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Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

paultyma.blogspot.com

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Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

#81

Post by davedx »

pekk wrote: post #79
zeteo wrote: post #47

This article is full of misconceptions. Let's address a few of the most egregious ones. >there are billions of stars and planets in our galaxy and billions of galaxies. Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers. There's no obstacle to working with large numbers once you understand powers and logarithms (i.e. pre-calc). Very smart people have looked at the Drake equation and it yields a very wide…

If poodles are at a zero, we are at a zero too. We can "theoretically" dump massive quantities of cash into building a giant craft but we are nowhere close to making a craft or society that will sustain itself for ~100,000 years until it gets to another star. We cannot even guarantee that we can sustain ourselves with all the earth's resources without wiping out our own society for 100 years.

Where do you get the 100,000 years number to get to another star?

Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

#82

Post by pekk »

ebbv wrote: post #2

The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. And it's obvious that if we could travel around the galaxy and we detected life forms on another planet, we would obviously go visit them and check them out. The…

> We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet

Which is a human characteristic shared by hardly any (if any) other species on Earth. So why do you suppose that fundamentally different life will have that human characteristic?

> if intelligent life does exist in our galaxy which is more advanced than ourselves, it will obviously try to contact us.

More advanced than ourselves, presumably, in the mode of what it means for humans to be more advanced. And you are again presupposing that said beings have human-like interests and will be excited about sending us prime numbers on the radio. This isn't a 'certainty'. This is no better than an article of faith on your part.

Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

#83

Post by sixQuarks »

gmaslov wrote: post #23
sixQuarks wrote: post #9

My theory is that once a life form gets advanced enough, their brains start penetrating a hidden dimension that we know nothing about. This dimension is so much richer than "our universe", that they never come back to this one.

It may have started to happen to us already -- I'm sure there are a few people here who have gotten lost in the World of Warcraft dimension for a time.

true - now think if WOW was a trillion times more immersive.

Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

#84

Post by pekk »

davedx wrote: post #81
pekk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If poodles are at a zero, we are at a zero too. We can "theoretically" dump massive quantities of cash into building a giant craft but we are nowhere close to making a craft or society that will sustain itself for ~100,000 years until it gets to another star. We cannot even guarantee that we can sustain ourselves with all the earth's resources without wiping out our own society for 100 years.

Where do you get the 100,000 years number to get to another star?

Where do you get any number? It's a back of the envelope, order-of-magnitude thing. We don't have anything close to faster-than-light spacecraft and there's no reason to think we will in the near future, except for pure religious hope.

Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

#85

Post by chc »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #61
krapp wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You left out the misconception where FTL travel is even possible. That's probably most likely why we'll never meet aliens... the low likelihood of them being able to harness that level of energy reduced even further by the likelihood of a ship happening to stumble across this particular rock.... and then, further still by them even caring if they find us. Heck, there might be cloud-squid in Jupiter we're not even awa…

We don't need FTL. Our current age limit is becoming more obviously arbitrary every year. Sooner rather than later we'll be able to extend our age limit to several centuries. We could spread out to all the nearby stars in less than one lifetime at even .1c. We could with generation ships anyway, but that's far less desirable. We could populate most of the Galaxy in a million years with no FTL whatsoever, and if FTL n…

Your assertion that "our current age limit is becoming more obviously arbitrary every year" is lacking in evidence — it's been somewhere between 120 and 130 years for as long as we can tell, and we have not managed to surpass that even once. That's not arbitrary; it's a scientific fact.

But let's forget that. Let's grant that in the future we'll be able to quadruple the human lifespan to 480 years. For the sake of argument, I'll even grant that manned interstellar flight at 0.1c is achievable. At this rate, it will still take most of our very long lifespans to reach the three nearest systems that are candidates for habitable exoplants. You'll still need a generation ship unless you want a colony of geriatrics. (Also, once you do get there, you're very likely to find that the potentially habitable exoplanets turn out not live up to that potential in much the same way the potentially habitable Venus turned out not to, so you'll spend the rest of your extended lifespan moving on to the next system.)

Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

#86

Post by joe_the_user »

zeteo wrote: post #47

This article is full of misconceptions. Let's address a few of the most egregious ones. >there are billions of stars and planets in our galaxy and billions of galaxies. Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers. There's no obstacle to working with large numbers once you understand powers and logarithms (i.e. pre-calc). Very smart people have looked at the Drake equation and it yields a very wide…

Jeesh,

Article: Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers.

Zeteo: There's no obstacle to working with large numbers once you understand powers and logarithms (i.e. pre-calc).

Me: The article said "fully understand" and "humans". Some scientists may indeed easily work with aspects of large number. Many people are lost. I'd say you're wrong but it's a disagreement on arguable, hardly settled points. Calling your disagreement with the author a "misconception" on the author's part is implying a hard factual accuracy on your side - and here you are both wrong and disingenuous.

The rest of your post is about like this.

Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

#87

Post by old-gregg »

zeteo wrote: post #47

This article is full of misconceptions. Let's address a few of the most egregious ones. >there are billions of stars and planets in our galaxy and billions of galaxies. Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers. There's no obstacle to working with large numbers once you understand powers and logarithms (i.e. pre-calc). Very smart people have looked at the Drake equation and it yields a very wide…

And this is the top rated comment? None of these "misconceptions" have much to do with the main point OP is making: we think too small, and we pick the wrong analogies and frameworks when we discuss an alien visit.

If anything, your post is yet another manifestation of this. It simply doesn't matter what happened to native americans, when the entire Columbus story does not apply.

And what do your comments about googles in pockets and drake equation have to do with anything? Do you have anything to say about actual point the OP is making?

Ugh...

Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

#88

Post by tokenadult »

I found an online posting of a secondary school textbook reprint of Arthur C. Clarke's essay "We'll Never Conquer Space,"

http://www.olivenri.com/conquer_space_files/Conquer_space.pd...

which lays out just how vast outer space is, and how time (with travel being strictly limited by the speed of light) as much as distance limits the feasibility of voyages between stars, especially back-and-forth voyages between stars.

A blogger on a planetarium website

http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/why-we-will-never-conquer-s...

and the maker of a Prezi based on Clarke's essay

http://prezi.com/uxc2owcv5ekp/well-never-conquer-space/

both emphasize that traveling to a nearby star is already a huge task.

The probable density in the universe of intelligent living things (the "aliens" of the title of the submitted blog post) among all the many stars is low. All those aliens run into the same hard physical laws we run into if they attempt to make a voyage to another star. To the most relevant correct approximation, our probability of meeting interstellar voyagers is even lower than our probability of being interstellar voyagers, and our probability of being interstellar voyagers during the lifetime of anyone now reading Hacker News is nil. Remember, we have not even visited Mars, not even on the proposed one-way trip,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5390730

and humankind has delayed in traveling to Mars far beyond my imagining (I thought that the trip would be made in 1980s, and even dreamed of being on the landing crew) because humankind has higher priorities and better claims on our shared resources. So the submitted blog post title is correct, even if you quibble about the blogger's reasoning (as I do). We won't meet the aliens, because the aliens won't make a trip here before we all die.

Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

#89

Post by SiVal »

I don't buy the idea that they wouldn't need to come here, because their statistical models, based on remote observations of conditions, would be able to predict everything they would find.

I think we've learned enough about complexity and sensitive dependence on initial (and later) conditions to say that, unless we're wrong about complexity, the outcome of all these historical accidents wouldn't be predictable. They would still have to observe, meaning explore, to see what ended up actually happening around the universe and, in addition, they would never know for sure if they had already found all the Black Swans out there.

Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

#90

Post by loxs »

krapp wrote: post #50
zeteo wrote: post #47

This article is full of misconceptions. Let's address a few of the most egregious ones. >there are billions of stars and planets in our galaxy and billions of galaxies. Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers. There's no obstacle to working with large numbers once you understand powers and logarithms (i.e. pre-calc). Very smart people have looked at the Drake equation and it yields a very wide…

You left out the misconception where FTL travel is even possible. That's probably most likely why we'll never meet aliens... the low likelihood of them being able to harness that level of energy reduced even further by the likelihood of a ship happening to stumble across this particular rock.... and then, further still by them even caring if they find us. Heck, there might be cloud-squid in Jupiter we're not even awa…

If FTL is not possible, this makes for a very good reason to conquer the nearest habitable planets. If they are overcrowded and able to conquer Earth in reasonable (for them) time-frame, I don't see any reason why they wouldn't want to. That of course is only if "habitable" means the same thing to them as to us (liquid water, oxygen etc.).
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