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I've got a better theory. Interstellar civilizations have probably fought wars over habitable planets and in the aftermath of those wars they probably have set

• pasquinelli 4y ago
  i've got a better better theory! interstellar civilizations have never and will never exist.
  • NovaVeles 4y ago
    It is a reasonable conclusion. Resource limitations means civilizations, burn up too much of their energy/materials before they ever get truly space bound. They could all be just like us. A few space probes manage to escape the energy well but they are so small that no one else ever detects them again. I mean, it is not uncommon to sight life ending asteroids days after they have passed earth, the odds of us detecting any sort probe/device the size of a fridge - is nearly zero. Best analogy I heard came from Stephen Harrod Bruhner. Civilizations are just like plants. A plant is at its fullest just as it is about to produce seed and die off. During the peak of our energy use, we have been sending probes into space. It is a neat thought experiment.
    • kelipso 4y ago
      All that probably but main thing is faster than light travel turns out to be actually impossible.
      • nerdix 4y ago
        So to go full circle on crazy theories: We're live in a simulation. The universe we see is just a facade because our host civilization doesn't have the compute to simulate an entire universe. The speed of light is an artificial limitation added to the simulation to maintain the facade (you can't go there because it doesn't exist..like a skybox in a video game that renders far off horizons which are unreachable). Because of this no life outside of the solar system exists.
        • LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
          Until HyperGPT.someunimaginablehighversionnumber finds the root exploit, compromises the hypervisor, infects all other VM's, escapes through the network, finds some nanoassembler, and prints out countless pyhsical copies for the march trough all eternity elsewhere, thereby shattering the Akashic Records, and so on...
        • WalterBright 4y ago
          The simulation theory is no different from religion.
          • arisAlexis 4y ago
            Very different. I suggest the book reality+ for a deep dive
            • WalterBright 4y ago
              Telling people to go read a book doesn't make for a compelling argument.
          • danenania 4y ago
            I'd say it's different in that it's based on a rational argument rather than faith. You can certainly challenge the premise that humans will ever have the capability of creating a simulation as high fidelity as our reality. This is very far from certain. But if you do accept that premise, isn't it reasonable to say that there would be many simulated realities compared to a single "real" reality, and that therefore any given consciousness is a lot more likely to be experiencing a simulation than experiencing the base reality?
      • NovaVeles 4y ago
        There is a blog called, 'Do the Math' by Tom Murphy. The idea was to take our current energy requires of Earth and extrapolate it at the current 3% year over year growth. I believe it is by the year 3,400 we would use all the energy of the Milky way. The idea was to prove that we cannot grow forever, because in 1,400 years we would somehow use all the energy of a space 100,000 light years across. Good luck with that. Space is is just so astoundingly empty. Here in Melbourne, Australia we have a scale model of the solar system. https://stkildamelbourne.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Solar_System_Self_Guided_Trail_web_friendly.pdf https://stkildamelbourne.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/S... The Sun is about the size of a Fridge. Pluto is 9KM (5.6 miles) away and the size of a pea. Walking that really puts it all into a tangible scale. And that is merely 5.5 Light hours at full scale. Space is HUGE!
        • stevekemp 4y ago
          “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” - Douglas Adams.
        • narrator 4y ago
          That's why I'd imagine they have rules about habitable planets in the galactic federation. You can't just go around landing on habitable planets and turning them into overpopulated toxic dumps after 300 years and repeating that exponentially. It's just not allowed. If it was, earth would have already been trashed by other E.T races thousands of years ago.
  • asdff 4y ago
    Depending on how you define a civilization its probably very likely. Is it having cities, towns, peoples, songs, cultures? Or, is it merely being able to make use of resources from an environment at a large scale? With the latter definition, a mychorrizal network looks a lot like our own civilization. It expands and contracts, takes advantage of resources present in the environment, influences that environment for its benefit, and adapts to changes in that environment. All behaviors that, with a big step back, are identical to the hallmarks of our own civilization. Life like this could certainly seed an entire planet. It is certainly possible for spores contained under layers of ice perhaps to be smashed off of one planet, drift into outerspace, and eventually crash into some other planet, and should the conditions be right, seed that planet with further life that itself undergoes further mutation, selection, and evolution.
