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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?

#281

Post by behnamoh »

Balgair wrote: post #269
burlesona wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but I think it's worth remembering/noting that this happens mostly because it's very difficult if not impossible to imagine what a sentient being with a psychology entirely unlike our own would be like. I think that most people (who think about such things) realize that extraterrestrials, if they exist, may well be more alien than we can even imagine. But it's fun to imagine things, so we try anyway…

For instance, try to imagine a new emotion that is not a composite of the emotions you have. We know animals have emotions, and they mostly map to our emotions. With less related animals likely having less related emotions to ours (like the emotions of a tuna fish compared to a chimpanzee). Now, try to map the emotions of life-form that from a completely different tree of life from ours. Their version of emotions may…

I agree. But at the same time, some things can be quite common across the universe. For example, evolutionary processes that arise due to competition in an ecosystem lead to certain traits (conservativism, being vigilant all the time, etc.) which could be common across life-forms that have very dissimilar trees of life. For instance, think of how birds, deers, and butterflies react to dangers around them. We as humans can relate better to deers and birds, but not so much to butterflies. Nonetheless, all of us share the same "fear" about surrounding movements and that has influence on our emotions and character.

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

#282

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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…

Would you visit every single anthill? What if an advanced alien civilization just doesn't care after passing by thousands or millions of primitive civilizations?

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

#283

Post by King-Aaron »

imglorp wrote: post #21

The hard fact is there are no shortcuts to interstellar travel, barring new physics. Any trip will consume vast amounts of energy and it will take decades if not centuries or longer. Advanced tech may reduce the expense to your civilization but the fact won't change. While all life, ants or not, may be universally worthy of study, is it worth that much sacrifice? Also, if the ants talk, exchanging messages would make…

> no shortcuts to interstellar travel

Wormholes tho

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

#284

Post by GistNoesis »

behnamoh wrote: post #192
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…

> 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. That's a good point, and I've also always wondered how fine-tuned those constants are. One problem though, is that changing the initial parameters would most likely have chaotic effects as the…

One advantage of QM is that from outside the universe you still have some degrees of freedom : you can modify the phases without impacting the observable of the world.

You can make a pretty strong local change like flipping a coin, at any point in space-time without impacting the rest of the phases elsewhere too much, because the farther away in time and space from your modification, the more decoherent the phases would be and therefore their impact would be minimum.

And because the QM equations are time-reversible, you can propagate them backwards through time up to the origin of time. And you now have a new almost identical initial configuration, which when simulated forward will give rise to a universe that behave the same way until the time of the modification but then bifurcate.

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

#285

Post by pre »

notahacker wrote: post #180
pre wrote: post #18

Fermi's paradox says nothing about how likely aliens are to visit earth. It notes that we can't see any sign of them when we look into the sky. Perhaps the humans don't care about the ants, but the ants damn well can see signs of human activity.

Would an intelligent ant species living on an uninhabited island identify global warming and driftwood as conclusive evidence of the existence of a higher intelligence causing it?

If they have telescopes then the trails from star-link satellites would probably give it away.

The ants in the article were in driveways though.

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

#286

Post by King-Aaron »

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.

Our ant colony might be sitting inside a terrarium on some aliens desk...

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

#287

Post by inDigiNeous »

behnamoh wrote: post #90
simonh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to be sure what a 10 or 100 million year old civilisation might still find interesting. I certainly wouldn't think a few hundred years of industrialisation, and a few decades of the information technology age gives us any real idea.

This. Plus, who says those ETs are of biological form anyway? Even we are thinking about AI doing most of the work, transhumanism and uploading our minds to machines, and finally, integrating with technology. Why think that a 10 million year old civilization still has flesh bodies, needs, and curiosities? Another comment also mentioned that ETs don't necessarily share the same interests and thought process as we do,…

This. The assumption that these ETs would appear in the same form as us, or even in the same dimension, shows us how limited our thinking is.

If a lifeform has gone through let's say million times the evolving that we have, wouldn't their consciousness and expression of life have developed probably into something alltogether different.

Maybe even something that we cannot see or hear with just our physical senses or instruments. There are many theories about this if you read on the subject, people being in contact with different species, but explaining that they came from between dimensions from example.

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

#288

Post by em-bee »

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.

we are an ant colony on our own island.

we may not study all ant colonies on the planet, but we certainly check all islands, and if there are ants, we will at least check if those ants are the same as other ants we have already seen.

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

#289

Post by cnity »

simiones wrote: post #129
b112 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> 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.

This is not quite the right way to look at it. The general theory of relativity isn't just some unmeasurable difference in the margins of the calculations. There are _real_ situations (e.g. near a black hole) where the predicted properties of relativity totally overwhelm the predicted movements under newtonian physics.

It's not insane to think that there equally are not-yet-predicted situations in which FTL speed is possible, under conditions that have never been possible in the natural universe but are possible with human intervention.

If you don't believe that humans are capable of achieving such situations, look simply at our creation of anti-matter despite ~essentially being unable to find~ rarely finding any in the natural universe.

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

#290

Post by cortic »

drichel wrote: post #268
cortic wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of any theories that earth like conditions are new or unique, in fact half of all stars like ours are over 9 billion years old. And the universe has almost stopped making new stars. If you believe it takes, on average 9 billion years X 100 billion star systems to create 1 civilization, then you believe in some kind of 'filter' that stops life almost completely. A filter that we have passed to be the…

There is indeed as far as I know some evidence that we are early bloomers https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2015/news-2015... Half of the stars might be 9 billion years old, but for heavy emelents fo form, you need already certain conditions like neutron star mergers need to have occured. Our galaxy might be just old enough for that.

That is interesting, and it changes my math a bit, though not to your favor;

>Based on the survey, scientists predict that there should be 1 billion Earth-sized worlds in the Milky Way galaxy at present, a good portion of them presumed to be rocky. That estimate skyrockets when you include the other 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

So for us to be near the first, near enough not to trip on Fermi's paradox, and allowing a short 5 billions years for these planets to have existed on average; we are (1000 billion X 5 billion) to 1. Which still needs one hell of a filter to explain.

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