There Have Probably Been Aliens
nytimes.com
There Have Probably Been Aliens
1–10 of 163 posts
Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens
#2Content of the article is pretty information, but worst clickbait title of the year. At the risk of alienating some fraction of HN community (no pun intended), I'm going to say this is what you get when trying to chase the likes of Gawker (again, no pun intended).
Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens
#3Title is mild clickbait. There's no evidence for the claim, just a persuasive argument that it's probably true.
Interesting nonetheless.
Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens
#4Probably. Assuming they're correct. Our planet is 12,742km in diameter, yet we've only drilled 12.262km deep [1] (and we were wrong about how hot it was gonna be), and sent a human down ~10.900km [2] (and we still can't decide how deep we've actually been). Do we really think we understand the probability of alien life on another planet that well, given the amount of data we have on those planets, and that we're constantly proven wrong on our own?
And yet (either way) I'm not sure it really matters. No human has left our own planet for longer than 437.7 days [3]. Say they're right, though. If an alien race exists, we're still a ways from being able to do anything about it. Unless we can make it there in 1.198 years. If that alien race can make it here, awesome. Let's talk then. If they can make it here and are hostile, then it's been swell. See you on the other side. Probably.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records
Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens
#5Content of the article is pretty information, but worst clickbait title of the year. At the risk of alienating some fraction of HN community (no pun intended), I'm going to say this is what you get when trying to chase the likes of Gawker (again, no pun intended).
The irony here is that Gawker's relevant clickbait is actually far superior:
http://io9.gizmodo.com/11-of-the-weirdest-solutions-to-the-f...
Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens
#6The most likely reason that nobody seems to be out there is the great filter. The author asks if our civilisation will last millenia or millions of years - but I think a more apt scale would be decades or centuries.
It just seems pretty obvious that we have an ever increasing set of opportunities to extinct ourselves, and therefore the probability of a civilisation ending disaster only grows.
All the aliens either blew themselves up, starved, or are the kind of incredibly boring, mind-numblingly conservative people you wouldn't invite to a local cluster cocktail party.
Oh, either that or civilisations tend to disappear up their own simhole.
Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens
#7m - km, fix the units
Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens
#8There have been aliens -- and they don't care about us.
To assume that a collection of beings which have obtained the ability to travel amongst the stars would focus their attention on a single species on a single planet is fundamentally selfish.
What resources does our earth contain that are not (more easily) obtainable elsewhere? If Drake's equation "holds", then what novelty do _we_ provide?
Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens
#9"In other words, given what we now know about the number and orbital positions of the galaxy’s planets, the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borders on the irrational."
This is terribly silly. It reminds me of the Onion talks:
"Step 1: Devise an idea to create a car that runs on compost. Step 2: Create the car. We’ve already completed Step 1. We’re half way there."
Increased certainty on three of the seven factors is irrelevant, because 99% of the uncertainty is concentrated in the other four. Specifically, the odds of abiogenesis are ~1/2^n, where n is the complexity in bits of the smallest self-replicator. n is bounded below by ~100 or so (or it would have happened in a lab somewhere), and is bounded above by ~1 million (the smallest existing bacteria), so we know it's somewhere in there. But where? We have only the vaguest guesses.
"Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization on a habitable-zone planet is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are not the first."
"One in 10 billion trillion" sounds like a very large number, and it's put in italics for emphasis, but in information-theoretic terms it's tiny. log2(10^22) is just 73 bits. If all that we know about a number is that it's somewhere between a hundred and a million, saying that X would imply it's higher than 73 (well technically 73 + log2(#incidences of molecular combination), so probably a few hundred) is not a disproof of X, nor really even much evidence against X.
Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens
#10> a probability for civilizations to form of one in 10 billion per planet was considered highly pessimistic
I think people underestimate how low probabilities can really be. According to wiki the shortest self-replicating RNA is 165-bases long. Even if you convert all observable universe in RNA this is still not enough for this RNA to form by chance (4^165 is much larger than number of atoms in observable universe).