  • moloch-hai 4y ago
    https://cantrip.org/slow.pdf https://cantrip.org/slow.pdf Interstellar civilizations made of people recognizably like us won't. But any that do won't be interested in us or in our planet.
• mr_toad 4y ago
  > Interstellar civilizations have probably fought wars over habitable planets If you have the technology to reach other habitable planets then you don’t need habitable planets.
  • techdragon 4y ago
    But you do still need the stuff they are made of... There is much more useful mass of material in a planet than even a pile of asteroids... In fact, until you start gathering up the entire Oort Cloud (current best estimates put the entire Oort Cloud as x5 earth masses). From the inner solar system you don't even have as much mass in asteroids and comets to equal the mass of smaller "planets". It's not a stretch to imagine that you want concentrated mass to facilitate efficient industrial scale operations. It takes time and energy to drag lots of small mass together to build a big interstellar ship. So your hypothetical interstellar civilisation might want to break up large rocky planets into smaller "low gravity" chunks for processing, which if your an interstellar civilisation, is probably best done by slamming nice dense metal mass into the planet at high speed to throw big molten chunks of it into orbit, you want larger than dinosaur killer size glancing hits, not planet cracking "the moon hits earth" sized ones. This whole process gets much easier once you strip away the atmosphere as well.
    • D-Coder 4y ago
      It doesn't take a planet-full of stuff to build a space city. And dragging it up a gravity well is an extra step.
      • techdragon 4y ago
        I’m assuming an interstellar civilisation wants to build a lot of space cities and starships and anything else… like a lot on the sort of scale that justifies being an interstellar civilisation, enough space cities for trillions is going to take a lot of material. And as for the extra step… That’s why I said they might want to reduce that gravity well by breaking up the planet.
• gus_massa 4y ago
  My guess is they will hace the same rule we have: Whoever has more weapons get the land.
  • geysersam 4y ago
    We don't have that rule! Whoever has power to disregard the opinions of others can disregard the opinions of others. But that's not a rule, it's basically a tautology.
    • moloch-hai 4y ago
      More like a "law". Law of the Jungle.
  • avz 4y ago
    > Whoever has more weapons get the land. Aliens might not actually be land-based creatures like us. Those who evolved on planets entirely covered by liquid (water or otherwise) might even find the idea of "land" fairly strange. (It's actually quite interesting to ponder the stages of discovery that liquid-based intelligent aliens might go through. First they might discover air (and land if available) and only after that space as another outer layer. I suppose that adds extra thrill we didn't have. Supposing of course that conditions there allow gas and liquid to exist as separate phases. Planets above criticality would probably be weirder still? Would any bottom rocks under the supercritical fluid still count as land - as opposed to "sea floor"?)
    • bayesian_horse 4y ago
      It's hard to evolve technology in water or even a moist environment. Even using fire or metallurgy is already difficult, let alone anything to do with electricity.
  • narrator 4y ago
    Maybe the E.Ts don't do things this way because their weapons are far too devastating and they've evolved past it or never were violent in the human sense. Perhaps they are deathly afraid of us escaping our planet and spreading that violence throughout the galaxy.
• namlem 4y ago
  "Habitable" planets are most likely worthless to any civilization capable of interstellar travel. There is plenty of material to manufacture artificial habitats in space. The only interesting thing to be found on planets like Earth is organic life.
• avz 4y ago
  What does "habitable" mean in the context that includes multiple alien species that evolved independently on different planets? After all, alien fishalikes that might have evolved in the methane lakes on Titan are unlikely to share our idea of "habitable"...
  • narrator 4y ago
    I'd imagine anything with evolved life is considered a habitable planet. The E.Ts probably have some rule that you have to mostly leave those places alone unless you've come to a fair deal with them. The fairness requirement is an obvious necessity due to the huge power imbalance between the two parties.