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Why We'll Never Meet Aliens
iggychaos writes "The idea that aliens will come visit us is fundamentally flawed. Paul Tyma ponders the technology that would be required for such an event and examines how evolution of that technology would preclude any reason to actually make the trip. He writes, 'Twenty years ago if I asked you how many feet were in a mile (and you didn't know) you could go to a library and look it up. Ten years ago, you could go to a computer and google it. Today, you can literally ask your phone. It's not a stretch at all with the advent of wearable computing that coming soon - I can ask you that question and you'll instantly answer. ... How would you change if you had instant brain-level access to all information. How would you change if you were twice as smart as you are now. How about ten times as smart? (Don't answer, truth is, you're not smart enough to know). Now, let's leap ahead and think about what that looks like in 100 years. Or 1000. Or whenever it is you'll think we'd have the technology to travel to another solar system. We'd be a scant remnant of what a human looks like today. ... The question of why aliens might 'want to come here' is probably fundamentally flawed because we are forming that question from our current (tiny) viewpoint. The word 'want' might not apply at all to someone 1000 times smarter than us."
It's Steve Urkle.
Oh I thought the fact that they wouldn't come over was personal.
I mean seriously, If i wanted this I would talk to my friend on mushrooms. This is not new in any sense of the word.
The dolphins and mice demonstrate that they do want to come. ;-)
This train of thought sounds like how people in the early 20th century predicted flying cars and bases on the Moon by the year 2000. Transportation was the driving force of technology then and people extrapolated and came up with these crazy ideas. Now we are in the information age and people are extrapolating computers implanted in our brains. I don't think it will happen.
"We have no idea how supertechnologically enhanced superscientific aliens would think. THEREFORE, we can be sure that we'll never meet any aliens. Because we don't understand anything of their thought processes. So we can say with certainty they won't find it logical to make the trip."
I'm really not interested in opinion pieces (especially ones that ramble on as much as this one) and would like to filter them off my front page.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Maybe they'll do it out of compassion, to find someone to help to?
The question of why aliens might 'want to come here' is probably fundamentally flawed because we are forming that question from our current (tiny) viewpoint. The word 'want' might not apply at all to someone 1000 times smarter than us.
Who cut the cheese? This can so easily be turned on it's head. It would be just as easy to posit that said aliens, because of their intelligence and enlightened nature, have made it their life's purpose to seek out primitive cultures and assist in their evolution.
Or seek out life forms and destroy their plants. Sort of the galactic equivalent of driving down the highway and shooting road signs. Highly populated, spherical road signs, with significant mass (and gravity).
We aliens are spending tons of money to find really stupid (no intelligence) bacteria on Mars. Why wouldn't some super smart aliens want to find us?
Skimmed TFA - not worth more of my time.
Going back down to that STEM article ..
...because we taste delicious
people left Europe to come to the new world- first for GOLD, gathered under the excuse of converting the natives to Christianity, and later because people couldn't stand their proselytizing any more.
"Any soul is worth saving, at least to a preacher".
It is not a matter of IF but WHEN. i.e. When is the human race going to grow up and look outside their myopic & arrogant view that they are the most important lifeform on the universe? Oh that's right, they finally have proof.
Contact has _already_ happened. It is just NOT allowed on the global scale - yet.
If I'm wrong I'll be just another idiot ranting that you won't remember. :-)
But if I'm right you'll be more interested in knowing that the limits to knowledge are not artificially limited by Science; there is another path to Knowledge.
Beside, the real interesting question is not "Are we alone?" but "Why the hell do we look so similar??"
Earth has more than a bunch of rocks minerals and elements. there are surely unique organisms here not only that there is your culture and inventions. There's many ways to do things or to express ourselves, I don't think any advanced civilization has already thought of all those things. Most likely they are just as screwed up as we are and pick the first idea that works... not always the best.... so they would be in the market for different stuff, styles and ways of thinking that can be easily exported.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
While we're pondering how advanced or 'cybernetic' our apelike species is becoming and what that implies for alien contact, the Vogons are drafting legislation to setup a committee to analyze the ramifications of setting up a committee to analyze the ramifications of building a space-highway through the Solar system. We're not going to be able to ponder much longer.
Just a few hundred years, given how lightning fast committees are.
when you can stay here and play Angry Birds?
I read this article in Andy Rooney's voice (though I'm quite sure it would work in Seinfeld's as well)
"and another thing, just WHO ARE these ALIENS anyway?"
I think I need a time out
*fumbles with 12 oz soda can because it's too much*
crazy dynamite monkey
How can we ever understand how aliens think if we have articles like this making our entire species dumber by the letter?
The author of this opinion piece claims that people 1000 times smarter than we currently are might not want the same things we want (such as meeting aliens), but since he is not 1000 times smarter, he really isn't in the position to tell us.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Duh. If you can't predict then you can't say what they WON'T do.
The reason why aliens would come and visit are numerous. Here are the top 3 that I thought of while reading his poorly thought out article.
1. They are running out of space on their home world, and earth has some nice views, good water, nice temperature. Perfect place to raise a family without bumping into your neighbor (i.e. they don't want to steal just our gold, they want to steal everything)
2. They want to learn about alternate biologies cultures, psychology, etc.
3. Religion. We must spread the word of Latter Day Saints/Allah/etc. etc.
The main problem is the fool thinks the future will be just like the recent past, rather than the distant pass. He assumes our technology will continue to grow dramatically, rather than incrementally.
Right now, the most logical way to do star travel is to increase lifespans to 200+ years and develop a nice cryo-statis type thing.
Which means travel is possible in just about 80 years of technology growth or so, (at least to Alpha Centauri) plus another 100/200 years of cry-sleep transit.
The original article was written by someone that saw way too many bad sci-fi shows and think the most dramatic, silly inventions are likely, and that we/aliens will wait till everything is all settled till we go exploring.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
We'd still have the desire to explore, to go places, to see new things, to go where no one has gone before. To actually have an experience. No matter how smart I'll become, I will always prefer exploring a cave system to reading about exploring a cave system, let alone another planet, especially one with aliens on it. I also like the lack of awareness displayed by the author about his own argument. If you're going to claim claims about the future are inherently untrustworthy because of our limited viewpoint and intelligence, don't follow it up with a claim about the future.
You've made the running for the most assinine Slashdot submission of the year.
We're hundreds of times smarter than the ancient Greeks and Romans -- and by "smarter," I mean we have vastly greater information available to us. And yet, I'd jump at the chance to go visit them in their time and place. Why? Because I think they were still pretty sharp, given their constraints. They did some pretty impressive stuff. Additionally, human nature makes for interesting drama, regardless of the level of technology. And that would map on reasonably well to any alien civilization capable of interstellar travel and communication with us. In other words, they'd have to have some order to their society, which we could learn in time. They'd likely have some form of metaphysical belief structure, and possibly several competing structures. They have to communicate somehow. They have to have advanced understandings of math and science. These are all things we could learn from them, or at least about them, just as an ancient Roman could learn to use a tablet computer, if they really wanted to. An advanced civilization would know that we are capable of advancing, and that would make us interesting to them.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
1. we cant even universally handle different colors or sexes of our same species, its absurd to think we'd approach aliens any differently.
2. we still use and condone physical violence at all social levels to solve problems despite it being scientifically ineffective and counterproductive.
3. no ones proven Gary Busey is not in fact an alien lifeform
4. it is statistically improbable any advanced alien lifeform would even remotely consider a presence on the same planet as snooki and perez hilton.
5. Most aliens probably called it off after they found out we quit manufacturing twinkies.
Good people go to bed earlier.
- It's one thing to see plans for cool technology we might want to trade, it's another thing to actually have the object in question exactly as the other group designed it.
- Just to prove we can. That's why we went to the moon, it's a major reason we'll eventually go to Mars and beyond.
- Green-skinned Orion slave girls.
- Cultural exchange. It's one thing to see pictures and films and other information about a place, it's another thing to actually experience it.
Even if the aliens are far more technologically advanced than we are, or vice versa, there are benefits to this kind of trade.
I am officially gone from
Actually if *anything* remains it might be the concept of "want", having goals is pretty central to the definition of intelligence.
\u262D = \u5350
Paul makes a very common mistake: trying to imprint his logical understanding of the motivations an alien race we've never met. Even humans had numerous motivations for leaving their countries and spending years to travel to foreign lands. Anyone who insists that it CAN'T happen is probably as wrong as the scientists who insisted in 1902 that Man will never fly.
