- As far back as the sixteenth century, Italian philosopher and Dominican friar Giordano Bruno argued that the stars above us were in fact stars surrounded by their own system of planets and they too could be presumed to be inhabited (for why would God go to all the bother to create a world, only to leave it empty?) — a theological position known as “cosmic pluralism.” This extension of the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system that toppled humanity’s place at the center of the universe was of course a heresy.
Despite what we think, Everyone always assumed we were not alone... May be thinking we are, is the most interesting approach
- Compared to the universe’s 13.8-billion-year-old life span so far, 4 billion years for things to kick off hints at how unlikely this may be.
it took 2 billion years between the first emergence of bacterial and archaean life and eukaryotic life (cells with true nuclei), and another billion again before eukaryotes got friendly enough to bunch up into multicellular life.
Basically we are, aren't we? Ever had problems playing games or talking on skype (or whatever) due to lag? I'm no space guy but what if the closest intelligent life is so far away that your conversations have 60,000 year lag. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
I'm a space guy, and you're not going to have a conversation at all with 60,000 year lag, because by the time anybody gets anybody else's second response, that anybody else will be well on their way to send probes or representatives or something. And that 60k year lag is not a far-fetched estimate, you did good, because if the only other life-bearing solar system was on the exact opposite side of the galaxy, but the same distance away from the galactic center, it'd be ~50,000 light years away. I don't think life is that sparse, and if I were an advanced species that came across humans, I'd leave them alone on principle (please clap). No but if there were an ethical galactic order, I guarantee you that it'd afford some protections to us mudcrabs, currently reveling in our own filth and squalor, until we grow up as a species. I'm currently considering the idea that "the great filter" may generally do a good job in snuffing out species unable to develop compassion on a planetary scale, so predominantly good guys make it to Type II or III civilizations. Not yet sure I really believe that (or doubt it), but it's still fun to entertain the notion. This "great filter" is directly related to the idea of the Fermi Paradox, which is mentioned in the jacobinmag article. I saw Ad Astra in theaters (first time at the movies in over a year), and despite the great cinematography and Brad Pitt's typically fantastic performance, it's a no, from me. Apparently it's just really difficult to write a good sci-fi story line. Please ask me questions to stop me from reading more Fox News articles?
I have to dash out the door here so more questions later, but I am curious about the notion of compassion on a planetary scale as a requirement to hit type II or III civilization. I would love to hear more about this idea as I have not considered this before.
It's purely speculative, I haven't heard it anywhere either. The idea might be out there somewhere else, though. To me, the idea of the "great filter" is like acknowledging that the technical challenges required to achieve type II are so great that a planet needs to maintain global peace (and other components of a healthy environment) for an incredibly long time while attempting colonization. It's certainly possible that something could go wrong after type II status, though. But if the majority are good, they might police the baddies? I dunno. We have no data, except the fact that no one's attacked us yet, or visited in the past (that we know of). It'd just be, ya know, really nice to have interstellar compassion. Imagine reppin' Earth culture at the galaxy-wide disco, and everyone's just chill af. Like I said to kleinbl00 elsewhere in these comments, it's at least comforting to know that Earth-like planets don't seem to be as rare as we once feared. So I'm sure there are plenty of non-life-bearing planets for the type III guys if they need them for target practice or whatever.
It's important to acknowledge that the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equation and the Great Filter are all extraordinarily pompous descriptions for preposterously simple notions that are backed up by absolutely nothing but philosophy. Worse, they're backed up by philosophy, from theoretical physicists, about sociology and exobiology. No one would take them the slightest bit seriously if they were theosophical theories about physics from a bunch of biologists but here we are. For some reason, the only people allowed to talk about little green men are the guys who get itchy when their data and their models require a constant or two to work. A biological answer to "the great filter" would involve acknowledging that social organization for evolutionary purposes must directly benefit the propagation of the species. This works for ants - depending on how you count, the ants are every bit as good at this as we are. A sociological answer to "the great filter" would involve acknowledging that social organization for tribal purposes must broach Dunbar's Number. But then, Naked Mole Rats are about four inches long and can be in colonies numbering in the hundreds so that's not so great either. The fuckin' singularity cult would argue that the obvious answer to the Fermi Paradox is that once we beat Moore's Law we all disappear inside the box and give no fucks about the physical universe anymore anyway so who cares what's happening on Tau Ceti. But nobody is allowed to discuss these things when talking about SETI because it makes the physicists upset.
