What do we do if SETI is successful?
universetoday.com
universetoday.com
"Given that our civilization is unable to assimilate well even those concepts that originate in human heads when they appear outside its main current, although the creators of those concepts are, after all, children of the same age—how could we have assumed that we would be capable of understanding a civilization totally unlike ours, if it addressed us across the cosmic gulf?"
I understand my dog and he understands me.
If they experience death then we have massive common ground already.
And what's it matter? There's lots of people superior to me. I'm not really concerned unless they're trying to do me harm. But that anger isn't due to their superiority, it is due to their harm.
You mastered interstellar travel and yet you arrived in THAT!?
Imagine all these scifi fans who aren't able to see actors in their favorite franchise but the characters. All of this bumped by factor of 10: pestering aliens why they aren't using e.g. photon torpedoes...
Still I'd be more concern about truly xenophobic people who'd either want to cease any contact - if it would happen or attack aliens to keep Earth and humanity "pure". Toss in religious fanatics seeing devils to spice things up.
Why go through the massive expense to come all the way here if the intention is something that is not conquering or total dominion over us? We did this to our own fellow humans a couple of hundred years ago.
So yeah, call it immature or insecure. But I prefer they just leave us alone to be honest.
And? Evolution is not "Progress to this $UTOPIC_POINT". Evolution does not mean "progress at all", using "progress" as you seem to use it in the rest of your post.
They may have evolved to not have any compassion for any species that is not their own. They may have evolved to a point of having no compassion whatsoever.
There is some (human, ape) logic that if you can survive millions of years while being technologically advanced, you probably have some compassion as if not, you would be extinct. But that's just human thinking; who knows. I would like to know.
If they treated us like dogs they'd already be better stewards of humanity than we are.
Domesticated mammalian[1] pet which share 80+% of our DNA and bred and naturally self-selected over few ten thousand generations for their obedience and take fair amount of training from birth is not the same as anything else on earth let alone from another planet.
[1] Domesticating of non mammalian animals is already quite hard with limited true successes, some birds probably come the closest.
would you feel common ground with a predatory fish? Or a plant? An insect colony?
The fish needs to eat, I need to eat. The fish has the drive to procreate, so do I, or at least I have a sex drive.
> Or a plant?
We both need sunlight to live, we both require a breathable atmosphere. We both need water.
> An insect colony?
Much of the above applies here as well, in addition to that I can see similarities between a large insect colony and our large cities, how things move, how roads and buildings are adjusted for efficiencies, how bad actors can harm the system.
Yes, I can see common ground between myself and all three of those things you listed.
But we find PLENTY of common grownds when we talk to the smartesr of those groups and races, across milenia and continents via groups, scientific forums, discussion books.
We find very little common grounds when we have forced encounters with the uneducated trouble makers up to no good, in systems designed for high trust abused by said individuals.
I'd bet good money lots of non-Western European civilizations had that same thought after the English, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. rolled up on their shores.
And you'd be correct.
Imagine an intelligent shade of blue. Thank you, Douglas Adams. I suspect we have no idea WTF is out there and I'm not a carbon chauvinist like Carl Sagan was. But I wish I would have lived long enough to find out and I suspect that won't be the case.
A finite intelligence, willing to talk across the galaxy, talking in finite sequences, using engineering and maths?
I'm sure there's a lot of universal aprioris
Things off the top of my head that humans usually take for granted as "universals":
- Separation of memory and DNA. What if memories were stored in DNA and can be passed between individuals?
- Inability to share memories. What if memories can be passed around like semen and sweat?
- Inability to easily read others' minds. What if kissing/touching someone would share all of each others' thoughts? How would that alien society develop differently?
- Existence of the ego. What if they live in a constant state of ego death, like some humans on certain drugs?
- Separation of the id and the superego. This is... one way to solve an alignment problem, I suppose. Imagine a species which replaced their sense of hunger/sexual craving, with a craving for morality. And they execute creatures like humans when they see a human do anything immoral, such as eating an ice cream when it can reduce your lifespan and thus deprive your children of a parent, or deprive your society of tax dollars.
- And many other possible examples that i can come up with that exists within human "thoughtspace", let alone concepts that do not exist within human thoughtspace
How would you feel if you met an alien species that communicates by raping their children? If that sounds weird to you, what if they can communicate via the DNA in sperm, so it'd be somewhat similar to how human sex transmits information from the human male to the human female?
> .. And they execute creatures like humans when they see a human do anything immoral
You will enjoy reading: https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/the-wager
> - And many other possible examples that i can come up with that exists within human "thoughtspace", let alone concepts that do not exist within human thoughtspace
And this: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub / https://www.amazon.com/There-No-Antimemetics-Division-Novel/...
It doesn't matter if they kiss to talk or pass on their memories as DNA or they exist in a permanent stat of ego death.
Because we received a modulated signal across the Galaxy, it tells me they:
1) are willing to talk using sequences 2) are technologically inclined, hence they know maths and physics
To use an example that a regular human would be familiar with: what if the aliens knew math and physics... and were basically ultra-nazis, and very happy to just subjugate you because "our nazi philosophy says that we are superior to everyone else and you are inferior to them" and put you in concentration camps as factory labor for their war machine? You have your own reasons for studying science and math, but what if their entire reason for studying science and math was to build rockets to kill others?
This seems extremely likely, actually! The vast majority of human history has been filled with autocratic governments that centralized power, not free democracies. From the sample size that we have in history, most of the time when the natives meet a stronger scientific power... has not gone well for the natives. What makes you think it will be any different if you meet an alien?
What makes you think just knowing math and physics means that the intelligent alien would be "good" by modern human standards?
And this is just standard boring political talk! We understand that from human politics! What if it's STEM-y and the aliens decide to say "we are killing all of you and slicing all of you into thin slices to scan, in order to scan you into training a LLM"? That sentence would not even be in human thoughtspace 10 years ago! There's almost certainly an even weirder concept that humans today do not have words for, which may be a strong motivation for aliens or even their primary motivation!
I am not an english major, by the way. I am a typical engineer with a strong STEM background, who has happened to have absorbed enough sci-fi concepts through osmosis. I do not consider it likely that we will meet aliens in our lifetime, but I do not expect aliens to follow modern human standards of behavior.
https://www.theatlantic dot com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cream-bad-for-you-health-study/673487/?gift=6EKMJibpmKCfcPyLaO_bP7FbQ_X-xjAyMuvHMMdnIes
We have no idea if it's universal or not. You being able to imagine something does not mean it's actually possible
You might as well as argue "we have no idea if aliens exist, being able to imagine aliens does not mean it's actually possible there are aliens", and you'd be technically right... right until the day we meet aliens.
Your line of thought is tantamount to "one should just close your eyes and cover your ears" towards the possibilities in this universe.
Note, I am not a conspiracy theorist and do not believe aliens have visited earth and abducted people or something stupid. But I find it extremely stupid to assume aliens would have familiar moral and ethical systems compared to humans, considering how extremely different human beings already are, and at least humans are all mostly similar! This is similar to european explorers being confused at matriarchal family systems when they meet some random tribe. If some humans cannot even wrap their head around matriarchy, how naive would it be to assume that the average human could be comfortable with alien ethics?
That is literally what language is for (well, and also sharing ideas).
actually, hp lovecraft
A hooloovoo!
> would you feel common ground with a predatory fish? Or a plant? An insect colony?
