An existential problem in the search for alien life
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
[0] https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/uap_amendment...
If aliens don’t exist, why are defense contractors trying so hard to shut down a bill that simply says “show us what you know about aliens”?
By the same logic, then “why would OpenAI and a bunch of big tech companies lobby so hard for AI ‘safety’ legislation, if AGI wasn’t close to existing [or already existed]? It means that we are close to AGI!”
As you can see, that type of reasoning doesn’t tend to lead to reasonable answers. And with the AI “safety” legislation, there have been plenty discussions on HN already, with the consensus being “they are doing it to secure their position at the top through regulatory capture, inflate their perception of importance [aka drive more money their way], and choke out new entrants.”
I don’t see it being that much different of a scenario with “alien bills”.
Because if they say "Nothing" will you shut up and believe them?
Of course not.
You can't prove a negative like this.
And there are lots of things that would be "alien adjacent" and would give away what military abilities we have to detect things.
At this point, the military has less ability than the people on this axis. We have billions of people with phones in multiple countries that can record with video everywhere. If aliens existed in anything that was more than a super-ultra-rare one-off, supressing the evidence in this day and age would be beyond impossible.
As for the contractors: it's almost certainly because the government isn't providing any funding in the amendment. The contractors would happily charge lots of money to compile a multi-thousand page report that effectively says "Nothing" if you paid them to. That's their whole bloody business model, for crying out loud.
Convince me that you have told me everything that you know about aliens. If not, i will force you to open up your IP for scrutiny and, possibly, any passing Russian ambassadors.
Are there any Congressional representatives not "funded by defense contractors"?
This made me think whether this is a type of computational limitation. That there is simply too much complexity and too many variables but theoretically it should still be possible. Perhaps this is a bit reductionist pov.
> Life brings complexity into the universe, she says, in its own being and in its products, because it has memory: in DNA, in repeating molecular reactions, in the instructions for making a chair.
Following this train of thought, if I assume that there is no fundamental difference between matter and life, life becomes a type of black hole of computational complexity. Like those parts of the unobservable universe which we could never peer into because of hard limits in physics. I can perhaps rationalize on a piece of paper that life is fundamentally deterministic but I can only think it, not behold it. DNA, memory is like some intense potential energy, a tightly wound spring that slowly lets off its energy in complex ways over potentially eons. Hence we are not fundamentally different than the light of the sun, warming the surface of rocks and evaporating water, but undergoing a far more intense process than simple evaporation.
Organic life is then merged/exterminated/controlled in favor of AGI.
AGI would not have the biological instinct to grow/spread/reproduce, and thus the cosmos should be populated with a handful of individual billion year old super advanced AGIs, perhaps only one or two per galaxy, sitting quietly in orbit around some stable star or perhaps even in the great voids outside the galaxy somewhere.
Finding one is likely near impossible as they may not want to be found.
what supports this idea
These are philosophical threads that I'd honestly rather not pull, because I suspect that in the end, the nihilists are most correct, and I just got into this business because I thought computers/video games were cool, but it seems that collectively we insist on it.
Or maybe every civilization eventually invents TikTok.
>Organic life is then merged/exterminated/controlled in favor of AGI.
Why? What would be the motivation for this? If we are the case study, AGI isn't able to "feed" itself energy without biological life to turn switches and dials. So why would this be a logical first step?
>AGI would not have the biological instinct to grow/spread/reproduce
This infers a 'perfect' AI. One without any biases from its creator. What makes you think that's possible? Also, is self-preservation/self-propogation not part of being able to think and reason?
We haven’t invented “AGI” yet (if AGI means a computer system that merges/exterminates/controls humanity). We have no idea even theoretically what such a system might look like, let alone how to create it.
I’d say we’re a lot closer to colonising the solar system and building cities on Jupiter’s moons than we are to building the machines from the Matrix. At least we kind of theoretically know how to do the former.
Meanwhile, we’re really good at building computer and industrial systems that (when combined with economic, social and political incentives) exert strong control over us, exterminate many of us, and may well exterminate a lot more in the near future.
But that doesn’t look like a Hollywood movie, so it’s less fun to think about.
Sorry, this wasn’t meant to be a dig at you personally. Some of the AI doom stuff just sets me off.
You: what a ridiculous statement, we haven’t even built that yet.
But that doesn't mean I'm stressed about what you're stressed about. We killed god once before we can do it again if we need to. The real danger is in us using AI to do more of what it already does now, not that it will decide to do some new thing.
But it doesn't matter. If you gave everyone a button and the warning that pushing it would end the human race, we'd all be dead pretty much immediately.
I think it's a given that on a long enough timescale, someone will create AGI and we'll no longer be the dominate race on earth. How that ends, in death, or slavery, I don't know.
I do hope that every AI researcher does their work with a small bit of fear of becoming the pet of an AGI.
What could it be? Near-zero term in the Drake equation? The dark forest? A great filter?
To understand different possibilities, they decided to determine the cause using a computer simulation. However, due to hardware limitations, they were only able to simulate one civilization at a time.
We can only speculate what the final answer was.
We have all the elements for answers if we focus on what we know, and forget the hand wavy sci-fi speculation.
1) Complex life is rare.
2) Reaching a space faring stage is even rarer. (we’re the most minimal definition of “space faring” you could come up with, and even then we got really lucky with so many things)
3) The universe is huge. It’s like, the hugest thing there is, man. And except for some little bits of interesting dust here and there, it’s mostly empty. As empty as it is huge.
So, does life - in any form - exist elsewhere in the universe? Almost certainly.
Are/were there life forms elsewhere in the universe that escaped their home planet gravity to go explore their moon or other planets in their solar system? Seems quite probable.
Is there any shot we are sufficiently close in space/time to encounter such another advanced life form? Almost certainly not.
As far as I know, we have observed complex (and extremely robust) life on every temperate, wet planet that we know about. Batting a thousand.
The universe is probably teeming with life, but sadly, most of it is probably just goo.
So the better way of thinking about this is a 75 year thick slice through spacetime containing the edge of the visible universe shortly after the big bang at one end and the solar system over the last 75 years at the other end. The volume between the past light cones of Earth now and 75 years ago.
Interplanetary: easy.
Interstellar: pushing the boundaries of what's possible imho.
Intergalactic: no way.
Our closest planet (Mars) is 3 lightminutes away.
Our closest star (Proxima Centauri) is 5 lightyears away.
Our closest galactic neighbour (LMC) is 150000 lightyears away.
Creating a closed self-sustaining ecosystem capable of supporting large animal life & cut off from the earth's resources is not something we've been able to do even at a proof-of-concept level.
We're very confident in ourselves but idk. It's not preposterous that life is a planetary expression and that it's simply not possible to expand an instance of it beyond the planet that birthed it. We assume we aren't subject to this constraint but we haven't demonstrated it at all.
We have never seen another living planet so we don't know what to expect from one. I touched on this originally but I'll be explicit now: the fact that we can't create a closed ecosystem even given a working example and diverse raw materials is a powerful indicator of our ignorance about the contours and possibilities of life.
I'm not saying it is impossible, but I'm saying any confident assertions about its possibility, much less how "easy" it is are fantasy if not pure hubris. It's quite possible that no level of advancement will allow for even merely interplanetary life.
This assumption is exactly what I am challenging: that there is such a thing as "general suitability" to life.
We should be open to the possibility that a living system is only compatible with the specific circumstances it emerges from. We've seen nothing to indicate either way, of course, not having seen any other life. But we should not so comfortably assume it's a transferrable process.
Interplanetary: chemical.
Interstellar: nuclear.
Intergalactic: antimatter / black hole.
"The Dark Forest" by Liu Cixin is sci-fi, but I don't think it's too hand-wavy. It presents a pretty logical answer to the Fermi Paradox, based on a couple obvious axioms.
Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
If you read the books, you'll notice that they talk about "hiding gene" and "cleansing gene"; these are traits that civilizations acquire as they evolve.
I think that this has real-world implications in terms of how we conduct our SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence); we should be careful of our radio emissions and things like sending a powerful signal / message to another star should probably be avoided.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no empirical evidence for life outside of Earth. My guess is that it exists out there somewhere, but there's no good basis for believing that life is as common as the Dark Forest hypothesis requires.
Dark forest is way down at the bottom of "plausible explanations"
It just sounds like it makes sense for 3 min then it really, really doesn't
Taking the (original) dark forest problem and applying it to civilizations in space sounds like a Strawman problem
(you can also think about all the technical hurdles such a thing would take, also remember that the fast something goes the harder it is to maneuver and to stop at the destination), don't underestimate all the kinds of noise that such thing will create and can be traced back to its origin.
- No species on Earth do that kind of unprovoked attack, unless it is very cheap and quick (and riskless)
So no, I think there are many better explanations than simply the dark forest one
How would you do that? There's a tremendous amount of energy already in it, it's releasing it gradually for now but what if there were ways to make it release all at once? One potential approach would be to throw something at it at relativistic speeds (you'd imagine accelerating things to near-lightspeed would be a pretty obvious milestone in the tech tree).
For an advanced civilization, this is pretty easy; they'd probably be able to do it routinely from a mobile spaceship so they don't have to give away their home star's position.
There _are_ signs consistently that something has an understanding of physics and inertia that violate our understanding of such things, which implies our assumptions about distance of things in the universe are wrong.
Those vehicles appearance but lack of most interaction, lack of destruction implies something worse, that we are probably still such a primative civilization we're treated like zoo animals.
These conversations about the last century of the search for alien life in the light of David Grusch's testimony to Congress and the various and numerous UAP videos are.. interesting to say the least.
