6 ms·

Ideas for finding ET are getting more inventive

28 points by MoSattler 4y ago

MoSattler 4y ago
https://archive.is/1HseW https://archive.is/1HseW
meroes 4y ago
The Foundation series is my main imagination pump here (it gets me thinking about this stuff): This is one of the most interesting empirical questions, if there is life or not outside of us, but it seems like there must be. And if there is extra terrestrial life, there are probably large clusters of it because of confounding reasons, like stable stars making it easier for multiple planets in system to be habitable, somewhere out there. We probably know we are not close to a ‘large cluster’, because we’d know by now by the local nature of clusters. So I think we can/should be in the headspace of the Foundation series. There are almost assuredly large clusters of power, and we are not part of it. The clusters know this state of affairs and so do all the outlier planets like us. I’m not saying we should remain hidden or anything. I’m not even sure what the consequences are in this headspace. But I think we can and possibly should start realizing we’d be in contact by a cluster rapidly, if there were any in our Galaxy. That dynamic just seems so inevitable and Asimov was able to capture it. The clusters will heavily cluster and remove most outliers by absorbing them. And the real outliers are very far between.
- MoSattler 4y ago
  What makes me very skeptical about this is the Fermi Paradox* * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
  - m3kw9 4y ago
    He is using logic which is from our current planets situation , technology situation , culture situation which could be completely different from a different species deciding if trying to contact another civilization makes sense. Also, even if this is most likely, the amount of time we have to observe visitors is very limited relative to millions/billions of years of existence, plus, there are trillions of planets that may have life that may or may not interest these guys. All in all it only proves how unlikely we will be visited but doesn’t say anything about if life is out there or not.
    - MoSattler 4y ago
      I know this is not really your argument, but I think it's related: I don't buy that the problem is that we just don't know what to look for. There must be some observable characteristics that indicate its presence. It seems implausible that intelligent life forms would not leave any visible traces and that their planets would be indistinguishable from uninhabited ones.
      - Beldin 4y ago
        They aren't... from nearby. Cosmic distances are vast and the telltale signs are small. I'm not sure we would have detected an abundance of sealife deep in Titan's oceans or fliers deep in Saturn's clouds. I once looked into the reach of the Arecibo message; I can't quite remember the numbers but the main point stands: it's indecipherable but detectably artificial after a short distance (guess: 60-100 lightyears), and no longer distinguishable from natural radiation after about 5× that (guess: 250ish-600 lightyears). The point is that even an intentional message quickly (in cosmic terms) becomes gibberish and, fairly soon after, too faded to even recognise as being a signal. On top of that, the receivers would have to be looking. Basically, I doubt we would recognise artificial signals intentionally sent to us from further than 15 lightyears out except with much, much luck. That explains why we didn't find any clear non-intentional signals yet. An interesting take on this is to flip the question: from how far away would we, with our current approaches, be able to unambiguously, definitively detect life on Earth? And intelligent life? I'm not sure we're able to do even the former from Pluto, let alone from the interstellar medium.
        MoSattler 4y ago
        > I'm not sure we're able to do even the former from Pluto We can communicate with Voyager 1 beyond the limits of the Solar System, so I am not sure if earth's constantly emitted signals would not be detectable from Jupiter.
        giantrobot 4y ago
        The ability to communicate with Voyager is a function of the transmission and reception system. We have to send an incredibly focused transmission to Voyager for it to pick up our signal and listen with very sensitive instruments on a long temporal baseline to detect Voyager's signals. The inverse square law tells you that the flux of a signal decreases at a square of the distance. A receiver 2 miles away from a transmitter will receive a signal at a quarter of the strength of a receiver only a mile away. Our broadband omnidirectional broadcasts don't actually reach very far out into the solar system let alone the galaxy. Only very powerful narrowband signals reach very far and those are very directional.
  - no_wizard 4y ago
    I sometimes wonder if the simplest answer for this is that nature / evolution obeys some principle of simultaneous discovery[0][1] and convergence. In which case all advanced civilization may simply be on roughly the same timescales. In another words, it’s possible that all intelligent life is more or less at the same level of development, and this creates a situation where we only discover each other at the same time [0]: https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/1482596/simultaneous-invention https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/1482596/simultaneous-... [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
      That feels incredibly unlikely. The universe is billions of years old. There was nothing preventing an intelligence from developing on Earth a billion years earlier. That being said, our civilization got an enormous boon coming later in the history of the planet. Fossil fuels and the abundant energy economy would not be available without the right biologic circumstances (eg lignin metabolism developing late) and timing.
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    Calling it the Fermi "paradox" really seems like begging the question to me. You've got a theory ("this math says life should be common") which conflicts with observed reality ("we don't see shit!"). Is that a paradox? It seems more like an invalidation of the theory to me. The resolution to the "paradox" is realizing that something in your theory is wrong. What is the common refrain? If the facts don't fit the theory, then the theory is wrong! Isn't that the core essence of science? Empiricism is a repudiation of Platonic a priori reasoning. Beautiful and elegant theories that don't fit the facts are simply wrong.
- yyyk 4y ago
  IIRC, the Foundation series doesn't actually have any aliens, apart from (if we define it that way) some human-derived offshoots and the Robots?
  - jpollock 4y ago
    The Foundation Series doesn't have any aliens because the humans created a bunch of robots that then decided to kill _EVERYTHING_ELSE_ in the galaxy to protect the humans.
    - e40 4y ago
      Was that in the original 3 books? I don't remember that...
    - mathstuf 4y ago
