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Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

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Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#81

Post by eru »

wisty wrote: post #28
luser001 wrote: post #4

Almost everything good and bad that humans have done is due to the drive of a SMALL number of (or single) individuals (American Decl. of Independence, Soviet revolution, Indian freedom struggle, race to colonize the world, WW2, 9/11, Iraq invasion). That is why it doesn't matter if 99.999% of the world is pre-occupied with one mindvirus or other. It's the 1-in-100k person who really takes humanity to the next level o…

The whole "great men made history" meme is kind of discredited. It's true to a point, and it's certainly a lot more interesting (therefore easy to remember) if you say that WWII was Hitler vs. Churchill and Stalin, but it's not entirely correct. In science, it might just be 1% of the top 1% who make the big breakthroughs - how many times did one guy make more than one really huge breakthrough? I can think of one big…

Also you often have the same thing invented multiple times independently, at the same time or in different times.

So if by some accident we missed a genius, she would probably be replaced by a bunch of merely clever people.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#82

Post by freshhawk »

I really did not expect this much resistance on HN to a fairly classical solution to the fermi paradox. Mostly it's spun in a more positive "retreat into virtual reality" type situation but it's the same thing.

We have no idea how humans will react to the ability to sate every desire and wish artifically. It's not just hyper-porn and the xbox 720, this would apply to the desire for exploration, solving hard problems, building well functioning societies, raising successful offspring, etc.

There also has to be something hilariously ironic about all of us on hacker news insisting that people in the future will reject fulfilling technological wastes of time in favour of productive activities that benefit themselves and humanity. At this very moment a large percentage of the brightest minds in the world are working on getting people to click on internet ads and building products that monetize well but are honestly a net loss to humankind.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#83

Post by simondlr »

themgt wrote: post #40

I think the most likely answer is either: a) Same reason we don't SMS other species on earth - we're first, and if anyone else catches up it'll be a long time from now b) We can't begin to conceive of the sort of technological advances achieved by other lifeforms. The fermi paradox rests on probabilities accumulated over billions of years, but ignores how briefly human intelligence has existed - the written word is o…

Good point, something that I have not contemplated before. It makes sense: If we evolve to the point where we can control reality, why would we be concerned with expanding and travelling the universe?

It is almost like saying: "You can do anything and become what you want to become." What do you choose?

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#84

Post by eru »

freshhawk wrote: post #78
peterwwillis wrote: post #34

I think we haven't met any Aliens because we're selfish, paranoid, violent, irrational, un-evolved monkeys with baseball caps and video games and nobody wants to make friends people who happily destroy their environment [and therefore themselves] because it's easier than cleaning up their mess. Our major societies are full of petty, self-serving, closed-minded assholes and i'm a perfect example of that. The technolog…

> We start destroying the environment, > somebody notices, we start pulling back > on our rampant destruction enough to keep > things operating We did? That's great news. It must be recent though, so far i've only heard a lot of talk and a few useless feel good activities for guilty first worlders to distract themselves with like recycling their pop cans. As far as self correction goes, the only thing any species has…

Locally, rich countries are actually quite good at cleaning up. As an example, compare England today with England 150 years ago.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#85

Post by freshhawk »

rsheridan6 wrote: post #56

Not credible, because if even a few people stay away from futuristic, all consuming super-porn, and can convince their kids to do the same, then those people will come to predominate, and the super-porn becomes irrelevant. There are already people who would consciously eschew any form of entertainment that would prevent reproduction - the Amish would ban it within their communities for sure. On the other hand, if jus…

But is it likely that there would be enough people (with never a dip large enough to spell disaster) who live on the razor thin edge of rejecting the technology that leads to dead ends hundreds of years later but still push forward the technology necessary for advancement? Is there a stable organization that can do this?

I agree that violent distruction is more likely now, but I think that that is probably an easier problem to solve than this one.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#86

Post by edanm »

redwood wrote: post #52
ccc3 wrote: post #38

At some point in the article he states: Evolution simply could never have anticipated... Evolution, by definition, doesn't anticipate anything. It's disappointing to see a university professor writing on evolution who seemingly doesn't even understand the evolutionary process.

I'm sorry but this is a way of speaking that doesn't necessarily imply he believes in an evolution capable of cognition. It's a short hand for saying "humans evolved in situations so unlike the situation they have today, that the traits they evolved are no longer best-suited for survival in today's world"

That same paragraph stuck out for me as well.

I would give the benefit of the doubt for the sentence the GP quoted, but then the author actually tries to justify the fact that evolution couldn't have computed it even if it wanted to:

"Evolution simply could never have anticipated the novel environments, such as modern society, that our social primate would come to inhabit. That would be a computationally intractable problem, even for the new IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that runs 280 trillion operations per second. Even long-term weather prediction is easy when compared to fitness prediction"

Now that's just begging for people to completely misunderstand how evolution works.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#87

Post by freshhawk »

firefoxman1 wrote: post #66
calydon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're really special nothing you think of is original. I'm not saying you're not special though. :)

Hahaha thanks. I read somewhere that at the same time you think of a grand new idea, 10 people somewhere in the world will also have the same idea. I doubt that's always true, but it's pretty amazing nonetheless.

Heh, that is depressingly likely given the numbers. There must be a german word for the appreciation of a clever/accurate but depressing idea.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#88

Post by sandee »

"We have already shifted .., from physics to psychology as the value-driver and resource-allocator. "

While not agreeing to the article broadly, i agree to the statement above. Infact, i believe this is a desirable thing and we should see more of this in future. Past 200 years were about discovering the physics of things. The next 200 years would be about the discovering the working of "mind" which makes physics discoveries possible. Basically about neurological sciences , thought process , perception and more. This trend has barely started and we have a long way to go.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#89

Post by freshhawk »

eru wrote: post #84
freshhawk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We start destroying the environment, > somebody notices, we start pulling back > on our rampant destruction enough to keep > things operating We did? That's great news. It must be recent though, so far i've only heard a lot of talk and a few useless feel good activities for guilty first worlders to distract themselves with like recycling their pop cans. As far as self correction goes, the only thing any species has…

Locally, rich countries are actually quite good at cleaning up. As an example, compare England today with England 150 years ago.

Unfortunately that's mostly accomplished through economic means of displacing the mess to poorer places. Our actual levels of consumption and destruction globally has only increased.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#90

Post by balbeit »

freshhawk wrote: post #82

I really did not expect this much resistance on HN to a fairly classical solution to the fermi paradox. Mostly it's spun in a more positive "retreat into virtual reality" type situation but it's the same thing. We have no idea how humans will react to the ability to sate every desire and wish artifically. It's not just hyper-porn and the xbox 720, this would apply to the desire for exploration, solving hard problems,…

But by having people click on those ads, the companies that are advertising (which could be and are companies actively engaged in "physical" products) are acquiring paying customers and thus have greater ability to fund their products.

SpaceX, Boeing, GM, and Victoria Secret need revenue sources to create their 'non-virtual-reality' products, and marketing/advertising creates a revenue source. If they had a net loss from advertising they simply wouldn't do it.

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