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The problem with the dark forest / everyone is hiding explanation is that you can't hide. For over a billion years Earth has been broadcasting a very powerful

by api 4y ago

The problem with the dark forest / everyone is hiding explanation is that you can't hide. For over a billion years Earth has been broadcasting a very powerful signal screaming "likely biosphere here" in the form of its albedo spectrum. It's a wet, warm planet that for almost two billion years has had a heavily oxidizing atmosphere. There are few natural explanations for that that don't involve life, since it strongly implies that something is doing work to maintain an energy differential. If there are "reaper" aliens around in any form, it would be logical for them to start firing relativistic kinetic weapons at any candidate biosphere immediately. Why wait for intelligence to even get a foothold? Just whack any potential competitor while it's nothing but goop and creepy crawlies. So if there are ancient powerful hostile or "grabby" aliens around, we should not be here. It's a pretty powerful argument for one of: (1) We are very early. (2) Intelligent complex life is extremely rare, occurring less often than e.g. once per galaxy per ten billion years. (A bit different from being very early since it implies we might never find another even after billions of years.) (3) Something weird is going on, e.g. our solar system is being kept as a wildlife preserve and/or there is a "prime directive" or something. (4) Something even weirder is going on, which explodes into a long tail of possibilities. Maybe we are wrong about our basic cosmology. Maybe continued advancement in intelligence leads places very different from space flight such as traversing dimensions or converting oneself into some more exotic form invisible to us (like the "ascension" trope in sci-fi). ... and so on.

ajuc 4y ago
(5) the great filter is between simple life and complex life - so it's not worth it to preemptively strike at every complex life candidate because there's too many candidates
bsenftner 4y ago
As good an explanation as any: I like to imagine God is really lonely, and we are in a specifically constructed empty universe with one life bearing planet for the purpose of evolving God a peer. It's lonely on top, ya see.
- tsol 4y ago
  Why is this greyed out? If you say aliens got lonely on here people will engage you, but if you say God got lonely you get downvoted. Honestly though, these discussions are talking about things past our knowledge. An intellectually honest discussion should be able to include this stuff. It reminds me of people who hate the idea that a omnipotent being created us, but are fascinated by the idea a hyperintelligent being simulated us
  - bsenftner 4y ago
    Exactly, if we're discussing evolution why does that discussion become non-intellectual and unworthy when including the obvious endgame of evolution?
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      Evolution has no endgame, so the precise moment you assume any kind of endgame (especially an "obvious" endgame), the discussion becomes non-intellectual and unworthy. Also, if you want to discuss what God is or wants of us, pick a God and we can discuss, based on holy books and revelations, what His/Her/its intentions may be. Just saying "God" doesn't mean anything at all - there is little similarity to be found for example between YHWH, Brahman, and Amaterasu that could see a meaningful discussion.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Aliens are, by definition, hypothetical beings that are similar to us in obeying the same laws of physics. God is, by definition, a transcendental being which exists beyond the laws of physics. These two ideas are fundamentally different. In particular, speculating about what God may want (even if you believe one exists) is entirely futile, as it could want anything at all. In contrast, there are constraints on what an alien species could possibly be like - for example, we know with essentially absolute certainty that an alien species wouldn't eat quarks, whereas there is no reason to say that God wouldn't consume quarks. Now of course, depending on your particular religion, you may have some things that you believe God told you explicitly. In no major religion though is God just lonely. For example, in Christianity God created us and He only wants us to follow His laws; the notion that we could evolve to become akin to God is heretical - God is only one, and He demands worship and love, not emulation. For another example, in some versions of Hinduism, God (Brahman) encompasses everything, and we are already God - we can grow to understand this thing, but the very notion of a second God is entirely nonsensical, as God is already literally everything.
chewxy 4y ago
"biosphere" is one heck of a bias. We only started sending out low entropy information out into outer space in the past 120 years or so
- krisoft 4y ago
  > "biosphere" is one heck of a bias. What is the bias here? Who is biased, the "reaper" aliens? The commenter you are responding to? Can you expand your comment a bit? > We only started sending out low entropy information out into outer space in the past 120 years or so Humans yes. But our planet looks unmistakably like it can have life. That is the signal.
giantrobot 4y ago
> (2) Intelligent complex life is extremely rare, occurring less often than e.g. once per galaxy per ten billion years. (A bit different from being very early since it implies we might never find another even after billions of years.) I think a more practical take on this isn't life is rare it's that both space and time are big. Two civilizations existing simultaneously but 1/100th a galaxy apart are still a thousand light years apart. Each would see the other's home system as one of billions of observation candidates. Even with massive SETI operations by both civilizations the odds of those two civilizations discovering one another are pretty small. Even if we posit advanced civilizations are more abundant, separated by only a few hundred light years, the odds are still very small any two civilizations will find each other. Detecting "leaked" radio emissions just isn't a thing that can happen. The inverse square law make this plain. If we placed our most sensitive radio telescopes on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system we wouldn't be able to detect Earth's radio emissions save for rare blips where a powerful radar system's beam happened to point directly at Alpha Centauri. Earth would need a system of persistent ASETI transmitters aimed at specific stars to have a chance to have emissions be detected by civilizations there. There don't need to really posit anything weirder than space is fucking huge to explain the Fermi paradox.
- Snowflame 4y ago
  There are some science-y reasons in support of (2), though. Granted, we are biased by being familiar with human life, of course. Consider this: phosphorus is a fairly rare element out there. It's comparatively common on Earth vs. other parts of the galaxy, and "more common" is still somewhat rare on Earth. Yet, Earth life has gone out of its way to use phosphorus for some fairly key parts of itself (DNA!) despite its rarity. Maybe it's path dependence / weird luck, but maybe phosphorus really is that much better than other elements for such purposes. If phosphorus really is both very rare galactically AND key for the development of advanced life, that really does argue in favor of (2), that Earth just hit the cosmic jackpot for sustainability of life. (High phosphorus scarcity would also make interstellar colonization by humans a non-starter... we'd be stuck using robots to explore at best.)

