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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?

#181

Post by ojosilva »

3395810 wrote: post #16

I assume that any culture that is capable of developing interstellar flight will have a high degree of curiosity. We humans study even the most "mundane" life forms on our planet and try to study the rest of the universe outside of our planet. That is why I think extraterrestrials would want to make contact with us. > We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking dow…

Interstellar flight alone is not of interest. OTOH, it would allow earthlings to become visitors.

Commerce. If we use our experience as a basis here, this is the #1 interest that would lure alien explorers to this neck of the woods. Commerce is what got us to cross the Atlantic: looking for routes, buyers, suppliers, riches and land. All science-first approach ("they should come to study us") is so 20th century utopism.

But without really being sure what matters to aliens the most, commerce, tourism or science, makes it hard to lure them. We sent Voyager with curiosity in mind: songs, poems, language samples, pictures... But we could have sent instead a list/sample of our prime minerals, water supplies, preferred payment methods and our "1-800 number" for contact. Scientists can be so un-enterpreneurial sometimes!

Now, what then could get their attention and provoke a visit?

Become a menace.

Without really being sure what matters to aliens makes it tough to envision a way to get them really interested on the 3rd rock enough to launch a mission or send signals. So the most effective (and reckless...) is to become a menace, or at least a nuisance, to them. Fiction has played around with that idea, nuclear capability being the trigger that got them to notice or outraged enough to wipe us out...

Let's say we develop a gravitational wave cannon capable of making Sirius shoot over as a billiard ball into Procyon. Oh, now that would get their attention!

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

#182

Post by lisper »

whatshisface wrote: post #171
lisper wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is important to remember when analyzing such things that evolution does not optimize the reproductive fitness of organisms, it optimizes the reproductive fitness of genes. Organisms are a side-effect, a result of the fact that cooperation often provides a competitive advantage [1]. But evolution neither knows nor cares about civilization. It just so happens that, at the moment here on earth, genes that build brain…

I'm not sure if birth control is the greatest example of our genes being the enemy. Birth control is popular because raising a child is horrifyingly net-negative in the 21st century (unlike most prior centuries, where it made you richer and secured your future), and also because birth is incredibly painful for humans specifically. Both of those are unpleasant facts, and many people would consider our civilization bet…

Birth control is not an example of genes being our enemy, it is an example of us being our genes' enemy.

And "us" is not really the right way to characterize this because our genes are part of "us". It is more like "the part of us that sees value in technological civilization in its own right" vs "the part of us that sees value in being the biological creatures we call humans". The fact that these concepts don't have names is one indication of just how far off the radar this idea is.

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

#183

Post by klmadfejno »

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…

Why do people assume a universe simulating our own runs on comparable physics?

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

#184

Post by tachyonbeam »

whatshisface wrote: post #175
tachyonbeam wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, our curiosity and desire to explore is a reflection through our instincts of basic biological imperatives. Even bacteria "want" to explore, find new territories where there might be undiscovered resources, etc. Exploration is what helps a species survive long-term. We're smart, but the things we instinctively want are still a reflection of the basic things that any life form wants and needs. I don't…

Bacteria don't want to explore, they float around, and occasionally do gradient climbing to navigate to good chemicals. That's an example of a pro-survival technique that works very well, but is not going to lead to anything better. Every living thing on Earth except for people is an example of a living thing with some degree of intelligence, or at least beneficial control, but that does not have scientific progress.

Amoebas can propel themselves, and if you drop them in one corner of a lake, I can guarantee you that they will explore it to find food and reproduce.

Bacteria don't have scientific progress, but because they reproduce rapidly, they also evolve very fast compared to us. Some of them can even exchange genetic material with each other (!). This is a way for them to exchange "knowledge" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilus).

I can guarantee you that if you observed amoebas under a microscope for a while, you would realize that these are more sophisticated little machines than you think.

> "largest genomes belongs to a very small creature, Amoeba dubia. This protozoan genome has 670 billion units of DNA, or base pairs. The genome of a cousin, Amoeba proteus, has a mere 290 billion base pairs, making it 100 times larger than the human genome."

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

#186

Post by mxcrossb »

mindcrime wrote: post #127
dimitrios1 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stan…

Everyone always argues “the universe is so big there must be aliens”. But as soon as you ask why aliens don’t act like us, it becomes “the universe is too small to have that kind”! I think the heuristic is just fine.

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

#187

Post by mdip » 

   > Why Do We Assume Extraterrestrials Might Want to Visit Us?
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, though it'll be hard to write this without the tone seeming that way, but the question alone has a pretty simple set of answers and their own problems:

  (1) Our only way to study how an *intelligent* extraterrestrial would behave would be to study the behavior of other intelligent[0] beings.  Our data set consists of one species.  Enough of this species wants to visit an extraterrestrial civilization, and given no other examples, we assume it's probably the same.
  (2) Related to (1), we have exactly zero evidence of the existence of *any* extraterrestrial life, let alone life that understands that they live on "something in space", that there is other life on a planet orbiting a sun amongst an infinite number of stars, etc.
Maybe I'm not the article's target audience, but this is so far down the list of questions that need to be answered at this point that I had a hard time being motivated to read the whole thing.

The first, and a more interesting question is: "Is there any life, intelligent or otherwise, outside of this planet?[1]" If we found, say, that samples from Mars or some other planet/asteroid had a diversity of different bacteria/single-celled organisms, etc, it would increase the probability that there is intelligent life out there "somewhere". If everything comes back empty, there's probably better things to focus research energy on.

[0] The title is missing that important piece. If they are unaware that life could exist they won't be all that interested in visiting. The mattresses (from the planet "where mattresses are grown") likely haven't pondered any of the big questions of life, the universe and... everything.

[1] Tricky problem: you sent something up from a planet teaming with all kinds of bacteria/life; I've read about how they sanitize/handle things but it still amazes me that they can say with any confidence that there was no cross-contamination, but IANARS.

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

#188

Post by kgin »

If you assume that there is a civilization that has gone to the trouble of developing interstellar transportation, I think you can assume they value the differences between different parts of the universe. Considering that inhabited planets or even solar systems seem to be much more rare than uninhabited ones, I don't think it's unreasonable to think these difference-interested beings would want to stop by to at least map out an inhabited planet.

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

#189

Post by behnamoh »

htfu wrote: post #161
GistNoesis wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unive…

And why exactly would someone go to all this trouble instead of just throttling that region of space? Surely you don't mean to say it would all run on a single chip? And if this was a simulation there'd presumably be a purpose to it and once heavy computation emerges the entity running the sim would throw more resources at this interesting phenomenon, not try to get rid of it. It'd be like "each time the neural net a…

> It'd be like "each time the neural net achieved AGI, the humans tore it down to refocus on the real goal, bombproof traffic sign recognition".

Except that if the entity who's running the simulation is itself AGI, it really does not have interest in discovering yet another AGI in its own simulation.

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

#190

Post by vuciv1 »

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…

I find this point weak because we literally study ants and sell ant colonies for interested parties
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