Hacker News Reader

Comment by mpreda | Hacker News Reader

We can expect these posibilities: 1. no life 2. simple life 3. advanced intelligent civilization

In the first two cases, we need to send a physical probe there. In the third case it might be enough, and much faster, to send communication signals there and get answers back. The third case is also arguably the most interesting.

View on HN

If 3, And The are truly advanced we should consider not communicating with them. Maybe they are hiding from someone else... ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

If they are truly that advanced, they certainly already know about us. It seems kind of arrogant to presume that we could detect them with our primitive technology and they could not detect us. Most likely scenario is that they don't care about us in the same way we don't care about ants.

It's why I'm 100% it can't be advanced life: we can't find life anywhere in the galaxy but we find advanced life in our own backyard (I know 120 light years is quite a lot)?

That might just mean that life is rare, but inevitably becomes advanced.

Even sending over a probe at 30% the speed of light would take 400 years, plus another 120 to hear back from it. No matter how interesting, for our human society it would be really hard to raise significant funds for a project that will only pay off in over 500 years, if at all. If they have similar lifespans, such a project might be similarly hard to get off the ground for their society.

That leaves radio communication, but the latest intel they have on us left earth around 1900. At that point we wouldn't have been able to receive anything from them. It's probably questionable if we would have picked something up had they sent a radio signal our way a week ago. Right now SETI might have a radio antenna pointed their way, but that won't last indefinitely, and these events are a bit hard to time from 120 lightyears away.

4. dead or dying intelligent civilization

Slightly different than #1 assuming 'no life' means it never evolving

I can imagine a billion-year old civilization in its last gasps. Maybe it was a beautiful peaceful and technologically advanced civilization. Maybe it appeared and died before encountering any other advanced intelligent life from outside it's solar system.

Then again maybe it is dead from a nuclear or other catastrophic type of war.

A billion year old technologically advanced civilization in our own galaxy would probably be fairly easy to find as current models estimate that it'd only take a couple million years to colonize the galaxy even without FTL travel. Thus we'd expect to see various technosignatures scattered everywhere (including within our own solar system).

They'd have to either have advanced extremely slowly compared to us, such that a thousand years of our development are many millions of years of development to them or had some sort of extinction event that was so thorough as to render all of their stuff around other stars inactive (I guess maybe they might consider it extremely important to hide from developing civilizations though, in which case we probably can't even fathom what sort of hiding mechanisms they might have).

It's worth considering that with another century or two of development, assuming we don't face some sort of societal collapse, we'll definitely be capable of sending small probes to our nearby stars at large fractions of light speed. Given a couple thousand years without a collapse, we most probably can send self-replicating machines to colonize the galaxy like that. Even supposing that it takes us 100,000 years to get to that point, that's just 0.01% of a billion year old civilization's time.

What if the advanced civilization treats us like the way we treat animals?

In my view it's better to stay away from the advanced civilizations

the ‘dark forest’ hypothesis.

We do have animal rights, don't we?

Do you want to be livestock? (Most animal mass is livestock).

We'd be lucky to be treated like bugs.

Yeah right. We like to think we do.

We do? Where?

If we detected their planet, and they're significantly more advanced than us, then it follows that they know a lot about our planet already.

> What if the advanced civilization treats us like the way we treat animals?

As long as they don't treat us like we treat plants, it will be fine. I bet that that tomato didn't consent to be genetically raped with flounder's dna.

Or like Columbus treated the people who lived in South America or the Caribbean. How did that monster get a day named after him?

Many forms of life may be detectable using telescopes. A jungle planet will look different in many ways than an ice world.l, ways that are detectable. A billion LED street lamps would similarly make the night side detectable.

Well only once you get to very very close to it.

For reference, this is Pluto as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. Until the New Horizons flyby that was our best picture, and Pluto is right here in our solar system.

https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/1996/news-1996...

Not something like the "red edge" associated with plant life.

It's 120 light years away, sending a probe isn't going to do much unfortunately.

Not on human lifespans. But on species lifespans, we could probably establish contact.

Why not aim an antenna at it, and download the answers to the questions of the universe?

Because it's directional communication (point-to-point), in order to be energy-efficient over long range.

1. They may have found us and may have directed a communication beam at us.

2. The technology they use may be so advanced as to overcome any power problems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com