by api 4y ago

ajuc 4y ago

(5) the great filter is between simple life and complex life - so it's not worth it to preemptively strike at every complex life candidate because there's too many candidates

bsenftner 4y ago

As good an explanation as any: I like to imagine God is really lonely, and we are in a specifically constructed empty universe with one life bearing planet for the purpose of evolving God a peer. It's lonely on top, ya see.

tsol 4y ago
Why is this greyed out? If you say aliens got lonely on here people will engage you, but if you say God got lonely you get downvoted. Honestly though, these discussions are talking about things past our knowledge. An intellectually honest discussion should be able to include this stuff. It reminds me of people who hate the idea that a omnipotent being created us, but are fascinated by the idea a hyperintelligent being simulated us
- bsenftner 4y ago
  Exactly, if we're discussing evolution why does that discussion become non-intellectual and unworthy when including the obvious endgame of evolution?
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Evolution has no endgame, so the precise moment you assume any kind of endgame (especially an "obvious" endgame), the discussion becomes non-intellectual and unworthy. Also, if you want to discuss what God is or wants of us, pick a God and we can discuss, based on holy books and revelations, what His/Her/its intentions may be. Just saying "God" doesn't mean anything at all - there is little similarity to be found for example between YHWH, Brahman, and Amaterasu that could see a meaningful discussion.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Aliens are, by definition, hypothetical beings that are similar to us in obeying the same laws of physics. God is, by definition, a transcendental being which exists beyond the laws of physics. These two ideas are fundamentally different. In particular, speculating about what God may want (even if you believe one exists) is entirely futile, as it could want anything at all. In contrast, there are constraints on what an alien species could possibly be like - for example, we know with essentially absolute certainty that an alien species wouldn't eat quarks, whereas there is no reason to say that God wouldn't consume quarks. Now of course, depending on your particular religion, you may have some things that you believe God told you explicitly. In no major religion though is God just lonely. For example, in Christianity God created us and He only wants us to follow His laws; the notion that we could evolve to become akin to God is heretical - God is only one, and He demands worship and love, not emulation. For another example, in some versions of Hinduism, God (Brahman) encompasses everything, and we are already God - we can grow to understand this thing, but the very notion of a second God is entirely nonsensical, as God is already literally everything.

chewxy 4y ago

"biosphere" is one heck of a bias. We only started sending out low entropy information out into outer space in the past 120 years or so

krisoft 4y ago
> "biosphere" is one heck of a bias. What is the bias here? Who is biased, the "reaper" aliens? The commenter you are responding to? Can you expand your comment a bit? > We only started sending out low entropy information out into outer space in the past 120 years or so Humans yes. But our planet looks unmistakably like it can have life. That is the signal.

giantrobot 4y ago

> (2) Intelligent complex life is extremely rare, occurring less often than e.g. once per galaxy per ten billion years. (A bit different from being very early since it implies we might never find another even after billions of years.) I think a more practical take on this isn't life is rare it's that both space and time are big. Two civilizations existing simultaneously but 1/100th a galaxy apart are still a thousand light years apart. Each would see the other's home system as one of billions of observation candidates. Even with massive SETI operations by both civilizations the odds of those two civilizations discovering one another are pretty small. Even if we posit advanced civilizations are more abundant, separated by only a few hundred light years, the odds are still very small any two civilizations will find each other. Detecting "leaked" radio emissions just isn't a thing that can happen. The inverse square law make this plain. If we placed our most sensitive radio telescopes on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system we wouldn't be able to detect Earth's radio emissions save for rare blips where a powerful radar system's beam happened to point directly at Alpha Centauri. Earth would need a system of persistent ASETI transmitters aimed at specific stars to have a chance to have emissions be detected by civilizations there. There don't need to really posit anything weirder than space is fucking huge to explain the Fermi paradox.

Snowflame 4y ago
There are some science-y reasons in support of (2), though. Granted, we are biased by being familiar with human life, of course. Consider this: phosphorus is a fairly rare element out there. It's comparatively common on Earth vs. other parts of the galaxy, and "more common" is still somewhat rare on Earth. Yet, Earth life has gone out of its way to use phosphorus for some fairly key parts of itself (DNA!) despite its rarity. Maybe it's path dependence / weird luck, but maybe phosphorus really is that much better than other elements for such purposes. If phosphorus really is both very rare galactically AND key for the development of advanced life, that really does argue in favor of (2), that Earth just hit the cosmic jackpot for sustainability of life. (High phosphorus scarcity would also make interstellar colonization by humans a non-starter... we'd be stuck using robots to explore at best.)