I'm so fascinated (as an uneducated layman) by space and cosmology but honestly most of it's way over my head because with questions like this I inevitably get bogged down in philosophy. Like What is life? What is consciousness? What is intelligence? That's before we even start talking about the practical hurdles like communicating, navigating or traversing the huge distances when we don't even know why our models are so out of touch with our observations (dark energy). Two questions then. 1. From this side of the great filter. How likely do you think it is that we could permanently escape earth and survive/flourish? My guess given the current state of things is close to zero chance, but I'd love a more informed perspective. 2. From the other side of the great filter. What do you think the difference in intelligence/capabilities would be if there was ever contact? My gut feeling is it would be like an upside down bell curve or similar. Probability close to 1 that Civilisation A is vastly, vastly ahead of Civilisation B curving down to close to 0 where both are about equal, then rising again to close to 1 where B is ahead of A.
Almost 100% likely. We're at the point where asteroids and comets pose almost no threat, because we're developing the tech to nudge them enough that they avoid Earth. We track all the big stuff, and should have years of notice to prevent global catastrophe. In just another 20 years, if a large asteroid/cometary impact hasn't happened, it never will. Nukes? Even if Trump starts some serious shit, there'd still be some survivors, somewhere. Billions might die, but a few tens or hundreds of million might live, if not more. Eventually, they rebuild civilization, and it probably doesn't take but another few thousand or ten thousand years at worst, the blink of an eye on astronomical timescales. Similar arguments for an epidemic, whatever. Some people, somewhere, survive and go into subsistence until they can rebuild society. And society always wants to eventually expand into space. If we can avoid the billions-of-deaths-thing, though, yes please. The inverse bell curve idea sounds mostly right, but it supposes that the more advanced civilization wants to make itself known to the lesser, and I think that's probably almost never the case. Why would aliens bother us humans, at this point in our development? We would just try something dumb and end up hurting ourselves. If there is really some sorta galactic order, then there would be a set of criteria of governing who can hang. I guarantee you that we don't meet that criteria yet.How likely do you think it is that we could permanently escape earth and survive/flourish?
What do you think the difference in intelligence/capabilities would be if there was ever contact?
At this point in our evolution as a species, what incentive does another civilization have to spend the intensive resources it would take to make contact with us? We have nothing to offer, unless we ourselves (food, labor) or our planet are the resource. Otherwise, the only reason I see to make contact is because you can do it from a distance, but the communications lag makes that an endeavor that is unlikely to return a result in any biological being's lifetime, so why do it, and also, why risk calling in the guys who are likely to see you as a resource?
Hello, half-baked space person here. Of all the speculative answers on why another civilization would contact us: The flip side is our own (to extend the metaphor) child-like curiosity of the cosmos around us. Are we truly alone? What could we learn from other life (technologically, biologically)? Where are they at in their civilization's development? Is there evidence/ hope for us to come to a place of global unity or overcome existential troubles like climate change without great loss [actually the first link covers this too]? Edit: So both points I meant to link were from the same conversation. The link above would start at what I sought to answer. The start of Sagan's dialogue with Carson on the search for terrestrial life on that date: It touches most of the conversations and some jokes along this thread. Worth a fun, informative listen.What made this optimism nevertheless terrifying was the unknown of what the adults of the cosmos would be like. Would they be peaceful? Would they be so advanced that they would treat us as we treat a fruit fly or a rat, or a lab mouse, or even Laika the space dog? Would they treat us as food, the way we treat cows and pigs? Would they carry with them genocidal new diseases the way Europeans did to the Americas? Would they be the disease? Would they demolish the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass?
Clifford Simak's "Big Front Yard" of 1959 presupposes that in a universe of abundance, the only reasons to interact with other species are cultural. After all, if it's natural resources you need there are plenty of planets unbeloved by angry natives who don't want their water taken. The example from "big front yard" involves small mouse-like aliens who take a bunch of spare parts from a Yankee trader and pay him back by turning a black'n'white TV in for repair to color. He then discovers their "stargate" for lack of a better term and wanders out into the plains of interstellar commerce where he discovers that while humans have not invented antigravity, apparently we're the first culture to come up with coating things in different-colored pigments for purely aesthetic purposes. There's a later story from the '80s, the title, author and gist of which I cannot recall, but it was an archetypal "the aliens are among us" story with the argument that duh they're here for the culture. The only thing I do remember was the extremely poignant example of rabbits: the alien in the story explained that any number of races could look at a rabbit and produce any number of reproductions but to date, only one culture has come up with a "wascally wabbit." If you think back through the history of human exploration, minerals provide a short-term gain, biological specimens a slightly longer gain, but what we've gotten from exploration, over the long term, has been cultural exchange. It's undoubtedly anthropocentric to assume the same about an encounter with other species but really, the one thing we're likely to have that's unique to us is our culture.
