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Comment by asdfadfs | Hacker News Reader

>>The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. <<

Look, there are many ponds of varying sizes, a couple of meters to hundreds of meters in diameter, in the woods near my home. Some of them most likely have life of some form. How interested are you in going there and study that life or even just check out what life there is? None? Right. That is the whole point of the article. You already know there is life there, it is not unique. Why bother?

Your are making the exact mistake the author cautions against. We think we are important, most likely we are a dime a dozen in the vastness of the galaxy.

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There are people who are interested in the contents of those ponds, and they already have been studied.

The people who are curious about the ponds (planets) are the ones that would be put on the ship.

Not to mention your analogy is terrible. Those ponds aren't interesting to me because they are nothing special. They don't contain anything that we aren't constantly surrounded with everywhere.

On the other hand in the galaxy, planets with life on it are special. And intelligent life even more so.

Your argument is extremely, extremely weak. As I said, it's obvious, if aliens were cruising around the universe the whole purpose of it would be to find other intelligent life and inhabitable planets and interesting stuff. If we were doing it, that would obviously be our purpose, there's no reason to think that wouldn't be the purpose of any other intelligent life.

>Not to mention your analogy is terrible. Those ponds aren't interesting to me because they are nothing special. They don't contain anything that we aren't constantly surrounded with everywhere. On the other hand in the galaxy, planets with life on it are special. And intelligent life even more so.

No - the whole point of the article is that they're not. Sure, it's a tiny proportion of planets. But in an unimaginably vast universe, there have got to be billions of them - and while there would surely be aliens who study some other civilizations, once you've seen a few million human-level civilizations you've seen them all. Analogy: even though four-leaf clover are rare and interesting as clover go, still the vast majority of four-leaf clover in the world have never been examined by a human.

But it doesn't matter that in the entire universe there are tons because anything outside of our galaxy might as well not exist when you're talking about communication / contact.

So just focusing on the galaxy, even if life arises on every planet where it is capable, it's not going to be common. The planets with life on them will be few and far between. And as I said, based on our evidence, not even all (or any necessarily) of those will have intelligent life.

>>There are people who are interested in the contents of those ponds, and they already have been studied.

But has every single pond been studied no matter its size. Do people rush to study a new discovered pond 5 meters in diameter? Is it that novel that people will rush to it? No, because there are millions of ponds just like it. That is who we are, a little pond maybe 1 meter in diameter (probably should call it a puddle), nothing extraordinary about it. There are a millions of other 1 meter ponds/puddles around the world, why would our pond/puddle be singled out? What is so special about our tiny pond/puddle? That is the point of the article. You are not thinking big enough.

I addressed every point you bring up.

You insist we're nothing special, there's no reason to believe that.

If that were the case and there's human like intelligent life all over the place in the galaxy then we should start picking up their signals pretty soon.

Even more so, we should have picked some up already (because certainly some of them should have been ahead of us.) But we haven't found anything. We are quite possibly alone in the Milky Way in terms of intelligent life, and if we aren't, the advanced aliens are very far away indeed.

ehhh you arent really backing up your points. We have to take this argument for what its worth, i mean we are basically talking a thought experiment along science fiction lines right here... and thats ok, makes for an interesting change. BUT in lines with that you have to from a thought experiment standpoint justify your arguements...

The original author went to great length to justify his arguments, I think a lot of his are flawed, but they are at least fully thought out/hashed. You cant play this thought experiment game without playing by the same rules...

You believe intelligent life is rare in the galaxy, also you believe inter galactic distances are so vast that even with mature FTL travel those regions will remain inaccessible. I dont really see a strong justification for the second postulate, the first i am on the fence about

The analogy doesn't really hold because ponds in the forest are going to be much more homogenous than planets. If every pond we looked was unique, we would probably be more interested in individuals.

Of course, there's no reason to assume that life on different planets is more diverse than different ponds, but it seems more likely.

Humans have spent a massive amount of time and effort studying other forms of life on this planet. As a species, we clearly have an intense interest in that, demonstrated in everything from what we look at on Reddit, to what books are purchased to what types of vacations people like to take, to gardening and cultivation, to the number of people that work in fields directly related to the environment or animals.

Your premise is invalid.

Right, and thanks to all that time studying it is very likely that whatever is in the pond is nothing new. Which is kind of the point of the article. Whatever is in the pond is most likely nothing we haven't seen before. Now, studying the depths of the Arctic is a different matter. Are you saying that we are so rare (just like Arctic species hundreds of meters below ice) that aliens will rush to study us?

The whole point is that we are probably average, just like the life in the pond is probably average, which is the reason nobody will put us on their priority list.

If life is so common that alien civs just have their total pick of who to study, then we should see some evidence of all these neighbors.

Remember, civilizations are composed of billions of beings. You only need one being to decide to come study this pond, or otherwise enforce a rule against anyone doing it.

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