10 ms·

We do know that under the laws of physics evolution of intelligent creatures is possible. We also know that against someone capable of coming here, we're defens

by avz 10y ago

We do know that under the laws of physics evolution of intelligent creatures is possible. We also know that against someone capable of coming here, we're defenseless, conveniently pinned to this beautiful, but small rock and with no way to escape. We also know that space is huge beyond imagination and that the law of large numbers means that after billions of years of unfamiliar evolution across the billions of unfamiliar worlds throughout Milky Way alone almost anything may conceivably come out of it. At times, I find it weirdly surprising that I don't actually experience fear every time I look up at the sky. Then again the lack of fear is easy to understand: a deadly encounter with an alien race happens only once, so evolution had no chance to tune our responses appropriately. This reminds me of dodo of Mauritius [1]. It is said that the birds were not fearful of humans (nor presumably of other abstract threats that could conceivably come from across the seas). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo

ianai 10y ago
I doubt if life is plentiful that our planet would be rare enough to burden with the distance.
ageofwant 10y ago
There is no reasonable reason why we should fear aliens. There is absolutely nothing present on earth that is not hyper abundant elsewhere and more conveniently harvested from a shallower gravity well. There is just nothing here that is special, especially special enough to travel many light years to get to. It is also hard to image why a species that have that capability would not be able to synthesize what they want from base materials.
- rebuilder 10y ago
  There's a line of thought that annihilation of one species is the only possible outcome from two spacefaring species meeting. This stems from the assumption that both are growth-seeking, which makes sense since they wouldn't be likely to meet without being expansionist. Seeking growth, they will need more and more resources. Direct competition inevitably ensues, leading to conflict and destruction either via warfare or economic means. That's all pretty theoretical, but just one example of why aliens might not be benign. I don't think it's reasonable to say we have nothing to fear.
  - ageofwant 10y ago
    Aliens arriving today must be technologically superior to humans by several orders of magnitude. If they are not they would exploit their local resources first before finding need to expand. So the changes of technologically equivalent aliens arriving today is negligible. The amount of material present in Jupiter is rather large. If a species arrives that is routinely capable of converting gas giants into habitats and is currently in pressing need for housing then yes, we may be bulldozed into extinction - there might be even some poetic justice in that. But why would the Developers choose Jupiter, why not some other system with many more Gas giants or currently coalescing clouds ? Resource based arguments don't hold much water for me, not at this scale anyway.
    - kiba 10y ago
      A dyson swarm does not require any new technology to develop, only the constant churning out of satellites. They do not need to be technologically superior to us. In any case, we would still be ants compared to them.
      - ageofwant 10y ago
        I dunno, a self-replicating swarm would by definition be technological superior to us, for the next few decades at least.
        kiba 10y ago
        You don't need a "self-replicating swarm" to build more satellites. You just need to pump out lot of satellites. There's nothing special about self-replicating "swarm", either.
        naasking 10y ago
        Automated self replication is pretty special. We don't have anything like that yet. All of our tech requires human intervention when it breaks down.
- manquer 10y ago
  genetic diversity may be not so common elsewhere and worth mining
  - ageofwant 10y ago
    Which would involve a few abductions and/or some probing...
  - SwellJoe 10y ago
    Wouldn't that be an argument that an alien race wouldn't annihilate us, rather than they would? I mean, what good is a dead planet for genetic diversity (and, I suspect that if enslavement were the goal, humans would resort to extreme lengths to try to prevent it, up to and including destruction of large swaths of our own planet)? But, I don't think enslavement or a human zoo is a very likely motivation for a species advanced enough to travel light years to get here.
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  well, unless aliens are looking for trainable slaves
