Have we already been visited by aliens? • Hacker News Board

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#331

Post by yoz-y » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:36 AM UTC

svachalek wrote: post #287

confidantlake wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "ali…

> Would they seal us off and make a zoo

This one kind of works because it only takes one civilisation to block us and keep the others out.

> once you have reached 100% understanding of physics, you will know whether this premise true or not true

How does understanding physics give you the certainty?

As a solution to the paradox that would assume that all civilisations are extremely xenophobic and also always assume that collaboration is impossible.

BTW: my current belief is that most likely life is just super-rare (phosphorus problem, and way too many required variables) and also that colonising a galaxy is probably a sub-optimal solution for overpopulation.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#332

Post by trestenhortz » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:18 AM UTC

King-Aaron wrote: post #323

trestenhortz wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put it in perspective, if the furthest distance man has travelled from the earth is the moon, and we represent that as 1 inch, then the closest star is about 200km / 125 miles away. In such a scale, Voyager has travelled 80 feet.

The distances aren't lost on me by any stretch - However I don't feel that the argument about distance would be as relevant to a hypothetical "class 3" civilisation.

I’m talking current capabilities rather than possible future technological capabilities.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#333

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 12:08 PM UTC

raggi wrote: post #279

TeMPOraL wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a weird statement that confuses the purpose of an object with what an object does. Purpose exists only in our heads; natural objects don't have one. There is no tag attached to atoms. In other words, anything that behaves as a sail would, can be called a sail. And there are plenty of objects around us that behave as sails, not made such by humans, or made so unintentionally.

Evolution derives purpose from experimentation. It is not intent driven design, it is experiment driven design, but many aspects of persistence through evolution are nonetheless purposeful. If an adaptation is significantly successful, it becomes prominent in the created population and there is a reason for it - that is the noun, purpose. This would be different if you said "have purpose" instead of "the purpose".

I disagree. "Purpose" connotes intent, and evolution has none. It's a glorified random number generator hooked to a feedback loop. The only "purpose" evolution has is in POSIWID sense - the purpose of a system is what it does[0].

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#334

Post by pc86 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

jwally wrote: post #178

johnisgood wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. Even PubMed is ridden with ridiculous stuff. PubMed! To give you an example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068791/ Thankfully we can do our own research, see by whom it has been cited, in what journal it has been published, and so forth. You can easily tell that this is quite an unimportant and incredible one. Of course you could tell it yourself after having read it that it is nonsense.

Are there any guides / heuristics on how a layperson can evaluate technical literature? For example my mother-in-law is starting to micro-dose lithium and cited this article as evidence: https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2020/12/lithium-and-a... Which cites 19 medical journals. The website itself reeks of bullshit, but how can I tell if the journals it cites are valid or just woo?

I think a more important question is whether or not a layperson should be evaluating technical literature on their own at all. I'm wholly uneducated and unprepared to evaluate even simple medical literature, so I find a doctor who I trust and who can explain why they do the things they do.

There is an idea, especially here in the US, and especially over the last 10-15 years, that you can just "do your own research" and come to correct conclusions about things that have been studied for decades or centuries. You can't. If you want to do it for your own edification, or because it's interesting, by all means. But please not for making real decisions that have a real impact.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#335

Post by sailingparrot » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 1:40 PM UTC

yters wrote: post #294

sailingparrot wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet we have very good evidence it indeed has. If life originated somewhere else, it landed here before DNA evolved.

What is the evidence? Seems hard to have evidence for anything billions of years ago given we don't have historical records past a few millenia. It is all guesswork past that point, and the patterns of organisms and their complexity makes an earth origin of DNA extremely improbable if not impossible. Try reading through a graduate level book on bioinformatics to marvel at the sheer ingenuity, for lack of a better wor…

You can look up origin of DNA there is a ton of good resource, but one of the main reason is that we know all life on earth does not use the same DNA, some domain uses DNA based on a certain set of protein while some other domain uses DNA based on another set, which is very strong evidence that DNA was 'invented' multiple times.

So if the building blocks of life arrived from somewhere else, it was at best RNA not DNA.

But must of all I find your reasoning puzzling, you find DNA marvelous (which it is) and thus assumes it must have come from somewhere else. What does this 'somewhere else' has that we don't have here? The Universe is relatively homogeneous.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#336

Post by sailingparrot » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

coderaptor wrote: post #283

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.

