8 ms·

They are dangerous and reckless. They were also done in the name of humanity, but without humanity’s consent. I despise the naive scientists who did them as mu

by trvz 7mo ago

They are dangerous and reckless. They were also done in the name of humanity, but without humanity’s consent. I despise the naive scientists who did them as much as those who brought the damocletian sword of nuclear weapons on us.

wongarsu 7mo ago
I assume you are against them due to the silent forest hypothesis? Better not announce ourselves, because anything out there might not be friendly to us?
- whattheheckheck 7mo ago
  The vast space of everything seems to me that any intelligent life eventually discovers physics to get out of this dimension. Dune space feudalism is unlikely
- cyberax 7mo ago
  The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case. There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. You'd be far better off just using a particle accelerator to forge any chemical element and then assemble them into molecules using nano-replicators. The best you can do is to send information, possibly with the help of gravitational lensing. Sci-fi mode on: given that the potential galactic civilization is going to be information-based, who's to say the Earth is not already under attack? An interstellar fleet of large invasion ships with soldiers is not feasible, but a small drone with an AI that connects to terrestrial networks and steers the civilization towards collapse is possible. I'd start investigating if TikTok algorithm developers got some nudges from a weirdly knowledgeable source.
  - gambiting 7mo ago
    >>There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. Material, no. but we know with absolute certainty that Earth will stop being habitable for humans at some point. So assuming any intelligent race, human descendent or otherwise, still exists on this planet, it will have to eventually move. It's just pure luck that we evolved when we did. But there are valid reasons for interstellar travel(other than you know, pure curiosity).
    - kibwen 7mo ago
      I wouldn't characterize it as "moving". Any excursion outside of the solar system will not be done by anything resembling a modern human, full stop. It may be plausible to send some sort of robot with some sort of nanomachine hoo-hah off in the direction of a nearby star, to seed life there. But no living human will ever leave the heliosphere.
    - cyberax 7mo ago
      It's a catch 22. If you want to preserve the Earth's biosphere or even biological humans, then you would need to move at least a ship the size of a small planetoid. That will support life for millenia that will be required for interstellar travel. And if you can do that, then why bother with the interstellar travel? Just move to a higher orbit to survive the red giant stage. And then move closer to the stellar remnant, white dwarves will provide plenty of energy for trillions of years. And if you manage to transcribe yourself into some kind of computing-based device, then why bother at all?
      - gambiting 7mo ago
        I think moving a small planetoid and moving a planet are not really comparable technical challenges, are they? Even a small moon like Deimos you could probably move by attaching giant rockets to a side and pushing(absolutely absurd, but let's go with it). How would you move the earth with its atmosphere still intact? Is your rocket stretching out the entire way from the surface to the edge of space?
        jjk7 7mo ago
        Use the atmosphere itself as propellant gas.
        cyberax 7mo ago
        Arrange a stream of asteroids to transfer momentum from one of the outer planets. Or just terraform Mars.
    - the_af 7mo ago
  - dbacar 7mo ago
    That sounds like an invisible malevolent force trying to destroy us, himm, sounds familiar :).
  - exe34 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  - IncreasePosts 7mo ago
    That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space, as opposed to inner space. Humans sit about half way between the biggest and smallest things in the universe. Instead of exploring the cosmos, which takes tons of energy and is almost entirely empty, we could be exploring the space between atoms and building worlds without our own world. It is also almost entirely empty, but the energy costs to construct anything would be close to zero.
    - the_af 7mo ago
      > That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space I'm sure you do understand it. I mean, sure, the other things you mention are also interesting, but mankind has been awed by a starry night's sky since we were able to look up. We gave names to the arrangements of bright things in the skies and imagined gods in them, and navigated by them. The are awe-inspiring. It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature.
      - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
        > It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature. Judging by social media, half the population has an unhealthy obsession about travel and tourism. It's not hard to connect dreams of space to interests of most people here: most stars you look at have planets around them, now imagine some of those are like Earth, and now suddenly this is a place to on a cruise to, to have new pictures to post to Instagram.
    - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
      Observe that ~all sci-fi stories happening in outer space actually don't happen in deep space - there's always a warp drive or a stargate or such used to skip the boring, empty parts, and jump straight to habitable planets and peculiar space phenomena. It's the same as with sailing stories and reality - the interesting parts are everything that isn't the open blue sea.
      - 7mo ago
  - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
    > The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case. Wrong. Dark Forest isn't about conquest, it's about preemptive strikes. The Dark Forest hypothesis assumes that travel between stars is hard - more importantly, that even communications at those distances is hard - specifically, that it takes a long time, which prevents building trust. This, combined with one other assumption: that technological progress makes unpredictable jumps ahead, makes the conclusion fall out straight from basic game theory. So per the Dark Forest hypothesis, if you spot a primitive agrarian society sending a "hello" to you with smoke signals, you're better off lobbing a nuke at them in response - because otherwise, should you send a friendly "hello back" instead, you may discover that while that message was in flight, they underwent a triple industrial revolution, and shot a magic proton bomb at you. Why would they do that, you ask? Because from their POV, at any moment you can have a sudden technological breakthrough and start dragging black holes at them or whatever. Point being, it's best for them to get rid of you, while they still can. (People get too fixated on the forest metaphor XOR the sci-fi parts, but it's really neither; the second book of the trilogy pretty much spelled out the whole rationale like a math textbook, in case anyone missed it after half of first book making analogies to it with ants and history of modern China and such.) (ETA: what's the justification for "sudden technological jumps" assumption? History. Humanity had ~all the ingredients for the industrial revolution for centuries, and it's not clear why it happened when it did, and not a century or two earlier (or later). Then it happened, but the outcome wasn't "evenly distributed". Then the 20th century saw several large nations jumping all the way from pre-industrial agrarian societies to post-industrial peer superpowers, in a span of merely a few decades. The author writes extensively about living through that transition in the first book.)
    - cyberax 7mo ago
      The ability to strike itself assumes easy interstellar travel. After all, if you can _destroy_ whole planets and stars, why not just send colonists immediately? Or maybe pre-emptively sterilize everything to make sure your eventual expansion encounters no issues. Moreover, if your first instinct is to strike while hiding, then your equilibrium state would be a civilization that is the most successful at wiping out everything around it, spread all over the habitable universe. Dark Forest just doesn't work from the game-theoretical perspective.
srean 7mo ago
Elaborate please.
- jonplackett 7mo ago
  They read The Three Body problem
  - giantrobot 7mo ago
    They read the Three Body Problem but forgot that light exists. For aliens with interferometers looking at Earth there's little question there's some sort of interesting active chemistry (life) here. Theres no hiding that fact. If they're within about 100 light years they'll be watching the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the atmosphere. Even if they're don't know the exact cause the spectra of pollutants and rates of change will give hints the changes are unlikely to be from random natural processes. Outside of 100 light years but pretty much anywhere in the galaxy (assuming interferometers capable of getting spectra of Earth) will know there's some sort of life here. Even if you want to assume some aliens don't recognize life as we understand it they'll at least see extremely interesting and varied chemistry. The idea you're going to hide Earth's biosignatures is silly. Trying to hide our technology signatures is pointless. At about 70 light years any interested aliens will start seeing isotopes resulting from above ground nuclear testing.
    - kibwen 7mo ago
      Telescopes aren't magic, and space is big. There are 100 billion+ stars in the galaxy. Within a 100 light-year radius, there are 27 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_95%E2%80%93100_light-years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_95... ). Nobody's looking at Earth. If any hypothetical civilization were to find our system, it would be by blanketing the entire galaxy in 100 billion drones and checking every single star, in which case the dark forest doesn't matter anyway.
      - giantrobot 7mo ago
thegrim33 7mo ago
I'm firmly against METI, but the Voyagers aren't evenly remotely METI / risky.
fanatic2pope 7mo ago
Earth's "radio bubble" is well over 100 light years across now. If there are aliens out there, they are probably already on their way to ask us in person why Ross, the largest Friend, doesn't simply eat the others.
- krapp 7mo ago
  Radio signals do weaken and dissipate over time and space. Broadcast signals could fade into the cosmic microwave background in a few light years depending on their strength. The sci-fi trope of aliens picking up Earth tv and radio just isn't plausible.
  - exe34 7mo ago
    And in that light, you're worried two blocks the size of a small car will get picked up on the alien's hyperspace scanners?
    - krapp 7mo ago
      I'm not, but other people seem to think it's a problem worth worrying about.
    - bananamogul 7mo ago
      Yet we spend tax dollars trying to do the same thing.
      - kibwen 7mo ago
        No, we don't. If you're talking about SETI, that's looking at radio signals. If you're talking about killer asteroid early-warning detection, we generally don't have the capacity to reliably detect voyager-sized asteroids even in our own solar system, let alone in interstellar space.
  - dheera 7mo ago
    Imagine how far technology has come in 100 years. Then imagine if the alien had just a 1 million year head start to technology. 1 million years is less than 1/1000 of the age of the universe earlier. We have literally no idea what technology the alien could have.
dbacar 7mo ago
For some good portion of the earth's population, I dont think things would go worse than it is even if there were an alian invasion.
dcminter 7mo ago
I think you're not appreciating how big space is. They're not going to be near any star for thousands of years - and near here is still very distant. If we're still around then, we'll probably be able to look after ourselves.
ravenstine 7mo ago
Good thing those gold plates give aliens the wrong directions to Earth anyway.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
jacquesm 7mo ago
The chances of either Voyager ending up in the hands of intelligent aliens are remote compared to the chances of us blowing ourselves up. Be happy that there is at least a tiny possibility of a tombstone for a race which once upon a time aeons ago showed some promise. Personally I think they should have stuck a mummy in there.
- TeMPOraL 7mo ago
  They're not even wrong about both their complaints. The "damocletian sword of nuclear weapons" is actually what's been keeping humanity from setting the planet on fire for the past 60+ years.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
  Could be, they find friends: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/V%27ger https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/V%27ger
mikkupikku 7mo ago
There is zero empirical evidence that aliens actually exist. All the arguments for why they should exist despite this lack of evidence are borderline theology.

by trvz 7mo ago

wongarsu 7mo ago

I assume you are against them due to the silent forest hypothesis? Better not announce ourselves, because anything out there might not be friendly to us?

whattheheckheck 7mo ago
The vast space of everything seems to me that any intelligent life eventually discovers physics to get out of this dimension. Dune space feudalism is unlikely
cyberax 7mo ago
The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case. There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. You'd be far better off just using a particle accelerator to forge any chemical element and then assemble them into molecules using nano-replicators. The best you can do is to send information, possibly with the help of gravitational lensing. Sci-fi mode on: given that the potential galactic civilization is going to be information-based, who's to say the Earth is not already under attack? An interstellar fleet of large invasion ships with soldiers is not feasible, but a small drone with an AI that connects to terrestrial networks and steers the civilization towards collapse is possible. I'd start investigating if TikTok algorithm developers got some nudges from a weirdly knowledgeable source.
- gambiting 7mo ago
  >>There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. Material, no. but we know with absolute certainty that Earth will stop being habitable for humans at some point. So assuming any intelligent race, human descendent or otherwise, still exists on this planet, it will have to eventually move. It's just pure luck that we evolved when we did. But there are valid reasons for interstellar travel(other than you know, pure curiosity).
  - kibwen 7mo ago
    I wouldn't characterize it as "moving". Any excursion outside of the solar system will not be done by anything resembling a modern human, full stop. It may be plausible to send some sort of robot with some sort of nanomachine hoo-hah off in the direction of a nearby star, to seed life there. But no living human will ever leave the heliosphere.
  - cyberax 7mo ago
    It's a catch 22. If you want to preserve the Earth's biosphere or even biological humans, then you would need to move at least a ship the size of a small planetoid. That will support life for millenia that will be required for interstellar travel. And if you can do that, then why bother with the interstellar travel? Just move to a higher orbit to survive the red giant stage. And then move closer to the stellar remnant, white dwarves will provide plenty of energy for trillions of years. And if you manage to transcribe yourself into some kind of computing-based device, then why bother at all?
    - gambiting 7mo ago
      I think moving a small planetoid and moving a planet are not really comparable technical challenges, are they? Even a small moon like Deimos you could probably move by attaching giant rockets to a side and pushing(absolutely absurd, but let's go with it). How would you move the earth with its atmosphere still intact? Is your rocket stretching out the entire way from the surface to the edge of space?
      - jjk7 7mo ago
        Use the atmosphere itself as propellant gas.
      - cyberax 7mo ago
        Arrange a stream of asteroids to transfer momentum from one of the outer planets. Or just terraform Mars.
  - the_af 7mo ago
- dbacar 7mo ago
  That sounds like an invisible malevolent force trying to destroy us, himm, sounds familiar :).
- exe34 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- IncreasePosts 7mo ago
  That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space, as opposed to inner space. Humans sit about half way between the biggest and smallest things in the universe. Instead of exploring the cosmos, which takes tons of energy and is almost entirely empty, we could be exploring the space between atoms and building worlds without our own world. It is also almost entirely empty, but the energy costs to construct anything would be close to zero.
  - the_af 7mo ago
    > That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space I'm sure you do understand it. I mean, sure, the other things you mention are also interesting, but mankind has been awed by a starry night's sky since we were able to look up. We gave names to the arrangements of bright things in the skies and imagined gods in them, and navigated by them. The are awe-inspiring. It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature.
    - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
      > It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature. Judging by social media, half the population has an unhealthy obsession about travel and tourism. It's not hard to connect dreams of space to interests of most people here: most stars you look at have planets around them, now imagine some of those are like Earth, and now suddenly this is a place to on a cruise to, to have new pictures to post to Instagram.
  - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
    Observe that ~all sci-fi stories happening in outer space actually don't happen in deep space - there's always a warp drive or a stargate or such used to skip the boring, empty parts, and jump straight to habitable planets and peculiar space phenomena. It's the same as with sailing stories and reality - the interesting parts are everything that isn't the open blue sea.
    - 7mo ago
- TeMPOraL 7mo ago
  > The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case. Wrong. Dark Forest isn't about conquest, it's about preemptive strikes. The Dark Forest hypothesis assumes that travel between stars is hard - more importantly, that even communications at those distances is hard - specifically, that it takes a long time, which prevents building trust. This, combined with one other assumption: that technological progress makes unpredictable jumps ahead, makes the conclusion fall out straight from basic game theory. So per the Dark Forest hypothesis, if you spot a primitive agrarian society sending a "hello" to you with smoke signals, you're better off lobbing a nuke at them in response - because otherwise, should you send a friendly "hello back" instead, you may discover that while that message was in flight, they underwent a triple industrial revolution, and shot a magic proton bomb at you. Why would they do that, you ask? Because from their POV, at any moment you can have a sudden technological breakthrough and start dragging black holes at them or whatever. Point being, it's best for them to get rid of you, while they still can. (People get too fixated on the forest metaphor XOR the sci-fi parts, but it's really neither; the second book of the trilogy pretty much spelled out the whole rationale like a math textbook, in case anyone missed it after half of first book making analogies to it with ants and history of modern China and such.) (ETA: what's the justification for "sudden technological jumps" assumption? History. Humanity had ~all the ingredients for the industrial revolution for centuries, and it's not clear why it happened when it did, and not a century or two earlier (or later). Then it happened, but the outcome wasn't "evenly distributed". Then the 20th century saw several large nations jumping all the way from pre-industrial agrarian societies to post-industrial peer superpowers, in a span of merely a few decades. The author writes extensively about living through that transition in the first book.)
  - cyberax 7mo ago
    The ability to strike itself assumes easy interstellar travel. After all, if you can _destroy_ whole planets and stars, why not just send colonists immediately? Or maybe pre-emptively sterilize everything to make sure your eventual expansion encounters no issues. Moreover, if your first instinct is to strike while hiding, then your equilibrium state would be a civilization that is the most successful at wiping out everything around it, spread all over the habitable universe. Dark Forest just doesn't work from the game-theoretical perspective.

srean 7mo ago

Elaborate please.

jonplackett 7mo ago
They read The Three Body problem
- giantrobot 7mo ago
  They read the Three Body Problem but forgot that light exists. For aliens with interferometers looking at Earth there's little question there's some sort of interesting active chemistry (life) here. Theres no hiding that fact. If they're within about 100 light years they'll be watching the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the atmosphere. Even if they're don't know the exact cause the spectra of pollutants and rates of change will give hints the changes are unlikely to be from random natural processes. Outside of 100 light years but pretty much anywhere in the galaxy (assuming interferometers capable of getting spectra of Earth) will know there's some sort of life here. Even if you want to assume some aliens don't recognize life as we understand it they'll at least see extremely interesting and varied chemistry. The idea you're going to hide Earth's biosignatures is silly. Trying to hide our technology signatures is pointless. At about 70 light years any interested aliens will start seeing isotopes resulting from above ground nuclear testing.
  - kibwen 7mo ago
    Telescopes aren't magic, and space is big. There are 100 billion+ stars in the galaxy. Within a 100 light-year radius, there are 27 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_95%E2%80%93100_light-years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_95... ). Nobody's looking at Earth. If any hypothetical civilization were to find our system, it would be by blanketing the entire galaxy in 100 billion drones and checking every single star, in which case the dark forest doesn't matter anyway.
    - giantrobot 7mo ago

thegrim33 7mo ago

I'm firmly against METI, but the Voyagers aren't evenly remotely METI / risky.

fanatic2pope 7mo ago

Earth's "radio bubble" is well over 100 light years across now. If there are aliens out there, they are probably already on their way to ask us in person why Ross, the largest Friend, doesn't simply eat the others.

krapp 7mo ago
Radio signals do weaken and dissipate over time and space. Broadcast signals could fade into the cosmic microwave background in a few light years depending on their strength. The sci-fi trope of aliens picking up Earth tv and radio just isn't plausible.
- exe34 7mo ago
  And in that light, you're worried two blocks the size of a small car will get picked up on the alien's hyperspace scanners?
  - krapp 7mo ago
    I'm not, but other people seem to think it's a problem worth worrying about.
  - bananamogul 7mo ago
    Yet we spend tax dollars trying to do the same thing.
    - kibwen 7mo ago
      No, we don't. If you're talking about SETI, that's looking at radio signals. If you're talking about killer asteroid early-warning detection, we generally don't have the capacity to reliably detect voyager-sized asteroids even in our own solar system, let alone in interstellar space.
- dheera 7mo ago
  Imagine how far technology has come in 100 years. Then imagine if the alien had just a 1 million year head start to technology. 1 million years is less than 1/1000 of the age of the universe earlier. We have literally no idea what technology the alien could have.

dbacar 7mo ago

For some good portion of the earth's population, I dont think things would go worse than it is even if there were an alian invasion.

dcminter 7mo ago

I think you're not appreciating how big space is. They're not going to be near any star for thousands of years - and near here is still very distant. If we're still around then, we'll probably be able to look after ourselves.

ravenstine 7mo ago

Good thing those gold plates give aliens the wrong directions to Earth anyway.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

jacquesm 7mo ago

The chances of either Voyager ending up in the hands of intelligent aliens are remote compared to the chances of us blowing ourselves up. Be happy that there is at least a tiny possibility of a tombstone for a race which once upon a time aeons ago showed some promise. Personally I think they should have stuck a mummy in there.

TeMPOraL 7mo ago
They're not even wrong about both their complaints. The "damocletian sword of nuclear weapons" is actually what's been keeping humanity from setting the planet on fire for the past 60+ years.
ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
Could be, they find friends: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/V%27ger https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/V%27ger

mikkupikku 7mo ago

There is zero empirical evidence that aliens actually exist. All the arguments for why they should exist despite this lack of evidence are borderline theology.