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Have we already been visited by aliens?

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Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#281

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

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…

Have you heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)? Or that birds brains are "wired" more dense, like our cerebellum?

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#282

Post by noetic_techy »

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

Listen to his interviews, he is talking about his colleagues at Harvard, not the general public. They are the ones saying things like "I wish it never existed because we can't explain it"

>>it is a pretty big fallacy to say "we don't understand it, therefore it was aliens".

Again, this is not at all what he is saying. Read his paper and listen to his interviews. It exhibits the signs and being an artificial construct, and he even points to a similar object that was detected that turned out to be a booster launched back in the 50s. You can't easily explain the acceleration of the object with known natural entities like comets and asteroids. It showed no plume nor ejecta, yet seemed to gain speed equivalent to 10% of its mass being ejected. The reason the booster did this was due to the push of solar winds on a thin shell of a hollow object. Hence the theory that this may be some kind of alien solar sail. It does have an extremely odd geometry. The renderings of it being a large turd of an asteroid is pure speculation. There is no clear picture of it. I bet if Voyager 1 made it to another star system it would accelerate also due to its thin surfaces and exhibit the same profile, albeit smaller. And we left a gold disk with our address on it. What if it has technology that we haven't even conceived of? It actually would be worth while for our species to mount an expedition to catch up with it and turn it around. Sounds expensive but wow would it be huge if it was an alien craft.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#283

Post by coderaptor »

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…

The amount of press and public interest he’s drummed up likely encourages young folks to get into the field, raises the profile of the work, and encourages public support of more funding and exploration.

And, since he’s not wrong or right - just exploring possibilities and being imaginative, I think it’s pretty cool.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#284

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

yoz-y wrote: post #120
mtts wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 books and all are nice but the Dark Forest Theory doesn't hold agains much scrutiny. Among other reasons because if that were true we would be already dead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmCTmgavkrQ

Why is that? Let's say we've emitted since about 100 years. They are bound by lightspeed like we are. Our wavefront hasn't reached them so far, OR it has, and they are about 50 lightyears away, busy building a slow annihilation fleet, arriving here anytime about 100 years from now, depending on how high up to lightspeed they can go?

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#285

Post by erklik »

sailingparrot wrote: post #259
erklik wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>our civilization already has the technology to send a probe to another star system. Yet we haven't sent anything. Maybe aliens are the same. Maybe they don't have the political will to send anything. Maybe they have their own climate change, or insane leaders to deal with. Or maybe not, maybe they've developed a virtual universe and are living in that instead of exploring the physical one. I find the assumption that…

> Yet we haven't sent anything. But we have, quite a few of them actually, and 2 have left the solar system. It's just that none of them will come close to any star for a few hundred thousands of years.

> It's just that none of them will come close to any star for a few hundred thousands of years.

I don't believe we have sent anything explicitly for the purpose of reaching another star? Right? Exploring our Solar System with probes, sure. Has there been a probe that was meant to explore another star system?

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#286

Post by XorNot »

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…

This is ignoring the obvious question: what are we not doing that we should be with researching Oumuamua on that basis?

What concrete experiments would prove its an alien construct as opposed to being just interstellar rock?

The scientific community isn't rejecting proposals to find more Oumuamua like objects, and has been actively trying to figure out how we could intercept another one when it turns up.

So what exactly is requiring us to start from "it might be aliens" in order to get funded?

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#287

Post by svachalek »

confidantlake wrote: post #255
lambda_obrien wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the three books, you realize that the true message is that if you're considered a possible threat to an advanced species, they'll annihilate you, otherwise you'll be left alone. Maybe every other species which knows about us knows we can't even leave our own planet/moon right now, the most we can do is send useless robots to other planets over 30 years.

I haven't read the third book so maybe they expanded on it, but from the first 2 books the theory seemed different. It is far too dangerous to let a non advanced civilization live because they can quickly develop to an advanced civilization.

That's how I understand it: light speed is so slow and technological progress is so fast that any intelligent species could develop the ability to wipe you out faster than you could realize the threat is coming. Ergo, the only possible way to be safe is to destroy other civilizations as soon as they pop up their heads.

I feel like a lot of so-called solutions to the Fermi paradox fail when they speculate on what "aliens" would do. Would they seal us off and make a zoo, or find it morally wrong to contact us, etc, etc. It's bold to assume a single policy, since there would likely be multiple alien civilizations, or multiple factions even if there is only one.

So I give this one more credit in that once you have reached 100% understanding of physics, you will know whether this premise true or not true and it more or less dictates that you answer it if it is true. However, I'm not convinced that with 100% knowledge of physics you would find yourself so vulnerable. And even if you were, it still seems various forms of containment would be just as effective as a genocidal attack.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#288

Post by XorNot »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #264
bostonsre wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis seems very unscientific.

Happens all the time. People's ideas get ignored even when they have evidence backing them up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis > Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. > He could offer no acceptable…

Medical doctors and surgeons are not scientists. They don't do research, they don't publish papers. Medical research is an entirely different field which overlaps in skills sometimes.

But MDs are more like mechanics for the human body.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#289

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

RobertoG wrote: post #122
blueblisters wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker

http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200203/0743435265___0.htm

:-)

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#290

Post by buildstatements »

XorNot wrote: post #286
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…

This is ignoring the obvious question: what are we not doing that we should be with researching Oumuamua on that basis? What concrete experiments would prove its an alien construct as opposed to being just interstellar rock? The scientific community isn't rejecting proposals to find more Oumuamua like objects, and has been actively trying to figure out how we could intercept another one when it turns up. So what exac…

I only saw part of the Lex interview, and in the part I watched Loeb was saying if we had seen it on the way TOO Earth, we could have sent a rocket to investigate.

If we aren't looking, and a chance arises, we'll miss it, and if we do spot something like it early, what are the chances we are ready with a rocket to go look?

Would be nice if humanity could pre-plan. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/be... is a less controversial example.

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