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Thanks to technology we can perceive many things that we have no evolutionary reason to be able to perceive. Our current physics also doesn't seem to be _so_ wr

Thanks to technology we can perceive many things that we have no evolutionary reason to be able to perceive. Our current physics also doesn't seem to be _so_ wrong that it allows much room for technological societies to hide from our instruments.

indymike 4y ago
> Thanks to technology we can perceive many things that we have no evolutionary reason to be able to perceive. We might be able to perceive, but that doesn't mean we understand what we see. Every time I engage with medicine, I learn how little humanity actually knows, despite all the technology. We still don't understand what causes many diseases, or how to heal many wounds. How would we find completely alien life when we can't even find the cause of a disease that plagues 23% of the adult population?
- adrianN 4y ago
  The same way we find the disease: by the effects the aliens have on their surroundings.
  - indymike 4y ago
    You are missing the point, in our arrogance to believe we understand things, we do not really understand them. The drive to understand more is powerful, and has lead to huge advances, but we still have a long way to go.
    - adrianN 4y ago
      I agree that we still have a very long way to go. I disagree that the areas of the universe that are still mysterious to us are likely to be hiding places for aliens.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > We still don't understand what causes many diseases, or how to heal many wounds. Right, but we still know the diseases and wounds exist.
  - Supermancho 4y ago
    Sometimes, you have to wait until you're dead or dying to know they exist. I'm not convinced that humans have mastered perception after mastering writing 5 thousand years ago.
- ben_w 4y ago
  You're partially right, but missing something important. Where you're correct: Aliens that are only found on planets would be almost impossible to spot, and even if we look at them and see the consequences of their existence on their atmosphere we may interpret that as non biological in origin. What you're missing: However, if they are expansionist and can build space habitats and automation of the sort we have reason to believe is possible, the question is "why are there visible stars? Why are they not all already surrounded in Dyson swarms?" which is hard to miss regardless of underlying chemistry or biology.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    So far as we can currently understand, it seems that about 96% of the matter-energy of the universe is stuff that we cannot see, detect, or explain. Dark matter/energy. There's more than enough room for fanciful explanations.
    - db48x 4y ago
      Except that dark matter doesn't even interact with itself. Particles of dark matter just pass right through each other rather than clumping together to form complex molecules, rocks, planets, etc.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      A Dyson swarm emits approximately same energy as its host star, just in infrared. Dark Matter could, I guess, be Matryoshka brains organised carefully to not hit each other by their keepers, so long as they are also actively "gardening" what we can see so they never ever get Dyson-d.
Loquebantur 4y ago
Wrong isn't the same as incomplete and we have a weird tendency to overlook things, we find then "obvious" afterwards. Things we do not easily perceive are such that are too fast, too small, too high energy generally and, most importantly, too unexpected. Further, you can hide in plain sight: you only have to look "unbelievable" (for example), so society will not transmit the information of your sighting. You can hide where (nearly) no one is looking as well: deep under the ocean, far below the surface, high in the sky, etc. Most likely, this isn't exhaustive. Places we don't know about are perfect for hiding ,-)
bioemerl 4y ago
Yeah, we are at the point that we are getting data on black holes colliding millions of light years away from us based on the deviation of a Lazer across miles over the width of a few atoms. To suggest the universe is full of life and we simply can't see it? I don't buy it. I think it's more likely that the signals just aren't there, because they are... Not hidden, but are too weak and crossing too grand a distance to be detected.
colordrops 4y ago
There are plenty of things that we are aware of that are currently impenetrable by our instruments, such as the inside of black holes or the past. And who knows what we aren't aware of. Is there any reason to believe that physics is a complete description of reality? Or even a significant slice? It could be just describing a very tiny human centric slice of all that exists.
- db48x 4y ago
  Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up 95% of the Universe (the rest is all the normal matter and energy in all of the galaxies put together). Our understanding of physics is both very complete, and contains large unknowns. You might imagine that there are a lot of aliens hiding in the Dark Matter, but as far as we can tell Dark Matter particles pass right through each other, as well as normal matter. They cannot clump together to make stars or planets or life forms the way normal matter can. Thus all aliens would be made of normal matter like us.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    > Our understanding of physics is both very complete Citation please.
    - db48x 4y ago
      I’m sure I could find some, but I haven’t bothered. We know that our current understanding of physics is incomplete (various niggling little problems with the Standard Model, the whole Dark Matter question etc), but these are surprisingly small problems. We only know about these problems because of the extreme sensitivity of our instruments. The new physics that will eventually fill these gaps will answer fascinating questions, but won’t change anything about our understanding of life. For example, petaquarks were first observed in the early 2000’s, and the Large Hadron Collider provided additional evidence for their existence. But they’re so unstable that they can never stick around long enough to participate in any life processes, so as far as our understanding of aliens goes they are irrelevant. Maybe they exist naturally inside the cores of neutron stars, but that’s not really a very habitable environment. Similarly, however we resolve the apparent paradoxes in our understanding of gravity and quantum mechanics won’t matter at all to the study of life. Gravity is so weak that it is essentially irrelevant in any sort of chemical system, even when quantum mechanics is necessary to understand the fine details.
ben_w 4y ago
> Our current physics also doesn't seem to be _so_ wrong that it allows much room for technological societies to hide from our instruments. Perhaps. An idea I first heard from my brother a decade or two ago was that the Dark Energy expansion of the universe might be the waste product of all the aliens who figured out some way to trick the laws of physics into giving them free energy. (Obviously that's more of a sci-fi plot device than science at this point, take it with the due level of seriousness).
- cpeterso 4y ago
  That's pretty much the plot of Isaac Asimov's novel "The Gods Themselves". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves
  - ben_w 4y ago
    He probably read it, though that novel predates the discovery of Dark Energy.

