7 ms·

Self-replicating alien probes could already be here

35 points by fraqed 13y ago

shameless_1 13y ago
> ... and may still be here but undetectable to our current technologies. I recently saw a nature doc where they were raising Panda cubs. Because the species isn't doing that well and breeding in captivity is problematic they try to keep them unfamiliar with humans [0]. Keeping them undomesticated, so to speak. The caretakers wear Panda costumes every time they have to interact with the cubs. They do the same when raising endangered birds: hand puppets reduces imprinting with humans [1]. In that respect, I think it's overkill for alien tech to rely on advanced tech to make themselves undetectable. Look up at the sky. See those Boeing and Airbus planes? That's how easy it is. Disguise your spacecraft as a reflective metal tube that leaves a trail of water vapor and you're done. Disclaimer: I don't actually believe they're among us. [0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fXBRKWmICU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fXBRKWmICU [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XNkV02P8Ysc#t=73s http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XNk...
- sejje 13y ago
  That's how easy it is to fool us, that doesn't mean the standard would hold true for other potential civilizations.
cristianpascu 13y ago
Cancer has long been cured. But big pharma companies will loose their profits if they release the cure. And since we don't see any cure, that proves that big pharma companies hold it secret. Hence cancer has been cured. THEY ARE HERE!
s_q_b 13y ago
Well there is a particular self-replicating set of devices that we already know in detail. If we're going down this road, have they bothered to think that maybe we're the self-replicating alien probes? Disclaimer: Don't believe it for a second, but fun to speculate. Personally I think the Drake equation, the "Great Filter", etc. are just mathematical laziness. The chance of life arising is likely just infinitesimally small. Rare earth hypothesis all the way.
- gizmo686 13y ago
  I found the idea that we are the dependents of self-replicating alien machines entirely possible. We still do not have a clear sense of how life began on Earth, or how rare the conditions necessary to begin life are. If life began on some other rock in space and got transfered to Earth in its very early form, it would be far to say that it was a self-replicating alien machine.
- TausAmmer 13y ago
  You can also think that "Life" is everything. Puddle of mud is life, it have streams, layers, densities, changes, reacting to environment. How does one cell in your body knows about you? How does that cell understand your perception? Our understanding about life could be exactly like that one small cell perceives life. I think Life is not a chance, it is just a process that pops out wherever it can in whatever form it can. Diversity of life is dictated by environment in it. A ocean is so complex form of life also. Rocks around Saturn is very complex form of life. All it takes is just definition.
  - lukifer 13y ago
    I too believe that the line between life and non-life is fuzzier than it looks, and that our four-dimensional information patterns are difficult to disentangle from the surrounding ecosystem, and the seemingly unalive habitat in which we dwell. And as a member of that grand super-being called Life, I implore you on bended knee: Paragraphs. Please.
  - pygy_ 13y ago
    "Life" usually refers to an exothermic, self-sustaining phenomenon that can process, integrate and react to information. DNA, proteins, membranes, cells, etc. are IMO implementation details.
    - TausAmmer 13y ago
      You tap rock, he responds with "hard" surface, sound, temperature. Rock can change shape depending on weather/location to adopt. But yes, as you said, definitions, same as someone defines "love", just no one understands what it is :D
3327 13y ago
I think the high tech his article is talking about is a few orders of magnitude greater than the imagination and thoughts of the comments mentioned so far. Think of technology that assemble from dust, factory probes that can detect elements and generate children from the bare elements in interstellar space. Or technology that could create and collapse Stars.
novalis78 13y ago
So, to summarize: 1.) There is no other life form in the galaxy 2.) There is, but their probes are undetectable 3.) There is, but the probes hide before we reach maturity 3.) All life forms in the universe are of the same biological age as us (Moore's law) Did I miss anything? ad 1.) well, extremely unlikely with a lot of philosophical rammifications ad 2.) possible - we should find out soon ad 3.) unlikely - if there is more than one alien civilization doing this, one of them would not have had the desire to hide from us ad 4.) looks more and more like the real deal.
