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More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)

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Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)

#91

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

timmg wrote: post #36
lelanthran wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing. Why? Why would you expect it to be any more benevolent or any less murderous than the actual aliens visiting? Presumably it would be trained on their values, not ours.

I wouldn't expect it to be less murderous than the aliens themselves. That wasn't my point at all. I'd expect it to contain all their knowledge and be able to live "forever". But I generally wouldn't expect aliens to be "murderous" at all. Why send a group or probe lightyears away just to kill or enslave a primitive species? If they have the ability to do that, we wouldn't really have anything of interest for them.

> Why send a group or probe lightyears away just to kill or enslave a primitive species?

Killing/enslavement just as a side effect. You have to tell it explicitly to NOT kill/enslave covering any edge cases. Even if they do we can turn out to be sufficiently different that the probe doesn't consider us relevant from aliens' standpoint.

Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)

#92

Post by lelanthran »

timmg wrote: post #36
lelanthran wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing. Why? Why would you expect it to be any more benevolent or any less murderous than the actual aliens visiting? Presumably it would be trained on their values, not ours.

I wouldn't expect it to be less murderous than the aliens themselves. That wasn't my point at all. I'd expect it to contain all their knowledge and be able to live "forever". But I generally wouldn't expect aliens to be "murderous" at all. Why send a group or probe lightyears away just to kill or enslave a primitive species? If they have the ability to do that, we wouldn't really have anything of interest for them.

> Why send a group or probe lightyears away just to kill or enslave a primitive species?

That question makes no sense. It presumes that they are at all interested in, or even notice, us. We're special, from our PoV. That doesn't mean we are special.

Did you notice how many ants you drove over on your last car trip? Did you even care?

To a space-faring species, we are probably just as interesting as ants. After all, you are assuming that they'll send their brightest minds to visit us, but it is equally likely that we are "discovered" by their equivalent of joy-riding teens.

Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)

#93

Post by emj »

TFNA wrote: post #87
pigpop wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments like yours make me think that sci-fi shows (and a lot of literary sci-fi) like Star Trek did a grave disservice to our conception of advanced spacefaring civilizations. They were always focused on alien planets , assuming that once a race was able to travel the stars that they would still chain themselves to a gravity well. It's like imagining an industrial society where everyone still lives on a farm like t…

In his novel Aurora , Kim Stanley Robinson challenged this view by suggesting that at the small scale of orbital structures, there may be insurmountable obstacles to biological life, like the buildup of salt through waste. His ultimate conclusion was that “life is a planetary phenomenon” (and we should take better care of the planet we have).

Living in bunkers is no fun, I love cities but even those are bigger than the best generation ship.

Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)

#94

Post by sph »

Ccecil wrote: post #86
didgetmaster wrote: post #48

>..War of the Worlds, where Earth is invaded by benevolent Martians. I don't think I have heard the word benevolent used in that context before.

Did AI write it? If so that is concerning...

No, Martians wrote it as counter propaganda

Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)

#95

Post by abhikul0 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #71
lelanthran wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing. Why? Why would you expect it to be any more benevolent or any less murderous than the actual aliens visiting? Presumably it would be trained on their values, not ours.

I spent ages trying to find it, but couldn't. Unless I dreamed it. I read a sci-fi story where the probe lands on Earth, and then teaches us enough science to get our own ships together, and tells us where to go to meet the probe makers. So they don't have to go anywhere and can sit comfortable at home and wait for the aliens to come to them.

I tried to lookup a Star Trek episode of this premise and found a Voyager episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_One_(Star_Trek:_Voy...

This is a likely scenario of misinterpretation between species haha.

Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)

#96

Post by altmanaltman »

pigpop wrote: post #60
roenxi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our values are murderous, I wouldn't want to be visited by aliens that shared out values. A galactic version of human society would quite reasonably identify that earth couldn't fight back then special interests would have our planet liquidated for its natural resources without making headlines in space-news. Possibly colonise us, kill all the humans then offer an apology a few generations later and maybe a small loc…

I don't see why an intelligent alien species would have similar values to us. It would depend entirely on their social organization so unless they were the exact equivalent of us evolutionarily (omnivorous, sexually dimorphic, social, bipedal, terrestrial, etc.) they would value the lives, property, territory and status of their own kind and other animals very differently. A race of aquatic arthropods could be mostly…

I mean could a race of aquatic arthropods ever organize in scale enough to be a species that can travel light years and invade others? Wouldn't they just eat each other and never have any need to build a community or to colonize space?

We need to have some baseline for what we consider as "intelligent species" in this context and most intelligent species will need to have a system where they can pool their resources together towards something in a sustained social manner. This rules out a lot of social patterns such as beings that are solitary, canibalisitc and hell bent of eating each other.

Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)

#97

Post by metalman »

stackghost wrote: post #81
pfdietz wrote: post #61

It would not be surprising if ancient life did exist on Mars, since impacts would likely have sent life back and forth between Earth and Mars (and possibly Venus). For the same reason, the existence of ancient life on Mars would not show that life is likely to arise on Earth-like worlds, since one could not conclude it was an independent event.

>impacts would likely have sent life back and forth between Earth and Mars By what mechanism is an impact giving some debris on Mars enough delta-V to reach Earth, without obliterating Mars and also sterilizing the debris due to heat and plasma?

chunks get blasted off essentialy whole and unmodified, as they are contained in bigger chunks that act asl launch shields, though will exerience truely massive acceleration and then renentry on earth and other bodies.

The evidence for life on mars is based on carbon nodules in rock, and things like CO² and methane gas,and some other chemistry and mineralology. The main one are the carbon nodules, which are ubiquitous in many sedimentary rocks on earth, though in the samples that I have of earth rocks, there are very often macro fossils that are naked eye identifiable There are countless miles of cliff here where everything has a fossil, but complete specimins, and soft tissue fossils remain rare, here, so the chances of such a thing making it to earth from mars, schould it exist in the first place are almost zero, though the martian ice caps could concievably hold meteors with earth life fossils that are naked eye visible and identifiable.

Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)

#98

Post by bregma »

londons_explore wrote: post #25

It is quite remarkable that the question of life on mars (or not) hasn't been answered conclusively despite a lot of human effort to get an answer.

It's because the more important question of "how can I personally profit from this?" usually takes precedence.

Re: More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)

#100

Post by eleveriven »

didgetmaster wrote: post #48

>..War of the Worlds, where Earth is invaded by benevolent Martians. I don't think I have heard the word benevolent used in that context before.

Maybe benevolent in the same way a heat-ray is a form of urban renewal
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