indymike 4y ago

> Thanks to technology we can perceive many things that we have no evolutionary reason to be able to perceive. We might be able to perceive, but that doesn't mean we understand what we see. Every time I engage with medicine, I learn how little humanity actually knows, despite all the technology. We still don't understand what causes many diseases, or how to heal many wounds. How would we find completely alien life when we can't even find the cause of a disease that plagues 23% of the adult population?

adrianN 4y ago
The same way we find the disease: by the effects the aliens have on their surroundings.
- indymike 4y ago
  You are missing the point, in our arrogance to believe we understand things, we do not really understand them. The drive to understand more is powerful, and has lead to huge advances, but we still have a long way to go.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    I agree that we still have a very long way to go. I disagree that the areas of the universe that are still mysterious to us are likely to be hiding places for aliens.
ceejayoz 4y ago
> We still don't understand what causes many diseases, or how to heal many wounds. Right, but we still know the diseases and wounds exist.
- Supermancho 4y ago
  Sometimes, you have to wait until you're dead or dying to know they exist. I'm not convinced that humans have mastered perception after mastering writing 5 thousand years ago.
ben_w 4y ago
You're partially right, but missing something important. Where you're correct: Aliens that are only found on planets would be almost impossible to spot, and even if we look at them and see the consequences of their existence on their atmosphere we may interpret that as non biological in origin. What you're missing: However, if they are expansionist and can build space habitats and automation of the sort we have reason to believe is possible, the question is "why are there visible stars? Why are they not all already surrounded in Dyson swarms?" which is hard to miss regardless of underlying chemistry or biology.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  So far as we can currently understand, it seems that about 96% of the matter-energy of the universe is stuff that we cannot see, detect, or explain. Dark matter/energy. There's more than enough room for fanciful explanations.
  - db48x 4y ago
    Except that dark matter doesn't even interact with itself. Particles of dark matter just pass right through each other rather than clumping together to form complex molecules, rocks, planets, etc.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    A Dyson swarm emits approximately same energy as its host star, just in infrared. Dark Matter could, I guess, be Matryoshka brains organised carefully to not hit each other by their keepers, so long as they are also actively "gardening" what we can see so they never ever get Dyson-d.

Loquebantur 4y ago

Wrong isn't the same as incomplete and we have a weird tendency to overlook things, we find then "obvious" afterwards. Things we do not easily perceive are such that are too fast, too small, too high energy generally and, most importantly, too unexpected. Further, you can hide in plain sight: you only have to look "unbelievable" (for example), so society will not transmit the information of your sighting. You can hide where (nearly) no one is looking as well: deep under the ocean, far below the surface, high in the sky, etc. Most likely, this isn't exhaustive. Places we don't know about are perfect for hiding ,-)

bioemerl 4y ago

Yeah, we are at the point that we are getting data on black holes colliding millions of light years away from us based on the deviation of a Lazer across miles over the width of a few atoms. To suggest the universe is full of life and we simply can't see it? I don't buy it. I think it's more likely that the signals just aren't there, because they are... Not hidden, but are too weak and crossing too grand a distance to be detected.

colordrops 4y ago

There are plenty of things that we are aware of that are currently impenetrable by our instruments, such as the inside of black holes or the past. And who knows what we aren't aware of. Is there any reason to believe that physics is a complete description of reality? Or even a significant slice? It could be just describing a very tiny human centric slice of all that exists.

db48x 4y ago
Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up 95% of the Universe (the rest is all the normal matter and energy in all of the galaxies put together). Our understanding of physics is both very complete, and contains large unknowns. You might imagine that there are a lot of aliens hiding in the Dark Matter, but as far as we can tell Dark Matter particles pass right through each other, as well as normal matter. They cannot clump together to make stars or planets or life forms the way normal matter can. Thus all aliens would be made of normal matter like us.
- colordrops 4y ago
  > Our understanding of physics is both very complete Citation please.
  - db48x 4y ago
    I’m sure I could find some, but I haven’t bothered. We know that our current understanding of physics is incomplete (various niggling little problems with the Standard Model, the whole Dark Matter question etc), but these are surprisingly small problems. We only know about these problems because of the extreme sensitivity of our instruments. The new physics that will eventually fill these gaps will answer fascinating questions, but won’t change anything about our understanding of life. For example, petaquarks were first observed in the early 2000’s, and the Large Hadron Collider provided additional evidence for their existence. But they’re so unstable that they can never stick around long enough to participate in any life processes, so as far as our understanding of aliens goes they are irrelevant. Maybe they exist naturally inside the cores of neutron stars, but that’s not really a very habitable environment. Similarly, however we resolve the apparent paradoxes in our understanding of gravity and quantum mechanics won’t matter at all to the study of life. Gravity is so weak that it is essentially irrelevant in any sort of chemical system, even when quantum mechanics is necessary to understand the fine details.

ben_w 4y ago

> Our current physics also doesn't seem to be _so_ wrong that it allows much room for technological societies to hide from our instruments. Perhaps. An idea I first heard from my brother a decade or two ago was that the Dark Energy expansion of the universe might be the waste product of all the aliens who figured out some way to trick the laws of physics into giving them free energy. (Obviously that's more of a sci-fi plot device than science at this point, take it with the due level of seriousness).

cpeterso 4y ago
That's pretty much the plot of Isaac Asimov's novel "The Gods Themselves". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves
- ben_w 4y ago
  He probably read it, though that novel predates the discovery of Dark Energy.