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Have we already been visited by aliens?

newyorker.com

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Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#121

Post by sterlind »

wait_a_minute wrote: post #84
notahacker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even for other humans, and not just because we can't or won't foot the bill for more education and medication, but also because encouraging relatively primitive tribes to abandon their traditions and join the modern world is widely seen as unethical.

I see no issues with telling tribes or ancient cultures or fledgling species if their beliefs about reality are incorrect. Otherwise those faulty beliefs could lead the species to extinction.

There's education and then there's coercion. The Amish know that technology and modern society exist, and they even participate some for work, but they don't bring it back home, and they haven't altered their way of life.

Coercion is like the Indian boarding school programs in the Pacific Northwest. Taking Indian children away from their parents and beating them if they spoke their native languages, with the goal of wiping out the culture and forcing assimilation.

I'm cool with the Amish method but not the boarding schools.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#122

Post by RobertoG »

blueblisters wrote: post #107
cgriswald wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to distance isn’t energy; it’s time. Even at speeds much lower than the speed of light, a civilization could have spread across or explored the Milky Way in a few millions of years. These needn’t have been biological creatures. Von Neumann probes, “Genesis” machines, or just flinging rocks with sensors on them to tour the stars would do the trick.

What would motivate a civilization to undertake such an experiment? A probe a 50,000 light years away would take 50,000 years to send back any meaningful information. Unless alien life-spans are significantly longer than humans, I would think this would probably not be funded by their science department.

A probe of the sophistication of a Von Newman machine, that can reproduce, would be the alien in itself. A network of such probes would be a civilization.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#123

Post by openasocket »

eloff wrote: post #86
bostonsre wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis seems very unscientific.

This is very common in science. New theories are usually rejected and ridiculed until/if they develop enough evidence behind them to sway people. Some careers are destroyed. Some scientists are only vindicated posthumously. The process can take many decades. Scientists, like most humans, are not that open-minded and are subject to the same group-think blind spots. I think if we could get better at being open-minded a…

It's not just science, I can think of an example from pure mathematics. Cantor's work showing the uncountability of the real numbers was derided by prominent members of the mathematical community for decades. This despite the fact that he was able to boil down his argument into a proof so simple it's taught in introductory undergraduate classes. Now, this was at a time when mathematicians were still trying to rigorously define set theory and ground mathematics on a foundation of logic, but still it's a relatively simple and understandable proof. I think the moral of the story is that people are stubborn and are capable of disagreeing about just about everything.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#124

Post by at_a_remove »

Xcelerate wrote: post #41

Tangential to the article, but I’m not sure why more isn’t mentioned about what I consider to be the most likely reason we haven’t been visited by aliens: they probably exist somewhere due to the sheer size of the universe, but the speed of light is indeed the fundamental limit to classical information transfer as our current understanding of physics predicts, and therefore we are simply too far away from any sort of…

This has been my basic take on it.

However, if you want a point of concern, I'll throw out some alternatives. I'm going to ignore generation ships, because those seem a trifle unlikely (too complex, rather cruel to the inhabitants), but let's imagine some embryo-laden carriers, freeze-dried aliens, and von Neumann probes.

Now, again, that's still a long way for very little gain. There's nothing physical you could bring back to your civilization that would be "worth" the trip, but what about some irrational civilizations? Religious zealots, or just a large enough portion of a technologically advanced society that says, "Screw it, let's hurl some madly self-replicating probes out into the spiral arm." Ninety-nine percent of their civilization might think that is a terrible idea (or pick your proportion), but there only needs to be a few to pull it off.

Why are we not seeing the von Neumann probes? I will admit that the other scenarios are less likely. But where are they? Even at a ten thousandth the speed of light they would have swarmed the galaxy, replicating down one spiral arm, into the core, and back out along the remaining arms.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#125

Post by sterlind »

blueblisters wrote: post #107
cgriswald wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to distance isn’t energy; it’s time. Even at speeds much lower than the speed of light, a civilization could have spread across or explored the Milky Way in a few millions of years. These needn’t have been biological creatures. Von Neumann probes, “Genesis” machines, or just flinging rocks with sensors on them to tour the stars would do the trick.

What would motivate a civilization to undertake such an experiment? A probe a 50,000 light years away would take 50,000 years to send back any meaningful information. Unless alien life-spans are significantly longer than humans, I would think this would probably not be funded by their science department.

Von Neumann probes would be great at asteroid mining. If you just let the probes keep going rather than limiting their distance, they'd cover the 50k light years easily. Not much overhead on the civilization.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#126

Post by t-writescode »

mrbonner wrote: post #17

I just started to watch the 1993 series Star Trek new generation. The show has some interesting ideas regarding advanced civilizations vs the primitive ones. One of which is called the prime directive prohibiting any star fleet from intervening with the evolution of primitive people. In one of the episodes “who watches the watcher” the USS enterprise travels to planet Minkita 2 for a rescue mission and encounters a p…

What's the spoiler-filled version of what happened?

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#127

Post by kenny87 »

mrbonner wrote: post #17

I just started to watch the 1993 series Star Trek new generation. The show has some interesting ideas regarding advanced civilizations vs the primitive ones. One of which is called the prime directive prohibiting any star fleet from intervening with the evolution of primitive people. In one of the episodes “who watches the watcher” the USS enterprise travels to planet Minkita 2 for a rescue mission and encounters a p…

Those that like this episode would also very much enjoy VOY, Episode 6x12, Blink of an Eye [1]. Fascinating premise, essentially a pre-warp society views Voyager as a sky deity, eventually Voyager becomes the raison d'etre for the scientific progress of an entire civilization.

[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Blink_of_an_Eye_(episod...

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#128

Post by phkahler »

mtts wrote: post #105
gfxgirl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the idea that there are gazillions of advanced aliens has been pretty much disproven by the fermi paradox. If there are gazillion, at least one out of all the diversity out there should have already colonized the entire galaxy and evidence should be plentiful.

According to the Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin the Fermi paradox is solved by the certainty that if an alien civilization announces its presence to the rest of the universe, one of the gazillions of other advanced alien civilizations is sure to destroy it. So they keep quiet.

The Killing Star.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#130

Post by flycaliguy »

mrbonner wrote: post #17

I just started to watch the 1993 series Star Trek new generation. The show has some interesting ideas regarding advanced civilizations vs the primitive ones. One of which is called the prime directive prohibiting any star fleet from intervening with the evolution of primitive people. In one of the episodes “who watches the watcher” the USS enterprise travels to planet Minkita 2 for a rescue mission and encounters a p…

I can’t say I’ve ever seen a post on the internet go ahead and explain what the prime directive is before.
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