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The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

iflscience.com

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Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species. You don't get to the top of the food chain by being nice, you get there by murdering all of the competition and plundering all of the resources. And if you were trying to be nice, someone else would have just wiped you out. The big question is if a species can eventually reach some point of co…

> Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species. Well we could always be pets. That wouldn't be so bad.

> Well we could always be pets.

Porno for Pyros has you covered

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgPeP_pfjp4

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#52
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either way, I really hope that we establish contact with aliens in my lifetime. Hopefully they're chill, and like us lol.

I think we're expecting too much, afaik to detect anything we'd need aliens to be deliberately signaling us(tv, radio it's alien equivalent isn't going to be strong enough ). Or sending out a much much more powerful signal in all directions. And it has to repeat. We're expecting aliens to be very committed to doing something we don't do ourselves. We have deliberately sent out powerful signals with things like the Ar…

We're always listening. Why wouldn't "they"?

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#53
post #44

Be careful when training AI models on unknown signals, or uploading them publicly on the Internet to be picked up into training datasets. It might be an adversarial data poisoning attack, which is designed to bias the model into servicing the attacker. In this case, a superintelligent digital lifeform might be literally sending itself across space into every direction, and who knows what it does once it lands into a…

Only on HN can the top comment for a post about astronomy from the 1970s be about fucking 2025 era LLM concerns.

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#54
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species. You don't get to the top of the food chain by being nice, you get there by murdering all of the competition and plundering all of the resources. And if you were trying to be nice, someone else would have just wiped you out. The big question is if a species can eventually reach some point of co…

Here's a related thought experiment for those hoping for interstellar kumbaya: On planet Jung dwell the Jungians, sapien-like beings who need only a single cup of a rare liquid to live an entire lifetime. For humans, that same cup grants twenty extra years of healthy life. Human just landed on the planet Jung and discovered the liquid--what happens next?

The "2 sentients 1 cup" thought experiment?

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#55
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species. You don't get to the top of the food chain by being nice, you get there by murdering all of the competition and plundering all of the resources. And if you were trying to be nice, someone else would have just wiped you out. The big question is if a species can eventually reach some point of co…

Here's a related thought experiment for those hoping for interstellar kumbaya: On planet Jung dwell the Jungians, sapien-like beings who need only a single cup of a rare liquid to live an entire lifetime. For humans, that same cup grants twenty extra years of healthy life. Human just landed on the planet Jung and discovered the liquid--what happens next?

If your point is to prove that the patterns of domination and conquests that exist here will necessarily exist in the stars too, then I'm afraid your thought experiment is deeply flawed.

If ever we are able to journey through the interstellar medium, we ought to have achieved immortality by then. We'll probably live as deincarnated beings in virtual worlds, free from any desire to grow exponentially, having realized this is deeply unsustainable and pointless once you have mastery over physical reality.

Read Diaspora by Greg Egan, perhaps it can cure you from this simplistic vision of the far future we have inherited from the 50s pop SciFi books.

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#56

Quite similar to the "my cat listening to me making 10 grammar mistakes" meme. Alien: sends SOS after years of studying human communication signals, as a last ditch effort to mark their existence before being wiped out by supernova. Humans: Look - the sky people said WOW .

> Quite similar to the "my cat listening to me making 10 grammar mistakes" meme. Which meme is that?

I haven’t heard it before, but I just searched it up, it looks like a confused cat with that as the text. The joke is that the person is meowing at the cat, but doesn’t speak cat, so the cat is confused.

The example I found was from 2019.

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species. You don't get to the top of the food chain by being nice, you get there by murdering all of the competition and plundering all of the resources. And if you were trying to be nice, someone else would have just wiped you out. The big question is if a species can eventually reach some point of co…

I think if you develop to that point, you don’t really need to have a competitive scarcity mindset anymore.

My thought exactly. The universe has near infinite resources. There is nothing in our solar system that needs conquering.

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#59
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quite similar to the "my cat listening to me making 10 grammar mistakes" meme. Which meme is that?

Trips me up too can't find anything related Edit0: AH! Meowing to your cat and your cat being annoyed at the mistakes in cat speech you're making.

haha

my cat does correct me until I get it right lol

Re: The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful

#60
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. Aggression leads to infighting; infighting wastes resources on zero-sum conflict. >based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic. Which version of Earth culture has a better shot at building e.g. a megastructure for an interstellar beacon: Earth culture during the post-nationalist 90s moment, or Ear…

I am to my dorsal-most heart muscle cell what society is to me. All my cells mostly cooperate. Certainly they cooperate long enough to build a megaproject called a human, so large-scale cooperation is possible . But there are also lots of bacteria in the world. Way more than animal cells. And they're doing okay on average.

Indeed. Some of those bacteria would love to consume your megproject. As you soon as you lose power to resist, they get a banquet of a lifetime!
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