8 ms·

The Joy of Cosmic Mediocrity

42 points by dnetesn 7y ago

topmonk 7y ago
This is a stupid question. Any world we discover that doesn't harbor intelligent life we would in all surity dismiss as a world that never will. See Mars, for instance. OTOH, any world that was inhabited by aliens would, besides within a very narrow time frame, either have advanced to a state where their world would, for sure, be unrecognizable by us, or have destroyed themselves to such an extent that we would never have known they were there. Typically human hubris, why can't we recognize the most logical explanation for so much dark matter? The wreckage and debris of a great alien war. Face it humanity, you're not the pinnacle of intelligence that you think, but, frankly the figurative apes throwing stones at each other after a (galactic version of) World War III.
- fierarul 7y ago
  > why can't we recognize the most logical explanation for so much dark matter? The wreckage and debris of a great alien war. Ooh, this one is original. Great sci-fi idea.
- Ygg2 7y ago
  > Typically human hubris, why can't we recognize the most logical explanation for so much dark matter? It's not hubris. It's rationality. If what you say is correct, we would probably see more evidence of alien life. You can't just see a star flicker and jump to aliens. Why is that explanation much better than we're inside Matrix. And dark matter is rounding error or even worse our overlords manually tweaking parameters. Both are untestable theories, which means they are essentially useless.
  - topmonk 7y ago
    They aren't useless, they are a direction which could be pursued but isn't. Why do you think it takes a one out of a million type of person to develop new technologies? Everyone dovetails into the same overarching implied narrative that everything we see has become that way based only on a few simple laws and everything was empty before that. So all our discoveries tend to cement that narrative because we aren't looking for anything else.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- fennecfoxen 7y ago
  I'm afraid that this comment is not the pinnacle of intelligence that you think it is. But for people who come by and want to know why this dark matter suggestion is fundamentally ill-informed and wrong: Dark matter isn't merely "not bright" matter, it is matter which does not interact with electromagnetic radiation. It is generally expected that the vast majority is non-baryonic, for a variety of reasons. The observed density of all matter in the universe is about 30% of the universe's critical density, but Big Bang nucleosynthesis results readable in the cosmic microwave background show much less helium and lithium than you would expect if it were baryonic — it is safe to say that baryonic matter is only 5% of the critical density. Moreover, small dense objects (black holes) would produce gravitational micro-lensing effects which aren't present, while more diffuse objects would affect the absorption spectra of light. And finally, the observed distribution of dark matter in the universe just ... sorta makes it a rather poor candidate for war debris.
  - topmonk 7y ago
    Why can't the remenants from an alien war not be baryonic? The observed distribution is very odd, actually. In some galaxies there is nearly none, in others quite a lot, yet it tends to be hang quite close to matter even though the forces between them are quite weak.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >OTOH, any world that was inhabited by aliens would, besides within a very narrow time frame, either have advanced to a state where their world would, for sure, be unrecognizable by us, or have destroyed themselves to such an extent that we would never have known they were there. Why? It's entirely possible (also for us) that scientific and technological advancement plateaus. You get the early hanging fruit and a progress that looks like an exponential curve but turns out to be more like a sigmoid, as more advanced inventions get harder to reason for a human level intelligence, require too much energy, need resources that are depletable (minerals etc), are too complex to manufacture, etc. So there wont be any logical necessity for "a state where their world would, for sure, be unrecognizable by us". Nor it's required that they would "have destroyed themselves". >Typically human hubris, why can't we recognize the most logical explanation for so much dark matter? The wreckage and debris of a great alien war. Black matter has some physical properties. It's not just garbage we can't identify. Also how is a "great alien war" the "most logical" explanation for black matter?
  - topmonk 7y ago
