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

scientificamerican.com

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

#171

Post by johnchristopher »

codeshaman wrote: post #133
furyofantares wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

Yes yes, the brain, the mapping, the neural network... the physical, chemical, electrical thing that if wired properly would produce consciousness... It would be so easy if it were that easy... And brain science can't explain too much, because it couldn't research these substances, since they're illegal everywhere in the world. Edit: Long story short - take the red pill and you'll see for yourself how little we under…

I'll juste leave this quote here:

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

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

#172

Post by cgriswald »

melling wrote: post #14

I wish someone would instead come up with a project to really capture the public's attention about space exploration. More interest means more funding. The U.S. Budget is measured in billions. The New Horizons project, for example, only cost $700 million. The Lunar X Prize might have been that project but it doesn't seem to be making progress: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize http://lunar.xprize.o…

I saw a lot of people complaining online about the cost of New Horizons. I took the time to explain that if we had foregone a single aircraft carrier, we could have sent nearly 20 such missions to Pluto. And that was just for the carrier, not for the support craft, aircraft, etc.

A carrier costs roughly $12 billion, and costs about $1.5 billion per year in operational costs.

People really have no concept of how much NASA costs. They think NASA gets an insane amount of money. We'd have moon bases and maybe even a Mars base if NASA got the funding people think they get.

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

#173

Post by eli_gottlieb »

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…

And maybe the entire progress of science over centuries and millenia has taught us that the crazy stuff we see when tripping isn't real in the slightest.

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

#174

Post by eli_gottlieb »

johnchristopher wrote: post #171
codeshaman wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes yes, the brain, the mapping, the neural network... the physical, chemical, electrical thing that if wired properly would produce consciousness... It would be so easy if it were that easy... And brain science can't explain too much, because it couldn't research these substances, since they're illegal everywhere in the world. Edit: Long story short - take the red pill and you'll see for yourself how little we under…

I'll juste leave this quote here: "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

Let me add: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U

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

#175

Post by logingone »

adventured wrote: post #151
logingone wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon Musk is an engineer, not a philosopher, and I stand to be persuaded, but I find using him to counter Michio Kaku ridiculous.

A philosopher would be the first to understand that no one is or can be excluded from the realm of ideas or thought. Being a philosopher is not an extraordinary designation, such that it puts them beyond the mental abilities of someone of Elon's obvious mental aptitude.

Exclusion? Oh dear, here we go with the black or white. "realm of ideas or thought" - and the simplification. "not an extraordinary designation" - and dismissing philosophy. "beyond the mental abilities" - and more simplification. "mental aptitude" - you'll be fine then with neuroscientists or some such fixing the falcon.

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

#176

Post by cgriswald »

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…

We may not be able to understand the ten-lane superhighway, but we can certainly distinguish it from natural phenonemon.

Radio SETI is the most popular, but searches have been done in a wide variety of ways. For instance, A search for a complete Dyson swarm can be done by looking for "stars" which only emit radiation in the far infrared. Partial Dyson swarms can be detected by comparing the mag of a star at two different wavelengths. Megastructures are potentially detectable via the tranit method. And searches have been done to look for signs of galactic engineering.

I'm still willing to entertain the idea that Kaku is correct, but it mostly just seems like wishful thinking to me.

The evidence thus far suggests that even if life is everywhere in the universe, technological life may not be.

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

#177

Post by on_and_off »

jahnu wrote: post #4

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

Some scientists have similarly been warning against blindly revealing our existence. If our history is anything to go by, meeting another civilisation would be very dangerous.

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

#178

Post by scrumper »

XorNot wrote: post #145
S4M wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to speculate, how about the possibility of uploading people's mind to a robot? Let's say that we are able to send outer space a bunch of self replicating robots (they can travel to various planets and build a copy of themselves using the raw materials they can find there). After some time, we have lots of robots at many points in space, then you make a copy of your mind and send it at the speed of light t…

Still a relatively slow way to get around. We have some co-factor here for "median time between alien contacts" which might be thousands of years. In which case they came, they saw, and the people who saw them remembered it as folk tales.

"Speed" could be seen in terms of perceived time for distance covered. No reason with a robot-uploaded consciousness that you couldn't slow its perception of time such that travel between the stars becomes something comprehensible by a human-like mind. A bit like video game time acceleration, but real.

That doesn't address what happens to the visitees, but if that kind of slow-scale exploration becomes the default, then any civilizations on a similar level to the robot explorers would have technology and societal structures in place to support meaningful contact of that nature.

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

#179

Post by cgriswald »

zf00002 wrote: post #132
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:…

I read an interesting book called "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe" that attempts to tackle why we haven't found evidence of any other life. It was written in 2000 so I guess it's rather old now in that many interesting things have been discovered since to discredit it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis

The main problem we have in the search for extraterrestrial life is that we really do not know much about life. We know a reasonable amount about Earth life, but that's about it. I have read only portions of Rare Earth for my research and plan to return to read it through. But some of the arguments made seemed to rest on a lot of supposition. I'm not convinced they're wrong exactly.

I think there may be many "Great Filters" to explain the Fermi paradox, and the rise of metazoans may be one of those filters. But I'm not necessarily convinced that complex life requires, for instance, a large moon to stablize the tilt of the planet. Evolution seems a little more robust to me.

I do not know if they mention this in the book or not, but I am afraid that the transition to land may be infrequent (many worlds may not even have land above sea level). Even if dolphins or whales were as intelligent as people want to believe, they are unlikely to ever develop space travel or even radio communication.

I'm equally on the fence about the mediocrity principle. Maybe complex life takes a long, long time and Earth somehow got lucky. We are already freaks because we orbit a G-type star. Most stars are M-type (red dwarfs). They are very long lived and have plenty of time for life to form and evolve on planets around them. Put another way, maybe somehow we are just "first".

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

#180

Post by Panoramix »

murbard2 wrote: post #164
Pigo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The only thing this argument has going for it is sounding wise by virtue of being self-deprecating. If there are structured radio signals being emitted, it matters not whether or not we understand what the aliens are up to, if it hits a sweetspot between noise and simplicity we can tell it's a signal. And no, "radio waves" aren't the equivalent of "smoke signals", if there are better ways to communicate across space,…

Those are huge assumptions IMO. Maybe they don't feel the need or comprehend the concept of communicating over long distances. Maybe they discovered a different force we don't know of. Just because radio waves worked for us, it doesn't mean every advanced civilization will makes use of them. The possibilities are so vast and endless.
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