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China's Race to Find Aliens First
- mceoin 9y agoNothing good will come of this. Stay dark in the forest.
- humanfromearth 9y agoLet's hope they don't use the Sun as an amplifier.
- shaunlgs 9y agoI get that reference.
- NeoBasilisk 9y agoIsn't it primarily for receiving signals rather than sending them? Of course if we ever do receive a convincing signal that appears to come from extraterrestrials, it is nearly unthinkable that no one would send anything back in that direction, so I see your point.
- delecti 9y agoI suspect that any theoretical aliens which would have hostile intentions towards us and could get here to inflict them is going to be able to find us even if we don't go out of our way to make our presence known.
- okonomiyaki3000 9y agoWhy would any aliens have any intentions toward us? Why should they care at all? The only resources we have on earth that aren't more easily acquired in space are sitcoms and reality shows.
- celticninja 9y agoPopulations expand exponentially. To keep growing the population will eventually need resources in space. This leads to more exponential growth and then we are competing for the same space resources as the aliens in a few centuries time. If the aliens sent a medium sized asteroid to impact earth now they would hinder our progress significantly, allowing them the opportunity to get the resources first.
- dheera 9y agoWe aren't anywhere near anything resembling competition for space resources. If we could harness all the resources available around the solar system and beyond, we wouldn't have an energy crisis at all. The problem is actually getting those resources transported. If an alien had means to mine and transport resources, they'd probably have found plenty of other richer resources besides Earth.
- danbruc 9y agoPopulations can not grow exponentially for a long time, the volume of space you can colonize only grows with the third power of time given that you are limited to the speed of light. And within galaxies it's more like the second power due to the flat shape of galaxies. With our current rate of population growth, I think about one or two percent per year if I remember correctly, we would only make it a few percent across the Milkyway before running out of resources even if we could travel at the speed of light. You can search my comment history, there is somewhere a more detailed comment with all the numbers and assumptions. Bottom line is, if you want to colonialize the universe, you either need a population growth rate very close to zero and a lot of patience or you have to beat Einstein. EDIT: Here [1] is the mentioned comment. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13638012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13638012
- njarboe 9y agoOr growth and then collapses all over the place. If humans colonize the galaxy (universe is really hard), it will likely look like a growing amoeba than an expanding sphere.
- tialaramex 9y agoMore seriously, although those stories are a lot of fun, (and also check out his short stories which I felt are better): It is very unlikely that there is anything out there that is capable of actually coming here, for the same reason it's very unlikely we can ever leave the solar system. A radio "conversation" over many generations - if that's even possible - would be the high point of our civilisation.
- dmix 9y agoIs there any literature that digs deeply into this subject? Ideally by someone far smarter than the average smart person? I've been meaning to read up on this subject...
- sfifs 9y agoWell the original post refers to the Three Body Problem series which is a rather interesting take on the topic. The English translations have now been available for a couple of years.
- blacksmith_tb 9y agoAgreed, unless we haven't gotten a hold of all the physics necessary for trips on that scale. That said, I do think it's overly pessimistic to think that aliens would mistreat us as a matter of course - obviously we've done a lot of that to each other in the past, but I'd like to think that most modern societies (say, Norway, to pick a random example) wouldn't just casually enslave and kill a new tribe. We're at a point in our history where even the idea of colonizing is anathema (not that there isn't plenty of fallout from before that was true...). So I don't have a hard time imagining a species that's thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years ahead of us would have a very different take on interacting with other sentient beings (assuming we make that cut for them).
- Gustomaximus 9y agoTo add to that point, most colonisation has been about resource capture.If you have technology for inter galactic travel I imagine resource access of the universe becomes abundant. But who knows, maybe we make good pets.
- okonomiyaki3000 9y agoNothing at all will come of this. There is practically zero chance of ever detecting a signal from the one or two other intelligent species that might be in our galaxy. But your comment sounds like you are concerned about broadcasting. The chinese (like SETI) are just listening. Of course, we're all broadcasting all the time but, so what? What do we have to fear from being heard?
- QAPereo 9y agoHis comment is referencing an excellent trilogy by Cixin Liu, although it’s true that also related to broadcasting. Massive spoilers of the second and first books: https://books.google.com/books?id=ThKrDgAAQBAJ&pg=PT163&lpg=PT163&dq=dark+forest+stealthy+hunters+chains+of+suspicion&source=bl&ots=f6FBoljCfM&sig=SBjv7oc-J7Uigvwr6eHkqdnwDBE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjYqd2PmbDXAhXJqFQKHb6jCbgQ6AEIJjAA https://books.google.com/books?id=ThKrDgAAQBAJ&pg=PT163&lpg=... https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/18127/dark-forest-postulate-used-to-explain-the-fermi-paradox https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/18127/dark-fo...