      Did I miss something, or was this explained in one of the preceding series (I think I only missed Empire)?
    - LarryMullins 4y ago
      Which novel is that from? It's been some years since I read any of Asimov's books, but the way I remember it is this: In the Robot novels, the overwhelming majority of humans live on Earth in mega cities (caves of steel) with relatively few robots, and a small minority of humans live on a few dozen (50 or so) other worlds in highly roboticized societies. These humans call themselves Spacers and have very xenophobic inward cultures. In the extreme cases, exemplified by Solaris, they shun contact even with other Spacers from their own planet and surround themselves entirely with robots. Eventually the human majority leaves Earth, because a robot following the Zeroth Law decides to irradiate Earth to force humanity to spread out in the galaxy. The humans from Earth don't take many if any robots with them and rapidly overtake robot-centric Spacer culture, which is all but forgotten (as are robots). The massive galactic human population of the Empire novels are the descendants of the humans that left Earth later, not the Spacers.
    - yyyk 4y ago
      I don't recall that. I do recall some ominous foreshadowing regarding aliens in the final book*, but nothing definitive. * Maybe D. should have thought about that possibility before embarking on a scheme that required hindering humanity's technical development for an indefinite period?
- svieira 4y ago
  If you use Foundation as your pump you may enjoy John C. Wright's Count to the Escaton sequence. It's Foundation with aliens, logic, ethics, love, and scales of time and intelligence beyond anything else I have ever read. N. B. It most closely resembles the part of Foundation where the Mule shows up.
pcrh 4y ago
I like how the SA observatory is known as Meerkat, given the comedic stance they take when on guard. Otherwise, I always found favour (regrettably) with the argument that the amount of energy needed to transmit a signal across the galaxy was too great, as the intensity of the signal falls by the cube of the distance.
- ProjectArcturis 4y ago
  That's certainly true for unfocused light like a lantern, but lasers diminish only linearly with distance.
sammalloy 4y ago
I’ve been following this topic for a long time, and I’ve noticed within the last decade or so, more and more people on this issue arguing that we could be the first intelligent species in the galaxy. For some reason, I’m very hostile to this idea, mostly given the age of the universe and where we sit in the light cone since the Big Bang. Are there any proponents of the idea that we are the first who can convince me otherwise? Another idea of that seems to be trending in fiction for the last several decades, from the Culture series to the Three-Body Problem to Westworld, is the idea of the sublime, and the proposition that the so-called elder species would have transitioned and left our galaxy some time ago, hence why we haven’t seen any evidence for their existence. Could anyone also comment on this popular idea?
- xqcgrek2 4y ago
  The universe will continue with most stars living for trillions of years. We are early.
  - xwdv 4y ago
    And in the end humanity will still only have been nothing more than some percent of a percent of a percent of its existence at best. And an individual human life so short someone could ask if you ever even existed at all.
- kevinventullo 4y ago
  I’m not a proponent of the idea that we are the sole intelligent species in the galaxy, but I think it’s at least plausible. In my mind it boils down to statistics. Basically, it seems to me that many, many conditions have to come together for life to emerge at all on a given planet, and then many, many more conditions have to develop for intelligent life to emerge. If the denominator in that probability is significantly larger than the number of planets in the galaxy, then the probability of any given galaxy harboring intelligent species would be approximately zero. Similarly, the conditional probability that there are at least two intelligent species in a galaxy given there is at least one (namely humans here on Earth) is still approximately zero.
- 4y ago
Loquebantur 4y ago
I wonder why ideas in this field seem to be stuck with technolgy of the last century? Sending some EM signal and hoping for an answer appears somewhat ridiculus. If at all possible, you would go yourself or send an AI capable of doing some serious information gathering. Now, why do people pretend, the time of travel was prohibitive? Not only does that rely on the weirdly self-centered assumption, substantial speeds weren't accessible, it also presupposes domestic time frames. Lastly, the idea we should have been "visited" already. This has the unspoken implication of some big vehicle appearing in the sky, radio broadcasts and TV crews gathering, etc. Why? What sane entity would go about it in this manner?
- wingspar 4y ago
  >> Lastly, the idea we should have been "visited" already. This has the unspoken implication of some big vehicle appearing in the sky, radio broadcasts and TV crews gathering, etc. Why? What sane entity would go about it in this manner? It’s that basically what happened in our planets ‘Age of Discovery’? Some European ship shows up on a shore/lagoon and ‘takes over’?
  - nradov 4y ago
    Europeans hardly had to do much to "take over" in the Americas. After the first few ships arrived, about 90% of the indigenous people died of smallpox and other infectious diseases. At that point the Europeans just walked into land that was largely depopulated and faced only limited resistance. https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html
- nine_k 4y ago
  If aliens are so internally slow that a few hundred thousand years is not a big deal for them, they likely cannot develop quickly enough to achieve interstellar travel before their star burns down. There are rather understandable limitations on the physical size of electromagnetic transmitters due to wavelength and power parameters. There are also size limitations for sensors: you cannot capture too few photons per second, else you will not register a coherent picture of faster-moving processes on Earth. There are also limitations on the size and mass of a device that needs to slow down from interstellar speeds to take a reasonable peek at Earth. Basically, physics as currently known to us does not allow for a grain-sized interstellar sounding craft that could transmit back much useful info, let alone to spread a lifeform.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wolverine876 4y ago
An observation about anything published: Why do the make me read the entire article to find what I want, which is a bulleted list of new techniques? That's how most things I read online are. Many HN posts are long articles from which I'm trying to extract a bit of information. Who has time? If I want more context, I'll read it after I find out what the techniques are. Maybe I can use an AI to do it for me: 'Please list the new techniques in this artcle'.

28 points by MoSattler 4y ago

https://archive.is/1HseW https://archive.is/1HseW

The Foundation series is my main imagination pump here (it gets me thinking about this stuff): This is one of the most interesting empirical questions, if there is life or not outside of us, but it seems like there must be. And if there is extra terrestrial life, there are probably large clusters of it because of confounding reasons, like stable stars making it easier for multiple planets in system to be habitable, somewhere out there. We probably know we are not close to a ‘large cluster’, because we’d know by now by the local nature of clusters. So I think we can/should be in the headspace of the Foundation series. There are almost assuredly large clusters of power, and we are not part of it. The clusters know this state of affairs and so do all the outlier planets like us. I’m not saying we should remain hidden or anything. I’m not even sure what the consequences are in this headspace. But I think we can and possibly should start realizing we’d be in contact by a cluster rapidly, if there were any in our Galaxy. That dynamic just seems so inevitable and Asimov was able to capture it. The clusters will heavily cluster and remove most outliers by absorbing them. And the real outliers are very far between.

MoSattler 4y ago
What makes me very skeptical about this is the Fermi Paradox* * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
- m3kw9 4y ago
  He is using logic which is from our current planets situation , technology situation , culture situation which could be completely different from a different species deciding if trying to contact another civilization makes sense. Also, even if this is most likely, the amount of time we have to observe visitors is very limited relative to millions/billions of years of existence, plus, there are trillions of planets that may have life that may or may not interest these guys. All in all it only proves how unlikely we will be visited but doesn’t say anything about if life is out there or not.
  - MoSattler 4y ago
    I know this is not really your argument, but I think it's related: I don't buy that the problem is that we just don't know what to look for. There must be some observable characteristics that indicate its presence. It seems implausible that intelligent life forms would not leave any visible traces and that their planets would be indistinguishable from uninhabited ones.
    - Beldin 4y ago
      They aren't... from nearby. Cosmic distances are vast and the telltale signs are small. I'm not sure we would have detected an abundance of sealife deep in Titan's oceans or fliers deep in Saturn's clouds. I once looked into the reach of the Arecibo message; I can't quite remember the numbers but the main point stands: it's indecipherable but detectably artificial after a short distance (guess: 60-100 lightyears), and no longer distinguishable from natural radiation after about 5× that (guess: 250ish-600 lightyears). The point is that even an intentional message quickly (in cosmic terms) becomes gibberish and, fairly soon after, too faded to even recognise as being a signal. On top of that, the receivers would have to be looking. Basically, I doubt we would recognise artificial signals intentionally sent to us from further than 15 lightyears out except with much, much luck. That explains why we didn't find any clear non-intentional signals yet. An interesting take on this is to flip the question: from how far away would we, with our current approaches, be able to unambiguously, definitively detect life on Earth? And intelligent life? I'm not sure we're able to do even the former from Pluto, let alone from the interstellar medium.
      - MoSattler 4y ago
        > I'm not sure we're able to do even the former from Pluto We can communicate with Voyager 1 beyond the limits of the Solar System, so I am not sure if earth's constantly emitted signals would not be detectable from Jupiter.
        giantrobot 4y ago
        The ability to communicate with Voyager is a function of the transmission and reception system. We have to send an incredibly focused transmission to Voyager for it to pick up our signal and listen with very sensitive instruments on a long temporal baseline to detect Voyager's signals. The inverse square law tells you that the flux of a signal decreases at a square of the distance. A receiver 2 miles away from a transmitter will receive a signal at a quarter of the strength of a receiver only a mile away. Our broadband omnidirectional broadcasts don't actually reach very far out into the solar system let alone the galaxy. Only very powerful narrowband signals reach very far and those are very directional.