    > It's entirely possible (also for us) that scientific and technological advancement plateaus. If technology does plateau and did so near where we are now, it would be extremely unlikely, because it would require two unlikely but unrelated events both happening. Mathematically, you would multiply the probabilities of each together. > Also how is a "great alien war" the "most logical" explanation for black matter? It's distribution is quite odd. In some galaxies but not much in others, and tends to be around regular matter even though it there isn't much force keeping it that way.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >If technology does plateau and did so near where we are now, it would be extremely unlikely, because it would require two unlikely but unrelated events both happening. Yeah, I don't buy this argument. First, regarding "technology plateau" being unlikely, that presupposes what it oughta prove [1]. We can discuss it as a counter-assertion to mine, but it can't be part of an argument that proves that we're unlikely to be in a plateau, because that would be circular reasoning. Second, even if that "technology plateau" is low probability was a legit argument, and even given that "technology plateaus now" is also low probability, and thus their chances of happening together being even lower probability (the multiplication of those two low probabilities) -- that would just prove that "technology plateaus now" is low probability. It wouldn't mean it's impossible, much less that it's not happening. And my assumption wasn't based on probabilities, but on empirical observations. Winning the lottery is low probability. Your first script getting accepted to be made into a major movie is too. But if you have the lottery ticket in your hands, have verified the winning numbers, and you just got a call from a Hollywood director that want's to buy your script, the fact that those two events occurring together are "low probability" doesn't matter. They are reality. (Besides, for any two events with low probability that have happened in history, somebody could have made the exact same argument you've made, to "prove" that they didn't happen). Plotting the outline of inventions on a timescale, and their impact, one can see that there's a big boom in the 18th century, continues to 19th century, peaking in 20th to mid 20th century. For 60+ years we haven't found anything as big as electricity (Maxwell and co), electric light, combustion engine, telephone, television, internet, photography, AD/DA conversion, nuclear power, transistors, DNA, Quantum Mechanics, penicillin, antibiotics, Relativity, flight, plastics, rockets, etc. Even computers and the internet herald back to 30s and 60s respectively. Where are those equivalent impact theories or inventions (as opposed to mere optimizations and marginal improvements to existing theories/inventions) in the last 60 years? I'm sure you'll find a few. I doubt you'll find 1/10th as many as in, say, 1900-1950. (High impact items, equivalent to the ones listed above. Not e.g. string theory -- compared to the advent of Relativity or QM it's small incremental peanuts). [1] Of course, me saying that "technology does plateau" is also an assertion that I haven't proven. So, sure, one could argue in favor or against it. But one can't start from asserting that technology plateau is an "unlikely event" to disprove that technology plateaus, because that would be a circular argument. So at best your argument is not an induction, but just an unproved assertion itself).
xwdv 7y ago
Our mediocre world could have been a bit more interesting if we simply had a habitable moon with other beings, alien fauna, and even exotic diseases.
- twic 7y ago
  We did, until the dinosaurs nuked it.
mellosouls 7y ago
The article deals with The Principle of Mediocrity as applied to extra terrestrial life in an optimistic way, essentially saying we've been here before, many times, convinced of our special place and we've always been corrected by some new perspective. So, while not actually countering current challenges - eg. The Fermi Paradox - head on, the reminder was reassuring for those of us sceptical about life elsewhere, but longing to be proved wrong.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  The Principle of Mediocrity has also been applied to hilariously wrong results. If you go back to the early scientific age, you will find a widespread belief that the other planets in our solar system were inhabited! After all, why should the Earth be special? It was only after this was shown to be nonsense that SETI moved out to planets around other stars. What all this does, of course, is ignore anthropic selection. If life is extremely rare, then Earth will be special just by the fact we are here to be making observations. In the end, a PoM argument for intelligent life being common is just circular reasoning.
credit_guy 7y ago
