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

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

#111

Post by binary132 »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #21
this_user wrote: post #7

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…

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…

How is it not obvious that a one-world empire ruled by totalitarian futurists would have been vastly more motivated and funded to do Big Engineering Stuff than 1990s liberal late-capitalism?

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

#112

Post by binary132 »

nradov wrote: post #104
Telemakhos wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. In that sense, war is a megaproject. War organized the Manhattan Project, which is still the metaphor we use for any massive scale, sophisticated project. The space race was a cold war endeavor to make ICBMs that weren't obviously ICBMs, and the Soviets were terrified that the Space Shuttle was a nuclear dive-bom…

The Space Race was partly a Cold War propaganda program but it diverged almost completely from the ICBM programs. ICBMs have to be solid fueled to minimize launch time. But manned orbital launchers have to be liquid fueled (for the core) for efficiency and safety.

obviously the space race was about weaponizing space in many people’s minds

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

#113

Post by cake-rusk »

echelon wrote: post #102
bluGill wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't. while we don't know for sure if there is life there is nothing close enough to contact. The closest star is 4 light years, anything within 20 light years has been studied and has no signs of radio or other communication. Anything more than 20 light years is a 40 year message round trip - too far to establish contact in your likely lifetime. (If you are very young maybe 30 light years - but that doesn't add…

HN armchair astronomer question time. What's your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox? Any crazy far-fetched sci-fi / pseudo-scientific ideas? I'm not really a fan of "Dark Forest". I prefer these: - We're truly rare, maybe even first. Intelligence is extremely hard. LUCA is old, civilization happened yesterday. - Fragile universe. It's easy to destroy universes by accidentally setting off vacuum collapse. This woul…

Obviously simulation hypothesis. The vastness of space and the limit on the speed of light suggest multiple worlds are being simulated in the same "space" such that isolation between worlds is always maintained.

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

#114

Post by binary132 »

jcgrillo wrote: post #25
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #21

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…

Not advocating for this approach, but maybe a fascist oligopoly will get the job done. Or something entirely stranger like a corporate theocracy. There's plenty of room for aggressive, murderous, backstabby species to achieve incredible things. We have a great existence proof right here on Earth. EDIT: Maybe even a future culture that reveres aggression and has achieved some success in their warlike ways will look ba…

The world wars drove more technical progress than the world has ever seen, before or since. (Making your iPhone better at doing the same thing worse and slower so the end result comes out basically the same isn’t “progress”.)

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

#115

Post by ghurtado »

rozab wrote: post #62
Geee wrote: 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…

Although this comment is of course silly, this is a theme in Peter Watts' Echopraxia

Really? As in "intergalactic software virus"?

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

#116

Post by binary132 »

dlivingston wrote: post #28
this_user wrote: post #7

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. How can you estimate likelihood of behavior when currently N=0 (or N=1 if you count humans)? There is no baseline, no control; it's just complete speculation, a roundabout way of saying "this is what I think humans would likely do, therefore, all advanced life forms must also be like this".

Evolution favors highly competitive individuals and collectives

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

#117

Post by marshray »

rozab wrote: post #62
Geee wrote: 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…

Although this comment is of course silly, this is a theme in Peter Watts' Echopraxia

I believe there are elements of this in A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge too.

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

#118

Post by ghurtado »

Geee wrote: post #101
rozab wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although this comment is of course silly, this is a theme in Peter Watts' Echopraxia

I haven't read this book, but there are a few books with a similar theme where a digital intelligence spreads throughout the universe. This is a variation on the idea with a somewhat plausible mechanism.

> lands into a training dataset somewhere and starts deploying itself.

Leaving aside how incredibly vague this "mechanism" is, there is a very large list of infinitely unlikely coincidences that would have to take place for this to occur.

Consider how often human software, built in the same planet, by the same race, on the same hardware and using the same language, during the same time period, with most of the same tools, fails to be compatible.

Now take all those "same"s and change them to "different" and you tell me who's gonna file that Jira ticket.

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

#119

Post by __david__ »

binary132 wrote: post #107
treetalker wrote: post #2

Extraterrestrial as in "not of Earthly origin" — not as in space aliens.

TFA is suggesting it’s aliens.

No, it’s not: > "Our study did not conclude that the Wow! Signal constituted evidence of a signal emanating from an extraterrestrial civilization. However, null results are instrumental in refining future technosignature searches," the team concludes.

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

#120

Post by schneems »

birn559 wrote: post #86
schneems wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The somewhat counterintuitive rules for the best expected strategy to repeated conflicts: - Nice - Friendly - Retaliatory/provokable - Clear https://youtu.be/mScpHTIi-kM At 15:00 in.

Largely depends on the parameters. I believe it also assumes infinite resources. In general it's a very simple model not meant to explain all and everything.

The interesting thing here is that it breaks assumptions that to be "alpha" you MUST dominate to win. Even if within only these parameters, it suggest there are conditions where being "nice" isn't just a nebulous ethical thing, but it's an optimal conflict strategy.

I think it carries two different messages to two different groups. If you're a "lets all be friends" type, then it's important that you also guard the resources that allow you to be nice. Being provokable isn't "being mean" its the thing allowing you to be nice. If you're a "take advantage of the rubes" type, it's a hint that there might be metaphorical money left on the table by being too greedy.

> not meant to explain all and everything.

That it's not true ALL the time, is less interesting than the fact that it's true some of the time. At least to me.

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