- colinm 13y ago
  > 1.) well, extremely unlikely with a lot of philosophical rammifications How can you say it is likely or unlikely?
- RivieraKid 13y ago
  "well, extremely unlikely with a lot of philosophical rammifications" Whether it's likely or unlikely is just a guess, we don't have a good estimate of the probability. I believe we're the only civilization in the universe. What do you mean by philosophical rammifications?
ronjouch 13y ago
<semi-spoiler>If "self-replicating alien probes" are your thing, I highly recommend Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson, an excellent SF classic that is currently on sale on https://www.humblebundle.com/ https://www.humblebundle.com/ as part of the Humble eBook Bundle 2</semi-spoiler>
- BillyMaize 13y ago
  I second this. I just finished the last book of the trilogy last week and it was great.
  - ronjouch 13y ago
    Oh really? How were episodes 2 and 3? I'm mostly hearing "good, but not as good as Spin" comments. I'll give them a look then, thanks. Hey, or maybe just wait till they pop up in an upcoming Humble Bundle :P
    - btipling 13y ago
      Axis and Vortex are interesting stories, but very different from the first one. They become maybe a little bit less interesting with each iteration, but are still entertaining. The first book is full of mystery and the personal dynamics of a few people over a large section of their lives and none of the other books are like that, although some amount of mystery is a piece of each. I definitely didn't regret reading Vortex or Axis.
      - BillyMaize 13y ago
        This exactly. Axis was good and Vortex didn't turn into what I was hoping for until the very end of the book, but they were both worth it still.
- jpitz 13y ago
  Also, Forge of God / Anvil of the Stars, by Greg Bear.
flashmob 13y ago
With advanced tech, there is no need for them to build probes. Eg. use wormholes to peek in to any location in the universe, or some other teleportation system. Probably that's why you can't see them. Source: Sci-fi films.
iamthepieman 13y ago
This is a really interesting idea presented in a miserable article. It feels like it's just rehashing sci-fi tropes. and there's no discussion of the "The new calculations, reported in the International Journal of Astrobiology"
TausAmmer 13y ago
Well, if you break narrow thinking that only high tech(electricity/metal) civilizations can explore galaxies. Everything is forces interacting each other and one object can only interact with so many other object, but totally not interact with anything else beyond its capabilities of understand, perceive/see/hear. Everything could be crawling of life we do not perceive/understand/detect. Humans operate in very narrow band of frequencies, thanks to technology we widened the band but it also presented us with new problem/revelations. Some made religion from science and ran into a wall. "Earth" was so intelligent to grow people. If Seed is intelligent to grow plant, why not earth?
vaporeyes 13y ago
I have always been of the mind that if they wanted to come here they would have already and it wouldn't be pleasant.
ddeck 13y ago
>the fact that we have not detected or seen any evidence of alien probes in the solar system suggests there have been no probe-building civilizations in the Milky Way in the last few million years How does that compute exactly? There are ~300 billion stars in the Milky Way, which is ~100k light years across. I can't even begin to think about the travelling salesman problem involved, but even with many probes, many civilizations, and travelling close to the speed of light, I'm guessing it would take some serious time to get around to visiting each star.
- Thrymr 13y ago
  > the Milky Way, which is ~100 light years across. Make that ~100,000 light years.
  - ddeck 13y ago
    Ah, you beat me to the edit. Indeed, 100k
- Luc 13y ago
  Self-replicating, though. Exponential growth in number of probes.
  - ddeck 13y ago
    Sure, but the conclusion drawn was that it indicated "no probe-building civilizations"
    - scotty79 13y ago
      I think "probe" in that conclusion was a shorthand for "self-replicating space probe built for the purpose of utilizing exponential growth for scouting galaxy in reasonable time"
  - johnchristopher 13y ago
    Limited by the actual resources to support that exponential growth.
zavulon 13y ago
As long as they're programmed correctly, and not like the probes in Star Control II, I have no issue.
ars 13y ago
Can you really slingshot around a star? Doesn't that require the star to be moving relative to your destination? But aren't the stars more or less moving together? Normally you expect the outer vs inner ones to move at different speeds, but the whole issue with the galactic rotation curve is that they are all moving at the same speed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GalacticRotation2.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GalacticRotation2.svg
