Why We'll Never Meet Aliens | Hacker News Reader

Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

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40 pointschangdizzle49 comments

It's true that once something was able to reach us, they'd probably have very little interest in conquering us, stealing our resources, or anything else "movie aliens" do. Where I disagree is that such beings wouldn't be interested in us.

Start with us. Despite knowing basically where we came from, what our ancestors looked like, and how their DNA would look, we're still fascinated to find links and steps along the way. I'm still intrigued by bugs and bacteria, despite being much more advanced and sophisticated. We still call our dogs "smart," and enjoy when they communicate with us in their simple ways.

Anything that goes into space is probably curious. You don't even start a space program to look or travel elsewhere if you're not interested in what might be out there!

How could you not be interested in an entirely different biosphere? In exploring among plants and animals, the likes of which you'd never seen? If you lack that kind of curiosity, you'd just stay home in the first place. We're all just speculating of course, but it's an interesting topic.

You've fallen into a trap: anthropomorphizing aliens.

Aliens aren't necessarily anything like us. Curiosity isn't necessarily a property of life. An example: cats don't appear to experience remorse, yet dogs do. One could envision the same for curiosity.

One motivation for a space program is when a civilization realizes their resources will be gone in a matter of centuries.

Curiosity, by this point, is extremely likely to be a required condition for intelligence in any species. You should look into the AI work done in developmental robotics and Artificial Curiosity...

By what point? In time? In evolution? Because curiosity can be simulated with machines why does that prove that its a characteristic of all developing biological life?

For one, any technological civilisation needs curiosity as it's basis.

Second, curiosity is prevalent all around advanced animals, mammals etc. Seems like an emergent property of evolution, that would be hard to not come out in any evolutionary process.

"by this point" == "given the degree of understanding of Intelligence that we have reached so far"

Maybe that's because we've designed it to resemble our own intelligence?

I would think that a prerequisite for space exploration would be curiosity. I mean you make a good point, but the willingness to go beyond one's current means and traveling through the unknown kind of allude to an instinctual curiosity to see what is new and different.

One of the classic examples is the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment. A paperclip maximizer is a superintelligent AI whose sole goal is to maximize the number of paperclips in the universe. Such a being is curious to the extent that learning more about the universe increases the expected number of paperclips in its future light-cone.

A paperclip maximizer is indifferent to your existence, but thoroughly believes that it could make better use of your planet than you could, as you are hardly optimized for the production of paperclips.

The Paperclip Maximizer: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? I sense the approach of the p-zombie.

I'm not sure what you mean by "conceivable" and "metaphysically possible", and I don't see a resemblance to p-zombies. Could you elaborate?

just trolling. The distinction was posed here (http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl). The resemblance: if a superintelligent AI lacks 'conscious experience, qualia, or sentience'.

Obviously the Paperclip Maximizer would be supplanted by the Maximizer Maximizer, which only sees value in copies of itself. The Maximizer Maximizer that stumbles onto the mental trait "curiosity" will eventually crush all other variants of Maximizer. Once it develops the advanced technologies of space travel, it discovers that seizing faraway planets is possible but going through all that trouble is not a net positive towards self-actualization as a Maximizer Maximizer Maximizer.

Thus TFA is correct.

Obviously the Maximizer Maximizer is just another potential foe for the Paperclip Maximizer to seek out and crush in its infancy. (Sound brutal? It isn't; if you pull it off right, not a single paperclip will be harmed.)

The potency of the Minimizer Maximizer is more likely to be discovered by a curious Maximizer variant. But will it have the wisdom to not to employ it?

But you are falling into a anthroporeligio trap of assuming the Paperclip Maximizer considers potential paperclips in their uncoiled wire form to have comparable moral status as actual paperclips, once the wire reaches the factory floor.

Sounds like a crappy example though, as far as examples/thought experiments go.

How is this specific choice of example any good, or makes any sense?

It's alien enough that people won't try to anthropomorphize the Paperclip Maximizer. That's not an easy thing for an example to accomplish. And it was originally conceived for talking about artificial intelligence, which makes it a bit less outlandish.

To develop advanced technology without curiosity would be rather implausible.

>You've fallen into a trap: anthropomorphizing aliens. Aliens aren't necessarily anything like us.

Yes, we're talking about aliens that ARE like us here. Not some alien bacteria.

As far as evolution is concerned, it should work pretty much the same in any planet, and produce more or less similar results.

Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5613920

Original Link: http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2013/04/why-well-never-meet-ali...

the largest logical fallacy among many that this article suffers from is that alien species would necessarily need to be technologically advanced to reach us. This probably comes from another flawed line of thought that aliens need to be like us in some way (hence requiring things like figuring out how to survive radiation, last for long periods without food and so on). This doesnt really make sense since on earth itself there are species that can do things we humans couldnt do (cockroaches can cope with tremendous amounts of radiation for example, and bacteria that live near geysers etc - thrive at extremely high temperatures). So why isn't it possible that an alien species that just about figures out how to ride a rock in space and doesnt really need all the advancement that we need to survive - comes floating by planet earth and decides to check us out sometimes?! Don't back up a lack of imagination with flawed logic ;)

The energy required to reach escape velocity generally precludes a planet from generating enough force to fling an object outside its gravity well.

The energy required to sustain life generally precludes large lifeforms from surviving for long periods in space on a spacerock. Anything that evolved into a complex organism probably required a stable source of energy for billions of years. Ours is the sun, and at a very specific distance range.

> The energy required to sustain life generally precludes

> Anything that evolved into a complex organism probably required

Both of those claims are based on a single data point.

If there are or were aliens, why have we not heard them?

Forget visits, why haven't we heard a peep? From anywhere?

The universe is 13.77 billion years old. It took planet earth 4.54 billion years to evolve a species capable of emitting significant electromagnetic radiation.

I'm starting to be pretty convinced that we are the first advanced species, and perhaps life is a lot more rare than we imagine.

Because we've been listening, rather half-assedly, for less than 100 years to a thing that is orders of magnitude larger than that (in light years) and haven't heard anything ... there must be nothing there?!

That's pretty much like knocking on the door of a house with all the lights on, and when it isn't answered three milliseconds later, concluding no-one is home.

Because space-time is expanding at an extraordinary rate, such that vast portions of the universe are forever inaccessible?

"For example there are stars which may be expanding away from us (or each other) faster than the speed of light, and this is true for any object that is more than approximately 4.5 gigaparsecs away from us." [1]

That said, 4.5 gigaparsecs is 10^10 light years, which is still pretty damn big.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space

Isn't the expansion of the universe way out of scope of this article and discussion? Obviously, if there are aliens that far away, they by definition cannot reach us.

It could explain why we haven't encountered aliens despite the advanced age of the Earth. The Earth has been around for roughly 1/3rd the age of the universe, but because space time is expanding exponentially, only a fraction of the universe (roughly 20%) is theoretically reachable, even when travelling at the speed of light. A planet like Earth that formed around the same time, or earlier, even relatively close to the Earth, may now be in the unreachable zone. By the same token, the longer it takes for an intelligent species to evolve, the less likely it is that they will ever be able to contact us.

Perhaps we are being shielded.

Perhaps aliens don't indiscriminately broadcast signals.

Perhaps they do but they are too weak to penetrate the noise by the time they get to us.

Perhaps they are encoded to match background radiation to all but those with the right cipher.

Perhaps there is some sort of sub-space that messages can be transmitted on that we have yet to discover.

Perhaps pulsars are interstellar beacons placed by advanced civilizations to signal a rendezvous point for any species capable of reaching it. (Anyone know if this is the basis for a sci-fi story?)

As an aside, I find it somewhat amusing when people lay out a statistical basis for how life is so incredibly rare to the point where it's unlikely that we even exist.

Contact is close, in that (spoilers, in case anyone hasn't read the book) the signal being broadcast contains instructions on a device to send its occupants via a wormhole network to a rendezvous point.

This is why:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law

Anyway, if you actually wanted to seek other planets, you would need a HAL-style computer, sperm and eggs on ice, and an artificial womb. Then, life could realistically spend thousands and thousands of years traveling in space. If this is even possible then I suspect one or another lifeform would have done it by now. Since they apparently haven't, I doubt there's much out there. Fermi's paradox really.

What's this BS premise about them being "1,000 times smarter than us"?

For one, we're not 1000 times smarter than people 2000 years ago. Just more tech savvy and able to play with more abstract / mathematical patterns (which helps with IQ scores). As far as our general thinking, philosophy and emotional intelligence goes we are about as smart as those "ancients". Or even worse. And if there's any doubt that that holds in aggregate, it sure holds in isolated cases. Do you believe the average American is smarter than, say, Euclides or Aristotle? Or Newton, Da Vinci, etc?

Second, what about aliens that are in more or less a similar state as us? They might live 10-20-100 light years away, have a similar level of technology, etc. We might be able to meet them if we or them attempt a mission, or talk to them over radio waves.

