7 ms·

Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

96 points by zinxq 13y ago

ebbv 13y ago
The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. And it's obvious that if we could travel around the galaxy and we detected life forms on another planet, we would obviously go visit them and check them out. The issue is that, for it to have any hope of ever visiting or communicating with us the intelligent life would have to be in our own galaxy. Which is a lot less likely (going down from billions of billions to just billions of stars.) Even then the task is far from trivial. But I think it's a certainty that if intelligent life does exist in our galaxy which is more advanced than ourselves, it will obviously try to contact us. Also based purely on what we know about life on earth intelligent life which is capable of developing technology is exceedingly rare when compared to life in general. It's not necessarily required that any planet which gives rise to life ever eventually develops intelligent life. If not for the extinction of the dinosaurs we'd never exist. So personally I tend to think it's most likely there are other planets with life in the Milky Way, but possibly none with intelligent life. And even less likely for it to be more advanced than us.
- asdfadfs 13y ago
  >>The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. << Look, there are many ponds of varying sizes, a couple of meters to hundreds of meters in diameter, in the woods near my home. Some of them most likely have life of some form. How interested are you in going there and study that life or even just check out what life there is? None? Right. That is the whole point of the article. You already know there is life there, it is not unique. Why bother? Your are making the exact mistake the author cautions against. We think we are important, most likely we are a dime a dozen in the vastness of the galaxy.
  - ebbv 13y ago
    There are people who are interested in the contents of those ponds, and they already have been studied. The people who are curious about the ponds (planets) are the ones that would be put on the ship. Not to mention your analogy is terrible. Those ponds aren't interesting to me because they are nothing special. They don't contain anything that we aren't constantly surrounded with everywhere. On the other hand in the galaxy, planets with life on it are special. And intelligent life even more so. Your argument is extremely, extremely weak. As I said, it's obvious, if aliens were cruising around the universe the whole purpose of it would be to find other intelligent life and inhabitable planets and interesting stuff. If we were doing it, that would obviously be our purpose, there's no reason to think that wouldn't be the purpose of any other intelligent life.
    - lmm 13y ago
      >Not to mention your analogy is terrible. Those ponds aren't interesting to me because they are nothing special. They don't contain anything that we aren't constantly surrounded with everywhere. On the other hand in the galaxy, planets with life on it are special. And intelligent life even more so. No - the whole point of the article is that they're not. Sure, it's a tiny proportion of planets. But in an unimaginably vast universe, there have got to be billions of them - and while there would surely be aliens who study some other civilizations, once you've seen a few million human-level civilizations you've seen them all. Analogy: even though four-leaf clover are rare and interesting as clover go, still the vast majority of four-leaf clover in the world have never been examined by a human.
      - ebbv 13y ago
        But it doesn't matter that in the entire universe there are tons because anything outside of our galaxy might as well not exist when you're talking about communication / contact. So just focusing on the galaxy, even if life arises on every planet where it is capable, it's not going to be common. The planets with life on them will be few and far between. And as I said, based on our evidence, not even all (or any necessarily) of those will have intelligent life.
    - 13y ago
- aegiso 13y ago
  > We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. Actually, as far as our interactions with other life forms go, we either ignore them (intestinal bacteria), keep them away (diseases), exterminate them (pests), or harvest and devour them (farming), or kill them for sport (hunting). The utterly insignificant fraction that become objects of our affection are those that are extremely close to us on the evolutionary scale. This wouldn't be the case with a civilization advanced enough to visit. Not even close. If someone somewhere discovered a new breed of cockroach, would you care?
  - trafficlight 13y ago
    If it were a Mars cockroach, we would desperately care.
    - aegiso 13y ago
      Except it would be extremely unlikely for us to be the first new species such a space-faring civilization would be coming into contact with. At galactic scale, there's not much difference between a Mars cockroach and a regular cockroach.
      - ebbv 13y ago
        > At galactic scale, there's not much difference between a Mars cockroach and a regular cockroach. There's not much difference between one species and another here but we still study all of them in great detail. Don't mistake your lack of intellectual curiosity about a certain subject as being a trait shared by everyone else. I don't care about football but that doesn't mean nobody else does. Similarly, as I said already, if you're going to go cruising about the galaxy, you're going to put people on that ship who are interested in what they're going to find. Otherwise there's no point.
  - ebbv 13y ago
    Oh come on. That analogy is so weak I can barely believe you're serious. See my response to the other guy who brought up a similar analogy.
- roc 13y ago
  Looking at the level of interest/affection we have for intelligent animals on our own planet isn't exactly reassuring. We know/strongly suspect dolphins/whales/etc are intelligent. But we don't care enough about what they might have to say to really try to communicate them. And we know gorillas are intelligent. We even know we can teach them to communicate on a simplistic level -- but we don't really do it. We just don't care to. Occasionally we take one from captivity, establish communication aaaand... leave it as a curiosity for some sub-set of under-funded researchers. No-one's going into the jungle to liaise with the gorilla tribes, help them through their troubles, educate them, present them with technology, medicine, etc. The best we've managed on either count, on a species-to-species level, is to start to try to raise their perceived value to a level greater than that of slight inconvenience. (To halt the wanton slaughter we were previously, casually and without much remorse, engaged in.) So would aliens ever come to Earth to stock up their zoo or fill out an encyclopedic survey of the galaxy and its life? On-Earth experience suggests that part is near-guaranteed if they ever swing by. Might they ever establish communication with a handful of such subjects, mostly to see if it could be done? Again on-Earth experience suggests that's also plausible-to-likely. But would they ever establish "contact" as our culture defines it? On-Earth experience makes that look less likely than their visiting in the first place. The only real hope we have for contact, is if the Aliens perceive themselves to be only marginally more advanced than ourselves [1]. But for that to be plausible starts to eat into the requirement/assumption that they be significantly more advanced than ourselves. [1] more along the lines of Spaniard/Native American interactions, than human/gorilla.
  - ebbv 13y ago
    I wasn't arguing the aliens would treat us well. They very well might not. But they'd probably make some form of contact with us. That was my only point. I think it's guaranteed. Just think about if we got that technology. If suddenly magically a ship capable of zipping around the galaxy appeared in NASA's hands, other than disassembling it and trying to replicate it, what would we use it for? Looking for other life and inhabitable planets. No reason to think aliens wouldn't do the same. It's obvious, IMHO.
    - 13y ago
- katbyte 13y ago
  Not to mention they may have religious or cultural reasons to contact/convert/kill any other form of intelligent life.
  - tylee78 13y ago
    indeed. again, looking at world affairs, that might be a greater motivational force than anything else.
- pekk 13y ago
  > We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet Which is a human characteristic shared by hardly any (if any) other species on Earth. So why do you suppose that fundamentally different life will have that human characteristic? > if intelligent life does exist in our galaxy which is more advanced than ourselves, it will obviously try to contact us. More advanced than ourselves, presumably, in the mode of what it means for humans to be more advanced. And you are again presupposing that said beings have human-like interests and will be excited about sending us prime numbers on the radio. This isn't a 'certainty'. This is no better than an article of faith on your part.
- akiselev 13y ago
  The interest and affection we have for pets is a very different situation than that of an intergalactic civilization's view on intelligent life. If they respect other life, intelligent or not, in the galaxy, chances are they would be very unwilling to interfere. I'd be very excited to visit a planet with other life on it but I would give an extreme amount of thought about whether I wanted to risk introducing pathogens or exposing an intelligent civilization to knowledge and technology far beyond its time (the immediate philosophical and psychological impact of discovering that you are not alone in the universe cannot be predicted, especially with alien races). If, on the other hand, they didn't respect other life not as advanced as them, why would their actions be any different than that of humanity for thousands of years when dealing with less intelligent life forms?
codex 13y ago
This article seems to gloss over the hypothesis that aliens evolved under evolutionary pressure, and are thus likely to want to reproduce and expand. So no matter how advanced they may become technologically, they might still want our resources and our planet, simply because they're reproducing themselves at an exponential rate--especially if they've solved the immortality problem, which is likely. Even with advanced birth control, aliens may still want to have cute alien babies. They could chose to simulate their lives in a computer instead, likely it's cheaper to acquire a real planet than simulate one.
- asdfadfs 13y ago