> just exploring possibilities and being imaginative, I think it’s pretty cool.

I completly agree with that, but I believe you can do that without being disingenuous, as Carl Sagan did.

> since he’s not wrong or right

This is what is written on the back of his book: "Harvard’s top astronomer, showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization."

How is that not wrong? It is even worse than wrong since he is very aware of the other potential explanations, it's straigh up lying.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#337

Post by GoblinSlayer » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

wait_a_minute wrote: post #190

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already done for indians. Impossibility of FTL travel just saved all life in universe from you.

The trend of our species has been to become more moral and nice to one another. Read up on how humans viewed one another 1,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago and see the trend. There's no reason to believe or to ONLY believe that we'd be a violent and evil species if we became space-fairing and had FTL travel. In such a far future, I'd like to choose to work towards and to think about having a society that is even mor…

That's ok, in 10000 years when we will think better, we can fly to the stars.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#338

Post by jwally » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #334

jwally wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any guides / heuristics on how a layperson can evaluate technical literature? For example my mother-in-law is starting to micro-dose lithium and cited this article as evidence: https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2020/12/lithium-and-a... Which cites 19 medical journals. The website itself reeks of bullshit, but how can I tell if the journals it cites are valid or just woo?

I think a more important question is whether or not a layperson should be evaluating technical literature on their own at all. I'm wholly uneducated and unprepared to evaluate even simple medical literature, so I find a doctor who I trust and who can explain why they do the things they do. There is an idea, especially here in the US, and especially over the last 10-15 years, that you can just "do your own research" a…

Honest question. If your back hurt and your primary-care-physician recommended you see a chiropractor but you saw on wikipedia that chiropractic is pseudoscience with a risk of injury; how would you proceed?

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#339

Post by SuoDuanDao » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

mrec wrote: post #99

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #63

I've long thought the starseeder hypothesis was a good bet from purely statistical grounds. What are the odds of intelligent life arising ex nihilo? We'd assume infinitesimal. Given that it happened once, what are the odds that life will successfully expand to other planets? I at least would assume better than it happening independently again, we've never seen autogenesis but we have sent tardigrades to the moon.

> What are the odds of intelligent life arising ex nihilo? We'd assume infinitesimal. Why would we assume that? We've been seeing biologically interesting chemicals appear from much simpler ones for well over a century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Chemical_synthesis... Also, your "starseeder hypothesis" sounds a lot more deliberate than panspermia theories, but correct me if I'm misunderstanding you the…

Why wouldn't we assume that? Even with the ability to synthesize full DNA molecules, we haven't yet figured out how to make a living cell from scratch. If our best synthetic biologists still find it impossible to assemble a viable cell while having all the tools to do so in theory, I wouldn't expect it to be likely to happen by accident, barring some quantum weirdness that makes the starseeder hypothesis seem positively banal.

As to deliberateness... I see the difference between starseeder and panspermia hypotheses that in the former; life happened once in a gravity well, became multicellular, figured out a means to escape the gravity well, and then spread throughout the galaxy while in the latter; life happened once in space, drifted a while, got stuck in a gravity well and then figured out how to be multicellular.

I suppose - particularly given the vastness of the places with no gravity wells compared to places with gravity wells - that it's my own gravity-well bias that makes me reach for 'starseeder' hypotheses before panspermia ones. But I think whether life was multicellular before or after the bulk of the interstellar spreading, the instinct of life to spread would be the motive force whatever its problem solving capabilities.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#340

Post by pc86 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

jwally wrote: post #338

pc86 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a more important question is whether or not a layperson should be evaluating technical literature on their own at all. I'm wholly uneducated and unprepared to evaluate even simple medical literature, so I find a doctor who I trust and who can explain why they do the things they do. There is an idea, especially here in the US, and especially over the last 10-15 years, that you can just "do your own research" a…

Honest question. If your back hurt and your primary-care-physician recommended you see a chiropractor but you saw on wikipedia that chiropractic is pseudoscience with a risk of injury; how would you proceed?

This is a good question, and I'm a little biased in that I do think chiropractic is pseudoscience as medical treatment, but it also feels really good. So I go every once in a while the same way I do with a massage.

I would just tell them my concerns and either ask for why they think that would help, or maybe get a second opinion? It's hard to say for sure.