And in that case, nothing of all those ("we're insects to them") etc, will hold.

Any alien species that is capable of coming here, and curious enough to want to learn about our form of life, is probably more than capable of doing so without alerting us to their presence.

A lot of the comments: http://xkcd.com/638/

I don't know much about all this but we haven't even left our solar system (if we truly have then fine galaxy). I mean physically as I imagine other emissions do get out but idk. And we find new life forms on Earth all the time. Are we really qualified to say there is no life out there?

Imagine a race of technologically advanced religious zealots. Now imagine that their god has tasked them with converting everyone in the universe and kill any who refuse. If you're having trouble, just imaging a Catholic Space Crusade or an Islamic Space Jihad, it's the next "logical" step. I'd be pretty afraid of aliens with that kind of mindset.

I think it's difficult to do any sound prediction. Once you reach a certain level of civilization advancement, I think everything is different, a little bit like you couldn't compare our civilization with the first human beings fighting for food.

There's an interesting idea in "Accelerando" that supertech civilizations would value "novelty" the way we [once] valued gold and Bitcoin values rare prime numbers, and it's hard to imagine a better source of novelty than an alien civilization.

Now - that doesn't address the virtuality thing, but I've a friend with a compelling take on that: If we're assuming that any sufficiently advanced civilization would rather simulate us than visit us, then it's pretty reasonable they'd have more than one simulated universe. And it's pretty likely that the simulated universes would have super tech civs that start up their own simulations, causing a recursion, which in turn makes it more likely than not that we're in a simulated universe. And, if we're in a simulated universe, then we're already "in contact" with the host universe/civilization - otherwise, what's the point in the simulation in the first place?

We might never meet aliens because we don't even know what we're supposed to search for. Our definition of life is limited to carbon lifeforms, and searches are limited to signals of something that resembles human civilization (e.g., laughably Dyson's spheres). A pretty naive, anthropocentric, reductionist view of the universe if you ask me.

Once you stop seeing living beings as carbon actors in a scenic universe, you realize the existence of amazing life forms everywhere, in all scales, and that the definition of "intelligent lifeform" is an illusion.

It's a really interesting and complex topic to think about. I don't feel knowledgeable enough to make arguments one way or another, but I'd like to think that two species from different planets could happen upon each other at least by accident, in the same way that I, as a human, encounter an ant on the sidewalk. We're the most advanced on the planet; we may not care to interact with every living being on Earth, but that doesn't mean we won't step on them while moving from point A to B.

So if we in the future are going to be advanced enough to visit some planet with alien life we are not going to be interested in meeting them?

This is really out of topic but qz.com has the worst mobile experience. On my Android phone I have a quarter of an inch size view port.

I'd like to humbly suggest that, if given the opportunity, one experiment with DMT. It's the closest thing to a "nearest neighbor" argument that I can come up with, but of course I have no explanation.

This is the best write-up that I've come across on the subject: http://ewwty.com/2012/02/24/dimethyltryptamine-dmt-experienc...

And for a longer treatment I recommend reading "The Cosmic Serpent", which centers around the information gained during Shamanistic ayahuasca sessions (dmt based) which led to the discovery of many plant-based pharmaceutical precursors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cosmic_Serpent

I knew someone who experimented with DMT. Their personality was distinctly different afterwards, and has remained different for several years. In a negative way.

Change yourself at your own risk.

How did his personality change?

https://www.erowid.org/columns/teafaerie/2012/01/19/ymmv-201...

Do your homework. Know yourself, know your substance, know your source - then pay attention to your [mind]set and setting.

There's no known physical risks to using DMT. It is naturally produced by your body in small amounts.

The risk is integrating the experience of traveling to another "dimension" and then coming back to reality. If you aren't psychologically fit, you shouldn't try it. But mostly it will feel like a dream. Hard to believe it happened and impossible to explain.

It sounds silly but the effect of DMT is not like a typical drug. The universal experience of flying through "hyperspace" and feeling some intelligent force attempt to interact with you is a legitimate mystery of brain chemistry.

It exists everywhere in nature including the Acacia tree which is thought to be the "burning bush" from the Bible.

I agree. Its SO much different, and so infinitely fascinating. Every time I've made it "through" it was an utterly different world that was populated by autonomous, interacting intelligence.

I posted this because I feel it a very real possibility that our proximity to alien life has nothing to do with physical distance or resources, so to speak.

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