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“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” - Arthur C. Clarke
by 41b696ef1113 5y ago
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” - Arthur C. Clarke
- deepsun 5y agoWhy the second one is terrifying? Two possibilities exist: either aliens can reach us or they cannot. If they cannot, it's sad. If they can, they are already so advanced that they need nothing from a small blue speck of dust in the vast Space that we call Earth.
- sidpatil 5y agoIf they're that advanced, they might not even consider us to be intelligent by their standards. To them, we might appear as an ant on the sidewalk would appear to us. And as such, they might not even notice if they accidentally step on us.
- duxup 5y agoPossibly, I think more so if there are many of us specs. Having said that intelligence and curiosity go hand in hand, hard to imagine them not being somewhat interested in the specs.
- tshaddox 5y agoThere are decent arguments (though I’m not fully convinced) that human intelligence is in fact general and that there can be no agent X such that X’s intelligence is to human intelligence as human intelligence is to ant intelligence.
- causi 5y agoEven if that were the case, there could be intelligences which think so quickly that humans are still slow fools by comparison. Particularly since we know of many limits to human intelligence. For example, humans can only truly think of a couple hundred different individuals as persons, instead of just examples of the general concept of people. That's why ten people dying in a three car pileup don't make you ten times as sad as one person being hit by a car. See also, the monkeysphere or Pak Protectors. Humans also have limits in relational comprehension. For example, you can know, and he can know that you know, and she can know that he knows that you know, and I can sort of know how she knows that he knows that you know, but somewhere around there it breaks down for a human mind.
- tshaddox 5y agoI agree with that, although I think it boils down to the fact that even if human intelligence is general there is still no limit (other than the laws of physics) to how much more technologically advanced another species could be. If we believe that human intelligence is general, then we could still increase our speed and abilities with technology—we already do this with things like a pen and paper, computers, cultural ideas about collaboration, etc. I certainly think it's possible that human intelligence is general but that our total computational and creative power is so incredibly tiny compared to another species with general intelligence that the other species may not care much about our wellbeing.
- KronisLV 5y agoCare to list some or maybe link some literature? It's certainly an interesting argument to make, that's for sure! That said, if there were an intelligence at the scale of a planet (just a thought experiment, maybe like the "Planetary AC" in The Last Question by Isaac Asimov: https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html), i doubt they'd see us as much more than mold, which we'd find on a loaf of bread ourselves.
- tshaddox 5y agoThe argument I'm most familiar with comes from David Deutsch. Here's a very quick summary of the argument: https://www.bretthall.org/alien-intelligence.html https://www.bretthall.org/alien-intelligence.html
- desmosxxx 5y agoI'm highly skeptical of this argument. e.g. I don't think humans avoid killing certain species because of their intelligence relative to us, but rather some more absolute scale (e.g. feels pain, or passes the dot test, etc.) What's more common is just pure aggression or selfishness
- adrianN 5y agoThe absolute scale for other species is more like "is a pet" vs "is not a pet". Humans kill other humans without too much hesitation if they can convince themselves that those other humans are sufficiently different from their in-group.
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoParochial altruism is an adaptation to resource scarcity and danger. An advanced civilization will be less affected by such problems.
- adrianN 5y agoI think it's quite risky to assume anything about alien psychology.
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoAgnosticism is useless for the purpose of decision making, it only suggests that all decisions are equally good.
- adrianN 5y agoI suggest acting according to worst case assumptions, not weighing probabilities equally.
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoWorst case is when you choose a wrong strategy.
- theandrewbailey 5y agoAnd yet, there are humans that study ants. Wouldn't some individual from said advanced intelligence find us worthy enough to preserve and study?
- deepsun 5y agoI doubt they would "step", because what "step" would mean here? Blow up Earth? But there are so much more readily available asteroids that it's not even worth messing up with planets. On the other hand, ants are interesting, just for curiosity. We can certainly amuse and entertain, just like ants do, and we can afford leaving alone their nests, just because they don't really bother us. But if we mean stepping on a single ant, not all the ants, then it's certainly possible aliens could kill a few humans inadvertently.
- handmodel 5y agoYou would think if other advanced life existed in abundance that many of them were civilizations that started billions of years ago. If they still can't reach us - that probably means that civilizations self-destruct at a certain point or stuck in an area to be eaten by the stars there. That would likely be our fate too if it turns out moving from solar system to solar system is extremely hard.
- vl 5y agoSimple explanation is why nobody travels to the stars is that it’s extremely expensive and very useless: you can’t really exist without biome, and building out compatible biome at the far star is very, very hard.
- deepsun 5y agoI can argue it's not really that hard. We can even experiment right now to recreate it on Mars, or on Earth with Mars-like conditions (it's certainly much easier to colonize Antarctic than Mars). Just create big hermetic container, and put there minerals, bacteria and fungi. Heck, people even do it at home with big sealed glass bottles. No need to bring living biome. Just bring spores, seeds, sperm and eggs.
- vl 5y ago(As it stands now) It is a multi-generation trip. These humans need to live somewhere and eat something, thus it's logical choice just to ship biome with them. Additional advantage is that error-prone 'boot' process to built up new biome at destination is eliminated. But this is not the main point. It's still extremely expensive. Imagine that world GDP needs to be taken for few years just to build single ship. Who would agree to that in democratic society?
- deepsun 5y ago> These humans need to live somewhere and eat something No, why? Humans will travel in form of frozen sperm and eggs.
- willis936 5y agoIf they can reach us then we face an insurmountable existential threat from without. If they cannot reach us then we face an insurmountable existential threat from within.
