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I've never understood the position that the greatest scientific question is whether or not we're alone in the universe. Given the number of stars out there, it

I've never understood the position that the greatest scientific question is whether or not we're alone in the universe. Given the number of stars out there, it seems wildly improbable that we are alone, and if we're not then it's anyway going to be basically impossible to communicate with them due to speed of light limitations. P ?= NP is IMO way more significant for a start, to say nothing of questions about consciousness, fusion energy, ways to explore and colonise space, ...

matkoniecz 5y ago
"the greatest scientific question" is a bit pointless distinction, but it is certainly an interesting question. And putting some resources into that research is a good idea, even just for what we learned about our own planet thanks to having a different context. Or having an interesting question for people to become interested in adjacent research at least.
bnegreve 5y ago
> Given the number of stars out there, it seems wildly improbable that we are alone This tells you nothing unless you also know the probability of (intelligent) life emerging on a planet. As far as we can tell it could be very low, and earth could very well be a unique combination of factors that allows it. Remember, there are many more possible deck of 52 cards than there are planets in the universe.
- DavidSJ 5y ago
  There's also the possibility that the existence of one civilization in a cosmic neighborhood tends to preclude the emergence of other civilizations in that same neighborhood, due to the tendency of civilizations to rapidly expand and take resources that might have been used by others, before those others even get a chance to emerge. In that case we can't treat our existence as independent of the existence of other nearby civilizations.
  - hokumguru 5y ago
    What makes you think other civilizations would be focused on rapid expansion like humanity?
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
      You don't have to assume that they all do. You can assume that .1% of them do, and it works out precisely the same.
      - light_hue_1 5y ago
        Worse. von Neumann probes show that none of them can be expansionist, otherwise the galaxy would have been overrun in half a million years. So then.. maybe only the civilizations that aren't expansionist survive? Or everyone changes their mind and no one is expansionist by the time they get the right tech? Or maybe it's physically impossible to build von Neumann probes for some reason we don't yet understand? Or who knows what else. In any case, it's got to be zero in the history of our galaxy.
        cdelsolar 5y ago
        I mean, let's try to build a von Neumann probe. How? I don't believe that our knowledge will continue to increase exponentially. Hard AI may never be achievable (although von Neumann probes don't necessarily need it). In order to build a von Neumann probe, once you need the very first microchip or anything resembling one, you're screwed. Will the von Neumann probes also be able to build an entire fabrication lab?
        pharke 5y ago
        There could be good reasons we wouldn't see von Neumann probes. They could be extremely dangerous to deploy similar to the arguments that are currently being made against autonomous weapons systems. That might result in them having many built in limitations such as needing to phone back periodically or being saddled with multiple redundant systems or safeguards that would prevent them from mutating into something that could harm the originating civilization. Also don't forget that the purpose of the probes is exploration and/or resource harvesting. For exploration you only need a handful of probes at each star system and they may depart after completing their survey which would result in a very small footprint. For resource extraction you need some means of transporting the resources back to where they will be used in a timely manner which puts limits on the effective distance at which they can operate. A civilization may even decide that it's pointless to explore the entire galaxy this way since it would take millions of years to gather and transmit the information, what government do you know of that's capable of planning over that kind of timescale?
- randerson 5y ago
  Isn't the universe potentially infinite?
  - vardump 5y ago
    We don't really know. It might be. But the region we can observe is definitely finite. What we can causally affect (light cone) is a subset of that. And where we can travel given the Ultimate Technology is a small subset of the previous.
- crazypython 5y ago
  A bunch of self-replicating patterns in a physics simulation believe other self-replicating patterns must exist elsewhere.
- jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 5y ago
  > This tells you nothing unless you also know the probability of (intelligent) life emerging on a planet Life is not only probable, it's inevitable. Given the proper conditions, it's just a matter of time. And the same happens with intelligent life, it just needs more time without being hit by a meteor.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Where do you get that intelligent life is inevitable from a sample size of one?
    - splistud 5y ago