  - ageofwant 10y ago
    He, beings capable of interstellar travel would have very little need for "slaves", I mean, even on mean old earth slaves only made sense until 1 coal joule was cheaper than 1 man joule. If you can travel over light years a joule is going to be extraordinarily cheap, or time is not relevant. Either way, very hard for me to see how human slaves would be of any use to them.
    - LoSboccacc 10y ago
      correct on all account but still you're applying a earthling stick to measure usefulness. maybe they need a creativity core for their warship ai.
      - arcticbull 10y ago
        Or pets! ^_^
      - wattt 10y ago
        Or snu snu
- wruza 10y ago
  Imagine that you are an alien. Relativity is strange thing, today you see small tribe with toy nuclear weapons, but then you turn your engines on, and tomorrow it is powerful intergalactic race. It is reasonable to take a cure before a disease makes it hard.
  - rangibaby 10y ago
    I've had exactly this experience in Civilization 2. Playing at the higher difficulties, the computer cheats and swaps any knowledge it learns to all other computer players. The computer players are all hostile 100% of the time (a feature of the version that I play), so will never help you in that or any other way. It was quite a surprise after wiping out the most advanced and powerful civilzation other than me (they had 19th century riflemen, I was several tiers ahead of them so had tanks, battleships, and modern artillery) to have the other civilizations "trade up" to the same level of technology as me and have nukes flying at my cities. The best way to stop computer civilizations from becoming a threat is to capture or raze all of their cities except for a single one, which you will keep as a pet. After all, you're not a monster.
- indexerror 10y ago
  There is something special here, which is the unique combination of biospheres and natural processes that enable life as we know it. Maybe aliens also have the same life form as us, and they are looking for similar habitats? Our search for such habitats so far has not been very successful, which shows that we are a indeed one of a kind in the known universe. The aliens who can visit us, however, are likely to possess technologies to terraform unsuitable planets. But maybe their technological development was not well rounded and space exploration was pursued way more than other form of technologies. Remember that we went to moon before we had smartphones. Just a simple analogy, but who knows?
  - ageofwant 10y ago
    Yea, reminds me of "The Road not taken" https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
- icantdrive55 10y ago
  What if they were like most of us, and when landed; decided we looked better on their alien plates? "Be--boop-be--boop--taste good, and so many of them. Let's call home? We now know what to serve at our hootenanny? I hope they don't give me methane?" Yes--they just happen to speak English, and Lost in Space Robot.
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  "There is no reasonable reason why we should fear aliens." If you'll allow me to strawman you a bit, I've always found such arguments facile at best. They seem to reason from something akin to this "As mankind has become more advanced, he has grown from being tribalistic and violent to understanding that fear itself is more dangerous than actual external threats" Yes, but we've never actually reached such nirvana except in our imaginations. Instead, history has shown us all sort of intelligent and evolved populations both being the perpetrators and victims of indiscriminate violence. In addition, looking at how humans develop and what we know of species in general on the planet, there's never any reason to be afraid of anything -- until there is. That's the problem with induction and not knowing enough about the greater universe. Things are always fine and dandy for the turkey until Thanksgiving comes. It's extremely problematic to speculate about alien beings. I note, however, that we tend to think in terms of aliens having some sort of policy towards humans: they want to eat us, they want to conquer us, and so on. Assuming we are just a few rungs up the evolutionary ladder from pond scum, it's much more likely that we're not important at all -- and that if there were some terrible interaction with aliens, it would probably be akin to a man accidentally kicking over an anthill on his way to work than some sort of dramatic invasion or intervention. The scariest thing about potential technologically superior alien beings isn't that they are hostile. It's that they're completely apathetic and have better things to do. Which takes care of Fermi's Paradox quite nicely.