- DesiLurker 5y agoIf they are super advanced they dont have to able to physically reach us to do serious damage. Just a targeted Gamma-Ray-Burst would do a great damage & we wont see it coming either.
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoEven if we assume that aliens have our exact mentality, we figured out to not genocide the Sentinelese. Why the aliens can't figure out as much?
- krapp 5y ago>Even if we assume that aliens have our exact mentality, we figured out to not genocide the Sentinelese. Why the aliens can't figure out as much? There is a kinship bond within members of the same species, although it isn't universal. As John Donne said, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." We're human and the Sentinelese are human, and even though we're not genociding them (mostly, I think, because they have nothing worth killing over otherwise they would have been dead a long time ago,) we're still genociding plenty of other fellow humans. We even avoid killing animals to extinction because humans share and suffer the consequences of living in a complex ecosystem with other beings. But we also cut the fins off of sharks for soup and throw them back into the water to drown. But none of those connections would exist between aliens and humans. We're not one of them, nor do we share the same biome, so our deaths might well be entirely void of meaning or consequence for them. In a Dark Forest scenario, there's little to no advantage to contact or cooperation with an alien species, and every possible advantage in sending a GRB to fry anything that so much as looks like life before it has a chance to evolve into a threat.
- tw04 5y agoBecause we can only frame things in our own view. If an alien species was that advanced, then they would either want to help us evolve to a point we were passive (which we currently are very much not) or destroy us. And to clarify by "passive" I mean becoming a species that finds a way to co-exist with other "apex predators". Our current modus operandi is that we eliminate anything that poses a serious threat to our ability to do what we want when we want with 0 repercussions. See: lions, tigers, bears, wolves, bobcats, mountain lions, etc. anywhere that humans have a meaningful presence.
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoTigers are protected species. And if wolves are a threat to us, then we are as relevant as wolves.
- deepsun 5y ago> either Your argument vastly underestimates size of the Space and the amount of goods in it. I firmly believe that the third option will take place: "no one needs to bother". Why bother destroying some little tiny pale blue dot, if your sky is literally filled with them and you can't even count them? We're so focused and enclosed our minds on our precious Earth, that we laughably think is so big and valuable.
- Larrikin 5y agoAs for possibility one... The aspect to me, that doesn't involve the traditional alien race destroys humanity, is an idea I heard in an astrophysics podcast. It is still pretty terrifying although I guess more sad. An advanced aliens visited the earth hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years ago, extracted all of the rare compound that allows for their ability to have such an advanced society capable of traveling such distances and just left. We are purposefully being ignored since it is known to the galaxy/universe that we have no way of effectively reaching or communicating with other advanced civilizations. All of the useful material was extracted so no advanced alien civilizations even have a reason to come and visit.
- King-Aaron 5y ago> they need nothing from a small blue speck of dust in the vast Space that we call Earth. Unless, of course, we turn out to be a delicious delicacy
- deepsun 5y agoThen farm it :) Why destroying the delicacy to the last bit. Or are we a farm already? :)
- King-Aaron 5y agoBig if true
- AussieWog93 5y ago>If they can, they are already so advanced that they need nothing from a small blue speck of dust in the vast Space that we call Earth. Looking back historically, many of the European powers of the 1500s-1800s were literally millennia ahead of the people they colonised in terms of technological prowess. In spite of this, indigenous ideas, beliefs and culture still had an influence on the Europeans (and if it weren't for the attitudes of the time that influence would be much greater and we'd be all the better for it). I wouldn't be surprised if Aliens with advanced technology discovering Earth found the same thing.
- deepsun 5y agoEuropean colonizers needed resources (gold, food) and territory. But that's because we have limited supply here on Earth. But in outer space, both are abundant, e.g. it's much easier to mine water or gold out of comets and asteroids, than lifting it up from a planet. If aliens are so advanced, it literally costs nothing to them to choose any other planes on the sky.
- sgt101 5y ago>Looking back historically, many of the European powers of the 1500s-1800s were literally millennia ahead of the people they colonised in terms of technological prowess. I don't think this is true. India was colonized, and it had very comparable technology - perhaps 50 or 100 years behind. There are cases of very primative people being colonised of course, but often the capabilities of other civilisations are minimised in our history - for example north american natives are seen as hunter gatherers whereas there was extensive farming and land exploitation in many places in the USA - along with pottery and settled living.
- AussieWog93 5y agoOK, perhaps I could have been a little bit more precise with my language, given this is HN, but the overall point still stands. We have hands-on experience as a species with technologically primitive societies being discovered by technologically advanced societies and going on to influence language and philosophy. Given this, I don't think it's a given that an advanced alien race would look at us as not worth their time.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoHa! You underestimate the value of our beautiful women!
- footlose_3815 5y agoif they had the capability to visit us, we wouldn’t want them here.
- MrAwesome 5y agoTraditionally, the second one is viewed as terrifying because an alien race may see us as a potential future threat. In a lot of science fiction, they see some violent/awful news from Earth indicating that we're monsters, and decide that it would be better to go ahead and exterminate us before we can do unto others as we do unto ourselves. So the thinking is less that we're a threat to them now (if they can get here, we certainly are not), but some intelligent beings may look at how we have treated one another over the last few centuries/millennia and decide that they don't want us (or any self-replicating machines we happen to plop out) roaming/colonizing/populating/enslaving/murdering/reeducating the galaxy.
- Animats 5y agoThird possibility: we're not alone in the universe but there's nobody close enough to talk to. If you really can't go faster than light, that's the most likely possibility.