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Comment by Towaway69 | Hacker News Reader

My thinking is that the universe is full with life and communicating life. However communication is only possible with the right technology.

What is that technology? Technology that can only be created by a harmonious society working together to share ideas and combine ideas from everyone in a non competitive manner.

In that way the universe ensures peace and harmony ensures knowing that warring civilisation aren't able to leave their home base nor communicate with the universe.

It might sound slightly esoteric and spiritual but there many ways to societally live together in harmony with all humans.

After all not one individual can completely understand the universe, how can one nation hope to reach out to a non understandable universe.

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The idea of global harmonious cooperation represent the main evolutionary threshold appearing before us all. This should be our future, if We all individually find enough trust in ourselves, and let us collectively evolve in such direction.

And as We, I do not foresee only human beings, but more broadly the Living, as We, interspecies from Earth. Finding a way to unite individualities should include ways to establish communication channels with so-called wildlife individuals.

The idea of considering such a path being esoteric is a way to get distrustful people on board, which may be a waste of time and resources. We should focus on uniting everyone who already think this is the new normal.

Well said and thank you for saying it.

And yes, we should start at home and begin communicating with our surroundings. Be it the planet or the species with whom we share this spaceship earth.

How can a particular technology have a non-competitive harmonious society as a hard requirement for it's discovery?

Not a tech per se but I think they’d be more efficient. They’d go for standardization as the default, which would mean far less duplication of effort. They’d only break with that if a gain was to be realized.

In many cases higher rank humans block innovation because it threatens them. There’d probably be less if that too. Personally I suspect this is one reason it took 300000 years for humans to start building significant technology.

The thing that’s hard to imagine is what the driving force would be without much conflict. Conflict and competitions are easy motivators, at least for us. But a being with a different psychology might have different drives. It doesn’t have to be conflict that motivated growth, just some drive that ties into motivation.

I think if we look at pure science (science outside of publish-or-die commercial universities) and see the desire to learn and discover, that is plenty of motivation for many.

Humans have a natural urge to be inquisitive and make their life's simpler. Obviously if war and conflict were to be the only motivational possibilities, then I do wonder how we made it down from the trees!

If the resources required to communicate are planet-scale, then it would require comparable cooperation to build it. Maybe that gets you somewhere. And then maybe you choose to communicate in a way that requires massive resources at the receiver end too... Not a full answer to your question, but this gets you somewhere.

A more compelling answer to me is this; civilizations that don't learn how to cooperate at the scale of their planet will destroy or deplete it before they are able to build something of this scale. We have some evidence for this suggestion here on Earth...

Planet scale cooperation utilizing planet scale resources is possible in a planet scale military dictatorship as well. Actually it sounds easier and more plausible than in a free society.

> A more compelling answer to me

Agreed, but that's just the usual great filter idea.

> Actually it sounds easier and more plausible than in a free society.

It doesn't have to be but with our current mindset, I would agree.

If imagining a cooperative society is hard then it is even harder to imagine the technology that would arise out of such a society.

Edit: for me the open source software movement is a good example of what a cooperative society could do. In 40 years we have gone from room size computers to mobile device that can communicate with anyone on the planet and have access to all the worlds knowledge. This would never have been possible IMO without millions of developers sharing their knowledge.

Think of technology that we can't imagine.

Just as we can't imagine a harmonious society, so we can't imagine the technology that would arise from such a society.

It's a recursive argument, I know, but that's the core of the problem.

I'm sorry, but this seems like handwaving. I don't see why we couldn't imagine the technology?

Perhaps we are using technology in different context. I mean understanding of physics + a machine (made out of matter) built thanks to that understanding. Do you perhaps mean something else?

Not wanting to handwave, I was suggesting that I don't know what this technology might be.

Sure we can have ideas and possible approaches but just as many scifi authors thought that we would be flying around instead of driving by now, it doesn't have to be the right idea.

My favourite idea is to consider the planet our spaceship and ensuring our existence into the future the technology that we need. It does seem to be the hardest problem to solve currently.

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