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Existing laser tech could be used for “porch light” to attract alien astronomers
- booleandilemma 8y agoWhat’s the worst that could happen?
- devoply 8y agoWhat's the best that could happen? No such thing as a free lunch.
- King-Aaron 8y agoProbably extermination via a similar-yet-higher-powered laser, as the worst case scenario
- andrewljohnson 8y agoI prefer a Dark Forest strategy for approaching the universe. If anything, we should be thinking about how to emit less radiation that can be traced back to Earth into space. Best case: aliens send us technology via morse code. Worst case: relativistic projectile from advanced civilization destroys Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest
- bgee 8y agowas thinking exactly this when I saw the title.
- seiferteric 8y agoAt this point I think I would rather take our chances with the aliens since we are going to destroy ourselves anyway.
- ALittleLight 8y agoFor being such a cynic about humanity you're awfully optimistic about aliens.
- tantalor 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favourite-longshot_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favourite-longshot_bias
- gisely 8y agoI think there might be some reasons to be optimistic. Any civilization that might notice our signal and decide to interact with us has with us has existed much longer than our own civilization with high probability. Thus, there is more evidence of long-term stability in such a civilization than our own. With stability comes the potential for experience, with experience the potential for wisdom.
- ALittleLight 8y agoHow would you expect a society that is extremely stable would deal with an incohate civilization? I think it's at least plausible they would want to stifle potential problems in the cradle, so to speak.
- merpnderp 8y agoWhy would you believe they’d have our extremely temporary set or morals? Human empires have lasted for thousands of years and the one thing that binds 99% of human history is soul crushing enslavement of each other.
- AWildIdeaApp 8y agoAnything living the human exponential economic way in space, would be as visible to us as a von Neu-Mann-Probe.
- BrandoElFollito 8y ago
- medius 8y agoI just finished reading the series a few days ago. That's how I look at our universe now.
- flukus 8y agoThis seems to be based on the premise that alien civilizations can only find us if we broadcast and doesn't account for them sending out probes Even in that universe, we know they could easily send probes out to the galaxy and it would solve the whole "chain of suspicion" thing that makes destroying alien civilizations the best option.
- paulsutter 8y agoQuoting the link > Like hunters in a "dark forest" ... where any two civilizations cannot communicate well enough to relieve mistrust, making conflict inevitable. Therefore, it is in every civilization's best interest to preemptively strike and destroy any developing civilization before it can become a threat, but without revealing their own location, thus explaining the Fermi paradox.
- sebazzz 8y agoI think the explanation of the Fermi paradox is the fact that without a natural predator and add technically superior intelligence we populate the entire planet, while also having little care for the environment causing global warming which is then a problem handled too little too late (or even denied) by our politicians around the globe. This can eventually cause conflict, especially when food prices become too high. Besides that we are also are still fighting like toddlers (USA, Russia, China, Middle East) though it is hard to tell how serious those conflicts are. I think we are before the gap, that might also be because I'm pessimistic about the current state of the world. That said, if I'm wrong I would rather have any aliens find us. If you're advanced, you probably resolved various issues regarding limited resources, so why would you kill us as being primitive species?
- antepodius 8y agoWhy would you kill an ant? Would you care if one died while workers were building an orphanage?
- internet555 8y agoWhat was the Greek story (Plutarch? Idk) where some guy being hunted by some army captain crashes on some island and the local pseudo intellectual sophist says they need to kill him before the army captain comes or else they’ll be punished for either aiding him or letting him go. Then the army captain finds out they killed his target for no reason so he kills all of them for being corrupt idiots
- eloff 8y agoThis seems to me like shining a laser pointer randomly up into the sky and hoping someone from a passing plane sees it? Is this practical given the vastness of space and the directionaality of this laser?
- joezydeco 8y agoWell not just a plane passing overhead, a plane passing overhead 200 years from now. Maybe we should be aiming the big laser at Oumuamua. With a big HEY COME BACK HERE message.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rdtsc 8y agoI've wondered if that was the purpose of the "probe". To see if anyone follows it, or otherwise interacts with it. Let's say you know there is a habitable planet, but you don't want to land there first, instead send a probe and see if the planet reacts to it. If they do, it would indicate a rather advanced civilization.
- Johnny555 8y agoLet's hope that there are no interstellar laws against shining lasers at other star systems.