  >>This article seems to gloss over the hypothesis that aliens evolved under evolutionary pressure, and are thus likely to want to reproduce and expand. Remember though that we've already seen that people in rich nations are not driven to reproduce and expand like bunnies. Is there some evolutionary pressure on you that drives you fuck woman and have children with them? Is the impulse so strong that you cannot help yourself? We can have as much sex as we want, but without the children because of birth control. Why would it be any different for Aliens?
  - danielweber 13y ago
    > people in rich nations are not driven to reproduce It may be true for many, even most. But you would need to expand it to all. Otherwise those who do want to reproduce and spread will continue to do it. Also, we may be in a lull. There may be some gene that either makes people not want to reproduce, or makes people really want to reproduce. That gene is about to experience a whole boatload of selective pressure.
- evv 13y ago
  Agreed. The article also seems skeptical that aliens would be willing or capable to travel for thousands of years to reach us. For a truly advanced species who have undoubtedly extended their lifetime drastically, I doubt thousands of years would feel like a very long time. Hell, thousands of years wouldn't even feel like a long time for human-built computers.
deleted 13y ago
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exratione 13y ago
Never is a strong term. But on the whole, not a viable collection of answers to the Fermi Paradox, even with the usual qualification that it is most likely a machine phase civilization that would come knocking rather than its biological ancestors. All it takes is one faction within one species to decide on self-replicating probes that can recreate its own biosphere at each stopover, and the whole galaxy will be visited in a time that is very short compared to its lifespan. That species will be us unless the Great Filter makes itself known sometime within the next century or two; I haven't seen any compelling suggestions as to what it might be at this point, however. Further, the article fails to consider the value of data, which I think is the most likely trade good for any sort of interstellar commerce. I think one could make good information-theoretic and game theory arguments as to why you really have to send an intelligent data extractor/compiler of some sort to a very remote source in order to maximize the rate at which you can obtain the data that's most valuable to you.
camus 13y ago
if they are like us but more advanced, that's better. remember what happened to american indians? ;)
swayvil 13y ago
They must take into account the effects of raw aether upon sailcloth!
snowwrestler 13y ago
> The bottom line is that if an alien race is capable of getting here, all the other technology they've requisitely developed in the meantime would make the trip unnecessary at best - and more than likely, simply meaningless. This argument is structurally similar to the argument that God exists because God is perfect, and a necessary attribute of perfection is existence. It begs the question. Personally I think the real reason we'll never meet aliens is that such travel is physically impossible.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- astine 13y ago
  "This argument is structurally similar to the argument that God exists because God is perfect, and a necessary attribute of perfection is existence. It begs the question." No it doesn't. The hypothetical alien race remains hypothetical throughout the argument. Not so with the Ontological Proof.
  - snowwrestler 13y ago
    What is each speaker trying to prove? 1) the idea that God exists 2) the idea that aliens will never come visit us Both start their proof with an assertion that contains within its concept the very conclusion that they are trying to prove. Both attempt to leverage an opinion that is personally held ("I think God is perfect", "I think alien science will obviate the need to visit") into an objective statement that applies universally ("God exists","aliens will never come visit").
- apalmer 13y ago
  Not similar at all, maybe in sentence structure, not in logical structure
sixQuarks 13y ago
My theory is that once a life form gets advanced enough, their brains start penetrating a hidden dimension that we know nothing about. This dimension is so much richer than "our universe", that they never come back to this one.
- gmaslov 13y ago
  It may have started to happen to us already -- I'm sure there are a few people here who have gotten lost in the World of Warcraft dimension for a time.
  - sixQuarks 13y ago
    true - now think if WOW was a trillion times more immersive.
adventured 13y ago
"It's easy to get lost in the numbers thrown around - there are billions of stars and planets in our galaxy and billions of galaxies. Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers." Speak for yourself.
webwielder 13y ago
Another day, another instance of someone saying "Stephen Hawkings" or "Jony Ives". The biggest impediment in my mind to alien contact is time. Intelligent life could have evolved any time in the past 13 billion years or any time in the next googol years. The probability that we would cross temporal paths in our few thousand years of viable existence seems low.
- solistice 13y ago
  Thing is, we don't actually know what the half life of an intelligent species is. Civilisations? Yes, in the case of ours, but simply taking our species as the sample could get us a number that could be magnitudes off.
- johngalt 13y ago
  Exactly, other life would be a minimum of a million years ahead of us or a million years behind. Using earth as a reference. Life has been on earth for 4 billion years, and nothing remotely interesting until the last 0.5 billion years. All of human civilization has occurred in the last .000012 billion years. From our perspective 'Alien life' will be either the faintest traces of ancient ruins or pond scum.
tempaccount9473 13y ago
If aliens aren't coming to this planet, clearly this is a market ripe for disruption! I'm now looking for a cofounder who will shake up the L2L (lifeform to lifeform) market with a new disruptive social media platform for unmotivated hypotetcial advanced beings to share pictures of intergalactic felines.
- glurgh 13y ago
  'advanced' belies the sort of casual sentientism that is an embarrassment and a blight on this site, the technology industry and entrepreneurship. It's also irrational since it ignores a massive yet underserved market. Opening line of the elevator pitch - 'It's like Google, but for goo'.
  - tempaccount9473 13y ago
    > Opening line of the elevator pitch - 'It's like Google, but for goo'. Uh, we just pivoted to a Facebook for homogeneous omniscient beings of pure energy.
futhey 13y ago
Life usually makes me feel silly for using the term `never`. As a rule, I don't.
tocomment 13y ago
He's not addressing the idea of von neumann probes. Just a species or self-replicating probe that spreads out in all directions using all resources. Another option is an alien race seeing us as a potential competitor for resources after millions of years more development and wanting to stop us now.
mihaifm 13y ago
The question is not "why would they want to visit us", but "why are they not here", aka The Fermi Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox Every issue related to the existence of aliens must answer that paradox first. My favorite interpretation: we are the most advanced civilization in the galaxy. "Why would they want to visit us?" - this can have trivial answers: the same reasons why we study ants today.
- anywherenotes 13y ago
  I like this one the most: "It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself" There could simply be a technological ceiling. Once civilization reaches the ceiling, it hits it's head on the ceiling, and falls down the stairs either destroying itself or at very least losing most the progress.
FilterJoe 13y ago
I liked the article but not the misleading title. A title like "Alien movies have so many implausible ideas" would have been more accurate and not get people so stuck on the one idea implied by the title. Of all the implausible ideas in sci fi movies and books, the one which always rubbed me most wrong is not mentioned: How military encounters would play out. Consider: Most naval battles in space are modeled after 2 dimensional naval war fare. Not only is space 3D, but there is no reason to suppose technology geared around combating vessels floating in water has any relevance to space combat. However, the most important variable determining the outcome of first encounters with (quite possibly) hostile alien races has nothing to do with the military gear and tactics. It has to do with relative technology level. Greg Bear's "Anvil of the Stars" which looks at it from this angle and here are some notes I distilled: In most sci fi movies and books, there are World-War-II-Naval-like space battles with weapons/ships/shields at near parity. I have always thought this to be highly implausible, and I thought the most interesting aspect of this book was to consider three possible battle situations in space: 1) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly higher tech level. If they detect you before you detect them, you are dead. Period. Your only possibility to win such a battle is to detect them first and destroy them instantly - and your chances of being able to do that are slim. 2) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly lower tech level. Using the logic above, all that matters is you being able to detect them before they detect you. The technologies of stealth, electronic counter measures, detection, etc. are therefore all extremely vital in order to never be defeated by aliens with a lower tech level. 3) There is a possibility that you encounter an enemy close enough to your own tech level that the battle could last more than a split second. It is only in these instances that all the other things often written in other science fiction stories might matter - amount and type of shielding, weapons systems, quality of personnel, etc. But such battles are very unlikely, because technological progress is so fast. Consider what it would be like for any of today's industrialized nations with a substantial military to combat the most powerful nation on earth from 200 years ago - there would be no contest at all. The universe has been around for billions of years, so the chance of two races encountering each other that are within a few hundred years of each others' technology level is very low. The above logic also applies to planetary defense as well, though with even more emphasis on not being detected.
pbreit 13y ago