Humans famously show compassion for all of these. I don't think alligators co-evolved with Steve Irwin.
Humans even show compassion for rocks and non-living things. We show compassion for the literal ground. We anthropomorphize it. Is this anthropomorphization not an attempt to understand and have compassion.
Regardless, you just asked how OP feels. I don't know how they do, but I can say how I do. "Yes"
> Yes.
> Humans famously show compassion for all of these.
But alligators rarely show compassion for humans, barracudas are not known for saving drowning babies and plants frequently show no compassion to anything.
IOW, Alien life might resemble alligator mindsets more than human ones. We don't know.
On the other hand, even predatory mammals are documented on occasion to render aid to humans (i.e. dolphins rescuing humans from drowning, or intervening in shark attacks), and in domestic settings can be convinced to raise young from other species (domestic cats/dogs will raise most baby animals if introduced correctly). It's not as cut and dried as a hard species boundary on compassion.
Compassion seems just a natural evolutionary direction as it is far more energy efficient for creatures to form coalitions.
Coalitions within the species (family unit, clan, pack, etc), sure. Coalitions with external parties? That's rare outside of concurrent intertwined evolution (symbiotic relationships, parasitic relationships, etc).
I'm not; I'm only pointing out that the conclusions I see ITT expressing the notion that a more intelligent species would necessarily be more compassionate is more unlikely than the converse, because from our one and only sample of life, we don't see it often.
IOW, I am replying "We don't know that" to the assertion "They will be compassionate.".
We have a sample size of zero.
But again, you cannot build a ship with an individual. Physics gets in your way.
> That's rare outside of concurrent intertwined evolution (symbiotic relationships, parasitic relationships, etc).
Everything evolves together. We're all on the same planet and working in the same ecosystem. Cross species collaborations isn't too uncommon and we even see it happen in some regions but not others.
The point is if you collaborate with your own you're very likely to collaborate with others. The smarter the animal the more common this is
> It's not as cut and dried as a hard species boundary on compassion.
My final sentence is
> We don't know.
So I think we're in agreement on this :-)
Would you, as a species advanced enough to have historically observed and begun to understand human behaviour, attempt to cooperatively interact with humans?
Or something like the Cylon resurrection technology, which downloads your memories into the latest fast cloned avatar/physical body?
It is also important to note that understanding is not equal. Certainly I understand my cat far better than she understands me. Famously Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are mutually intelligible[0], yet this does not create equal understanding between all parties. Norwegians fair the best while Swedes are out of luck. It probably isn't surprising that this happens even when all speakers are speaking the same language. You can speak in front of 10 people and you may hear 15 different interpretations, none need be what you intended.
Language is messy. It's incredible communication happens with it. But we're smart creatures, and there's ways to establish frames of reference. We have theory of mind, even if we don't all use it. But using it certainly helps. Communication is best when all parties are trying their best to understand one another. Sometimes we confuse that to mean we're trying because we're talking. You're not trying unless you're considering what was intended to be said, despite the words used. To which, that, I agree is the lion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Danish,_Norwegia...
Except that they aren't mutually intelligible. See what a Dane thinks: https://satwcomic.com/cold-reality-shower
> From the very beginning when I started making this comic Swedes and Norwegians have been telling me jokes about how weird Danish is, and how it's so weird not even Danes understand it so they have to speak Swedish or Norwegian to communicate. The Norwegian and Swedish languages are a lot closer to each other, so I can see where the joke comes from.
> That's all well and good and I laughed along, until I started meeting a lot of Swedes and Norwegians at conventions and realized a lot of them honest to god think that Danes understand Norwegian and Swedish
Swedish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible (or if they aren't there's enough interaction that difficulties don't arise). Danish isn't mutually intelligible with either.
Written Danish and written Norwegian are mutually intelligible, because they have conservative orthography. But the languages have diverged.
> Generally, speakers of the three largest Scandinavian languages can read each other's languages without great difficulty. The primary obstacles to mutual comprehension are differences in pronunciation.
> In general, Danish and Norwegian speakers will be able to understand the other's language ***after only a little instruction or exposure***
The claim is not that they understand one another in a zero-shot setting, but they do need exposure and training. They are different languages. Mutually intelligible is a spectrum, not a binary thing (as would be requisite from the original comment).
Formally Norwegian is West-Scandinavian (together with Icelandic and Faeroese), whereas Danish and Swedish are East-Scandinavian.
Also, please remember that the Norwegians have two different written languages (and the average Norwegian might not even speak any of those, as there are many dialects in Norway). One of those written languages is based on Danish from when Denmark ruled Norway.
In practice Norwegians and Swedes understand each other well when speaking, as their pronunciation are similar. Similarly Norwegians and Danes understand each other in writing, as the written language (and the vocabulary) are similar.
I know a lot of Danes who do not understand Swedish or Norwegian, and those movies or TV shows are normally subtitled in Denmark.
Source: I am Danish having worked a lot with both Swedes and Norwegians.
I guess I should also add an important note: "mutually intelligible" is a spectrum, not a binary thing. If "mutually intelligible" meant "people understand one another with no issues" then 1) they'd be speaking the same language, 2) the premise of asymmetry mentioned in my original comment wouldn't be possible in the first place.
From what I'm aware, the Nordic mutual intelligibility still requires some training and exposure (it seems you're verifying this). Much like how a person from the West Coast of the US might think someone with a heavy southern accent or heavy New York accent is unintelligible until they get some exposure (but these are still the same language!).
Of course, that has the assumption that aliens are a bajillion years ahead of us in terms of evolution, size, consciousness etc, that's only one school of thought. If there's an alien race with comparable intellect and the like, I'm confident we'd detect it and communication would be possible.
Anyway my cat understands me just fine, she just chooses to ignore me.
Echopraxia not as good, but I still enjoyed it.
> carl sagan called METI “deeply unwise and immature"
It's repeated ad nauseum online, but always verbatim, just those few words and never a full passage, and never with a citation. In other words, it has all the hallmarks of an apocryphal quote or misattribution.
The reason I'm suspicious is because Sagan contributed to the Aricebo message[1], which is literally sending such a radio signal, and the the Voyager disc[2], which is similar. He even wrote an entire sci-fi novel[3] about it.
He describes radio contact in generally positive and hopeful terms in his book Cosmos. He of course acknowledges the dangers of encountering a more technologically advanced civilization, but he goes out of his way to contrast the frightening example of the Aztecs with other more peaceful first encounters such as the Tlingit. He also argues that any significantly more advanced species that had survived millions of years would necessarily have achieved zero population growth and would likely be peaceful. You don't have to take my word for it, you can read his own words in the Encyclopedia Galactica chapter of his book on the Internet Archive[4].
So, if the quote you cited was true, it would represent a late-in-life and somewhat surprising change of heart from cautious optimism to "dark forest" style paranoia. Personally, I believe it's simply one of the many falsely attributes quotes floating around the Internet.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel)
[4]: https://archive.org/details/sagancosmos/page/n184/mode/1up
[0]: https://www.science20.com/brinstorming/meti_should_we_be_sho...
The info in Voyager is just a vanity plate... or a time capsule. Nothing wrong with that anyway. Some time in the future, humans will locate it and put it back in a museum.
Even if the UN makes a respond expect someone else to send a different one at some point.
But oppositely, if naturally defusing radio waves could be somehow detected from some further away location, the aliens would know already we're here and indeed lots about us so hand wringing about responding seems dumb there too.