If there's one thing we can generalize about truly intelligent people is that they are always curious. The geniuses can come up with questions nobody else can.
I don't see the economics of that. It's going to take a lot of resources for somebody to get from another habitable planet to here.
Of course this whole scenario with super 1000x intelligent beings you concocted is just as far fetched as aliens travelling here to meet us.
Maybe they'll just stop over here for a roadside picnic. ;)
I've heard we're protected by The Doctor.
1 - Curiosity - Maybe they can predict us, but what are untested predictions worth. Think Doc Smith's Arisians and their "Visualization of the Cosmic All." They still needed Samms' lens on-site to test their prediction.
2 - Charity - Arguably we could certainly use some assistance.
3 - Boredom - When you've solved that many problems, and when you've run out of "Gilligan's Isolated Stellar Cluster" reruns, you need something to do.
Really, we have no idea how rare the Earth is - or isn't, and that would affect the likelihood of being investigated by a more advanced type of life. We've been finding planets in the Goldilocks belt, and some of those are nearly Earth-sized. But at the same time we're learning more about how critical Jupiter and the Moon are to our development, so OUR requirements were actually quite complex, not that that needs to be universal.
But the rarer the circumstances for intelligent life to develop, the more likely it gets that we will be investigated. That assumes that that puts us in the bucket of "interesting things", and that that bucket is smaller than it would be if the galaxy were teeming with life.
I do have to agree with the article's assertion and reasons that there won't be an invasion force. If there were to be any hostile actions by aliens, it would almost have to be xenophobic fear - get us before we get the technology to get them. If that were the case, we'd never see an invasion force - comets and asteroids are much simpler, easier, cheaper, less risky, and at least as effective.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Exactly! And once they use all those resources to get here, what do you think they are going to need more of? Resources! Do you see how your argument eats itself?
your basing it on the assumption with greater intelligence comes lowered ambition and curiosity, this has always proven to be the opposite, the more we learn the more outrageous and unbelievable our next endeavours become. We will always seek to understand the unknown that is our nature and i think a fundamental part of us that intelligence / evolution will never strip away. p.s. someone tell me how to put cariage returns in a /. post for the love of god why does it never show up right
Even if it doesn't take all that much resources (i.e. someone discovers some kind of short-cut drive that is cheap to operate), chances are most systems are going to have pretty much the same raw materials.
Though such a move would probably be rooted in political or social priorities rather then strict economical ones, getting away from rules or consequences for instance. There is also the question, of course, of how common are habitable planets... I imagine any creature that makes it to space has enough of a mental need to spread out that they might like the fact there is a whole planet that is not registered anywhere in their list of deeds and thus is legally unowned.
The author is projecting his own value system on alien's motivations too. I agree they probably wouldn't want to turn us into batteries ala Stephan Hawking / Matrix largely because why? - you can already create anything we could possibly have.
OTOH it's not IMPOSSIBLE that advanced creatures have an advanced morality / compassion / values that causes them to CARE about the fate of things not themselves.
Why we ourselves show some primitive forms of this on occasion.
The philosophies, politics, religion and entertainment of today has hardly changed since the dawn of recorded history.
Technology has changed, certainly; instead of watching Greek drama in a theater, we now watch Greek drama in a theater with CGI effects. But history has time and again proven that new toys do not qualitatively change mankind.
(p.s. - ironically, our imminent ascendance to godhood is another of those ideas that has been around forever...)
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I think that we can safely assume that people 1000 times as smart as us will want to continue living. And chances are pretty good that they will be nigh immortal. Nigh immortal beings need lots of resources over time. But another factor will be to limit competition for resources. Immortal, highly intelligent creatures will want to make sure that other immortal, highly intelligent creatures won't come along and take their resources. It all comes back to survival. Being 1000 times as intelligent as humans doesn't mean squat if you're dead.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
When I first started driving, I bought maps... first the cheap ones, then the really good street atlas books with indices. From there, I was able to plot my way to my destination pretty quickly though it required I step myself through each turn, street name and all that. But in the end, I learned where I was at any given time, felt I knew generally where anything was relative to my own position and about how far and how long it would take me to get there. None of this was as fast or efficient as a car GPS with traffic signal reception, of course. So after I moved away from my home area to another state, I finally broke down to get a GPS with traffic and all that. The new location was far more challenging to drive in and missing turns were far more costly in terms of time and frustration -- it was a much older area and so the roads are much more complicated, unpredictable and unforgiving.
But now that I have been using GPS all this time, I find that my ability to learn my way around and know where I am has diminished significantly. I have grown extremely reliant on GPS navigation. I have lost the skills and knowledge I once had. (My knowledge not actually lost... I'm still familiar with my original area and know my way around quite well still)
I think most people will find the same problem where other technological improvements are concerned. Even the practice of typing instead of writing has had affect on our ability to write by hand for many of us and remembering simple things like phone numbers? I used to have dozens in my head. Now I have just a few and the rest are comfortably in my phone where I have ready access to them. Tech has definitely made us all soft even if it's more efficient. It makes us horribly dependent.
So what if we went to the next levels? Brain interfaces? Computer data completely replacing our own memories? With intelligent decision making telling us "the best choice" in any given situation? The things we can allow machines to do for us is probably beyond my imagination, but even what I can imagine is pretty frightening when you think about it. What will we become when we become symbionts with the machines?
Giving up what little I have already lost is reason enough for me to reconsider how much I should rely on technology. But to imagine what humanity might become is certainly reason to consider blocking certain things to prevent our own failure.
Consider what might happen if we all matrix ourselves until the first outage we experience cuts us off from all knowledge. We instantly become as useless as a 5-year-old.
Perhaps this is a bit off-topic, but the summary was enough to release a collection of thoughts which have been gathering over the past few years.
Comment moderation has been enabled. All comments must be approved by the blog author.
This is why we only see 7 comments, all of which amazingly support the author.
The reason that aliens want to come here is that they need suitable hosts in which to insert their larvae.
Yeah, we can't meaningfully talk about things that are wholly unlike us, but... So far, nothing appears to have changed the existence of "wanting" as a concept, and it's inconceivable that anything would. Which means there's not much point arguing about it; this is off in "what if everything big became small, and everything small became big" territory.
The big problem is:
"We don't know what X is like" is not evidence that X is unlike us.
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How is this argument different from "The singularity, because reasons, and beyond that, nothing is knowable"?
--Joakim Ziegler
No, food. Human is a delicacy in some regions of the galaxy.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Think about it; if M-class planets are so rare, and this alien species can fly faster-than-light to our planet, they likely want to take over our planet (and wipe us out in the process). Why else would they bother showing up? Besides, the author makes a key logical fallacy; having information does not make one smarter, it makes you better informed. Just because you can instantly pull up the equation for gravity or the schematics of a rocket, doesn't mean you'll understand it.
about as much as Europeans were interested in the Africans.
But that did not stop them from coming to Africa.
"The word 'want' might not apply at all to someone 1000 times smarter than us."
Sure, so a lot of aliens are probably going to be uninterested in colonizing or exploring (and those are two very different things) the universe, but all it takes is one species or one subgroup within one species) that does want to colonize and explore.
I think the answer to the Fermi paradox is probably a combination of technological species being rare and interstellar spaceflight being expensive. I imagine the nearest interstellar species is probably far away and that they're making really slow progress on their interstellar empire.
Okay dumbass, tell me this: If you had landed on the moon when you were 19, how many chicks would you have had sex with by now?
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...had individuals who are more intelligent than modern humans. No need for it. And both collective minds chose to contact humanity. I think creators of these fictional races (in Doctor Who and Star Trek respectively) have more insight into the future of humanity than Paul Tyma.
You are not to far off.
This planet just happens to be several light-years off the main trade routes.
Fewer than 1 in 20 stars have a planet in the habitable zone.
Fewer than 1 in 200 stars have a planet that supports life.
1 in 20,000 have evolved any intelligent life.
So there are a lot of places out there that are off the beaten path and not visited often. Most intelligent species are not noticed for many years after they become space faring and start to explore. This is just a fact of space being so big and there being so many places where there is no life.
About the only people that make it this far off the beaten path and come across this little planet are the ones that are hiding from something or the ones that get lost.