      Because we're not working from a sample size of one. But if we were, then what other possible conclusion would there be?
      - goatlover 5y ago
        We are, since Earth has the only life known in the universe to date. The other possible conclusions are any probability < 1, which means not inevitable.
    - jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 5y ago
      Life is inevitable + Evolution is a universal law = Intelligent life is inevitable Given the proper conditions, that is. A planet that is just a ball of magma won't see life (as we know it) until it cools down.
      - goatlover 5y ago
        Given the proper conditions, life might form once in a thousand planets, and intelligent life might be one in a billion. We don't know, but there's some probability for both. It could be really low, or it could be relatively high. The Rare Earth solution to the Fermi Paradox is as good a guess as any. Life of some kind might be relatively common, but intelligent life could still be really rare. We are the only species on Earth in 3.5 billion years to make radio telescopes and spacecraft. On other worlds, it might never happen because of the thousand different factors that led to hominid evolution which might be different elsewhere. For example, If the non-avian dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct from a large meteor impact, who knows whether any technological civilization would have ever formed. At any rate, mammalian evolution would have gone differently, and it's anyone's guess whether some non-hominid intelligent species would have evolved instead. They didn't during the age of the dinosaurs. We don't even know whether multicellular life is a low probability event. Maybe Cambrian explosions don't happen very often. There's no inevitability here, only unknown probabilities.
jack-bodine 5y ago
I think the question isn't whether or not we are alone, but why don't we know the answer. As you said, it's 'wildly improbable that we are alone.' So the great question is, why is the universe so quiet?
- roywiggins 5y ago
  To quote Fermi, "Where is everybody?"
  - jandrese 5y ago
    Fermi was operating under the assumption that travel between solar systems would not only be possible, but it would be desirable. The answer to the Fermi paradox might be as simple as "solar systems are too far apart".
    - gremlinsinc 5y ago
      Or we're in a simulation, and everything we perceive as "out there in the expanse of space" is just fake data like a background on a website...from a processing standpoint it'd be much easier to feed/render certain views only under observation, otherwise just nothing exists there...it's save resources for a simulation from a computing standpoint... Like in a video game where new areas are rendered as you discover them....
    - goatlover 5y ago
      That's Frank Drake's answer to the Fermi Paradox. He doesn't think it is a paradox, because he thinks it's just a matter of time before SETI makes a detection. It's just that the search needs to be thorough enough since the aliens stick to their solar systems. Jill Tartar has talked about how we would need to think about investing in a powerful radio beacon for 60,000 years if we wanted other aliens to know about us. That gives one an ideal of the scale of time and distance SETI is dealing with, assuming their assumptions are more realistic than Fermi's was.
  - splistud 5y ago
    Not as frequently asked, "when was everybody?"
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
Given that we haven't even done a thorough search of a single planet in our own solar system yet(we're only beginning to scratch the surface on Mars), these sort of articles should be taken with a giant grain of salt. They failed to detect megastructures and radio waves on certain frequencies. Given these metrics life on earth would have been entirely undetected until the last ~100 years despite life having existed here for billions of years. What if aquatic life is the norm in the universe, and we are outliers? Perhaps there are millions of super-intelligent whale-like species out there. Our current search methods would detect nothing.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  I’m afraid that whales are precisely as smart as they need to be to strain krill, navigate, and reproduce.
  - Razengan 5y ago
    What about humans? What ultimately have we achieved beyond reproducing?
    - RalfWausE 5y ago
      We are f...ing good at killing ;-)
    - Razengan 5y ago
      No really, what have we done that will outlast us or matters to anyone but us? (on geological scales let alone cosmic)
      - JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
        Concrete.
  - StanislavPetrov 5y ago
    How smart could whales become if they had a billion more years to evolve without having their environment destroyed by humans or some other "smart" species?
light_hue_1 5y ago