I have a very boring solution to Fermi's paradox: interstellar travel is simply very hard. Beyond the reach of any civilization, no matter how technologically advanced. Or maybe, just within the reach, so that advanced civilizations will occasionally travel to neighboring stars, but this results in a very small minority of all the stars in the galaxy being populated, and we are not close to any of these. Oh, as for intergalactic travel, I'm close to 100% certain it is way beyond the capability of any civilization. It's very hard to imagine intelligent beings with an attention span of millions of years.
- crazygringo 7y ago
  And not just hard, but without any clear payoff. We're evolutionarily fine-tuned to live on Earth. We love a blue sky, room temperature, certain levels of gases in the atmosphere, and so on. It takes very little work to live here, relatively speaking. Living long-term in outer space and other planets means either forgoing most of the things that make people happy, or else attempting to recreate them in incredibly incredibly expensive ways that ultimately aren't as good. It's cool to dream about living under glass domes on other planets... but the reality is that after the novelty wears off after a couple of weeks, I think you'd realize you'd just rather go back to Earth. It's way nicer. "What about if we ruin Earth?" plenty of people counter. Well don't. It's a helluva lot easier to apply our intelligence to normal prosaic things here like taking care of the environment, than to building interstellar spaceships that can colonize other planets.
  - scribu 7y ago
    What about the payoff of not going extinct if life on Earth gets wiped out by a commet or some other catastrophe?
    - kristianc 7y ago
      Given the last mass extinction was 65 million years ago, this might count as premature optimization.
K0SM0S 7y ago
IMHO, Science is prodigy but not magic, so when we try to explain things that are way too complex or out-of-scale (whether big or small) relatively to us, the solution space is so incredibly vast that we might as well be guessing — science lets us rule out 1% of the 'whys' and we're almost none the wiser. Consider this: - galaxies may generally follow cycles, patterns, notably depending on the activity of their supermassive blackhole (or quasar, etc); life may be peaking during a "sweet spot" in the cycle, and plummeting at other times. What may be critical is thus not only age but 'state' of the galaxy, and we might find ourselves in the beginning of such a cycle (we sure accumulate enough particularities in the topology of our local spacetime, being both rich yet calm enough, to warrant the assumption that we're currently 'privileged' on average). - We have no way to detect life in other galaxies. They could be swarmed by spaceships and interstellar spatian empires and we just wouldn't be able to determine that. Thus basing the Fermi "paradox" on such a small sample (on the order of 10⁻¹²) seems much too weak data. We simply don't know. We actually can't properly observe ours yet, especially behind the core, generally in the alignment of the disc. We are just now discovering that said disc is distorted and there are remnants of jets above/below us[1]. There are hundreds of galaxies in our local Andromeda-Triangulum region, huge gravity streams, and we've only begun to grasp that in the last few decades... It's still very, very early in our observations of the cosmos. I think it's good to ponder such questions and raise apparent "paradoxes", go science! — but to draw any conclusions based on weak data and conjecture of a perceived (read: biased) mean is, IMHO, rather foolish, way too premature at best. Not hubris but wishful thinking, belief, opinion. So let it be that, humbly, defusing the anxiety. In the grander scheme of things, we're not much better off than the Ancient Greeks when faced with this question. Give it another thousand years, and then I'd expect a whole other level of questioning. Not 10 or 20 or even 100, if we are to tackle that kind of scale — we need infrastructure for this, in space, way beyond the solar system (think telescopes, probes, not even manned missions). The ultimate problem with time is not evolution (of us, of science, of tech), it's information travel: e.g. if we were to use the thickness of the Milky Way to set up telescopes, at ~1,000 LY, it would take half that time to transmit pictures to a central aggregator. 5 centuries for your next picture, I don't know if we'll be able to commit to such transgenerational projects without huge changes in our biology (lifespan, mindset, whatever but huge, enough to make us a different species). Until we're able to do such things, grow such infrastructure, gather such meaningful data, we're just too small to even look at the cosmos. Let alone draw conclusions. We really just have to keep going at it, and it's gonna take a long, long time. [1] Contrary to the very regular spiral illustration we're acquainted to, we are now realizing the Milky Way could actually look more like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A

