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Have we already been visited by aliens?

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Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#231

Post by matteocantiello »

eloff wrote: post #45
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #35

> Loeb, though, explicitly rejects the Sagan standard—“It is not obvious to me why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he observes—and flips its logic on its head: “Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.” So long as there’s a chance that 1I/2017 U1 is an alien probe, we’d be fools not to pursue the idea. “If we acknowledge that ‘Oumuamua is plausibly of extraterrestrial-techno…

> I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct and actively discouraging science based on the idea it could be. Actually yes. You'll be laughed out of the virtual room, not get funding, and potentially damage your career. As he points out in his interview with Lex (linked elsewhere in the comments here) is fine to propose a multi billion dollar experiment to detect o…

I thought the idea of searching for industrial pollution was actually a pretty bad one. We've been polluting at detectable levels for just ~100 years. And if we keep doing it we'll likely wipe us out in a few hundred more. Overall it seems very likely industrial pollution is a very short-lived phase of any civilizations, so chances of detecting this signature are tiny.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#232

Post by sailingparrot »

erdos4d wrote: post #229
sailingparrot wrote: post #218

I don't understand what is happening with Avi Loeb. I was not familiar with him before Omouamoua but from what I gathered he is a respected academic in the field. So how can someone like that be so disingenuous about this topic? There is currently basically no evidence whatsoever that Omouamoua is an alien constructs. If we are generous we can consider this at most a plausible explanation among others (certainly not…

Have you read any of his arguments? They are sound and nobody has come up with anything substantive to dispute them. Can you offer an actual rebuttal?

Yes I have read them. And don't get me wrong I find some of them interesting. What I consider junk-science and what really irks me is his tendency to just try to suffocate all other possible explanations brushing them off like they have no merit.

As I said, I don't think we should not consider the possibility that this may be alien technology, but the carthesian in me just cannot take seriously anyone that is willing to make such strong claims based on such very little evidence. Science is not supposed to be politic, where you just try to yell louder than your "opponents".

> They are sound and nobody has come up with anything substantive to dispute them.

You can find a very good synthesis of rebutals in this video [1] by Professor Kipping.

You can also find a partial rebuttal in a paper by the very team that discovered Omouamoua [2].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX_Bj7064Ms&t=240s

[2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.01910.pdf

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#233

Post by erdos4d »

floatrock wrote: post #134
tiborsaas wrote: post #47

Prof David Kipping did a point-by-point analysis of Loeb's claims: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX_Bj7064Ms TLDW: most likely a natural object.

Thanks for the link. Always good to hear the other side, especially after listening to the Lex interview a while back. Here's the summary: Loeb's argument for Ouamuamua being aliens rests on 6 observed anomalies. All but 1 or 2 have pretty reasonable rebuttals. [1]: Anomaly: There are too few interstellar asteroids to expect something like this, so it must have been aimed at us. The brand new telescope that discovere…

6 isn't an accurate statement of the argument raised here. It wasn't just accelerating, but did so without changing its rotation at all. Comets don't do that when they outgas, the forces torque then about and you get variance in their rotational period.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#234

Post by King-Aaron »

trestenhortz wrote: post #97

It’s not aliens. Nothing can convince me that there’s any practical way to travel the distances between the stars. If you don’t agree then I think you fundamentally don’t grasp how incomprehensibly vast those distances are. I absolutely believe in life in other worlds but there’s no way to travel from star to star.

Once upon a time, it was inconceivable that there could be any practical way to travel between continents.

I feel that making this assertion based on our current understanding of the universe is fundamentally flawed.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#235

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

stretchcat wrote: post #180
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.

Every advancing civilization will eventually create an internet. Once they do that, interstellar travel is off the table. Advanced civilizations stay closely packed because they cannot tolerate latency once they get a taste for near instant communication.

Given that serious interstellar travel really requires FTL transport, I suspect that the two are rather closely connected.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#236

Post by munificent »

bostonsre wrote: post #54
eloff wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct and actively discouraging science based on the idea it could be. Actually yes. You'll be laughed out of the virtual room, not get funding, and potentially damage your career. As he points out in his interview with Lex (linked elsewhere in the comments here) is fine to propose a multi billion dollar experiment to detect o…

Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis seems very unscientific.

> Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis seems very unscientific.

Your statement is self-referential. If a hypothesis is "plausible" than practically by definition it is above ridicule. But how do you decide which hypotheses are plausible?

Science, at its core, is a social system. One of the key goals of that system is prioritization. There are finite research resources and it's important to allocate them to the most promising areas. Ridicule is one of the more extreme tools scientists use in that social process to reach consensus about which hypotheses are plausible.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#237

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

godelski wrote: post #163
PoachedSausage wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there has been some sort of accident of scale, like the intergalactic fleet in Hitch Hiker Guide to the Galaxy that arrives to destroy Earth but is eaten by a dog. There could be a banging ET party going at the Planck scale and we would never know, they might as well be on the other side of the universe.

The problem with this is that mechanics is not scale invariant. This puts bounds on creatures. Unless there's some crazy different way to compute I wouldn't expect a being to be able to have strong cognitive functions and be the size of a fly. They would also have a difficult time building advanced machinery to get to galactic travel scales. Similarly I wouldn't expect a creature the size of a Brontosaurus to become…

I think this is a mistaken way of thinking in general, because you're omitting time. Your assuming that intelligent/thinking/conscious creatures would necessarily function on timelines that make sense to us. If that were true, then what you're saying makes sense - there are real bounds on how fast you can move chemical energy from A to B, for example.

But I see nothing preventing intelligent life from operating on massively longer timescales. This requires, of course, that you believe that intelligence (and maybe consciousness too) is substrate and timescale independent, which may or may not be a big ask depending on where you stand on these issues.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#238

Post by wolco5 »

Joeri wrote: post #176
eloff wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, but my sister always says I’m not open-minded because I won’t read all her antivaxer info. If we give all ideas equal credence, better ideas will not win out.

Your sister grew up with you and went through the same schooling as you.

Doesn't she deserve to be heard? By labeling her a antivaxer and ignoring her based on that label you effectively are closing your mind to her.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#239

Post by kls »

munificent wrote: post #236
bostonsre wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis seems very unscientific.

> Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis seems very unscientific. Your statement is self-referential. If a hypothesis is "plausible" than practically by definition it is above ridicule. But how do you decide which hypotheses are plausible? Science, at its core, is a social system. One of the key goals of that system is prioritization. There are finite research resources and it's important to allocate them to…

Ridicule is one of the more extreme tools scientists use in that social process to reach consensus about which hypotheses are plausible.

It is also a very sinister and discrediting tool. As an example the CRU employed this tactic and set an entire area of scientific research back due to the optics of scientific politics. It can cause the tainted smell of agenda, and that is never good for enlightening people.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#240

Post by 7thaccount »

jrumbut wrote: post #174
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A possible chink is that civilizations just don't do that -- carpet colonize the whole galaxy, or fill it with their probes to the extent that we seem them all over the place. The Fermi paradox relies on material (probes, colonies) and light (signals). With the material explained away, the lack signals is much easier to explain in that we haven't listened long and we can only hear very loud signals. (Or maybe advance…

Do you know if about any simulations of what it would look like if there were alien radio operators? If there were 50 other Earths scattered around the galaxy (ones that have been broadcasting like us but for longer) should the first television have imnediately picked up interstellar "I Love Lucy" or would it be faint anomalies from SETI? Somewhere in between?

The milky way is 100,000 light years across and I love Lucy is what, 60-70 years old? I would say we've reached a very small portion of the milky way
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