- no_wizard 4y ago
  I sometimes wonder if the simplest answer for this is that nature / evolution obeys some principle of simultaneous discovery[0][1] and convergence. In which case all advanced civilization may simply be on roughly the same timescales. In another words, it’s possible that all intelligent life is more or less at the same level of development, and this creates a situation where we only discover each other at the same time [0]: https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/1482596/simultaneous-invention https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/1482596/simultaneous-... [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    That feels incredibly unlikely. The universe is billions of years old. There was nothing preventing an intelligence from developing on Earth a billion years earlier. That being said, our civilization got an enormous boon coming later in the history of the planet. Fossil fuels and the abundant energy economy would not be available without the right biologic circumstances (eg lignin metabolism developing late) and timing.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  Calling it the Fermi "paradox" really seems like begging the question to me. You've got a theory ("this math says life should be common") which conflicts with observed reality ("we don't see shit!"). Is that a paradox? It seems more like an invalidation of the theory to me. The resolution to the "paradox" is realizing that something in your theory is wrong. What is the common refrain? If the facts don't fit the theory, then the theory is wrong! Isn't that the core essence of science? Empiricism is a repudiation of Platonic a priori reasoning. Beautiful and elegant theories that don't fit the facts are simply wrong.
yyyk 4y ago
IIRC, the Foundation series doesn't actually have any aliens, apart from (if we define it that way) some human-derived offshoots and the Robots?
- jpollock 4y ago
  The Foundation Series doesn't have any aliens because the humans created a bunch of robots that then decided to kill _EVERYTHING_ELSE_ in the galaxy to protect the humans.
  - e40 4y ago
    Was that in the original 3 books? I don't remember that...
  - mathstuf 4y ago
    Did I miss something, or was this explained in one of the preceding series (I think I only missed Empire)?
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    Which novel is that from? It's been some years since I read any of Asimov's books, but the way I remember it is this: In the Robot novels, the overwhelming majority of humans live on Earth in mega cities (caves of steel) with relatively few robots, and a small minority of humans live on a few dozen (50 or so) other worlds in highly roboticized societies. These humans call themselves Spacers and have very xenophobic inward cultures. In the extreme cases, exemplified by Solaris, they shun contact even with other Spacers from their own planet and surround themselves entirely with robots. Eventually the human majority leaves Earth, because a robot following the Zeroth Law decides to irradiate Earth to force humanity to spread out in the galaxy. The humans from Earth don't take many if any robots with them and rapidly overtake robot-centric Spacer culture, which is all but forgotten (as are robots). The massive galactic human population of the Empire novels are the descendants of the humans that left Earth later, not the Spacers.
  - yyyk 4y ago
    I don't recall that. I do recall some ominous foreshadowing regarding aliens in the final book*, but nothing definitive. * Maybe D. should have thought about that possibility before embarking on a scheme that required hindering humanity's technical development for an indefinite period?
svieira 4y ago
If you use Foundation as your pump you may enjoy John C. Wright's Count to the Escaton sequence. It's Foundation with aliens, logic, ethics, love, and scales of time and intelligence beyond anything else I have ever read. N. B. It most closely resembles the part of Foundation where the Mule shows up.

pcrh 4y ago

I like how the SA observatory is known as Meerkat, given the comedic stance they take when on guard. Otherwise, I always found favour (regrettably) with the argument that the amount of energy needed to transmit a signal across the galaxy was too great, as the intensity of the signal falls by the cube of the distance.