Most audiovisual technology of the past 50 years has been advanced by porn. VCRs, video compression, cheap cameras, 3D, you name it. There was a need for cheap development of moving images so capitalism found a way. Capitalism usually finds a way. The philosophical answer to "what is consciousness" and "what is intelligence" is a question that can be discussed but from a pragmatic standpoint, the discussion is "can I take it or do I have to negotiate." Which, obviously, has a different answer when you're incommunicado with the bleeding-hearts of your nation. But it also drives a more pragmatic question that generally gets obliterated in all the philosophy: what is the economic case for space exploration? What need is being driven by launching billion-dollar probes at Mars? You can make one: NASA gives us prestige in the face of other nations that allows us leverage in international discussion. It also allows us to publicly try out new technologies that can be used for other (often less public) uses. By sending billion-dollar probes to Mars we are reminding the rest of the planet that we're number one. But this whole "asteroid mining" thing. Or "terraforming Mars." I mean... we have a dire need to terraform EARTH to the point where our CO2 levels are closer to habitable and not only is it going to be a lot less work to take our atmosphere from 400ppm to 250, we're already here. Culturally, this is what brought the Apollo program to a screaming halt: the USSR gave up, we lost in Vietnam and the country lost their appetite for giant extraplanetary boondoggles so inside five years we'd gone from 2001 to Rollerball and Logan's Run. SETI is so laughably un-useful that it's not even worth modeling. Planck's Law predates broadcasting yet we've had this romantic notion of little green men watching I Love Lucy since the dawn of television. SETI was entirely focused on the hydrogen band because obviously we broadcast everything everywhere all the time and it's the only place that isn't swamped and then lo and behold the minute we develop tight-beam communication we're looking for that now. The Drake Equation is bullshit and always has been because Frank Drake wanted time on a radiotelescope and the Navy wanted a justification. So Frank came up with seven stacked bullshit factors and said "look, coefficients" and the Navy said "great I just need something to put on the form." Hey, am_Unition I got one! Give me the energy requirements for a tightbeam visual signal from, say, Alpha Centauri B. I wanna be able to read morse code at night. We've got logarithmic energy density so I'm going to need to up the brightness an order of magnitude. Presume 100% efficiency of the laser/maser/whatever- how much energy is my tightbeam communication across a puny 4.3 light years going to consume? Bonus points if you give me a number for both red and blue wavelengths.Like What is life? What is consciousness? What is intelligence?
Yepperz. Realistically, it will "cost" governments tens of trillions of dollars to solve the climate problem. Over the next ten to twenty years, it will become glaringly obvious that we have no choice. When people are like, "HEY, send me to start terraforming Mars RIGHT NOW!", I wanna tell them, "OK, have fun! I'll be here. Maybe you'll get the bandwidth to email me before you die, but maybe not". I think NASA is probably realizing that any serious attempt to colonize Mars needs to be an international endeavor if it will ever have a chance of succeeding (/affording it). With a staunchly anti-globalist president, there's no good reason for NASA to broadcast that, because they also probably realize that they're gonna have to pull a Vatican and think on timescales of human generations from the get-go, so what's four or eight years? I've been trash talking a Mars shot since I got here. The public simply doesn't understand how many challenges there are to colonizing Mars, and unlike asteroid mining, there are essentially zero business incentives for sending people to Mars. That I can think of, at least. It's not hydrogen emission, it's emission generated when hydrogen bonds to hydroxide and makes water. Had to look it up, I was so confused, I thought "Why would SETI be looking at... Lyman-Alpha..?". I don't think targeting water is a terribly bad idea. Water has so many unique properties (yuge heat index, less dense in the solid phase than the liquid, relatively small temperature difference required for phase changes, should occur everywhere in the universe near a previous supernova that produced the Oxygen, etc.), and although it certainly might drastically