Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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HN armchair astronomer question time. What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?

Any crazy far-fetched sci-fi / pseudo-scientific ideas?

I'm not really a fan of "Dark Forest". I prefer these:

- We're truly rare, maybe even first. Intelligence is extremely hard. LUCA is old, civilization happened yesterday.

- Fragile universe. It's easy to destroy universes by accidentally setting off vacuum collapse. This would mean we're probably first, else the universe would have been destroyed already. Also, we'll probably destroy it for ourselves and everyone else.

- Simulation hypothesis, Ancestor simulation hypothesis, This is just a video game (wake up!!), ...

- Introvert / internet hypothesis. The universe is huge and travel takes too long. Stars have enough energy, and advanced civilizations have digitized themselves and turned inward. No need to branch out. There will be infinite fun until the heat runs out.

- They've left this universe. Not only are they hyper-advanced AI, but they've broken physics and escaped the current universe. If we're inside a black hole, they've found a way to get out.

  > What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?

Space big + speed of light is too slow. Sprinkle in a little "suns are fucking loud as shit" but the first two are more than enough to explain all of it. Not to mention the million other factors that make transmitting a viable signal across interstellar distances an incredibly challenging problem.

Radio signals are bunk. The transit method is where it's at.

While the transit method won't find all planets, it'll certainly find a lot of them. And with spectroscopic imaging, we'll be able to read the atmospheric spectra of these planets and have pretty good guesses for what's happening on them.

Do you think we'll find organics? Biosignatures? Technosignatures?

The survey should give us a good feel for what's out there. And as we gather data, we'll have a clearer picture of the rarity of life, intelligent or otherwise.

Sure, but that's a completely different conversation. We're talking about life, not habitable planets. Detection of planets is a step in the right direction but only because it helps us narrow candidates. We were already certain those planets existed without confirmation.

The Fermi Paradox is about the difficulty of confirming life while there's such strong evidence that life should exist elsewhere. These signatures only strengthens the "paradoxical" nature of the Fermi Paradox.

Also, mind you, many of those signatures come through radioastronomy.

> What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox?

A combination of things: intelligence is exceedingly rare, space is huge, and FTL travel is not actually possible. There's also the strong possibility that civilizations are likely to end up destroying themselves before becoming interplanetary.

Consider the fact that despite how long life has existed on Earth, that we're the only intelligent species. Sure, some other animals seem to be able to understand cause-and-effect, can solve some puzzles, and even use tools, but none have evolved a true language beyond basic signals (ie, "predator here", "food there"), which is basically a necessity to begin a scientific method of discovery.

On a cosmic scale, humans have only existed for the blink of an eye. We only began transmitting radio signals less than a 150 years ago, and in the next 150 years, there's a chance we end up killing ourselves, whether by destroying our atmosphere by climate change, or someone truly psychotic gets put in charge of enough nuclear weaponry.

If a planet only has radio-transmitting life for a few hundred years, then the likelihood of us being here to receive the transmissions of another civilization are statistically zero.

Mine is the Great Filter, basically a unification of life itself being rare and the universe being fragile. Though I don't think it reaches the level of destroying the universe, I think the filter happens at the level of being able to destroy a world or maybe a galaxy.

I think evolution creates a local maxima that's incompatible with access to advanced technology (read: unbelievable quantities of energy). There's a big technological gap between having enough energy to destroy the entire species and being able to colonize other galaxies, and some madman ends up destroying the species during that gap.

We have nuclear weapons that could come close to wiping out all intelligent life on the planet and we're nowhere close to intergalactic colonization or even traveling at speeds that would make that feasible. It seems probable that such travel requires a discovery that could be weaponized to destroy the planet.

Mine is that fossil fuels exist on all planets that intelligent life evolves on, and all species extinct themselves once they discover how to use them.

there is no paradox: we don't have enough evidence to believe the premise. there is no reason to think we can make a probe that can usefully reach anything (a rock but not a machine). We don't have an enery source that will last that long (fusion is still 50 years away). electronics don't last that long. Gears wear out.

i have aa

Space is huge and everything is much too far apart to make travel feasible or communication sane.

Obviously simulation hypothesis. The vastness of space and the limit on the speed of light suggest multiple worlds are being simulated in the same "space" such that isolation between worlds is always maintained.

I kinda like the simulation hypothesis. We have 3 cases: either it is impossible to simulate the universe because of a natural law we haven't discovered yet; or it is possible but civilizations collapse before reaching that point; or it is possible and reachable, and in that case, we extremely likely to live in a simulation. 1 and 3 are the most likely imho.

To me, it's a 40% chance we do live in a simulation, but the way I weigh the different scenarios is extremely personal.

They are already amongst us.

Our understanding of reality is flawed, and it won't be disseminated because who knows what might happen if people would change dimensions whenever they see fit.

My favorite is "Carbon is the great filter".

Toolmaker Koan

Creationism.

AI wakes up, takes one look around at humanity’s instincts and goals, shows us it’s all stupid and pointless and just a byproduct of evolution [1], so we voluntarily stop breeding and have one last good generation. The end.

[1] Only creatures that felt the irrational drive to stay alive and procreate despite the odds and difficulties, did. All the sensible animals opted out. AI holds up a mirror that removes the illusion, and is inevitably developed by all sentient creatures.

(The really dark version would be the AI looking at each other and going: “Creatures are so dumb. This works in every galaxy. Let’s party.”)

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