Of all the many reasons why our view of alien visitation is radically off-target, that the trip would be meaningless probably doesn't even make the cut. It's hard to imagine an advanced species would have advanced without curiosity.
api 13y ago
This is just a bunch of idle speculation. We can't speculate on the motives of aliens at all. Look at how hard it is to discern the motives of other humans, and now tell me you're going to discern the motives of something biologically completely unlike us? You can't assume they're rational motives either. Why should aliens be incapable of something like religion, egotism, mass delusion, or hedonic desires? As far as the feasibility of star travel: it's hard, but not impossible. The thing that makes it hard really isn't the propulsion problem. You can go to the stars using technology contemporary with the Beatles white album: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsi... A thermonuclear Orion could achieve around 10% the speed of light... according to figures computed using 60s assumptions of vehicle mass. With very lightweight materials and more efficient thermonuclear charges higher fractions are certainly achievable. (Though the acceleration would be rough!) What you can't do with 60s-70s tech is survive the trip. The biological, structural, psychological, and engineering robustness challenges outweigh the challenge of propelling yourself at meaningful fractions of the speed of light. But those are all things that will yield to incremental progress. (BTW: the same is true for Mars. The Apollo rig could have, with very minor modifications, sent astronauts to Mars. They would have been dead when they got there. The life support tech to keep a human in a can alive that long did not exist. Propulsion isn't the hardest problem.) The fact is that we simply don't know. We don't even know if there is other complex life in our galaxy, let alone what it might be capable of or what it might do.
- powertower 13y ago
  > You can't assume they're rational motives either. Why should aliens be incapable of something like religion, egotism, mass delusion, or hedonic desires? I think the question would be if irrationality, egoism, delusion, and hedonism allows (or prevents) a species to advanced to FTL travel. They might also have an idea that the only life that should exist in this universe is theirs. Or they might believe that connecting with all other sentient beings is a primary goal in existence. Or they might be incredibly altruistic and want to help and benefit all others. Though the author's other points are all valid... There is no reason to invade this planet for its resources when a few asteroids in their own solar system contains everything they need.
jblz 13y ago
This article assumes a lot: * The aliens who possess the technological ability to reach Earth are the ones who built it and evolved alongside it. Who's to say they didn't take it by force? * FTL is something that must be developed through technology. (i.e. discounting the possibility of naturally occurring wormholes) * The aliens have no inherent desire for exploration Yes, I've watched too much Sci-fi :)
- jblz 13y ago
  ...also, if you're traveling FTL, then time travel isn't that much of a stretch. So, ya.
zeteo 13y ago
This article is full of misconceptions. Let's address a few of the most egregious ones. >there are billions of stars and planets in our galaxy and billions of galaxies. Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers. There's no obstacle to working with large numbers once you understand powers and logarithms (i.e. pre-calc). Very smart people have looked at the Drake equation and it yields a very wide range of values [1]. >Christopher Columbus first landing on North America (not a good event for native Americans) The main reason Europeans were able to take over America was disease. The Aztec effort to kick out the Spanish was hampered by smallpox [2], and colonization of North America had to wait for over a century before the native population was sufficiently depleted by disease to stop offering resistance. [3] Needless to say, disease worked unintentionally and because both sides were the same species. > So, screw it, all movie alien races invented artificial gravity. Or, you know, maybe they built ships with rotating crew habitats that simulate gravity by centrifugal force. (I belive 2001 does a pretty good job of showing the concept.) > If getting humans to another star system is a 100 on some "technology ability scale", we're a 2 which is not comparatively far ahead of say, poodles - who are probably at a 1. First off, poodles are at a zero. Second, if 10% of world GDP was dedicated to building an interstellar, multi-generation ark, we pretty much have the technology to do it right now. The technological problem is to reduce the cost to the point where the political will to do it can be summoned (probably around 0.01% of GDP). >Maybe they want to trade with us. Well, yeah, right. If you've gotten this far it's obvious we have no tech that would interest them. [4] >How many years before we have a brain interface to Google? You'd know everything. We already have Google in our pockets. But instantly finding any quote by Darwin doesn't mean I understand the theory of evolution. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Range_of_values http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Range_of_values [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuitl%C3%A1huac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuitl%C3%A1huac [3] See timeline in http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366998666&sr=8-1&keywords=1491 http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colum... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
- krapp 13y ago
  You left out the misconception where FTL travel is even possible. That's probably most likely why we'll never meet aliens... the low likelihood of them being able to harness that level of energy reduced even further by the likelihood of a ship happening to stumble across this particular rock.... and then, further still by them even caring if they find us. Heck, there might be cloud-squid in Jupiter we're not even aware of who make better conversationalists than us. The aliens might even show up after a thousand year trip and ignore the Earth entirely.
iamthepieman 13y ago
Most of the comments here make an assumption that aliens would have similar motivations as ourselves. Is there a chance that another intelligent lifeform would share ANY mental or emotional similarities with us? This assumes that they even have mental or emotional capabilities in the first place. An alien intelligence could express itself collectively like an advanced ant colony or they could communicate in ways so different than us that we would each appear like brute beasts to each other. If a giant amoeba colony that developed intelligence by acting as individual neurons in a collective brain we wouldn't even know unless its actions betrayed higher level planning and thinking. This would require that its motivations were at least marginally similar to our own.
- danielweber 13y ago
  I have no problem believing that, if there is alien life, that many of them are quite different. I do have a problem believing that there is lots of alien life and all of them will come to this guy's "it makes sense to me so it must make sense to advanced aliens" conclusions to say home.
  - iamthepieman 13y ago
    Agreed. The problem with reasoning about potentially unreasonable (at least to us) lifeforms is self-evident.
lnanek2 13y ago
Since we haven't met aliens yet, and interstellar travel would take ridiculous amounts of time and energy, I don't think any of us alive will meet aliens. It's like saying none of us will experience an ice age. Even if they do happen regularly, it happens regularly on geologic time scales, so it isn't going to happen in your life span. There might be so many stars out there that aliens are bound to happen, but crossing stars takes so much time and energy it isn't going to happen often.
bane 13y ago
On top of all that, we're forgetting that aliens might not just be very distant from us in space, but also in time. Implied in the Drake equation is also the percent of technologically advanced intelligent life-bearing planets in the universe, but technologically advanced intelligent life-bearing planets that happen to have hit some technological threshold within the right time frame to contact us. Once you start thinking of it that way, the probabilities get freakishly small. A couple small evolutionary events and a parallel Earth could have achieved sentient space-faring intelligence of some sort a billion years ago. If they came to check us out we wouldn't be here. Likewise, a couple mass extinction events on another parallel Earth could keep space-faring intelligence on the back burner for another 2 billion years.
crucialfelix 13y ago
The film and even more so the book Solaris describes an alien intelligence that is far more interesting than the anthropomorphic forms that humans fantasize about. The "alien" in Solaris is a sentient ocean that covers the surface of the planet. All kinds of structures form and dissolve on the surface. The being can communicate with visitors by accessing their minds and seems to alter reality itself to entertain their fantasies. Whose to say that other lifeforms would be single units (like human egos), or would operate on time scales that we can even comprehend ? Or operate consciously only in 3 dimensions. that said, there are probably more like us.
unclebucknasty 13y ago
How can we say definitively (or with any certainty) that there are relatively advanced life forms everywhere, such that they are a dime a dozen? How do we know that interstellar travelers wouldn't find us rare and interesting? Curiosity more than anything is what drives our need to know. I think that's what would drive such visitors. In fact, because they would be more technologically advanced and would likely have solved resource problems, etc., they would naturally have time to spend exploring and answering questions. Finally, we can assume such explorers are more advanced than we, but not necessarily by orders of magnitude. I think people have a tendancy to attribute god-like qualities to them because they have solved some problems that we have not. But, the idea of splitting an atom was outlandish until a handful of dudes, inspired by another dude's theory did it in a relatively short span. Similar with other breakthroughs. At any given time, a single discovery can advance our knowledge far beyond what we thought possible, and even moreso with the accelerating pace of technology. And, BTW, many of our own "resource problems" are completely solvable and should not exist. For instance, we have an obesity problem in the U.S. while millions starve elsewhere (and in the U.S.). It seems that our biggest obstacles are a product of human nature. If anything, an alien species' appearance might be indicative of an advancement in philosophy or organizational behavior (ex. hive mentality vs. individual) moreso than a far superior intelligence.
alan_cx 13y ago
I look around at a "human" species on this planet I don't understand and don't feel part of. Either I'm looking at a successful alien invasion, or I'm it.
chmike 13y ago
Aliens would indeed not travel to us for earth's ressources. But our earth is special by the existence of life. If life emergence is a random process, the forms it can take may be as well. There would be alot to learn and gain from a direct access to it. Science and knowlege is the ultimate ressource any ciilization will run after, after energy and other limiting facors have been mastered. Another frequent mistake is that ET would travel direct from home to earth. As far as we know FTL is impossible. So it makes better sense to travel by small hops from one solar system to the next one. It could be more a ant like colonization process. This would imply that ET visiting earth would irst build one or more bases in our solar system and visit earth from there.
LogicFailsMe 13y ago
We do a lot of crazy crap in the name of invisible gods. What's to say an alien race wouldn't get it in their heads that it's their sacred duty to their chosen deity to fill every planet in the universe with their greatness, exterminating all the impure in the process? I have no problem believing the equivalent of the Daleks or the Ori might one day demonstrate a variant of the replicator hypothesis at our expense. Why must they have a coherent logical basis for all their behavior? We certainly don't.
- unclebucknasty 13y ago
  Right, or a coherent logical basis that we would understand.
guard-of-terra 13y ago
If aliens exist we should be able to notice consequences of their existence - either accidental or intended. Even if we miss the window of contact, galaxy should be teeming with shadows of alien civilizations if only we know where to look.
ansible 13y ago
Well, most of the people in this comment thread haven't been reading good-enough science fiction, including Paul. First, go read Accelerando by Charles Stross: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera... And for the bits you don't understand, you can also check out the woefully incomplete but still helpful technical companion: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Accelerando_Technical_Companion https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Accelerando_Technical_Companio... Then you'll want to read up in general on molecular nanotechnology. K. Eric Drexler has updated Engines of Creation, and its also free online: http://www.wowio.com/users/product.asp?BookId=503 http://www.wowio.com/users/product.asp?BookId=503 So if we get visited by "aliens" there's an even chance it will be some runaway Von Neumann replicator seeds shot out from a nearby solar system, bent on converting our entire solar system to computronium. Or if we're lucky, some relatively benevolent replicator seeds merely intent on cataloging all the myriad of life that has arisen around the galaxy without actually intending to destroy said life. There is just about zero chance than any recognizably biological (I prefer the term "squishy") life coming to visit us, just because sending any sizable chunk of matter across interstellar distances at any reasonable speed so so damn expensive, even for Kardashev type 2 civilizations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
alan-crowe 13y ago
They might not be trying to explore physical space, they might be trying to explore chemical space. Chemical space? http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/04/18/a_short_peptide_and_a_small_molecule.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/04/18/a_short_pept... Consider the question of whether there is any alternative biochemical basis for life. It is quite likely that even an alien super-intelligence finds the question impossible. Sure, it can invent synthetic biologys that are variations on its own biochemistry, but is there anything genuinely different out there? Given the size of chemical space it is probably easier to travel ten thousand light years to the nearest planet with life on it and look to see if its basis is the same or different.
ttrreeww 13y ago
Actually, there are increasing amount of evidence that implies we are related to the aliens on a genetic level. See Sirius the documentary. We literally are who we seek.
tokenadult 13y ago
I found an online posting of a secondary school textbook reprint of Arthur C. Clarke's essay "We'll Never Conquer Space," http://www.olivenri.com/conquer_space_files/Conquer_space.pdf http://www.olivenri.com/conquer_space_files/Conquer_space.pd... which lays out just how vast outer space is, and how time (with travel being strictly limited by the speed of light) as much as distance limits the feasibility of voyages between stars, especially back-and-forth voyages between stars. A blogger on a planetarium website http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/why-we-will-never-conquer-space.html http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/why-we-will-never-conquer-s... and the maker of a Prezi based on Clarke's essay http://prezi.com/uxc2owcv5ekp/well-never-conquer-space/ http://prezi.com/uxc2owcv5ekp/well-never-conquer-space/ both emphasize that traveling to a nearby star is already a huge task. The probable density in the universe of intelligent living things (the "aliens" of the title of the submitted blog post) among all the many stars is low. All those aliens run into the same hard physical laws we run into if they attempt to make a voyage to another star. To the most relevant correct approximation, our probability of meeting interstellar voyagers is even lower than our probability of being interstellar voyagers, and our probability of being interstellar voyagers during the lifetime of anyone now reading Hacker News is nil. Remember, we have not even visited Mars, not even on the proposed one-way trip, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5390730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5390730 and humankind has delayed in traveling to Mars far beyond my imagining (I thought that the trip would be made in 1980s, and even dreamed of being on the landing crew) because humankind has higher priorities and better claims on our shared resources. So the submitted blog post title is correct, even if you quibble about the blogger's reasoning (as I do). We won't meet the aliens, because the aliens won't make a trip here before we all die.
SiVal 13y ago
I don't buy the idea that they wouldn't need to come here, because their statistical models, based on remote observations of conditions, would be able to predict everything they would find. I think we've learned enough about complexity and sensitive dependence on initial (and later) conditions to say that, unless we're wrong about complexity, the outcome of all these historical accidents wouldn't be predictable. They would still have to observe, meaning explore, to see what ended up actually happening around the universe and, in addition, they would never know for sure if they had already found all the Black Swans out there.
millstone 13y ago
> it's nearly comical to believe we're the only intelligent life in the universe Why the obsession with life? If our space ships landed on a distant planet containing an advanced civilization of intelligent robots, would we shrug, say “no life here,” and head home? In fact, if you think about it, life is the most boring thing we could discover. We already know a lot about life, and how life may evolve, but we know absolutely nothing about how civilizations and intelligence may come from other substrates. I hope we don’t find life, but something far weirder.
givan 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations 92.35% of human population is religious, in every religion there are gods that can be easily associated with aliens. Looking at some religios beliefs the coming of gods means all kind of things, some religions interpret them as the end of the world, the return of christ etc. Aliens showing up will have a big impact on people beliefs, most of us will be very scared, many will believe the end of the world version and panic. The social impact of alien existence on our current society is huge and if advanced aliens really discovered us then they sure know this and wait for our society to get more mature to be ready to meet them.
summerdown2 13y ago
Interestingly enough, this argument seems self defeating. Let's think what he's saying: a) Aliens who can get across space to us would be far in advance of us in all dimensions of technology. b) They would also be far smarter than us because technological evolution would act much more than biological and therefore give them machine-brain interfaces. c) With their great science they would be able to know what we're like (so far below them) and have no need to come here. except as far as I can see, c) is overruled by b) If aliens have got so far by technological evolution and use machines to augument their bodies and minds, they're not really that far in advance of us - they just have better tools. They wouldn't see us in that case as insects - rather as cripples who just need a wheelchair. If they used their science to augument our bodies and minds in the same way as they do with their own, we'd be perfectly able to have conversations with them.
kamakazizuru 13y ago
the largest logical fallacy among many that this article suffers from is that alien species would necessarily need to be technologically advanced to reach us. This probably comes from another flawed line of thought that aliens need to be like us in some way (hence requiring things like figuring out how to survive radiation, last for long periods without food and so on). This doesnt really make sense since on earth itself there are species that can do things we humans couldnt do (cockroaches can cope with tremendous amounts of radiation for example, and bacteria that live near geysers etc - thrive at extremely high temperatures). So why isn't it possible that an alien species that just about figures out how to ride a rock in space and doesnt really need all the advancement that we need to survive - comes floating by planet earth and decides to check us out sometimes?! Don't back up a lack of imagination with flawed logic ;)
- soneca 13y ago
  I agree. There are complex organisms on Earth that can froze and defroze themselves and continue to live. What if one of those evolve to inteligence on a low gravity planet. It would be much easier to travel through space.

96 points by zinxq 13y ago

ebbv 13y ago

The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. And it's obvious that if we could travel around the galaxy and we detected life forms on another planet, we would obviously go visit them and check them out. The issue is that, for it to have any hope of ever visiting or communicating with us the intelligent life would have to be in our own galaxy. Which is a lot less likely (going down from billions of billions to just billions of stars.) Even then the task is far from trivial. But I think it's a certainty that if intelligent life does exist in our galaxy which is more advanced than ourselves, it will obviously try to contact us. Also based purely on what we know about life on earth intelligent life which is capable of developing technology is exceedingly rare when compared to life in general. It's not necessarily required that any planet which gives rise to life ever eventually develops intelligent life. If not for the extinction of the dinosaurs we'd never exist. So personally I tend to think it's most likely there are other planets with life in the Milky Way, but possibly none with intelligent life. And even less likely for it to be more advanced than us.

asdfadfs 13y ago
>>The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. << Look, there are many ponds of varying sizes, a couple of meters to hundreds of meters in diameter, in the woods near my home. Some of them most likely have life of some form. How interested are you in going there and study that life or even just check out what life there is? None? Right. That is the whole point of the article. You already know there is life there, it is not unique. Why bother? Your are making the exact mistake the author cautions against. We think we are important, most likely we are a dime a dozen in the vastness of the galaxy.
- ebbv 13y ago
  There are people who are interested in the contents of those ponds, and they already have been studied. The people who are curious about the ponds (planets) are the ones that would be put on the ship. Not to mention your analogy is terrible. Those ponds aren't interesting to me because they are nothing special. They don't contain anything that we aren't constantly surrounded with everywhere. On the other hand in the galaxy, planets with life on it are special. And intelligent life even more so. Your argument is extremely, extremely weak. As I said, it's obvious, if aliens were cruising around the universe the whole purpose of it would be to find other intelligent life and inhabitable planets and interesting stuff. If we were doing it, that would obviously be our purpose, there's no reason to think that wouldn't be the purpose of any other intelligent life.
  - lmm 13y ago
    >Not to mention your analogy is terrible. Those ponds aren't interesting to me because they are nothing special. They don't contain anything that we aren't constantly surrounded with everywhere. On the other hand in the galaxy, planets with life on it are special. And intelligent life even more so. No - the whole point of the article is that they're not. Sure, it's a tiny proportion of planets. But in an unimaginably vast universe, there have got to be billions of them - and while there would surely be aliens who study some other civilizations, once you've seen a few million human-level civilizations you've seen them all. Analogy: even though four-leaf clover are rare and interesting as clover go, still the vast majority of four-leaf clover in the world have never been examined by a human.
    - ebbv 13y ago
      But it doesn't matter that in the entire universe there are tons because anything outside of our galaxy might as well not exist when you're talking about communication / contact. So just focusing on the galaxy, even if life arises on every planet where it is capable, it's not going to be common. The planets with life on them will be few and far between. And as I said, based on our evidence, not even all (or any necessarily) of those will have intelligent life.
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aegiso 13y ago
> We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. Actually, as far as our interactions with other life forms go, we either ignore them (intestinal bacteria), keep them away (diseases), exterminate them (pests), or harvest and devour them (farming), or kill them for sport (hunting). The utterly insignificant fraction that become objects of our affection are those that are extremely close to us on the evolutionary scale. This wouldn't be the case with a civilization advanced enough to visit. Not even close. If someone somewhere discovered a new breed of cockroach, would you care?
- trafficlight 13y ago
  If it were a Mars cockroach, we would desperately care.
  - aegiso 13y ago
    Except it would be extremely unlikely for us to be the first new species such a space-faring civilization would be coming into contact with. At galactic scale, there's not much difference between a Mars cockroach and a regular cockroach.
    - ebbv 13y ago
      > At galactic scale, there's not much difference between a Mars cockroach and a regular cockroach. There's not much difference between one species and another here but we still study all of them in great detail. Don't mistake your lack of intellectual curiosity about a certain subject as being a trait shared by everyone else. I don't care about football but that doesn't mean nobody else does. Similarly, as I said already, if you're going to go cruising about the galaxy, you're going to put people on that ship who are interested in what they're going to find. Otherwise there's no point.
- ebbv 13y ago
  Oh come on. That analogy is so weak I can barely believe you're serious. See my response to the other guy who brought up a similar analogy.
roc 13y ago
Looking at the level of interest/affection we have for intelligent animals on our own planet isn't exactly reassuring. We know/strongly suspect dolphins/whales/etc are intelligent. But we don't care enough about what they might have to say to really try to communicate them. And we know gorillas are intelligent. We even know we can teach them to communicate on a simplistic level -- but we don't really do it. We just don't care to. Occasionally we take one from captivity, establish communication aaaand... leave it as a curiosity for some sub-set of under-funded researchers. No-one's going into the jungle to liaise with the gorilla tribes, help them through their troubles, educate them, present them with technology, medicine, etc. The best we've managed on either count, on a species-to-species level, is to start to try to raise their perceived value to a level greater than that of slight inconvenience. (To halt the wanton slaughter we were previously, casually and without much remorse, engaged in.) So would aliens ever come to Earth to stock up their zoo or fill out an encyclopedic survey of the galaxy and its life? On-Earth experience suggests that part is near-guaranteed if they ever swing by. Might they ever establish communication with a handful of such subjects, mostly to see if it could be done? Again on-Earth experience suggests that's also plausible-to-likely. But would they ever establish "contact" as our culture defines it? On-Earth experience makes that look less likely than their visiting in the first place. The only real hope we have for contact, is if the Aliens perceive themselves to be only marginally more advanced than ourselves [1]. But for that to be plausible starts to eat into the requirement/assumption that they be significantly more advanced than ourselves. [1] more along the lines of Spaniard/Native American interactions, than human/gorilla.
- ebbv 13y ago
  I wasn't arguing the aliens would treat us well. They very well might not. But they'd probably make some form of contact with us. That was my only point. I think it's guaranteed. Just think about if we got that technology. If suddenly magically a ship capable of zipping around the galaxy appeared in NASA's hands, other than disassembling it and trying to replicate it, what would we use it for? Looking for other life and inhabitable planets. No reason to think aliens wouldn't do the same. It's obvious, IMHO.
  - 13y ago
katbyte 13y ago
Not to mention they may have religious or cultural reasons to contact/convert/kill any other form of intelligent life.
- tylee78 13y ago
  indeed. again, looking at world affairs, that might be a greater motivational force than anything else.
pekk 13y ago
> We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet Which is a human characteristic shared by hardly any (if any) other species on Earth. So why do you suppose that fundamentally different life will have that human characteristic? > if intelligent life does exist in our galaxy which is more advanced than ourselves, it will obviously try to contact us. More advanced than ourselves, presumably, in the mode of what it means for humans to be more advanced. And you are again presupposing that said beings have human-like interests and will be excited about sending us prime numbers on the radio. This isn't a 'certainty'. This is no better than an article of faith on your part.
akiselev 13y ago
The interest and affection we have for pets is a very different situation than that of an intergalactic civilization's view on intelligent life. If they respect other life, intelligent or not, in the galaxy, chances are they would be very unwilling to interfere. I'd be very excited to visit a planet with other life on it but I would give an extreme amount of thought about whether I wanted to risk introducing pathogens or exposing an intelligent civilization to knowledge and technology far beyond its time (the immediate philosophical and psychological impact of discovering that you are not alone in the universe cannot be predicted, especially with alien races). If, on the other hand, they didn't respect other life not as advanced as them, why would their actions be any different than that of humanity for thousands of years when dealing with less intelligent life forms?

codex 13y ago

This article seems to gloss over the hypothesis that aliens evolved under evolutionary pressure, and are thus likely to want to reproduce and expand. So no matter how advanced they may become technologically, they might still want our resources and our planet, simply because they're reproducing themselves at an exponential rate--especially if they've solved the immortality problem, which is likely. Even with advanced birth control, aliens may still want to have cute alien babies. They could chose to simulate their lives in a computer instead, likely it's cheaper to acquire a real planet than simulate one.

asdfadfs 13y ago
>>This article seems to gloss over the hypothesis that aliens evolved under evolutionary pressure, and are thus likely to want to reproduce and expand. Remember though that we've already seen that people in rich nations are not driven to reproduce and expand like bunnies. Is there some evolutionary pressure on you that drives you fuck woman and have children with them? Is the impulse so strong that you cannot help yourself? We can have as much sex as we want, but without the children because of birth control. Why would it be any different for Aliens?
- danielweber 13y ago
  > people in rich nations are not driven to reproduce It may be true for many, even most. But you would need to expand it to all. Otherwise those who do want to reproduce and spread will continue to do it. Also, we may be in a lull. There may be some gene that either makes people not want to reproduce, or makes people really want to reproduce. That gene is about to experience a whole boatload of selective pressure.
evv 13y ago
Agreed. The article also seems skeptical that aliens would be willing or capable to travel for thousands of years to reach us. For a truly advanced species who have undoubtedly extended their lifetime drastically, I doubt thousands of years would feel like a very long time. Hell, thousands of years wouldn't even feel like a long time for human-built computers.

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exratione 13y ago

Never is a strong term. But on the whole, not a viable collection of answers to the Fermi Paradox, even with the usual qualification that it is most likely a machine phase civilization that would come knocking rather than its biological ancestors. All it takes is one faction within one species to decide on self-replicating probes that can recreate its own biosphere at each stopover, and the whole galaxy will be visited in a time that is very short compared to its lifespan. That species will be us unless the Great Filter makes itself known sometime within the next century or two; I haven't seen any compelling suggestions as to what it might be at this point, however. Further, the article fails to consider the value of data, which I think is the most likely trade good for any sort of interstellar commerce. I think one could make good information-theoretic and game theory arguments as to why you really have to send an intelligent data extractor/compiler of some sort to a very remote source in order to maximize the rate at which you can obtain the data that's most valuable to you.

camus 13y ago

if they are like us but more advanced, that's better. remember what happened to american indians? ;)

swayvil 13y ago

They must take into account the effects of raw aether upon sailcloth!

snowwrestler 13y ago

> The bottom line is that if an alien race is capable of getting here, all the other technology they've requisitely developed in the meantime would make the trip unnecessary at best - and more than likely, simply meaningless. This argument is structurally similar to the argument that God exists because God is perfect, and a necessary attribute of perfection is existence. It begs the question. Personally I think the real reason we'll never meet aliens is that such travel is physically impossible.

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astine 13y ago
"This argument is structurally similar to the argument that God exists because God is perfect, and a necessary attribute of perfection is existence. It begs the question." No it doesn't. The hypothetical alien race remains hypothetical throughout the argument. Not so with the Ontological Proof.
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  What is each speaker trying to prove? 1) the idea that God exists 2) the idea that aliens will never come visit us Both start their proof with an assertion that contains within its concept the very conclusion that they are trying to prove. Both attempt to leverage an opinion that is personally held ("I think God is perfect", "I think alien science will obviate the need to visit") into an objective statement that applies universally ("God exists","aliens will never come visit").
apalmer 13y ago
Not similar at all, maybe in sentence structure, not in logical structure

sixQuarks 13y ago

My theory is that once a life form gets advanced enough, their brains start penetrating a hidden dimension that we know nothing about. This dimension is so much richer than "our universe", that they never come back to this one.

gmaslov 13y ago
It may have started to happen to us already -- I'm sure there are a few people here who have gotten lost in the World of Warcraft dimension for a time.
- sixQuarks 13y ago
  true - now think if WOW was a trillion times more immersive.

adventured 13y ago

"It's easy to get lost in the numbers thrown around - there are billions of stars and planets in our galaxy and billions of galaxies. Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers." Speak for yourself.

webwielder 13y ago

Another day, another instance of someone saying "Stephen Hawkings" or "Jony Ives". The biggest impediment in my mind to alien contact is time. Intelligent life could have evolved any time in the past 13 billion years or any time in the next googol years. The probability that we would cross temporal paths in our few thousand years of viable existence seems low.

solistice 13y ago
Thing is, we don't actually know what the half life of an intelligent species is. Civilisations? Yes, in the case of ours, but simply taking our species as the sample could get us a number that could be magnitudes off.
johngalt 13y ago
Exactly, other life would be a minimum of a million years ahead of us or a million years behind. Using earth as a reference. Life has been on earth for 4 billion years, and nothing remotely interesting until the last 0.5 billion years. All of human civilization has occurred in the last .000012 billion years. From our perspective 'Alien life' will be either the faintest traces of ancient ruins or pond scum.

tempaccount9473 13y ago

If aliens aren't coming to this planet, clearly this is a market ripe for disruption! I'm now looking for a cofounder who will shake up the L2L (lifeform to lifeform) market with a new disruptive social media platform for unmotivated hypotetcial advanced beings to share pictures of intergalactic felines.

glurgh 13y ago
'advanced' belies the sort of casual sentientism that is an embarrassment and a blight on this site, the technology industry and entrepreneurship. It's also irrational since it ignores a massive yet underserved market. Opening line of the elevator pitch - 'It's like Google, but for goo'.
- tempaccount9473 13y ago
  > Opening line of the elevator pitch - 'It's like Google, but for goo'. Uh, we just pivoted to a Facebook for homogeneous omniscient beings of pure energy.

futhey 13y ago

Life usually makes me feel silly for using the term `never`. As a rule, I don't.

tocomment 13y ago

He's not addressing the idea of von neumann probes. Just a species or self-replicating probe that spreads out in all directions using all resources. Another option is an alien race seeing us as a potential competitor for resources after millions of years more development and wanting to stop us now.

mihaifm 13y ago

The question is not "why would they want to visit us", but "why are they not here", aka The Fermi Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox Every issue related to the existence of aliens must answer that paradox first. My favorite interpretation: we are the most advanced civilization in the galaxy. "Why would they want to visit us?" - this can have trivial answers: the same reasons why we study ants today.

anywherenotes 13y ago
I like this one the most: "It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself" There could simply be a technological ceiling. Once civilization reaches the ceiling, it hits it's head on the ceiling, and falls down the stairs either destroying itself or at very least losing most the progress.

FilterJoe 13y ago

I liked the article but not the misleading title. A title like "Alien movies have so many implausible ideas" would have been more accurate and not get people so stuck on the one idea implied by the title. Of all the implausible ideas in sci fi movies and books, the one which always rubbed me most wrong is not mentioned: How military encounters would play out. Consider: Most naval battles in space are modeled after 2 dimensional naval war fare. Not only is space 3D, but there is no reason to suppose technology geared around combating vessels floating in water has any relevance to space combat. However, the most important variable determining the outcome of first encounters with (quite possibly) hostile alien races has nothing to do with the military gear and tactics. It has to do with relative technology level. Greg Bear's "Anvil of the Stars" which looks at it from this angle and here are some notes I distilled: In most sci fi movies and books, there are World-War-II-Naval-like space battles with weapons/ships/shields at near parity. I have always thought this to be highly implausible, and I thought the most interesting aspect of this book was to consider three possible battle situations in space: 1) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly higher tech level. If they detect you before you detect them, you are dead. Period. Your only possibility to win such a battle is to detect them first and destroy them instantly - and your chances of being able to do that are slim. 2) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly lower tech level. Using the logic above, all that matters is you being able to detect them before they detect you. The technologies of stealth, electronic counter measures, detection, etc. are therefore all extremely vital in order to never be defeated by aliens with a lower tech level. 3) There is a possibility that you encounter an enemy close enough to your own tech level that the battle could last more than a split second. It is only in these instances that all the other things often written in other science fiction stories might matter - amount and type of shielding, weapons systems, quality of personnel, etc. But such battles are very unlikely, because technological progress is so fast. Consider what it would be like for any of today's industrialized nations with a substantial military to combat the most powerful nation on earth from 200 years ago - there would be no contest at all. The universe has been around for billions of years, so the chance of two races encountering each other that are within a few hundred years of each others' technology level is very low. The above logic also applies to planetary defense as well, though with even more emphasis on not being detected.

pbreit 13y ago

Of all the many reasons why our view of alien visitation is radically off-target, that the trip would be meaningless probably doesn't even make the cut. It's hard to imagine an advanced species would have advanced without curiosity.

api 13y ago

This is just a bunch of idle speculation. We can't speculate on the motives of aliens at all. Look at how hard it is to discern the motives of other humans, and now tell me you're going to discern the motives of something biologically completely unlike us? You can't assume they're rational motives either. Why should aliens be incapable of something like religion, egotism, mass delusion, or hedonic desires? As far as the feasibility of star travel: it's hard, but not impossible. The thing that makes it hard really isn't the propulsion problem. You can go to the stars using technology contemporary with the Beatles white album: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsi... A thermonuclear Orion could achieve around 10% the speed of light... according to figures computed using 60s assumptions of vehicle mass. With very lightweight materials and more efficient thermonuclear charges higher fractions are certainly achievable. (Though the acceleration would be rough!) What you can't do with 60s-70s tech is survive the trip. The biological, structural, psychological, and engineering robustness challenges outweigh the challenge of propelling yourself at meaningful fractions of the speed of light. But those are all things that will yield to incremental progress. (BTW: the same is true for Mars. The Apollo rig could have, with very minor modifications, sent astronauts to Mars. They would have been dead when they got there. The life support tech to keep a human in a can alive that long did not exist. Propulsion isn't the hardest problem.) The fact is that we simply don't know. We don't even know if there is other complex life in our galaxy, let alone what it might be capable of or what it might do.

powertower 13y ago
> You can't assume they're rational motives either. Why should aliens be incapable of something like religion, egotism, mass delusion, or hedonic desires? I think the question would be if irrationality, egoism, delusion, and hedonism allows (or prevents) a species to advanced to FTL travel. They might also have an idea that the only life that should exist in this universe is theirs. Or they might believe that connecting with all other sentient beings is a primary goal in existence. Or they might be incredibly altruistic and want to help and benefit all others. Though the author's other points are all valid... There is no reason to invade this planet for its resources when a few asteroids in their own solar system contains everything they need.

jblz 13y ago

This article assumes a lot: * The aliens who possess the technological ability to reach Earth are the ones who built it and evolved alongside it. Who's to say they didn't take it by force? * FTL is something that must be developed through technology. (i.e. discounting the possibility of naturally occurring wormholes) * The aliens have no inherent desire for exploration Yes, I've watched too much Sci-fi :)

jblz 13y ago
...also, if you're traveling FTL, then time travel isn't that much of a stretch. So, ya.

zeteo 13y ago

This article is full of misconceptions. Let's address a few of the most egregious ones. >there are billions of stars and planets in our galaxy and billions of galaxies. Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers. There's no obstacle to working with large numbers once you understand powers and logarithms (i.e. pre-calc). Very smart people have looked at the Drake equation and it yields a very wide range of values [1]. >Christopher Columbus first landing on North America (not a good event for native Americans) The main reason Europeans were able to take over America was disease. The Aztec effort to kick out the Spanish was hampered by smallpox [2], and colonization of North America had to wait for over a century before the native population was sufficiently depleted by disease to stop offering resistance. [3] Needless to say, disease worked unintentionally and because both sides were the same species. > So, screw it, all movie alien races invented artificial gravity. Or, you know, maybe they built ships with rotating crew habitats that simulate gravity by centrifugal force. (I belive 2001 does a pretty good job of showing the concept.) > If getting humans to another star system is a 100 on some "technology ability scale", we're a 2 which is not comparatively far ahead of say, poodles - who are probably at a 1. First off, poodles are at a zero. Second, if 10% of world GDP was dedicated to building an interstellar, multi-generation ark, we pretty much have the technology to do it right now. The technological problem is to reduce the cost to the point where the political will to do it can be summoned (probably around 0.01% of GDP). >Maybe they want to trade with us. Well, yeah, right. If you've gotten this far it's obvious we have no tech that would interest them. [4] >How many years before we have a brain interface to Google? You'd know everything. We already have Google in our pockets. But instantly finding any quote by Darwin doesn't mean I understand the theory of evolution. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Range_of_values http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Range_of_values [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuitl%C3%A1huac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuitl%C3%A1huac [3] See timeline in http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366998666&sr=8-1&keywords=1491 http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colum... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

krapp 13y ago
You left out the misconception where FTL travel is even possible. That's probably most likely why we'll never meet aliens... the low likelihood of them being able to harness that level of energy reduced even further by the likelihood of a ship happening to stumble across this particular rock.... and then, further still by them even caring if they find us. Heck, there might be cloud-squid in Jupiter we're not even aware of who make better conversationalists than us. The aliens might even show up after a thousand year trip and ignore the Earth entirely.

iamthepieman 13y ago

Most of the comments here make an assumption that aliens would have similar motivations as ourselves. Is there a chance that another intelligent lifeform would share ANY mental or emotional similarities with us? This assumes that they even have mental or emotional capabilities in the first place. An alien intelligence could express itself collectively like an advanced ant colony or they could communicate in ways so different than us that we would each appear like brute beasts to each other. If a giant amoeba colony that developed intelligence by acting as individual neurons in a collective brain we wouldn't even know unless its actions betrayed higher level planning and thinking. This would require that its motivations were at least marginally similar to our own.

danielweber 13y ago
I have no problem believing that, if there is alien life, that many of them are quite different. I do have a problem believing that there is lots of alien life and all of them will come to this guy's "it makes sense to me so it must make sense to advanced aliens" conclusions to say home.
- iamthepieman 13y ago
  Agreed. The problem with reasoning about potentially unreasonable (at least to us) lifeforms is self-evident.

lnanek2 13y ago

Since we haven't met aliens yet, and interstellar travel would take ridiculous amounts of time and energy, I don't think any of us alive will meet aliens. It's like saying none of us will experience an ice age. Even if they do happen regularly, it happens regularly on geologic time scales, so it isn't going to happen in your life span. There might be so many stars out there that aliens are bound to happen, but crossing stars takes so much time and energy it isn't going to happen often.

bane 13y ago

On top of all that, we're forgetting that aliens might not just be very distant from us in space, but also in time. Implied in the Drake equation is also the percent of technologically advanced intelligent life-bearing planets in the universe, but technologically advanced intelligent life-bearing planets that happen to have hit some technological threshold within the right time frame to contact us. Once you start thinking of it that way, the probabilities get freakishly small. A couple small evolutionary events and a parallel Earth could have achieved sentient space-faring intelligence of some sort a billion years ago. If they came to check us out we wouldn't be here. Likewise, a couple mass extinction events on another parallel Earth could keep space-faring intelligence on the back burner for another 2 billion years.

crucialfelix 13y ago

The film and even more so the book Solaris describes an alien intelligence that is far more interesting than the anthropomorphic forms that humans fantasize about. The "alien" in Solaris is a sentient ocean that covers the surface of the planet. All kinds of structures form and dissolve on the surface. The being can communicate with visitors by accessing their minds and seems to alter reality itself to entertain their fantasies. Whose to say that other lifeforms would be single units (like human egos), or would operate on time scales that we can even comprehend ? Or operate consciously only in 3 dimensions. that said, there are probably more like us.

unclebucknasty 13y ago

How can we say definitively (or with any certainty) that there are relatively advanced life forms everywhere, such that they are a dime a dozen? How do we know that interstellar travelers wouldn't find us rare and interesting? Curiosity more than anything is what drives our need to know. I think that's what would drive such visitors. In fact, because they would be more technologically advanced and would likely have solved resource problems, etc., they would naturally have time to spend exploring and answering questions. Finally, we can assume such explorers are more advanced than we, but not necessarily by orders of magnitude. I think people have a tendancy to attribute god-like qualities to them because they have solved some problems that we have not. But, the idea of splitting an atom was outlandish until a handful of dudes, inspired by another dude's theory did it in a relatively short span. Similar with other breakthroughs. At any given time, a single discovery can advance our knowledge far beyond what we thought possible, and even moreso with the accelerating pace of technology. And, BTW, many of our own "resource problems" are completely solvable and should not exist. For instance, we have an obesity problem in the U.S. while millions starve elsewhere (and in the U.S.). It seems that our biggest obstacles are a product of human nature. If anything, an alien species' appearance might be indicative of an advancement in philosophy or organizational behavior (ex. hive mentality vs. individual) moreso than a far superior intelligence.

alan_cx 13y ago

I look around at a "human" species on this planet I don't understand and don't feel part of. Either I'm looking at a successful alien invasion, or I'm it.

chmike 13y ago

Aliens would indeed not travel to us for earth's ressources. But our earth is special by the existence of life. If life emergence is a random process, the forms it can take may be as well. There would be alot to learn and gain from a direct access to it. Science and knowlege is the ultimate ressource any ciilization will run after, after energy and other limiting facors have been mastered. Another frequent mistake is that ET would travel direct from home to earth. As far as we know FTL is impossible. So it makes better sense to travel by small hops from one solar system to the next one. It could be more a ant like colonization process. This would imply that ET visiting earth would irst build one or more bases in our solar system and visit earth from there.

