Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Fermi paradox revisited: Technosignatures and the contact era

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 353 posts

Re: The Fermi paradox revisited: Technosignatures and the contact era

#211

Post by OkayPhysicist »

ionwake wrote: post #161
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd suspect the vast majority would. Apex predators are pretty much the only niche that gains any incremental, real utility from investing energy in increased intelligence. What benefit would an individual slightly smarter manatee acquire?

Hi, I found this comment interesting could you please elaborate? Don't scavengers benefit from as much intelligence as possible to survive?

Scavengers are probably the second most likely to develop intelligence, and I was definitely thinking in terms of carnivore vs. herbivore. Intelligent scavengers such as corvids and raccoons come to mind. That said, it's quite possible to scavenge with limited intellect. Vultures, for example, are somewhat intelligent, but not the extent of a dolphin, wolf, or primate. Additionally, a sufficiently intelligent scavenger will probably eventually turn to hunting. If you've got tool use, and are hungry for something dead, it's not a terrible leap to kill the thing yourself.

On the whole, intelligence in nature is largely focused on predicting another animal's actions, and planning to take advantage of that foresight. The benefit of being better at that than your peers is immediately obvious in a hunter: predict, hunt, kill, eat. For things that aren't doing the hunting, more passive solutions can be optimal: evolving faster escapes, or natural defenses such as being very large take less energy, and can be developed much faster, when compared to the rather energy intensive process of maintaining a large brain and raising intelligent young.

Re: The Fermi paradox revisited: Technosignatures and the contact era

#212

Post by friend_and_foe »

cletus wrote: post #163

Focusing on radio communications for SETI purposes and as a solution to the Fermi Paradox I find to be incredibly outdated thinking. Let me summarize: 1. Planets are incredibly inefficient in creating living area per unit mass; 2. Orbitals are incredibly efficient at creating living area per unit mass. IIRC 1% of Mercury's mass could create a full Dyson Swarm around the sun and have billions of times of the living ar…

You're ignoring the temporal aspect. A dyson swarm would be visible thousands of light years away, thousands of years after it happened. Humans current technological kick start has only been going on for a hundred or so years. Our entire known history, complete with dark ages, is a few thousand years. By the time something even sees it, who knows how much such a civilization will have changed. Would the dyson swarm even be there? Would the civilization? Is it even worth investigating?

Now reason the same way for a galaxy and millions of years. Modern humans haven't even existed for one million years. A civilization could be born, evolve and die with such a light in their sky, who's to day they'd even notice something off about such a galaxy in their sky. Its just a little redder, a little older, a little farther away. And then, supposing someone existed at just the right time and place and noticed, what would they do about it?

Re: The Fermi paradox revisited: Technosignatures and the contact era

#213

Post by alfiedotwtf »

credit_guy wrote: post #149

The Fermi paradox is good for a nice chat at a party. But it's not a paradox at all. Imagine there's an alien civilization in our galactic neighbor Proxima Centauri. How would we know they are there? To make it more plausible. Let's say we figure out a way to send a space probe to Proxima Centauri. How do we communicate with that probe? Easy, you say, just like we communicate with the Voyagers: they point a reasonabl…

Flip the point of view for a moment - what's the absolute best way we could try to say "hey, we're here" to the universe in the hope of detection from far away civilizations?

I like the idea of Contact's Prime Number signal but how would you do this on a large scale? I was thinking Dyson Sphere a star as a huge Flag Semaphore to send the message, but then what rate do you flip bits to make it optimal for the receiving end far far away?

Now flip it back... would the current SETI pick up this signal if this were happening somewhere close in the Milky Way? If not, then yeah maybe SETI should be wound down :(

Re: The Fermi paradox revisited: Technosignatures and the contact era

#214

Post by floxy »

AlbertCory wrote: post #176
credit_guy wrote: post #149

The Fermi paradox is good for a nice chat at a party. But it's not a paradox at all. Imagine there's an alien civilization in our galactic neighbor Proxima Centauri. How would we know they are there? To make it more plausible. Let's say we figure out a way to send a space probe to Proxima Centauri. How do we communicate with that probe? Easy, you say, just like we communicate with the Voyagers: they point a reasonabl…

Well said. The "Drake Equation" is complete and utter garbage. There is no such thing as a "probability" of any of those terms, in the way we normally understand probability, i.e. dice or card games. That said, there probably are intelligent civilizations somewhere in the universe, but we have that pesky problem of distance and the speed of light, as you said. People like to imagine that eventually civilizations find…

>There is no such thing as a "probability" of any of those terms, in the way we normally understand probability, i.e. dice or card games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability

Re: The Fermi paradox revisited: Technosignatures and the contact era

#215

Post by dragonwriter »

dragonwriter wrote: post #155
whatshisface wrote: post #150

If you assume that intelligent life has to pass a certain number of "steps" to develop, doesn't the central limit theorem dictate that the more of those steps there are, the closer in time each separate species will achieve intelligence?

