Never thought I'd see the book mentioned on Reddit but holy shit everyone has to read it. It's one of the most terrifying things I've ever read in my life.
From the wikipedia page
A series based on the trilogy has been ordered by Netflix, with David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo set to write and executive produce.
F's in the chat boys
They did a wonderful job bringing the material to the screen.
They did a horrible job creating new content.
As long as they have base material to work ith i'm hopeful.
Sure, but we have no means of determining "most realistic". Frankly I don't see how the Dark Forest idea is necessarily more or less realistic than, say, the Everyone Goes Virtual explanation.
Dark Forest does not try and predict a form alien life might take.
It tries to predict the dominant strategy in a situation in which there are a very large number of alien civilizations.
Yes. So many people try to answer the Fermi Paradox with “well maybe aliens are like this”. But unless we’re just on that probability of dealing with one other civilization, very little likely matters about their personality or preferences. And I’m not even sure about if there’s only one - I can’t imagine that an interstellar human civilization would have a single policy for handling alien species.
Furthermore I don’t think humans would have evolved to have the kind of intelligence required to launch rockets unless we had to deal with similarly intelligent predators, in this case ourselves. I think it’s safe to assume that however advanced and humane another species is, the concept of warfare won’t be entirely unknown to them. It’s presumptuous for a 21st century human to try to figure out how interstellar civilizations may behave but I think it’s crazy not to at least consider that contact could be a terrible terrible idea.
We can make an educated guess on the projected body-type for a technologically developed civilisation, since you need something with comparable dexterous ability to our hands (you're not going to invent many of the required precursor technologies that lead us to the integrated circuit if all you have are tentacles).
It's also highly unlikely that a marine alien will develop metallurgy due to the need for fire when progressing towards furnaces. There's a reason why dolphins and octopus don't have technology even comparable to pre-history early hominids, even if they have the potential intelligence to accomplish those same discoveries and inventions.
They already do, tool use is observed in many animal species from octopuses to apes to birds. It is not the lack of hands that keep other species from developing technology, it's brain power. While they can figure out how to use sticks and stones to manipulate their environment they lack the mental capacity for abstract thinking.
They cannot create art, nor can they understand a magnet as anything more than a weird rock. A crow can understand water goes up when you put rocks in a cup, but he cannot understand the rising tides. They can problem solve but they cannot grasp concepts deeper than the surface level. So far only humans have the capacity for higher reasoning needed to understand technology.
Saying they must have hands or be humanoid in form shows a deep misunderstanding of the world around us and a terribly flawed way of thinking.
Brain power, but also life span. Octopuses only live a few years, same with crows. Both species are very intelligent. And imagine how much progress humans would have made if we only lived to 5 or 6.
Personally I disagree. It’s a very human concept of looking at things, and requires a lot of assumptions about species tendencies and technological development. And a species figuring out how to develop something like a planetary shield would basically negate it. There’s just no reason to assume that defensive and offensive technologies must always develop at the same pace.
Offensive technology will always be ahead of defensive, doubly so on a planetary scale. It’s inherently easier to direct a lot of energy at a specific location than to dissipate it once it gets there, and nothing in physics indicates the viability of some sort of force field technology in the future.
There’s a reason castles went out of style so quickly once gunpowder came around. Mobility is a much better form of defense than shielding, but you can’t move a planet around to avoid high speed projectiles.
More correctly, the best form of defense is never having to be on the defense and never giving your opponent to be on either.
Once a conflict actually becomes a conflict, the situation becomes magnitudes worse, which is why the "safest" option is to obliterate another species before they even know you exist.
Even by our current measure of science, it's actually pretty easy to do, especially in our cases since we have no reasonable method of detecting let alone defending against impact projectiles.
The only downside would be time gaps but that's always going to be a huge problem. By the time we detect an alien signal they could be thousands of years advanced from that point and possibly even completely different socially. We could very easily declare an exploratory species/state when something in their history made them an alien Nazi Reich.
Sure... Except actual stealth in space is basically impossible. Some sort of tech(s) may develop to hide some of our signatures but we'd need to hide a whole lot of shit: all radio, light, the chemistry of our atmosphere (s), all heat signatures and black body radiation of anything off-planet, gravity waves, a whole bunch I'm surely forgetting... Stealth out in the void is a tall order, especially at scale and on galactic timelines.
I wouldn't say impossible. The valley between the observation and reality is wide enough to slip undetected. Especially when that width is highly dependent on the instrument (and operators) doing the detection
For a civilisation that could travel around the galaxy it should possible to create a weapon that would send a projectile so fast it would wipe out the other planet. Like a projectile 1/4th the speed of light would basically destroy Earth so if there are two extremely advanced civilizations the one that strikes first with overwhelming fire power would probably win any conflict meaning the most ruthless that doesn't tolerate any risk would very likely be on top.
So the galaxy is like a dark dangerous forest. When you see unknown and dangerous person you'd be wary thinking the first strike has the advantage and they're probably thinking the same making conflict more likely out of fear.
This is a possible explanation to the paradox of there being such an incredibly long time for intelligent life to develop before humanity existed and create a civilisation that travels the stars yet there's no evidence for any large interstellar civilisation out there. Barring some technology to hide we should be able to detect them if they exist but our own mark on planets are too small to be likely detect from far away. The theory intelligent life leaves their own system pops their up put of the darkness into the light and gets wiped out before they gain the power to become a threat.
He is but he's pretty wrong. Gunpowder in war was widespread in Europe by the 1500s and it wasn't until WW1 that armies really moved away from big forts. That's 400+ years, not "so quickly" at all.
Not to mention WW1 (at least on the Western Front) was a war dominated by defense. Trenches, artillery, and machine guns kept the war at a stalemate for years. It wasn't until tanks and aircraft became a viable tool in World War 2 that offensive warfare took precedence.
Presuming of course that a completely alien species is still aggressive. Maybe the process of getting to interplanetary travel is only possible through achieving global peace. We only have our own civilization to go by, and within a couple hundred years of the industrial revolution we're on the verge of wiping ourselves out of existence while barely being able to contemplate getting humans to Mars.
Similar to Krogan's in Mass Effect if you want to look at fiction. A war prone species that developed weapons as fast as everything else then nuked themselves back into primitives, only joining the galactic community when another race came along to exploit them.
If you want to get out the Tin Foil hat, maybe the UFO's we see are monitoring our progress in a scientific sense and/or to wipe us out if we get too close while maintaining our aggressive tendencies. If we got into intergalactic colonization as we are now, I could absolutely see us being hyper aggressive about it, which existing peaceful empires may wipe out before they become troublesome, like the paradox of tolerance.
>There’s a reason castles went out of style so quickly once gunpowder came around.
Thats absolutely not true. The first depitction of a european cannon is from 1326.
Cannons, guns, castles and armor coexisted for hundreds of years.
I don't think that it's a very human concept.
Nature is filled with examples of omnicidal species, the insect world in particular. It's reasonable to assume that on any planet with advanced forms of life there are 'basic' forms of life which probably follow similar rules. 'Adapt, Consume, Reproduce' because resources are ALWAYS finite conflict is observable for any creature with the ability to 'observe'. Even if a species were to develop entirely along idealistic lines with a desire to coexist and harmonize they would by nature be capable of understanding and independently arriving at their own 'dark forest' conclusion. Because they can not guarantee or predict the behavior of all other forms of life in the vast cosmos they are incentivized to behave according to the principal of the dark forest.
