91–100 of 124 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I am a fan of Bostrom’s conjecture about the simulation, though." It's boring as hell, metaphysical conjecture, suitable for late night bar talk and deus-ex-machina sci fi plots. The 1/3 probability especially is total bullshit. It's fun if viewed as an art project, and as such has some entertainment value. It does not really explain anything. Unless one enjoys figuring out with theoretical physics, which facets of…
Well, it depends. Often people consider the simulation as the stereotype of sci-fi simulations we read or watched about. But it could be much more than just "being in a computer".
If it's touring equivalent system, then it's just like being inside a computer.
And if it's not touring equivalent, yet 'equally powerfull', I think you need to invent some new mathematics.
Sure, we don't know what nature is but just inventing fabulous concepts that don't explain anything takes us nowhere.
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The notion in the article is great fodder for a novel, but I think this perspective is sound. You've said almost as much, but I think there's a good argument to be made that societies which undergo an industrial revolution either collapse the ecology that supports them, or survive it by maturing and expending energy on QoL for the whole biosphere. In either case the window of time for making a cosmic racket is fairly…
The argument I've heard most is that a civilization only has a short time where it's blasting broadcasts into space willy-nilly, before improving their tech and making it more efficient, thus dramatically lowering its potential to be discovered by its stray broadcasts.
So the alien communications just look like noise to us here on earth.
We’re nearing the “everything encrypted” point ourselves, and we would certainly be very careful about emissions control if we ever got ourselves out of the solar system.
Presumably any other advanced civilization would have had its own paranoid Sci-Fi literature/film/whatever, and would behave accordingly.
For example, many explanations are of the type "Well, maybe the aliens are all doing X," but it requires every independent civilization to be doing that, with no exceptions, so that we haven't even detected one variant, not even one that needed to escape its star and colonize the galaxy, which many experts find unsatisfying. I found the book to be a fun and quick read that touches on a lot of scientific/comsological/biological/etc concepts.
(Looks like he has a newer editing with 75 explanations...[1] I haven't read that one.)
I see the article also mentions the simulation hypothesis. Personally, I'm intrigued by the overlap between secular simulation hypotheses and religious notions of the universe having a Creator.
[0]https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Teeming-Aliens-WHERE-EVERYBO... [1]https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Teeming-Aliens-WHERE-EVERYBO...
The 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…
Or they might realize the universe is just inherently a dangerous place and design their own little universe to go inhabit. Peacefully exiting the universe.
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But that’s the thing, if our galaxy had lots of 20-21st century Earth level civilizations, we would be able to detect them with our existing SETI programmes. Personally I like the hypothesis that states eventually all comms will be encrypted and therefore indistinguishable from white noise.
> But that’s the thing, if our galaxy had lots of 20-21st century Earth level civilizations, we would be able to detect them with our existing SETI programmes. But we couldn't. In general, SETI couldn't even detect such a civilization even if it was in the star system closest to earth: > If an extraterrestrial civilization has a SETI project similar to our own, could they detect signals from Earth? > In general, no.…
Your quote relies on us detecting re-runs of "I Love Lzcwwdrrr", but our telescopes can reliably do spectrographic analysis of faraway stars and planets these days. We'd likely be able to detect things like unnaturally high levels of hydrocarbons in otherwise oxygen-full atmospheres, and other industrial by-products.
If Alpha Centauri had a planet with an industrial civilization, we might be able to spot city lights.
My 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…
I'm reminded of the old problem of the flight of bumble bees. Someone did some calculations on bees, modeling their flight using the same properties of aerodynamics as fixed wing aircraft, and they came to the conclusion that bees couldn't fly. Of course the obvious answer was that bees simply don't fly the way that fixed wing aircraft do and we merely did not understand how they flew at the time (we do know). But im…
The bumblebee thing is a myth. The rest of your comment is defeatist.
One of the comments at the bottom of the post points out what I believe to be a likely scenario: "As we develop VR tech that allows us to simulate any world we desire, recreational or purpose driven, there is less and less reason to explore the rest of the universe." Using humanity as a example for how intelligent life advances, we can look at the developed nations. The develop nations are the ones who would create a…
There also is a force which makes humans cluster. Silicon Valley is the biggest cluster of IT and VC at the moment. Accelerando (by Charles Stross) describes vividly how an advanced AI civilisation still clusters (Mainly because solar/fusion power and communication speed).
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The argument I've heard most is that a civilization only has a short time where it's blasting broadcasts into space willy-nilly, before improving their tech and making it more efficient, thus dramatically lowering its potential to be discovered by its stray broadcasts.
Or everything they’re broadcasting is encrypted, even the metadata and framing bits. With spread-spectrum, directional and burst patterns to mitigate side channels and jamming. So the alien communications just look like noise to us here on earth. We’re nearing the “everything encrypted” point ourselves, and we would certainly be very careful about emissions control if we ever got ourselves out of the solar system. Pr…
without regulatory constraints, our own use of radio would've required that rather quickly.
i think it's entirely possible another civilization simply never would've used radio at beyond a hobbyist level without the use of spread-spectrum heavily-coded techniques.
> Presumably any other advanced civilization would have had its own paranoid Sci-Fi literature/film/whatever
i don't think it's a given that another species would even have fiction. or paranoia.
The fermi paradox is not really a paradox if it is based off of a probability that we don't even know. Once we know the conditions and steps it takes to form life then we can take a stab at estimating this probability.
Don't trust your intuition on this, while the universe is incredibly large, nobody knows how infinitesimally small the probability of life spontaneously arising from base elements is.... Additionally, we need to know the probability of having this life form evolve into something that can communicate across space.
There are things around you that have nearly zero probability of occurring again anywhere in the universe. Unless you have a twin, the probability of someone being born anywhere in the universe with your exact configuration of DNA is nearly zero. It is possible that the formation of intelligent life shares an equally small probability. Again, we don't know this probability until someone is able to recreate it.