zeckalpha 13y ago
Viruses?
- scotty79 13y ago
  Did you see recently any virus that is able to propel itself through interstellar space or replicate there? Viruses are just tiny chemical programs that hijack replication system existing in their environment. But there has to be some replication system to hijack.
  - zeckalpha 13y ago
    Viruses could travel via asteroids.
    - scotty79 13y ago
      Travel, but not replicate. The only idea I can come up with to fit viruses into exponentially self-replicating alien probe goes like this: Life is abundant in universe, chemistry everywhere leads to DNA, and life mostly comes out of DNA. Smart aliens designed viruses to travel by asteroids. Those asteroids at some points meet planets with life. Viruses hijack this life to replicate themselves and change the life to develop intelligence. Intelligence that will eventually develop and use technology powerful enough to blow up whole planet. That event will release cloud of asteroids containing viruses that will infect other life bearing planets. I don't like this idea. It's slow and has many assumptions that I don't believe are true.
- gizmo686 13y ago
  Viruses don't self replicate. They inject their DNA/RNA into a host cell at let it clone them.
Gravityloss 13y ago
wouldn't capturing enough mass to create a duplicate probe at least halve your speed?
- scotty79 13y ago
  Probe would probably accelerate up to its max speed compensating for speed loss.
scotty79 13y ago
Arrogant solution to Fermi paradox why we don't see life is that we might be one of the first civilizations. Life is hard. It took third of the age of universe for life do develop to the point of touching anything outside the Earth. And before that to have chemistry we needed first stars to turn into novas and dust from those novas to mix and re-condense into new stars. It ought to take some time. Some time for our galaxy to form before that... There's still a lot of time so it's as I said arrogant claim but we might belong to the first generation of civilizations in our universe.
- johnchristopher 13y ago
  Or worse. We might belong to the last, too late to the party. Imagine we develop a bit of tech and find out that space has already been colonized and exploited. That all the fun is going on strong in the core. That we are too far away from that core, that there isn't enough energy to harvest to even travel there or even send something there. That we are born too late and too far.
- RivieraKid 13y ago
  I'm shocked by your arrogance.
scotty79 13y ago
> there have been no probe-building civilizations in the Milky Way in the last few million years or that the probes are so hi-tech we are unable to detect them I think whoever build such probes is so hi-tech that we won't be able to detect them. Can we detect Russell's Teapot yet? We are proud of our telescopes but we are basically blind to small objects. Especially since such probe could just make a pass through solar system at 10% light speed.
- pcl 13y ago
  Russell's Teapot I'd never heard of that before. Turns out it's a metaphor for atheism / agnosticism. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot: [Bertrand] Russell wrote that if he claims that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, it is nonsensical for him to expect others to believe him on the grounds that they cannot prove him wrong.
lrem 13y ago
Does it have to be really that "high tech" to be "undetectable"? Today we're happy if we can detect asteroids of thousands of tons as they're floating towards us. A probe meant for interstellar travel just doesn't have the energy to keep flashing all the time. I seriously doubt that we can detect a few tons of unspecified material, traveling at high speed in some distance from Earth, with big enough probability. Thus, the only statement we can make is "no probe designed to make contact was seen in our system in the last <100 years". This does not sound as such a huge paradox to me.
speeder 13y ago
Sometimes I wonder why we don't do this ourselves... If we start now (and I think we can reach faster than 10% of c) we can learn about 3 stars I guess in our lifetime!
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
Don't want to take us too far out into pseudo-science land, but any kind of contact with an alien probe would most likely be intermittent and not reproducible. For those reasons, even if we observed it in nearby planetary space or in the atmosphere I'm not sure anybody would take the observation seriously. Along those lines, I've always thought the Rendlesham Forest incident[1] sounded the most to me like a story of an autonomous, perhaps self-replicating probe. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident

35 points by fraqed 13y ago

> ... and may still be here but undetectable to our current technologies. I recently saw a nature doc where they were raising Panda cubs. Because the species isn't doing that well and breeding in captivity is problematic they try to keep them unfamiliar with humans [0]. Keeping them undomesticated, so to speak. The caretakers wear Panda costumes every time they have to interact with the cubs. They do the same when raising endangered birds: hand puppets reduces imprinting with humans [1]. In that respect, I think it's overkill for alien tech to rely on advanced tech to make themselves undetectable. Look up at the sky. See those Boeing and Airbus planes? That's how easy it is. Disguise your spacecraft as a reflective metal tube that leaves a trail of water vapor and you're done. Disclaimer: I don't actually believe they're among us. [0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fXBRKWmICU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fXBRKWmICU [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XNkV02P8Ysc#t=73s http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XNk...

sejje 13y ago
That's how easy it is to fool us, that doesn't mean the standard would hold true for other potential civilizations.

cristianpascu 13y ago

Cancer has long been cured. But big pharma companies will loose their profits if they release the cure. And since we don't see any cure, that proves that big pharma companies hold it secret. Hence cancer has been cured. THEY ARE HERE!

s_q_b 13y ago

Well there is a particular self-replicating set of devices that we already know in detail. If we're going down this road, have they bothered to think that maybe we're the self-replicating alien probes? Disclaimer: Don't believe it for a second, but fun to speculate. Personally I think the Drake equation, the "Great Filter", etc. are just mathematical laziness. The chance of life arising is likely just infinitesimally small. Rare earth hypothesis all the way.

gizmo686 13y ago
I found the idea that we are the dependents of self-replicating alien machines entirely possible. We still do not have a clear sense of how life began on Earth, or how rare the conditions necessary to begin life are. If life began on some other rock in space and got transfered to Earth in its very early form, it would be far to say that it was a self-replicating alien machine.
TausAmmer 13y ago
You can also think that "Life" is everything. Puddle of mud is life, it have streams, layers, densities, changes, reacting to environment. How does one cell in your body knows about you? How does that cell understand your perception? Our understanding about life could be exactly like that one small cell perceives life. I think Life is not a chance, it is just a process that pops out wherever it can in whatever form it can. Diversity of life is dictated by environment in it. A ocean is so complex form of life also. Rocks around Saturn is very complex form of life. All it takes is just definition.
- lukifer 13y ago
  I too believe that the line between life and non-life is fuzzier than it looks, and that our four-dimensional information patterns are difficult to disentangle from the surrounding ecosystem, and the seemingly unalive habitat in which we dwell. And as a member of that grand super-being called Life, I implore you on bended knee: Paragraphs. Please.
- pygy_ 13y ago
  "Life" usually refers to an exothermic, self-sustaining phenomenon that can process, integrate and react to information. DNA, proteins, membranes, cells, etc. are IMO implementation details.
  - TausAmmer 13y ago
    You tap rock, he responds with "hard" surface, sound, temperature. Rock can change shape depending on weather/location to adopt. But yes, as you said, definitions, same as someone defines "love", just no one understands what it is :D

3327 13y ago

I think the high tech his article is talking about is a few orders of magnitude greater than the imagination and thoughts of the comments mentioned so far. Think of technology that assemble from dust, factory probes that can detect elements and generate children from the bare elements in interstellar space. Or technology that could create and collapse Stars.

novalis78 13y ago

So, to summarize: 1.) There is no other life form in the galaxy 2.) There is, but their probes are undetectable 3.) There is, but the probes hide before we reach maturity 3.) All life forms in the universe are of the same biological age as us (Moore's law) Did I miss anything? ad 1.) well, extremely unlikely with a lot of philosophical rammifications ad 2.) possible - we should find out soon ad 3.) unlikely - if there is more than one alien civilization doing this, one of them would not have had the desire to hide from us ad 4.) looks more and more like the real deal.