If the summary is at all a reflection of the logic in the article, the article is fundamentally flawed. People today who have quicker access to look up information using their phones are not smarter than those who lived 50 years ago and needed to go through a more laborious process to find the answer. Having access to more information does not in and of itself make you smarter. The reason that we traditionally use the amount of information that someone has quick access to as a measure of intelligence is that in the pre-Internet age, the majority of people who had quick access to large amounts of information were people who were very smart (the others were usually idiot-savants of one sort or another). However, quick access was merely a proxy used to determine intelligence, not an actual measure of intelligence (of course the fact is that as we have tried harder to quantify intelligence we have discovered that intelligence is not one thing but instead a collection of related things).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I think this is almost certainly wrong for two reasons.
1) It would be wonderful if "want" will disappear in the future when information technology, or technology in general, will have advanced in ways we can't imagine. But we are physically limited to whatever resources we have on the planet, and maybe a few close asteroids. Right now, even clean water, clean air, and food aren't as available as we would like everywhere on the planet, and it doesn't look like we can assume that will get better as the population continues to grow.
2) Even if we had unlimited energy and maybe a Star Trek replicator to create any kind of matter we need, wouldn't that tend to make a species more curious about the rest of the universe? Humans who are barely surviving don't wonder much about other planets when they're wondering where the next meal will come from. But humans (and maybe also aliens) who have most of their wants already answered would be much more likely to look farther afield for challenges.
In short, I believe in more of a Star Trek/Star Wars future than a Wall-E future.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Except on Christmas, we can see The Doctor in action, saving us all...again.
chances are most systems are going to have pretty much the same raw materials.
Exactly. Why not take them from something closer to home and avoid all the fighting and killing, just to get some salty water (the only resource Earth has that is obvious from afar).
If any putative aliens are just looking for Lebensraum, why pick a planet where the most common source of protein also wields nuclear weapons?
They probably already have a catalog of "un-occupied" planets with adequate food stocks which are a whole lot less contentious.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
That has not much to do with smartness. ... inlegible ...
You can be as s,art (or intelligent) as you want. If yu know nothing you have nothing to work with.
Education and knowledge is the key, not smartness.
The rest of the article seems rather
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Let me see if I follow...
We used to store information in books, in libraries.
Then we digitized our data such that you could look it up from your computer.
Now we have computers small enough to fit in our pockets, with access to all of this information.
Aliens will have even better technology, therefore they won't want to visit us.
huh?
Know the difference between information and knowledge.
How would you change if you had instant brain-level access to all information. How would you change if you were twice as smart as you are now. How about ten times as smart? (Don't answer, truth is, you're not smart enough to know).
I so enjoy when people equate having knowledge with being smart, or intelligent. It's rather like listing to someone expound upon 'common sense'. While having quicker access to information, especially the direct brain to cloud stuff, is very intriguing and have a high awesome factor, it's doesn't make your smarter. It doesn't even mean you know more stuff, it just means you have easy access to information, okay a crap ton of information.
You may be able to quickly determine whether a cup goes best with a saucer, spoon or napkin (this used to be on at least one standard intelligence test) in picosecond but, your still just as dumb as you were a picosecond ago (do neurons fire that fast?), you just and idiot that can quickly access information.
Probably more than we've got. Still, they might do it out of sheer spite, or for teh lulz. I might, if I was a fucking well hard spaaace halium.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So, aliens won't have any interest in us, because they'll be so much smarter than us? Just like we're so much smarter than ants, bacteria, and plain old rocks, that nobody studies them?
Intelligence would allow us or aliens to go.
Emotion would lead us or aliens to go.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan's_ass
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Though when I think about it, we take it for a given (not without some modeling behind it, but still) that there is a good even distribution of raw materials in the galaxy, but I guess it is possible that is not the case. It is already known that our star system developed in another part of the galaxy and drifted to our current 'between arms' position... I guess I could kinda see something like the area our star formed had unusually large amounts of iron and the area we are in now is unusually low on it.... then we get aliens coming and getting all eye buggy that our core is made of iron and it is so cheap we waste it on things like thumbtacks.
Ha, fighting & killing.
Like they're going to come to earth before every living thing is dead.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Currently, with the understanding we have, we find it hard to move matter. So why not just transport a minimum amount of yourself (DNA) to other worlds and set up a replication shop. Grow your own civilization at the destination. It's far cheaper and more interesting that way, because when you do meet in the middle, or finally make it there, you'll have close but not-quite distant relatives.
Also, I suspect at some time we'll be able to quantum entangle enough particles to construct our DNA remotely and initiate civilization by remotely.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
It's actually quite stupid when you think about the idea of any two alien species making contact in our universe.
I do believe wholeheartedly there is life out there. It comes down to basic chemistry and statistic probability. Amino acids formed in some ocean on another planet that eventually lead to life. I even believe there are aliens that have figured out how to leave their planet and travel in space.
But space is too big and it is far too difficult to travel across it. Think of the massive amount of technological hurdles needed to overcome even sending humans to Mars, let alone sending humans to another solar system, even one a few light years away.
I don't accept that aliens are out there that have solved all these problems easily and can freely come and go at will. I actually think its also stupid to assume aliens are smarter than us or have figure out how to defy fundamental physics. It could very well be that all other life in our whole galaxy is nothing more than slime and single cell organisms, maybe the real miracle of our planet is that we evolved into something that could think and ponder about the universe, not just that life began on it.
And finally I agree, what motivation would there to spend the trillions upon trillions of dollars required to build a spaceship capable of travelling to another solar system, even if we know it contains life, even sentient life? Yes I am sure a lot of people would like to go and investigate, but the logistics are simply insurmountable. Even if an alien race forgoes capitalism and money and profit and all that rot and solely pursues space travel for esoteric reasons, it comes down to a basic resource issue, you have to find enough fuel/energy and material to build a spaceship able to keep a crew alive for many years.
It's senseless to believe we will ever venture out of our own solar system, and it is ridiculous to assume another alien species has as well.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
a) Because there aren't any aliens to meet
b) Because even if there were, they might not be within (fill in the blank with) N>3 light years from us.
c) Because absolutely trivial physics suggests that for ANY constructed object to travel N > 3 LY, or 18 trillion miles, it would require stupendous amounts of energy. At one kilometer per second -- 1 megajoule per two kilograms of payload -- it would still take 300,000 YEARS to travel ONE light year. To cut travel time down to 300 years, one would have to travel at 1000 kilometers per second, at an energy cost of 1terajoule per two kilograms, and shortly after that one has to start paying a relativistic penalty and get less and less benefit for each doubling in energy cost. Any propulsion system that involved reaction mass would have to lift MANY orders of magnitude more mass, multiplying this already absurd number by a much larger absurd number.
True, there is always the chance of new physics, of "warp drives" and other such stuff, but that so far is pure science fiction, and if anything the fact that we AREN'T up to our armpits in smelly alien suggests that either there REALLY aren't any aliens to meet or that there is no such new physics out there to discover.
I love SF, and am a physicist and thrilled at the prospect of new physics, but when answering an open ended question it is always better to base the answer on what is known, not what MIGHT be true, if life were a Heinlein novel. Based on known physics, we'll never meet aliens because it is effectively impossible to travel in person between the stars.
Sending one's genetic code, OTOH, might be doable, if you could get it past the customs and immigration people who might not be thrilled at us cloning a potentially hostile competitive species and raising it out of all natural cultural context just to say high to a life form that didn't evolve on Earth.
rgb
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This article is fucking trash.
It presumes that access to more information equates to more intelligence. It doesn't.
If access to information helped drive intelligence, the average person today would shit on Motzart and Einstein, and a 15 year old girl would have found the Higgs 2 years go while tweeting about Jake (he's so cuuuuuuute~!).
Then it presumes that such increased intelligence makes beings less likely to explore and seek out other beings. Horseshit.
If intelligent beings didn't care about less intelligent beings, we wouldn't have people who dedicate their lives to studying the less intelligent beings we have on this planet, or people who keep pets, etc.
If technologically advanced beings didn't care about exploring undeveloped places, Columbus and Magellan would have stuck their thumbs up their asses while tugging their dicks all day at home instead of all day at sea.
"How would you change if you had instant brain-level access to all information. How would you change if you were twice as smart as you are now. How about ten times as smart? (Don't answer, truth is, you're not smart enough to know)."
So we can't know what we'll do when we're more intelligent, yet TFS ignores that rule and tells us anyway? Laughable.
It's as fucking bad as Tyson's line about aliens not giving a shit about us because they'd be so far advanced that we'd be nothing but bugs or dust to them.
Why would you presume such a large gap in technological advancement? Why wouldn't there be civilizations who are just somewhat more advanced, to the point where we're still a curiosity? Wouldn't a growth in advancement lead to a growth in stellar reach, and thus increase our chances of meeting despite any lack of intentional interest on their part?
Why even presume a lack of interest comes along with advancement? We're excited when we see signs of water on other planets. We're actively looking for that shit. If we found a fucking planet full of boring space slugs we'd be going out of our fucking minds with excitement. We have people who dedicate their lives to talking to parrots and apes and shit. We literally know how to twerk our black booties to tell bees where some delicious pollen is.
Since the dawn of man we have wondered if we were alone in the Universe. There is no reason to presume that any other species would be different. Indeed, there is reason to believe that such curiosity goes hand-in-hand with intelligence and increased likelihood to become the dominant species on a planet.
I've studied neuron systems in both animals and computer simulations. Know what happens when the inputs become the same over enough time? Boredom. Know what happens if you just randomly change one pixel in a field of view of an OCR machine intelligence? The same thing that happens when you do that with people. They stare at it. They fixate on the new input, they'll study that which they do not know or have not explained. That's why we explore. It's not a human thing, it's a LIFE thing.
Neural networks may not be the primordial soup du jouer, but any complex system I observe, from selection pressure applied to randomly arrange instruction sets, or simplified chemical bonding chain sims, the tendency to "know" and experience more and generally become more complex is a common thread. If conditions are too hostile to allow such complexity to arise, then I wouldn't expect something like sentience, however, once that critical mass has been reached you can bet your bottom dollar the aliens would want to come and say "Hi", if for no other reason than to know more about the Universe.
Imagine what would happen if we detected a faint ordered "intelligent" signal from space, even a primitive one. Despite the impossible odds that the civilization would even be around to hear our response, EVERY damn nerd with a satellite dish would be re-purposing it to broadcast everything from the complete works of Shakespeare to Girl-on-Xenomorph Porn. You think mountain climbers climb because they want to? No. Go talk to one. The mountain is THERE. It must be climbed. There's an almost insatiable lust in explorers, human, animal and artificial alike. If you think for one second that we'd turn down the chance to pop over for a spot of alien tea, were it in our power to do so, then you haven't been studying life for very long.
Now, the idea of "wanting" might not apply to even us in a post-scarcity economy, but you can be damn sure that keeping fresh configurations of neurons firing is the unwritten prime directive of the cosmos. Accelerating the rate of knowing just makes you get bored FASTER! It means you need more input quicker to keep you entertained. What do you get the cosmic collective mind that already knows everything? 7 billion irrational unpredictable under-evolved pets to study, that's what.
And advanced enough alien culture might not ever need to make direct contact with us to learn all they need to know. They might have robotic probes that could stealthily sit and watch much like a National Geographic photographer, except with the cloaking device enabled because unlike a lion pride we'd react to the observers.
Second, maybe life (even advanced non-space faring societies) are common enough for them to ignore?
Third, this is ALL speculation because our knowledge of the universe is so limited we can't possibly make an informed guess. Just about ANY theory has equal validity.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
It's because we are made out of meat....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
How would you change if you had instant brain-level access to all information. How would you change if you were twice as smart as you are now. How about ten times as smart? (Don't answer, truth is, you're not smart enough to know). The word 'want' might not apply at all to someone 1000 times smarter than us.
I'm smart enough to know that "Smart" and "Technologically Advanced" are not the same thing.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I have a problem with equating smartness with having quick access to information.
AccountKiller
There are more resources here than what it will take to get here. Profit!
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
There could be a million "maybes" which describe a highly-intelligent being's wants and desires, but this one is far more definite.
I don't know if it follows that highly intelligent beings are automatically driven by curiosity, but if not, I would call into serious question how they become highly intelligent in the first place.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
Perhaps want has nothing to do with it. Maybe they would need to come here.
Thats the last question I guess.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We are still killing each other for irrational reasons down here.
Why would intelligent life even want to stop by for conversation? ((with a bunch of violent irrational creatures))
And we don't need ANY arguments about what such beings would be like in order to understand that there is nothing unique here to want. The Solar System is composed of approximately 99.95% hydrogen and helium. This is basically the same as the composition of the rest of the Universe. While some elements may be slightly more common or concentrated in slightly more convenient forms in one place than another there simply isn't anything particularly unique in one star system that isn't present in another.
Furthermore look at the energetics of interstellar space travel. "Accelerating one ton to one-tenth of the speed of light requires at least 450 PJ or 4.5 ×10^17 J or 125 billion kWh, without factoring in efficiency of the propulsion mechanism. This energy has to be either generated on-board from stored fuel, harvested from the interstellar medium, or projected over immense distances." -- Wikipedia. In 2008 the world used roughly 474×10^18 J, which means the entire power output of the human race for a year would suffice to accelerate one starship of 40 tons to 0.1C, roughly. This is about the weight of the 'J' class Apollo Lunar mission payload (LEM, CM, SM, etc). Clearly even the most limited interstellar travel would have an energy cost that is frankly hard to imagine.
So, considering the enormous cost and the high degree of technology required to traverse interstellar space, why bother? Certainly it can never be economical. The energy costs quoted above indicate that even the most expensive conceivable processes for making things would be cheaper (IE using solar power to perform nuclear reactions to transmute one element into whatever other ones you need and then make whatever you want out of it) than traveling to where you can find something.
Clearly a civilization could in principle literally consume all matter in its vicinity. It is hard to imagine how this would lead to expansion for economic reasons though, there'd never be any hope of getting a return on your investment.
Obviously someone can always invent some new hypothesis as to why, for reasons of alien psychology, aliens would want to travel, but nobody knows squat about alien psychology, so there's really no point in debating it. The very fact that such an undertaking would be VAST in scope, significant even for a Kardeshev level 2 civilization indicates it wouldn't be carried out on some whim, and it seems unlikely that a civilization which spent its energy so profligately on whims would survive long.
I know it isn't a real popular opinion to hold, but everything I see indicates that interstellar distances are pretty close to uncrossable for physical beings like humans. Frankly I think that is the plain answer to the whole Fermi Paradox that people just don't really want to come to grips with. The gulfs between the stars are so wide that nobody crosses them, EVER.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Society is dominated by scarcity. You always need either power or material. Food and most other things come from a combination of the two. So the question of "why" is simply answered by "do they need materials or energy that may be local to us" or "are they just curious."
Learn to love Alaska
How completely boneheaded! If I were ten times as smart and had instant access to all known information (and presumably a very long life, by virtue of magical technology), I would get BORED. What better way to relieve boredom than to go looking for a totally alien perspective on the universe?
If we are not smart enough to know how advanced aliens would think, how can Mr. Tyma be smart enough to be sure that they will not, for their own incomprehensible reasons, come here?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Smartness is having a correct answer. Whether it's complex deduction or trivia isn't distinguished by most.
Learn to love Alaska
The more curious we get... I hope to hell that a person 10, 100, or 1000* smarter than we are now wouldn't have abandoned curiosity.
I wish I was a neutron bomb, for once I could go off...
We need a beacon.
The author writes How would you change if you were twice as smart as you are now...Or whenever it is you'll think we'd have the technology to travel to another solar system
Having the technology to travel to another solar system does not necessarily require a super-human intelligence. The author's conclusion may be correct but not due to this very weak argument.
One might instead argue that a race that has the capability of travelling to another solar system would be strongly motivated to do so simply because they have nearly exhausted the mysteries of their own system.
Consider an extremely long-lived race with a very slow metabolism. Unlike humans, they might very well have the patience for such a long trip and and a biological advantage that makes the prospect less daunting.
And back on the topic of intelligence, my experience is that curiosity is strongly correlated with intelligence. Furthermore, what would be the imperative driving the development of such intelligence? It would most likely be either curiosity or a threat. In either case, migration/exploration is likely.
It's 1.000 feet in a mile, right? What else?
How would you change if you had instant brain-level access to all information
Unlimited access to information --- good, bad and misleading --- is not the same thing as understanding, Nor is understanding the same thing as skill.
On one hand, as a hyperintelligent super powerful alien, why would you bother introducing yourself to a bunch of mindless apes? If you have questions, just disguise yourself as a human, have a couple of chats, ingest a bit of our media, and whatever passing curiosity you'd have about us would be quickly satisfied.
