Are we stuck with the Zoo Hypothesis?
universetoday.com
universetoday.com
I feel like I'm going crazy.
If there was an identical civilization residing on an identical earth orbiting an identical sun at the distance of our closest celestial neighbor, there is an exact and precise 0.0% chance that we would be able to detect them.
We wouldn't be able to detect them optically or electromagnetically.
There's no room for debate, we cannot resolve enough detail at that distance and our (and therefore their) highest-output EM emissions would fall below the noise floor. We probably wouldn't even be able to tell the composition of their atmosphere besides "uh there's a little methane, some oxygen, and some nitrogen in the extreme upper layers".
It may be possible to send low data rate pulses between the two systems if high-gain high-power communications equipment is purposefully designed and installed on both planets and used to do so. Like two globe-spanning networks of high-power high-gain highly directional transmitters and receivers that are synced up to allow for continuous operation as both we and they rotate on a frequency ideal for punching through the magnetosphere, transiting space, and differentiating itself from the gigantic broadband emitters (the suns) adjacent to us.
But neither we nor the hypothetical other-humans are doing any of that.
But all of these supposedly smart people are like "where are the aliens? we're looking but they're not there!"
We can't even detect ourselves at the distance of our nearest neighbor!
The universe is quite old. Civilizations could have arisen billions of years ago. It stands to reason that one or more of them would expand aggressively and attain a very high level of technological development, with Dyson Spheres and other artificial megastructures. This could include unnatural-looking star arrangements, technosignatures in stars, etc.
The people who make these assumptions also assume, generally, that humanity will one day attain such a state. And in the not terribly distant future, at that. (Thousands rather than millions or billions of years.)
Yet we don't see ANY evidence for any of this sort of thing. It's not that there are no civilizations at all, it's that, as far as we can tell, there are zero great star-faring civilizations -- no Rulers of the Cosmos.
So why not? They've had billions of years. And any explanation (like "they're just not interested") has to apply universally, to ALL such civilizations.
The most parsimonious explanations are:
The Zoo ("they, being unfathomably more advanced than us, don't want us to see them,")
The Great Filter ("something makes such life extraordinarily unlikely. This something -- the filter -- might be in our future.")
The notion that ALL such civilizations are too wise to expand at this stage of the evolution of the cosmos ("the vacuum is too warm and it makes life/computation less efficient, so let's hibernate a few billion/trillion years until things cool down," or "we have attained enlightenment and don't need Dyson Spheres".)
New Physics. ("We wouldn't even know them if we saw them. They might be able to convert waste heat to matter, etc.")
Interstellar travel takes so long that any lifeform attempting it would be extinct by the time it arrived. Accordingly, intelligent lifeforms don't attempt it (and lifeforms lacking intelligence can't). We don't see VN probes because they're pointless from the POV of the sending civilization: by the time the probe's return signal reached home, the sending civilization would be extinct, and it knows it, so it doesn't bother.
We're at a stage in our development where just one lifetime ago, we didn't know other stars had planets, we didn't know there were other galaxies, and no human had ever been to space. We're still wide-eyed about the idea of space travel. But really, space travel is so difficult and expensive that almost any other use of resources has a better ROI. In a coupla hundred years we'll have calmed down (if we're still around).
Why no VN probes? Perhaps we don't know what to look for; it's pretty anthropomorphic to imagine they're going to look like Voyager 2. Or perhaps VN probes are just silly; there's no point in sending a probe to a distant star, if we'll all be extinct before it arrives.
i think that's why everyone was so interested in that asteroid that was behaving just a little bit unlike every other rock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua
I'm going to try and work through it here.
As a civilization spreads, the outer nodes get "dumber" as the speed of light begins to cut into bandwidth/response. So agents get much more bang for their buck increasing their complexity while staying inside the light-second (or light-hour, with caching) sphere, right up until computational complexity is nearing the atomic level (i.e., "computronium").
So you get these planetary-sized shells of computronium, bound by the bandwidth limit of C. Human-equivalent intelligence gets a simulation space that's larger than a few hundred thousand Earths[0]. I'm probably not explaining it all that well, but Accelerando is free on the internet[1]. Like I said - not amazing literature, but pretty neat ideas.
The sad part of all this is that civilizations reach this hard halt where they've converted their systems into computronium - they come to a sudden halt, and no way to press on outwards, as they're all held in thrall to the light sphere.
[0] I challenge the notion of "simulation space" or even the notion that "downloaded humans" would stay human for very long (they wouldn't). Another problem: Stross' system is a little bit magical in terms of its infrastructure, because a fog of undifferentiated laser-connected micro-computers is going to have terrible latency across a 1 AU distance, and there's no way for a central authority to route things. But Stross is way smarter than I am . . so who knows?
[1] https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
[1.a] Unrelated, but check out "A Colder War", also downloadable. CIA Cold War shenanigans meets Cthulhu! Features some obscure Cambrian species. This sent me down a rabbit hole of learning about the incredible early animals of our planet's history.
If humans saw an unnatural-looking star arrangement I would expect them to expand a lot of energy trying to come up with an explanation as to why this star arrangement had formed naturally?
Semi-Zoo: We, seeing something that could be explained as alien, will explain it in some other way.
We do this, for example, with our pet dogs, ascribing anthropomorphic qualities to their behavior. While it may be true that a dog can experience emotion, they do not (likely) experience it the way we do.
When it comes to these ideas about an alien civ traversing the cosmos (or staying home) we can only think about it in terms of the arguably tiny box that is our perspective. While this position has proven pretty useful to us so far, unless we learn to remove ourselves from the box, our explanations on the grander scale of galactic civilization and technologies beyond our understanding will be perpetually deficient. Insert Sagan's quote about advanced tech looking like magic here, I guess.
I think we are getting there, though. We have some interesting thinkers in the world right now, and more surely to come with future generations. It just bothers me that this thread seems to be full of some really limited and unprovable ideas that are being presented as unassailable. So far our greatest explanation as to why we don't have any alien buddies is The Great Filter, and that's a about as structurally sound as wet tissue. Important to remember that we have a long, long way to go and it would be my hope that we achieve the ability to think like something other than ourselves.
(building any electronics that resist radiation and last more than 50 yrs is a very complicated process as well)
Also, the processing needn't be fast at all if going vast distances. There's a lot of time to complete a calculation. Lot's of time and lots of room for redundancy. Same with fuel, yes the rocket equation is wicked, but if you could just get more of it from an asteroid or whatever, just get more of it. Huge, slow burners with "CPUs" a mile wide.
> New Physics. ("We wouldn't even know them if we saw them. They might be able to convert waste heat to matter, etc.")
How do we even know what to look for? Why would we think that something we've only understood for 100-200 years is in any way a meaningful signature for billion year old civilizations?
We might as well be looking for the presence of flint flakes. That at least was state of the art technology for thousands of years.
So another option is that there is some reason it's impossible to leave the solar system. Maybe there's something just outside the solar system which we cannot prepare for and won't overcome. Perhaps any life form will run into this issue, which we may never know about, and they stay in one star system.
We already have evidence of an extinction-level event (Chicxulub impact) 66 million years ago. A strong enough solar flare would eradicate all life in extra-terrestrial colonies. We are just lucky to be alive.
That's not how I see it. The Great Filter implies, and quite strongly, that the Filter is in our past -- and, as such, it's extremely egotistical. For, ultimately, the implication is that we may quite literally be unique.
It's also not at all clear that something like the Chicxulub impact would result in the extinction of humanity. Unlike dinosaurs, we're able to adapt with technological solutions, such that at least a breeding population would survive such a catastrophic event. (This applies broadly, to other technological societies.)
Granted, a supernova could go off somewhere in the neighborhood, but this is a low-likelihood event, and thus cannot be a Filter. The Filter, after all, has to apply universally.
I think that the most parsimonious explanation is new physics. There's nothing egotistical in the notion that we don't understand everything there is to understand about how science and technology might progress, and looking for infrared waste heat and the technosignatures we're already familiar with, at our present level of development... this might, for obvious reasons, be totally futile.
No, it doesn't! The scale of the universe is huge, as in HUGE! There is simply no way a microscopic bug like us can influence anything at an inter-stellar distance.
- Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-search-for-ex...
(Of course, one could make the counterargument that we don't have Arecibo anymore...)
…several (or several thousand) years into the future. And even then tracking difficulties and the sheer vastness of space would make the chances of success near-zero.
Due to having a fixed dish with only a movable antenna feed the available look angles of aricebo are limited.
In all likelihood the aliens looking for us have a mega-aricebo in a random valley that is perfectly capable of receiving our signals but it is positioned one degree off-axis from the angle needed to receive us and they are as puzzled as we are as to why they are not hearing anything either.
Please could you provide a link that supports this assertion? We can detect gases in exoplanets?
if you were surveying a planet, and the dominant species regularly engages in assymetrical warfare against every other species it encounters.... would you pay them a visit?
we're stuck on a literal planet of Predators
worse than a Zoo though, would be a Lab: were we made for a purpose by someone else to test a hypothesis? or even worse... what if we are the control group?
We can have have radio (electromagnetic) communication between the Earth and the Moon just fine.
How do you imagine focusing "any transmitter in the galaxy" to converge at a distance of, say, 200 light years?
Any rough calculations on the method, focusing array size?
The moon is our celestial roommate.
Light need 1.3 seconds on average to travel from Earth to the Moon.
Do you still think your comment makes any sense?
Yes, because the nearest celestial neighbor is the moon and the nearest star is the sun. I don't see how Proxima Centauri is relevant here.
How much detectable technological signature we emit for others to detect? I am not a physicist but I guess that would be next to nothing for any considerable space distance.
So every other civ that is tractable to us is not detectable (just like us!) Any other civ that in theory can be detectable is incomprehensible just like humans are intractable to ants.
Even if we exist as a civ in current state for a million years (which we won't given out history) our signature will still be negligible for likes of us to detect.
The rest is just empty talking for the talking sake.
Is this logic? Or just 2 unrelated claims concatenated.
Why can't ants comprehend beetles if they are "similar or same"
this one is tricky how do we define similarity? ants to ants is easy because we can assume they are the same or the difference is negligible.
could you elaborate please? i can’t say that i understand your statement
It's far more plausible we could have some comprehension of even a very advanced civilization than not. For us to not be able to comprehend them, they would have to entirely be using physics we don't understand at all. Not physics we know + physics we don't, but only physics we don't know about. Which, given how much of low energy physics we understand to great deals of precision, seems extraordinarily unlikely.
it is really important to establish some sort of vocab to ensure that we are talking about the same thing here.
By comprehend I mean you, as an ant, "understand" a bug in a sense that you can predict its movements, eat it, force it to go away, or breed the thing if you find its symbiotically useful, in a sense you have internal world model of a thing, comprehend.
hence, ant in a strict sense, does not comprehend humans, it doesn't have world model of us, as a thing. most that it can do, it can see us as a force of nature that somehow happens to it.
on the other hand, we understand it almost perfectly, we can play with them, be benevolent, or malevolent toward their entire "civilization" we can joke with then playing with their communications, we don't get everything but we understand the gist of it.
> It's far more plausible we could have some comprehension of even a very advanced civilization than not. For us to not be able to comprehend them, they would have to entirely be using physics we don't understand at all. Not physics we know + physics we don't, but only physics we don't know about. Which, given how much of low energy physics we understand to great deals of precision, seems extraordinarily unlikely.
no, just no. it is pure speculation, we think too much of ourselves.
By that definition, many mammals and birds, if not even the vast majority, actually understand us then, thus proving that simpler lifeforms can understand much more complex ones. Probably some of the bigger fish, reptiles and amphibians too.
The difference between ants and us is more one of simple scale. If we had been the size of ants, we also wouldn't have been able to do anything against a gorilla, even with a lot of current technologies. And yes, if it turns out there exist aliens the size of planets or solar systems, we won't have any realistic way of defending against them if they are aggressive. But that still won't mean we couldn't comprehend some of what they do, at least enough to realize they are an intelligent life form.
The bigger problem would of course be if they are (a) not made of any form of matter we recognize (imagine dark matter aliens, though that doesn't seem plausible in our current physical models), or (b) live at entirely different time scales than us, say having "neurons" that fire once in a thousand years, or once per planck time.
It doesn't actually make much sense in context.
That doesn't follow. Just because you can represent intelligence as a number doesn't mean it actually is one. Plus ants don't make any effort to understand us.
Let's say we start leaving some scent trails around a nest in the hope of starting a conversations.
Will the ants see that as "communication from an advanced civilisation"?
Even if they do - unlikely, but let's pretend - will they be able to use that communication to power up ant civilisation to the highly advanced and superior technological level that defines the Internet and Hacker News?
It's far more likely that beyond a certain point civs become invisible, because they're doing things less mature civs literally can't imagine.
And this applies even if we share a physical space with them. We could be surrounded by technology and completely unable to recognise it. It would be invisible to us, except maybe - maybe - the very occasional fleeting anomaly.
Because we're looking for radio scent trails, and the galactic civ is using Something Else Entirely which we not only don't have the words or the math for, but the brain space to begin to imagine it.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/webb-discovers-meth...
that is next to nothing, observable universe is 93 billion light-years around 0.1 stars per cubic light-year (Google response) universe is humongous and very very sparse, our current limit is light speed.
> advanced alien technology
that goes against my second claim, lol, they (if they exist) are capable of observing and understanding us, we can't observe them and, quite likely, we are unable to understand them.
every other civ that is as primitive as we are is bound by the same light speed constraint
G'Kar demonstrates the alien nature of Sigma 957: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLZW8Deq8vE
Do ants comprehend microbes? They don't, but we comprehend (or at least apprehend) ants and microbes, which makes us qualitatively different than ants.
And is it really true that ants can't tell the difference between a forest and a house? That everything to them looks like a similar level of "wild"? I find that rather hard to believe. Ants are afraid of predators and will bite creatures which they perceive (whatever "perceive" means at the ant level) to be attacking their nest.
It may be possible for there to be an alien civilization so different in capabilities, goals, and mindset that we comprehend them no better than ants comprehend us. But I have a hard time believing that they would be so different from us that we wouldn't even be able to notice their presence if we were looking right at something they'd made or used somehow.
> How much detectable technological signature we emit for others to detect? I am not a physicist but I guess that would be next to nothing for any considerable space distance.
The basic argument is that once humans became a "colonizing" species, pretty quickly anywhere which could be lived in by humans was lived in by humans; and that once we became a species with a significant ability to transform our environment, you can't go far without finding evidence of that transformation.
Extrapolating out, we expect that our own civilization will begin to colonize the stars at some point; and then at some point our technology will become good enough to transform the galactic environment to suit our desires.
Doing the math any spacefaring civilization with what we'd consider basic level of travel could colonize the entire galaxy in 100m years or so; and so far we've had 100x that long since the universe began. So if life capable of becoming a star-faring civilization were common, we'd expect to find the galaxy already widely colonized; and we'd expect such a civilization to transform the galactic landscape as dramatically as we humans have transformed the Earth's landscape.
The lack of such a galactic civilization is what needs explaining. Where does our intuition from the extension of our own growth on planet Earth not match up to reality?
- Maybe there is a galaxy-wide civilization but either they don't see the value in transforming the environment? Or maybe there are fundamental limits to technology of which we're not aware, such that no galaxy-wide civilization would ever be able to transform the environment?
- Maybe there are loads of civilizations like ours, but they never go galactic; a Great Barrier that has stopped them and will stop us as well. But why? Are there fundamental limits of technology that make it universally impractical (which we'll hit up against soon)? Is it inevitable (or highly probable) that such civilizations become inward-focused, and spend all their time in simulations instead? Or do most civilizations end up falling prey to Moloch [1] and destroy themselves before they manage to go galactic?
- Or, maybe there's loads of life on other planets, but none of them ever become technological: that is, the Great Barrier is becoming capable of scientific discovery, and it's behind us. In 100 million years or so we'll be the first galactic civilization which everyone else finds.
- Or, maybe simple life like bacteria is common, but complex life is rare; or maybe life at all is rare.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
that is the second part of my answer, as soon as you can be noticeable you stop being comprehensible by those whose means of communications are less evolved.
you either can have a peer to peer communication, which is blocked by our capability (and currently speed of light)
or you are unable to comprehend more advanced means of communication.
again to my analogy, ant can see human impact on the planet, but it can't comprehend that it is human impact and not some different form of nature landscape.
> Maybe there is a galaxy-wide civilization but either they don't see the value in transforming the environment? Or maybe there are fundamental limits to technology of which we're not aware, such that no galaxy-wide civilization would ever be able to transform the environment?
if we are speculating here, I think civilizations akin to to ours are extremely common, there is no reason to think that we are special. We are just weak enough to not to be able to connect due to our technological limits.
I also think that advanced civs are pretty common, it is just we are unable to understand and detect them so we think the cosmos is empty.
So, a zoo but a zookeeper flashes us a high five as he departs for his next adventure.
I'm only slightly intelligent but if I had access to all the resources I needed on my own planet, I wouldn't want talk to any of our leaders either.
Humanity blasts all sorts of signals indiscriminately into the universe. Our best guess is that other intelligent life would do the same. I mean, sure, obviously we're also looking for the former, but we're expecting the latter.
"No, you were not alone"
People don't even appreciate how different other humans are, I don't think we're close to imagining how different other "life-forms" are (the very idea of a "life-form" is also a concept humans impose on the universe more than a feature of it).
We've been struggling to understand how animals see the world, we're struggling to guess whether AI sees the world, we struggle to imagine how extraterrestials see the world. Heck, we don't even have a solid definition for what an "alien" is, one that could help us draw a line between e.g. a geological process and a living thing. See the novels "Solaris" and "Invincible" by Stanisław Lem.
For a more Earthly take, Frank Schätzing explored what another animal might see like in The Swarm.
For me, the realization came with the advent of LLMs. If we dropped a probe on a different planet, and found something behaving like LLMs there, I would not be able to say if that's an advanced form of a native inhabitant of the planet or not.
If it is going to entertain the zoo hypothesis, it should also entertain the dark forest hypothesis among others. It is a false dichotomy to say "zoo or nothing".
In general, the article seems to have an agenda of getting to the zoo hypothesis via process of elimination. But it fails to eliminate Sagan’s response, which is that simply not having detected signs of life isn’t sufficient evidence to rule out life whether it is intentionally hiding from us or not.
I don’t know. In terms of getting to the bottom of things this article reads more like wish fulfillment for a science fiction trope. It gets close to a genuine exploration of the history of SETI, but poses too many fallacious arguments in its conclusion.
What, after like 50 years of searching across billions of light-years of space? Maybe someone can chime in with the cubic light-years.