colinm 13y ago
> 1.) well, extremely unlikely with a lot of philosophical rammifications How can you say it is likely or unlikely?
RivieraKid 13y ago
"well, extremely unlikely with a lot of philosophical rammifications" Whether it's likely or unlikely is just a guess, we don't have a good estimate of the probability. I believe we're the only civilization in the universe. What do you mean by philosophical rammifications?

ronjouch 13y ago

<semi-spoiler>If "self-replicating alien probes" are your thing, I highly recommend Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson, an excellent SF classic that is currently on sale on https://www.humblebundle.com/ https://www.humblebundle.com/ as part of the Humble eBook Bundle 2</semi-spoiler>

BillyMaize 13y ago
I second this. I just finished the last book of the trilogy last week and it was great.
- ronjouch 13y ago
  Oh really? How were episodes 2 and 3? I'm mostly hearing "good, but not as good as Spin" comments. I'll give them a look then, thanks. Hey, or maybe just wait till they pop up in an upcoming Humble Bundle :P
  - btipling 13y ago
    Axis and Vortex are interesting stories, but very different from the first one. They become maybe a little bit less interesting with each iteration, but are still entertaining. The first book is full of mystery and the personal dynamics of a few people over a large section of their lives and none of the other books are like that, although some amount of mystery is a piece of each. I definitely didn't regret reading Vortex or Axis.
    - BillyMaize 13y ago
      This exactly. Axis was good and Vortex didn't turn into what I was hoping for until the very end of the book, but they were both worth it still.
jpitz 13y ago
Also, Forge of God / Anvil of the Stars, by Greg Bear.

flashmob 13y ago

With advanced tech, there is no need for them to build probes. Eg. use wormholes to peek in to any location in the universe, or some other teleportation system. Probably that's why you can't see them. Source: Sci-fi films.

iamthepieman 13y ago

This is a really interesting idea presented in a miserable article. It feels like it's just rehashing sci-fi tropes. and there's no discussion of the "The new calculations, reported in the International Journal of Astrobiology"

TausAmmer 13y ago

Well, if you break narrow thinking that only high tech(electricity/metal) civilizations can explore galaxies. Everything is forces interacting each other and one object can only interact with so many other object, but totally not interact with anything else beyond its capabilities of understand, perceive/see/hear. Everything could be crawling of life we do not perceive/understand/detect. Humans operate in very narrow band of frequencies, thanks to technology we widened the band but it also presented us with new problem/revelations. Some made religion from science and ran into a wall. "Earth" was so intelligent to grow people. If Seed is intelligent to grow plant, why not earth?

vaporeyes 13y ago

I have always been of the mind that if they wanted to come here they would have already and it wouldn't be pleasant.

ddeck 13y ago

>the fact that we have not detected or seen any evidence of alien probes in the solar system suggests there have been no probe-building civilizations in the Milky Way in the last few million years How does that compute exactly? There are ~300 billion stars in the Milky Way, which is ~100k light years across. I can't even begin to think about the travelling salesman problem involved, but even with many probes, many civilizations, and travelling close to the speed of light, I'm guessing it would take some serious time to get around to visiting each star.

Thrymr 13y ago
> the Milky Way, which is ~100 light years across. Make that ~100,000 light years.
- ddeck 13y ago
  Ah, you beat me to the edit. Indeed, 100k
Luc 13y ago
Self-replicating, though. Exponential growth in number of probes.
- ddeck 13y ago
  Sure, but the conclusion drawn was that it indicated "no probe-building civilizations"
  - scotty79 13y ago
    I think "probe" in that conclusion was a shorthand for "self-replicating space probe built for the purpose of utilizing exponential growth for scouting galaxy in reasonable time"
- johnchristopher 13y ago
  Limited by the actual resources to support that exponential growth.

zavulon 13y ago

As long as they're programmed correctly, and not like the probes in Star Control II, I have no issue.