Please correct me if you have data to the contrary.
Not to mention that lightspeed is slow. Even to Proxima Centari it will take several years for that signal to reach its destination.
This is also the great challenge of SETI. It's quite possible we've already received alien signals but just can't differentiate them from all the noise. I know they say that in space no one can hear you scream, but the sun is screaming at the top of its lungs and it is a thing bigger than you can imagine.
[0] https://www.discovermagazine.com/what-would-the-sun-sound-li...
>The name of the hypothesis derives from Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest, as in a "dark forest" filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like ghosts". According to the dark forest hypothesis, since the intentions of any newly contacted civilization can never be known with certainty, then if one is encountered, it is best to make a preemptive strike, in order to avoid the potential extinction of one's own species. The novel provides a detailed investigation of Liu's concerns about alien contact.
Wouldn't that kinda imply that your vision on the topic is almost certainly wrong anyways?
Sure I'd fight for humanity, but I'd be so disappointed. Maybe even enough to just give up.
(I have to admit I just could not make it through part 2 of the Three Body problem, it went to slow for me.)
> The Berserker hypothesis, also known as the deadly probes scenario, is the idea that humans have not yet detected intelligent alien life in the universe because it has been systematically destroyed by a series of lethal Von Neumann probes.
Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful premise for a book which can simply mobilize a plot device to brush this problem aside. However, if we want to bring the conclusions back to reality they have to undergo a customs inspection which flags said plot device.
The probes are out there and were programmed never to come back to Earth.
If we ground ourselves back in reality where the speed of light is probably law and the spooky aliens probably don't get to tamper the laws of physics, the actual game-theoretic winning move is always to grow voraciously, threat or no.
If we received a signal (at light speed) that described how to build a physical alien computer, and then ran a program on that computer, which happened to be AI, we would have alien visitors.
"Normal view! Normal view! Normal VIEW! Normal VIEEeewwww..."
Light is energy, it is a form of electromagnetic radiation, that travels in waves and consists of particles called photons. While photons do not have mass, they carry energy and momentum, which allows them to interact with matter.
But remaining 95% of the Universe is made of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, so if aliens are made of dark matter and use dark energy technology, their laws of physics may be different, and they could be capable of interstellar travel because they may not be limited by light's speed. Their dark matter and dark energy based technology may be incomprehensible or even irreproducible by us humans.
Scientists are still not sure what Dark Matter and Dark Energy are, so 95% of the Universe is still a big question mark to us all.
But it could also be something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics.
Couldn't they have some other way of seeing things?
Though survival of the fittest is likely a law and so they will have a concept of competition between groups of some form (though their definition of groups will be different) simply because those without will be destroyed by the first group that does have that concept.
I dunno, it just reeks of the culture of suspicion in communist China. A product of that place and time.
My own idea is the 'used car salesman' idea of the universe. (Reeking of my own mind and place and time). To me, economics will rule in the galactic community. In that water, metals, energy, it's all cheap and everywhere. No need to have any competition over it. No, the only scarce thing is life and then even more it's intelligence. Any other civilization will be desperate to get rights over us and our history.
So, to me, the aliens will come to us loud and proud. Balloons and banners.
And of course, a contract as long as a the rings of Saturn, with print as small as the atoms.
We shouldn't be wary of the weapons, but the lawyers
China (well, Xi) seems to be eyeing a similar path. I feel like there's something worth noting about the Three Body Problem being a product of its culture.
One could say these sentences are also a product of "its culture".
The world is not black or white, good or evil. Things are more nuanced and complicated than advertised to be.
I'm not the single source of truth either, but I think there are lots of resources for people interested in avoiding propaganda and trying to understand things more deeply.
Much safer to make friends or coinvestors, slaves at the very least. Get them all to buy in and police themselves. Better yet, you take that one rare thing, life, intelligence, and put it to work for you. Make the aliens you've just contacted be a part of the pyramid scheme
If you think that's a relevant upside, then some of them think so too. Well we better just start shooting up all the exoplanets as soon as we can. Not take any chances.
So there's a good chance that aliens may be made of anti-matter and using anti-energy. But even if they tried to communicated with rest of universe with such anti-energy-based technology, we humans simply may not be detecting it or interpreting it yet, and we may still be waiting for that elusive signal (energy-based) indicating advanced intelligent life.
Most theories that involve "dark matter" being ordinary matter like tons of neutron stars, huge clouds of dust, bazillions of asteroids or dark planets have been checked for and excluded. So if there were "dark matter" aliens, they really would be completely strange in that they aren't even made from the same kind of matter, but from maybe particles that we don't even know about. But if those hypothetical dark matter particles were capable of this kind of organisation, like clumping together into stars or planets, we would have probably seen those by now. So extremely strange, and improbable imho.
Btw. anti-matter is not "dark matter" in this sense, and dark matter being anti-matter was excluded very very early on by a simple observation: anti-matter and matter, when they come into contact, react in an annihilation reaction. E.g. an electron and anti-electron annihilate into two photons of a characteristic and exact 511keV energy. All other particles and their anti-particles also do this and exhibit their own characteristic energy. Any contact between a region of matter and region of anti-matter in space would radiate in these energy signatures, something which is very easy to detect. Dark matter is known to exist within galaxies, even within star systems, so this kind of contact zone would have to be there, and would be extremely visible to us.
Anti-energy doesn't exist in our current understanding of physics. Energy is always positive, and in quantum theories energy cannot even become zero, always slightly above zero.
This is an example of how rhetoric can hijack people's ability to reason logically.
Galactic community might have rules about developing species, but we can make agreements once "escape".
Charles Stross' Singularity Sky seems the most reasonable to me. Superintelligent computers trade unimaginable technology (their infintely replicable trash) for their most sought after asset (new forms of entertainment) and then just piss off to another world having completely bent our cultural development.
1. Survival is the primary goal of all civilizations.
Agree.
2. Resources in the universe are finite.
True in the theoretical sense, but false in the practical sense.
3. Civilizations cannot be certain of others’ intentions.
Not obviously true or false.
4. Communication is dangerous.
This is such a strong axiom and is almost certainly false.
Its conclusion from applying the four axioms is that preemptive annihilation is the rational strategy.
As an alien civilization, if your strategy for survival in the cosmos is to "immediately and totally annihilate any sign of life", then that is almost a surely losing strategy. If intelligent life is prevalent, and the cost of annihilating a species is so low that they can just do it willy-nilly, then all it takes is one surviving colony to use the same superweapon against you and you're finished. Oh, you'd also have to be annihilating species left and right across the galaxy without revealing your location. And in the worst case, you've just pissed off all the known alien entities in your galactic neighborhood. Good luck to you.
It makes for fun writing, but I don't understand how anyone can take it seriously.
> Not obviously true or false.
"Intentions are uncertain" is true, though.
If you are claiming that it is possible to be certain of other civilisations intentions, I am very skeptical.
- Setup a massive array of antennas in space for reception only
- Try to decode their radio traffic and understand how they are exchanging information
- Steal their their knowledge and use it to advance human race forward.
- Reduce all our electromagnetic emissions to minimum to deny them the same advantage. Forbid anyone from sending signal towards them so we have time to technologically catch up to them without them noticing.
Any kind of contact will ends up in abysmal disaster as we have seen in the past, when advanced civilization shown up on shores of less advanced one.
