Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET • Hacker News Board

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#111

Post by jessriedel » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:28 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #104

nicboobees wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, agree to disagree. The average person doesn't really care if there is or isn't water on mars, or if someone spent millions of their dollars taking a photo of pluto. Year after year the news reports another big experiement which cost millions to setup, and which claims to "give us answers as to how the universe was created". I just couldn't be less interested. It's rich people (Or taxpayer funded people) playing…

Space travel and exploration have directly resulting in many commercial products, which themselves have generated billions in revenue and tens of thousands of jobs (if not more). Not only is your statement disappointing to hear from anyone presuming to be technically literate, it is objectively wrong.

Actually, I think you're wrong here. Space travel is a very inefficient method of R&D. Almost any other basic research has more practical benefit.

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#112

Post by jessriedel » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:30 PM UTC

nicboobees wrote: post #103

jessriedel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually exactly my philosophy [1]. I agree with each of your examples (water on mars, photos of Pluto, early-universe cosmology). Nonetheless, the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is in a completely different league. The random guys on the street will not only care about this tremendously, he will care for the same correct reasons that scientists care . [1] Minus the part about it being a waste of t…

So we find out there's some creatures on Pluto that are roughly the same as frogs. How does that impact anyones life? It'd be an interesting fact, and maybe fun if we could move some over here as pets, but beyond that, it's a colossal waste of energy and money.

Do you mean impacting their life materially? Why would it have to impact their life materially to be valuable? Sharing a joke with a friend at a bar doesn't have material benefit, but it's one of the valuable things in life.

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#113

Post by Zikes » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:33 PM UTC

myth_buster wrote: post #105

usefulcat wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm pretty sure we lost it well before that when we started spewing radio signals. Voyager is a minuscule speck travelling in a single direction at a snail's pace, while those radio signals are racing across enormous swaths of space at the speed of light.

How about nuclear tests and explosions? Would that be drawing curiosity?

What sort of signals do (human scale) nuclear explosions give off that are detectable from light-years away?

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#114

Post by moogly » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:33 PM UTC

jahnu wrote: post #4

Hawking wants to find them, but seemingly not reveal ourselves... http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/apr/26/stephen...

Yeah, he's reiterated this plenty of times over the past bunch of decades, so I was mightily surprised to see this announcement.

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#115

Post by nicboobees » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:34 PM UTC

thebouv wrote: post #51

nicboobees wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it worth millions of dollars to know that? Nope. It's rich people playing with their toys.

What is millions of dollars for scientific research compared to millions blown on stadiums, or billions on new jet fighters?

Stadiums benefit millions of people. Jet fighters save lives. Finding out that there's water on mars, or some single cell organisms on pluto, does nothing apart from fill a few future text books.

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#116

Post by agentgt » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

Pigo wrote: post #106

agentgt wrote: post #99

One of my favorite topics is the Fermi Paradox and consequently the Great Filter (which someone already discussed). One of my favorite explanations is that there are other ET out there but they are two engrossed with their own entertainment to "give a fuck" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#They_tend_to_iso... ). I find it amusing and ironic while also seriously consider it a possibility. From wikipedia:…

That feels like too much assumption to me. The scenario described well by Michio Kaku is the only one that seems probable to me. "Lets say we have an ant hill in the middle of the forest. And right next to the ant hill, they're building a ten-lane super-highway. And the question is 'Would the ants be able to understand what a ten-lane super-highway is? Would the ants be able to understand the technology and the inten…

Yes I generally agree that this is one of the strongest explanations. Especially if you consider the small spectrum of communication we are examining (and thats just electromagnetic for all we know dark energy may provide a superior mode of communication). I just like the entertainment one because its amusing and sort of describe a great portion of our own civilization. The reality I think/hope is there will always be explorers/dreamers/big thinkers.... I hope.

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#117

Post by kenj0418 » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:39 PM UTC

myth_buster wrote: post #105

usefulcat wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm pretty sure we lost it well before that when we started spewing radio signals. Voyager is a minuscule speck travelling in a single direction at a snail's pace, while those radio signals are racing across enormous swaths of space at the speed of light.

