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Can someone explain to me how a species that can do one of the following can also do something as mundane as…crash? 1. Travel faster than light 2. Sustain a p

by ftio 3y ago

Can someone explain to me how a species that can do one of the following can also do something as mundane as…crash? 1. Travel faster than light 2. Sustain a peaceful, productive, spacefaring civilization over millions of years to travel here 3. Create AI that can do 1 or 2 Am I missing something here? How can both of these facts be plausibly true? These are genuine questions, not snark.

optymizer 3y ago
I think ants could say the same thing about us. How could someone as advanced as a human just drown in the water or fall from a window and die?
bongobingo1 3y ago
Entropy? Surely even hyper intelligent mega aliens can spill coffee on their keyboard at least once. Things just go wrong sometimes.
smeej 3y ago
What evidence do we have that they traveled faster than light rather than, say, leaving a very, very, very long time ago? Or launching something in our direction, in hopes of generations surviving, but they didn't manage to, so there's nobody on board anymore? Or why couldn't they just have significantly misidentified what it would take to navigate in our atmosphere and have sent a ship that wasn't prepared, and didn't have a way to realize it wasn't prepared? I can think of a lot of very prosaic reasons.
- krapp 3y ago
  >What evidence do we have that they traveled faster than light rather than, say, leaving a very, very, very long time ago? We would see a generation ship coming. It would be big, it would give off waste heat, it would probably have to stay in orbit, if we're assuming it follows physics we're familiar with, it would have to use chemical or nuclear rocket propulsion, dump waste and need constant refueling and maintenance. So either they have warp drives and magical tech bullshit or they don't exist. Those are the two options.
  - TechBro8615 3y ago
    Now, hear me out... maybe the generation ship is the Moon...
  - smeej 3y ago
    You're assuming the intelligent species is anywhere close to the size of human beings. And that their generations are anything like our generations. You're assuming that they eat like we do, or weigh as much as we do. Just because a human generation ship would have to be large, it doesn't mean some other species' generation ship would have needed to be.
    - krapp 3y ago
      To account for the size of the various UFOs that have been seen, if those accounts are to be taken at face value, we don't seem to be dealing with space smurfs.
fear_and_coffee 3y ago
[dead]
djokkataja 3y ago
I agree that intuitively it seems to not make sense, but with regard to your specific points, and assuming that there's actually more than a nothingburger behind this whole story: 1. I wouldn't necessarily assume FTL. But even if we assume "arbitrarily technologically advanced," there's no reason to think that any technology will ever have an absolute 0% chance of failure. 2. It only has to be sufficiently peaceful to not wipe itself out. 3. I don't think AI doing things changes either of the previous two points. What I find harder to believe is that humans would be able to get their hands on a crashed alien craft and keep it.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  It's also an assumption that the pilot of the craft is from the same species that manufactured it. Perhaps the technology was gifted to them by a superior civilization, or maybe they stole it, or maybe they're a genetically engineered descendant of an advanced species that died off millions of years ago without recalling its probes with their hibernating pilots.
barbariangrunge 3y ago
It’s not a fancy alien who crashed. It’s a drone from a fleet of paperclip producing ai swarms. It crash landed here, but 1000 others didn’t crash, and they’re already at work secretly converting the earth to paperclips The paperclip ai swarm’s origin story: some tech startup from 100 light years away screwed up their ai system and went extinct / got turned into paperclips The universe is devoid of life because all of it, everywhere, has been converted to paperclips by various civilizations badly tuned ai systems. They don’t send out radio signals because, obviously, they need to grow as strong as possible before meeting other paperclip systems; so their kind of paperclips will win
- utopcell 3y ago
  ..and let's waste 1000s of work-hours as a community: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
  - barbariangrunge 3y ago
    Universal paperclips is a great game
    - utopcell 3y ago
      Could not agree more, it was fun playing it.
michaelmrose 3y ago
If FTL exists there is no reason to believe without knowing specifics that achieving it requires a particular level of improvement over present development. It be technologically behind us along a path not taken or just ahead. There is a fantastic little short story exploring this idea its only a few pages. https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf If FTL isn't a factor its not necessary for them to have survived millions of years. Maybe we shall be ready to undertake such journeys in a century and perhaps suitable targets exist only decades journey away. Lastly even capable humans sometimes make simple stupid mistakes. No reason to hold our neighbors to infinitely high standards. Centuries of progress didn't stop us from losing a space probe because of a failure to convert units properly.
wly_cdgr 3y ago
Open ocean vs. reefs
wly_cdgr 3y ago
They weren't ready for how thiccccccccc Ice Spice is
- throwawayadvsec 3y ago
  I definitely did now wake up expecting to see Ice Spice being mentioned on an HN thread about aliens
colechristensen 3y ago
Can someone explain to me why the phone in my pocket is literally 6000 times as fast as my childhood computer and yet still regularly laggy, slow, and broken? It would seem as though such things would be ridiculous but clearly no matter how far ahead you are in some metric or another, things are still going to be shit now and then. Are our machines really all that much more reliable than they were 20, 50, 100, 150 years ago? The answer is meh, no, it's a mixed bag. Advancement hasn't made everything have magical quality and reliability. Some things are a lot better, some things are a lot worse.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  I guess software ate the alien world too... > Wirth's Law [0] is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
hnthrowaway0315 3y ago
You can always crash, given that mechanic failure happens all the time. Plus, you might not be able to recover from that failure, e.g. stuck on a planet forever, given that you do not have the material to repair the ship. You are probably thinking, how come such an advanced species cannot repair its own ship? Well we humans can rarely repair our own ship, we usually rely on professionals to do that. Now that advanced species will have much more advanced systems that no individual can achieve that. Even if they rely on AI, what if AI system broke?
marcusverus 3y ago
You can attribute those achievements to entire species, but entire species do not drive vehicles--individuals do. Imagine a species with a mean IQ of 150. If such a species had a IQ distribution similar to ours, around ~2% of them would be as dumb as the average human, with almost half of them being dumber than a human 'genius'--and we don't expect human geniuses to be infallible!
tus666 3y ago
If aliens were here they would have something better to do than buzz navy pilots off the west coast and then crash.
- fy20 3y ago
  Maybe they are teenagers, trying to entertain themselves for summer while school is out. If there is one other intelligent species out there, it's highly likely there are even more. Why would they care about us in that case?
ssalka 3y ago
One rare circumstance could be due to an EMP, whether natural or man-made.
mustacheemperor 3y ago
Humans crash probes into interstellar bodies all the time. “Wreckage” could be fragments of some unmanned craft, like a von neumann probe, creators unknowably many light years away and maybe long dead. Interesting to consider how that revelation might change life very little overall.
Tepix 3y ago
It could be one of many cheap probes sent by something like the Breakthrough Starshot.

by ftio 3y ago

optymizer 3y ago

I think ants could say the same thing about us. How could someone as advanced as a human just drown in the water or fall from a window and die?

bongobingo1 3y ago

Entropy? Surely even hyper intelligent mega aliens can spill coffee on their keyboard at least once. Things just go wrong sometimes.

smeej 3y ago

What evidence do we have that they traveled faster than light rather than, say, leaving a very, very, very long time ago? Or launching something in our direction, in hopes of generations surviving, but they didn't manage to, so there's nobody on board anymore? Or why couldn't they just have significantly misidentified what it would take to navigate in our atmosphere and have sent a ship that wasn't prepared, and didn't have a way to realize it wasn't prepared? I can think of a lot of very prosaic reasons.

krapp 3y ago
>What evidence do we have that they traveled faster than light rather than, say, leaving a very, very, very long time ago? We would see a generation ship coming. It would be big, it would give off waste heat, it would probably have to stay in orbit, if we're assuming it follows physics we're familiar with, it would have to use chemical or nuclear rocket propulsion, dump waste and need constant refueling and maintenance. So either they have warp drives and magical tech bullshit or they don't exist. Those are the two options.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  Now, hear me out... maybe the generation ship is the Moon...
- smeej 3y ago
  You're assuming the intelligent species is anywhere close to the size of human beings. And that their generations are anything like our generations. You're assuming that they eat like we do, or weigh as much as we do. Just because a human generation ship would have to be large, it doesn't mean some other species' generation ship would have needed to be.
  - krapp 3y ago
    To account for the size of the various UFOs that have been seen, if those accounts are to be taken at face value, we don't seem to be dealing with space smurfs.

fear_and_coffee 3y ago

[dead]

djokkataja 3y ago

I agree that intuitively it seems to not make sense, but with regard to your specific points, and assuming that there's actually more than a nothingburger behind this whole story: 1. I wouldn't necessarily assume FTL. But even if we assume "arbitrarily technologically advanced," there's no reason to think that any technology will ever have an absolute 0% chance of failure. 2. It only has to be sufficiently peaceful to not wipe itself out. 3. I don't think AI doing things changes either of the previous two points. What I find harder to believe is that humans would be able to get their hands on a crashed alien craft and keep it.

TechBro8615 3y ago
It's also an assumption that the pilot of the craft is from the same species that manufactured it. Perhaps the technology was gifted to them by a superior civilization, or maybe they stole it, or maybe they're a genetically engineered descendant of an advanced species that died off millions of years ago without recalling its probes with their hibernating pilots.

barbariangrunge 3y ago

It’s not a fancy alien who crashed. It’s a drone from a fleet of paperclip producing ai swarms. It crash landed here, but 1000 others didn’t crash, and they’re already at work secretly converting the earth to paperclips The paperclip ai swarm’s origin story: some tech startup from 100 light years away screwed up their ai system and went extinct / got turned into paperclips The universe is devoid of life because all of it, everywhere, has been converted to paperclips by various civilizations badly tuned ai systems. They don’t send out radio signals because, obviously, they need to grow as strong as possible before meeting other paperclip systems; so their kind of paperclips will win

utopcell 3y ago
..and let's waste 1000s of work-hours as a community: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
- barbariangrunge 3y ago
  Universal paperclips is a great game
  - utopcell 3y ago
    Could not agree more, it was fun playing it.

michaelmrose 3y ago

If FTL exists there is no reason to believe without knowing specifics that achieving it requires a particular level of improvement over present development. It be technologically behind us along a path not taken or just ahead. There is a fantastic little short story exploring this idea its only a few pages. https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf If FTL isn't a factor its not necessary for them to have survived millions of years. Maybe we shall be ready to undertake such journeys in a century and perhaps suitable targets exist only decades journey away. Lastly even capable humans sometimes make simple stupid mistakes. No reason to hold our neighbors to infinitely high standards. Centuries of progress didn't stop us from losing a space probe because of a failure to convert units properly.

wly_cdgr 3y ago

Open ocean vs. reefs

wly_cdgr 3y ago

They weren't ready for how thiccccccccc Ice Spice is

throwawayadvsec 3y ago
I definitely did now wake up expecting to see Ice Spice being mentioned on an HN thread about aliens

colechristensen 3y ago

Can someone explain to me why the phone in my pocket is literally 6000 times as fast as my childhood computer and yet still regularly laggy, slow, and broken? It would seem as though such things would be ridiculous but clearly no matter how far ahead you are in some metric or another, things are still going to be shit now and then. Are our machines really all that much more reliable than they were 20, 50, 100, 150 years ago? The answer is meh, no, it's a mixed bag. Advancement hasn't made everything have magical quality and reliability. Some things are a lot better, some things are a lot worse.

TechBro8615 3y ago
I guess software ate the alien world too... > Wirth's Law [0] is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

hnthrowaway0315 3y ago

You can always crash, given that mechanic failure happens all the time. Plus, you might not be able to recover from that failure, e.g. stuck on a planet forever, given that you do not have the material to repair the ship. You are probably thinking, how come such an advanced species cannot repair its own ship? Well we humans can rarely repair our own ship, we usually rely on professionals to do that. Now that advanced species will have much more advanced systems that no individual can achieve that. Even if they rely on AI, what if AI system broke?

marcusverus 3y ago

You can attribute those achievements to entire species, but entire species do not drive vehicles--individuals do. Imagine a species with a mean IQ of 150. If such a species had a IQ distribution similar to ours, around ~2% of them would be as dumb as the average human, with almost half of them being dumber than a human 'genius'--and we don't expect human geniuses to be infallible!

tus666 3y ago

If aliens were here they would have something better to do than buzz navy pilots off the west coast and then crash.

fy20 3y ago
Maybe they are teenagers, trying to entertain themselves for summer while school is out. If there is one other intelligent species out there, it's highly likely there are even more. Why would they care about us in that case?

ssalka 3y ago

One rare circumstance could be due to an EMP, whether natural or man-made.

mustacheemperor 3y ago

Humans crash probes into interstellar bodies all the time. “Wreckage” could be fragments of some unmanned craft, like a von neumann probe, creators unknowably many light years away and maybe long dead. Interesting to consider how that revelation might change life very little overall.

Tepix 3y ago

It could be one of many cheap probes sent by something like the Breakthrough Starshot.