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

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

#161

Post by dylan604 »

sbelskie wrote: post #151
dylan604 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don’t think civility has a lot to with civilization in the anthropological sense of the word.

"...first use in English is attributed to Adam Ferguson, who in his 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society wrote, "Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood but the species itself from rudeness to civilisation".[14] The word was therefore opposed to barbarism or rudeness, in the active pursuit of progress characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment." [0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization

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

#162

Post by adjkant »

godelski wrote: post #104
koheripbal wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if you were a billion years old and had seen ants before, it's unlikely that you'd take interest in any specific ant hill you walk by.

Idk, there are still people that study ants. Both professionally and as a hobby. Just because you don't care doesn't mean someone doesn't. I don't know why the same wouldn't be true for aliens. Unless those aliens are ant like (hive mind...ish)

What percentage of ants that exist are studied? They absolutely study some, but the vast majority of ants won't ever be acknowledged by a human. That seems like a relevant factor here if the assumption is that humans are like ants in both interest level and commonality in the universe.

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

#164

Post by natechols »

tzs wrote: post #137
tsimionescu wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are problems of resiliency and energy storage that could be more or less fundamental problems. It could take millions if years of technological civilization to produce a machine capable of sustaining life for the hundreds of thousands of years necessary for interstellar travel, and civilizations may tend to collapse for various reasons before reaching such technological peaks. It's also entirely possible that w…

> It could take millions if years of technological civilization to produce a machine capable of sustaining life for the hundreds of thousands of years necessary for interstellar travel. For a generation ship, are you referring to all the machinery that can maintain a balanced ecosystem of plants and animals and humans in order to provide food for the people during the trip to the new planet, and to make all the thing…

I'm always fascinated in the assumptions underlying some of these proposals, and how little thought they've given to the problem. For example, the complete disregard for the lives or autonomy of the "replacement crew", who are effectively treated as a consumable resource starting from childhood.

Science fiction set on generation ships tends to be extremely gloomy for good reason.

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

#165

Post by julius_set »

nkoren wrote: post #94
kfarr wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that quote but lately feeling like advanced tech doesn't necessarily mean angelic

Old-school angels were just as likely to rip your face off as serve you tea and cookies. Read the older Abrahamic texts, and it's clear that to encounter an angel was often a terrifying experience, even when it went well. Obviously their marketing department has given angels quite a rebranding over the last thousand-odd years, but still...

Cue the plot of Doom Eternal

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

#167

Post by godelski »

purplecats wrote: post #113
godelski wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk, there are still people that study ants. Both professionally and as a hobby. Just because you don't care doesn't mean someone doesn't. I don't know why the same wouldn't be true for aliens. Unless those aliens are ant like (hive mind...ish)

and those ants don't know they are being studied/farmed

I'm not sure I like this line of reasoning because it implies that the ants aren't aware of us. Certainly they are in some cases. Ants are able to physically perceive us. So if aliens aren't using some means of passive remote sensing to study us then I don't see why we wouldn't also notice them (though they may have good reason to not use active means). Sure, the ants aren't aware of what why we're hanging out around them, but they are aware of us.

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

#168

Post by zabardasth »

krapp wrote: post #88
kfarr wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that quote but lately feeling like advanced tech doesn't necessarily mean angelic

Angelic doesn't imply good, just being sufficiently advanced enough to seem like magic (to use another Clarke quote.) Demons are technically angels after all.

> And she took on another heart—no longer minded toward earthly things—but ecstatically in the angelic dialect, sending up a hymn to God in accord with the style of the angels. And as she spoke ecstatically, she allowed “The Spirit” to be on her garment.

It seems that speaking to one would be quite a terrifying experience, especially if one were speaking in tongues.

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

#169

Post by mylons »

Retric wrote: post #154
deeeeplearning wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why it was downvoted. Many people have looked into this. https://gtocx.jpl.nasa.gov/gtocx/competition/ Even entire competitions to find optimal colonization methods. Could take 90M years with measly future human tech. Age of Milky Way is 13.5 Billion so even conservatively you could indeed colonize the galaxy many many times over in that time.

The Milky Way lacked rocky planets early on, making that 12.5 Billion year age largely meaningless. Which is just one of many bad assumptions in how people do these calculations. At a minimum you don’t get a straight path from A to B. Assuming any kind of limitation in distance traveled and your at the mercy of the distribution of whatever resource you need. Aka need rocky planets with liquid water, that’s likely goi…

If you used the Von Neumann machine approach wouldn’t it not really matter if the planet was habitable or not?
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