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A Lonely Universe

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Re: A Lonely Universe

#71

Post by frazbin »

akomtu wrote: post #52
api wrote: post #13

On top of all these probabilities I think you also have to add the probability of high technology. Humans existed for 100k years before we started doing things like harnessing steam and electricity and we have no evidence early humans were insufficiently intelligent. There is a whole chain of mental and cultural developments that may very well not be common.

The official history says humans started diverging from advanced monkeys only 12k years ago. The unofficial history describes a few impressive and socially advanced civilizations before that "flood" event, but all of them valued knowledge only so long as it helped with day to day tasks. So they've built some interesting structures, but weren't technologically advanced by our standards. Our generation, that started 12…

nope! 300k years ago, people who were anatomically as smart as us were walking around. Just not very many on account of the glaciers, megafauna, and competing hominids. Can't do agriculture on a glacier

Re: A Lonely Universe

#72

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #32
Causality1 wrote: post #2

Either intelligent life is rare in the universe or there's something that happens to it that prevents it from what we envision as the future of our own species, i.e., colonizing and spreading among planets. Maybe 99.99% of species ruin their own climate before getting off-world. Maybe they all decide it's happier living as hunter-gatherers. Unless we're alone, there is some fate that's common to all intelligences and…

Or maybe Von Neumann machines can't be built because they're impractical. Consider that you need an AI that can deal with a huge range of potential environments, build extraction, processing, and assembly machinery, and do all of this with perfect error correction and oversight. Pretty much eternally. It's an interesting thought experiment. But as a practical engineering project, it really doesn't sound even remotely…

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

Re: A Lonely Universe

#73

Post by shagie »

kingcharles wrote: post #30
Causality1 wrote: post #2

Either intelligent life is rare in the universe or there's something that happens to it that prevents it from what we envision as the future of our own species, i.e., colonizing and spreading among planets. Maybe 99.99% of species ruin their own climate before getting off-world. Maybe they all decide it's happier living as hunter-gatherers. Unless we're alone, there is some fate that's common to all intelligences and…

How about the possibility that perfect VR is invented, every person can live inside their own perfect universe, and the whole species just doesn't give a fuck about exploring the (real) universe? That would stop a civilisation from exporting any spacecraft or signals outside its homeworld.

The book Diaspora by Greg Egan touches on this.

I particularly like the short story in there "Wang Carpets".

It builds on Wang Tiles, discovered by Hao Wang when trying to solve a tiling the plane problem. He discovered that it is possible to simulate a Turing machine with a given tile set which meant that solving that tiling the plane problem was equivalent to solving the halting problem. ... but you can simulate a Turing machine with tiles.

If that piques your curiosity, Andrew Glassner's Notebook: Recreational Computer Graphics has some examples of tile sets that can solve math problems.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Andrew_Glassner_s_Noteb... (page 216 and page 217)

Re: A Lonely Universe

#74

Post by WalterBright »

We owe it to the universe to send out interstellar probes loaded with micro organisms to seed interesting planets.

The notion that we have to sterilize all the interplanetary probes just so we don't "infect" other dead planets is just silly. We should have dropped a bag of life into Saturn's atmosphere, instead of a sterile probe.

Re: A Lonely Universe

#75

Post by edgyquant »

pmoriarty wrote: post #68
7thaccount wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing would be sadder to me to see us stagnate forever. As a non corporeal being, I think you could live nearly forever and learn far more. I think creating "children" could be possible too if we had the technology to digitize people in the first place. I don't think we would give up on exploration either. Just build a ship, send it somewhere, and transport your consiousness over the distance. If you wanted to go b…

"I think you could live nearly forever and learn far more." But it wouldn't be you living forever. It would be some copy of you (at best).

What’s the difference?

Re: A Lonely Universe

#76

Post by WalterBright »

DrBoring wrote: post #55
m3kw9 wrote: post #54

To me, the more advanced we get the more fragile we are from getting wiped out. Mainly because of weaponry that gets unnecessarily strong that can be easily triggered to wipe us out. It’s already hard for us to keep nuclear weapons at bay and we one deterrence mistake from huge set back. Now imagine 3000 years later what type of weapons we’d invent. Mini black holes? Antimatter bombs?

I like to think that a society that can control antimatter has solved the problem of scarcity. Which would hopefully end most human discontentment and hostility.

America has solved the hunger problem. It hasn't ended human discontentment and hostility at all.

Re: A Lonely Universe

#77

Post by hoseja »

Very good article. The Earth chauvinism in trying to theorize about extraterrestrial life is blinding. There could be magnetohydrodynamic life in star plasmas for all we know. We need to explore WAY more before we try to reach any conclusions.

Re: A Lonely Universe

#78

Post by hoseja »

WalterBright wrote: post #74

We owe it to the universe to send out interstellar probes loaded with micro organisms to seed interesting planets. The notion that we have to sterilize all the interplanetary probes just so we don't "infect" other dead planets is just silly. We should have dropped a bag of life into Saturn's atmosphere, instead of a sterile probe.

Why? What will thousand years of delayed seeding do? It's very dumb to smear our poop onto other planets before we thoroughly investigate them.

Re: A Lonely Universe

#79

Post by hoseja »

pfdietz wrote: post #57
thrashh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another possibility is that energy is really hard to come by. Humans absolutely struggle to amass much energy. Think of the insane amount of energy required to lift things into space, and how many millions more amounts of energy we’ll need just to build something in space. Heck if you go drive off grid on Earth, you can barely bring any energy with you and you won’t really be able to generate an appreciative amount o…

It actually doesn't require THAT much energy to get into orbit. The energy of a kilogram of mass in low earth orbit is about 9 kWh, although rockets will use a bit more than that (not enormously more, though). Fuel cost remains a minor fraction of launch cost, even with Falcon 9. In comparison, the best aluminum plants in the world use 13 kWh to make a kilogram of aluminum. Yet no one says aluminum is out of reach be…

Aluminium has been out of reach for much of history.

Re: A Lonely Universe

#80

Post by 7373737373 »

beecafe wrote: post #47
kerblang wrote: post #7

Dumb physics question: If a dying civilization 99,000 light years away sent its last radio transmission 100,000 years ago, we'd never know it happened, right? Maybe I'm missing something with those radio waves bouncing back and forth around us off of various big objects in the milky way.

Gravitational lensing could give us a few more chances if they were in just the right place, but the event would have to be really massive (supernova level) for light echoes from interstellar material

Interestingly, an infinite amount of chances, since signals can wrap around a black hole an arbitrary amount of times - they are just incredibly weak and have to be viewed from the right position!
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