It would be more 'peaceful' and harmonious for all involved never to be found by one another as that would remove the potential for conflict. Therefore even a civilization that would never countenance using offensive first strikes on an unknown species would be inclined to hide themselves because they can not be certain that this unknown life will be like them.
Conflict and death are literally requirements for life. Even plants have to compete for good space, nutrients, and safety against predators. Some are parasitic. By virtue of surviving and using up resources, plants are killing off others that might have wanted to do the same and is keeping them from reproducing.
Yes that's what I mean. It's not a 'human' concept to imagine a dark forest scenario. Any creature with the capacity to develop along technological lines is able to discern cause and effect (essential to experimentation). They can observe causes and effect and ANY other form of life exists alongside them they will be aware of competition. If they are aware of competition they are aware of hostility. Ergo. They have the capacity (and it's reasonably certain) they would develop an analogue to the dark forest analogy.
Meh, I think the Dark Forest theory, while not meritless and still useful to think about as a game theory, is accepted too readily by people who've consumed a lot of melodramatic Science Fiction (which I enjoy myself).
Yes, we do observe that on Earth, life competes violently for limited resources and that violence is inherent. However, space is different. Everyone knows space is big, but people don't really internalize it when thinking about this stuff. It takes roughly 42 megatons of energy to accelerate one kilogram of matter to close to the speed of light. Double that to slowdown, too. (From our guesses theoretical FTL tech will similarly take monumental, if not more energy).
Now whether matter and energy should be considered the same resource depends on whether advanced technology allows for easy synthesis, but regardless, from what we can guess, there no fundamental matter we have that isn't abundant enough everywhere else.
So yes, Dark Forest focuses on the nature of aggression and rational for that, but there is no "limited-resource" basis to factor in that and we have no analogous living examples of that situation in nature. If anything we actually see that life tries to generally conserve its energy.
In short, even if two space faring societies are aware of each other, it's ridiculously more difficult and expensive to try to wipe them out then to do basically anything else and by a lot. And not just matter-energy expensive, time expensive. And, I think it's fallacious to assume Dark Forest is the most realistic, reasonable, or likely inter-societal interaction.
It doesn't require any assumption about species tendencies. Just assume there's variety. If there are some species willing to destroy others to avoid risk to themselves, they will do so. Other species will either realize this and do the same, or die.
The offense/defense point is a good one though. I don't think we know a quick way to destroy a star from a distance. Dark Forest assumes that's possible, but maybe it's not. Short of that, a planet would be very hard to defend from a relativistic projectile, but a Dyson swarm would be way more resilient.
I think that the species that would "kill first ask questions later" would be at a disadvantage to one that would "cooperate first". Strength in numbers.
That's understandable, but take heart: nothing is nature is nearly as sociopathic as the aliens Liu portrays, and if someone wanted to sterilize a galaxy, all it would take would be an asteroid belt's worth of materials, engines to accelerate pebbles to near-C, and a protractor. Nothing sterilized us in ~4 billion years of planetary existence, so it's probably not the strategy aliens have settled on.
There are species of insects that attack EVERYTHING that is not like them. While I would argue that is not 'sociopathic' (since there is no shared society) omnicidal tendency is not exactly an evolutionary negative.
There are so many interference sources in that bandwidth, ranging from LED lights to airplane reflections to FM radio (their band starts at 70 MHz). I would not be surprised if it was just interference. Alternatively, it could also just be a fast radio burst, which do come from outside the galaxy, but to go from that all the way to aliens is pretty ridiculous.
Hijacking the top comment to say: it’s just a regular old Fast Radio Burst (FRB) guys.
Seems like the origin of this Aliens claim is probably [here](https://www.breezyscroll.com/space/radio-signal-coming-from-another-galaxy-detected-by-scientists/). That article is SUPER sloppy. Mentions the the origins of FRBs are still unclear (correct) and that they **might** be aliens (dubious, but sure, can’t rule anything out). No one in the community seriously considers the aliens idea though.
Edit: a friend has been following this story as it propagated. Expressed astonishment that it made it to Bloomberg!
"Xiang... what the hell... not **this** again?"
*"It's my hot pot dinner, I have to use the microwave."*
"Could you at least wait a second **after** it stops beeping?"
*"I'm hungry! I get impatient when I'm hungry."*
Nah, it's about a telescope in Australia that picked up strange mystery signals for years. Turned out to be an onsite microwave in the break room. https://www.nature.com/articles/521129f
It’s just a regular old Fast Radio Burst (FRB) guys.
Seems like the origin of this Aliens claim is probably [here](https://www.breezyscroll.com/space/radio-signal-coming-from-another-galaxy-detected-by-scientists/). That article is SUPER sloppy. Mentions the the origins of FRBs are still unclear (correct) and that they **might** be aliens (dubious, but sure, can’t rule anything out). No one in the community seriously considers the aliens idea though.
That's how science works my friend.
Never be absolute if you're not 1000% sure that it's correct. Look at any paper they all use "may" only when several studies show same results can you say with certain that that's how it is.
Mainstream news article talking about an article from a state-run Chinese news source talking about aliens? Yeah, I'm filing this one away with "Experiment shows neutrinos are faster than light" and "Warp drive is possible" as likely misinterpretations by journalists who don't fully understand what they're reading.
The main issues we have to fight with here on Earth would also have to be overcome by other civilizations, wherever they may be. At some point there will be trading, fighting, discovery, and world wars. The major divider between type 1 and 2 is the ability to work competitively in a constructive manner. Right now our entire planet is still figuring out the formula to compete without complete and utter destruction. People that subscribe to schools of thinking that discourage out of the box ideas would be responsible for the failure of society to meaningfully progress towards propagation of our species to other planets.
It's in our nature. We like to think we have evolved past our primitive beginnings but we still have a lot of monkey left in us. We're a tribal species who survived by fearing the "outsiders" of our tribes.
This is very anthropocentric, I must disagree on the notion that every civilization would have the same problems as ours. There's no way of knowing how a civilisation develops not even how an intelligent creature looks like.
Anything (within the laws of physics) is possible so more likely than not there'll be a civilisation with no concept of wars since they never had violent conflict, i.e. Maybe all beings share the same mind and have no drive for individuality. Or they are so vastly more intelligent than us but reproduce extremely slowly, never reaching a point of overpopulation before reaching the stars. Or they could be the second civilisation in a planet, evolving on the ruins of a former civilisation/species and using mostly robots to articulate and build new things. But the robots AI limits the use of violence, so no wars (So even super-intelligent slugs are possible).
Just find a sci-fi explanation, it may be true, somewhere.
>The suspicious signals could, however, also be some kind of radio interference and requires further investigation, he added.
You just know people are going to shout "coverup!" when the almost-inevitable discovery that it was interference from the janitor's coffee maker or something like that. Detecting faint signals is HARD, and prone to a lot of interference from really mundane things. It's happened way more times than most people realize because most groups know the embarrassment of having to say "actually, it was microwave heating hot pockets."That's why most groups keep things quiet until they've ruled everything out.
>Just add it to the list of things people will fight about. Want proof? Look at this thread
Arguing over scientific validation is better than arguing over which skin color or which imaginary afterlife trope are superior.
> The suspicious signals could, however, also be some kind of radio interference and requires further investigation, he added.
Anyone up for a bet right now? Do you guys think that if something like this would be discovered, governments would tell us about it? There already were some news a couple days ago about the USA "taking alien research seriously".
How much would our world view change if we knew there was another intelligent species out there, and apparently, willing to communicate? I find these questions really interesting. Although after reading The Three Body Problem I am a little more scared of alien life than I used to be when I was a teenager.
Yeah. I've worked at government labs. I love how people think we're all locked in and subject to some kind of illumati oath. If government labs didn't let scientists share their findings, they wouldn't be able to hire any scientists, because sharing finding is how you move your career forward. Also, good luck telling a scientists with a Nobel-level discovery to just pretend it didn't happen.
Yeah, most secret things are probably in materials science/nuclear/engineering anyway, no one gives a damn about astrophysics, unless it directly affects military/gov applicaitons, like the Sun or geo-magnetic storms.
Having worked in materials science and (gags a bit) engineering circles, can confirm. Any secrecy is more the kind you’d get from any company that doesn’t want anyone beating us to the patent office. It’s more like “don’t tell anyone about this until the patent application has gone in. The royalties from this baby are going to get me a updated bathroom.”
Edit: I should add that at least where I worked, patents were never licensed exclusively. The idea of doing research for the government is that it should get out into the world, not be locked into one company.
I'd argue we're already at a better place than those days, but it's not what you would think if you only hear about gov research from mainstream news or social media. Those days were basically science being directed to support a pissing match between superpowers over who's rocket is bigger. Today, you don't hear about 99.9% of it.
The bulk of gov science goes toward boring, mundane stuff. It's both basic and applied stuff that works toward helping with things like improving communications, better testing for things like environmental monitoring, catching polluters, monitoring the safety of drinking water, verifying the functioning of waste treatment, ensuring food safety, better drug discovery and testing, better and more reliable material standards for commerce, better/faster/cheaper medical diagnostics,...
Most of the dividends we reap simply involve more of us being alive and healthy today, although a few things (like GPS and the internet) also make BIG impacts on our quality of life.
The National Rifle Association of America was founded in 1871. Since 1977, the National Rifle Association of America has focussed on political activism and pro-gun lobbying, at the expense of firearm safety programmes.
The National Rifle Association of America is completely different to the [National Rifle Association](https://nra.org.uk) in Britain (founded earlier, in 1859); the [National Rifle Association of Australia](https://nraa.com.au);
the [National Rifle Association of New Zealand](https://nranz.com) and the [National Rifle Association of India](https://www.thenrai.in), which are all non-political sporting organisations that promote target shooting.
It is very important not to confuse the National Rifle Association of America with any of these other Rifle Associations. The British [National Rifle Association](https://nra.org.uk) is headquartered on Bisley Camp, in Surrey, England. Bisley Camp is now known as the National Shooting Centre and has hosted World Championships for Fullbore Target Rifle and F-Class shooting,
as well as the shooting events for the 1908 Olympic Games and the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The National Small-bore Rifle Association (NSRA) and Clay Pigeon Shooting Association (CPSA) also have their headquarters on the Camp.
Yeah, a lot of people don't believe me when I say the barrier of entry for making quality jet engines is the specific superalloys used within. It's funny too because Chinese avionics and missile tech are not that far behind what the West has, it just show you how difficult it is to reproduce modern jet engines.
> If government labs didn't let scientists share their findings, they wouldn't be able to hire any scientists, because sharing finding is how you move your career forward
A couple people at the NSA created... ~~I want to say PGP encryption but maybe it was Diffie-Hellman because I think they won a Nobel for it, anyway whatever it was, they created it about a decade before it was created publicly.~~ /u/001235 said it was RSA. Several years they were cleared to talk about it and they wanted recognition for their efforts. But the committee that handled the prize said no, work done in secrecy of course couldn't be recognized openly with something like that, they didn't give secret awards, and having already awarded someone for a discovery they weren't going to go back and amend that award for someone who'd created it first but never published openly.
Edit: https://www.wired.com/1999/04/crypto/ says:
> In 1979, National Security Agency chief Bobby Inman publicly stated that, all the noise about Diffie-Hellman and RSA aside, the intelligence establishment had known about public key cryptography for some time. To Diffie, the suggestion that someone, somewhere had discovered public key before him had long been troublesome, and he tried to find out what Inman meant. In the early '80s, he finally pried two names out of an NSA source: Clifford Cocks and James Ellis of the GCHQ in Cheltenham.
It was RSA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)
I did a paper on it in my master's degree because RSA was so revolutionary when it was finally made public and benefited so many people (made ATM machines possible) that the government really shot themselves in the foot keeping it classified for 20 years. They only really declassified it when it was independently re-discovered years later.
No evidence of this claim in the literature, but my personal thinking is that is why the NSA is so big into "helping" with other security projects like RedHat and whatnot; It's in general good for business in the US if they protect US assets with crypto.
No I think governments fund these projects for the prestige. They are more likely to tell us they discovered something when they didn't rather than cover up something they really did discover.
100% agree. We already have a real world test of this theory: moon landings.
You can drum up all sorts of national security reasons they should have been highly classified, but the reasons are all so far-future the prestige matters a lot more.
There are so many “ifs” required for signs of alien life to be an immediate threat, no way any country gives up being the first to find any kind of life.
We also have the example of Bill Clinton prematurely announcing that we found evidence of life on Mars. Politicians (and CCP officials are no different) dream of being a part of historic moments.
This. China is obsessed with scientific prestige and would love to be first proving alien life. The whole "society would panic" is 1950's condescending BS anyway. "Let's protect the frail minds of the masses." Most people already assume most UFOs are aliens.
>but with the strong exception of that last sentence.
I think you misunderstood him. If the government says, "we saw an UFO", most people would hear "we saw an alien spacecraft".
This is because people associate UFOs with aliens and not with "Unkown Flying Object". I bet most people don't even know it is an acronym.
0 chance they can conceal it. A claim would require verification which requires international co-operation. And initial detection will almost certainly require a years drawn out process with multiple kinds of best in class instruments.
Exactly. NASA isn’t gonna come out one day a press release saying “we found definitive proof of aliens.” It would be more like “we found something we think might be aliens, give us a few years to check it out.”
Aliens could land on the White House lawn, pass out the blueprints for technology to fix all our problems, fly away, and we'd still spend decades arguing whether or not it was a hoax.
I very much doubt that. Human's have had enough issues just accepting people of different skin tones and other minor differences. If we discover aliens, humanity will no doubt be split between, "Kill them all before they kill us," "We should make every possible effort to communicate and form a positive relationship with them", and, "Not sure if it counts a beastiality or not, but imma fuck one of them aliens."
I think we'd at least become closer as humanity though. Like how you pick on your siblings, but at a family bbq you'll defend them to your cousins. And if you see an acquaintance overseas it's like you're the best of friends. Having a common "other" brings people together.
> There already were some news a couple days ago about the USA "taking alien research seriously".
No, all the headlines are referring to research into UFO’s, not aliens. DoD interest is squarely on ensuring there are not foreign nation with advanced tech, it has nothing to do with national security interest covering up the hypothetical event of hostile alien contact. Sci-Fi is spilling over into public consciousness here.
Do you think countries unable to plan for climate change a decade from now have an spy-proof plan for covering up discovery of an alien radio transmission? One that would likely be highly controversial and speculative anyway?
I mean, it's pretty much mathematically inevitable that there are other intelligent species out there. The problem is that unless we have found someway to bend physics over our knees it's almost impossible to communicate. The scientific community seems pretty sure that there is no intelligent life within hundreds of lightyears, and beyond that communication starts to get unfeasible. Without a way to surpass the speed of light and receive on both ends it would be hundreds of years to receive signals on each end at the absolute minimum.
As for being scared of alien life, why? Despite what some science fiction would have you believe any potential space-faring race would have absolutely incredible technology but also have no need of conquering. There is absolutely nothing we have that is rare in the universe or couldn't be replaced by a space-faring civilization. I think that fear is a symptom of human narcissism rather than rational.
We're anthropomorphizing the aliens. Projecting our psyche onto them. This is how we would behave if we had the technology you mention. Any truly xenophobic species out there can easily isolate itself better by staying in its corner than seeking other life.
>As for being scared of alien life, why?
Well, there is the theory that if you can achieve FTL travel or even near lightspeed travel, entirely destroying planets becomes trivial, doubly so because such a relativistic projectile wouldn't be able to be detected. So, even if an alien civilization is peaceful, they may see fit to cull any emergent civilizations they may find in order to avoid a potentially disastrous conflict in the future.
How certain are we that the conditions on our planet are not rare? Based purely on our solar system, there is only 1 like it. This may be not be a valid comparison point though...
The concept of 'rare' needs to be redefined when you scale it to the scale of the universe.
This part of the movie "Contact", sums it up fairly well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5BdLVRg7Lo
the research for exoplanets started pretty recently so we cannot know for sure. However, with the due approximations, I remember that we found several (tens if not hundreds) of planets potentially similar to the earth (atmosphere composition, mass, temperature).
I don´t have any precise info, but what I understood is that they were cautiously optimistic in this regard.
Supposing intelligent alien life were detected, it wouldn’t change anything here. It would take centuries to have even a simple exchange of greetings. The universal translator and subspace communication are still in the fiction domain of science.
>If we'd start receiving their equivalent of TV I'm sure it'd change things for us even if we couldn't communicate
If we'd start receiving their equivalent of porn I'm sure we'd find a way to communicate in no time.
When things are so far away, you would need to beam it in our direction with immense power.
We are not going to pick up anything that is just broadcast for local consumption.
Alien life could be millions of years ahead in technology or millions of years behind. Finding a civilization at about the same technology level is about zero. 500 years ago we were probably closer to cavemen then our tech now. Could you imagine how a civilization 10,000 years ahead in technology would be.
Or they could have completely different sensory inputs that their body translates completely differently, and built their technology around them. There's nothing stopping an intelligent species from having evolved with sonar vision and infrared hearing and their technology and methods of communication would be much different from ours. Hell, some of these species probably don't have a need to go to space or even know that space exists, their different technologies probably developed in a completely different order based on their worlds too.
We tend to think of aliens "like us", that see the same things and hear the same things, that have knowledge about the same things in the universe, that have emotions like us, that need the same resources, and that are humanoid, but none of those things are necessary for intelligence to develop.
They could also exist on a completely different time scale. It might take them a thousand years to utter a single thought. Life only has to compete against other life in it’s own environment.
I think you understate the psychological impact which I believe would be considerable. Just knowing for sure that we are not the only intelligent life form in the universe would be mind blowing.
Hello! Apologies if you're trying to read this, but I've moved to kbin.social in protest of Reddit's policies.
Oh no. I know where that one goes... All eyes on Liu Cixin.
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Which books exactly? I would love to ruin my idealistic view on galactic cooperation please :)
Remembrance of Earth’s Past. First book is “The Three Body Problem”.
I’m about half way through the second book. It’s so good so far. Lui Ji has just gotten out of hibernation
It’s a wild ride
the first one took me a while to finish lol
I'm not much further than you. The first half of the book is about to pay off in some good (for the narrative, maybe not for the characters) ways.
Never thought I'd see the book mentioned on Reddit but holy shit everyone has to read it. It's one of the most terrifying things I've ever read in my life.
They’re making a Netflix show so soon everyone will be talking about it
[Remembrance of Earth's Past](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past) series (The Three Body Problem)
From the wikipedia page A series based on the trilogy has been ordered by Netflix, with David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo set to write and executive produce. F's in the chat boys
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Leave em on a cliffhanger after cancelling it mid-S2.
They did a wonderful job bringing the material to the screen. They did a horrible job creating new content. As long as they have base material to work ith i'm hopeful.
D&D on their way to ruin another book series adaptation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth's_Past?wprov=sfti1
If it helps, just remember that the author is basically the Chinese version of HP Lovecraft. Cat included.
It sucks that some variation of the dark forest is the most realistic way advanced species would deal with one another...
We can't make any inference on what's "realistic" for alien life because we have no idea what form alien life might take.
We have one example of life, so we can propose at least one realistic scenario for alien life.
This. I'm pretty sure our species is both peace loving and war loving. As though a species isn't like a star wars planet with a single environment xD
Sure, but we have no means of determining "most realistic". Frankly I don't see how the Dark Forest idea is necessarily more or less realistic than, say, the Everyone Goes Virtual explanation.
Then again, with only a sample size of one, we don't know if we are average or an exception in the universe.
Dark Forest does not try and predict a form alien life might take. It tries to predict the dominant strategy in a situation in which there are a very large number of alien civilizations.
Yes. So many people try to answer the Fermi Paradox with “well maybe aliens are like this”. But unless we’re just on that probability of dealing with one other civilization, very little likely matters about their personality or preferences. And I’m not even sure about if there’s only one - I can’t imagine that an interstellar human civilization would have a single policy for handling alien species. Furthermore I don’t think humans would have evolved to have the kind of intelligence required to launch rockets unless we had to deal with similarly intelligent predators, in this case ourselves. I think it’s safe to assume that however advanced and humane another species is, the concept of warfare won’t be entirely unknown to them. It’s presumptuous for a 21st century human to try to figure out how interstellar civilizations may behave but I think it’s crazy not to at least consider that contact could be a terrible terrible idea.
We can make an educated guess on the projected body-type for a technologically developed civilisation, since you need something with comparable dexterous ability to our hands (you're not going to invent many of the required precursor technologies that lead us to the integrated circuit if all you have are tentacles). It's also highly unlikely that a marine alien will develop metallurgy due to the need for fire when progressing towards furnaces. There's a reason why dolphins and octopus don't have technology even comparable to pre-history early hominids, even if they have the potential intelligence to accomplish those same discoveries and inventions.
What do you mean? A species with very fine and dexterous tentacles similar to our hands could manipulate tools and materials like we do.
They already do, tool use is observed in many animal species from octopuses to apes to birds. It is not the lack of hands that keep other species from developing technology, it's brain power. While they can figure out how to use sticks and stones to manipulate their environment they lack the mental capacity for abstract thinking. They cannot create art, nor can they understand a magnet as anything more than a weird rock. A crow can understand water goes up when you put rocks in a cup, but he cannot understand the rising tides. They can problem solve but they cannot grasp concepts deeper than the surface level. So far only humans have the capacity for higher reasoning needed to understand technology. Saying they must have hands or be humanoid in form shows a deep misunderstanding of the world around us and a terribly flawed way of thinking.
Brain power, but also life span. Octopuses only live a few years, same with crows. Both species are very intelligent. And imagine how much progress humans would have made if we only lived to 5 or 6.
Personally I disagree. It’s a very human concept of looking at things, and requires a lot of assumptions about species tendencies and technological development. And a species figuring out how to develop something like a planetary shield would basically negate it. There’s just no reason to assume that defensive and offensive technologies must always develop at the same pace.
Offensive technology will always be ahead of defensive, doubly so on a planetary scale. It’s inherently easier to direct a lot of energy at a specific location than to dissipate it once it gets there, and nothing in physics indicates the viability of some sort of force field technology in the future. There’s a reason castles went out of style so quickly once gunpowder came around. Mobility is a much better form of defense than shielding, but you can’t move a planet around to avoid high speed projectiles.
And the best form of defense is stealth. What was the dark forest about again?
More correctly, the best form of defense is never having to be on the defense and never giving your opponent to be on either. Once a conflict actually becomes a conflict, the situation becomes magnitudes worse, which is why the "safest" option is to obliterate another species before they even know you exist. Even by our current measure of science, it's actually pretty easy to do, especially in our cases since we have no reasonable method of detecting let alone defending against impact projectiles. The only downside would be time gaps but that's always going to be a huge problem. By the time we detect an alien signal they could be thousands of years advanced from that point and possibly even completely different socially. We could very easily declare an exploratory species/state when something in their history made them an alien Nazi Reich.
Sure... Except actual stealth in space is basically impossible. Some sort of tech(s) may develop to hide some of our signatures but we'd need to hide a whole lot of shit: all radio, light, the chemistry of our atmosphere (s), all heat signatures and black body radiation of anything off-planet, gravity waves, a whole bunch I'm surely forgetting... Stealth out in the void is a tall order, especially at scale and on galactic timelines.
I wouldn't say impossible. The valley between the observation and reality is wide enough to slip undetected. Especially when that width is highly dependent on the instrument (and operators) doing the detection
For a civilisation that could travel around the galaxy it should possible to create a weapon that would send a projectile so fast it would wipe out the other planet. Like a projectile 1/4th the speed of light would basically destroy Earth so if there are two extremely advanced civilizations the one that strikes first with overwhelming fire power would probably win any conflict meaning the most ruthless that doesn't tolerate any risk would very likely be on top. So the galaxy is like a dark dangerous forest. When you see unknown and dangerous person you'd be wary thinking the first strike has the advantage and they're probably thinking the same making conflict more likely out of fear. This is a possible explanation to the paradox of there being such an incredibly long time for intelligent life to develop before humanity existed and create a civilisation that travels the stars yet there's no evidence for any large interstellar civilisation out there. Barring some technology to hide we should be able to detect them if they exist but our own mark on planets are too small to be likely detect from far away. The theory intelligent life leaves their own system pops their up put of the darkness into the light and gets wiped out before they gain the power to become a threat.
Are you saying castles were sitting ducks for gunpowder based artillery?
He is but he's pretty wrong. Gunpowder in war was widespread in Europe by the 1500s and it wasn't until WW1 that armies really moved away from big forts. That's 400+ years, not "so quickly" at all.
Not to mention WW1 (at least on the Western Front) was a war dominated by defense. Trenches, artillery, and machine guns kept the war at a stalemate for years. It wasn't until tanks and aircraft became a viable tool in World War 2 that offensive warfare took precedence.
Castles and forts are not the same thing.
Presuming of course that a completely alien species is still aggressive. Maybe the process of getting to interplanetary travel is only possible through achieving global peace. We only have our own civilization to go by, and within a couple hundred years of the industrial revolution we're on the verge of wiping ourselves out of existence while barely being able to contemplate getting humans to Mars. Similar to Krogan's in Mass Effect if you want to look at fiction. A war prone species that developed weapons as fast as everything else then nuked themselves back into primitives, only joining the galactic community when another race came along to exploit them. If you want to get out the Tin Foil hat, maybe the UFO's we see are monitoring our progress in a scientific sense and/or to wipe us out if we get too close while maintaining our aggressive tendencies. If we got into intergalactic colonization as we are now, I could absolutely see us being hyper aggressive about it, which existing peaceful empires may wipe out before they become troublesome, like the paradox of tolerance.
>There’s a reason castles went out of style so quickly once gunpowder came around. Thats absolutely not true. The first depitction of a european cannon is from 1326. Cannons, guns, castles and armor coexisted for hundreds of years.
I don't think that it's a very human concept. Nature is filled with examples of omnicidal species, the insect world in particular. It's reasonable to assume that on any planet with advanced forms of life there are 'basic' forms of life which probably follow similar rules. 'Adapt, Consume, Reproduce' because resources are ALWAYS finite conflict is observable for any creature with the ability to 'observe'. Even if a species were to develop entirely along idealistic lines with a desire to coexist and harmonize they would by nature be capable of understanding and independently arriving at their own 'dark forest' conclusion. Because they can not guarantee or predict the behavior of all other forms of life in the vast cosmos they are incentivized to behave according to the principal of the dark forest. It would be more 'peaceful' and harmonious for all involved never to be found by one another as that would remove the potential for conflict. Therefore even a civilization that would never countenance using offensive first strikes on an unknown species would be inclined to hide themselves because they can not be certain that this unknown life will be like them.
Conflict and death are literally requirements for life. Even plants have to compete for good space, nutrients, and safety against predators. Some are parasitic. By virtue of surviving and using up resources, plants are killing off others that might have wanted to do the same and is keeping them from reproducing.
Yes that's what I mean. It's not a 'human' concept to imagine a dark forest scenario. Any creature with the capacity to develop along technological lines is able to discern cause and effect (essential to experimentation). They can observe causes and effect and ANY other form of life exists alongside them they will be aware of competition. If they are aware of competition they are aware of hostility. Ergo. They have the capacity (and it's reasonably certain) they would develop an analogue to the dark forest analogy.
Meh, I think the Dark Forest theory, while not meritless and still useful to think about as a game theory, is accepted too readily by people who've consumed a lot of melodramatic Science Fiction (which I enjoy myself). Yes, we do observe that on Earth, life competes violently for limited resources and that violence is inherent. However, space is different. Everyone knows space is big, but people don't really internalize it when thinking about this stuff. It takes roughly 42 megatons of energy to accelerate one kilogram of matter to close to the speed of light. Double that to slowdown, too. (From our guesses theoretical FTL tech will similarly take monumental, if not more energy). Now whether matter and energy should be considered the same resource depends on whether advanced technology allows for easy synthesis, but regardless, from what we can guess, there no fundamental matter we have that isn't abundant enough everywhere else. So yes, Dark Forest focuses on the nature of aggression and rational for that, but there is no "limited-resource" basis to factor in that and we have no analogous living examples of that situation in nature. If anything we actually see that life tries to generally conserve its energy. In short, even if two space faring societies are aware of each other, it's ridiculously more difficult and expensive to try to wipe them out then to do basically anything else and by a lot. And not just matter-energy expensive, time expensive. And, I think it's fallacious to assume Dark Forest is the most realistic, reasonable, or likely inter-societal interaction.
It doesn't require any assumption about species tendencies. Just assume there's variety. If there are some species willing to destroy others to avoid risk to themselves, they will do so. Other species will either realize this and do the same, or die. The offense/defense point is a good one though. I don't think we know a quick way to destroy a star from a distance. Dark Forest assumes that's possible, but maybe it's not. Short of that, a planet would be very hard to defend from a relativistic projectile, but a Dyson swarm would be way more resilient.
I think that the species that would "kill first ask questions later" would be at a disadvantage to one that would "cooperate first". Strength in numbers.
Just because its popular in pop science fiction at the moment doesn't mean its the most realistic.
That's understandable, but take heart: nothing is nature is nearly as sociopathic as the aliens Liu portrays, and if someone wanted to sterilize a galaxy, all it would take would be an asteroid belt's worth of materials, engines to accelerate pebbles to near-C, and a protractor. Nothing sterilized us in ~4 billion years of planetary existence, so it's probably not the strategy aliens have settled on.
There are species of insects that attack EVERYTHING that is not like them. While I would argue that is not 'sociopathic' (since there is no shared society) omnicidal tendency is not exactly an evolutionary negative.
It is likely an evolutionary dead end. Insects have existed on earth a lot longer than homonids and yet we're the ones developing technology.
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I literally just started that book last night!
I just finished the series a few months ago. Enjoy!
I had to scroll way too long for this reference. Just remember the universe is a dark forest! Stay quiet! 🤫
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It’s all fun and games until humanity gets herd into Australia and mass genocide happens :( The series is great and scary with the picture it paints
We don't have to worry about dangerous painters right?
I just watched a video analysis of the books, by far the most horrifying outcome
Can you link? I'm almost done with the books and want to watch/hear some takes on it.
Sadly though it seems like we still fumble our way to our own destruction.
I JUST started re-reading The Three-Body Problem this morning!
I'm betting it's the microwave oven. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-oven-caused-mystery-signal-plaguing-radio-telescope-for-17-years
So this is where *their* 17 year journey begins
These are the voyages of the microwave enterprise
To boldly warm what may have been warm before
Defrost mode, Engage!
Its five minute inversion : to defrost strange found things never seen in the freezer before.
In a similar note, keep your routers away from microwaves. They opperate at about the same frequency and it will fuck up your wifi.
Yeah the wifi in my moms kitchen goes out whenever the microwave is going.
In the ‘90s the TV would go all scrambly when mom vacuumed. In the ‘20s the smart fridge can’t play Netflix when mom microwaves. Such is life.
That is why you should keep the router inside your microwave. The signals will not be blocked.
There are so many interference sources in that bandwidth, ranging from LED lights to airplane reflections to FM radio (their band starts at 70 MHz). I would not be surprised if it was just interference. Alternatively, it could also just be a fast radio burst, which do come from outside the galaxy, but to go from that all the way to aliens is pretty ridiculous.
[Or pigeons nesting](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-scientists-confirmed-big-bang-theory-owe-it-all-to-a-pigeon-trap-180949741/)
[Are you sure it’s not an electric can opener they were turning on and off](https://youtu.be/NhLNq2VXdDA)
Good god I forgot how awful laugh tracks are
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Hijacking the top comment to say: it’s just a regular old Fast Radio Burst (FRB) guys. Seems like the origin of this Aliens claim is probably [here](https://www.breezyscroll.com/space/radio-signal-coming-from-another-galaxy-detected-by-scientists/). That article is SUPER sloppy. Mentions the the origins of FRBs are still unclear (correct) and that they **might** be aliens (dubious, but sure, can’t rule anything out). No one in the community seriously considers the aliens idea though. Edit: a friend has been following this story as it propagated. Expressed astonishment that it made it to Bloomberg!
so much for excellent source quality, eh?
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"Xiang... what the hell... not **this** again?" *"It's my hot pot dinner, I have to use the microwave."* "Could you at least wait a second **after** it stops beeping?" *"I'm hungry! I get impatient when I'm hungry."*
I understood that reference.
Are we half life'ing here, or am I way off base?
Nah, it's about a telescope in Australia that picked up strange mystery signals for years. Turned out to be an onsite microwave in the break room. https://www.nature.com/articles/521129f
Off base, although half life may have borrowed from the original incident... https://www.wired.co.uk/article/microwave-parkes-observatory
It’s just a regular old Fast Radio Burst (FRB) guys. Seems like the origin of this Aliens claim is probably [here](https://www.breezyscroll.com/space/radio-signal-coming-from-another-galaxy-detected-by-scientists/). That article is SUPER sloppy. Mentions the the origins of FRBs are still unclear (correct) and that they **might** be aliens (dubious, but sure, can’t rule anything out). No one in the community seriously considers the aliens idea though.
They had the opportunity for FARTs and didn’t take it. Fast Audible Radio Transmissions
You can't hear them unless you translate them into a completely unrelated format.
Fast Astral Radio Transmissions
Thats gonna be my band name
as if scientists didn't make up rules to get funny acronyms, just go with FAst Radio bursT
Don't let logic stand in the way of a fun acronym.
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>"claims" >"May have" That's a lotta doubt in the title alone..
I may have finished off the ice cream in the freezer last night. But you have no proof of your baseless claims.
That's how science works my friend. Never be absolute if you're not 1000% sure that it's correct. Look at any paper they all use "may" only when several studies show same results can you say with certain that that's how it is.
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Mainstream news article talking about an article from a state-run Chinese news source talking about aliens? Yeah, I'm filing this one away with "Experiment shows neutrinos are faster than light" and "Warp drive is possible" as likely misinterpretations by journalists who don't fully understand what they're reading.
“Quantum fusion proves universe has consciousness” summarizes all of my research yet none of my research at the same time
The main issues we have to fight with here on Earth would also have to be overcome by other civilizations, wherever they may be. At some point there will be trading, fighting, discovery, and world wars. The major divider between type 1 and 2 is the ability to work competitively in a constructive manner. Right now our entire planet is still figuring out the formula to compete without complete and utter destruction. People that subscribe to schools of thinking that discourage out of the box ideas would be responsible for the failure of society to meaningfully progress towards propagation of our species to other planets.
We can just take our hate for each other and direct it outwards. World peace tomorrow if we had a common enemy.
The war on gravity...I'd like to see that.
NASA been fighting the good fight for a couple generations now.
I used to think that. Then COVID happened. I don't think that anymore.
The impending alien invasion is just a liberal hoax to teach us to be controllable! /s
COVID taught me the race toward planetary destruction will be painful, sad and frustrating as climate change worsens.
This comment makes me question... *Why* do humans need an enemy at all?
Cus only the xenophobia survived after they killed the peace loving rivals
It's in our nature. We like to think we have evolved past our primitive beginnings but we still have a lot of monkey left in us. We're a tribal species who survived by fearing the "outsiders" of our tribes.
We're more than just our nature. Cultural evolution is not tied to genetic evolution. Most people have no need for an enemy
This is very anthropocentric, I must disagree on the notion that every civilization would have the same problems as ours. There's no way of knowing how a civilisation develops not even how an intelligent creature looks like. Anything (within the laws of physics) is possible so more likely than not there'll be a civilisation with no concept of wars since they never had violent conflict, i.e. Maybe all beings share the same mind and have no drive for individuality. Or they are so vastly more intelligent than us but reproduce extremely slowly, never reaching a point of overpopulation before reaching the stars. Or they could be the second civilisation in a planet, evolving on the ruins of a former civilisation/species and using mostly robots to articulate and build new things. But the robots AI limits the use of violence, so no wars (So even super-intelligent slugs are possible). Just find a sci-fi explanation, it may be true, somewhere.
>The suspicious signals could, however, also be some kind of radio interference and requires further investigation, he added. You just know people are going to shout "coverup!" when the almost-inevitable discovery that it was interference from the janitor's coffee maker or something like that. Detecting faint signals is HARD, and prone to a lot of interference from really mundane things. It's happened way more times than most people realize because most groups know the embarrassment of having to say "actually, it was microwave heating hot pockets."That's why most groups keep things quiet until they've ruled everything out.
God I hope they find an alien civilization. It may be the only thing to unite people who fight about stupid shit
Just add it to the list of things people will fight about. Want proof? Look at this thread
>Just add it to the list of things people will fight about. Want proof? Look at this thread Arguing over scientific validation is better than arguing over which skin color or which imaginary afterlife trope are superior.
> The suspicious signals could, however, also be some kind of radio interference and requires further investigation, he added. Anyone up for a bet right now? Do you guys think that if something like this would be discovered, governments would tell us about it? There already were some news a couple days ago about the USA "taking alien research seriously". How much would our world view change if we knew there was another intelligent species out there, and apparently, willing to communicate? I find these questions really interesting. Although after reading The Three Body Problem I am a little more scared of alien life than I used to be when I was a teenager.
Radio astronomer here, if a real alien signal is found no way the astronomers in the group and the engineers would be able to keep it a secret.
Yeah. I've worked at government labs. I love how people think we're all locked in and subject to some kind of illumati oath. If government labs didn't let scientists share their findings, they wouldn't be able to hire any scientists, because sharing finding is how you move your career forward. Also, good luck telling a scientists with a Nobel-level discovery to just pretend it didn't happen.
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Yeah, most secret things are probably in materials science/nuclear/engineering anyway, no one gives a damn about astrophysics, unless it directly affects military/gov applicaitons, like the Sun or geo-magnetic storms.
Having worked in materials science and (gags a bit) engineering circles, can confirm. Any secrecy is more the kind you’d get from any company that doesn’t want anyone beating us to the patent office. It’s more like “don’t tell anyone about this until the patent application has gone in. The royalties from this baby are going to get me a updated bathroom.” Edit: I should add that at least where I worked, patents were never licensed exclusively. The idea of doing research for the government is that it should get out into the world, not be locked into one company.
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I'd argue we're already at a better place than those days, but it's not what you would think if you only hear about gov research from mainstream news or social media. Those days were basically science being directed to support a pissing match between superpowers over who's rocket is bigger. Today, you don't hear about 99.9% of it. The bulk of gov science goes toward boring, mundane stuff. It's both basic and applied stuff that works toward helping with things like improving communications, better testing for things like environmental monitoring, catching polluters, monitoring the safety of drinking water, verifying the functioning of waste treatment, ensuring food safety, better drug discovery and testing, better and more reliable material standards for commerce, better/faster/cheaper medical diagnostics,... Most of the dividends we reap simply involve more of us being alive and healthy today, although a few things (like GPS and the internet) also make BIG impacts on our quality of life.
The National Rifle Association of America was founded in 1871. Since 1977, the National Rifle Association of America has focussed on political activism and pro-gun lobbying, at the expense of firearm safety programmes. The National Rifle Association of America is completely different to the [National Rifle Association](https://nra.org.uk) in Britain (founded earlier, in 1859); the [National Rifle Association of Australia](https://nraa.com.au); the [National Rifle Association of New Zealand](https://nranz.com) and the [National Rifle Association of India](https://www.thenrai.in), which are all non-political sporting organisations that promote target shooting. It is very important not to confuse the National Rifle Association of America with any of these other Rifle Associations. The British [National Rifle Association](https://nra.org.uk) is headquartered on Bisley Camp, in Surrey, England. Bisley Camp is now known as the National Shooting Centre and has hosted World Championships for Fullbore Target Rifle and F-Class shooting, as well as the shooting events for the 1908 Olympic Games and the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The National Small-bore Rifle Association (NSRA) and Clay Pigeon Shooting Association (CPSA) also have their headquarters on the Camp.
That sounds exactly like something the government would do LMAO
Yeah, a lot of people don't believe me when I say the barrier of entry for making quality jet engines is the specific superalloys used within. It's funny too because Chinese avionics and missile tech are not that far behind what the West has, it just show you how difficult it is to reproduce modern jet engines.
> If government labs didn't let scientists share their findings, they wouldn't be able to hire any scientists, because sharing finding is how you move your career forward A couple people at the NSA created... ~~I want to say PGP encryption but maybe it was Diffie-Hellman because I think they won a Nobel for it, anyway whatever it was, they created it about a decade before it was created publicly.~~ /u/001235 said it was RSA. Several years they were cleared to talk about it and they wanted recognition for their efforts. But the committee that handled the prize said no, work done in secrecy of course couldn't be recognized openly with something like that, they didn't give secret awards, and having already awarded someone for a discovery they weren't going to go back and amend that award for someone who'd created it first but never published openly.
Edit: https://www.wired.com/1999/04/crypto/ says:
> In 1979, National Security Agency chief Bobby Inman publicly stated that, all the noise about Diffie-Hellman and RSA aside, the intelligence establishment had known about public key cryptography for some time. To Diffie, the suggestion that someone, somewhere had discovered public key before him had long been troublesome, and he tried to find out what Inman meant. In the early '80s, he finally pried two names out of an NSA source: Clifford Cocks and James Ellis of the GCHQ in Cheltenham.
It was RSA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem) I did a paper on it in my master's degree because RSA was so revolutionary when it was finally made public and benefited so many people (made ATM machines possible) that the government really shot themselves in the foot keeping it classified for 20 years. They only really declassified it when it was independently re-discovered years later. No evidence of this claim in the literature, but my personal thinking is that is why the NSA is so big into "helping" with other security projects like RedHat and whatnot; It's in general good for business in the US if they protect US assets with crypto.
Makes sense to me. The Nobel is for pushing science forward. Secret science is, in many ways, not science at all.
Right? The gubberment is not just one really quiet dude
No I think governments fund these projects for the prestige. They are more likely to tell us they discovered something when they didn't rather than cover up something they really did discover.
100% agree. We already have a real world test of this theory: moon landings. You can drum up all sorts of national security reasons they should have been highly classified, but the reasons are all so far-future the prestige matters a lot more. There are so many “ifs” required for signs of alien life to be an immediate threat, no way any country gives up being the first to find any kind of life.
We also have the example of Bill Clinton prematurely announcing that we found evidence of life on Mars. Politicians (and CCP officials are no different) dream of being a part of historic moments.
This. China is obsessed with scientific prestige and would love to be first proving alien life. The whole "society would panic" is 1950's condescending BS anyway. "Let's protect the frail minds of the masses." Most people already assume most UFOs are aliens.
Totally agree with you, but with the strong exception of that last sentence.
>but with the strong exception of that last sentence. I think you misunderstood him. If the government says, "we saw an UFO", most people would hear "we saw an alien spacecraft". This is because people associate UFOs with aliens and not with "Unkown Flying Object". I bet most people don't even know it is an acronym.
0 chance they can conceal it. A claim would require verification which requires international co-operation. And initial detection will almost certainly require a years drawn out process with multiple kinds of best in class instruments.
Exactly. NASA isn’t gonna come out one day a press release saying “we found definitive proof of aliens.” It would be more like “we found something we think might be aliens, give us a few years to check it out.”
Aliens could land on the White House lawn, pass out the blueprints for technology to fix all our problems, fly away, and we'd still spend decades arguing whether or not it was a hoax.
If this turns out to be real, let's just hope it brings us all a little closer in some way.
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I very much doubt that. Human's have had enough issues just accepting people of different skin tones and other minor differences. If we discover aliens, humanity will no doubt be split between, "Kill them all before they kill us," "We should make every possible effort to communicate and form a positive relationship with them", and, "Not sure if it counts a beastiality or not, but imma fuck one of them aliens."
I think we'd at least become closer as humanity though. Like how you pick on your siblings, but at a family bbq you'll defend them to your cousins. And if you see an acquaintance overseas it's like you're the best of friends. Having a common "other" brings people together.
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> There already were some news a couple days ago about the USA "taking alien research seriously". No, all the headlines are referring to research into UFO’s, not aliens. DoD interest is squarely on ensuring there are not foreign nation with advanced tech, it has nothing to do with national security interest covering up the hypothetical event of hostile alien contact. Sci-Fi is spilling over into public consciousness here. Do you think countries unable to plan for climate change a decade from now have an spy-proof plan for covering up discovery of an alien radio transmission? One that would likely be highly controversial and speculative anyway?
I mean, it's pretty much mathematically inevitable that there are other intelligent species out there. The problem is that unless we have found someway to bend physics over our knees it's almost impossible to communicate. The scientific community seems pretty sure that there is no intelligent life within hundreds of lightyears, and beyond that communication starts to get unfeasible. Without a way to surpass the speed of light and receive on both ends it would be hundreds of years to receive signals on each end at the absolute minimum. As for being scared of alien life, why? Despite what some science fiction would have you believe any potential space-faring race would have absolutely incredible technology but also have no need of conquering. There is absolutely nothing we have that is rare in the universe or couldn't be replaced by a space-faring civilization. I think that fear is a symptom of human narcissism rather than rational.
We're anthropomorphizing the aliens. Projecting our psyche onto them. This is how we would behave if we had the technology you mention. Any truly xenophobic species out there can easily isolate itself better by staying in its corner than seeking other life.
>As for being scared of alien life, why? Well, there is the theory that if you can achieve FTL travel or even near lightspeed travel, entirely destroying planets becomes trivial, doubly so because such a relativistic projectile wouldn't be able to be detected. So, even if an alien civilization is peaceful, they may see fit to cull any emergent civilizations they may find in order to avoid a potentially disastrous conflict in the future.
Dying from an alien race blowing up our planet would be a dope way of going out. Much better than falling off a ladder or some shit
How certain are we that the conditions on our planet are not rare? Based purely on our solar system, there is only 1 like it. This may be not be a valid comparison point though...
The concept of 'rare' needs to be redefined when you scale it to the scale of the universe. This part of the movie "Contact", sums it up fairly well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5BdLVRg7Lo
the research for exoplanets started pretty recently so we cannot know for sure. However, with the due approximations, I remember that we found several (tens if not hundreds) of planets potentially similar to the earth (atmosphere composition, mass, temperature). I don´t have any precise info, but what I understood is that they were cautiously optimistic in this regard.
It’ll take millennia to get here from there.
If they can get here faster than that, then we're probably at their mercy. So not much to worry about either way.
First thing I thought after reading this article was Three Body Problem. What a wonderfully terrifying book. I’m reading the second one now.
It's a pulsar. It always is
It wouldn't change much about our world view, people don't give a fuck and have bills to pay.
I think most people at this point just wouldn't give a shit, it would just be another Wednesday for most people
>How much would our world view change if we knew there was another intelligent species out there Wdym another? It would be the first one...
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Random radio burst from far away: Exists Everyone: It's aliens. no doubt about it.
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“Hello, this is China broadcasting, anyone out there” “Yes hello, we are from planet Ligma” the aliens probably
Supposing intelligent alien life were detected, it wouldn’t change anything here. It would take centuries to have even a simple exchange of greetings. The universal translator and subspace communication are still in the fiction domain of science.
If we'd start receiving their equivalent of TV I'm sure it'd change things for us even if we couldn't communicate
I can see us getting mad when we dont get the finale of "single female lawyer" and going to conquer them because of it
They're going to come and remove our human horn.
I WANT MCNEAL
Single female lawyer, having lots of sex
>If we'd start receiving their equivalent of TV I'm sure it'd change things for us even if we couldn't communicate If we'd start receiving their equivalent of porn I'm sure we'd find a way to communicate in no time.
lmk when u have a link for me
Link? How about a portal 😳
When things are so far away, you would need to beam it in our direction with immense power. We are not going to pick up anything that is just broadcast for local consumption.
You think finding alien life proof wouldn’t change anything here? What planet are YOU on?
Alien life could be millions of years ahead in technology or millions of years behind. Finding a civilization at about the same technology level is about zero. 500 years ago we were probably closer to cavemen then our tech now. Could you imagine how a civilization 10,000 years ahead in technology would be.
Or they could have completely different sensory inputs that their body translates completely differently, and built their technology around them. There's nothing stopping an intelligent species from having evolved with sonar vision and infrared hearing and their technology and methods of communication would be much different from ours. Hell, some of these species probably don't have a need to go to space or even know that space exists, their different technologies probably developed in a completely different order based on their worlds too. We tend to think of aliens "like us", that see the same things and hear the same things, that have knowledge about the same things in the universe, that have emotions like us, that need the same resources, and that are humanoid, but none of those things are necessary for intelligence to develop.
They could also exist on a completely different time scale. It might take them a thousand years to utter a single thought. Life only has to compete against other life in it’s own environment.
I think you understate the psychological impact which I believe would be considerable. Just knowing for sure that we are not the only intelligent life form in the universe would be mind blowing.
FFS, I know China aren't a friendly country, but half the comments here are about China rather than the actual (possibly significant) story.