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

#211

Post by grawprog » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 7:46 AM UTC

Supermancho wrote: post #158

grawprog wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We are like fungus to them. Maybe the fungi think that about us? They've been around longer than we have and take up more of the planet.

> They've been around longer than we have and take up more of the planet. It looks like that to us, because our influence is visible over 80+% of the ground, but there's fungus IN us and covering more surface area than you can see. Imagine anywhere there's water (including from the air and including the oceans), there's fungus over a % of the land and organisms that you can see with a microscope. Fungus influence cov…

Yup, life as we know it wouldn't even exist without their decomposition abilities. Dead stuff would pile up, nutrients wouldn't be recyled, beer wouldn't exist. A world without beer just wouldn't be worth living in.

Fungi are very much overlooked, their role in forests alone is amazing let alone everything else they do.

If someday, some scientists discovered some kind of conscious fungal intelligence, i would not be surprised.

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

#212

Post by ben_w » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 8:33 AM UTC

bena wrote: post #173

ben_w wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can't fake gravity. Yes we can, it’s a standard part of fairground rides. (I’ll agree that the unknowns of space colonisation, and of the automation we’d need to be able to afford the infrastructure to even launch a serious effort, may prevent such colony efforts from happening)

Centrifugal force does mimic gravity but it's not really something we can do at scale or even in space. When we're talking about a generation ship, we're talking about something a little larger than the Gravitron. Not to mention, they work within Earth's gravity. Take a tube and spin it around you in space, it does nothing to you because there's no other forces working on you. Nothing putting you in the frame of the…

> Take a tube and spin it around you in space, it does nothing to you because there's no other forces working on you.

Yes, it does — if you are in contact with the structure, the force you feel is the outside acting against your inertia to keep you in uniform circular motion. There is a layer of air in contact with the structure at any moment, so it ends up co-rotating, so anywhere inside except the axis of rotation itself will feel a force proportional to the distance from the axis.

> When we're talking about a generation ship, we're talking about something a little larger than the Gravitron.

Naturally. You can still spin them along and axis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder

We are a long way from been able to build such structures, and I have doubts about the suitability of human political psychology given the travel times involved and how long countries last for on average, but the physics of spin-gravity is fine, even though there may be noticeable Coriolis effects depending on scale.

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

#213

Post by e12e » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 10:53 AM UTC

eloff wrote: post #202

e12e wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to make an assumption about speed - it certainly won't be more than a tiny fraction light speed. Eg voyager appear to travel now at less than 0.00006 c (16 km/s). Than turns 100k light years into ballpark 150 M year journey (no it doesn't its 1.8 bn years as mentioned in reply) . Still possible to cross 10.000 times - but that would be a straight line. I suspect the distances will grow somewhat fractally if…

To imagine that voyager technology will define the maximum velocity of interstellar travel, a thousand years from now, ten thousand, a million, etc is short sighted. Maybe we never can exceed light speed, but we could get up to a reasonable percentage of it.

Sure, but it puts things into perspective. If we assume 1% of c is feasible - it's still a 10 Million year journey to cross 100k light years. That's much better - it gives 1 000 chances in 10 bn years.

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

#214

Post by sbelskie » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 12:56 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #161

sbelskie wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/Civilizatio…

“... in the anthropological sense of the word.” -me, just recently.

If you are wondering where we might find a definition matching that sense, try the first sentence of the article you linked:

“A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification, a form of government and symbolic systems of communication such as writing.”

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

#215

Post by purplecats » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 1:04 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #167

purplecats wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i think you may be confusing the ideas "aware of" and "being studied".

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

#216

Post by Enginerrrd » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 1:09 PM UTC

aeonflux wrote: post #80

Enginerrrd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only logical path is to download our brains onto computers, which will happen before that point. Once that technology exists, that's the only form of life that will dominate. Robots, nano-machines and hyper-intelligences will blow easily damaged flesh with finite lifespans. Habitable regions would be massively expanded.

If we can live inside a computer and create our entire world what will be the motivation to explore the universe?

Because we'll need energy and resources to run the computers!

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

#217

Post by Balgair » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 3:10 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #47

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.

Given the relative age of planets and stars, other alien "civilizations" would be hundreds of millions or Billions of years older than us. The notion that we'd all be roughly at the same level of advancement is statistically impossible pop-sci-fi fantasy. In my opinion, it's unlikely that they are even organic individuals anymore. Even the separate alien "entities" might have a process of merging once they achieve a…

In some ways, then, we are 'alone'. Sure, there may be intelligent life out there, but the vast differences in biology combined with the likely vast differences in technology will render us 'alone' all the same.

Just like a goldfish in your apartment. To you, you are alone, goldfish don't count as company. And to the goldfish, it is alone, as humans don't count as whatever a goldfish thinks a friend is.

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

#218

Post by mylons » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #208

mylons wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s risky about it? The risk seems in them overtaking the entire galaxy more than anything, no?

Building something with zero possibility of change across millions of years is difficult. Something as simple as reproducing endlessly means they end up wasting enormous amounts of resources. But, you also risk things like probes that don’t slow down and hit one of your planets.

Sure, but we’re now beginning to talk about infinite scale and infinite resources. Who cares if 1 planet doesn’t produce probes as fast or at all? Who cares if 1 probe slams through a planet? That being said, I think the latter case might be more controllable by a civilization capable of creating the machines?

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

#219

Post by godelski » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 9:47 PM UTC

purplecats wrote: post #215

godelski wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i think you may be confusing the ideas "aware of" and "being studied".

The topic was really about how we may not know we're being studied by unknown aliens, just like ants. My response was about the ants not knowing the why but still aware of existence. So far we don't know about the existence of aliens, hence the part about how they'd have to be doing passive and remote studying.

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

#220

Post by skissane » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 10:23 PM UTC

s5300 wrote: post #209

root_axis wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly possible that we might visit Mars, but colonizing it just isn't possible within the foreseeable future, certainly not within Musk's lifetime. We're not even close to having the technology necessary to survive that kind of journey and the engineering, logistics and medical science required to actually start a colony is far beyond anything we are currently capable of.

Musk has touched on the fact that it's nearly guaranteed to not be possible within his lifetime. This is one of the reasons (he's spoken of) that he's having a decent amount of kids and also doing things like Neuralink.

Colonisation of Mars is going to be a long process. There is going to be a gap of decades (maybe even more than a century) between the arrival of the first settlers and the attainment of self-sufficiency (autarky, the ability to survive without continual resupply ships from earth). From my reading of Musk's various comments, he doesn't think it is likely he'll live to see self-sufficiency (autarky), but he certainly hopes that the arrival of the first settlers can happen in his lifetime.