If you assume that they vary independently , yes.

Incidentally, my statement above is incorrect on a couple of levels: first, I was thinking of the law of large numbers not the central limit theorem, and second, even the LLN would only say that about the average step length, not the total time to the end of any step.

Re: The Fermi paradox revisited: Technosignatures and the contact era

#216

Post by anotherman554 »

saalweachter wrote: post #202
_tom_ wrote: post #80

The Fermi paradox assumes that "intelligent" is one threshold, and we are beyond it. We couldn't communicate with the most advanced primates from a million years ago. A civilization a million years past ours would be unlikely to want to talk to us. The average star in our galaxy is a billion years older than our sun. You can only communicate with civilizations near your level, which are inherently much rarer. We aren…

So a fun thing to try to think about is "What's missing from our intelligence?" Our brains may just be made up of lumps of neurons, but we can break out various capabilities we have: * language * tool use * memory * ability to think about hypothetical situations * ability to think about abstract concepts * theory of mind We can think about what alien creatures or civilizations are like that lack them. A civilization…

If you look at animals on earth, they just aren't curious about many of the things we are curious about. My cats for example don't find television interesting.

Suppose there's some property of physics that looks like random noise to us (maybe like a TV looks like random noise to a cat) but to a different species they see it's something they can model and understand while our species just ignores it?

Re: The Fermi paradox revisited: Technosignatures and the contact era

#217

Post by LunarAurora »

saalweachter wrote: post #202
_tom_ wrote: post #80

The Fermi paradox assumes that "intelligent" is one threshold, and we are beyond it. We couldn't communicate with the most advanced primates from a million years ago. A civilization a million years past ours would be unlikely to want to talk to us. The average star in our galaxy is a billion years older than our sun. You can only communicate with civilizations near your level, which are inherently much rarer. We aren…

So a fun thing to try to think about is "What's missing from our intelligence?" Our brains may just be made up of lumps of neurons, but we can break out various capabilities we have: * language * tool use * memory * ability to think about hypothetical situations * ability to think about abstract concepts * theory of mind We can think about what alien creatures or civilizations are like that lack them. A civilization…

IMO It is not only the possible form of intelligence at the personal level that counts, but also the aggregate "intelligence" of all humans. This is more easily imagined. To put this crudely, have you ever thought (maybe after an encounter with some person), how better our society would be without all the "backward" (no offences) elements?

An ET civilization will certainly judge us at that "aggregate level" (However that comes about)

Re: The Fermi paradox revisited: Technosignatures and the contact era

#218

Post by thehappypm »

superposeur wrote: post #138
cryptonector wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they're not communicating using EM. And maybe they can't get off planet. And maybe the mean distance between pairs of civilizations is so large that interstellar travel is just not practical at all for any of them and us as well.

Yes, these are alternative explanations. The explanation that is surprisingly undermentioned is the one I put forward: there is no life.

How do you explain it happening exactly once?

If it’s vanishingly unlikely, but space is incomprehensibly huge and time is vastly long, then it happening exactly once is extremely improbable. 0 times, believable. But those probabilities yielding 1 life event must mean 2 life events is also possible, no? Or 3? Or 100? Why so confident it’s exactly 1?

Re: The Fermi paradox revisited: Technosignatures and the contact era

#219

Post by friend_and_foe »

Mistletoe wrote: post #22
pharke wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have to assume that they know this and are in fact only looking for messages that are purposefully sent at very high power. It's also why they favor listening at the hydrogen line since transmissions at that frequency stand the best chance of penetrating through cosmic dust, i.e. you would only use that frequency if you were intentionally trying to transmit across interstellar distances. I think they don't po…

For me it boils down to- would an advanced civilization beam out a very strong locating signal on purpose? They would have to be very certain they were the baddest strongest civilization in the galaxy. I can’t think of a way intelligence and that idea go together.

With one single data point, we presume that life is ubiquitous in the universe and that intelligent civilizations probably exist in more than one place, yet we assume that everyone else is scared to give away their position, even though we aren't. If we can presume intelligent life is out there even though up to now we only know of ourselves, why not presume that that life behaves like us in at least this one way? Seems paradoxical to assume differently, no?

Re: The Fermi paradox revisited: Technosignatures and the contact era

#220

Post by steve76 »

credit_guy wrote: post #149

The Fermi paradox is good for a nice chat at a party. But it's not a paradox at all. Imagine there's an alien civilization in our galactic neighbor Proxima Centauri. How would we know they are there? To make it more plausible. Let's say we figure out a way to send a space probe to Proxima Centauri. How do we communicate with that probe? Easy, you say, just like we communicate with the Voyagers: they point a reasonabl…

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN