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Ok, so we can explain this plus Dark Matter in one shot. Basically, planets slightly larger than Earth are practically guaranteed to evolve intelligent life.
by rossdavidh 8y ago
Ok, so we can explain this plus Dark Matter in one shot. Basically, planets slightly larger than Earth are practically guaranteed to evolve intelligent life. Intelligent life eventually develops technology that allows them to shield the existence of their planet, or even entire stellar system, from the probes of the Evil AI Lifedestroyer. So, all that Dark Matter is just the intelligent life in the universe, using normal prudence to keep out EAILD (see above), more or less like most humans live in houses with walls.
So, any system that is not part of Dark Matter yet is either:
1) unconducive to life (or complex life, anyway)
2) was already zapped by the EAILD
3) like us, is in a transient state where the EAILD hasn't arrived yet, but we haven't learned how to cloak our solar system yet either
Again, the key here is that planets just slightly larger than Earth are the most likely to evolve intelligent life, so they nearly always end up cloaking, and thus we don't see them.
Enjoy.
- deepsun 8y agoAnd they use Dark Energy to power their houses.
- rossdavidh 8y agoAha! Good point.
- ahelwer 8y ago[removed for spoilers as requested]
- jahnu 8y agoThanks so much :)
- johnchristopher 8y agoThat's pretty cool! Is that a reference to a book or a movie ?
- cosmic_shame 8y agoStrong vibes of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Chinese writer Liu Cixin.
- glaurung_ 8y agoDefinitely! I thought the same thing. Also relevant: https://xkcd.com/1377/ https://xkcd.com/1377/
- kerbalspacepro 8y agoIt sounds like something from the last book of the Three Body Problem trilogy
- mason55 8y agoSecond book, aptly called “The Dark Forest”
- rossdavidh 8y agoNot as far as I'm aware, but I think Benford did a series with an EAILD, and I'm sure others have done it in some format longer than a HN comment.
- peterlk 8y agoAlternative theory: the EALD use said planets as incubation for their offspring. We are a natural progression in the growth of an individual EALD in the same way that cell division and growth of gut bacteria are a natural progression in the growth of a human. A more mature EALD uses all resources available on an Earth-sized planet in order to grow up into a fully mature EALD.
- rossdavidh 8y agoOoooohhh, this has potential. The EAILD prefers planets that are still rocky (not gas giants), but naturally goes for the bigger ones first. It just hasn't gotten around to planets as small as us yet. I like it.
- papln 8y agoIt's just as likely that dark matter is the byproduct or containment technology of EALID destroying intelligent life's planet, or capturing it in something analogous to how a spider wraps a fly stuck in its web.
- rossdavidh 8y agoAh! Perhaps it's just sticking all the intelligence-generating planets, and the stellar systems they came from, into a pocket universe, or something. Maybe it's a form of plague quarantine. Lots of possibilities.
- afturner 8y agoThis is one of the coolest things I've ever heard :D please let scifi be scinonfi (aside from the EAILD, that bad boy can stay in fi land)
- PC_LOAD_LETTER 8y agoThe problem with this (very interesting and fun) theory is that Earth would have to somehow be the very last planet to develop such intelligence amongst the large list of planets within detection range, which seems unlikely.
- dylan604 8y agoWhy unlikely? Someone has to be last
- jacobtwotwo 8y ago> Someone has to be last That makes it possible, not likely. For any population N > 2, it's less likely that you'll be last than that you will not be last.
- dylan604 8y agolooking at the data, it’s like we’re trying our damndest to be last. Defunding education, limiting what can be taught (ex: Texas removing critical thinking), etc all seem like we just enjoy tripping on our own shoe laces
- Supermancho 8y agoYou're focusing on the wrong scale. Intelligence has skyrocketed in the past thousand years. Policy decisions in our lifetime, do not matter or they end all human matters at once.
- moate 8y agoCertain policy decisions matter on a larger scale. Killing off millions of people has to have some meaning on future abilities, right? I think that generally I agree with you, but I would tend to say you have a small (but >0) number of things that would have huge long term ripples.
- 8y ago
- pmoriarty 8y agoSo they can't be seen visually, but can be detected gravitationally? That doesn't sound like very effective cloaking to me.. especially not against some hypothetically advanced intelligence.
- jordanpg 8y agohttps://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/7afc686e-640b-4fb0-b902-666baad180ac https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/7afc686e-640b-4fb0-b902-666baad...
- RamshackleJ 8y agoSuch a fun idea! Just to add to the lore, we can already detect galaxies without dark-matter. Which would be galaxies already scrubbed of intelligent life by the EAILD http://www.astronomy.com/news/2019/03/ghostly-galaxy-without-dark-matter-confirmed http://www.astronomy.com/news/2019/03/ghostly-galaxy-without...
- rossdavidh 8y agoYes, it adds a kind of creepy ghastliness to that discovery, doesn't it?
- shobith 8y agoThis is great! The Expanse has a similar theme around the EAILD, they have the protomolecule instead.
- fwip 8y agoYou heard it here first folks, there's so many Earth-sized planets they add up to many times the mass of the rest of the universe. Just a couple billion per star.
- swombat 8y agoYou forget that the cloaking devices have weight too... maybe that's where it's gone.
- bpicolo 8y agoOr perhaps dark matter is just the cloak itself. It's nice an thick to provide adequate warmth
- rossdavidh 8y agoWell you might want to cloak your star as well, doncha you know.
- labster 8y agoI'd like to see the math behind the orbital parameters here. The most I've seen is one million Earths in a single system[1], and so I'm curious how you could get a few orders of magnitude more. [1]: https://planetplanet.net/the-ultimate-solar-system/ https://planetplanet.net/the-ultimate-solar-system/
- fwip 7y agoOh I don't know anything about that, I just plugged in the ratio of the mass of the earth to our sun.
- Jach 8y agoI have a more readily falsifiable idea. My reclusive neighbor is a witch, she sometimes alters data away from expected predictions so that scientists have something to puzzle over.
- rossdavidh 8y agoFun fact: in the first hour after I made it, this comment racked up about 25 HN "points", presumably from people who thought, "ha! that's goofy, I like it". Then, in the ten hours or so since then, it has fallen down to 17, presumably because the conversation turned from absurd to, "well, does this theory actually make sense?" Which, given that HN points don't actually buy you anything, is fine. But, I wonder what it means that the first hour was mostly upvoting and the hours since then mostly downvoting. Maybe people are in a more positive mood in the morning? Or maybe it doesn't seem worth downvoting until a bunch of other people have commented on it. Or, of course, perhaps the EAILD is attempting to bury it with 'bot downvotes. In which case, I guess we're already doomed...
- pram 7y agoI have a theory: your initial post, in isolation, is funny and interesting. However as it accretes more replies and becomes the biggest thread in the topic, people downvote it because they find the entire discussion annoying.