- Johnny555 8y agoespecially if those astronomers live in nearby systems, such as around Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Earth, or TRAPPIST-1, a star about 40 light-years away that hosts seven exoplanets, three of which are potentially habitable. If the signal is spotted from either of these nearby systems, the study finds, the same megawatt laser could be used to send a brief message in the form of pulses similar to Morse code. “If we were to successfully close a handshake and start to communicate, we could flash a message, at a data rate of about a few hundred bits per second, which would get there in just a few years,” 40 light years in "just a few years"? So this laser beam travels faster than the speed of light? In any case, I don't open my front door and flash my lights to invite strangers off the street, and I don't think we should be doing the same thing to strangers from outer space, you never know if it's an interstellar axe murderer and if they meet us at our planet, then they are already known to be far more technologically advanced than we are so there's nothing we can do to stop them.
- devoply 8y agoI would venture a guess that all so-called intelligent life seeks make use of anything that it can get its hands on and order it according to its will. If this is true, then you really don't ever want to meet other intelligent life. At best they would integrate you into their economic system, just like we integrate people with lower intelligence into our economic system... or underdeveloped countries for that matter. A bit worse would be making us into slaves, which might appeal to their humanity. Most likely is simply to eliminate us and take the planet for their own colony and keep us as pets.
- ams6110 8y agoIf there is life in the Proxima Centauri system, and it has the technological capability to get to the Earth, I think they already know about us.
- sean2 8y agoSerious question: how could they already know about us? Are you simply assuming they have advanced signal detection technologies that match their space fairing capability?
- rajekas 8y agoI bet aliens love it when you shine a pointer in their eyes
- village-idiot 8y agoAre they fucking crazy? Turn out that light! Our first encounter with space faring aliens will probably go about as well as native Americans first encounter with Europeans.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- beerlord 8y agoThe value that Earth provides is the fact that it hosts millions of living species. Mere geological resources can be gathered from asteroids or other planets with lesser gravity wells. The Alien species would have to determine if Human technology, economy and culture holds any value to them. If it does, they will conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the various billions of humans inhabiting the planet, and eliminate the least-productive in order to improve average genetic quality and bring the overall species back to within the carrying capacity of the planet. For example, 56% of the Earth's population from the least-productive countries could be eliminated, for only a 6% decrease in scientific output, and 17% decrease in GDP. Doing so would also result in a 23% decrease in carbon emissions. Of course, if they find that humanity holds negative value, they will simply eliminate all humans, and turn the planet into a giant nature park.
- chillacy 8y agoThey could treat us like we treat dogs, lab mice, or beef cattle too...
- detritus 8y ago...sport.
- antepodius 8y agoIf we're talking about intelligences that can travel between stars, there is no 'carrying capacity' aside from space on the surface for radiative cooling towers to stop the planet from boiling from the heat generated by the trillions of humans and machines. Seriously, you can probably put all the nonhuman processes of an ecosystem into a bottle that takes in air, energy, and wastewater and puts out food/crops/etc, and you can just dismantle some asteroids for the materials needed for as many fleets of solar panels as you need to put around earth, assuming they don't want to use what's powering their rockets. Really, the limiting factor is cooling the earth. You'd probably want to block all infrared from the sun for convenience. Implying these beings would likely have any need to worry about 'decreasing' carbon emissions is ludicrous. It's like humans going to a beehive and worrying about killing some bees to stop honey wastage when the humans poke a hole in the hive to collect honey- no, they'll just completely reconstitute the hive. There's a chance it's some first-interstellar-travel thing we might do right now, but it's more likely it's from the time a civilisation is kardashev-2, given that time would be longer. Fermi paradox's still a problem, though.
- crobertsbmw 8y agoHow we would agree on a handshake? Aliens don’t know English let alone Morse code.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoBut any alien that can build a receiver knows math, and understands physics, and probably has come to similar conclusions about computation. They might be so different from us that communication would be impossible, but it's not likely. If nothing else, you can draw simple two-color pictures by sending pixels in a NxM grid, where N and M are both primes. Enough minds thinking about the problem will eventually figure it out.
- antepodius 8y agoWhat would we do if we detected a big glob of binary? Try and look at it in everywhich way. And we would as well if it was stranger.
- AWildIdeaApp 8y agoYes, we could do that- we could even improve upon the idea. Make a Satellite laser light house, that shines densly compressed information towards the green zones of other solar systems, where we know moons or planets to be. If we manage to stabilize that, upon the estimated location of the planet, the information will appear as a stable disc of light, flickering very fast - over the cloud-surface with the speed of the rotation of the planet. Anyone flying into the communication channel will get a sunburn of course. We shall call it UFO, for Unified Farout pOrchlight.