LogicFailsMe 13y ago

We do a lot of crazy crap in the name of invisible gods. What's to say an alien race wouldn't get it in their heads that it's their sacred duty to their chosen deity to fill every planet in the universe with their greatness, exterminating all the impure in the process? I have no problem believing the equivalent of the Daleks or the Ori might one day demonstrate a variant of the replicator hypothesis at our expense. Why must they have a coherent logical basis for all their behavior? We certainly don't.

unclebucknasty 13y ago
Right, or a coherent logical basis that we would understand.

guard-of-terra 13y ago

If aliens exist we should be able to notice consequences of their existence - either accidental or intended. Even if we miss the window of contact, galaxy should be teeming with shadows of alien civilizations if only we know where to look.

ansible 13y ago

Well, most of the people in this comment thread haven't been reading good-enough science fiction, including Paul. First, go read Accelerando by Charles Stross: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera... And for the bits you don't understand, you can also check out the woefully incomplete but still helpful technical companion: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Accelerando_Technical_Companion https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Accelerando_Technical_Companio... Then you'll want to read up in general on molecular nanotechnology. K. Eric Drexler has updated Engines of Creation, and its also free online: http://www.wowio.com/users/product.asp?BookId=503 http://www.wowio.com/users/product.asp?BookId=503 So if we get visited by "aliens" there's an even chance it will be some runaway Von Neumann replicator seeds shot out from a nearby solar system, bent on converting our entire solar system to computronium. Or if we're lucky, some relatively benevolent replicator seeds merely intent on cataloging all the myriad of life that has arisen around the galaxy without actually intending to destroy said life. There is just about zero chance than any recognizably biological (I prefer the term "squishy") life coming to visit us, just because sending any sizable chunk of matter across interstellar distances at any reasonable speed so so damn expensive, even for Kardashev type 2 civilizations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

alan-crowe 13y ago

They might not be trying to explore physical space, they might be trying to explore chemical space. Chemical space? http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/04/18/a_short_peptide_and_a_small_molecule.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/04/18/a_short_pept... Consider the question of whether there is any alternative biochemical basis for life. It is quite likely that even an alien super-intelligence finds the question impossible. Sure, it can invent synthetic biologys that are variations on its own biochemistry, but is there anything genuinely different out there? Given the size of chemical space it is probably easier to travel ten thousand light years to the nearest planet with life on it and look to see if its basis is the same or different.

ttrreeww 13y ago

Actually, there are increasing amount of evidence that implies we are related to the aliens on a genetic level. See Sirius the documentary. We literally are who we seek.

tokenadult 13y ago

I found an online posting of a secondary school textbook reprint of Arthur C. Clarke's essay "We'll Never Conquer Space," http://www.olivenri.com/conquer_space_files/Conquer_space.pdf http://www.olivenri.com/conquer_space_files/Conquer_space.pd... which lays out just how vast outer space is, and how time (with travel being strictly limited by the speed of light) as much as distance limits the feasibility of voyages between stars, especially back-and-forth voyages between stars. A blogger on a planetarium website http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/why-we-will-never-conquer-space.html http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/why-we-will-never-conquer-s... and the maker of a Prezi based on Clarke's essay http://prezi.com/uxc2owcv5ekp/well-never-conquer-space/ http://prezi.com/uxc2owcv5ekp/well-never-conquer-space/ both emphasize that traveling to a nearby star is already a huge task. The probable density in the universe of intelligent living things (the "aliens" of the title of the submitted blog post) among all the many stars is low. All those aliens run into the same hard physical laws we run into if they attempt to make a voyage to another star. To the most relevant correct approximation, our probability of meeting interstellar voyagers is even lower than our probability of being interstellar voyagers, and our probability of being interstellar voyagers during the lifetime of anyone now reading Hacker News is nil. Remember, we have not even visited Mars, not even on the proposed one-way trip, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5390730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5390730 and humankind has delayed in traveling to Mars far beyond my imagining (I thought that the trip would be made in 1980s, and even dreamed of being on the landing crew) because humankind has higher priorities and better claims on our shared resources. So the submitted blog post title is correct, even if you quibble about the blogger's reasoning (as I do). We won't meet the aliens, because the aliens won't make a trip here before we all die.

SiVal 13y ago

I don't buy the idea that they wouldn't need to come here, because their statistical models, based on remote observations of conditions, would be able to predict everything they would find. I think we've learned enough about complexity and sensitive dependence on initial (and later) conditions to say that, unless we're wrong about complexity, the outcome of all these historical accidents wouldn't be predictable. They would still have to observe, meaning explore, to see what ended up actually happening around the universe and, in addition, they would never know for sure if they had already found all the Black Swans out there.

millstone 13y ago

> it's nearly comical to believe we're the only intelligent life in the universe Why the obsession with life? If our space ships landed on a distant planet containing an advanced civilization of intelligent robots, would we shrug, say “no life here,” and head home? In fact, if you think about it, life is the most boring thing we could discover. We already know a lot about life, and how life may evolve, but we know absolutely nothing about how civilizations and intelligence may come from other substrates. I hope we don’t find life, but something far weirder.

givan 13y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations 92.35% of human population is religious, in every religion there are gods that can be easily associated with aliens. Looking at some religios beliefs the coming of gods means all kind of things, some religions interpret them as the end of the world, the return of christ etc. Aliens showing up will have a big impact on people beliefs, most of us will be very scared, many will believe the end of the world version and panic. The social impact of alien existence on our current society is huge and if advanced aliens really discovered us then they sure know this and wait for our society to get more mature to be ready to meet them.

summerdown2 13y ago

Interestingly enough, this argument seems self defeating. Let's think what he's saying: a) Aliens who can get across space to us would be far in advance of us in all dimensions of technology. b) They would also be far smarter than us because technological evolution would act much more than biological and therefore give them machine-brain interfaces. c) With their great science they would be able to know what we're like (so far below them) and have no need to come here. except as far as I can see, c) is overruled by b) If aliens have got so far by technological evolution and use machines to augument their bodies and minds, they're not really that far in advance of us - they just have better tools. They wouldn't see us in that case as insects - rather as cripples who just need a wheelchair. If they used their science to augument our bodies and minds in the same way as they do with their own, we'd be perfectly able to have conversations with them.

kamakazizuru 13y ago

the largest logical fallacy among many that this article suffers from is that alien species would necessarily need to be technologically advanced to reach us. This probably comes from another flawed line of thought that aliens need to be like us in some way (hence requiring things like figuring out how to survive radiation, last for long periods without food and so on). This doesnt really make sense since on earth itself there are species that can do things we humans couldnt do (cockroaches can cope with tremendous amounts of radiation for example, and bacteria that live near geysers etc - thrive at extremely high temperatures). So why isn't it possible that an alien species that just about figures out how to ride a rock in space and doesnt really need all the advancement that we need to survive - comes floating by planet earth and decides to check us out sometimes?! Don't back up a lack of imagination with flawed logic ;)

soneca 13y ago
I agree. There are complex organisms on Earth that can froze and defroze themselves and continue to live. What if one of those evolve to inteligence on a low gravity planet. It would be much easier to travel through space.