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Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#121

Post by account42 »

ballenf wrote: post #9
nend wrote: post #2

>We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path. Not really the most convincing argument. There are professions that study ants. And I'm sure I'm not the only person on this forum that has a casual interest in observing ants. Pretty sure aliens would still be interested in us even if we were as primi…

The point is that we're one of (large number) of ant colonies and there's nothing particularly interesting about us vs. any other ant colony. Even if ETs study ants generally, there's nothing unique about us to give us a greater than 1/(large number) chance of being studied.

That would imply that there are also lots of alien worlds that are similarly developed to us and those might be interested.

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#122

Post by 7thaccount »

op03 wrote: post #64
hans1729 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ants are interesting because of the complex behavioral systems emerging from their comparatively simple biological systems, reminiscent of the game of life. Seeing the insane complexity of the human condition (look at the amount of scientific disciplines we come up with) and thinking "nay, this won't be interesting to a higher mind" feels awfully dismissive. sure, depending on the leap of sophistication we may appear…

Recently I had a bunch of snails appear out of nowhere all over the garden. And I spent a whole lot of time, trying to figure out what they were feeding on, cuz some were getting really big. The whole thing was quite fascinating...like how the hell were they producing these huge ass shells without tearing all the plants apart? So I call a good buddy over (PhD in bio something or the other) thinking he would be as fas…

How did you know they were edible? I mean, I know people eat snails in certain parts, but how did you know these were safe?

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#123

Post by marcus_holmes »

torben-friis wrote: post #115
marcus_holmes wrote: post #111

I've always loved the thing about solar eclipses and auroras: in order to see an aurora during an eclipse, the moon has to be the exact same size as the sun (when viewed from the planet). Earth has this (for a while at least - the moon is slowly moving away from us), and it makes us special. So if you want to find aliens, look during a solar eclipse. It's a rare phenomenon and if there are alien tourists, they'll wan…

Pretty specist to assume they have eyes :)

True. Or that their eyes see the same spectrum as ours.

I wonder if it's even more spectacular in different wavelengths?

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#124

Post by hartator »

whitepaint wrote: post #103
hartator wrote: post #102

Yes, it’s exactly why we should be septic regarding ufo sightings and such. If aliens are so advanced, we are probably no different than ants for them. Why they should care about us? Why they should protect themselves to be seen?

> Why they should care about us? Why they should protect themselves to be seen? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples

> Right to self-isolation

Nothing wrong with that but no alien has asked us that question as far as I know.

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#125

Post by albanread »

I think we would want to visit them; and that's the reason we hope they might like to visit us. And we hope there is some easy shortcut through space; that we might figure out in the next few centuries; so we can visit people while we are still human and still have this motivation.

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#127

Post by mindcrime »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #113
marcus_holmes wrote: post #111

I've always loved the thing about solar eclipses and auroras: in order to see an aurora during an eclipse, the moon has to be the exact same size as the sun (when viewed from the planet). Earth has this (for a while at least - the moon is slowly moving away from us), and it makes us special. So if you want to find aliens, look during a solar eclipse. It's a rare phenomenon and if there are alien tourists, they'll wan…

What makes you think it is a rare phenomenon to them, or that they have the same conceptualizations of "needs and wants" as we do? What if they view these events the same way we view watching paint dry or grass grow? Just as we have to be careful not to anthropomorphize animals and other species, we must also not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing alien species until there's an actual encounter and we get to 'k…

or that they have the same conceptualizations of "needs and wants" as we do?

Availability heuristic. We are the only example of "human level or greater" intelligent life we know of, so we assign "human like" needs and wants to these hypothesized aliens because it's all we have. I think the key thing is just to remember that this is just a heuristic and not to be overly rigid about it. Your point, IMO, absolutely stands that there is no particular reason to assume that "aliens" must be similar to us in this regard.

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#128

Post by hartator »

stabbles wrote: post #106
hartator wrote: post #102

Yes, it’s exactly why we should be septic regarding ufo sightings and such. If aliens are so advanced, we are probably no different than ants for them. Why they should care about us? Why they should protect themselves to be seen?

We study ants too... Go to the ant, thou sluggard; Consider her ways, and be wise

99.99% of ant colonies are not been studied. And for 0.01% we do study, we don't care of them seeing us.

> Consider her ways, and be wise

There is no philosophy to extract from ant society. Pretty dystopian, totalitarian, and despotic.

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#129

Post by simiones »

b112 wrote: post #40
cnity wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> barring new physics Our understanding of physics changes constantly!

Indeed. So many seem to exude the concept that "today we know precisely how the universe works". Would one insist that Newtonian physics was the Only Way to Think of Things, prior to Einsteinian? While the speed of light may remain a barrier, it may not. Presuming the ability to be reached by a society which likely possesses scientific knowledge beyond ours, is to be a Roman, and presume the sun travels around the Ea…

The problem with this train of thought is that it fails to account for the observations so far. We know that the amount of energy required to accelerate an object increases as its speed approaches the speed of light. We have observed this effect. New physics will never contradict this - they may just put it in a new light, or perhaps discover a new dimension. But they will not invalidate the measurements we have so far.

Note that the observations done in Newton's time were never proved wrong - we just discovered that with better measurement precision and in different regimes of speed, they turn out to have additional small terms.

It is perfectly possible that we'll discover additional extremely weak forces and effects, and they may completely contradict our interpretations of the physical theories we've discovered, but they are unlikely to prove that the facts (measurements themselves) we know now are wrong, at least in the regimes we've noticed them.

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#130

Post by GistNoesis »

behnamoh wrote: post #84
GistNoesis wrote: post #77

It's all about computation. The computer running universe-simulations needs to be able to run fast. Regularities can be integrated quickly. Life not so much. Life can make computers which can ask computations which can't be reduced. Therefore as soon as a big enough computer is built somewhere in the universe, the whole simulation-time starts crawling to an halt because the inner computer use all the resources, and f…

It's a very interesting point that I hadn't noticed before. Of course, this relies on assuming (believing?) the universe is a giant simulation run on a computer with limited resources. I did not get your last sentence though. Could you elaborate?

Rules of the universe appear to us relatively simple. But the question of numerical stability is not solved specially for later times.

In physics it is natural to start from an initial state and integrate through time, starting from initial time and evolving by time-stepping.

Physics helps but this doesn't prevent the emergence of numerical instabilities like a big-computer being built.

So if you were running a universe simulation, when a life form start to emerge and starts building a big computer you can "erase" them from existence by approximating them away.

When your simulation starts crawling to an halt, you modify locally the current phases at the time of the modification so that the alien go extinct, and you propagate backwards in time towards the origin of the universe, to find the initial parameters of the simulation that when inputted make the alien never be a problem in the first place while not modifying too much the rest of the universe at current time.

From the perspective of a being inside the universe, the only thing we could observe by such a parameter search on the spaces of possible universe, are being amazed at how some constants of the universe seem to be fine-tuned.

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