- amasad 9y ago> There is practically zero chance of ever detecting a signal from the one or two other intelligent species that might be in our galaxy. What are you basing this on? I'd like to see your Drake equation variables.
- afsina 9y agoHow about chances that there is another intelligent being in another planet is 10^-1000 ?
- narrator 9y agoWhat if we're the North Sentinel Island ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island ) of the universe? The universe is a really really big place and there are probably plenty of habitable planets, especially with terraforming. We're probably just a little remote violent oddity. The most interesting thing about the earth is probably our DNA. They can get that easily without destroying us.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoNorth Senetinel Island is a anachronism. Much more likely to happen is Hispaniola. From De Casas: Destruction of the Indies The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty, as is premention'd, like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv'd, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher'd and harass'd with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard (of which you shall have some account in the following Discourse) that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred. Nay the Isle of Cuba, which extends as far, as Valledolid in Spain is distant from Rome, lies now uncultivated, like a Desert, and intomb'd in its own Ruins. You may also find the Isles of St. John, and Jamaica, both large and fruitful places, unpeopled and desolate. The Lucayan Islands on the North Side, adjacent to Hispaniola and Cuba, which are Sixty in number, or thereabout, together with with those, vulgarly known by the name of the Gigantic Isles, and others, the most infertile whereof, exceeds the Royal Garden of Sevil in fruitfulness, a most Healthful and pleasant Climat, is now laid waste and uninhabited; and whereas, when the Spaniards first arriv'd here, about Five Hundred Thousand Men dwelt in it, they are now cut off, some by slaughter, and others ravished away by Force and Violence, to work in the Mines of Hispanioloa, which was destitute of Native Inhabitants Whenever "explorers" from distant parts have "discovered" new areas, throughout history the indigenous peoples get badly screwed over. See the history of post-Columbus native Americans. Look at India and China to see what even very advanced civilizations with large populations still get screwed by the invaders.
- rgbrenner 9y ago
- kranner 9y agoPresumably they haven't found a way to use the Sun as an amplifier yet.
- Firebrand 9y agoToo late for that. Humanity has been broadcasting radio waves into deep space for more than a hundred years now, since the days of Marconi.
- mratzloff 9y agoNo, we haven't been. Of the signals that escape the ionosphere, all are indistinguishable from background noise by the time they reach Alpha Centauri. We're only really broadcasting within the solar system and a little beyond. Even if we had been broadcasting a very strong signal from the first radio experiment in all directions into space, that would still be less than 0.1% of the galaxy. We're fine. Aliens aren't watching The Honeymooners.
- sidcool 9y agoI think if the earth were to get destroyed (which is becoming more and more likely), an alien invasion would be the best way to get there.
- melling 9y agoThis caught my eye: “China poured more concrete from 2011 to 2013 than America did during the entire 20th century.“ China appears to not be slowing down.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoConcrete is not what most buildings are constructed out of in the USA. Steel at the tall end, wood at the shorter end, some brick here and there, whereas china is concrete for the vast majority of buildings. This is like saying Chinese ate more chicken feet in 2016 than Americans did over the last 100 years.
- retailbuyout 9y agoIt’s not clear what you’re saying. Are you implying that the chinese don’t build with anything but concrete? That’s still an absolutely ridiculous amount of concrete to pour. Or, it’s not actually clear if you disagree with the thesis so much as the argument.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoYes, to the dead reply to my answer. Chinese build mostly with concrete unless the building is over around 30 stories tall, then they have to use steel of course. The reason they use so much concrete is that it’s cheap, and they can use lots of unskilled migrant labor. Remember, china builds as much to keep poor farmers employed as much as it does to actually create the structure. The drawback to this approach is that overbuilding is required and the structure become decrepit more quickly. The USA uses less concrete for opposite reasons: wood is plentiful, skilled workers to build with steel are also plentiful, and anyways, you can’t import cheap Chinese or Indian workers to build in concrete like the Middle East and Singapore does.
- DrScump 9y agoGiven that the USA figure should include major concrete structures like Hoover Dam, it's still kind of stunning.
- dghughes 9y ago
- adamredwoods 9y agoIf extra-terrestrial being are using communications technology we haven't reached yet, which I feel is the case for faster-than-light communications, then we have a long time to go yet.
- techwraith 9y agoHaven't they read The Three-Body Problem?
- rudilee 9y agoThat's exactly where their inspiration came from, they even invited Liu Cixin to visit the facility.
- mattmanser 9y agoIt's extensively discussed in the article.
- sushisource 9y agoWow. A fantastically written article. I have a hard time buying the pessimism that intergalactic contact is doomed to end in conflict, but it's not like anyone really knows. Now, the bit about chaos on earth if we do find others... Yeah, that's scary.
- microcolonel 9y agoYeah, seems like it would be all too much work to have a conflict with an alien species. I mean, why even bother? We're probably pretty early to the civilization party anyway.
- sgk284 9y agoI agree that the pessimism is disheartening, but looking at the limited data we have, is there any evidence of an intelligent species (e.g. humans) discovering the presence of another intelligent species (e.g. humans) without conflict soon thereafter? Not a fan of extrapolating from single data points, but it's the best we've got for now.
- malux85 9y agoI think it will likely go beyond that. If aliens are hyper intelligent they probably go well beyond sentience to something else and may not even consider us “conscious” (or whatever they have) Then think about how we human treat much lower life forms. For example, a plant. We have no ethical issue mowing down a paddock of plants because we don’t see them as equal life forms. We have mostly no ethical issue of killing millions of cattle/sheep for mostly the same reasons. When there’s a large intelligence differential, the smarter one might not even try and communicate
- MarkPNeyer 9y agoWhich humans? And which other life forms? Plenty of humans treat animals with respect. I see people like spiritual leaders as being far more conscious than political leaders or sociopath CEO’s. I don’t think this increased ethics is some weird quirk of spiritual leaders, but rather a deep feature of true intelligence. It would take a lot of energy and computional capacity to make it all the way across deep space. I don’t see how a species could do that if it were fighting itself at home. If it’s not fighting itself at home, why? Dictatorships are unstable because there’s always someone else who wants to be on top. The only way I can imagine a stable societ with that much reach is if the society contains individual members who care ahout each other. A house divided against itself will not stand, and a social network at war with itself can never reach the stars. If you imagine how different humanity would have to be for us to get out that far, we’d have to all be concerned with the welfare of all humans. Once empathy reaches critical mass, the bodhisattva vow becomes an obviously correct moral imperative. I think of it like a schelling point for sufficiently introspective intelligent minds. Once you’ve expanded empathy to all humans, you can’t stop there. He only way to truly care about all humans - in all their myriad forms and oddities - is to care about all beings.
- justinzollars 9y agoI'm enjoying the Atlantic more and more
- dEnigma 9y agoStory aside, that's some very unlucky/lacking contrast between the main title and the title background image.
- azernik 9y agoThis article is a bit unfair to the dark-forest conception of interstellar life. The axiom that Liu put forward was not about some inherently expansionist nature of intelligent life, but about the difficulty of communication and understanding. It takes two round-trips to communicate, but a small multiple of one for a species that can launch an attack that moves at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. And such attacks may be fast enough, or hard enough to detect, that second-strike capability is impossible. In his books he explicitly compares this to the prisoner's dilemma - maybe you yourself don't want to expand beyond your own star system, but as soon as you know another species exists, you know that if they are hostile and do find you, they will destroy you before you know there's any threat. And so you are incentivized to attack when the other civilization has not yet been alerted to your presence.
- SideburnsOfDoom 9y agoThe article says > it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival. How about > it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of another. The hunters are strangers who do not trust each other (or even have a language in common), so can respond with long dangerous negotiations to establish good intent, or with a swift bullet. Everyone knows this, and acts accordingly. The stable state is pre-emptive strikes, zero trust, maximum hostility.
- FranOntanaya 9y agoThis is a very "me vs them" individual bias vision. It assumes every individual civilization can take another with a "single" obliterating bullet like some street gang conflict. In practice we are ant colonies in that dark forest. Unless you can understand enough the rumblings of another civilization, you don't know how far they've expanded. They may have fully functional, fast replicating colonies in one of the trillions of Oort cloud objects and you just pissed them off by trashing their historical sites. We could go insane hypothesizing destruction on light-years bubble scales, but then you can rest assured other civilizations are now aware of your existence and will take note of your undesirable quality as neighbor.
- jordache 9y agothe three body problem was a horrible book. The whole notion of detecting signals from other civilizations is not a novel concept in Sci-fi world. There are much better articulated & compelling examples from other science fiction works..
- bcherny 9y agoI enjoyed the book. What are some better ones you recommend?
- philipkglass 9y agoIf you want some first contact stories that are better (IMO) than The Three Body Problem, try: - Blindsight by Peter Watts (cannot recommend this strongly enough) - The Forge of God and sequel Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear - Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds - Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky I appreciated getting a non-Western take on one of the most durable SF tropes in the Three Body Problem, but I didn't much enjoy it overall, and didn't read the sequels. It didn't hang together logically for me. The aliens could have built orbital habitats in their home system faster and easier than finding a replacement planet, even if they couldn't directly fix the problems of their home planet. Also I had a hard time squaring the aliens' (believable, hard-SF) colony ship capabilities with their magical, completely-beyond-known-physics "sophons" that they sent ahead.
- golem14 9y ago"His master's voice", by Stanislaw Lem
- Flemlord 9y agoAnvil of Stars is my favorite book in this genre. It can be read without reading the prequel. Gateway by Frederic Pohl is also a great brush-with-aliens book although technically not first contact.
