Comment by dirktheman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dirktheman | Hacker News Reader

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It depends on your definition of ‘edge of solar sytem’, as there are many definitions around. What amazes me the most is that we built something 35 years ago, shot it into space and it’s still going strong, sending radio signals from a place so far away that it takes 16 hours to get here. They supplied it with an 8-track disc that contains information about earth and humanity.

To me, this speaks volumes about the brilliant naivety of that era, and I mean naivety in the most positive way possible: an uncurbed enthousiasm where you don’t see all the implications and problems on your path, but just execute. Did they think about the fact that 8-track records would be outdated by the time the Voyager would reach a destination where alien life would be possible? It seems not. But they built the thing, and it’s still doing what is’s supposed to do. This mindset has been missing for a long time, although the new Mars Rover project has got my hopes up again.

> What amazes me the most is that we built something 35 years ago, shot it into space and it’s still going strong, sending radio signals from a place so far away that it takes 16 hours to get here.

I completely agree. I remember reading about Voyager 1 and 2 back in 1989, when I was a just a child, and thinking how cool it was that humans could build something to send into space and it could last so long. 23 years later, it is even more impressive that it is still out there and kicking... and may last another 10 years :) It is very impressive, to say the least.

One thing that really stuck in my mind when I heard the story was that, even 35 years later, "we're now a substantial fraction of a 'light-day' from the Earth..."

With the term "light-years" most commonly mentioned (eg, from a few days ago: http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/astronomers-find-su... ) I think hearing about light-hours and light-days helps to put things a little more into perspective (though it's all still mind-boggling).

I agree with you that it speaks volumes about the optimism of the era. That said, Sagan & Druyan gave a great deal of thought to the "message in a bottle": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

Thanks for the link! I do wonder however if an alien, should it encounter one, could figure out the symbols on the cover. The 'record player' symbol is pretty self-explanatory if you already know what a record player is, but I suspect that to an average 16-year old teenager it's complete gibberish...

> to an average 16-year old teenager it's complete gibberish...

But an average 16 year old teenager isn't going to be the one to find the record floating in space. Rather, by definition, if the record is found, it will be found by an extremely advanced spacefaring civilization. Hopefully, they can decode it.

> Hopefully, they can decode it.

There is a fair amount of debate regarding whether or not this would actually be a good thing, for example Stephen Hawking doesn't think so: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8642558.stm

The notion that we shouldn't try to contact aliens for fear they might destroy us is a silly one. I would rather be destroyed by an alien race versus being destroyed by any number of natural disaster or nuclear war.

There's also a good chance that by the time a race can travel between interstellar space, they'll be mature enough not to kill everything they see.

I would rather not be destroyed at all.

> There's also a good chance that by the time a race can travel between interstellar space, they'll be mature enough not to kill everything they see.

What makes you think that? Humans just put 1 ton hover over another planet yet we still kill each other over which parts of which iron age books we think are more than just stories.

What we do know is that within a populous of a given scientific advancement its possible for there to be a massive variation of individual and group morality as well as individual education level (particularly in regards to science). We know this because it's our current world.

Based on the reality we know about it isn't terribly apparent to me that just because some population has achieved a given level of scientific advancement that some of them won't gleefully steal my lunch.

I agree, within the human race, enormous variations in intelligence, opinion, morality, development et al exist. But there is a good chance that aliens, if they exist, don't think or behave like humans. Maybe they are some Borg-like people with a collective mind. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that IF they exist, they leave humanity alone. With the mess we're making, they'd steer clear from the depraved, self-destructing human race. Can't blame them...

I don't really see the drawbacks in contacting them. I am sure any specie that is able to travel to Earth will already have the technological means to scout a large part of (if not the whole) galaxy, and would have most likely found us in the first place.

Competitiveness has been the driver of all human progress. Without it people just stagnate.

So any interstellar race is likely to be very competitive. You hope it doesn't show up as killing, but the reality is when you have two people who both want something, they fight.