There are really really good reasons why our status in the universe matters so much and they all have to do with what is next for us as a species. In part this has to do with the Fermi Paradox. Are we alone because we're in a protected garden? Alone because the half-life of civilizations is very low? Alone because there is a firewall that takes out all civilizations at a particular level of development (like say climate change)? Maybe if we learn about the firewall we can do something about it? The list of answers to the Fermi Paradox is immense and many of those answers could make a concrete difference to us. Who is to say that we can't communicate? Some theories of physics might allow for wormholes or something like that (this is not likely at all due to time travel paradoxes, but who knows). Even just learning about another civilization and measuring the rough properties of the atmosphere of their planet could be a revolution. If we discover that the atmosphere is totally unlike what we have, that a totally new kind of life is possible, we could open up entire new fields of science. The most obvious way to communicate is to put out basic facts about the universe, like say the energy states of your favorite atoms or something like that. What if their version of the basic facts is thousands of years ahead of ours? Physics works off of very little evidence, a small nudge toward the right answer is all that it would take to change everything. Even if we can't communicate in a lifetime or two, maybe we can communicate over the span of 200 years. Imagine what could be learned through an exchange with a culture that has followed a totally technological and scientific arc. We could be in a local minima missing really important things about the universe. We're in a pretty crappy place when it comes to AI. We know how to do some things, but the overall picture of figuring out what intelligence is, we're in the dark about that. We don't even know how to ask the right questions. Access to a totally different intelligence would change that completely. I could go on from fields like linguistics, to psychology, everything that communicating with an alien species touches upon would be revolutionized. Imagine how chemistry would change if we knew for sure that ammonia-based life was possible? We would invest massive sums and figure it all out, and all it would take is a bit of knowledge about the gross statistics of their atmosphere. And we're just scratching the surface.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  Most of that can be said about whales, but we still don’t see many whales-motivated scientific research being carried out even if there’s a possibility we could communicate. Who’s to say aliens would be any different?
gspr 5y ago
> I've never understood the position that the greatest scientific question is whether or not we're alone in the universe. FWIW, the actual paper does not put it like that. It instead calls it "one of the most profound and fundamental questions posed to science". That seems reasonable. > Given the number of stars out there, it seems wildly improbable that we are alone, and if we're not then it's anyway going to be basically impossible to communicate with them due to speed of light limitations. Don't you find it fascinating that we think it's wildly improbable that we are alone, yet have not been able to find other life? I certainly do. Ignoring the huge philosophical implications intelligent life elsewhere would have, it would also provide some very useful bounds on a bunch of the quantities involved in e.g. Drake's estimate. It would also offer some clues as to whether or not a great filter is likely, and wheter or not it lies ahead of us or behind us. Surely massively important! > P ?= NP is IMO way more significant for a start Important, yes, but not a scientific question (it is a mathematical one). > to say nothing of questions about consciousness, fusion energy, ways to explore and colonise space, ... A complete understanding of consciousness would also be monumentally important, I agree. But fusion and space exploration? Great, but surely "just" (huge and important) technological advances, rather than fundamental scientific questions?
- teachingassist 5y ago
  > Don't you find it fascinating that we think it's wildly improbable that we are alone, yet have not been able to find other life? I certainly do. Given that we can scarcely communicate with a chimpanzee, our nearest living relative, nor fully comprehend how any other species on Earth communicates (those which evolved under the same conditions that we did), I find it totally unsurprising that we're unable to communicate with aliens.
  - aksss 5y ago
    Humans have determined that chimpanzees and other species do communicate, and in many cases how they communicate, even if those who study such things don't understand the communications in anything but the broadest sense. Being able to communicate with aliens isn't really what we're asking for, but merely detecting that communications are happening at all.
kingsuper20 5y ago
>I've never understood the position that the greatest scientific question is whether or not we're alone in the universe. That is an odd thing. The one that I'm curious about is the drum-banging for spotting (probably highly simple) lifeforms on places like Mars. Given the ability of rocks to hop planets, it's a totally reasonable thing to find I think as you don't even need from-scratch bootstrapping. I expect it's partly a product of PR departments as you have to keep the public engaged, not unlike the occasional production of aesthetically pleasing images. It seems to me that it's enough to push for off-planet permanent human settlement. Heck, given the long-term possibilities of AI and von Neumann probes, distance isn't even an unassailable problem, you just have to change your time horizons.

