I always thought maybe the reason we don't see life in the surface of other planets is because of security/defense reasons. Why wouldn't they be cloaked? Isn't it a bad defensive position to just live out in the open like we do?
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
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or just defensively. The US invaded Iraq because they might have had WMDs. Other planets might have WMDs too. And they might think we have WMDs. Doesn’t matter if any of the sides actually do.
> The US invaded Iraq because they might have had WMDs. Be careful not to conflate public justifications with actual motivations.
The point is that public justifications are more important than actual motivations. Actual motivations can be enslaving other beings, ruling / mining an extra planet or just wanting to watch the universe burn. Motivations are already present because there are millions of motivations that map on to the same result - destruction of another group of living things. I'm pointing out that it's easy to find public justification as well.
It's also possible to do this unilaterally. China or any other country could also unilaterally decide to destroy another planet. And same possibility on the other side.
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#63I'm recently (as in last night) starting to question the likelihood of life forming at all.
I'm wondering how well we've nailed-down just what life is and how well we grok it's origination process. Cursory reading suggests we're still working from educated theory.
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#64>Thank you for visiting this site. Unfortunately we have detected that you might be running custom adblocking scripts or installations that might interfere with the running of the site Yeah leave the "might" be my problem https://web.archive.org/web/20201023131014/https://www.lives...
I'm not getting may anti-adblock behavior with Ffx 82 & uBO. What browser are you running?
Firefox 82 and uBlock...soo
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The US invaded Iraq because they might have had WMDs. Be careful not to conflate public justifications with actual motivations.
The point is that public justifications are more important than actual motivations. Actual motivations can be enslaving other beings, ruling / mining an extra planet or just wanting to watch the universe burn. Motivations are already present because there are millions of motivations that map on to the same result - destruction of another group of living things. I'm pointing out that it's easy to find public justifica…
Motivations lead to the justifications.
The problem with interstellar warfare is, outside the "Dark Forest" concept of "kill everyone just in case", there aren't all that many motivations that seem to make sense.
Any interstellar species probably doesn't really need to steal planets, resources, etc.
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#66Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#67What'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.
“Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting.”
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#68The dark forest theory lives!
Pfft! It's the Fermi Paradox writ large.
No other intelligent species has a word for "war".
The aliens have us in quarantine.
The Martians evacuated as soon as they realized that Percival Lowell could see them.
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article is just poorly written. Even the first line is messed up... > Those 1,004 star systems are in a direct line of sight to our planet... It's SPACE. Every star within 1000 light years is in a direct line of sight to every other star.
I was translating 'direct line of sight' as 'parallel enough to our ecliptic plane to see the Earth occluding the Sun'. > Every star within 1000 light years is in a direct line of sight to every other star. There could be space crap in between. - Of course I just realized something obvious. Along our PotE lies most of our solar system debris. Shouldn't that be obstructing alien views? Excepting highly tilted orbits o…
> There could be space crap in between. - Of course I just realized something obvious. Along our PotE lies most of our solar system debris. Shouldn't that be obstructing alien views?
Space crap is a lot less dense than you might think. Generally speaking, flying through the asteroid belt edge on looks like... well, just flying through space.
Turn it around: the space crap doesn't really prevent us from getting good views of Jupiter, Saturn, etc. Right? And it wouldn't prevent us from seeing Mars or Venus if they were outside of the belt either.
The total mass of the asteroid belt is estimated at something like 5% of the Moon's, and a third of it is accounted for by Ceres alone. It's spread pretty darn thin.
The Kuiper belt is much more massive, but is spread out even more thinly. Same again for the Oort cloud, where the average spacing between comet-sized bodies is about the same as the distance from Earth to Saturn.
A favorite quote from a relevant reference work: “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”