On the other hand, you could just come down here, forcibly take a few humans for study. Who the hell cares about witnesses (which makes the whole shady-abduction-in-remote-forest thing seem stupid).
I personally think that such aliens, if they exist, do already know about us as well as most other aliens in the universe. And they don't really care, except for the ones that are on par. In that case, they probably greet each other with a yawn and move on.
The aliens would come here because they want us as specimens for their intergalactic zoo, a la Slaughterhouse Five!
The alien surgeon general recommends not eating pasty white humans from the northwest continent. You can eat all the yellow ones you like from the eastern continent they are much healthier for you. Though you may find yourself hungry again in just a few parsecs.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
We all know any alien capable of reaching earth would be able to make a first post on Slashdot! AND we wouldn't even know it was +5 informative.. "Frosty Piss" is just a line of alien code to accomplish this task, but you didn't hear that from me.
It's nice to know that you know the resource it will take to get to another star system using technology invent 1000 years from now.
And it assume there aren't generation ships, or people travel in a slow expansion, so its not one large leap.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Consider an extremely long-lived race with a very slow metabolism. Unlike humans, they might very well have the patience for such a long trip
space sloths?
And here is why we WILL achieve contact: AI.
Once AI is good enough, a civilization could just send them out to make contact. Time wouldn't matter too much. As long as the have power, the AI will exist.
There is no reason to think a civilization couldn't do that.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Or just medical technology advanced enough where age is no longer an issue, or AI.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Intelligence != ease/convenience of data acquisition
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
Understood. we are the trailer-trash of the universe.
"Well sir, we've pretty much exhausted the available resources around this star, and worse, the star's going to go nova soon."
"The Kuiper belt?"
"Mined out fifty thousand years ago."
"The Oort cloud?"
"Slim pickings. At the current rate, we've got enough for another century at the outside."
"Dammit, you've got to give me something!"
"Well, there *are* other stars..."
"Don't be ridiculous, it takes resources to get there."
Somehow, I don't think they will be coming by icebike.
AccountKiller
"The word 'want' might not apply at all to someone 1000 times smarter than us."
How about the word NEED?
Considering the resources needed for a species that continues to grow it may be need that spurs a species to move beyond it's borders.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
Porn: the low-slung engine of progress.
Either that, or they're filming a reality show.
I agree with most posters that the logic in the post is hugely flawed (predicting something about the future by arguing that we can't know enough to predict it is inane). But more constructively: our constant access to information hasn't sated our desire for more information. Information collection is driving the recent knowledge boom as much if not more than ease of access. Besides, no matter how much time passes, if we haven't visited another world we won't have the information about that world at our availability. You have to collect information before you can use it... that's WHY further exploration will always be a goal (unless, you know, we obliterate ourselves somehow in the mean time, or find something similarly more important in any given short-term).
So all that anal probing was actually marinade injections?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
After browsing your Internets, we can say with confidence that we have no interest in you. However, we will take your cats.
Not to mention the fact that gravity wells make the resources at the bottom of them expensive- when most of the same resources are *equally available* in microgravity situations. If I had the technology to make giant space ships and mine other planets, why the hell wouldn't I just grind up an asteroid belt for the ore?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I guess curiosity is a low and base instinct that we will have eradicated by the time we evolve? How will we continue to evolve without curiosity?
Except, there likely aren't.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And don't forget about the Human horn!
I have zero interest in talking to ancient humans, but some egghead scientist might?
This guy's logic is beyond dull.
Why would we visit a frozen over lake in the middle of antarctica?
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Shouldn't I be getting thinner? And shouldn't my battery be lasting longer? Not too mention... I should be looking really sharp!
But I seem to be getting larger. My memory is slower. I run down faster....
Smartness is having a correct answer.
Learn to love Alaska
It's assigning modern human values to extraterrestrials hundreds or thousands of years in advance.
You can make up whatever thought experiments you want, but until you have real data to back it up it's all just science fiction.
Like they're going to come to earth before every living thing is dead.
Maybe they are looking for a good source of protein. The fresher the better.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Of course aliens are coming HERE!
We're cheap labor!
Now, take off those huffman lenses and obey.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
For all of its flaws, that odd artifact of Richard Gere's film career, The Mothman Prophecies had a couple insightful things to say about how a truly alien species would react to us. Both of them were in the form of a dialogue with the author of the book on which the film was based. They went:
Richard Gere: But they're more advanced than we are: why don't they just explain themselves?
Author: You're more advanced than a cockroach; you ever try to explain yourself to one of them?
Richard Gere: but what do they want?
Author: [something something] and their motives are not human.
I think that's going to be the truest indicator of alien intelligences: we won't even understand them on a basic psychological level, let alone be able to have debates and conversations and cheesy expositional dialogue with them.
That all depends on the cost of lift vs the cost of environmental support. Planetary operations mean cheap structures, you can spread out, free air, as much organics as you can harvest, no (or low) water processing cost, etc. You also have all your resources within a few thousand miles of each other... use up an iron deposit? Another one is not far away. Asteroids are pretty diffuse. There is also the quality of life element, workers (either low cost cattle or high priced operators) might not like being cooped up and are more willing to work when there is lots of open space.
And of course there is the question of how expensive life costs are. If you do not care about the place long term you can always use atomic rockets, and who knows what other tech might be involved. Countergrav, or even just a skyhook (if you have a ship already, why not?) might reduce the cost of lift enough to make it nice and cheap. Esp since chasing rocks around in space also costs fuel.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Intelligence. 1000 times more intelligent. Yeah right.
Chances are that intelligence has rapidly diminishing returns. Specially because people today are not more intelligent. Maybe better educated.
Based on our movies alone about ET's what aliens would want to drop by only if to exterminate us so we don't end up attacking them in the future.
..but probably not because they want to come and make contact for it's own sake.
For all we know collecting industrial-level civilizations is a hobby, like owning ant farms or exotic plant gardens.
Just because they want to come here doesn't mean they will likely see us as equals.
Could be creatures at our level are prized pets and one day Earth will be depopulated by Spore-like ships grabbing product for sale to real civilizations
A complex and fun novel with a main theme revolving around this exact question. Stop reading here to avoid spoilers..
Travel in body between star systems is not cost effective or appealing. BUT, what if you could upload your mind into a small holographic computer powered by ambient light and be shot across space towards a planet in another solar system. When there is less ambient light, processing speed and passage of time simply slows down - but the capsule continues on it's trajectory. When it gets near another star, more ambient light speeds up processing and time. Such a computer would be capsule shaped and not very large (a few feet long, less than a foot wide.) These capsules carry not one, but MANY sentient beings, from many races. What if you could create a whole lot of these capsules and send them in every direction. Many will never make it anywhere, or if they do, there may be little to nothing to see there, but a few will make it someplace interesting (specifically in the story, Earth.) In the book, these capsules have been arriving on Earth for many thousands of years, maybe many more, but humanity has never caught on to what they are till now (now being the near future.)
There is so much more to the book, of course, and most of it is interesting and fun. The main plot, though, is well handled and suggests a reasonable technological and science based solution to star travel.
You could also actually reason that being physically violent toward one another will be the single biggest factor in the sudden destruction of our civilization: See the following fictional doomsday scenario: Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
To quote Albert Einstein (who apparently heard it from someone else):
"I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones"
See also: Mutual Assured Destruction
But, that's all just for laughs.
THIS is the reality of our situation (if you dare to read it): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
I have seen a lot of bits about why interstellar travel may never be practical. All of them seem to assume not only travel in the flesh, but round-trip travel. Realistically, by the time we can build something that can travel to the stars, it seems quite likely that we also can download conciousness into a robot. Send a robotic (one-way) mission to build bodies and transmission equipment, then have the real travellers download themselves, or copies of themselves, via radio. No need for life support or suffer through the boredom of even relativistic travel.
Aliens might visit us for reasons that are not rational. Or, they may have a religion that makes them want to come over and convert us. Or maybe that was redundant.
Everybody knows it's better grilled.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Facebook (est. 2004), the social 'revolution'
allowing many-to-many conversations and helped overthrow some oppressive governments.
Tablets, smart phones: the basis of the summary wouldn't be recognizable a decade ago.
Those broke the MS monopoly and are breaking the Apple walled garden.
Massive acceptance of solar & implementation of wind power.
Power savings:
in '03 it was thought we'd need huge power draws to run today's computers.
Now theories of ever-growing energy requirements of a society are even in question.
With the above, it's helping break the oil monopoly.