- thriftwy 9y agoJust wanted to concur that Blindsight is an awful book. I see it recommended everywhere but I've found it thoroughly uncompelling. As far as recommendations go, Mote in God's Eye is hard to beat.
- xster 9y agoPlease please don't spoil the book for others while writing comments.
- brango 9y agoAnyone know anything about the credibility of the Disclosure Project[1]? I think something like 100+ ex-service personnel testified under oath that they'd witnessed UFO activity. If 100+ people testified to seeing me do something illegal, a court would convict me (barring exceptional counter-evidence). Having researched things as best I can I am now of the opinion they're already here, based mainly on the number, diversity and credibility of witnesses (e.g. ex-military personnel, former nuclear military personnel, Air Force, etc, not that any I know anything beyond that). [1] http://www.disclosureproject.org http://www.disclosureproject.org
- boomboomsubban 9y agoI looked over some of them, and this isn't very reliable. Eyewitness reports aren't terribly credible in the best of situations. Eyewitness reports of people in stressful careers often working long overnight hours aren't credible at all. Our memories are terrible, our brains make stuff up when confused, and sleep deprived dreams are very hard to distinguish from reality. Add in the large amount of amphetamines used in the military during that period, the very secretive weapons testing going on, and things like MK-ULTRA and these seem really far fetched.
- raverbashing 9y agoSo, if we can't trust their memories in those occasions (which I agree is problematic), why are we trusting them with doing their jobs under such conditions? I'd like to add that it might not be that all events happened under strenuous (personal) situations (and who knows how much evidence like recordings or other stuff might have been buried)
- dingaling 9y ago> why are we trusting them with doing their jobs under such conditions? Process, process, process. Or "train as you'll fight" in more bellicose terms. Drill and rote is the only way to get fallible humans to do the correct thing regardless of environment and conditions. However it's when things occur for which there's no process in place that you need flexible, quick-thinking NCOs and officers. And that's achieved by constantly putting them into those scenarios, as the British Army learned in its 'small conflicts' since WW2. Analyse, assess, plan and react within minutes. Unfortunately the higher echelons seldom retain that capability after years in stuffy corridors. It would be interesting to study the proportion of UFO "affirmations" originating from sharp-end military personnel versus desk-jockeys. I reckon the latter will be the vast majority.
- cetalingua 9y agoOur problem is that we have very limited imagination (and sensitivities) when interacting with other sentient beings even here, on earth. For example, cetaceans evolved in the environment where vision is limited. Hence, dolphins and whales do not have emotional facial expresssions that are so important for human primates. It confuses us when interacting with them, are they sad, happy, in pain? We have no idea. Next, is our profound inability to understand their complex acoustic communication, there is no Rosetta stone, and we are completely lost again. Any race to communicate with aliens should start with decoding non-human communication systems here on earth (shameless plug, anyone is interested to support our tiny fledging startup?) Finally, the recent situation with rescuing last living vaquita dolphins in Mexico once again demonstrated that humans have hard time imagining umwelt of other species. The plan was to capture remaining vaquitas and to put them in protected sea pens. Without any doubt, human intentions are good here, but as we often do, we go full steam, brute force into the situation. As a result, captured vaquita died from capture myopathy. This animal is shy, cryptic, and it cannot handle being surrounded by scary , noisy giants, touching it, grabbing it with its appendages, despite the fact that "giants" have all good intentions. This example is very relevant to thinking how we should interact with possible "others" or handle the signal, if it will be received one day. Even with all good intentions, we can still create chaos and danger, simply because we cannot understand "others" and how they see, experience the world.
- malux85 9y agoFascinating - do you need any data analysis/modelling help? My email is in my profile, let’s chat
- cetalingua 9y agoYes, absolutely, will email shortly.
- arcticfox 9y agoI'd never heard of vaquitas. Incredible that yet again a species is terribly threatened due to Chinese fertility treatments. > But like all cetaceans, the vaquita breathes air, making the gillnets deadly. The nets are set to trap another endangered species, the totoaba. This fish’s swim bladder is used in Chinese medicine to make a soup believed to boost fertility—and demand has skyrocketed in recent years. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/navy-use-dolphins-track-down-worlds-most-endangered-porpoise-180963908/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/navy-use-dolphins-...
- Yizahi 9y agoSo I assume they did found the guy to run it? http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2105278/china-offering-over-million-dollars-foreigner-run-worlds-largest http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2105278/china...
- phirschybar 9y agowow. I've always held to the Star Trek theory that any advanced civilization must be benevolent.
- sidcool 9y agoSomehow I am sure that some governments have already made contact with ET intelligence. This will be revealed in a few decades may be, when world is ready for it. A conspiracy theory but something unknown gives me the confidence and belief.