4 ms·

It is typical human self-centeredness to assume we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond. It is also mathema

by blunte 5y ago

It is typical human self-centeredness to assume we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond. It is also mathematically silly to assume that of all possible beings over current universe timeline that we are the most technically advanced. We have only existed for a minuscule sliver of that timespan. That’s not to say that we are statistically likely to have been visited, however. But it is possible.

theknocker 5y ago
Way to come up with reasons you're less "self-centered" than others because you have special insight into extraterrestrials.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
But how would anyone find us? If we accept that the max speed in space is lightspeed, then we're basically hidden. Why? Most of our communication relies on radiowaves... even communication to/from space. Now looking at history, we've known and used radiowaves for maybe a 100 years, and considering the current enviromental trends, we might be using it for eg. 500 more, before we die out. Or maybe 10.000. Mathematically it doesn't really matter a lot. Now look at the waves we've been sending out... a if we assume "the world ends" in 500 years, in a million years, there will be a 600 light-year "thin" shell of a 1mio light years sphere travelling away from earth, attenuated by the square law (twice the distance, 1/4 of the power). What are the chances, that the thin shell of radiowaves hits some other culture, on some other world, in their "600 years of power", that are able to detect those waves, and actually come visit us (if we're still alive, which we're probably not). Our world might be everything to us, but in a universal scale, our world compared to the universe is like an atom to our body... utterly insignificant.
- bostonsre 5y ago
  This could explain it, on the front page of hn right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27527384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27527384 Maybe they are prepping the battlefield to exterminate some pests?
- typeformer 5y ago
  Say the chance of developing FTL travel is totally minuscule but still inevitable given a long enough time horizon . Once that technology is developed by its very essence it spreads rapidly almost like the development of the wheel.
  - krapp 5y ago
    >Once that technology is developed by its very essence it spreads rapidly almost like the development of the wheel. And the Fermi Paradox says that if it did, we would see evidence of its effects... but we don't, which imples FTL isn't even remotely possible.
    - blunte 5y ago
      But all our assumptions or beliefs about what is possible and what can/would be observable is based on our, well, current understanding of reality. Since generally speaking, humans know or understand a bit more today than they did yesterday, it seems likely that there are things that today we think we know but do not know or know incorrectly. Thus, our rules about what is observable may be flawed. We may be missing evidence of other civilizations and visitors. Given the vastness of time and space and the fact that we DO know that there is a lot that we do not know (as opposed to not knowing what we do not know), it seems more reasonable to err on the side of we-probably-don't-know.
adamredwoods 5y ago
Drake equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
mindcrime 5y ago
It is typical human self-centeredness to assume we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond. I don't get the feeling that most educated people believe that "we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond". In fact, I'd wager that a significant portion, if not a majority, of such people believe that there likely is (or was, or will be) other such intelligent / sentient life in the universe. But... what I think many (maybe most) educated people hold is that it is very unlikely that Earth is being routinely visited by alien intelligences. And I think the basis for that belief structure is rooted in the underlying physical reality of the universe, regarding distances between other worlds, and the speeds that can be attained to travel between worlds. Simply put, it appears, based on what we know today, that even at light speed, (or a very, very large fraction of light speed), it would take around hundreds of years to travel back and forth to Earth from nearby planets that are suspected of being habitable. So even in the best case, where the aliens can travel at like 0.95 of c, and happen to be located on the very nearest habitable planet, it seems likely that they would have to be both very long-lived, and very tolerant of boredom, to travel back and forth between Earth and their world. Impossible? No. Likely? Hmm... OTOH, it seems like we do keep discovering more and more new "possibly habitable worlds" and the "best case" range to such a world keeps shrinking. And there's no particular reason I know of to think that "aliens" might not live dramatically longer lives than us, and maybe they are in fact fine with multiple hundred year jaunts around the universe. Or maybe they've invented the sci-fi trope "suspended animation". So never say never, I guess.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  It's a huge, huge leap from "Unexplainable things are happening" to "These are alien spacecraft." You can take the unexplainable part and do something useful with it - like making observations public and collecting more data. The rest is a speculative hypothesis about the data. This has always been one of the biggest problems with the reaction to these phenomena. You can't stop at "Unexplainable things are happening" without being told "They can't be, because interstellar travel is impossible." That's very poor logic and equally poor science.
  - 5y ago
heresie-dabord 5y ago
The assertion that there is intelligent life elsewhere is often conflated with UFOs being evidence of such life. The assertion of a high probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere is reasonable. The presence of testimony is not evidence. People report things for many reasons. Most of the time, it is a silly bid for a moment of fame and/or it just sells news/gathers clicks in an untrustworthy economy on a slow day. One day, we ourselves may advance our own intelligence sufficiently to achieve civilisation.
ConcernedCoder 5y ago
For those of us who have seen for ourselves, not some far-off glimpse of something unidentifiable, but an up-close and personal encounter with something unexplainable, it's been more than possible, no matter how improbable, for quite some time now...
cgriswald 5y ago
I don't think you have to be particularly self-centered to entertain the idea that we might be first. Despite the 8 billion year head start an alien civilization could have if it developed at the same pace as we, just early on, we see no evidence of any aliens out there anywhere. (And, despite billions of cameras, there is no evidence of any aliens here.) We ourselves owe our existence to a chance extinction of the dominant life form on Earth 65 million years ago. Without that, our mammal ancestors would not have been able to reproduce as frequently and plentifully, which would almost certainly have slowed the development of us if it didn't rule it out outright in the timescale the Earth has left. There's no guarantee most worlds with life even ever develop multi-cellular life. It took Earth billions of years to go from single-cell to multicellular. Yes, there has been a lot of time and a lot of star systems, but there are so many things that are required, I'm not at all confident that there is intelligent life out there. Earth is a sample size of 1, and we tend to treat it as if its the norm, but that's just a sometimes-useful assumption. The reality is we might have won the universal lottery.