E-ink
The Cloud
Now a start-up doesn't need to have huge VC funding to buy hardware it may not need, but can scale if they do.
Near-free micro-controllers with amazing sensor arrays (plus OpenCV).
3D printing
Vast materials science, directed sound, and other discoveries have happened (most I've read from Slashdot).
Engineers are better off now. Sure, politics is a little crazier, but technology (powering & directing the real world) is better off.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Depends on what resources you have in mind. We (earth) certainly have more liquid water on our planet than anything else "near by." If they have found some brilliant use for it and are running out, the economics of taking it from us could easily become profitable.
I know it isn't a real popular opinion to hold, but everything I see indicates that interstellar distances are pretty close to uncrossable for physical beings like humans. Frankly I think that is the plain answer to the whole Fermi Paradox that people just don't really want to come to grips with. The gulfs between the stars are so wide that nobody crosses them, EVER.
I think that the biggest scientific discoveries coming this century will be about what we can't do. We'll progress significantly in applied sciences such as medicine, but in physics, we'll likely prove the impossibility of many things of which we dream.
Many of us like science fiction stories, but the reality is that they are not dreams of the future - they are merely a modern type of fantasy. We keep dreaming of the stars even when it's impossible. Unless we find a mass relay embedded in Charon.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Galaxy central black hole: jackpot!
To serve man!
Not that people don't independently come up with existing ideas, but credit is due to Vernor Vinge for suggesting this first in his novel "Marooned in Realtime"
Actually, I am. I know that for every 100% I go up, I'd become 1000% more asshole.
Hence, I would become a super-knowing asshole of such epic proportions that you'd be enslaved to me. After all, with that asshole attitude, I'd exceed even the sociopathic tendencies of corporations.
Author of TFS and TFA are apparently not smart enough as-is.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I agree, the idea that intelligences capable of FTL travel or communication are unlikely to continue to house themselves in their original organic containters, built accidently by self-replicating molecules which give no thought (literally) to the comfort of the awareness they house.
For some period at least, such intelligences might have enough curiousity to look around the universe. The material part of their telepresence, however, might be about the size of a grain of sand, and at least as noticeble. Communication wouldn't be a priority. Would you talk to an ant? You might inhale a telepresence device, however. Or eat it. You'd never know.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The author conflates access to information with being smarter and in the process invalidates his own theory. I'm not necessarily smarter just because I can look up a set of facts quicker now than in the past. Just because we have access to the latest physics research papers via the preprint archive doesn't mean we're all magically more intelligent. Besides, since when does knowing more about the universe translate into LESS of a sense of wonder?
Not necessarily. It could be that they have nearly unlimited energy resources due to some amazing technological advance, but need matter to expand their civilization. I wonder if it would be cheaper to convert energy to matter, or to travel to new star systems in search of matter?
Of course aliens are not interested in us. Just look at this thread. Not one intelligent comment.
The author kinda rambles. But I think his point is that what we want from alien interaction right now is to learn lots of cool stuff.
That boils down into three categories.. 1. Super powerful energy sources. 2. Control of time, space, and gravity. 3. Unlimited life/food etc.
But an alien life form would already have these things, so why would they be interested at all in 'exploring the universe' when instead they could just sit on their fat happy asses and not worry about a thing ever? -Answer, they don't
Alternatively, in 1000 years (or more likely 10,000-100,000, if we survive that long), we will have all those cool gadgets. Then we will have no need of learning stuff from other aliens, so why would we care? -Answer, we won't.
On a side note, the whole idea of aliens coming to our planet to steal our 'resources' is ludicrous! If they have the technology for interstellar travel, creating unlimited amounts of air/water/etc will be easy. And if there is no real 'secret' to the universe, it would be much more economical to mine metals from asteroids and water from comets or rings. It takes way too much fuel to enter and exit the gravity of a planet.
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
I think you are thinking of human horn.
We ourselves on an exponentiating curve when it comes to technology, and will have to augment ourselves just to keep up with ~VERY~ short order (in the grand scheme of human history thus far.) Still, the presumption that being smarter (or even less human) will make us less curious is ... well ... curious.
I would assume you'd do it much the same way a horizontal wood chipper works: Using the grinding gears to keep pulling the material in. Or did you think that a wood chipper only works if stuff is thrown into the bin?
But as somebody else already pointed out- the fuel used to chase down the material could well be more than the cost to lift out of a gravity well.....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Essentially, the point is "why would they come here"?
And there's plenty of reasons. For instance, if humanity had that level of technology, we might be concerned with with an alien race hitting some tech singularity and coming to kill us all with underdeveloped morals and overdeveloped beam weaponry- we might want to monitor, meet, or conquer to ensure that such a thing doesn't happen. An alien race could certainly have a policy of exterminating anything that is sentient or surpasses a certain tech marker (FTL drives, grey goo, or something we haven't thought of yet). Alternatively, a race could seek out sentient sufferers and seek to aid that- if humanity reaches that level of advancement, instead of sitting back with a "prime directive" mentality, we may instead move in, ameliorate, offer immortality and uploads, etc.
I suspect FTL is either impossible or has not been invented in Virgo Supercluster. It seems unlikely that we would be in the brief window of time from which it is invented until we see visible signs of such a civilization.
Assuming they don't have the tech to build at the atomic level. Becasue if you can do that, then everything is 100% recyclable.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A thousand years later some of us may be a lot more connected with direct-brain-interfaces, to the point that there will be multihumanic species (like multicellular). It doesn't mean that the multihuman consciousness won't have curiosity, wants etc. Don't we, multicellular beings want to live, eat etc? Aren't we curious about bacteria? The whole article is pretty bad.
If you really want to know how fast evolution is going, just visit a museum of Sumer or ancient Egypt. Sumer for example go back to 4500 or 4000 BC. Than compare the every day life of a Sumerer to the today life. You would be surprised how little people have changed.
Sure, we have computers, air planes, auto mobiles, etc. today. But the every day life looks shocking familiar to 7000 years ego. We still drink wine and beer, enjoy music, enjoy dancing, enjoy talking, reading, praying, eating, mating, go to war, kill millions innocent including children, and so on. In fact I would say we didn't changed at all in 10,000 years.
The author is confusing knowledge with wisdom or being smart. Sure in 100 years you will be able to load every article of Wikipedia in your brain, but will it make you smart? Intelligence is not how much you know, intelligence is your understanding and your problem solving abilities. Nobody would think that Newton was stupid only because he didn't know how far is the next star from us (Proxima Centauri 4.2421ly).
Evolution is a very very very slow process. And if Darwin is correct then without pressure to become smarter, people will stay at the current level of "smartness". We have got the state in which we are smart enough, meaning we can produce food cheap and have a comfortable life. In fact, more smarter persons have a very difficult time to survive.
I don't really think that give more 10,000 years or 100,000 years, even with the current exponential increasing technology, we will get any smarter then the Sumerer. Maybe if we can replace the part of the brain for "intelligence" with a computer chip.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
I think the author is a prime example of how having better tech doesn't make you smart.
Aliens, are well, Aliens. They probably wouldn't be human, and thus, would evolve along a different type of path.
Another point, even with having all the tech in the world, sometimes it's nice to stretch your legs. I got computers, TV, phone, I don't have to leave home, everything I need is here or can be delivered. And yet I still go outside just for the heck of it.
And while I can't speak for Aliens, I can speak for humans and we tend to do things just because we can do it. Travel to other stars? I'd guess humans are going to figure out how to do it and start doing it before our sun expands. Or maybe we'll kill most of each other off and live in caves. But either way, we ain't going to get the tech and knowledge, then do nothing with it.
Be seeing you...
What ever happened to the reason we climb mountains? Because they are there.
Just because you're super smart and capable of meeting all your needs in the immediate locale, doesn't mean there's no reason to ever visit. Aliens might just want to hang out and talk. Or have exotic space sex. Or eat us. Or all three. Seriously, have a little imagination.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"To Serve Man"
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
The entire discussion as to why we will never meet aliens is fundamentally flawed because we are are discussing it from our current (tiny) viewpoint. And the rest? Well it's pure speculation.
--- You are in a little twisty maze of comments, all different.
... that'll get us. The type that doesn't want to buy the latest iPhone or follow their laws. Think of Aussies vs Aborgines, Pilgrims vs Indians, or Burmese pythons (pet rejects) vs alligators in the Everglades. No one consulted the Native Americans about the Loiusiana purchase. That's going to be the case with Earth, aka parcel #21239012. Hopefully not in my lifetime.
