Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests • Hacker News Board

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#141

Post by rsynnott » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #92

Given that life only appeared once on earth in 3.5 billion years on Earth, the Milky Way is around 14 billion years old, we don't really have a good reason to believe there were more than a handful of abiogenesis events in the history of the galaxy. Of course, its possible this is completely wrong, perhaps the Earth was completely unlucky, or perhaps there have been many abiogenesis events and they have just failed f…

> Given that life only appeared once on earth in 3.5 billion years on Earth

So, one theory is that once life shows up it tends to suppress protolife.

If it is hard for life to show up, then it is arguably very suspicious that it apparently did so so soon (in geological time) after conditions were suitable for it.

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#142

Post by neuronic » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

deeeeplearning wrote: post #72

INTPenis wrote: post #2

What's staggering to me is that with the new Voyager discoveries lately it feels like we're a bunch of stellar savages who just managed to release a buoy far enough into the ocean to feel the currents. Let alone recognize another savage on a different continent who might be doing the same experiment.

Using some rough numbers like the distance between NYC and London vs the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri the equivalent would be saying that Voyager 1 is about 1.8 Miles into a 3470 mile journey (from NYC to London).

Maybe also mentioned that it managed those 1.8 miles travelling since the 70s...

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#143

Post by rsynnott » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #133

Baeocystin wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. We have a Last Universal Common Ancestor, but that says nothing about whether or not there were other independently-formed branches that were competing at the time. My personal opinion is that life under early Earthlike conditions was/is almost a guarantee. There is compelling evidence that life already existed in and survived the Late Heavy Bombardment- that's very early in our planet's history. If it was truly…

> My personal opinion is that life under early Earthlike conditions was/is almost a guarantee. There is compelling evidence that life already existed in and survived the Late Heavy Bombardment- that's very early in our planet's history. If it was truly a rare event that sparked things off, I would expect it to have occurred much later in the planet's history. That is valid of course, but in the absence of evidence of…

Hmm, I'm not sure that that's correct. If you build an apartment block and it catches fire the week afterwards, then it's perhaps not reasonable to expect that if you build another one to exactly the same design it will never catch fire. At that point you might want to be reviewing your wiring plans.

That life showed up so early says... something. If life showing up was so fantastically difficult, we would arguably expect it to be later in geological time.

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#144

Post by dylan604 » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 10:41 PM UTC

apacehead51 wrote: post #138

If the planet is in the habitual zone for a given star with H2O then there is a biological chance some form of life exists. The evolutionary cycle for advances species development on the planet is the question. The human race did not evolve in a few million years. If there is a living advances species they could be very primitive compared to humans or much more advanced. There are so many variables that even science…

> If the planet is in the habitual zone

This makes it sound like the planet is hanging out on skid row with a belt wrapped around its arm getting ready to shoot up.

I prefer planets in the habitable zone. Less crime in that part of the solar system.

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#145

Post by dylan604 » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 10:45 PM UTC

buran77 wrote: post #20

INTPenis wrote: post #2

What's staggering to me is that with the new Voyager discoveries lately it feels like we're a bunch of stellar savages who just managed to release a buoy far enough into the ocean to feel the currents. Let alone recognize another savage on a different continent who might be doing the same experiment.

It may be even worse, that different continent is on a different planet. Space(time) is absolutely, mind-boggling massive. Everyone knows it's big but it hard to comprehend how big and why there could be many alien civilizations out there capable of broadcasting or detecting but never intersect in any way because the detection windows of any 2 civilizations don't line up. The Milky Way alone is ~150000-200000 light y…

> Humans have been civilized for only some tens of thousands of years,

That's giving humans a lot of credit. Civility has been regressing. I would be embarrassed for another civilization to find us now. Sure, we may have more technology and scientific understanding, but how we treat one another needs another world than civil.

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#146

Post by rsynnott » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 10:46 PM UTC

sudhirj wrote: post #31

me_me_me wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we though? Universe is huge. Wars on earth are waged over scares resources. If we are capable of reaching aliens would we really be incentivized to fight them while there are so many resources available elsewhere?

Habitable planets are the ultimate scarce resource. Once the earth is full we’ll have to find a way to move and there’s less than 5 good options in this solar system. In time they’ll be full too.

> Habitable planets are the ultimate scarce resource.

Are they? That was once a common belief, but recent results in extrasolar planet searching would tend to contradict it, or at least cast it into serious doubt.

> Once the earth is full we’ll have to find a way to move

Will we? It's quite possible we'll see humanity's maximum population within the next century. Malthusianism didn't really survive contact with modernity; it turns out that most people don't particularly _want_ to have fifteen children, and as countries develop their population tends to become self-limiting. Wholesale emigration off earth feels like a very unlikely solution to population pressure, especially given that society seems to be automatically solving it.

And if we have the energy to lift billions of people off earth, we also have the energy to massively increase population density. Food, in particular, is ultimately largely a question of energy; we typically grow it in fields today, but given super-cheap energy there are other options.

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#147

Post by psychoslave » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

AndyPa32 wrote: post #139

dyingkneepad wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically there is not need and motivation for humans to colonize anything outside the Earth. Our current gas emissions would disagree. Also, asteroids, gamma ray bursts, curiosity, sheer ambition, etc, etc. The thing is: we don't need to convince all of mankind to colonize another planet. All it takes is a few people. Crazy rich Mr. Musk is one example. He may not be able to achieve it, but maybe all we need is a…

> Our current gas emissions would disagree. While at first it might seem that Mars or any other planet is the solution to our environmental problem, the easiest solution to the problem would be fixing this planet. Colonizing Mars would take up so many resources that fixing Earth might be more cost-effective.

This is not Earth that needs to be fixed, it's human behavior.

Teraformation and space conquest are fassinating topics, but "fixing our behavior to avoid to fuck up the only accessible viable environment we have" is far from deserving only a mere "might be more cost-effective".

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#148

Post by dyingkneepad » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 10:52 PM UTC

AndyPa32 wrote: post #139

dyingkneepad wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically there is not need and motivation for humans to colonize anything outside the Earth. Our current gas emissions would disagree. Also, asteroids, gamma ray bursts, curiosity, sheer ambition, etc, etc. The thing is: we don't need to convince all of mankind to colonize another planet. All it takes is a few people. Crazy rich Mr. Musk is one example. He may not be able to achieve it, but maybe all we need is a…

> Our current gas emissions would disagree. While at first it might seem that Mars or any other planet is the solution to our environmental problem, the easiest solution to the problem would be fixing this planet. Colonizing Mars would take up so many resources that fixing Earth might be more cost-effective.

But way less fun :)

Or we could, you know, just transfer our consciousness to machines that can easily survive Mars and other environments and start our colonization after declaring ourselves to be Homo-sapiens-machina.

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#149

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 10:56 PM UTC

marta_morena_28 wrote: post #135

jcims wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly confident we'll eventually find that our form of life is the result of intentional or unintentional colonization of Earth. If you look at how quickly life began after the oceans settled out, then look at precisely how complex even the most primitive forms of life are (in terms of likelihood of stochastic construction to the point of sophistication to support evolutionary mechanisms) it seems incredibly unl…

Possible, but far reaching. There are other explanations: * We are a computer simulation (hence there is no colonization, we are in an experiment) * There are like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 habitable planets in the universe. Just because something is "extremely unlikely" doesn't mean that it didn't happen to us. I.e. whomever this happened to, would ask himself that question. We may just be the ones it happened to. A…

[deleted]

Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests

#150

Post by cletus » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 10:58 PM UTC

I'm pretty convinced at this point that it's incredibly unlikely that there's anyone around us to hear us. A lot of people have put a lot of thought into this. I'd suggest starting here [1] for an overview.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh...