Live data from Hacker News

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

livescience.com

81–90 of 226 posts

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

#81
post #55

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.

When you can figure out how to physically attach consciousness to a machine, get back to me

I understand the criticism but I think that moment will come LONG before we start effectively colonizing or terraforming the other planets. Id bet a LOT of money on that.

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

#82
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.

> with the new Voyager discoveries lately

What new discoveries, specifically?

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

#83
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not well. It makes the assumptions that all of the problems with space travel are logistically possible.

Given the age of the Milky Way, a civilization using even slow sub light travel with generation ships or autonomous probes could have colonized the entire galaxy many times over. Why has no one done that? Hence the paradox.

Yes, I know the paradox. It's simple. It's too simple.

It has huge assumptions. Namely the assumption that the current problems to colonization can be solved in a cost-effective manner.

The longest continuous length of time spent in what limited space flight we have is just under 440 days. Not to mention, all of it was spent in low Earth orbit. Once we go beyond that, we lose all protection from the Earth's magnetosphere.

Then there's also the loss of bone density due to lack of gravity. 1% per month is nothing to sneeze at.

We are not built for space travel. We are built to inhabit this planet. We have evolved to the conditions here.

And before you say that the generation ships will just fake gravity and have appropriate shielding. Where do you get that assumption? We can't fake gravity. We have a space station where they take 10 times the radiation as here on Earth because we can't even realistically shield that.

And then we get to "autonomous probes", the great handwave of people who think they can cleverly sidestep the "humans aren't built for space" issue.

Who builds them? For what purpose? What's our expected return? How can you justify the investment in time and resources to shoot into space, with absolutely no hope of even knowing there's a chance for a return on that investment until generations later, a probe that can at best return data.

And then there's the issue of it being an autonomous probe. Two words that hide a lot of other problems. A lot of other assumptions. One being that we'll have created an intelligence capable of running this thing.

In other words, the Fermi Paradox just assumes that all of these incredibly hard problems can and will be solved and that the solutions are logistically viable.

What if they're not?

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

#84
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, yes. The first thing we’re going to do as soon as we fine intelligent alien life is figure out how to kill it. And sadly we’ll have to assume they’re doing the same. An no, settling Mars won’t help. If someone / something can launch an interstellar attack it can certainly attack more than one planet and moon.

Are we though? Universe is huge. Wars on earth are waged over scares resources. If we are capable of reaching aliens would we really be incentivized to fight them while there are so many resources available elsewhere?

The amount of resources some society can gather increases with the square of time and linearly to its expansion speed. But life around here has an habit of expanding everything (including resource usage) exponentially with time.

There is a mismatch here that you are implicitly claiming that is solved for every space-faring civilization. Many people explicitly make this claim, what is reasonable, but it's not good to keep it implicit.

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

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you didn't know what ants were already they probably would be interesting

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.

Unless you are one of those people with the habit of studying ants, and cataloging the multiple ways that they can be different.

Or if you are one of those people that want to grow a crop on that plot of land, so the ants are a problem.

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

#86
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not well. It makes the assumptions that all of the problems with space travel are logistically possible.

Given the age of the Milky Way, a civilization using even slow sub light travel with generation ships or autonomous probes could have colonized the entire galaxy many times over. Why has no one done that? Hence the paradox.

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 we are the first, or one of the first, technological civilizations in the galaxy. Given how little we understand about the appearance of life, the emergence of multicellular life from single cell life, and the emergence of intelligence from multicellular life, there's not way to put an estimate on these probabilities.

Think about the fact that in 3.5 billion years there hasn't been any new abiogenesis on the only planet in the universe we know for sure can sustain life, and in this billion years a single life form has ever evolved from a single-cell to multi-cellular life, aren't the priors pretty decent that life is an extremely rare phenomenon? Given the fact that the Milky Way is somewhere around 13 billion years old, how often can we expect a once in 3.5 billion years event have happened?

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

#87
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This very instant? I suspect not well. But conceptually? Yes. If we made a space based telescope that could do IR-visible-UV spectroscopy with decent resolution/sensitivity we would be able to get some information about the chemical make up of the gasses on planets transiting their stars. Much like the kerfluffle about phosphine on Venus, there are some compounds you just wouldn't expect from strictly geologic proces…

My hypothesis is that, if given a (simulated) spectroscopical observation of Earth's atmosphere from a distance, astrophysicists would come up with plausible non-biological, non-industrial explanations for it.

Empirically, we've just had our first occurrence of astronomers not being able to explain a compound in a planet's atmosphere, and it's something much easier to deal with than a massive amount of oxygen.

I think they would settle on the opinion that any explanation would be about as interesting as life. But not fully settle on life.

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

#88
post #77
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's from Arthur C. Clarke: "If one considers the millions of years of pre-history, and the rapid technological advancement occurring now, if you apply that to a hypothetical alien race, one can figure the probabilities of how advanced the explorers will find them. The conclusion is we will find apes or angels, but not humans." [0] http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/alientech.php

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.

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

#89
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hypothesis is that, if given a (simulated) spectroscopical observation of Earth's atmosphere from a distance, astrophysicists would come up with plausible non-biological, non-industrial explanations for it.

Would be interesting to find an explanation for the surge (and decline) in atmospheric Freon, and its replacement with other refrigerants.

Would fluorocarbons be detectable in a remote spectrogram of the atmosphere at the levels they existed in the earth's atmosphere? Would the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere be more visible?

From [0] it looks like CFC's peaked on the order of 1 ppb. Humans (perhaps) just detected phosphine at the level of ~20ppb in Venus's atmosphere through telescope spectral analysis [1], but that's on a very close planet that we've been staring at intently for 4000 years; presumably there are compounds present in smaller concentrations that we haven't seen yet. Is there a heuristic for the hypothetical minimum sensitivity relative to interstellar distances?

[0] https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/hats/about/cfc.html [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4

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

#90

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?

Hiding would be good if you could do it, but:

(a) to the best of everyone’s knowledge it is impossible to hide your heat signature in space, let alone hide the shadow of a planet blocking the light of its star (metamaterial cloaks are far too frequency-specific)

(b) the biosignatures we’re looking for right now are anything out of chemical equilibrium, so a planet-dwelling civilisation would only hide from us if they wiped out their surface and ocean ecosystems at the very least

Post reply on HN