matkoniecz 5y ago

"the greatest scientific question" is a bit pointless distinction, but it is certainly an interesting question. And putting some resources into that research is a good idea, even just for what we learned about our own planet thanks to having a different context. Or having an interesting question for people to become interested in adjacent research at least.

bnegreve 5y ago

> Given the number of stars out there, it seems wildly improbable that we are alone This tells you nothing unless you also know the probability of (intelligent) life emerging on a planet. As far as we can tell it could be very low, and earth could very well be a unique combination of factors that allows it. Remember, there are many more possible deck of 52 cards than there are planets in the universe.

DavidSJ 5y ago
There's also the possibility that the existence of one civilization in a cosmic neighborhood tends to preclude the emergence of other civilizations in that same neighborhood, due to the tendency of civilizations to rapidly expand and take resources that might have been used by others, before those others even get a chance to emerge. In that case we can't treat our existence as independent of the existence of other nearby civilizations.
- hokumguru 5y ago
  What makes you think other civilizations would be focused on rapid expansion like humanity?
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    You don't have to assume that they all do. You can assume that .1% of them do, and it works out precisely the same.
    - light_hue_1 5y ago
      Worse. von Neumann probes show that none of them can be expansionist, otherwise the galaxy would have been overrun in half a million years. So then.. maybe only the civilizations that aren't expansionist survive? Or everyone changes their mind and no one is expansionist by the time they get the right tech? Or maybe it's physically impossible to build von Neumann probes for some reason we don't yet understand? Or who knows what else. In any case, it's got to be zero in the history of our galaxy.
      - cdelsolar 5y ago
        I mean, let's try to build a von Neumann probe. How? I don't believe that our knowledge will continue to increase exponentially. Hard AI may never be achievable (although von Neumann probes don't necessarily need it). In order to build a von Neumann probe, once you need the very first microchip or anything resembling one, you're screwed. Will the von Neumann probes also be able to build an entire fabrication lab?
      - pharke 5y ago
        There could be good reasons we wouldn't see von Neumann probes. They could be extremely dangerous to deploy similar to the arguments that are currently being made against autonomous weapons systems. That might result in them having many built in limitations such as needing to phone back periodically or being saddled with multiple redundant systems or safeguards that would prevent them from mutating into something that could harm the originating civilization. Also don't forget that the purpose of the probes is exploration and/or resource harvesting. For exploration you only need a handful of probes at each star system and they may depart after completing their survey which would result in a very small footprint. For resource extraction you need some means of transporting the resources back to where they will be used in a timely manner which puts limits on the effective distance at which they can operate. A civilization may even decide that it's pointless to explore the entire galaxy this way since it would take millions of years to gather and transmit the information, what government do you know of that's capable of planning over that kind of timescale?
randerson 5y ago
Isn't the universe potentially infinite?
- vardump 5y ago
  We don't really know. It might be. But the region we can observe is definitely finite. What we can causally affect (light cone) is a subset of that. And where we can travel given the Ultimate Technology is a small subset of the previous.
crazypython 5y ago
A bunch of self-replicating patterns in a physics simulation believe other self-replicating patterns must exist elsewhere.
jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 5y ago
> This tells you nothing unless you also know the probability of (intelligent) life emerging on a planet Life is not only probable, it's inevitable. Given the proper conditions, it's just a matter of time. And the same happens with intelligent life, it just needs more time without being hit by a meteor.
- goatlover 5y ago
  Where do you get that intelligent life is inevitable from a sample size of one?
  - splistud 5y ago
    Because we're not working from a sample size of one. But if we were, then what other possible conclusion would there be?
    - goatlover 5y ago
      We are, since Earth has the only life known in the universe to date. The other possible conclusions are any probability < 1, which means not inevitable.
  - jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 5y ago
    Life is inevitable + Evolution is a universal law = Intelligent life is inevitable Given the proper conditions, that is. A planet that is just a ball of magma won't see life (as we know it) until it cools down.
    - goatlover 5y ago
      Given the proper conditions, life might form once in a thousand planets, and intelligent life might be one in a billion. We don't know, but there's some probability for both. It could be really low, or it could be relatively high. The Rare Earth solution to the Fermi Paradox is as good a guess as any. Life of some kind might be relatively common, but intelligent life could still be really rare. We are the only species on Earth in 3.5 billion years to make radio telescopes and spacecraft. On other worlds, it might never happen because of the thousand different factors that led to hominid evolution which might be different elsewhere. For example, If the non-avian dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct from a large meteor impact, who knows whether any technological civilization would have ever formed. At any rate, mammalian evolution would have gone differently, and it's anyone's guess whether some non-hominid intelligent species would have evolved instead. They didn't during the age of the dinosaurs. We don't even know whether multicellular life is a low probability event. Maybe Cambrian explosions don't happen very often. There's no inevitability here, only unknown probabilities.

