Where are the aliens? Where are the dragons? | Hacker News Reader

Where are the aliens? Where are the dragons?

annevanrossum.com

20 pointsMrQuincle17 comments

What?! Wild arsed speculation that should embarrass a 14 year old! "maybe alien civilisations use FTL radios, maybe if we had evolved fireproof throats we could be dragons.?"

Edit Flag revoked. But I would like to ask MrQuintle, who on the face of it should be a dyed in the wool HN type, why he posted it. What did I miss? There appears to be some ML link that I assume is how you came across it but - why post it. It does seem utter tripe.

I think the story is kind of worthless and stupid too, but you can try to hand wave your way to getting something out of it.

E.g. there are so many planets, there must be life and other intelligent species on some of them, but we can't detect them. What are the possibilities for this that require the fewest unfounded assumptions? Well, one of them is that they simply don't communicate in ways we are looking for, so they aren't generating the radio signals we look for. FTL is stupid, but the idea that they aren't using radio is almost common sense.

Similarly, dragons are stupid, but the idea that evolution might tend to come up with solutions that prevent intelligence is reasonable. Running a big brain takes a lot of resources, it may be rare for situations where having a brain instead of twice as much muscle is selected for by the environment, for example. So that would also substantially decrease the amount of intelligent species.

Man, you guys are grumpy. I read it as an entertaining piece of sci-fi.

Hi there. I admit that's not anything scientific. :-) I just entertained to give some interesting variants of these ideas.

And I am not an expert in the question of superluminal communication, be it on Birgit Dopfer's experiment or using ordinary subluminal speeds through wormholes. But to consider that the absence of alien artifacts or communication might require us to look for gaps in our knowledge w.r.t. physics is a fun one, you've to admit. :-)

If you are Anne, hi. Please don't take it too personally. What were you speculating on? It seems too trivial to say maybe aliens have some other means of communication. Are there parameters we can use to close down the problem?

Grumpy, yes. Too quick to judge, yes, but still interested (although in UK timezone so tired)

Hi, lifeiststillgood. Yes I am Anne and I don't mind grumpy people so much. We all have our days! :-)

If quantum entanglement is used - in the way we understand now - a subluminal/luminal carrier is required. Sending these signals is power intensive, so it is likely to be the case that modulating an existing source might be cheaper. Not so much a parameter that helps us much further though.

Of course, it is important to take sparsity into account. It is very unlikely that a fixed signal originating from one point in the sky is the most efficient manner of communication. Sparsity is becoming quite an important concept in machine learning and I think SETI research might benefit from it. But, I've to say, I don't have experience with advances made in SETI research, so maybe they have advanced beyond the standard machine learning methods. :-) I'm just an ordinary roboticist.

I found some articles in this direction:

- http://arxiv.org/pdf/0810.3966, Searching for Cost-Optimized Interstellar Beacons and Messaging with Cost-Optimized Interstellar Beacons, by James Benford (short pulses rather than a continuous signal).

- http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4w59f2wk.pdf, Design of interstellar digital communication links: Some insights from communication engineering, by David Messerschmitt (optimization as a coordination tool with aliens).

Jesus, you're grumpy. And you say "wild-arsed speculation" like it's a bad thing. Are you one of those who thinks that science fiction is beneath your intelligence, and proper adults should only read novels about disgruntled middle-aged professors contemplating having affairs?

I assume that MrQuincle posted this because she is Anne van Rossum, the author of the piece, and doesn't think that it is 'utter tripe'.

FTL communication of any kind disrupts causality as we understand it. It's likely not possible.

The article is wild speculation, but so is everything regarding aliens. Even educated guesses are really just wild speculation because there are too many unknowns. We don't even know how many worlds can support life, how many forms life can take, how often life might evolve intelligence, etc.

I wonder sometimes if maybe there's a easter egg hidden in physics. If there were an easy way to convert matter to energy that we have yet to discover, we will likely destroy ourselves once we discover it. All it would take is one psycho with the right resources to unleash a kind of devastation that would make nuclear weapons look like fireworks. There might be no intelligent life out there because discovering the kind of energy resource that allows for easy interstellar travel might also make it too easy to kill ourselves.

Another possibility is the end game of intelligent life is not travelling around 21st century style, but digitizing our consciousness and living in a virtual world. Why travel to the stars when it makes more sense to turtle up in a giant computer and enjoy life? Something like a Dyson sphere.

Another possibility is the aliens are out there, they've just perfected the invisibility cloaks we're currently working on. Star Trek style, they're monitoring us unseen so as not to interfere with our civilization.

It's fun to think about, but it's all wild speculation at this point.

The whole point of mentioning FTL communication is to challenge the idea that we understand enough.

Our current understanding of causality makes us believe that FTL communication is 'likely not possible'.

If FTL communication is possible, it just means that our understanding of causality is wrong, and if that is the case it was never 'likely not possible'.

Anne McCaffrey wrote a series of novels (Dragonriders of Pern) based around fire breathing alien dragons. Their method of producing fire was to digest phosphine rich rocks in a dedicated stomach and then emit phosphine gas which would spontaneously combust when expelled and mixed with air. In short, fire breath without the need for fire in the belly.

Nice!

Almost anything is possible. I think a major constraint to evolving intelligent life is the fact that it requires large heads, which make birth difficult. The marsupial solution of giving birth to very small underdeveloped babies and completing development in an external pouch soleves this problem nicely. Also, hopping motion is more efficient than our clumsy walking, and leaves the upper limbs free to develop into hands for tool use. So I think it's likely that most intelligent life forms in the universe are basically kangaroos.

That doesn't answer the question of where they are, though.

I'm trying to figure out if there is a good reason for the mammalian birth canal to go through the pelvis, without much luck. If that routing is not advantageous, birthing problems would only come up when it happened to be prevalent on that planet.

Spawning only a few babies as "we" do it is important to only spawn healthy babies. The first test is the "great swim" of the sperm. The second is the health of the mother in the next 9 month and the "last" one is surviving birth. This making only the fittest/suitable survive.

And that is why "routing" it something hard makes sense.

I don't think this is a worthless or uninteresting article - but I think the author is missing the point.

WE are the dragons. Us. Human beings. We're the evolutionary exception, the ultimate apex predator, and so on.

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