narrow the types of "life", it seems like a decent start. I think I've said this before, but I wonder if there isn't something encoded into quasar outbursts, like if advanced civilizations ever systematically arrange matter to fall into the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. I doubt it's really possible to encode much on very short timescales, because the processes in the accretion disk and jets that create emissions are super turbulent and non-linear. Actually, we think the most common non-linear process energizing things there is probably magnetic reconnection (muh jerb), but anyway. The dots and dits could be days, weeks, months, or years-long, though, I guess. That'd be the best way to have an omni-directional signal, because you'd be modulating gamma-ray and relativistic particle fluxes, which are rare enough that your signal-to-noise ratio is muuuuuuch better than other wavelengths or lower energy particles, especially if it were coming from the center of your own galaxy. There are many many other considerations, though. Didn't know that about Drake and the Navy. I still maintain that the galaxy might be teeming with life, and there's not really a reason for them to bother us. Apparently there are plenty of solar systems with rocky, watery planets. There might be only a relatively small span in a civilization's development when they broadcast radio waves up into space before switching to neutrino beams or whatever. Think of it like a spherical shell of radio waves, and however many years they broadcast for, that's how many light years thick it is, and the radius of the shell is obviously growing one light year per year. The strength of the signal inside the shell decays as a function of 1/r^2; quite quickly, as the radius expands outwards. Ho boy, here we go. Pinging Devac for peer review. Like, with the naked eye? OK, you'll need an apparent magnitude of at least +6. Let's make it +4, because I don't want to voyage into the central Pacific Ocean to see this, I don't even wanna squint. We'll assume that the Alpha Centaurians (probably centaurs) have tuned their laser's beam divergence such that when it reaches us, the beam diameter is the size of Earth's diameter. And btw, they'll have to aim 4.3 years in advance, so (being nowhere near precise enough) 0.3 orbits ahead of wherever Earth is when they flip the switch. From the apparent magnitude wiki article, we'll just convert the m=0 flux for the "V"(= visible) band to m=+4 using Pogson's ratio, 2.512, raised to the (+4 - 0 =) 4th power: 2.512^4 = ~40. OK, so to have enough visible photon flux per unit area (we start with cm^2) for it to appear as an m+4 for everyone on Earth, we need 40 x 3.64E-20 (= ~1.5E-18) ergs/(s*cm^2*Hz). We need to get rid of the Hz. If we assume they're using a monochromatic beam smack dab in the middle of the visible light spectrum, say 550 nanometers (yellow) = lambda, and c = lambda*f (where c is the speed of light), so f = 3E8 (m/s)/5.5E-7 (m) = ~5E14 Hz. So 1.5E-18*5E14 = ~1E-3 ergs/(s*cm^2). 1 erg = 1E-7 Joule, so now we're at 1E-10 J/(s*cm^2) = 1E-10 W/cm^2. Sanity check before the final step: I guess this sounds kinda right. If cat toy laser pointers are around 1 mW (1E-3 W) and we're instructed to never shine them in peoples eyes (which are roughly a square centimeter), it makes sense that barely-discernible blinking lights in the sky should be around 10 million times less powerful. OK, best for last. Finally, we multiply by the cross-sectional area of the Earth... in square centimeters. Earth's radius is ~6000 km, = 6E8 cm, and pi*r^2 = ~1E18 cm^2. So those guys are rollin' with a 1E8 Watt laser. 100 million watts. Let's make it a "jiggawatt" (1E9 Watts) for funsies. According to gubbmint, you'd need about 400 windmills to power your laser. Only(?) 40 windmills for the 1E8 Watt laser. Problem is, you might want a lotta lasers. And the results for red and blue will be more or less similar, certainly well within an order of magnitude. If they built a truly dispersionless laser (not quite possible, but play along), and knew exactly where your eyeball would be at all times 4.3 years in the future, they could just use something as powerful as the toy laser, and it'd still damage your eye. Hey, what're you up to just after January 28th of 2024? Asking for a friend.... not only is it going to be a lot less work to take our atmosphere from 400ppm to 250, we're already here.
SETI & Drake Equation paragraph
Give me the energy requirements for a tightbeam visual signal from, say, Alpha Centauri B. I wanna be able to read morse code at night.
So, the final formula is: where: p - Pogson's ratio [] (dimensionless) m - magnitude [] (dimensionless) F - flux [J / (s * cm² * Hz)] c - speed of light [cm / s] λ - wavelength [cm] r - Earth's radius [cm] π - pi [] (dimensionless) Checking units: Power = [J / (s * cm² * Hz)] * [1 / s] * [cm²] Power = [J / (s * cm² * Hz)] * [Hz] * [cm²] Power = [J / s] * [(Hz * cm²) / (Hz * cm²)] Power = [J / s] = [W] No problems here. Using our values: p = 2.512 m = 4 F = 3.64E-27 [J / (cm² * Hz * s)] c = 3E10 [cm / s] λ = 5.5E-5 [cm] r = 6E8 [cm] pi = 3.14 we obtain: Power = 8.94E7 [W] So… pretty close and the difference comes down mainly to rounding. Other than that, under your assumptions, I see no problems with reasoning or method. Sorry for taking so long to respond, though. You need to double it, that's when Centaurs would get your message. Power = (p ^ m) * F * (c / λ) * π * r² Power = ([] ^ []) * [J / (s * cm² * Hz)] * [cm / s] * [1 / cm] * [] * [cm²] Power = (2.512 ^ 4) * 3.64E-27 * (3E10 / 5.5E-5) * 3.14 * (6E8)²Hey, what're you up to just after January 28th of 2024? Asking for a friend.
Thanks for the unicode formatting and generalization! I was in a hurry to get a quick response in. I'm happy to see we agree within about 10%, but if there's no calculus involved, is it even math at all?? :/
It's a good estimate of the lowermost power consumption, and you've done all the legwork. Kudos! Might be a base for fun Fermi problems or a reference point to some other interstellar communication discussions. Does it even need calculus? Beam dispersion would probably be some Gaussian bundle, dissipation is most likely adequately described as a sum of elements in form of whatnot_optical_coefficient * distance, error correction is a bunch of algebra, and involving any fancy astrophysics is just going to make us look desperate. Also, it's been a while since I had to use actual numbers to solve a problem. :Pbut if there's no calculus involved, is it even math at all?? :/
No no, I mean, when I do arithmetic or algebra only, it feels like I've cheated and made unrealistic assumptions. I'm almost inclined to go looking for an integral or something, but it's like you said, there's not a point, here. Maybe I am desperate! Us chump experimentalists use real numbers all the time. Come join us on the dark side, Devac :D. edit: But be careful out there! I've already written a satirical public service announcement skit that culminates with my pilot friend, wearing full captain's attire in the cockpit of the jets he flies, looking deadpan into the camera and saying, "Remember: If it's math, on a plane, it's a bomb."Does it even need calculus?
I just handed over my homework which concluded that the derivation of thermodynamic parameters in our model is A-OK because second derivatives are finite everywhere and third derivatives only tend to infinities when T = 0, which is, like, acceptable in critical systems under fluctuation/perturbation regime. We're all chumps, experimentalists just get swaggerific toys. Can't believe I forgot about that incident. Also, would love to see that PSA.when I do arithmetic or algebra only, it feels like I've cheated and made unrealistic assumptions.
Us chump experimentalists use real numbers all the time.
sigh NO, you say "damn, dude, are you seriously doing math for fun?" and then listen to what he says. The best conversations I've ever had have been interacting with people doing weird shit on planes. Last flight I saw someone writing up an inspection report on a '75 Targa and told him not to hate me because I drive a 996. I proceeded to have a 2-hour conversation with one of the world's foremost Porsche experts, a guy who gets paid by Larry Ellison to fly around buying Porsches for him, a guy who has bought and sold Porsches since he was sixteen years old, a guy who had so many stories about nameless rich people that I sat through four bourbons just goading him on. ALWAYS ask an expert about their expertise. You will learn shit you didn't even know you'd find interesting.
On the way back from Santa Fe, I sat next to a woman around my age, and I was working out some unit conversions in my notebook, pen and paper, just numbers and abbreviated units. She asks, "Looks like physics?", and I say, "Yeah! That's right, how'd you know?". And then she mentioned minoring in chemistry or something, but I forgot, because just a few exchanges later, we both went back to our own little worlds. Not even any awkwardness, just two people having some quality alone time on a plane. Which is about the most precious thing in the world after sharing a room to cut costs at a week-long conference.
Sorry Klein, bad joke about economics having basic logarithms and economic theory being a threat to national security. Of course I would at least ask. I've read enough of those papers to make me want to cry in my salad though. On the way back from Rwanda I actually met a dude who was pretty high up in the U.S. military. He served on peacekeeping missions in the Congo and stuff, and you bet he was opinionated on Trump. He knew a bunch of former colleagues that ended up promoted in the Department of State because they basically played the game. Shifted their plans in support of the new leader. It was an interesting perspective into how the inside of the government actually works and how the chain of command functions.
It's a much lower number than I expected, probably because in sci fi it's never a signalling laser, it's always a launch laser and that's a whole 'nuther animal. FUN FACT - disturbing portions of the historical record thinks Sirius was red. There are two real ways to resolve this: (1) presume that the historical record, as evidenced time and time again, is faulty (2) presume that the Sirians were pointing a launch/signalling laser at us for a few hundred years back in antiquity. (2) is a lot more fun and could be the impetus for a pretty fun sci fi conspiracy tale, or so I've heard. Or, if you're Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, you take the idea and throw it in the distant future at a completely different part of the galaxy so that your social commentary doesn't have to include people. 100MW is chump change. I've worked with powerplants that big. You can buy them on Alibaba. Which leads me to believe that divergence is more important than we're accounting for but I'm too lazy to do more than throw some numbers at an online calculator and watch it choke on the light years.
Do remember that we're discussing a case of illuminating Earth (and only Earth) with some dispersionless, cylinder-like, 100% efficient laser beam with perfect accuracy. Even then, with those idealisations, power scales with the square of the radius of the thing we want to illuminate. Accuracy is also fun: in our case, it's like pinpointing something roughly the size of a credit card on the surface of our Moon, but without the joys of 4.3 years worth of one-way delay or tracking a moving object. Also, I didn't say that divergence isn't significant. Just that it likely won't involve higher maths to find an approximation, which is semi-true. Had to do a double integral over a disk to get from intensity [W/m²] to power [W]. Here's how we can calculate the power delivered by a Gaussian beam, and it's ripe for plugging numbers in. I took the formulae and symbols from the article. There's also a calculation of how narrow the beam would have to be at its narrowest point, which turned out to be essentially zero (which I, perhaps mistakingly, interpreted as equivalent to a point source). Pinging am_Unition for peer review and help in moving it forward. It's not pretty, though. My initial intensity assumption goes asymptotically to infinity the narrower the beam, so there's possibly a problem/fuckup. I absolutely encourage everyone to play around with the numbers. Maybe it could work for other wavelengths?
Are you saying I just need 40 windmills to blind inhabitants of every close planet around? So now: How many windmill do I need to exterminate them? Asking for a friend After all, its a rational thing to do while I still have windmills and before they come with unknown intentions
That's the funniest sentence that I've read in a looooong time. But you're on a list now, ooli, you'll never be allowed into the Galactic Order. Bummer, dude. Correction: You'd need 40 windmills to get their attention by blinking out a message like a star turning on and off. OH, and I forgot to mention above, you'll need to position your laser a long, long way from the planet, because it's too close to the star for us to see anything but the star if it's anywhere near the planets. If "your friend" wanted to blind them, you'll need around, well, 400,000,000 windmills. How many do you have? How quickly does "your friend" need to exterminate said planet? "Your friend" could just cook them slowly with microwaves, and watch with enjoyment as their world grew hotter over several centuries (and you wouldn't even need to move far away from the star to do it). What I'm trying to say is that global warming is obviously not man-made, and we're gonna be in an alien stew. They'll time their arrival with when the meal's done. See now THIS is science.After all, its a rational thing to do while I still have windmills and before they come with unknown intentions
There is a 5 or so episode podcast series called “What is Life?” I recommend you check out. I will find a link and post it when I get home. It is geared toward folks like us who are interested in the sciences but are not scientists ourselves. Some of the answers that people give are quite entertaining and thought-provoking. I want to re-listen to it myself.
Here's my alien question, we're presuming they exist as 3D matter on another planet we can observe with the naked eye. It's unscientific to try and guess otherwise, but if a life form that could only experience 2D came across humans it's unlikely they'd be able to formulate anything close to an accurate hypothesis as to what's actually occurring. If the universe actually had more dimensions we'd never know, which is a ridiculous simulation argument but we do have examples of other life forms that lack the perceptual abilities we do.
The 2D reality encountering a 3D reality is often used for higher-dimensional analogies, but it doesn't have much physical meaning. However, it is true that if we could figure out how to access other dimensions, we'd be able to move through the universe like never before. Almost every single attempt at a grand unifying theory of physics invokes higher dimensions, and I think it's likely that they exist, but our simulation rules (or whatever) don't let us access them without a technology that may or may not even be possible. We won't know in our lifetimes :(. I'm agnostic on whether I think this is all a simulation or not. I'm also just agnostic, because it's kinda the same question. Thanks for the questions, everyone! I didn't have time to read Fox News today :).
It feels like it could work in the other direction too. This afternoon I was washing my hands in the sink when I caught out of the corner of my eye a house centipede trapped in it, trying to climb out, to run away from the water and the noise and the giant towering above it. It scurried and scurried and got nowhere, until I let it out by letting it crawl onto a paper towel and then resting said towel on the floor. If you were to ask me, I'd say watching try to run away was a response from fear. But then, does it feel fear the way I do? Does it feel fear at all? It's a creature that is both very simple yet still complex, familiar and foreign, and I don't understand it at all other than I knew it wanted out of the sink (but then again, does it feel want) and was probably relieved to be on the ground (but did it feel relieved). If a form of alien life is as different as me and that centipede, but humans are centipedes in that scenario, chances are they're still not gonna be able to comprehend us.
That's like when people like Hawking say other civilizations might try to destroy us. They might remove us just out not caring (think, Hitchhiker's Guide intergalactic highway) but when it comes down to compassion we're really talking about human values and our philosophy. What is a value system? But who knows? They might be receiving our radio signals right now and see it as nothing worth investigating. Either it appears as randomness to them or we're just too stupid.But then, does it feel fear the way I do? Does it feel fear at all?
Incidentally the earliest mention I'm aware of is Martyn Fogg's Interdict Hypothesis of 1987. I read it when it came out (8th grade!) and it seemed so obvious that I lost patience with pretty much any Mars Attacks!-type scenario. This was, of course, a year after V, in which aliens cross light years to steal our, you guessed it, water.I don't think life is that sparse, and if I were an advanced species that came across humans, I'd leave them alone on principle (please clap). No but if there were an ethical galactic order, I guarantee you that it'd afford some protections to us mudcrabs, currently reveling in our own filth and squalor, until we grow up as a species.
I'm saving sci-fi lit. for post-grad. I also have your red-pill reading list pinned. (before "red-pill" was incel'd, r.i.p. another good sci-fi reference)
Yes, (No? and yes.) We are because we have not found anyone else. Should we temper that with a yet? But even if we aren’t all there is, can we even know? With our current technology, we can just barely discern the existence of other worlds where other life might exist. We could be, essentially, looking “them” right in the face and not know it. There are so many possibilities. It could be that we are alone and always will be, or that we are simply one of the first, and all the other intelligent life is a lot like us, barely able to see out but wondering where everyone else is. Or perhaps we are late to the party and everyone else has gone into their boxes, or are hibernating and waiting for the universe to cool down so they can come out and play. Personally, I think that a lot of the folks who do a lot of the talking about this leave out two key factors that might make contact impossible: light speed as a limit and the accelerating expansion of the universe.Basically we are, aren't we?
It takes a Jacobin Mag to argue that a biopic about Neil Armstrong is science fiction. Or go on a tear about the meaninglessness of "autur-driven works set in space" and skip the fuck over Arrival. Look- science fiction has never been about alien species, not even vaguely. It's been about aboriginals. Star Trek puts headgear on humans and gives them entirely human emotions; the Hugo- and Nebula-winning shit out there puts headgear on human civilization and takes it all back to colonialism every.single.time. What's stupid is this is a think-piece about brooding, lonely sci fi that doesn't so much as name-check Solaris, one of the few books that actually deals with an alien so alien that we can't find common ground. And let's be honest. If you open with a title card saying "It is the near future, 'a time of hope and conflict,'" your critique isn't philosophy, your critique is sci fi.Ad Astra may be among the first films to explicitly place Clarke’s lonely cosmos possibility at its heart, but a raft of hard sci-fi films in the last few years, auteur-driven works set in space such as Duncan Jones’s Moon, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, Ridley Scott’s The Martian, and Damien Chazelle’s First Man,
Arrival grossed less than half of the other in the list. So the argument still hold: Sci fi now, mostly are without aliens Since I'm on F. Herbert. The "Whipping star" book is about weird alien : stars (sound like Solaris, but it's not). You might also enjoy reading his short stories with aliens Since I'm on Arrival, it's bit for bit taken from a short story from F.Herbert (beside the twist end). Remember the worst part of the movie? The army guy trying to blow the alien.... Yeah me neither. It's a weak plot. It's also weak in F.Herbert story. But it's proof, they ripped the original material without elevating it much
For the record: It's not that sci fi is without aliens. It's that most of sci fi these days is so absurd that you don't recognize it's sci fi. I remember the halcyon days when Star Wars was finally ending and maybe we'd get back to serious sci fi again. And granted: that space gave us Arrival, Passengers, Interstellar, etc. But it also gave us an endless sea of fuckin' superheroes. Sci fi now, mostly are without aliens
Casting a penny into this awesome thread: Despite being in the camp thinking there's life out there, I adore this quote.If it's only us... It casts us humans not merely as one sentient species among billions, but as the sole way in which the universe became aware of itself. It is the story of the universe becoming conscious through us.
I've loved reading all the comments on this, and the mathematical geekitude, but I had another thought about the idea of us being alone: What if the universe is just far more malicious to life than we thought? We are a tiny little solar system in one arm of one moderately-sized galaxy. And our little planet in our little solar system has already had at least one extinction-level event caused by an asteroid. Recently, as our sensors have gotten better, we have seen not one, but two different extra-solar objects entering our system (RAMA I and RAMA II, according to kleinbl00), and I guarantee you that the first objects didn't just happen to show up when we build sensors strong enough to detect them... they've been whistling through our airspace (erm... space-space?) since forever. What if there is just so much shit flying around and crashing into each other, that life only has the luxury of time to develop, out here in our distant suburbs; in areas that are protected in some way from the primary debris flying out of the chaotic center of our Universe? Sure, the math says that there SHOULD be a gajillion planets out there that are habitable for things we would recognize as "life". But the practicalities of having a habitable environment, undisturbed and stable for long enough to develop intelligent human-equitable life, is a vanishingly small occurrence? Think Seveneves but on a galactic scale, rather than a planetary one... Hmmm....
Before there was Seveneves there was Lucifer's Hammer and before there was Lucifer's Hammer there was Rendezvous with Rama and before there was Rendezvous with Rama there was When Worlds Collide and really if you go back to the dawn of astronomy it's always about "the universe is just far more malicious to life than we thought." It's kind of like the whole "what if AI is evil" trope - I mean, fuckoff with that shit the first use of artificial intelligence was in RUR which was not only the first book about robots, it was literally about a robot uprising. Your discussion is literally FsubC ("the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space") and L ("the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space") in the Drake Equation, the veracity of which is handled eloquently in this xkcd comic. It's not entirely fair to pick on the Drake Equation as being six stacked bullshit factors we cannot begin to approximate. At the time he wrote it, those bullshit factors were complete unknowns and the intervening decades have not done much to fill in the blanks. We've got an n of one here - exactly one inhabited planet capable of transmitting into the void. But if we look at that n's historical record: - Ordovician extinction, 439m years ago - Devonian extinction, 364m years ago - Permian extinction, 251m years ago - Triassic extinction, 200m years ago - K-T extinction, 61m years ago That's an average of one extinction-level event every 94 million years. That's fifteen times as long as it took us to go from "walking erect" to "arguing about the Drake equation on the Internet." Fuckin' the discovery of radio waves is new enough that we have footage of their discoverer: So. Presume that Earth is an outlier with radically infrequent bombardment. How radical? Lascaux is probably less than 20,000 years old. So. From cave paintings to 4chan in 20,000 years. Leave everything else the same - don't give anyone a faster metabolism, don't give anyone better or worse socialization, don't give anyone any advantage or disadvantage beyond what we're looking at, and that 20,000 year period happens 4700 times, on average, between every extinction. Is the center of the galaxy 4700 times more hostile than the limbs? I'd think we'd see astronomical evidence of that.
From cave paintings to 4chan in 20k years... that's an excellent way to look at it, and makes it easier to wrap your mind around the timelines it can take a civilization to get from milestone to milestone. It's hard to conceive of the times and distances we are talking about here. Having a practical timeframe to think of, at least gives you a handhold to grab on to, as you slide down the infinite mountain of numbers... And ooli makes a good point about intelligence. I know the Drake Equation has thought of that, but breaking it down into layman-understandable pieces is a valuable exercise for me.
On the other hand, Arthropods in 500m years never managed to create 4chan Dinosaur in their 40m years span didn't get a radio wave out Mammal in 200m years only managed to get some primate out, 100m years ago, any extinction event in that time frame, and Adios 4chan, Telescope, and bipedal walk Not only the step from life to multi-cellular life took 4 billions years (1/4 of the universe life). But even after that the progression to intelligence life was long: In all the species around in the past 500m years, intelligence is a fluke.. we're still waiting for its 2nd coming. And Dolphins are more dumb than they look
We're not alone. I am sure. Just see how amazing this world is. Look at little bit closer at the crawling bug, think about the power of the Earth, i.e. its core and surrounding layers, how powerful everything are. Look at the sky, sun,l forest and mountains. Finally look at the space, it is magical, endless, mysterious. We still can only guess who, why and how created this. Everything is bigger and deeper than it seems. I would suggest you to watch french movie "La Belle Verte (1996)" It's like a guide to the life out of the Earth.