  - internaut 10y ago
    > That's the problem with induction and not knowing enough about the greater universe. Things are always fine and dandy for the turkey until Thanksgiving comes. This is why the spectre of dead civilizations like Rome haunt us to this day.
  - EthanHeilman 10y ago
    It seems plausible, i.e. not impossible with our current understanding of physics, that humans that could accelerate small quantities of mass to significant fractions of the speed of light (0.01-0.4c) thereby building relativistic missiles which could be launched at known planetary bodies in other star systems. The potential that humans may create and use relativistic missiles combined with the philosophy of safety first suggests that humans might be treated more like fire ants or brown recluse spiders: 1. if you see them you call pest control so they don't sting you when you aren't paying attention, 2. to get rid of the ones you can't find you leave some poison traps out, 3. and you make sure to vacuum regularly ("do you want ants this is how we get ants").
- IvyMike 10y ago
  "Have you heard the good news about our lord and savior K'Xthkapatykak?"
  - brightsize 10y ago
    Good Dobbs, who hasn't? You can't turn on the TV without seeing K'Xthkapatykak sitting in some comfortably-furnished studio begging/shaming me to call in with my credit card number to set up a recurring donation. And then there are its minions forever banging on my door (often with a sweet- but miserable-looking tadpole in tow) seeking to waste five minutes of my time reading the Tgprglna tablets with them and of course soliciting me to attend, credit card in hand, their next coven. They've got time travel, intergalactic hyperloops, immortality, FRB franchises across the universe, monthly credit-flow in the 8 digits (at least), and who does the IRS think should be tax-exempt, them or me?
- platz 10y ago
  > There is just nothing here that is special Except Us. How do you know so much about alien psychology? Trying reason about what motivates aliens, their desires, or how they think, is an error in anthropomorphization.
stephengillie 10y ago
Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. -Arthur C. Clarke
- diminish 10y ago
  "among all explanations to a weird new observation, the least interesting one is true." What if "we" are both alone and not alone. We are part of some universal life form whose elements prefer to be disconnected from the others for some periods.
- ozgung 10y ago
  Maybe the most plausible third options is that we are theoretically not alone in the universe and complex life is abundant, but the universe is so big that there are no way we can contact with any of the intelligent life forms. We're just underestimating the size of the universe. It's like living on a Pacific island 5000 years ago. There are definitely other people in the world but there is no way you can contact them.
  - nine_k 10y ago
    How did the settlers get to that island then?
    - chongli 10y ago
      Boats, obviously. But the settlers themselves were dead. Their descendants may have had oral traditions about how their ancestors reached the island but I don't think we have any evidence that they constituted a seafaring civilization. Those weren't really possible until the invention of reliable navigational instruments such as the compass.
      - nine_k 10y ago
        The first settlers got there by a boat thrown off-course by a hurricane, the the seafaring skill was lost, so communication became impossible. Fair enough.
weinzierl 10y ago
"The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken." -- Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
- wruza 10y ago
  My english is usually ok, but now I feel like it was when I tried to read native Sheakspeare. Can someone please rephrase that?
  - credit_guy 10y ago
    One man feeds a chicken daily and then kills it (wrigs its neck). From the daily feedings, the chicken learns that the man is not an enemy (he acquires a view that the nature is uniform, and friendly). Considering that the man eventually does kill the bird, that view was incorrect, so it should be refined.
  - strudey 10y ago
    The chicken assumes that the human will always care for it. Nature has not equipped it to deal with an intelligent predator.
- nobrains 10y ago
  The shooter and the farmer (Reference: The Three Body Problem)
logicallee 10y ago
If as many monkeys wrote randomly on as many keyboards as there are atoms in every moon, planet, and star in every solar system in every galaxy in the Universe and they did so for a hundred billion lifetimes of our universe, not one would so much as type approximately half of your first paragraph. So yes, under the laws of physics evolution and the eventual writings of avc (you) are possible, yet even a tiny sample, just half a paragraph, is unique in the history of this world and untold billions of possible other ones. While a hundred billion galaxies with a hundred billion stars might seem "infinite" - it's not so large at all. We can very easily be totally unique. Actually infinite monkeys typing truly randomly would bang out your whole comment (not just your first paragraph) within a few minutes. Never confuse a few hundred billion times a few hundred billion with the former. :)
scandox 10y ago
Whatever the truth it's going to be humbling - if not actually humiliating.
chakalakasp 10y ago
Worrying about an alien civilization coming to visit and take everything is like a moss cell sitting on a rock in the Himalayas fretting that in the next few days an exotic bacteria nestled in a thermal vent in the Mariana Trench is going to show up and stake a claim. It's actually significantly less probable than that by many orders of magnitude but it's hard for humans to grasp just how isolated everything in the universe is from everything else.
- chrischen 10y ago
  Well if the moss has the ability to travel from the Trench to the Himalayas then that moss if pretty capable and might be turning over rocks looking for gold or oil.
- greggman 10y ago
  I thought the Fermi Paradox suggested otherwise. Well, it suggests if life is common then some other civilization should have easily covered then entire milky way in slow self replicating drones long ago. That fact that we dont find drones suggests one of only a few things * life is rare * we're first * they all kill themselves before they get the drones built
  - krapp 10y ago
    >That fact that we dont find drones suggests one of only a few things Or, that there is something fundamentally flawed with the concept of self-replicating drones covering the entire galaxy that would make it infeasible in practice, despite it seeming perfectly rational on paper.
    - gurneyHaleck 10y ago
      Yeah, I really don't buy that premise at all. Just because some individual likes the idea of drones, doesn't make them implicitly virtuous. The decision to use resources to pollute the wilderness with arbitrary technology is a leadership decision, relying on the personality characteristics of an entity or social chain of command. This business about "drones" is an anachronistic paraphrasing of the original concept. People didn't speak in terms of the "drone" fad in the 20th century, like we do now. Drones were usually just target practice for the Air Force and Navy. The original concept just specified range of influence, and a demonstration of presence. It did not impose a manner of activity, be it drone replication or direct colonization with regimented staff, and divisions of duty among personel. [0] The Fermi paradox remained agnostic, simply implying possible speed of travel given geological time scales. Carl Sagan's Cosmos mentioned unmanned satellites (or unaliened? unoccupied...) as the most likely hypothetical form of first contact. Before we bump into any living thing, will probably notice a few remote control devices fanned out in front of their main corpus of civilization or colonization. That TV show also hypothesized about the possibility of dying civilizations leaving behind self-perpetuating remnants of technology, the likes of which might or might not be sentient. All of it was TV speculation though, not presented as surely factual. If you read between the lines, the premise of a "dying" civilization hints at the lack of self control present in a runaway factory neglected and left to churn out garbage. That idea does not assume that a collective of entities would always wish to tamper with and contaminate their surrounding domain presumptiously. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
ImTalking 10y ago
I don't worry about those things. I feel that any civilisation that has the capability for interstellar travel would have long since understood the laws of the universe and would have evolved past the need for a deteriorating, inefficient physical form. Think of the movie 'Lucy'. That's why I think there are no super-intelligent species out there, because either they blow themselves up due to petty issues like racism, nationalism, etc. or they have evolved past the need for physical form and basically just disappear off the face of the universe.
Pocketsnakes 10y ago
>We do know that under the laws of physics evolution of intelligent creatures is possible. That is false. We do not know how life is created and we have never replicated it. You're doing scientism.

by avz 10y ago

ianai 10y ago

I doubt if life is plentiful that our planet would be rare enough to burden with the distance.

ageofwant 10y ago

There is no reasonable reason why we should fear aliens. There is absolutely nothing present on earth that is not hyper abundant elsewhere and more conveniently harvested from a shallower gravity well. There is just nothing here that is special, especially special enough to travel many light years to get to. It is also hard to image why a species that have that capability would not be able to synthesize what they want from base materials.

rebuilder 10y ago
There's a line of thought that annihilation of one species is the only possible outcome from two spacefaring species meeting. This stems from the assumption that both are growth-seeking, which makes sense since they wouldn't be likely to meet without being expansionist. Seeking growth, they will need more and more resources. Direct competition inevitably ensues, leading to conflict and destruction either via warfare or economic means. That's all pretty theoretical, but just one example of why aliens might not be benign. I don't think it's reasonable to say we have nothing to fear.
- ageofwant 10y ago
  Aliens arriving today must be technologically superior to humans by several orders of magnitude. If they are not they would exploit their local resources first before finding need to expand. So the changes of technologically equivalent aliens arriving today is negligible. The amount of material present in Jupiter is rather large. If a species arrives that is routinely capable of converting gas giants into habitats and is currently in pressing need for housing then yes, we may be bulldozed into extinction - there might be even some poetic justice in that. But why would the Developers choose Jupiter, why not some other system with many more Gas giants or currently coalescing clouds ? Resource based arguments don't hold much water for me, not at this scale anyway.
  - kiba 10y ago
    A dyson swarm does not require any new technology to develop, only the constant churning out of satellites. They do not need to be technologically superior to us. In any case, we would still be ants compared to them.
    - ageofwant 10y ago
      I dunno, a self-replicating swarm would by definition be technological superior to us, for the next few decades at least.
      - kiba 10y ago
        You don't need a "self-replicating swarm" to build more satellites. You just need to pump out lot of satellites. There's nothing special about self-replicating "swarm", either.
        naasking 10y ago
        Automated self replication is pretty special. We don't have anything like that yet. All of our tech requires human intervention when it breaks down.
manquer 10y ago
genetic diversity may be not so common elsewhere and worth mining
- ageofwant 10y ago
  Which would involve a few abductions and/or some probing...
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  Wouldn't that be an argument that an alien race wouldn't annihilate us, rather than they would? I mean, what good is a dead planet for genetic diversity (and, I suspect that if enslavement were the goal, humans would resort to extreme lengths to try to prevent it, up to and including destruction of large swaths of our own planet)? But, I don't think enslavement or a human zoo is a very likely motivation for a species advanced enough to travel light years to get here.
LoSboccacc 10y ago
well, unless aliens are looking for trainable slaves
- ageofwant 10y ago
  He, beings capable of interstellar travel would have very little need for "slaves", I mean, even on mean old earth slaves only made sense until 1 coal joule was cheaper than 1 man joule. If you can travel over light years a joule is going to be extraordinarily cheap, or time is not relevant. Either way, very hard for me to see how human slaves would be of any use to them.
  - LoSboccacc 10y ago
    correct on all account but still you're applying a earthling stick to measure usefulness. maybe they need a creativity core for their warship ai.
    - arcticbull 10y ago
      Or pets! ^_^
    - wattt 10y ago
      Or snu snu
wruza 10y ago
Imagine that you are an alien. Relativity is strange thing, today you see small tribe with toy nuclear weapons, but then you turn your engines on, and tomorrow it is powerful intergalactic race. It is reasonable to take a cure before a disease makes it hard.
- rangibaby 10y ago
  I've had exactly this experience in Civilization 2. Playing at the higher difficulties, the computer cheats and swaps any knowledge it learns to all other computer players. The computer players are all hostile 100% of the time (a feature of the version that I play), so will never help you in that or any other way. It was quite a surprise after wiping out the most advanced and powerful civilzation other than me (they had 19th century riflemen, I was several tiers ahead of them so had tanks, battleships, and modern artillery) to have the other civilizations "trade up" to the same level of technology as me and have nukes flying at my cities. The best way to stop computer civilizations from becoming a threat is to capture or raze all of their cities except for a single one, which you will keep as a pet. After all, you're not a monster.
indexerror 10y ago
There is something special here, which is the unique combination of biospheres and natural processes that enable life as we know it. Maybe aliens also have the same life form as us, and they are looking for similar habitats? Our search for such habitats so far has not been very successful, which shows that we are a indeed one of a kind in the known universe. The aliens who can visit us, however, are likely to possess technologies to terraform unsuitable planets. But maybe their technological development was not well rounded and space exploration was pursued way more than other form of technologies. Remember that we went to moon before we had smartphones. Just a simple analogy, but who knows?
- ageofwant 10y ago
  Yea, reminds me of "The Road not taken" https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
icantdrive55 10y ago
What if they were like most of us, and when landed; decided we looked better on their alien plates? "Be--boop-be--boop--taste good, and so many of them. Let's call home? We now know what to serve at our hootenanny? I hope they don't give me methane?" Yes--they just happen to speak English, and Lost in Space Robot.
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
"There is no reasonable reason why we should fear aliens." If you'll allow me to strawman you a bit, I've always found such arguments facile at best. They seem to reason from something akin to this "As mankind has become more advanced, he has grown from being tribalistic and violent to understanding that fear itself is more dangerous than actual external threats" Yes, but we've never actually reached such nirvana except in our imaginations. Instead, history has shown us all sort of intelligent and evolved populations both being the perpetrators and victims of indiscriminate violence. In addition, looking at how humans develop and what we know of species in general on the planet, there's never any reason to be afraid of anything -- until there is. That's the problem with induction and not knowing enough about the greater universe. Things are always fine and dandy for the turkey until Thanksgiving comes. It's extremely problematic to speculate about alien beings. I note, however, that we tend to think in terms of aliens having some sort of policy towards humans: they want to eat us, they want to conquer us, and so on. Assuming we are just a few rungs up the evolutionary ladder from pond scum, it's much more likely that we're not important at all -- and that if there were some terrible interaction with aliens, it would probably be akin to a man accidentally kicking over an anthill on his way to work than some sort of dramatic invasion or intervention. The scariest thing about potential technologically superior alien beings isn't that they are hostile. It's that they're completely apathetic and have better things to do. Which takes care of Fermi's Paradox quite nicely.
- internaut 10y ago
  > That's the problem with induction and not knowing enough about the greater universe. Things are always fine and dandy for the turkey until Thanksgiving comes. This is why the spectre of dead civilizations like Rome haunt us to this day.
- EthanHeilman 10y ago
  It seems plausible, i.e. not impossible with our current understanding of physics, that humans that could accelerate small quantities of mass to significant fractions of the speed of light (0.01-0.4c) thereby building relativistic missiles which could be launched at known planetary bodies in other star systems. The potential that humans may create and use relativistic missiles combined with the philosophy of safety first suggests that humans might be treated more like fire ants or brown recluse spiders: 1. if you see them you call pest control so they don't sting you when you aren't paying attention, 2. to get rid of the ones you can't find you leave some poison traps out, 3. and you make sure to vacuum regularly ("do you want ants this is how we get ants").
IvyMike 10y ago
"Have you heard the good news about our lord and savior K'Xthkapatykak?"
- brightsize 10y ago
  Good Dobbs, who hasn't? You can't turn on the TV without seeing K'Xthkapatykak sitting in some comfortably-furnished studio begging/shaming me to call in with my credit card number to set up a recurring donation. And then there are its minions forever banging on my door (often with a sweet- but miserable-looking tadpole in tow) seeking to waste five minutes of my time reading the Tgprglna tablets with them and of course soliciting me to attend, credit card in hand, their next coven. They've got time travel, intergalactic hyperloops, immortality, FRB franchises across the universe, monthly credit-flow in the 8 digits (at least), and who does the IRS think should be tax-exempt, them or me?
platz 10y ago
> There is just nothing here that is special Except Us. How do you know so much about alien psychology? Trying reason about what motivates aliens, their desires, or how they think, is an error in anthropomorphization.

stephengillie 10y ago

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. -Arthur C. Clarke

diminish 10y ago
"among all explanations to a weird new observation, the least interesting one is true." What if "we" are both alone and not alone. We are part of some universal life form whose elements prefer to be disconnected from the others for some periods.
ozgung 10y ago
Maybe the most plausible third options is that we are theoretically not alone in the universe and complex life is abundant, but the universe is so big that there are no way we can contact with any of the intelligent life forms. We're just underestimating the size of the universe. It's like living on a Pacific island 5000 years ago. There are definitely other people in the world but there is no way you can contact them.
- nine_k 10y ago
  How did the settlers get to that island then?
  - chongli 10y ago
    Boats, obviously. But the settlers themselves were dead. Their descendants may have had oral traditions about how their ancestors reached the island but I don't think we have any evidence that they constituted a seafaring civilization. Those weren't really possible until the invention of reliable navigational instruments such as the compass.
    - nine_k 10y ago
      The first settlers got there by a boat thrown off-course by a hurricane, the the seafaring skill was lost, so communication became impossible. Fair enough.

weinzierl 10y ago

"The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken." -- Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

wruza 10y ago
My english is usually ok, but now I feel like it was when I tried to read native Sheakspeare. Can someone please rephrase that?
- credit_guy 10y ago
  One man feeds a chicken daily and then kills it (wrigs its neck). From the daily feedings, the chicken learns that the man is not an enemy (he acquires a view that the nature is uniform, and friendly). Considering that the man eventually does kill the bird, that view was incorrect, so it should be refined.
- strudey 10y ago
  The chicken assumes that the human will always care for it. Nature has not equipped it to deal with an intelligent predator.
nobrains 10y ago
The shooter and the farmer (Reference: The Three Body Problem)

logicallee 10y ago

If as many monkeys wrote randomly on as many keyboards as there are atoms in every moon, planet, and star in every solar system in every galaxy in the Universe and they did so for a hundred billion lifetimes of our universe, not one would so much as type approximately half of your first paragraph. So yes, under the laws of physics evolution and the eventual writings of avc (you) are possible, yet even a tiny sample, just half a paragraph, is unique in the history of this world and untold billions of possible other ones. While a hundred billion galaxies with a hundred billion stars might seem "infinite" - it's not so large at all. We can very easily be totally unique. Actually infinite monkeys typing truly randomly would bang out your whole comment (not just your first paragraph) within a few minutes. Never confuse a few hundred billion times a few hundred billion with the former. :)

scandox 10y ago

Whatever the truth it's going to be humbling - if not actually humiliating.

chakalakasp 10y ago

Worrying about an alien civilization coming to visit and take everything is like a moss cell sitting on a rock in the Himalayas fretting that in the next few days an exotic bacteria nestled in a thermal vent in the Mariana Trench is going to show up and stake a claim. It's actually significantly less probable than that by many orders of magnitude but it's hard for humans to grasp just how isolated everything in the universe is from everything else.

chrischen 10y ago
Well if the moss has the ability to travel from the Trench to the Himalayas then that moss if pretty capable and might be turning over rocks looking for gold or oil.
greggman 10y ago
I thought the Fermi Paradox suggested otherwise. Well, it suggests if life is common then some other civilization should have easily covered then entire milky way in slow self replicating drones long ago. That fact that we dont find drones suggests one of only a few things * life is rare * we're first * they all kill themselves before they get the drones built
- krapp 10y ago
  >That fact that we dont find drones suggests one of only a few things Or, that there is something fundamentally flawed with the concept of self-replicating drones covering the entire galaxy that would make it infeasible in practice, despite it seeming perfectly rational on paper.
  - gurneyHaleck 10y ago
    Yeah, I really don't buy that premise at all. Just because some individual likes the idea of drones, doesn't make them implicitly virtuous. The decision to use resources to pollute the wilderness with arbitrary technology is a leadership decision, relying on the personality characteristics of an entity or social chain of command. This business about "drones" is an anachronistic paraphrasing of the original concept. People didn't speak in terms of the "drone" fad in the 20th century, like we do now. Drones were usually just target practice for the Air Force and Navy. The original concept just specified range of influence, and a demonstration of presence. It did not impose a manner of activity, be it drone replication or direct colonization with regimented staff, and divisions of duty among personel. [0] The Fermi paradox remained agnostic, simply implying possible speed of travel given geological time scales. Carl Sagan's Cosmos mentioned unmanned satellites (or unaliened? unoccupied...) as the most likely hypothetical form of first contact. Before we bump into any living thing, will probably notice a few remote control devices fanned out in front of their main corpus of civilization or colonization. That TV show also hypothesized about the possibility of dying civilizations leaving behind self-perpetuating remnants of technology, the likes of which might or might not be sentient. All of it was TV speculation though, not presented as surely factual. If you read between the lines, the premise of a "dying" civilization hints at the lack of self control present in a runaway factory neglected and left to churn out garbage. That idea does not assume that a collective of entities would always wish to tamper with and contaminate their surrounding domain presumptiously. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

ImTalking 10y ago

I don't worry about those things. I feel that any civilisation that has the capability for interstellar travel would have long since understood the laws of the universe and would have evolved past the need for a deteriorating, inefficient physical form. Think of the movie 'Lucy'. That's why I think there are no super-intelligent species out there, because either they blow themselves up due to petty issues like racism, nationalism, etc. or they have evolved past the need for physical form and basically just disappear off the face of the universe.

Pocketsnakes 10y ago

>We do know that under the laws of physics evolution of intelligent creatures is possible. That is false. We do not know how life is created and we have never replicated it. You're doing scientism.