I think it's a bit too pretentious of us as a species to speculate about the motives and capabilities of alien civilizations who may be billions of years ahead of us. We haven't figured out dolphins, FFS! I wouldn't be surprised if in 100 years we look back at all this the same way we now think about the theory of an infinite number of turtles supporting the Earth. It's all just cutely naive speculation.
Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
81–90 of 124 posts
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#82My humble impression is that each and every philosophical hypotesis we make is somewhat based on human paradygms, structures, and super-structures. Why can’t we accept that we populated this world for the equivalent of a cosmic blink, and we are therefore unequipped to even grasp the existence of other life forms? I am a fan of Bostrom’s conjecture about the simulation, though. 1/3 is a damn high probability. At the…
> My humble impression is that each and every philosophical hypotesis we make is somewhat based on human paradygms, structures, and super-structures.
Exactly! Each time when I hear that scientists are looking for water because that's supposed to be a condition for life - I wonder how small imagination one needs to have to think that only "water-based" forms of life exist.
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#83Some slides I saw this morning from Sandberg and two others at this Oxford institute:
“Dissolving the Fermi Paradox” http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/media/eps/jodrell-ba...
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We might be doing a lousy job, but we're doing the best we can. We've literally never done this before, so we don't even have a very good idea whether we're doing a good job or not, that's how clueless we are. Signs are pointing to us more or less killing ourselves, though.
And everything else on the planet. So even without much experience, it's possible we can improve our performance a little on the topic.
the planet and life will be ok, don't worry. they both had already been through much worse cataclysms than puny humanity plague
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#85> advanced civilizations just want to compute We got the answer right here. It's much more interesting and probable to meet AGI than aliens. Space travel is dangerous, but virtual space is just as interesting.
Which only adds to the theory that we might be living in a simulated universe.
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#86maybe we have evidence aliens have been and gone, and just used used us to extract fuel from the planet and moved on.
I doubt that. Any advanced civilization that is capable of interstellar travel would use highly efficient techniques to do their thing. You may say it's the gold or platinum but we just heard of the neutron stars that collided creating a lot of those materials in the process.
Why bother using humans to extract anything when there are other, more efficient, ways of harvesting? That's just "ancient aliens" conspiracy theories if you ask me.
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool plot line for a SF novel. We advance VR so much that we end up meeting another civilization THERE instead of outside.
Permutation City and Diaspora by Greg Egan are great and at times touch on ideas like this.
I loved the irony of the virtual citizens of a polis travelling physically to another star system and the first creatures they encounter are inside the "natural" simulation hosted by the chemical evolution of the Wang carpets.
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#88The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the very reasonable surmise that there must be other forms of technologically advanced life out there somewhere in our great galaxy and the complete lack of any evidence for it. But not quite. This paradox assumes that a more technologically advanced society would naturally expand it's energy usage and output to the point that it could be detected by us. That is, expand…
> they might consciously create low-energy-usage steady-state
dystopias is just as likely
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#89[deleted]
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#90...you're scaring me. Are you saying H.P. Lovecraft was right?