This isn't quite why I wrote this, but it's close enough: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2023/alien_communication/ If we're going to argue in the form of fiction.
It's not actually sci-fi. They sent a message with Arecibo that was also encoded if not within a beacon signal. Just because it was a scifi plot does not mean its not something that could be done to good use. If humans wanted, we could send a similar beacon signal even if it's not pulses of all the primes between 1-101 with the same data from the gold plate.
At one point, flying like a bird was scifi. Traveling to the moon was scifi. Having a computer that fit in the palm of your hand was scifi. There's a lot of actual science that has been inspired from a scifi idea.
This is going to be difficult. Immediately there would be cults that would be inviting them to earth to salvage us.
We have a saying in Holland "the innkeeper trusts his guests like himself" which seems to apply here.
There's no reason to assume their society would have developed along similar lines. I'm sure there's alien civilisations that are more aggressive than us, but also ones that are less so.
I don't think we'll ever meet any though as our lifespan is just so short on a universal scale. And FTL travel seems to be impossible otherwise we'd have seen signs of it.
Of course according to our current physics understanding it is also impossible but I don't think humanity is very smart yet. But this thing might be right.
Many animals like cats do it. Its not a human concept but one from superior smarter predators which should occur regardless from what planet they are. The greater the differences in intelligence and power the easier it is to justify cruelty.
I do think it's less likely because to actually travel space they would need to be so technologically advanced that we simply wouldn't be worth fighting or destroying. Maybe studying which could be cruel in its own way.
What signs? Projects like LIGO that measure gravitational waves are still measuring cataclysmic collisions of ultra massive bodies. Maybe once the detector is good enough to detect exoplanets and smaller objects we can start drawing some conclusions.
I don’t believe FTL is possible, but on the off chance that it is, we’d be so deep into technology-as-magic territory that any speculation on detectability is totally pointless.
What is the minimum amount of aggression necessary to evolve sentience? What is the maximum amount of aggression in an interstellar space-faring species? Where is humanity on that scale?
A super-aggressive species would likely self-annihilate before possessing sufficient energy to travel interstellar distances... So the jury's still out on us.
Presumably any alien species was also shaped by evolution, so is also likely to be similarly competitive. Maybe you can escape your evolutionary past. But maybe not.
It is a bleak view. When I even think about the behaviors of some of the animals (e.g. seals, praying mantises) we share existence with, it seems like it could be accurate. On the positive side, the concept of the infinite game (e.g. culture) is what should give us hope.
Though I personally love the idea of advanced, civilized extraterrestrial life. I hope it exists (statistically feels likely but yet to be confirmed). Even if it turns out we humans are at a near lockstep with another civilization it'd be game changing if we could communicate especially.
All that said, maybe there's a "galactic civilization onboarding" program once a species meets a sufficiently advanced criteria independently, with no outside intervention. Perhaps the universe will turn our ideas on their head, and assumptions may not apply.
Our understanding of the world, for however great it is, is still likely full of things we can't fathom and unknowns we don't know. Its fun to speculate but the reality is we are only basing most of our knowledge on how things might be in the universe based on our singular planet's path of evolution.
It makes it truly hard to think of what alternative life forms may exist.
Lockstep evolution is extremely improbable. Even 1000 years head start is massive, a more realistic one would be tens of millions of years or more.
The space is finite, so is Milky way. Eventually, even if its far in the future, species will compete for resources and energy. The smarter ones realize that problems are easier solved as soon as possible, and we have dark forest stuff. Mankind is slowly also inching in that realization. We should work hard on improving ourselves massively and spreading out before caring whats out there. I simply can't imagine a realistic scenario where there won't be some immediate attack, ie speeding up some very dark asteroid into relativistic speeds, aimed at Earth.
Also, why should xenophoby, racism and similar perks be available only to humanity. Even we can see how deeply flawed creatures we are.
Indeed, I simply hate losing my sense of whimsy in these discussions because anything is still possible. Though realistically, yes, its worse odds than pretty much any other possibility. No disputing that.
>The space is finite, so is Milky way. Eventually, even if its far in the future, species will compete for resources and energy. The smarter ones realize that problems are easier solved as soon as possible.
Is space not ever expanding? My entire conceptualized version of what space (as in outer space) is that its always expanding, we actually have zero idea where the edges of the actual universe are, or if they even exist beyond theorizing. It may be the ultimate in lending itself to more cooperation than conflict as a result, since new resources are indefinitely being created.
Then again, if you believe expansion is constrained only to the Milky Way Galaxy (I don't see why it has to be, if we can colonize an entire galaxy I feel strongly at that point the technology for intergalactic travel exists at the same time, so we can finally see whats up in the Backward Galaxy[0]). Given this constraint, expansion over time will lead to issues inevitably but who's to say it couldn't be resolved in different capacities? Perhaps even civilizations have a natural apex expansion size (IE, its not actually infinite) and that creates natural growth boundaries. Since we aren't even a galactic species yet, we don't know how that would shape out in reality.
>and we have dark forest stuff
Or we simply don't know what stage other civilizations are in, or if they exist at all (though statistically, I've been told by people who absolutely know more than I do on multiple occasions its extremely unlikely there isn't some form of extraterrestrial life that would roughly resemble plants and animals but civilization is far less guaranteed)
We could actually be the most advanced (imagine that, it seems wild to me, but it is one possible), or it could be that indeed, it may follow the Dark Forest[1] hypothesis).
>We should work hard on improving ourselves massively and spreading out before caring whats out there. I simply can't imagine a realistic scenario where there won't be some immediate attack, ie speeding up some very dark asteroid into relativistic speeds, aimed at Earth.
I agree with the massive expansion, I don't think it should come at the entire expense of understanding what may be out there also, but in terms of resource allocation, expansion should have been paramount since the 1960s at least, IMO.
Eventually this rock, one way or another, will reach its inevitable peak and as a species we would do well to be spread around.
I don't know that we are guaranteed to be attacked. It makes alot of assumptions about how civilization evolves that is very human centric, but it is in fact the only model we have so I can't blame anyone for adopting it without question, but there always exists the possibility that there are other models of evolution that are less conflict driven and promote cooperation
>Also, why should xenophoby, racism and similar perks be available only to humanity. Even we can see how deeply flawed creatures we are.
In the same vain of this, why shouldn't they be? What purpose do those ideas even serve? They're not evolutionary constructs, they're cultural / societal ones created to justify oppressing one group of humans by another. Another civilization could have simply made better choices and evolved on a planet that trended toward cooperation and not conflict.
We only understand our version of how evolution trends, it doesn't make it law of the universe until we actually can study other non-human civilizations.
We would learn that they are gelatinous beings who coi5nt in base 17 and show an antenna to say hello.
- alien broccoli heads
Ideally they'd hold off until we were in a place where they thought we could handle it, but I can also see the argument made that the damage is just "growing pains" that every society in the universe has to eventually deal with, and that societies which survive the initial societal damage will recover quickly with the help of the knowledge and technology they gain access to while closed-minded and inflexible societies that fail to survive the initial societal damage might not be the kind of folks you'd want to be a part of your interstellar community anyway. How we'll react when confronted with the fact that we aren't alone in the universe might be the test that determines if we get to join to club, or be sold as pets, or put to work in the mines, or just get left alone.
That seems like a human-centric perspective.
Maybe they’re a cooperative, altruistic society with an innate desire to help, and maybe had been helped by others before. To not teach us about the imminent dangers of the universe might seem unconscionable to them.
Or maybe they’re a highly ordered society with an innate common goal and see nothing wrong with asking other entities to join their mission.
Sure, some humans may view their contact as intrusive or harmful, but that doesn’t mean they automatically would as well.
If I had to bet, I’d bet you’re right, but the universe is a big place and who knows what societies might be out there that would feel totally foreign to us.
Then I'd be worried about us - we aren't the best ones in the Orion Arm. Surely there would be a clownshow of who should be representing Earth in such contact. And I doubt any nation or country would freely and willingly give all the knowledge shared by extraterrestrials and lose all the potential advantage. Unless aliens would manage to share it across the globe in some way at once or demand it has to be open to anyone or there wouldn't be "deal" at all.
The older I get, I'm more on "an elaborated simulation, prob ran by our ancestors elsewhere", "we are the first ones to emerge constantly on the edge of annihilation" or "a freak accident of cosmic d20 roll" side of things. Star Trek and rest of the stuff is pretty fun but I expect that reality is really bland and sad.
A civilization capable of space travel doesn't seem that would be so interested in slaving or torturing humans for the sake of it. Would "our culture" disappear? I still doubt it. It'd be kept as History.
I like visiting museums and learning about the history of ancient civilizations but by no means I'd like to live in the any of those past environments.
In the neighborhood, there are 83 stellar systems within 20yl, and most have been looked at reasonably thoroughly. There are about a dozen plants in the habitable zone among them. If there's something that could affect us, it's probably one of those stellar systems. Most likely Kepler-90.
None of them seem to be talking using RF.
There probably is life out there, but spread so thinly that civilizations don't interact.
That doesn't necessarily mean we become machines, but we will have machines augment us.
They're feasible even with short lifespans with the use of generation ships. Or with suspended animation technology. Given that all three possibilities (life extension, generation ship, suspended animation) are already considered within the realms of possibility by humans (even though we haven't solved any of them yet), it seems a very flawed assumption that no other civilization could solve any of them.
On Earth itself, some animals or birds such as Greenland Shark, Bowhead Whale, some species of Tortoises (e.g., Galapagos Tortoise), Macaw, Arctic Tern, Koi Fish can live a long time (more than a hundred years).
Ocean quahogs are bivalve mollusks known for their impressive lifespans, often exceeding 500 years.
The immortal jellyfish, scientifically known as Turritopsis dohrnii, is a unique species capable of biological immortality. It can revert to its earlier life stage after reaching maturity, effectively allowing it to avoid death and potentially live indefinitely. This unique ability is due to a process called transdifferentiation, where its cells transform back into a polyp state. Despite its ability to revert to an earlier life stage, Turritopsis dohrnii is not truly immortal. In nature, it can still fall prey to predators or succumb to disease. Thus, while it can theoretically avoid death through regeneration, individual jellyfish can and do die under various circumstances. Researchers are fascinated by Turritopsis dohrnii for its potential insights into aging and cellular regeneration, which could have implications for human health and longevity.
On what basis? Are you assuming that malevolent extraterrestrials would be unwilling or unable to travel further than this? Why?
The Dark Forest solution to the Fermi Paradox (the first strike advantage): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUJYP8tnRE
How to Win an Interstellar War (without leaving home) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tybKnGZRwcU
what is a realistic timeline for first contact, and how will it actually happen?
so we decode a message that we are pretty sure is of alien origin.
we send a message back and then wait a few decades or centuries.
we don't know how far away the origin of the message is. let's assume that it is less than 50 light years. that's still a round trip of 100 years. in other words it's a generational project, and we don't know if our first response is understood. we'll have to keep iterating until we can confirm that we are actually communicating. and then, the next step will be to try to understand each other.
with a round trip that long, even under the most optimal conditions just establishing a dialog based on say math is going to take a few centuries.
of course once we have a dialog, communication is going to speed up because then we can send longer messages.
but then it could still take anywhere from 500 to 1000 years before a common language is developed and we are able to share actual scientific and engineering knowledge.
once we reached that level of communication however, we can collaborate on developing FTL.
contrary to star trek, it was always my idea that FTL travel is not developed by the inhabitants of each planet/star system on their own, but only in collaboration across multiple such systems. maybe even more than two. driven by the desire to meet each other.
so from the point of the first received message it will be one millennium before we get to learn anything about and from these aliens, and another millennium before we can meet them in person.
and that's the optimistic projection. it could just as well take 10 times as long.
Looks great - curious to know what broweser tech is it built with?
Built 15 years ago and still running!
Is Neptune's Pride still paying your bills?
My day job is working in a small games company called BlueManchu. We made Void Bastards, Wild Bastards, and have a new one we are prototyping now.
so i am being optimistic and hope that FTL is possible.
Not going to happen tomorrow, but perhaps in the next few thousand years something will be ready to begin its journey.
Not that I believe they are the same, but many people will come to this conclusion and they would not be probably wrong. Causality is strange.
“CosmicOS is a way to create messages suitable for communication across large gulfs of time and space. It is inspired by Hans Freudenthal's language, Lincos, and Carl Sagan's book, Contact. CosmicOS, at its core, is a programming language, capable of expressing simulations. Simulations are a way to talk, by anology, about the real thing they model.
CosmicOS is structured to communicate the usual math and logic basics, then use that to show how to run programs, then send interesting programs that demonstrate behaviors and interactions, and start communicating ideas through ”theater” and simulations. This is inspired by Freudenthal's idea of staging conversations between his imaginary characters Ha and Hb.”
People are so caught up in the 3I/ATLAS stuff, for example. Should we beam a message to it? What should we think of it? It's a circus.
Let's go back to Boyajian's Star instead. Can we really be sure the dimming is not caused by a mothership coming from that direction? It explains everything, right? Maybe that's how they communicate, by sending a paper plane and opening a large occlusion origami that says "we come from this general direction" (I'm cosplaying Avi Loeb here, satirically).
There's something about interpretation in all of this. Space is full of radio signals. We determine lots of them to be natural (with good reason).
I'm afraid proposing "we should answer" (in case of electromagnetic signals) could lead to a scenario in which people are encouraged to believe something without the means to verifying it. Some idiot group could do it just to increase the popular optimism about space in order to induce a favorable perception on the development of space technologies with the ultimate goal of just bumping some industry with money. It's the kind of world we live in right now, unfortunatelly.
If we want to be serious about humanity's place in the universe, first we need to be serious about our home right here. I don't think we're mature enough to have responsible control over technologies that could be used to send a powerful signal into space.
The same richest elites that refuse to acknowledge and do anything to revert climate change, will do nothing (except try to escape Earth in spaceships) if and when any humanity detects and anticipates any Earth destroying apocalypse inducer (asteroid/meteor or extreme solar flare) from out of the depths of space.
To a more naive, metaphor-blind audience, your mention of Don't Look Up makes it look like the scientists are warning about an alien comet and I'm the one ignoring it.
I'm very familiar with apocalyptical narratives of all kinds, but what I'm approaching here is much different. I'm talking about the integrity of scientific endeavours. In particular, space exploration endeavours.
Is it really a circus? Seems almost everyone who knows what they're talking about says it's just a natural object.
Anything can be a circus if you listen to people who don't know what they're talking about.
However, there is a chance he could be underestimating that audience, or at least part of it.
Finding a new type of comet is a scientific breakthrough, and I think his work points in that direction (still a guess from him though, but an educated one). He is trying to cake up those potential genuine discovers with sloppy sensacionalist makeup on top, and that's why I call it a circus.
If in a few months we confirm that 3I/ATLAS is a new kind of comet, he could use the papers he wrote to say he found evidence of that new type first, and also described its landmark characteristics. It would "legitimize" him. But the alien stuff would probably continue to be garbage. He can then say the scientists were skeptics, but he was right.
Now, what angle the aliens narrative serve? Why would a scientist subject himself to being a clown? I don't exactly know. In his case, I don't think it's good stuff.
I chose Tabby's Star to satirize him because my description of a mothership deploying an origami-like occluder matches the overall conclusion from the research at the time (a disturbed exomoon). It's an object from that system that changed is shape. In fact, "disturbed exosatellite" and "unfolding mothership from a planet" are quite compatible descriptions. What matters here is epistemology (we can't know if it's natural or not). Also, it's a good demonstration that we (general public non-astronomers) don't need his antics to imagine things.
If we get something coming from more than 100 light years away we might not have the technology to respond, and if we do it may not matter anyway if we are at risk of not having a technological civilization anymore 100-200 years forward. So the meaningful actions on those cases may not include answering back.
Then it will be the actual use of that message. Lets assume that we will decide that is a signal from a civilization that is out there. It will be a signal meant for us and for any other civilization that doesn't have the knowledge/culture level as them, meant for giving us a common ground for communicating back, or it will be something that just will tell us that someone intelligent is out there, but no mean to understand it?
So the options are that we find apparently benevolent aliens willing to contact us, or that we find out that someone is out there but no way to communicate/reach them. I think the second scenario is the most probable one, and how our civilization will react if widely enough will change with time, novelty at first and indifference a few years later.
We lost 150 years of progress? That's okay, we had 800 more years to advance before the aliens showed up or whatever.
It's such a weird thing I see so many people assuming. We were down to like 16,000 humans on Earth at one point, and that was before we'd developed things that you could theoretically scavenge and jumpstart your tech.
People need to stop doomscrolling; I'm certain this is depression projected.
Green power generation is also making huge strides forward, and battery technology is improving enough to make fully green grids a reality. We already see articles about how some countries are managing to go entire days without burning any fossil fuels for power generation. This will increase over time despite what the doomsayers predict. We aren't there yet, but the progress is almost inevitable.
The bigger problem is that we've already burned so much fossil fuel that we are noticeably altering the climate. This is going to cause a lot of stresses in the future, especially in a post-collapse scenario.
Obviously you're not going to get to 100% in a week if you're rebuilding civilization from the ground up, but if you can retain some of the knowledge you can get a big step up and hopefully avoid some of the pitfalls that caused the downfall of society in the first place.
That has warming by 2300 as 8C in an "emissions continue current trends" path.
Here's chatgpt giving a picture of what 8C warming looks like. Speculative, hallucinations, caveat emptor, etc...but to give a sense of proportion this, last time the earth was 8C *cooler* than now, ice covered 25% of the planet:
> At +8°C, Earth is fundamentally transformed. Large parts of today’s populated zones—South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, southern Europe, the southern U.S.—are functionally uninhabitable for humans outdoors. Wet-bulb temperatures regularly exceed survivable limits. Agriculture collapses across the subtropics; even mechanized, climate-controlled farming is marginal. Most of the world’s food comes from high-latitude regions: a narrow band across northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia. Sea levels are dozens of meters higher, drowning coastal megacities; Miami, New York, Shanghai, and London are gone. Phoenix is lifeless desert. Seattle is coastal tundra, wetter but still survivable.
> Civilization persists only in fragments. Mass migration and resource wars have rewritten borders. Population is a fraction of 21st-century levels. Global trade, universities, and modern governance are mostly memories. Local, self-sufficient polities dominate. The United States as an institution likely dissolves or transforms beyond recognition—2 out of 10 chance of recognizable survival. Harvard or MIT survive, if at all, as digital archives or autonomous AI-driven knowledge systems—3 out of 10. The world would still have people and culture, but not civilization as we know it.
Edit: I would appreciate knowing why I'm getting downvoted when I added citations for *possible* warming paths (from nature!). Yes, the chatgpt explanation is speculative but I mean, look at the thread we're discussing.
And without adaptation you get mass extinction. And the human system may be pretty fragile against the disappearance or deep change of key components of the global system.
The idea has nothing to do with "doom scrolling". Go watch some Cosmos...
I've seen Cosmos. It's not a counter to this argument in any way.
The population will be very small, but being very focused and hopefully able to jump start civilization again based on all the materials and knowledge still available.
I hope the second scenario is the most probable. Any aliens that could contact us would already know we can't even get along with each other, much less them. Even the most benevolent of aliens should see us as a "problem". (I was going to say "threat" but who am I kidding.)
It also could not be a message. I think we have ruled out nearby Dyson Swarm (as in thousands of light years), but we could find one in rest of our galaxy or even Andromeda. Dyson Swarms should be noticeably weird infrared stars.
It is also quite possible that we never decode their message. Even with one designed to be decoded, their thinking could be too different.
Resume the search for intelligence right here on Earth?
Then again, assuming the origin and wavelength is published, sending some gigawatt pulses is feasible even for private rogues today, and scientists keeping it secret appears even more sinister.
It will be out in 2 weeks!
Beg to be saved from ourselves? Fire up the old electronic thumb? Open a theme restaurant?
It's the only way to be sure.
I read an article about post cold war US society. Basically, from 1989-2001 the United States was in a transition period that culminated with the first opportunity to seize on a "universal bad" (terrorism) because the USSR filled the role so readily for so long, US society was set adrift with partisan factions that couldn't find a common enemy to get behind in times of internal struggle.
That is the gist of the article, sub USSR for aliens and all of humanity for US society and you have the same basic outline
In all seriousness, I think if we did receive something, it would be classified immediately, and the government, or governments, will move very swiftly with a heavy hand to silence the discovery. At the very least until they know exactly what it is, what it is conveying, and how to respond.
That said, I think that if it got out, a lot of people would absolutely lose their snot. Completely. It would be chaos in some places.
Bit too on the nose, maybe, but a heck of a lot more likely than a coverup by government scientists.
It would definitely be the most important discovery ever made and would move some billions of dollars, but realistically I think people would just carry on with their lives (assuming physical contact with them is impossible in a lifetime).
After some ohhhs and ahhhhs we would switch to the next thing.
Granted, this would be a lot of people, but I think it'd be a midrange of "kinda religious, but not enough to dive in"-types who are mostly freaking out over the revelation.
I’m sure they came up with an elaborate story how Jesus loves sentient mollusks from Alpha Centauri, but I hope most people are smart enough to realise how little sense it all makes. I for one am curious how this plays out, if I’m lucky enough to witness it.
At the end of the day, the Catholics (at least) don't believe they were given full knowledge of the universe at some arbitrary point in the past. Instead, we were plopped into it and expected to explore and understand it. This will require us to occasionally update our teachings - just like how scientists need to update their teachings when they discover they didn't understand something before.
It's unbelievably obnoxious to simply assume everyone who doesn't scoff at religion simply isn't "smart enough". You clearly haven't taken much time to understand the topic if you can't come up with even one good argument. Even Richard Dawkins is able to connect with religious logic to a degree.
I think the idea of Imago Dei is actually the most believable part. I am absolutely convinced that we're the forerunners of this universe. The first scenario where a creation becomes aware of its creator - even if I'm imagining the wrong architect.
Religion is completely disconnected from reality, making up things as they go.
A signal from a life form would either be conspiracy or a signal from god, so strong that we cannot understand it.
Either way, no real difference with what we have today.
If they go "oh yeah Religion, that's a quirk of your biology, don't worry you will outgrow it in time" then yeah, that's problematic.
If they go "Oh, you say that the savior Jesus Christ was a human? That answers one of our biggest questions. The story never made much sense before. Boy, those Angels must be pretty freaky looking for you then." then that's entirely different.
I'm not familiar with every religion, but I think most can say the same.
Pretty harrowing reading.
The question is moot, because any alien species advanced enough to send directed signals across solar systems, can and will reach, overwhelm and subsume Earth with ease, once we Earthlings manage to contact such aliens.
And if such events happened in the past, that might explain a few interesting notions we humans tend to have.
"Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God." ~Shermer's last law
But what if that was their intention from the very beginning? What if Earth itself is just yet another alien farm?
What if Earth's beautiful and bountiful life (flora and fauna) was the result of terraforming, by aliens, but indirectly using spores tacked onto cosmic flying objects (comets, meteors, asteroids) that they knew will cross such solar systems and crash into inhabitable planets on some not so random chance?
Abiogenesis is the emergence of life from nonliving organics. It is the leading theory regarding how life spawned on Earth, but it is being questioned due to recent evidence.
Conditions for Life: For life to exist, certain conditions must be met. These include:
* Presence of Water: Essential for biochemical reactions. * Organic Compounds: Building blocks like carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen are crucial. * Energy Source: Sunlight or geothermal energy can drive life processes.
Evidence and Research: While no definitive evidence of extraterrestrial life has been found, scientists continue to explore environments on other planets, such as Mars and Europa, which may harbor conditions suitable for life. The study of extremophiles on Earth—organisms that thrive in harsh conditions—provides insights into how life might exist elsewhere in the universe
One prominent theory regarding the extraterrestrial origin of life is Panspermia.
The Panspermia Hypothesis suggests that life, or the building blocks of life, may have been transported to Earth via comets, asteroids, or space dust.
There are several forms of panspermia:
* Naturalistic Panspermia: Life evolves on another planet and is ejected into space, eventually landing on Earth.
* Directed Panspermia: Intelligent beings from another planet intentionally send life to Earth.
* Intelligent Design Panspermia: Life is designed and seeded by extraterrestrial intelligences.
I believe Earth life is the result of Natural Panspermia. But if SETI or other observatories detect and confirm alien signal, then Directed Panspermia might be our origin.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a66036689/a-scientist...
I also think that if such powerful aliens (or actual gods for that matter) were to exist, they wouldn't give a rat's ass about whether we worship them. Because we'd have nothing to offer them. It's like us stepping on ants without thinking about it. Their world is so limited it's meaningless to us. If any gods existed we'd be the same to them.
In any case my intuition will always be to fight hostile authorities, even if its futile. I would never be able to be in the military for example.
For all of humanity's much vaunted intelligence, we really haven't bothered to unitedly plan for any threats from space, natural or otherwise.
If advanced alien beings did visit Earth in the past, they could be easily have become worshipped as Gods by the humans of that time.
Earth is such a tiny speck in the vast emptiness of space, that unless galaxy colonising aliens are capable of traveling in spaceships at FTL (faster than light) speeds, it may indeed take them hundreds or thousands or millions of years to pass by Earth again on their next sweep through the Goldilocks planets in their terraforming list in this corner of the Universe.
This is why it makes sense that we haven't planned for that too occur.
And really, if they do have FTL capability it's very unlikely we would have any tech that would be of any danger to them anyway.
It makes for nice SciFi B-movies but I don't think it's a realistic scenario.
A lot of other people seem to be happy worshipping humans of rather limited intelligence right now.
If yes you are already worshipping and imaginary concept. At least with aliens you would have some kind of connection with reality.
If not the word god is not really a part of the vocabulary.
But I think it's extremely unlikely they would give a rat's ass about what we do or believe.
If you mean "we are in a simulation" then maybe :) I like to think we are the end-of-semester program in a high school.
And for the last one I do not know, I would prefer everyone to leave us alone.
Not possible if our scientific understanding of c is accurate.
I don't care how many episodes of ST you've binged; warp speed is just fantasy.
Very different.
The iconic flip-type TriCorder telecommunicator of Star Trek, became the inspiration of the world's first portable cellular phone (first of which was the DynaTac, quickly followed by MicroTac and StarTac (world's first portable flip phone, and yup, that name is not a coincidence)) by Motorola (more famous iteration later as the iconic Moto Razr). Motorola engineer Martin Cooper said that watching Captain Kirk using his communicator on the television show Star Trek inspired him with a stunning idea -- to develop a handheld mobile phone.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/motorola-startac-rainbow-ce...
Star Trek's teleportation may have been SciFi, but Quantum teleportation has been proven to be doable in reality.
https://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-science/first-demonstrat...
https://www.aol.com/articles/oxford-physicists-achieve-telep...
Iron Man's Arc Reactor is a fusion reactor and pure sci-fi, but the Chinese and Americans are racing to build the first viable fusion reactors. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a64704814/ch...
Did you know that Radar was invented during experiments with radio waves for "Death Ray Gun" weaponry? A death ray is a theoretical particle beam or electromagnetic weapon that gained popularity in science fiction during the 1920s and 1930s after inventors like Nikola Tesla claimed to have developed one. British scientists, asked to evaluate the feasibility of a radio-wave "death ray gun" (supposedly being developed by the Nazis) finally concluded it was impossible, but realized the same principles could be used for aircraft detection.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-41188464
Galileo was jailed (put under house arrest, till he died of ill health) for his "blasphemous" statements concerning Heliocentricity, etc., but ancient Hindus have known and documented (in their Vedic texts) about Multiverse, Observer Effect, Illusory nature of Reality (e.g., modern science confirms that touch is an illusion of reality, we really cannot touch anything: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TDgey6g65X0) , and fundamentals of mathematics and science since thousands of years, many centuries or millennia before such concepts became understood and accepted by Western scientists or theorists.
Human flight was considered an impossible fantasy, until the Wright Brothers made it a reality.
Space flight was unproven until the Soviets made it a reality.
Did you know that scientists estimated the mass of all matter and all energy of this Universe, but they believe it accounts only for 5% of the content of the Universe? The remaining 95% of this Universe is unknown, but scientists believe it to be comprised of anti-matter and anti-energy, which are not yet understood properly by modern science. SciFi concept, this may seem, but that's the prevailing scientific theory.
Now think about this idea.. What if an advanced alien species, were made of anti-matter and using anti-energy? Would their technology obey the laws of physics as our modern science understands? Would they be able to travel across the galaxy faster than we humans deem possible with our limited understanding of how the Universe works?
'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic', according to Arthur C. Clarke's third law.
The "invention of tricorders" is far, far, far less impressive than breaking the known laws of the universe, after more than a century of literally trying to prove them wrong with experiments.
Now, if they left some time ago...
Just my personal opinion.
We have billions and billions of data points showing the Universe is empty. We have exactly one (1) data point showing it isn't. And that's us.
Besides, just look at the timeline. The universe has only been cool enough, with enough stable stars, with enough formed planets for potential life to form for a few billion years. Between that and the Drake equation, life alone is likely to be unreasonably uncommon. Life that forms after a planet becomes stable, doesn't have any planet-altering disasters, evolves to complex multicellular forms, evolves some kind of intelligence, becomes social, forms a society, advances technology, and starts exploring the universe...? Why bother? The math doesn't work.
Note: I'm not speaking about any KIND of life existing, I'm speaking about technological civilizations. My belief is that we are essentially the forerunners.
You may not have realized, or allowed yourself to realize, that you were doing that.
All the power of stars, and most of them still are not powerful enough that we can see them even on a dark night! What chance does any alien have of sending a message that reaches us if the light from their star isn't even powerful enough to be easy to detect? It was suggested elsewhere that even if we find an alien, we probably cannot respond if they are more than 100 light years away just because we can't get a message out powerful enough that they can detect (I can't verify this claim but it is reasonable)
The problem is "out there" is so far away, we are all isolated on our own island worlds. An ocean of space so vast we cannot meaningfully traverse it with probes or radio, to say nothing of manned interstellar flight.
But it never gets boring for me to imagine what other civilizations there might be, and how they might be different from us and from each other.
So in reality, there is a maximum distance we need to consider - the distance where any signal would have any chance of reaching a detectable region.
But besides, this still misses the most important part. Until 10 billion years ago, stars were much too big and poor in metals and unstable. We didn't have an earth until 5 billion years ago. It was inhospitable to life for a LONG time. We've only had multicellular organisms of any kind for 800M years. Our star is unusually calm, meaning we don't have to worry about being bleached every 5 million years or whatever.
I've said this a couple times in this conversation, but the best guess is honestly that we're the forerunners.
Wat?
"Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence", Carl Sagan
(Again, please note that I'm only speaking to technological civilizations; I fully believe the universe is teeming with microbial life.)
> we're finding evidence of absence everywhere we look.
Show your work. Show me any such "evidence".
You seem to be unfamiliar even with what kind of data cosmologists and astronomers process.
We've been to the moon. There are no machines. We've been to Mars (via machines). There are no civilizations. We've seen the orbits of thousands of planets which are absolutely too hot for any biological processes to synthesize. We've scanned countless stars and determined them to be too unstable for anything to survive in their orbit. We've looked into every single confusing thing in the universe we could find and have seen natural explanations for nearly every single phenomenon.
Do you think we just don't know anything about the universe? There is tons of evidence of absence. It might not be complete enough to make a guess yet, and that's a fine argument to make, but it's weird to pretend that the evidence doesn't exist.
edit: And again, while it's not evidence of absence, I'm still waiting for a galactic signpost to pop up somewhere. Unless you've got some explanation for why not one single civilization anywhere, even ones which have left their home planet and have nothing too serious to worry about with respect to retaliation?
There might be ones who don't bother to try to communicate at all and instead prefer focus on themselves for whatever reasons
'In fact, the author has heard from serious U.S. SETI researchers that they are convinced that “men in black suits” will appear at their laboratory door the moment a detection is confirmed.'
Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.08422
This basically is just demonstrating how people very very good in their field can still fail Civics 101. Men In Black were some funny movies back in the day, but they were just movies.
—-
https://www.public.news/p/pentagon-is-illegally-hiding-secre...
"The term is generic, as it is used for any unusual, threatening or strangely behaved individual whose appearance on the scene can be linked in some fashion with a UFO sighting."
Some stories dont even posit them as being from the government, just designed to give that impression. Some reckon alien hybrids. Even in the MiB films they were separate and just controlled the government largely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_black
Its a general fear of government intervention.
If you are asking on what legal basis this fear is founded. I don't think there needs to be one. Lots of governments do illegal stuff. Suits are the classic G man look. They dont need "Jurisdiction" to dress in a suit and harass SETI.
So, that most SETI of all SETI people, Carl Sagan posed the role of the security apparatus in Contact, in the form of NSC head Michael Kitz. The film version gace superficial treatment - Kitz locks down message data, and at the end repudiates Arroway’s visit. In his book version, however, the state apparatus is much more insidious. The astronauts (plural, multiple countries rep’d) are threatened with having their psychological reputations destroyed if they ever utter a word that their encounter ever actually took place, or contravene the governments’ (plural) line that the intended journey had failed. Arroway takes extraordinary measures to make sure her hidden testimony will get out ‘should anything happen to her’. Sagan had a security clearance. One is left with the impression that maybe he wasn’t just making up conflict for dramatic reasons.
The laws of physics are what they are, and governments keep things secret to avoid giving their playbooks and sources of information away to adversaries, not because they've re-discovered magic.
Government secrets can be super mundane and still angering the wrong people can lead to abuse.
IIRC Brian Toohey "leaked" information that was on the public record in the USA. The Australian government still pursued him over it. IIRC the claimed harassment campaign has strong overlaps with Men In Black shenanigans.
The look is explicitly styled on 1950s OSS goons. CIA/FBI would be the modern equivalent. They seem to exist.
Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, and at least to this point, the Executive Branch cannot get away with "classified" actions within the United States that can't be defended in court under the color of unclassified black-letter law. Even FISA is, in fact, a Federal court. And all the ooga-booga supposed uber-secret SOF units that allegedly exist are military units (to the extent they actually exist), which can't be used domestically under Posse Comitatus. Domestic law enforcement is the FBI's job. No ooga-booga secret CIA unit would have any remit to operate in the US against Americans, especially given the well-known FBI/CIA rivalry.
There are no "Men in Black." It's a fun movie premise, that's all.
Right so we got here eventually, you are arguing legally.
So it isnt that men in black suits dont exist (they do) its that they can be legally be prosecuted if found to be acting outside of their jurisdiction.
The issue is that law isnt reality, its not even a sideways glance at reality. People in power do things and then only regret them if they are held accountable at a later date. Which is often not the case.
It makes absolutely no difference if the guy in the black suit is a local cop cosplaying, government goons above their station, or actual black hats working illegally in the wrong jurisdiction, this shit happens.
Dont take it from me, take it from noted conservative writer Robert A Heinlein “government is a living organism. Like every living thing its prime characteristic is a blind, unreasoned instinct to survive. You hit it, it will fight back.”
So we can read the GP quote.
'In fact, the author has heard from serious U.S. SETI researchers that they are convinced that “men in black suits” will appear at their laboratory door the moment a detection is confirmed.'
As "We think we would be placed under extreme government pressure when a detection is confirmed through both legal and illegal means"
Its not the same as "SETI claims MIB is real" or anything.
Not sure. Can some of HN at least agree that if it's the Empire we all join and act as if we love serving the Emperor and then put subtle code in the planet killing weapons that overload and self destruct if pointed at human listed planets?
Earth might still be at risk, but never underestimate the human ability to sell large tracts of land to foreign investors in exchange for a few concessions.
I will do my part to find out which humanoid-like species are genetically compatible with as wide of coverage humanly possible.
[1] - https://theinfosphere.org/Bender_Bending_Rodriguez#Relations...
IMO a protocol that doesn't involve automated instantaneous backing up of data on a publicly-referenceable blockchain is worthless due to the apparently legitimate (in the eyes SETI researchers that a former SETI institute chairman references) concern about security services quietly stepping in the way.
(see my other comment for reference)