Preemptively killing any potential rivals that have reached a stage that they (the aliens) recognise as being just a few hundred years away from developing FTL (or whatever allowed their own expansion).
(Don't worry, there won't be a war. They'll just stand off at the edge of the solar system and fire relativistic masses at us. One hit, one kill. Pretty much any technology that allows interstellar travel can be used to kill a planet.)
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Who didnt need to climb a mounting to achieve that altitude. We could be visited by alien kids on a joy ride. They could be driven from their homes by the same pressures that drive us from our homes. Their would could incur a extinction event. Or they may just want to get a tan.
Or maybe, just maybe, they have a problem and would like a different point of view.
We can't imagine being 2-10 times as smart as we are now, but then they go on to speculate why a civilization 100-1000 times as smart would or would not do ANYthing?
I had a sucky sig.
We have met strange aliens. They've taken human form and infiltrated jobs like social security clerk and ... BANG... silence... voices: gffbvgfgfggvfffdssdf... :-)
John_Chalisque
They're coming for decorative spoons!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_w-hFjqto
"Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two" -- RFC 1925
Just because you know the answer instantly, doesn't mean you change who you fundamentally are. We have come a long way from hunter gatherer tribes, but you can still see it in us; when we make kills in video games it triggers the small adrenalin and dopamine release that we got when we made hunting in cave men times, and so on. Another thing that i think comes naturally in us and why we are here today is exploration (both knowledge and physical), and that wont change any time soon. I don't know why the aliens that are visiting us evolved, they might have no values.
Rocket Surgeon.
It's funny when someone tries to use their limited logic set to predict the actions of 1000x more intelligent than them.
If that was the case, we wouldn't know about them, and the premise of never "meeting" them still stands.
We might be under surveillance now and never even have a clue. They are watching our Drunk Kitten videos on YouTube also, but won't show us their Drunk Tribble vids.
Table-ized A.I.
Instant access to information won't make us smart or better decision makers. We are still subject to our emotions, and our curiosities, and our desires. Also, raw knowledge is not wisdom. I am reminded of a quote from Picasso .. "Computers are useless, they can only give you answers not questions" .. So yeah if we don't correctly and deeply query our information or understand how to trust it .. the information provided will not improve our decisions.
The Argument "They would be far to advanced to want anything to do with us because of blank" holds no water for me. I've always held the theory that a particularly creative species would adapt whatever tech they find to their own purposes. Lets say Galactic Civ 1 exists for eons but dies out due to calamity or other misfortune Post Industrial Civ 2 who are on par with us now discover some left behind tech lets say it's an FTL engine of some sort. Civ 2 reverse engineers it and within 10 - 20 years they have their own FTL and any number of derivative Tech discoveries made along the way. Wouldn't that Civ still be relatively on par with us albeit with more advanced tech and still subject to the same impulses for exploration and discovery as we are today? This basic hypothesis is far more likely in my opinion than the traveling gods scenario, where they'd be to advanced to care. Because The Great Galactic Civ 1 would have left behind enough relics and trash over the eons for multiple post Industrial Civ' 2's to find and adapt. It's as good a theory as any.
Look, the fact is that nearly all forms of intelligent life display the trait that we have dubbed "curiosity." We study things for the sole purpose of understanding them, I don't understand why a sentient species that has mastered space travel would look at Earth and decide that it's simply not interesting enough to investigate. Intelligence craves understanding and contact would be the best way to accomplish that. "What is that?" is a powerful and pervasive mindset, it drives science in it's entirety. A technologically superior species is likely to be more interested in answering all questions of existence, from quantum foam to "Why do humans act like that?" Technology is driven by curiosity and curiosity results in understanding, ergo the more knowledgeable you are the more questions you are likely to have, The only reason I see us not being visited are these: 1) We are alone. 2) Faster than light travel is impossible and we are not reachable. 3) Humans scare the living shit out of other sentient species because of our insane proclivity toward self destruction and murder.
We also have a right brain hemisphere to explore, that people currenlty hardly use at all. It has it's own wildly different kind of intelligence and might have possibilities that may seem scifi/magic today.
"The word 'want' might not apply at all to someone 1000 times smarter than us."
Or alternatively, it might. What was the point again?
This thinking is flawed. There were human beings alive 1000 years ago who were 1000 times smarter than the average human being living today. The simple truth is that most creatures prefer to have fun and be lazy.
A remote alien race wont be comprised of a population that is 100% smart. It will be more like what we have: 1% or less of the population are smarter than all the rest.
They will want to experience our culture, if only to mirror their own to themselves. Out of curiosity, out of wanting to have fun, out of wanting to experience something new. And maybe just because they can!
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
FTL travel will probably never be possible at all. Even though the Alcubierre drive is "not so impossible", there are still problems that make it improbable or useless. The front of the bubble has Planck lenght thickness : good luck assembling that!, from exotic negative mass matter with may or may not exist. But my favorite is being unable to steer the bubble or make it stop, so you're trapped in warp speed or hyperspace essentially.
Without FTL there's probably no point to interstellar travel at all. But maybe you can count on relativistic time dilatation so that you can reach a star in a short enough time for you?, if you go way over 0.1c. The only price to pay is all your friends and family, society and culture you lived in are all dead. But you can only reach a nearby system where you'll get to skirt around useless rocks, comets and gas giants.
Because over here in the real world, no 'one' will ever be capable of making the trip. Hawking is wrong, it wouldn't be Columbus coming to the new world, it would be Columbus sailing to the moon, and that is simply never going to occur.
"I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
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"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
By your calculation, a smart physicist, understanding the forces and their outcomes, would never choose to bungee jump, but some do. Why? It's the experience, Mr. Tyma, the experience.
I guess there'll always be idiots unless all 'advanced' civilisations 'out there' espouse eugenics and/or other self-limiting technologies. Religious beliefs also seem to be strangely resistant to logic.
So we might have expected a constant stream of idiots and religious nutters, from far away/the future/another dimension/angelic realms. Add to their numbers those utterly dull people interested in their genealogy (code for a ridiculous and pathetic search for an ancestor who actually did something 'unusual'; for example, being transported to Australia, inheriting a title, making a pile of money, or any other of the shabby claims to distinction our enfeebled moderns grasp at) and we should have been overwhelmed by visitors from the vasty depths of space and time, despite the very doubtful premise that in the future we will be much, much cleverer than we we are now, and, by analogy, so will be/are these posited 'aliens' who aren’t visiting.
On the other hand, maybe they are so sophisticated that they would no more consider introducing themselves to us individually, or even collectively, than the child with an ant farm bothers to make the acquaintance of the ants that make up her colony.
But if we leave aside the silly stuff and reflect upon the truly amazing size of the universe and the relative rigidity of the rules which seem to govern it, it doesn’t seem quite so strange that, so far, no one has called on us...
Well, if you asked me how many meters are in a kilometer, I wouldn't need a library, a computer, nor a phone; because the metric system isn't absolutely retarded. Also: genes. As advanced as they may be, it's hard to imagine they could 'predict' the biological evolution of all of the billions of living specimens our pretty little zoo has... The REAL reason why we'll never meet aliens is really much more simple: If they do have the tech to get to Earth they also have the tech to hide themselves from us while doing so. I think the author needs to read up on Fermi's paradox a bit...
The summary seems to have done a pretty bad job at describing the article, as it's more about how Hollywood alien encounters don't make sense (aliens coming along, inaccurate phasers blasting etc.)
Did you ever wonder though - why these same [alien] scientists who made these neato energy weapons never bothered to develop targeting systems? They still rely on crappy biological reflexes to aim them. It's even sillier when alien robot/cyborgs that can outperform humans in every other way somehow still aren't so great at aiming their phaser zapper. They miss just as much as the humans do, and by that I mean - a lot. Of course, Star Wars would have been a short film if every shot stormtroopers made hit Han Solo but it would have made more sense.
Its actually rather ridiculous when you think about it - we (as in current state of human tech) already have automated targeting systems that work well with our doofy bullet-guns. We literally have targeting systems in existence today better than anything you saw in Star Wars.
and also how aliens will have already explored so much of the galaxy they'll just stop exploring more (for some reason, seems a bit unlikely to me)
If we discovered a fish-like creature on Europa today it would be fascinating for us to study it. If however, we were 1000 times smarter and had spent the last 1000 years finding fish-like creatures across the galaxy, and could with 99.99% accuracy predict the exact existence of such creatures from light-years away, it probably wouldn't be all that interesting to go study another one.