42 points by dnetesn 7y ago

This is a stupid question. Any world we discover that doesn't harbor intelligent life we would in all surity dismiss as a world that never will. See Mars, for instance. OTOH, any world that was inhabited by aliens would, besides within a very narrow time frame, either have advanced to a state where their world would, for sure, be unrecognizable by us, or have destroyed themselves to such an extent that we would never have known they were there. Typically human hubris, why can't we recognize the most logical explanation for so much dark matter? The wreckage and debris of a great alien war. Face it humanity, you're not the pinnacle of intelligence that you think, but, frankly the figurative apes throwing stones at each other after a (galactic version of) World War III.

fierarul 7y ago
> why can't we recognize the most logical explanation for so much dark matter? The wreckage and debris of a great alien war. Ooh, this one is original. Great sci-fi idea.
Ygg2 7y ago
> Typically human hubris, why can't we recognize the most logical explanation for so much dark matter? It's not hubris. It's rationality. If what you say is correct, we would probably see more evidence of alien life. You can't just see a star flicker and jump to aliens. Why is that explanation much better than we're inside Matrix. And dark matter is rounding error or even worse our overlords manually tweaking parameters. Both are untestable theories, which means they are essentially useless.
- topmonk 7y ago
  They aren't useless, they are a direction which could be pursued but isn't. Why do you think it takes a one out of a million type of person to develop new technologies? Everyone dovetails into the same overarching implied narrative that everything we see has become that way based only on a few simple laws and everything was empty before that. So all our discoveries tend to cement that narrative because we aren't looking for anything else.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fennecfoxen 7y ago
I'm afraid that this comment is not the pinnacle of intelligence that you think it is. But for people who come by and want to know why this dark matter suggestion is fundamentally ill-informed and wrong: Dark matter isn't merely "not bright" matter, it is matter which does not interact with electromagnetic radiation. It is generally expected that the vast majority is non-baryonic, for a variety of reasons. The observed density of all matter in the universe is about 30% of the universe's critical density, but Big Bang nucleosynthesis results readable in the cosmic microwave background show much less helium and lithium than you would expect if it were baryonic — it is safe to say that baryonic matter is only 5% of the critical density. Moreover, small dense objects (black holes) would produce gravitational micro-lensing effects which aren't present, while more diffuse objects would affect the absorption spectra of light. And finally, the observed distribution of dark matter in the universe just ... sorta makes it a rather poor candidate for war debris.
- topmonk 7y ago
  Why can't the remenants from an alien war not be baryonic? The observed distribution is very odd, actually. In some galaxies there is nearly none, in others quite a lot, yet it tends to be hang quite close to matter even though the forces between them are quite weak.
coldtea 7y ago
>OTOH, any world that was inhabited by aliens would, besides within a very narrow time frame, either have advanced to a state where their world would, for sure, be unrecognizable by us, or have destroyed themselves to such an extent that we would never have known they were there. Why? It's entirely possible (also for us) that scientific and technological advancement plateaus. You get the early hanging fruit and a progress that looks like an exponential curve but turns out to be more like a sigmoid, as more advanced inventions get harder to reason for a human level intelligence, require too much energy, need resources that are depletable (minerals etc), are too complex to manufacture, etc. So there wont be any logical necessity for "a state where their world would, for sure, be unrecognizable by us". Nor it's required that they would "have destroyed themselves". >Typically human hubris, why can't we recognize the most logical explanation for so much dark matter? The wreckage and debris of a great alien war. Black matter has some physical properties. It's not just garbage we can't identify. Also how is a "great alien war" the "most logical" explanation for black matter?
- topmonk 7y ago
  > It's entirely possible (also for us) that scientific and technological advancement plateaus. If technology does plateau and did so near where we are now, it would be extremely unlikely, because it would require two unlikely but unrelated events both happening. Mathematically, you would multiply the probabilities of each together. > Also how is a "great alien war" the "most logical" explanation for black matter? It's distribution is quite odd. In some galaxies but not much in others, and tends to be around regular matter even though it there isn't much force keeping it that way.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >If technology does plateau and did so near where we are now, it would be extremely unlikely, because it would require two unlikely but unrelated events both happening. Yeah, I don't buy this argument. First, regarding "technology plateau" being unlikely, that presupposes what it oughta prove [1]. We can discuss it as a counter-assertion to mine, but it can't be part of an argument that proves that we're unlikely to be in a plateau, because that would be circular reasoning. Second, even if that "technology plateau" is low probability was a legit argument, and even given that "technology plateaus now" is also low probability, and thus their chances of happening together being even lower probability (the multiplication of those two low probabilities) -- that would just prove that "technology plateaus now" is low probability. It wouldn't mean it's impossible, much less that it's not happening. And my assumption wasn't based on probabilities, but on empirical observations. Winning the lottery is low probability. Your first script getting accepted to be made into a major movie is too. But if you have the lottery ticket in your hands, have verified the winning numbers, and you just got a call from a Hollywood director that want's to buy your script, the fact that those two events occurring together are "low probability" doesn't matter. They are reality. (Besides, for any two events with low probability that have happened in history, somebody could have made the exact same argument you've made, to "prove" that they didn't happen). Plotting the outline of inventions on a timescale, and their impact, one can see that there's a big boom in the 18th century, continues to 19th century, peaking in 20th to mid 20th century. For 60+ years we haven't found anything as big as electricity (Maxwell and co), electric light, combustion engine, telephone, television, internet, photography, AD/DA conversion, nuclear power, transistors, DNA, Quantum Mechanics, penicillin, antibiotics, Relativity, flight, plastics, rockets, etc. Even computers and the internet herald back to 30s and 60s respectively. Where are those equivalent impact theories or inventions (as opposed to mere optimizations and marginal improvements to existing theories/inventions) in the last 60 years? I'm sure you'll find a few. I doubt you'll find 1/10th as many as in, say, 1900-1950. (High impact items, equivalent to the ones listed above. Not e.g. string theory -- compared to the advent of Relativity or QM it's small incremental peanuts). [1] Of course, me saying that "technology does plateau" is also an assertion that I haven't proven. So, sure, one could argue in favor or against it. But one can't start from asserting that technology plateau is an "unlikely event" to disprove that technology plateaus, because that would be a circular argument. So at best your argument is not an induction, but just an unproved assertion itself).

