5 ms·
I've long held an unsupported belief that life anywhere in any form would "converge" upon only a few interesting things left to do after having mastered rearran
by Lucent 8y ago
I've long held an unsupported belief that life anywhere in any form would "converge" upon only a few interesting things left to do after having mastered rearranging atoms and forces in any configuration they desire.
Not only is there likely an ideal, optimized way of sending information long distances, I suspect there also a very limited number of things a matrioshka brain would care to broadcast or receive, like the values of some fundamental constant.
Saying "hi" for fun to other civilizations isn't even something we do on our own planet with our own people. We only talk to people for specific reasons, even if we're unaware of those reasons. We'll go out of our way to avoid a homeless person's greeting rather than risk learning something about/from him.
- brox 8y agoPerhaps the life forms with long-term success have learned that it is not prudent to broadcast your location; the smaller the chance of other civilisations knowing about your existence the better.
- sgt101 8y agoGreg Bear wrote an excellent pair of books based on this premise : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anvil_of_Stars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anvil_of_Stars Anvil of Stars is often said to be the weaker of the pair, but it haunted me for several reasons, not least the extremely spooky ending!
- mattkevan 8y agoCixin Liu’s Three Body Problem stories have exactly that premise. In the books game theory means that the most prudent way to deal with a competitor species is to obliterate it immediately on discovery. The answer to Fermi’s Paradox is that everyone is keeping their heads down and and hoping no one notices them. Humans, on the other hand, are merrily broadcasting away without a care in the universe...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoYeah, because living your entire existence in hiding, and instantly annihilating anyone else you come across just in case, is totally a worthwhile way to exist. Do you win if your civ makes it as far as the iron star era?
- b_tterc_p 8y agoI mean, if living before meeting aliens is worthwhile, then living with discovered and destroyed aliens should be fine, no? Your point doesn’t really hold up if the effort to destroy a civ is basically zero, while the cost to defend is approximately unachievable.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoDo you really even want to live in a universe like that? And if not, why contribute to creating it? Ultimately no one survives. There's no winning, you don't get a trophy for watching the last proton decay, so it is silly to survive for surviving's sake.
- dr_dshiv 8y agoPlus, wouldn't it also attract the attention of the nice guy alien civs? They've been keeping their head down, just developing tech for more thousands of millenia - they probably care about civilizational diversity. The destruction oriented would surely be on the nice guy hit list for destroying all these nice diverse civilizations. So then it's just a question of whether a nice guy attitude would enable better wartech than a destruction oriented attitude.
- b_tterc_p 8y agoI like being alive. I don’t generally extend my personal scale of experience beyond my neighborhood let alone intergalactic diplomatic relations. If we destroyed an alien civ, life would be as it were before meeting them, which was fine. Why do aliens need to factor into your world view?
- PinkMilkshake 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- matt4077 8y agoPeople do have a tendency to wave at strangers, when either one is in a non-car vehicle. I. e. a boat, Train, balloon, etc.
- macintux 8y agoPlus Jeeps and motorcycles. “I recognize that you too are pursuing this weird combination of pleasure and misery.”
- King-Aaron 8y ago> Driving a miata in a torrential downpour
- Chris_Chambers 8y agoA homeless person’s greeting is almost always an insincere and contrived opener for them to aggressively beg for or demand a free handout from you with an implicit threat of verbal or physical violence if you don’t comply with their request.
- syedkarim 8y ago>>Saying "hi" for fun to other civilizations isn't even something we do on our own planet with our own people. Actually, ham radio operators do exactly this. They literally send out messages out into the ether with the hopes of someone replying. QSL: https://rsgb.org/main/get-started-in-amateur-radio/operating-your-new-station/how-to-send-and-receive-qsl-cards/ https://rsgb.org/main/get-started-in-amateur-radio/operating...
- fernandopj 8y ago>Saying "hi" for fun to other civilizations isn't even something we do on our own planet with our own people. We do that all the time, in as many ways as we can think of. From the top of my head: - amateur radio - sending lasers signals to the moon and waiting for it to get back - chatting with random strangers on internet - the Arecibo message on space - SETI is basically trying to catch an alien "hello" - sending "messages on bottles" Really, sending "hi" in imaginative ways for no reason is a very human thing to do
- ianai 8y agoWho hasn’t shouted “hello” somewhere likely to have a good echo?
- colordrops 8y agoI beg to differ: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
- ryanmercer 8y ago>I've long held an unsupported belief that life anywhere in any form would "converge" upon only a few interesting things left to do after having mastered rearranging atoms and forces in any configuration they desire. Like plaguing Picard and crew on the USS Enterprise.