Also what about automated (Von Newman) probes? Paul doesn't really seem to consider all avenues of exploration.
I can think of a much more depressing reason why ETs may never travel. Perhaps at a certain level of development in cognitive psych and fundamental physics it becomes clear that conscious and personal identity are illusions. Then life is regarded as trap, reproduction ceases, and the remaining population subsides into a virtual reality bath to soothe its pain.
`Perche non reggi tu, o sacra fame de l'oro,l'appetito de' mortali?'
"The question of why aliens might 'want to come here' is probably fundamentally flawed because we are forming that question from our current (tiny) viewpoint. The word 'want' might not apply at all to someone 1000 times smarter than us." The question is flawed because it equates intelligence with technological progress. Tech level is not the same as intelligence. Second, the question assumes that we haven't been visited already and that we are not currently being visited now. There is plenty of evidence that we are in fact being visited. Third, it is assumed that we are "tiny" in our viewpoint when we may only be limited by our assumptions! The author presumes himself inferior and uninterested and then projects this as an axiom upon the rest of humanity. Give me a means to travel to another world right now and I will do it because I can! So, the author equates high intelligence with boredom and disinterest in "lesser" life and places? Stupid assumptions all.
Most people are mostly good most of the time.
Out of karma again, you polack cunt?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The reverse argument holds :
Being 1000x dummer ,
we are unaware of their visitations up to now
Avoid your fears , or wonder at the past
for example we on earth are always listening to radio, telephone and music ... now one hearing person wants to meet a deaf person, but does not know
how to reach him, when deaf person has no phone, radio or music-equipment at home . . . how to reach a deaf person, when never met before ???
or for example we on earth are always watching beautiful pics like museum, artworks, advertisings, movies, videos, and are talking about many beautiful pics ... now it happens we meet somebody who is blind from birth - how should we describe colours to him ??? how should we describe a beautiful pic to a blind person ???
so now earthlings want to meet aliens . . . means probably we are not more smart than 100.000 years ago ... despite of different equipment ... 100.000 years ago we had sticks, stone, arrows spears and splint-stones to make fire ... today we have cars, computers, electricity ... but we are today the same people like 100.000 years ago - because we still have the simple same taste like 100.000 years ago - the same simple taste like a paramecium - we are only content with something which looks as something somewhat best thing to us .... no matter if woman or man - we are only content with something which looks as the best to us. so we did not make any progress, no matter which equipment we have today and which equipment we had 100.000 years ago - we still have the same taste.
so why earthlings want to meet aliens ??? resp. why ever aliens want to meet earthlings ??? for same reason ??? or because of this primitive simple taste - to only be content with the best ??? - then aliens dont want to meet ever a single earthling ??? because earthlings are too primitive like parameciums ??? typic earthling - still believing in progress ? with only one single taste ? to be content only with the best ??? too primitive ! you can forget earthlings !? what a luck we survived the mayan calendar ! phew ! - so we already reached a new level of understanding mankind ! congratulations ! the primitive simple taste has been now dumped into trash ! finally ! phew ! that was really hard for us ! boah ! hey ! a new level of understanding mankind ! now ! thats a universal record ! so it is enough to lead wars against each other on earth - we have no place anymore for all weapons !
To be honest, I'd give it up. It'd be kinda like playing Pokemon with a GameShark pre-loaded with all the codes to give you a completely filled PokeDex, all of the badges, whatever pokemon of whatever type(s) and with whatever moves you want, whatever items (particularly Master Balls) you want, infinite items... To me, that's just not nearly as fun, because about five-sixths of the game has already been completed before you really begin.
Likewise, I personally think that having 'brain-level access to all information' wouldn't be as fun; you wouldn't actually be learning anything, because (if you had the device) you wouldn't have to learn anything: you'd call up a piece of information, recite it -- either verbatim, or in your own words (your choice) -- and then, just as quickly as you recalled it, it'd be gone. After a while, you'd barely have any memory of even doing it, because there just wouldn't have been enough synapses in use at the time. It would, I theorize, make us less intelligent, as people would rely on their instant-info devices more and more until hardly even the brightest of them could function without them. Eventually, we'd probably end up with everyone's brains almost atrophying.
And then, of course, someone would probably be foolish enough to try and use their device to simultaneously access all information at once. It would end up giving its user an unprecedentedly-large burst of data, probably overloading (or almost overloading) their brain as it desperately tried to contain all of the information it was given. They would become very silly -- extremely perturbed. They'd be... a freakazoid!
Or, more likely, a vegetable. :(
I read a sci-fi story called 'Waystation' from Amazing Magazine in the 50s that said that Earth's great contribution to the galactic community would be coffee but we know that they'll also come here for the sex, drugs and rock & roll of course!
Simple curiosity. And if Aliens could come here, it would be understandable that humanity would never be aware of it.
"If any sentient life existed nearby, it would detect us years ago and run away to another galaxy by now" ...not mine, but I can't for the life of me google who said that or where I read it.
How would you change if you were twice as smart as you are now. How about ten times as smart? (Don't answer, truth is, you're not smart enough to know).
And yet, the author is smart enough to know that aliens wouldn't be interested in humans/ interstellar travel. Good job.
The writer's conclusion is that we Humans will progress to the point that we won't care to travel to other stars, and that other species have likely evolved to the same state. I'd suggest that the first part is likely correct. We will progress to the point that we have access to all the information and Human opinions that might interest us and, thus would allow us to travel to the stars. However, whether or not we're interested might be much less important than the issue of latency. If we're all connected, traveling much past the Moon will cut us off from the "hive mind" in such a way that we'd be so lost as to no longer be functional, due to the delay in exchange of information due to the finite speed of light. This isn't an original thought. The late, great space scientist, philosopher, and SciFi writer Charles Sheffield made this exact point in his short story "Power Failure", which I read in his 1979 collection known as "Vectors". It is the single most thought-provoking SciFi collection I've read.
the writer of TFA is clearly a septic sceptic who lacks imagination of any kind and treats any kind of alien possibility from a human point of view. I mean Sagan could imagine floating sacks on Jupiter and he was a scientist (exact science is not know for its imagination, except the scorned ones who lead to quantum leaps because they diverted from the calculations for a second, right?)
to claim to know what any kind of 'alien' would do or think like is homo-centric, SETI is nice and has probably lead to some discoveries but is looking for patterns you sapiens consider to be patterns, tell me otherwise , what does an 'alien' pattern look like since you seem to be looking for familiar patterns there.
On the other hand if i were to give it some thought, i would either go with Klaatu or the star trek prime directive depending on how many planets are habitable (considering the fact they would be carbon-based in need of oxygen andd sustenance for starters)
The possibilities of an encounter are limitless, aliens might not need ships at all or might never have gotten to the point where communication relied on learning words other people invented, they might have been here as gods, von daniken style, they might have planted some algae to come back and harvest, only to see the farm turned into an interesting experiment
they might not exist (although the larger the place gets the more probably they do but never certain since even with dimensions you might just get an infinite number of copies of this one and not all possibilites like wishful thinkers like to think)
i think the writer is an attention whore trying to be a septic sceptic lacking imagination about it
maybe he's religious, or an atheist
which are the same to me since both are categorical and dogmatic and leave no room for anything but their own point of view
the bipolar nature of the sapiens, why don't you just follow the rules of evolution and go extinct already ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
It seems to me to be an argument for stagnation.
Easy access to information / knowledge does not satiate all curiosity, there will always be people (or beings) that wish to know more than is currently known.
What about "need"? What if they NEED to come visit us for some reason? Either to satisfy their hyper-intellectual curiosity about what other life exists in the universe, or just to murder us and rape our natural resources a la Independence Day and every other Sci Fi movie about marauding alien cultures..?
Assuming that aliens will not visit us with those reasons is to assume that travelling the universe and meeting other cultures is justifiable only on a whim, a literal flight of fancy.. this is, in fact, the opening of Star Trek (to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no (man|one) has gone before..) but that doesn't mean to say that this is the only justification to do so and that if you were a hyper-brained hyper-culture that you just wouldn't give so much of a shit..
You forgot a most likely possibility: they are fugitives from their own civilization. They need to get away for awhile to someplace safe and environmentally compatible until the heat is off. They could either plan the trip here or merely stumble across our planet while running away. So the first aliens we meet could be simple criminals.