xwdv 7y ago

Our mediocre world could have been a bit more interesting if we simply had a habitable moon with other beings, alien fauna, and even exotic diseases.

twic 7y ago
We did, until the dinosaurs nuked it.

mellosouls 7y ago

The article deals with The Principle of Mediocrity as applied to extra terrestrial life in an optimistic way, essentially saying we've been here before, many times, convinced of our special place and we've always been corrected by some new perspective. So, while not actually countering current challenges - eg. The Fermi Paradox - head on, the reminder was reassuring for those of us sceptical about life elsewhere, but longing to be proved wrong.

pfdietz 7y ago
The Principle of Mediocrity has also been applied to hilariously wrong results. If you go back to the early scientific age, you will find a widespread belief that the other planets in our solar system were inhabited! After all, why should the Earth be special? It was only after this was shown to be nonsense that SETI moved out to planets around other stars. What all this does, of course, is ignore anthropic selection. If life is extremely rare, then Earth will be special just by the fact we are here to be making observations. In the end, a PoM argument for intelligent life being common is just circular reasoning.

credit_guy 7y ago

I have a very boring solution to Fermi's paradox: interstellar travel is simply very hard. Beyond the reach of any civilization, no matter how technologically advanced. Or maybe, just within the reach, so that advanced civilizations will occasionally travel to neighboring stars, but this results in a very small minority of all the stars in the galaxy being populated, and we are not close to any of these. Oh, as for intergalactic travel, I'm close to 100% certain it is way beyond the capability of any civilization. It's very hard to imagine intelligent beings with an attention span of millions of years.

crazygringo 7y ago
And not just hard, but without any clear payoff. We're evolutionarily fine-tuned to live on Earth. We love a blue sky, room temperature, certain levels of gases in the atmosphere, and so on. It takes very little work to live here, relatively speaking. Living long-term in outer space and other planets means either forgoing most of the things that make people happy, or else attempting to recreate them in incredibly incredibly expensive ways that ultimately aren't as good. It's cool to dream about living under glass domes on other planets... but the reality is that after the novelty wears off after a couple of weeks, I think you'd realize you'd just rather go back to Earth. It's way nicer. "What about if we ruin Earth?" plenty of people counter. Well don't. It's a helluva lot easier to apply our intelligence to normal prosaic things here like taking care of the environment, than to building interstellar spaceships that can colonize other planets.
- scribu 7y ago
  What about the payoff of not going extinct if life on Earth gets wiped out by a commet or some other catastrophe?
  - kristianc 7y ago
    Given the last mass extinction was 65 million years ago, this might count as premature optimization.

K0SM0S 7y ago

IMHO, Science is prodigy but not magic, so when we try to explain things that are way too complex or out-of-scale (whether big or small) relatively to us, the solution space is so incredibly vast that we might as well be guessing — science lets us rule out 1% of the 'whys' and we're almost none the wiser. Consider this: - galaxies may generally follow cycles, patterns, notably depending on the activity of their supermassive blackhole (or quasar, etc); life may be peaking during a "sweet spot" in the cycle, and plummeting at other times. What may be critical is thus not only age but 'state' of the galaxy, and we might find ourselves in the beginning of such a cycle (we sure accumulate enough particularities in the topology of our local spacetime, being both rich yet calm enough, to warrant the assumption that we're currently 'privileged' on average). - We have no way to detect life in other galaxies. They could be swarmed by spaceships and interstellar spatian empires and we just wouldn't be able to determine that. Thus basing the Fermi "paradox" on such a small sample (on the order of 10⁻¹²) seems much too weak data. We simply don't know. We actually can't properly observe ours yet, especially behind the core, generally in the alignment of the disc. We are just now discovering that said disc is distorted and there are remnants of jets above/below us[1]. There are hundreds of galaxies in our local Andromeda-Triangulum region, huge gravity streams, and we've only begun to grasp that in the last few decades... It's still very, very early in our observations of the cosmos. I think it's good to ponder such questions and raise apparent "paradoxes", go science! — but to draw any conclusions based on weak data and conjecture of a perceived (read: biased) mean is, IMHO, rather foolish, way too premature at best. Not hubris but wishful thinking, belief, opinion. So let it be that, humbly, defusing the anxiety. In the grander scheme of things, we're not much better off than the Ancient Greeks when faced with this question. Give it another thousand years, and then I'd expect a whole other level of questioning. Not 10 or 20 or even 100, if we are to tackle that kind of scale — we need infrastructure for this, in space, way beyond the solar system (think telescopes, probes, not even manned missions). The ultimate problem with time is not evolution (of us, of science, of tech), it's information travel: e.g. if we were to use the thickness of the Milky Way to set up telescopes, at ~1,000 LY, it would take half that time to transmit pictures to a central aggregator. 5 centuries for your next picture, I don't know if we'll be able to commit to such transgenerational projects without huge changes in our biology (lifespan, mindset, whatever but huge, enough to make us a different species). Until we're able to do such things, grow such infrastructure, gather such meaningful data, we're just too small to even look at the cosmos. Let alone draw conclusions. We really just have to keep going at it, and it's gonna take a long, long time. [1] Contrary to the very regular spiral illustration we're acquainted to, we are now realizing the Milky Way could actually look more like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A