by blunte 5y ago

theknocker 5y ago

Way to come up with reasons you're less "self-centered" than others because you have special insight into extraterrestrials.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

But how would anyone find us? If we accept that the max speed in space is lightspeed, then we're basically hidden. Why? Most of our communication relies on radiowaves... even communication to/from space. Now looking at history, we've known and used radiowaves for maybe a 100 years, and considering the current enviromental trends, we might be using it for eg. 500 more, before we die out. Or maybe 10.000. Mathematically it doesn't really matter a lot. Now look at the waves we've been sending out... a if we assume "the world ends" in 500 years, in a million years, there will be a 600 light-year "thin" shell of a 1mio light years sphere travelling away from earth, attenuated by the square law (twice the distance, 1/4 of the power). What are the chances, that the thin shell of radiowaves hits some other culture, on some other world, in their "600 years of power", that are able to detect those waves, and actually come visit us (if we're still alive, which we're probably not). Our world might be everything to us, but in a universal scale, our world compared to the universe is like an atom to our body... utterly insignificant.

bostonsre 5y ago
This could explain it, on the front page of hn right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27527384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27527384 Maybe they are prepping the battlefield to exterminate some pests?
typeformer 5y ago
Say the chance of developing FTL travel is totally minuscule but still inevitable given a long enough time horizon . Once that technology is developed by its very essence it spreads rapidly almost like the development of the wheel.
- krapp 5y ago
  >Once that technology is developed by its very essence it spreads rapidly almost like the development of the wheel. And the Fermi Paradox says that if it did, we would see evidence of its effects... but we don't, which imples FTL isn't even remotely possible.
  - blunte 5y ago
    But all our assumptions or beliefs about what is possible and what can/would be observable is based on our, well, current understanding of reality. Since generally speaking, humans know or understand a bit more today than they did yesterday, it seems likely that there are things that today we think we know but do not know or know incorrectly. Thus, our rules about what is observable may be flawed. We may be missing evidence of other civilizations and visitors. Given the vastness of time and space and the fact that we DO know that there is a lot that we do not know (as opposed to not knowing what we do not know), it seems more reasonable to err on the side of we-probably-don't-know.

adamredwoods 5y ago

Drake equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

mindcrime 5y ago

It is typical human self-centeredness to assume we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond. I don't get the feeling that most educated people believe that "we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond". In fact, I'd wager that a significant portion, if not a majority, of such people believe that there likely is (or was, or will be) other such intelligent / sentient life in the universe. But... what I think many (maybe most) educated people hold is that it is very unlikely that Earth is being routinely visited by alien intelligences. And I think the basis for that belief structure is rooted in the underlying physical reality of the universe, regarding distances between other worlds, and the speeds that can be attained to travel between worlds. Simply put, it appears, based on what we know today, that even at light speed, (or a very, very large fraction of light speed), it would take around hundreds of years to travel back and forth to Earth from nearby planets that are suspected of being habitable. So even in the best case, where the aliens can travel at like 0.95 of c, and happen to be located on the very nearest habitable planet, it seems likely that they would have to be both very long-lived, and very tolerant of boredom, to travel back and forth between Earth and their world. Impossible? No. Likely? Hmm... OTOH, it seems like we do keep discovering more and more new "possibly habitable worlds" and the "best case" range to such a world keeps shrinking. And there's no particular reason I know of to think that "aliens" might not live dramatically longer lives than us, and maybe they are in fact fine with multiple hundred year jaunts around the universe. Or maybe they've invented the sci-fi trope "suspended animation". So never say never, I guess.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
It's a huge, huge leap from "Unexplainable things are happening" to "These are alien spacecraft." You can take the unexplainable part and do something useful with it - like making observations public and collecting more data. The rest is a speculative hypothesis about the data. This has always been one of the biggest problems with the reaction to these phenomena. You can't stop at "Unexplainable things are happening" without being told "They can't be, because interstellar travel is impossible." That's very poor logic and equally poor science.
- 5y ago

heresie-dabord 5y ago

The assertion that there is intelligent life elsewhere is often conflated with UFOs being evidence of such life. The assertion of a high probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere is reasonable. The presence of testimony is not evidence. People report things for many reasons. Most of the time, it is a silly bid for a moment of fame and/or it just sells news/gathers clicks in an untrustworthy economy on a slow day. One day, we ourselves may advance our own intelligence sufficiently to achieve civilisation.

ConcernedCoder 5y ago

For those of us who have seen for ourselves, not some far-off glimpse of something unidentifiable, but an up-close and personal encounter with something unexplainable, it's been more than possible, no matter how improbable, for quite some time now...

cgriswald 5y ago

I don't think you have to be particularly self-centered to entertain the idea that we might be first. Despite the 8 billion year head start an alien civilization could have if it developed at the same pace as we, just early on, we see no evidence of any aliens out there anywhere. (And, despite billions of cameras, there is no evidence of any aliens here.) We ourselves owe our existence to a chance extinction of the dominant life form on Earth 65 million years ago. Without that, our mammal ancestors would not have been able to reproduce as frequently and plentifully, which would almost certainly have slowed the development of us if it didn't rule it out outright in the timescale the Earth has left. There's no guarantee most worlds with life even ever develop multi-cellular life. It took Earth billions of years to go from single-cell to multicellular. Yes, there has been a lot of time and a lot of star systems, but there are so many things that are required, I'm not at all confident that there is intelligent life out there. Earth is a sample size of 1, and we tend to treat it as if its the norm, but that's just a sometimes-useful assumption. The reality is we might have won the universal lottery.