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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.
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.
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 ..
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
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
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
Cthulu is not evil, just amoral or uncaring.
And little microorganisms: http://science.ubc.ca/news/697
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.
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.
Maybe they'll just stop over here for a roadside picnic. ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
TFA kept focusing on economic reasons though... and joke aside, the author forgot a few not-so-obvious-but-just-as compelling reasons:
1) population pressure
2) cultural/historical/other inquiry (aka the "because it's out there and we'd like to see it for ourselves" rationale)
3) war (you know, rebels and stuff... Everyone from King David to Mao Zedong spent time on the lam - where better to hide from an oppressive government than, you know, outer-freakin'-space?)
4) Maybe they want to know what Natalie Portman tastes like while naked and covered in grits? (okay not that, but maybe some similar stupid reason - think of it as a glorified hunting expedition, a'la Predator)
5) politics (hell, we build bridges to nowhere on governmental funds...)
6) {insert lesser barely-rational and irrational reasons here}
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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
6) {insert lesser barely-rational and irrational reasons here}
Ferinstance, lulz. We'll always have lulz. On some level, I think lulz are a requirement for the development of intelligence. Oh sure, cognitive psychologists call it "play", but we all know the correct name is "lulz".
So aliens would visit us for the lulz. And we wouldn't like it. Lulz aren't fun for the victim, only the lulzer. If your victim is chuckling along, you're doing it wrong. Unless it's the "heh, heh, I'm a loser, you sure got me" nervous chuckling. The kind a lulz victim does because it's a viable alternative to crying or impotent rage.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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!
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
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
"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."
Humans taste about the same as pigs. I wouldn't call that the finest delicacy.
Bacon comes from pigs. Pigs are fucking delicious.
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.
And don't forget about the Human horn!
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 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
sport :) like predator
Only 'flamers' flame!
You guys are all of the incredibly naive assumption that intelligent aliens will have anything in common with us at all, an example is Terry Bison's excellent short story They're made out of meat. (full text at the link)
A thousand years more advanced? How about ten million years more advanced? That's mine but another example of how we have no clue whatever (BTW, I'm posting the last chapter tomorrow). Ten million years is a small fraction of the thirteen billion plus the universe has existed.
The bottom line, though is that we have no idea. There's no proof, or even any indication, that Earth isn't the first planet in the galaxy and maybe even the universe (unlikely as that seems to me) to host life. Mars was once hospitable to life, as our robots have found, but there is no indication it ever started there.
Great topic for discussion, though. Personally, I think they exist or did exist or will exist, but I really doubt we'll meet them.
Free Martian Whores!