jack-bodine 5y ago

I think the question isn't whether or not we are alone, but why don't we know the answer. As you said, it's 'wildly improbable that we are alone.' So the great question is, why is the universe so quiet?

roywiggins 5y ago
To quote Fermi, "Where is everybody?"
- jandrese 5y ago
  Fermi was operating under the assumption that travel between solar systems would not only be possible, but it would be desirable. The answer to the Fermi paradox might be as simple as "solar systems are too far apart".
  - gremlinsinc 5y ago
    Or we're in a simulation, and everything we perceive as "out there in the expanse of space" is just fake data like a background on a website...from a processing standpoint it'd be much easier to feed/render certain views only under observation, otherwise just nothing exists there...it's save resources for a simulation from a computing standpoint... Like in a video game where new areas are rendered as you discover them....
  - goatlover 5y ago
    That's Frank Drake's answer to the Fermi Paradox. He doesn't think it is a paradox, because he thinks it's just a matter of time before SETI makes a detection. It's just that the search needs to be thorough enough since the aliens stick to their solar systems. Jill Tartar has talked about how we would need to think about investing in a powerful radio beacon for 60,000 years if we wanted other aliens to know about us. That gives one an ideal of the scale of time and distance SETI is dealing with, assuming their assumptions are more realistic than Fermi's was.
- splistud 5y ago
  Not as frequently asked, "when was everybody?"

StanislavPetrov 5y ago

Given that we haven't even done a thorough search of a single planet in our own solar system yet(we're only beginning to scratch the surface on Mars), these sort of articles should be taken with a giant grain of salt. They failed to detect megastructures and radio waves on certain frequencies. Given these metrics life on earth would have been entirely undetected until the last ~100 years despite life having existed here for billions of years. What if aquatic life is the norm in the universe, and we are outliers? Perhaps there are millions of super-intelligent whale-like species out there. Our current search methods would detect nothing.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
I’m afraid that whales are precisely as smart as they need to be to strain krill, navigate, and reproduce.
- Razengan 5y ago
  What about humans? What ultimately have we achieved beyond reproducing?
  - RalfWausE 5y ago
    We are f...ing good at killing ;-)
  - Razengan 5y ago
    No really, what have we done that will outlast us or matters to anyone but us? (on geological scales let alone cosmic)
    - JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
      Concrete.
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  How smart could whales become if they had a billion more years to evolve without having their environment destroyed by humans or some other "smart" species?