There are two easy interpretations. One of these is imagining a new entity; aliens. The other is to imagine that humans are, essentially, human and falliable and are chasing lense flares and radar glitches.
One of these interpretations is much more likely than the other.
I don't doubt the existence of aliens. I just doubt that UFOs are aliens.
Why not at least link to the source of such a claim? Is there a paper that says this? I love how a pop-sci journalist can just throw out some definitive claim like that with no evidence whatsoever. As if there's overwhelming evidence for their claim to the point where it's not even worthy of debate.
I have no horse in the race either way, but last I heard there were multiple theories about the phosphine readings and just not enough data to come to any conclusion yet. I thought we were waiting for future missions to collect more data. There's multiple upcoming Venus missions, at least one of which is going to swoop up material from the atmosphere for analysis.
Biologists cannot even agree on a unique definition of life itself; but that hasn’t stopped them from unraveling aspects of the cell, the double helix, photosynthesis, enzymes and a host of other living phenomena…
For example, we usually talking about Earth as very ordinary world, assuming, we are not special.
For most parameters, Earth ordinary. But exists at least one parameter, which is specific.
What I mean, Earth in Galaxy region, where density of interstellar matter is very low, so low, for example Bussard engine could not work.
But for example in central Galaxy region, density of interstellar matter is few magnitudes larger, Bussard engine might work, and it is very real tech for interstellar travel with speed close to speed of light.
Sure this have some consequences, for example central galaxy regions considered very active for star bursts and even explosions, so they have not billions years of calm life, they really dangerous for life as we know it.
So, we are ordinary world and not ordinary at same time. From our current science view, we are in void, with low matter density.
Between us and other part of galaxy, exists huge (for us) void, which is not easy to cross.
Well, no, but it's totally reasonable to behave as if it is mostly average, at least for now. Looking under the streetlight[0] is a perfectly good idea when you've only managed to cover, like, a tiny percentage of the street so far. Once you run out of optimism about finding earthlike life (or it's become so common so as to be boring) then it'll be good to have people with more out-there ideas, but the people looking for earthlike life aren't being stupid for focusing on stuff that we already understand a bit.
Of the comparatively tiny 5k or so exoplanets we've discovered most would likely be difficult for advanced life to develop as they're gas giants and of the ones we've detected we've only performed atmospheric analysis on a fraction of them.
Radio signals are mostly just going to degrade and look like noise by the time they get to us. Even with a really strong directional antenna how well are you going to pickup your wifi signal that's on the other side of a major city?
Life could also be teeming across the universe just as organisms that haven't learned to harness electricity.
100% of worlds where Earth-like life could survive and that we have explored have an intelligent species living on them.
There isn't a single star system we have ruled out from having intelligent civilizations.
While we can put some bounds on things (some worlds are inhospitable to life as we know it, we're almost certainly the only intelligent species in our solar system at this time, we're likely the only intelligent civilization to inhabit our planet in at least the past few hundred million years, there probably isn't a recent galaxy-spanning empire in the milky way, there's likely no civilization actively trying to communicate with us, etc) there is absolutely no evidence that life as we know it is unusual either in terms of what sort of life is out there or how much.
Similar to how the current branch of life as we know it evolved on planet earth after what we assume was a large meteor impact and the resulting effects on the environment, what if the universe (or at least our local galaxy) was once much more populated and "busy", and then along came a cataclysmic event that wiped out the vast majority of life, resetting the stage for other more discrete, gentler and less energy hungry forms to thrive and exist. What if all those black holes and interesting space phenomena are the result of massively powerful weapons from a massive galactic scale confilct which literally destroyed entire solar systems by imploding stars? Or perhaps they are just clever physics tricks which fool outside observers into thinking there is nothing there, or what is there is so immensely dangerous/destructive that it's best to steer clear and leave well alone?
Furthermore, what if the majority of advanced life simply doesn't want to be found. Assuming that the development of other species in other worlds would roughly follow our own path (struggle for habitable space / usable resources), there would be an inherent distrust of other galactic civilisations at a percieved lower/higher level of development. The "dummies" would be avoided for (looks at today's news headlines) obvious reasons, and the more advanced civilisations would be an obvious threat which could not be defended against and so would not be targets for our exploration (a la "Dark Forest Theory" et al).
So, we're either in the first wave and we have some trouble headed our way sooner or later. Or we're in the second wave, and have likely been infiltrated culturally/genetically many millennia ago by the surviving intelligences (in whichever form, take your pick) from the first wave.
Forgive my rather crude treatment of the topic, I realise there is much more nuance and detail to these things. I simply present this idea in a rough form as a means to keep things within our realm of understanding.
(Before eventual colonization, this would warrant a really thorough "gamma soak" as in Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation space" SF series.)
Despite the environment being -320 or +320 Celsius.
I don’t know what to make if it. It’s weird.
You do have a point - 47 degrees below absolute zero is probably too cold for life
It’s clearly floating-point.
We're largely not looking for life in the interstellar vacuum.