstellar civilisation, is probably best done by slamming nice dense metal mass into the planet at high speed to throw big molten chunks of it into orbit, you want larger than dinosaur killer size glancing hits, not planet cracking "the moon hits earth" sized ones. This whole process gets much easier once you strip away the atmosphere as well.
And as for the extra step… That’s why I said they might want to reduce that gravity well by breaking up the planet.
Better feed it into an artificial black hole and the fish out all the nice heavy elements from the accreation disk!
Whoever has power to disregard the opinions of others can disregard the opinions of others. But that's not a rule, it's basically a tautology.
Aliens might not actually be land-based creatures like us. Those who evolved on planets entirely covered by liquid (water or otherwise) might even find the idea of "land" fairly strange.
(It's actually quite interesting to ponder the stages of discovery that liquid-based intelligent aliens might go through. First they might discover air (and land if available) and only after that space as another outer layer. I suppose that adds extra thrill we didn't have. Supposing of course that conditions there allow gas and liquid to exist as separate phases. Planets above criticality would probably be weirder still? Would any bottom rocks under the supercritical fluid still count as land - as opposed to "sea floor"?)
But to your point, I guess at the scale of even just the known universe it's hard to assert that anything is common or rare.
SETI has been sending unconventional radio signals to random spots of the cosmos and waiting for a quick response. An extraterrestrial SETI might have launched ʻOumuamua a billion years ago hoping that it would be detected by alien life.
I propose we find a cool Earth rock, launch it to the solar system Vega, and wait a couple billion years for an alien response.
Like a mycologist, you mean?
aka the VN Berserker hypothesis
Mold does not detonate nuclear weapons, emitting gamma rays into deep space, nor does it have an RF noise bubble out to 50 light years.
An optical survey of our atmosphere would demonstrate techno-signatures. Any observers in NEO would see city lights and pick up radio stations. Radar observation would reveal aircraft.
What if we're the first mold they've ever discovered? It would be a historic meeting for both civilizations.
Plot devices like aliens attacking Earth for her water really burns me up. The universe is brimming with water and materials. Why expend the effort to lift water out of a gravity well, when you can just gather it from comets and asteroids and not have pesky humans shooting at you?
As long as a species like humans is confined to their own rock, there's no threat of them doing much harm. Once they get to a second rock, there's a good chance they'll get to a 3rd, 4th and nth in another star system, within a couple decamillennia. It's exponential grown, limited only by the speed of light.
They'll probably start building Dyson swarms too and taking over stars that way, which is a lot more annoying than them taking over planets.
This is scary fast to observe if you're a long-lived species, or if you live around a gravity well and time dilation makes it seem like humans are buzzing along and taking over stuff at incredible speeds.
Our machine successors might. Or, might not see any reason to. Hot, rocky planets deep in gravity wells will in any case be of no more than academic interest.
And life that exists deep in gravity wells would be very interesting indeed.
Are there other known natural systems that push and mix pre-life molecules together?
Slarti: "Look at them, it makes no sense to me. They always go for the hot, rocky planets deep in gravity wells. Why do they do it?!"
Barti: "I guess there's no accounting for taste."
Slarti: "Maybe they want to avoid competition... no one is going to come there looking for resources."
Barti: "But they had to drain an Oorth cloud for fusion power to get there! You are right, it makes no sense!"
I think such a revelation would have almost no impact. Let's be real, people that are all in on religion didn't get there using logic. Adding one more unanswered question isn't going to change anyone's mind.