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i do think loeb is nonsensical but is there any a priori reason to think that academia should not speculate about extraterrestrial intelligence in general?
by throwawaymaths 1y ago
i do think loeb is nonsensical but is there any a priori reason to think that academia should not speculate about extraterrestrial intelligence in general?
- Zigurd 1y agoYes. Most people don't understand either physical and chronological distance enough to understand that contact with an alien civilization, if it exists or ever did exist, is vanishingly unlikely to happen because of time, physical changes to solar systems, distance, the endurance of civilizations, the speed of light, etc. Loeb is pandering to the UFO-susceptible.
- throwawaymaths 1y agowhat do you think of this? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394040040_Aligned_multiple-transient_events_in_the_First_Palomar_Sky_Survey https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394040040_Aligned_m...
- Zigurd 1y agoI don't think too highly of this, from the abstract: Notably, the candidate coincides in time with the Washington D.C. 1952 UFO flyover, and another (a candidate) falls within a day of the peak of the 1954 UFO wave
- throwawaymaths 1y agowow. ok. didn't even look at the data. the crazy thing is that you are so biased against these researchers that you have even shut out the possibility that these (and the DC UFOs) are extremely high formation flying USAF vehicles (for example).
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago"Endurance of civilizations" is the key parameter here. The universe is almost 14 billion years old. Colonizing the Milky Way only takes 1 million years if you can travel 10% of the speed of light. So time and distance aren't significant obstacles for a highly enduring civilization. Given our massive uncertainty about the endurance/motives/etc. of super-advanced starfaring civiliations, I don't think it's justified to say that alien interlopers are "vanishingly unlikely".
- giantrobot 1y ago> Colonizing the Milky Way only takes 1 million years if you can travel 10% of the speed of light. This statement comes up all the time as if it automatically wins any discussion of alien civilizations. It contains a number of huge possibly specious assumptions. The first and most obvious is that even a long-lived civilization could construct a technology allowing a non-trivial amount of mass to accelerate to 0.1c and more importantly decelerate at the destination to a relative velocity of zero to facilitate the colonization.
- asdff 1y agoAlso a lot of assumptions about mutation rate. Anatomically modern humans appeared 300k years ago. Behaviorally modern humans appeared 50k years ago. A species beginning colonization on one end of the galaxy might not be the same species at all by the time it reached the other end of the galaxy a million years later. There might be a whole spectrum of new species that emerged along the way.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoIt seems to me that such speciation supports the assumption of endurance. Over time you'd see selection for species which are patient, diligent, fecund star colonizers. Just like medieval Europeans spent decades or centuries building a cathedral, over time you'd select for species which spend centuries working on their next starshot.
- 1y ago
- api 1y agoWe have no idea. There are multiple unknown parameters in that sentence. We can’t say it’s likely or unlikely.
- Muromec 1y agoThe only reason is us declaring it seacular matter
- moi2388 1y agoNo. But claiming that a comet, which we know is a comet, might be a potentially hostile alien spacecraft is it the very least dishonest, but if claim also unfair and harmful for the general public and how they think about science. I don’t buy for a second Avi Loeb actually believes this; it’s just to up his citation index. I think it’s disgusting.
- poulpy123 1y agoThat's simple: clickbait speculation is not science