I can't remember where I heard this theory, but essentially it goes like this:

If you see an ant on the sidewalk when you're walking down the street, you don't stop to communicate with it, or teach it how to build a television. The theory goes that a civilization with the ability to travel through interstellar space would have a similar knowledge gap to us as we do to ants.

Granted, you also don't stop to ask it if you can build a house on top of its ant hill, so I suppose the analogy works both ways.

But if ants could and did paint little ant-paintings and murals, I bet someone would be collecting said paintings. Also, some website would have people arguing about the nuances of them. If aliens are to us as we are to ants, they might not need to care much about us to spawn a few instances of their minds and cross interstellar distances so as to chat with us as much as we care to. It might be so little effort for them so as not to need much reward. Just as kids have ant-farms.

That is true, but the analogy stops as we are very familiar with ants. On the other hand, a totally new specy of insect would be worth being studied, and thus preserved - at least partially.

yeah. Like an ant farm...

I doubt ants realize when they are in a farm. Maybe some alien already placed us in an empty galaxy to be able to observe us, I wouldn't care.

I think the knowledge gap between humans and ants is less then humans/ alien species that traveled to earth. Hawking is right and we should avoid making contact with any alien species...Security through obscurity actually works well in this situation.

This is a pretty naive view of the universe. Humans have been civilized as we know it for what, 4000, 5000 years? In a little over 100 years we've gone from horse-and-buggy to detecting dark matter and building particle accelerators.

The universe operates on a time scale incredibly more significant than that, and so it's conceivable that there are intelligent beings that have been around for millions of years. Their technology and the form that they take would likely be so far beyond what we know that a similar gap in evolution would be entirely plausible.

I was listening to CBC radio's Quirk and Quarks the other night (last night perhaps?) and on the show they were discussing the possibility of life in the universe.

People seem to hope that there are super advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, or just one maybe, out there somewhere a billion of years old. Someone to catch Voyager and look at the gold record of greetings from Earth.

The astrophysicist guest on the radio program described how the universe began, what elements existed when, more complex later on. It took a very long time for the early Universe to cool, a long time for it to condense, a long time for suns to exist which created elements, cycle after cycle of suns born and then die, then a long time for heavier complex elements to form. Then perhaps planets, any planets but maybe only a few that could support life. A long time.

Pretty much what he was saying was all life had the same amount of time to develop because the elements to create planets, molecules, life etc. didn't exist yet and when they did it exist it was at the same time everywhere, more or less.

There probably isn't a billion year old civilization out there since it couldn't come into existence there weren't any elements to make it and no way for any short cuts.

I think this is it, it's audio only: http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/episode/2010/01/02/the-top-10-unans...

Or probably there is.

Because we make some assumptions about what and how life should be. The question 'what is life?' is itself is unanswered. There fore to imagine earth like planets with earth like intelligent humans is sort of a wrong assumption to start with. As per Stephen Hawking, there might be life in stars too! A kind of life which we don't understand. They might argue, earth like planets to be too cold to survive or water to be dangerous to life.

What we know so far is a lot, but even that lot- is more or less like a drop of water in all oceans in the world.

Sometimes people unsuccessfully try to solve problems the traditional way. But somebody comes along and totally changes the paradigm of thought and presents solutions to problem in ways and directions unimaginable before. Those solutions look like a 'bolt from the blue' taking people totally by surprise. Like how Marian Rejewski surprised everybody else by cracking the German Enigma cipher. Such solutions are likely to give us deep insights in the future.

But for the moment 'impossible' should be banned word for stuff like this.

Totally agree. Even our assumptions on the concept of time are debatable. Sure, we could say the our planet is n years old, but we assume time is something linear, inflexible. When it comes to the unknown, we can't say some things are impossible. And kudos for the Marjan Rejewski reference! I'm into cryptography lately, and it's (another) amazing story.

To be fair to the person I was paraphrasing was responding to a specific question about intelligent life.

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