ProjectArcturis 4y ago
That's certainly true for unfocused light like a lantern, but lasers diminish only linearly with distance.

sammalloy 4y ago

I’ve been following this topic for a long time, and I’ve noticed within the last decade or so, more and more people on this issue arguing that we could be the first intelligent species in the galaxy. For some reason, I’m very hostile to this idea, mostly given the age of the universe and where we sit in the light cone since the Big Bang. Are there any proponents of the idea that we are the first who can convince me otherwise? Another idea of that seems to be trending in fiction for the last several decades, from the Culture series to the Three-Body Problem to Westworld, is the idea of the sublime, and the proposition that the so-called elder species would have transitioned and left our galaxy some time ago, hence why we haven’t seen any evidence for their existence. Could anyone also comment on this popular idea?

xqcgrek2 4y ago
The universe will continue with most stars living for trillions of years. We are early.
- xwdv 4y ago
  And in the end humanity will still only have been nothing more than some percent of a percent of a percent of its existence at best. And an individual human life so short someone could ask if you ever even existed at all.
kevinventullo 4y ago
I’m not a proponent of the idea that we are the sole intelligent species in the galaxy, but I think it’s at least plausible. In my mind it boils down to statistics. Basically, it seems to me that many, many conditions have to come together for life to emerge at all on a given planet, and then many, many more conditions have to develop for intelligent life to emerge. If the denominator in that probability is significantly larger than the number of planets in the galaxy, then the probability of any given galaxy harboring intelligent species would be approximately zero. Similarly, the conditional probability that there are at least two intelligent species in a galaxy given there is at least one (namely humans here on Earth) is still approximately zero.
4y ago

Loquebantur 4y ago

I wonder why ideas in this field seem to be stuck with technolgy of the last century? Sending some EM signal and hoping for an answer appears somewhat ridiculus. If at all possible, you would go yourself or send an AI capable of doing some serious information gathering. Now, why do people pretend, the time of travel was prohibitive? Not only does that rely on the weirdly self-centered assumption, substantial speeds weren't accessible, it also presupposes domestic time frames. Lastly, the idea we should have been "visited" already. This has the unspoken implication of some big vehicle appearing in the sky, radio broadcasts and TV crews gathering, etc. Why? What sane entity would go about it in this manner?

wingspar 4y ago
>> Lastly, the idea we should have been "visited" already. This has the unspoken implication of some big vehicle appearing in the sky, radio broadcasts and TV crews gathering, etc. Why? What sane entity would go about it in this manner? It’s that basically what happened in our planets ‘Age of Discovery’? Some European ship shows up on a shore/lagoon and ‘takes over’?
- nradov 4y ago
  Europeans hardly had to do much to "take over" in the Americas. After the first few ships arrived, about 90% of the indigenous people died of smallpox and other infectious diseases. At that point the Europeans just walked into land that was largely depopulated and faced only limited resistance. https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html
nine_k 4y ago
If aliens are so internally slow that a few hundred thousand years is not a big deal for them, they likely cannot develop quickly enough to achieve interstellar travel before their star burns down. There are rather understandable limitations on the physical size of electromagnetic transmitters due to wavelength and power parameters. There are also size limitations for sensors: you cannot capture too few photons per second, else you will not register a coherent picture of faster-moving processes on Earth. There are also limitations on the size and mass of a device that needs to slow down from interstellar speeds to take a reasonable peek at Earth. Basically, physics as currently known to us does not allow for a grain-sized interstellar sounding craft that could transmit back much useful info, let alone to spread a lifeform.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wolverine876 4y ago

An observation about anything published: Why do the make me read the entire article to find what I want, which is a bulleted list of new techniques? That's how most things I read online are. Many HN posts are long articles from which I'm trying to extract a bit of information. Who has time? If I want more context, I'll read it after I find out what the techniques are. Maybe I can use an AI to do it for me: 'Please list the new techniques in this artcle'.