How about nuclear tests and explosions? Would that be drawing curiosity?

I wouldn't think those would be noticeable unless you were already closely observing the earth.

I'm not a physicist, but I assume there isn't any detectable, unique signature of an explosion that can be detected from space. Stories I've read about test-ban treaties and non-proliferation efforts give the main mechanism for detecting tests are the seismic effects they have.

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#118

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:42 PM UTC

octatoan wrote: post #65

ifdefdebug wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything contradicting relativity is currently out of the scope of science and not backed by any observation whatsoever, so any travel-faster-than-light theory has exactly the odds granted to it by it's own believers, and zero for everybody else.

IANAP, but isn't the only argument against faster-than-light-travel the fact that it contradicts causality?

I don't see a problem there. The definition of causality is circular anyway. There's no formal mathematical self-consistent proof of causality. It's just sort-of assumed, and then there are back-arguments from relativity that say "Well, that violates something we sort of assume."

The problem is that in science, if you assume things in a naive way ("What goes up must come down." "Planets travel in circles") you're almost certainly wrong - because the details of physical reality are usually counter-intuitive and unexpected.

So what we really know is:

1. Spacetime is a thing. It has bulk properties described by GR. 2. Er - that's it.

We don't know what spacetime is made of, or what you can do with the things it's made of, or what their properties are.

So I'd classify this as "definitely not known due to lack of knowledge" rather than "definitely not proven."

Proposals like Quantum Dynamical Triangulation, Causal Sets, and Loop Quantum Gravity are beginning to ask what spacetime is made of, but they're barely in their infancy.

The one thing they have in common is the idea that there's a network of - something... - and the reality we recognise propagates across the network.

If the elements are discrete - and they almost certainly are, because of the Planck limit - there will be some moment where an element changes state.

How fast does that happen? What's the mechanism? What limits the state changes? (Adjacency? Some other property?)

It's completely mysterious, and I think it's unwise to make definitive statements about it until it stops being a mystery.

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#119

Post by furyofantares » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:43 PM UTC

codeshaman wrote: post #50

If we really believe in scientific progress, then we must accept that, compared to some time in the future, our current understanding of the Universe is akin to people thinking the world was flat some time in the past. Maybe the Universe's scale compared to our physical form has a purpose. Maybe it's intended to not be traversed physcally. Maybe that's the most obvious conclusion an intelligent life form might draw f…

> We should start exploring the inner space just like we are exploring the outer space. When will we see $100m invested in that ? :)

We already have: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/why-spend-...

And I'm sorry to tell you that I think brain science does a good job at explaining perception when intoxicated without invoking "other stuff out there"

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#120

Post by VLM » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 2:46 PM UTC

Pigo wrote: post #106

agentgt wrote: post #99

One of my favorite topics is the Fermi Paradox and consequently the Great Filter (which someone already discussed). One of my favorite explanations is that there are other ET out there but they are two engrossed with their own entertainment to "give a fuck" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#They_tend_to_iso... ). I find it amusing and ironic while also seriously consider it a possibility. From wikipedia:…

That feels like too much assumption to me. The scenario described well by Michio Kaku is the only one that seems probable to me. "Lets say we have an ant hill in the middle of the forest. And right next to the ant hill, they're building a ten-lane super-highway. And the question is 'Would the ants be able to understand what a ten-lane super-highway is? Would the ants be able to understand the technology and the inten…

Agreed and please don't forget that our ants may very well have implemented a working planetary scale communications network with an overlaid sentient intelligence (can't really call it an AI) operating on that distributed computational network based on inter-nest chemical pheromone exchange operating continuously for several million years of uptime ... but ... "Hey man they're just ants, sure we don't understand them much better than dolphins or monkeys but I'm sure they're not implementing anything as important as one of our roads"

Its quite likely the beings from planet X understand omnidirectional broadcast electromagnetic waves as an interstellar communications network technology about as well as your average software developer understands arcnet or 10base5 ethernet or flint-knapping.