Contact, recommended movie to watch! (For me much better than Interstellar)
Way, waaay better than Interstellar. That's a low bar actually. Interstellar was visually stunning, but absolute crap otherwise.
I liked contact and I liked interstellar.
SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
71–79 of 79 posts
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately leaving your house will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is stay the fuck inside.
We tried that in 2020. It didn't really work out that well as most people were physically unable to stay the fuck inside.
Beyond ability to follow government direction, the amount of genuinely damaging social isolation experienced by many people during COVID indicates we shouldn't be doing it without good reason. People need people, in proximity, at length. We're a social species.
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're like a paranoid child terrified that anyone that enters our room is going to steal our Lego, so we must be left alone! Nobody wants our Lego.
You know, if aliens are like Americans and we have oil.... I'm only half-joking.
But this is my point — it would take hundreds, or even thousands of years for aliens to get here. To do that they'd need some sort of abundant fuel source.
Let's say they have had thousands of years of Nuclear Fusion, for example, it wouldn't surprise me if they could produce any elements they need by fusing hydrogen.
But let's say they didn't, and they do in fact see Earth as a rare jewel full of precious materials... the logistics of taking our natural resources just seems like a joke. Surely the juice isn't worth the hundreds of years of planning and logistics squeeze.
I used to buy this dark forest idea, because it's scary and exciting, but I think the biggest mistake is projecting our behaviours onto extra-terrestrials.
If they wanted to destroy Earth they'd just slightly nudge a big asteroid in our direction and be done with it.
/ sorry for the ADHD rant
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
In your theory, what is the structure that supports sentience?
Stellar plasma supports long-lived, self-organizing magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) structures whose coupled electromagnetic and fluid dynamics implement distributed information processing. Sentience would supervene on these MHD attractors rather than on matter in a solid or neural form.
Thanks for the reply. I wonder what sort of stimulus such a system would be capable of perceiving. I suppose the context is so different that very little of my intuition about "life" could be applied productively.
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#75This assumes that ETs are deliberately transmitting high power signals towards us (or into space in general), although I'm not sure that is a reasonable assumption. I think it would generally be unwise to loudly announce a civilization's presence. According to chatgpt, our current earth-based radio telescopes would only be able to detect signals equivalent to radio leakage from earth at a distance of 1 light year.
But what did you think?
What did I think about what?
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#76This assumes that ETs are deliberately transmitting high power signals towards us (or into space in general), although I'm not sure that is a reasonable assumption. I think it would generally be unwise to loudly announce a civilization's presence. According to chatgpt, our current earth-based radio telescopes would only be able to detect signals equivalent to radio leakage from earth at a distance of 1 light year.
It's mostly not reasonable to try and ascribe human motivations to alien entities, particularly when we know some humans would definitely fire up the transmitter if they could. The presence or current lack of alien signals at the very least bounds estimates of local population density and what energy scale they're operating on. Currently there's no nearby Type 1 Kardashev scale civilizations.
Yes, there are arguments for and against sending out a strong deliberate "we're here" signal. But I guess you could also argue that the possible danger in announcing our presence is fairly well mitigated by the speed of light, as there are unlikely to be any other advanced civilizations within a few light years.
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that's why they won't find anything, IMHO. Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately transmitting interstellar beacon signals will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is STFU. At the same time, no advanced civilizations will be using coherent RF communications that stand out from the noise floor, because it makes little sense to keep doing that once your civilization…
> Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately transmitting interstellar beacon signals will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is STFU. Even if we credit the idea that it's unsafe to transmit, there are reasons to do it anyway, e.g. you have a holy text and a mission to share it with the universe.
Even if we credit the idea that it's unsafe to transmit, there are reasons to do it anyway, e.g. you have a holy text and a mission to share it with the universe.
Sounds like a great sci-fi premise. "Hey, there aren't enough knock-down, drag-out religious wars on Earth. Let's start beef with the nuclear-armed, FTL-capable sky wizard cult on Epsilon Eridani 4."
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stellar plasma supports long-lived, self-organizing magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) structures whose coupled electromagnetic and fluid dynamics implement distributed information processing. Sentience would supervene on these MHD attractors rather than on matter in a solid or neural form.
Thanks for the reply. I wonder what sort of stimulus such a system would be capable of perceiving. I suppose the context is so different that very little of my intuition about "life" could be applied productively.
Stimulus is the most interesting question. Is there anything that can reach from other stars to our sun without completely being overwhelmed by its own signals? Would it rely on planets as antennae? Calling that speculation would be an understatement;)
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#79I can't resist bragging:
I'm in the top 5% of all seti@home contributors. I'm in the top 2000 overall and I'm in the top 50 in Australia. According to boincstats I Accumulated more credit than 99.90166% of all SETI@Home Users - 28.91 quintillion floating-point operations. I think that's a lot.
I was sad when seti@home shut down. My CPU fans were not.