light_hue_1 5y ago

There are really really good reasons why our status in the universe matters so much and they all have to do with what is next for us as a species. In part this has to do with the Fermi Paradox. Are we alone because we're in a protected garden? Alone because the half-life of civilizations is very low? Alone because there is a firewall that takes out all civilizations at a particular level of development (like say climate change)? Maybe if we learn about the firewall we can do something about it? The list of answers to the Fermi Paradox is immense and many of those answers could make a concrete difference to us. Who is to say that we can't communicate? Some theories of physics might allow for wormholes or something like that (this is not likely at all due to time travel paradoxes, but who knows). Even just learning about another civilization and measuring the rough properties of the atmosphere of their planet could be a revolution. If we discover that the atmosphere is totally unlike what we have, that a totally new kind of life is possible, we could open up entire new fields of science. The most obvious way to communicate is to put out basic facts about the universe, like say the energy states of your favorite atoms or something like that. What if their version of the basic facts is thousands of years ahead of ours? Physics works off of very little evidence, a small nudge toward the right answer is all that it would take to change everything. Even if we can't communicate in a lifetime or two, maybe we can communicate over the span of 200 years. Imagine what could be learned through an exchange with a culture that has followed a totally technological and scientific arc. We could be in a local minima missing really important things about the universe. We're in a pretty crappy place when it comes to AI. We know how to do some things, but the overall picture of figuring out what intelligence is, we're in the dark about that. We don't even know how to ask the right questions. Access to a totally different intelligence would change that completely. I could go on from fields like linguistics, to psychology, everything that communicating with an alien species touches upon would be revolutionized. Imagine how chemistry would change if we knew for sure that ammonia-based life was possible? We would invest massive sums and figure it all out, and all it would take is a bit of knowledge about the gross statistics of their atmosphere. And we're just scratching the surface.

ironmagma 5y ago
Most of that can be said about whales, but we still don’t see many whales-motivated scientific research being carried out even if there’s a possibility we could communicate. Who’s to say aliens would be any different?

gspr 5y ago

> I've never understood the position that the greatest scientific question is whether or not we're alone in the universe. FWIW, the actual paper does not put it like that. It instead calls it "one of the most profound and fundamental questions posed to science". That seems reasonable. > Given the number of stars out there, it seems wildly improbable that we are alone, and if we're not then it's anyway going to be basically impossible to communicate with them due to speed of light limitations. Don't you find it fascinating that we think it's wildly improbable that we are alone, yet have not been able to find other life? I certainly do. Ignoring the huge philosophical implications intelligent life elsewhere would have, it would also provide some very useful bounds on a bunch of the quantities involved in e.g. Drake's estimate. It would also offer some clues as to whether or not a great filter is likely, and wheter or not it lies ahead of us or behind us. Surely massively important! > P ?= NP is IMO way more significant for a start Important, yes, but not a scientific question (it is a mathematical one). > to say nothing of questions about consciousness, fusion energy, ways to explore and colonise space, ... A complete understanding of consciousness would also be monumentally important, I agree. But fusion and space exploration? Great, but surely "just" (huge and important) technological advances, rather than fundamental scientific questions?

teachingassist 5y ago
> Don't you find it fascinating that we think it's wildly improbable that we are alone, yet have not been able to find other life? I certainly do. Given that we can scarcely communicate with a chimpanzee, our nearest living relative, nor fully comprehend how any other species on Earth communicates (those which evolved under the same conditions that we did), I find it totally unsurprising that we're unable to communicate with aliens.
- aksss 5y ago
  Humans have determined that chimpanzees and other species do communicate, and in many cases how they communicate, even if those who study such things don't understand the communications in anything but the broadest sense. Being able to communicate with aliens isn't really what we're asking for, but merely detecting that communications are happening at all.

kingsuper20 5y ago

>I've never understood the position that the greatest scientific question is whether or not we're alone in the universe. That is an odd thing. The one that I'm curious about is the drum-banging for spotting (probably highly simple) lifeforms on places like Mars. Given the ability of rocks to hop planets, it's a totally reasonable thing to find I think as you don't even need from-scratch bootstrapping. I expect it's partly a product of PR departments as you have to keep the public engaged, not unlike the occasional production of aesthetically pleasing images. It seems to me that it's enough to push for off-planet permanent human settlement. Heck, given the long-term possibilities of AI and von Neumann probes, distance isn't even an unassailable problem, you just have to change your time horizons.