ars 13y ago

Can you really slingshot around a star? Doesn't that require the star to be moving relative to your destination? But aren't the stars more or less moving together? Normally you expect the outer vs inner ones to move at different speeds, but the whole issue with the galactic rotation curve is that they are all moving at the same speed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GalacticRotation2.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GalacticRotation2.svg

zeckalpha 13y ago

Viruses?

scotty79 13y ago
Did you see recently any virus that is able to propel itself through interstellar space or replicate there? Viruses are just tiny chemical programs that hijack replication system existing in their environment. But there has to be some replication system to hijack.
- zeckalpha 13y ago
  Viruses could travel via asteroids.
  - scotty79 13y ago
    Travel, but not replicate. The only idea I can come up with to fit viruses into exponentially self-replicating alien probe goes like this: Life is abundant in universe, chemistry everywhere leads to DNA, and life mostly comes out of DNA. Smart aliens designed viruses to travel by asteroids. Those asteroids at some points meet planets with life. Viruses hijack this life to replicate themselves and change the life to develop intelligence. Intelligence that will eventually develop and use technology powerful enough to blow up whole planet. That event will release cloud of asteroids containing viruses that will infect other life bearing planets. I don't like this idea. It's slow and has many assumptions that I don't believe are true.
gizmo686 13y ago
Viruses don't self replicate. They inject their DNA/RNA into a host cell at let it clone them.

Gravityloss 13y ago

wouldn't capturing enough mass to create a duplicate probe at least halve your speed?

scotty79 13y ago
Probe would probably accelerate up to its max speed compensating for speed loss.

scotty79 13y ago

Arrogant solution to Fermi paradox why we don't see life is that we might be one of the first civilizations. Life is hard. It took third of the age of universe for life do develop to the point of touching anything outside the Earth. And before that to have chemistry we needed first stars to turn into novas and dust from those novas to mix and re-condense into new stars. It ought to take some time. Some time for our galaxy to form before that... There's still a lot of time so it's as I said arrogant claim but we might belong to the first generation of civilizations in our universe.

johnchristopher 13y ago
Or worse. We might belong to the last, too late to the party. Imagine we develop a bit of tech and find out that space has already been colonized and exploited. That all the fun is going on strong in the core. That we are too far away from that core, that there isn't enough energy to harvest to even travel there or even send something there. That we are born too late and too far.
RivieraKid 13y ago
I'm shocked by your arrogance.

scotty79 13y ago

> there have been no probe-building civilizations in the Milky Way in the last few million years or that the probes are so hi-tech we are unable to detect them I think whoever build such probes is so hi-tech that we won't be able to detect them. Can we detect Russell's Teapot yet? We are proud of our telescopes but we are basically blind to small objects. Especially since such probe could just make a pass through solar system at 10% light speed.

pcl 13y ago
Russell's Teapot I'd never heard of that before. Turns out it's a metaphor for atheism / agnosticism. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot: [Bertrand] Russell wrote that if he claims that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, it is nonsensical for him to expect others to believe him on the grounds that they cannot prove him wrong.

lrem 13y ago

Does it have to be really that "high tech" to be "undetectable"? Today we're happy if we can detect asteroids of thousands of tons as they're floating towards us. A probe meant for interstellar travel just doesn't have the energy to keep flashing all the time. I seriously doubt that we can detect a few tons of unspecified material, traveling at high speed in some distance from Earth, with big enough probability. Thus, the only statement we can make is "no probe designed to make contact was seen in our system in the last <100 years". This does not sound as such a huge paradox to me.

speeder 13y ago

Sometimes I wonder why we don't do this ourselves... If we start now (and I think we can reach faster than 10% of c) we can learn about 3 stars I guess in our lifetime!

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

Don't want to take us too far out into pseudo-science land, but any kind of contact with an alien probe would most likely be intermittent and not reproducible. For those reasons, even if we observed it in nearby planetary space or in the atmosphere I'm not sure anybody would take the observation seriously. Along those lines, I've always thought the Rendlesham Forest incident[1] sounded the most to me like a story of an autonomous, perhaps self-replicating probe. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident