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

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that paper. It definitely is interesting!

But I'd be careful generalizing too much from it. I'm not saying my proposal is correct but rather just recognizing issues with the paper. The reason for my proposal is that 1) here we are as complex entities. We humans exist. 2) One of, if not the, things in physics we are most confident about is that everything will be in its lowest possible energy state. It's true for the electrons that emit light while doing so just as much as it is true that creatures need to eat more to do more.

Notice something subtle but important in the paper. Their focus of efficiency is based on string length and reaction time. They note that string length decreases. Think about this a bit. For these strings to reduce it must mean that there was redundancy or excess in them. If mutations are random then modifying some of the characters in those strings will have no effect. We should also similarly look at parasites and see that these are a lower entropy state, in that they are able to leverage the information from the other "microbes" to perpetuate their own reproduction. They can't dominate because they can't live without the hosts but also at the same time this means they can't mutate as much and survive. There is a self selection bias to the results that isn't being properly accounted for. A survival bias that needs to be accounted for.

Now let's contrast to our more complex forms of life that my proposal is being based on. These lifeforms have lots of repetition in their genetic sequences. This is actually an important fact that the foundation of things like CRISPR are based on: clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. Even the acronym is a bit repetitive (which makes it great!). This is a defense mechanism made so that we're robust to mutations. My proposal is dependent on some complex life already existing. I don't know how to explain how life got to this complex level (something these researchers are working on), just that we are here, that I myself exist. I hope this is not a contentious axiom :)

They're tackling a really interesting problem and in no way am I trying to diminish their work. The best way to solve complex problems is to first solve overly simplified variants of them. Even if those result in completely inaccurate results the process is highly beneficial to tackling the more complex variants. Due to this we need to take results being mindful of the context. A post on the Relativity of Wrong hit the front page this morning[0] and it links to a page I've had bookmarked for over a decade. It captures what science is really about: being less wrong. Despite my disdain for that site (because it often runs contrary to the meaning of those words), the sentiment is right. Jun8's comment in [0] hits on this. It's not about being right, because "right" does not exist in an absolute sense. There is always more specificity that can make something more right. So instead, it is about decreasing our error. Just because you can't reach an idealized thing doesn't mean you can't get closer to it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45025600

I don't think you're wrong, I think it is just semantics. I mean as long as you're agreeing we're not like the Borg or some other hive mind collective haha. But yeah, the old saying has stayed true: it takes a village to raise a child.

Just that I think there's a lot of utility in using the terminology of "individual" to talk about each human. It's true, we're dependent on one another for our survival and reproduction. But the "independence" is not a description of our capacity of survival but in that our consciousness is independent.

We have terms like community (and a ton which make implicit approximations about the size) to describe what you're talking about.

I think maybe that part of the problem is, as you point out, there's often a misunderstanding in ants themselves. It is easy to see the emergent behavior of them operating as a group. As if there's some collective mind. But you're absolutely right you could say the same about humans. We know a lot more about ants than we did centuries ago and do know they do operate independently. While it is much more like a monarchy structure, each ant operates, in some form, as a self contained unit. It can exist outside a colony. It's not likely to survive long, but this distinction is worth assigning some word to, right? Clearly there's a distinction from were I to claim that the ant's body were independent from its head. We'd claim that false because the separation causes an immediate (or rather an exceptionally quick) death.

Maybe that is semantics, but I think those semantics are helpful to us communicating and we would be the worse were we to call these things the same.

  > I’d argue an individual human being able to understand enough to navigate major problems of their world can’t be expected to exist and was probably never the case.

Fwiw, I actually believe this too. I stated it the way I did because I think most people underestimate complexity (there's definitely advantages to that trait lol). But to refine my position more, I'd say that the current complexity of the world and what is required to solve its problems vastly exceeds that of millennia ago. I'd agree, the world has always been too complex for one man to understand, but certainly the scale of things has changed. In the past the forces pushing on a person or even community were primarily local. There were still global phenomena but if you go to 10000 BC a person's actions on the Eurasian continent had no meaningful effect on a person living in the Americas. Maybe Genghis Khan killed so many he that there was a small change in global temperature, but even then the main reason was that even just 1k years ago there were so few people that their combined efforts itself had little effect on the global temperature haha. Today, these things aren't true. One ship gets stuck in one canal and the whole system is put into chaos. There's lots of advantages to this global interaction but that's for the same reason these issues exist. With an over simplification that I think can be helpful to extrapolate from, just treat every person on the planet as a node and their relationship to others as an edge. Nor only do we have more nodes, but the average node also has more connections.

It had a high intensity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal#Intensity

Vacuum cleaners are an illusion. Broken vacuum cleaners, doubly so.

Sure, but that's a completely different conversation. We're talking about life, not habitable planets. Detection of planets is a step in the right direction but only because it helps us narrow candidates. We were already certain those planets existed without confirmation.

The Fermi Paradox is about the difficulty of confirming life while there's such strong evidence that life should exist elsewhere. These signatures only strengthens the "paradoxical" nature of the Fermi Paradox.

Also, mind you, many of those signatures come through radioastronomy.