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Fiddler on the Reef posted:I think generational ships make sense: in order to guarantee survival of your species you don’t want to be dependent on a planet or solar system to survive. You want to live in space. It’s way too easy for an enemy to send a few relativistic bullets your way and wipe out your species without them. Also if indeed the galaxy is teeming with life your probes are gonna have a hard time finding any suitable planets that aren’t already occupied. At that point why even bother going to planets? Dealing with the gravity well is just a massive pain in the rear end that prevents you from doing anything you'd really want to anyway. If you can already make these safe, massive, self-sustaining generation ships why not just build a shitload of space habitats and stretch out and enjoy yourselves in custom tailored environments along with your friends, family, and the vast majority of your species. Spread em out even a little bit and they're safe from rods from god, too
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Feb 25, 2021 23:19
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Bloody posted:were the occupation yeah hopefully the intergalactic space federation has a policy of leaving planets with already established self replicating life alone.
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Feb 25, 2021 23:21
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:At that point why even bother going to planets? Dealing with the gravity well is just a massive pain in the rear end that prevents you from doing anything you'd really want to anyway. If you can already make these safe, massive, self-sustaining generation ships why not just build a shitload of space habitats and stretch out and enjoy yourselves in custom tailored environments along with your friends, family, and the vast majority of your species. I like your optimism
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Feb 25, 2021 23:22
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the virgin generation ship crewperson: our culture and institutional knowledge has degenerated to the point where we've all regressed to barbarians because somebody broke our library machine two thousand years ago. we're going to get to a planet that got baked by a gamma ray burst the day after we left and now it's just a dead ball of rock but nobody knows it. we're going to drift until our oxygen systems finally break down because the religion invented to pass that knowledge schismed and the two sides killed each other. this sucks and I hate it here. the chad oneill cylinder inhabitant: it's tuesday so i'm going to take a shuttle to the neighboring asteroid hab for hang gliding zero g ultrasex
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Feb 25, 2021 23:27
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Fermi paradox is maybe bad math? I seem to recall some paper working out that the paradox comes from treating a succession of estimates of dynamics like "percent of planets with favorable conditions for single celled life" or "likelihood of single cell life developing into multi-cell life" as a set of independent point estimates and resultingly underestimating the chances that one of the parameters could be so close to zero it would render the law of large numbers re: the size of the galaxy moot.
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Feb 25, 2021 23:36
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:At that point why even bother going to planets? Dealing with the gravity well is just a massive pain in the rear end that prevents you from doing anything you'd really want to anyway. If you can already make these safe, massive, self-sustaining generation ships why not just build a shitload of space habitats and stretch out and enjoy yourselves in custom tailored environments along with your friends, family, and the vast majority of your species. Yeah, if you have the technology to build generation ships, you basically have all the technology you need to not care about habitable planets and just start living in space. Hell, theoretically that point you basically could sustain humanity longer than the universe has existed just with our current solar system. Star is becoming a red giant? Move your habitats out further. Star is shrinking down to a white dwarf? Time to cuddle up to the star again. The only reason to care about planets at all would be additional resources and maybe like a nice view.
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Feb 25, 2021 23:53
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I think that prokaryotic life is the rule in the universe, and it's probably everywhere. As pointed out by a previous poster, life on Earth arose about as early as one could imagine possible, and it stayed prokaryotic for billions of years. The Great Filter, in my opinion, is complexity. On Earth, we had the evolution of eukaryotes happen due to a hybridization of two separate lineages of life, the Eubacteria and the Archae. While previously thought to simply result in the acquisition of a mitochondrion, we now know that the separate genomes of these two branches of life hybridized to produce a third. This event kicks off a drive to increasingly complex organisms in this group only, as Eubacteria and Archae still remain largely unchanged. The filter here is the chance of this happening, as we don't see multiple hybridizations happening in the eukaryotic lineage so it must be hyper-ultra-rare. I think there's also a "sweet spot" for hybridization to happen: too early and there's not enough genetic diversity for meaningful complexity to arise, too late and the organisms are so different that hybrids have too much of an initial fitness defect to survive. Are there other filters? Oh most certainly. We're definitely in one right now, the Great Oxygenation Event was another, and the carbon-lock of the Carbinferous Period was a third. But the one that prevents aliens from being everywhere? I'd bet money on jumping to complexity being the reason why. It's even testable (are there slimeballs everywhere?) and likely universal (sacs of RNA won't make spaceships). No, no vegetables on that Baconator please. Do you take American Express?
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Feb 26, 2021 03:47
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mycomancy posted:I think that prokaryotic life is the rule in the universe, and it's probably everywhere. As pointed out by a previous poster, life on Earth arose about as early as one could imagine possible, and it stayed prokaryotic for billions of years. While all those events are interesting, there is nothing to suggest they are unique, or even rare. If earth-like planets exist (they do) given billions of years and the right energy inputs, I'd say life would HAVE to exist. Once you have life, you have iterative complexity. Failures disappear after one generation, but successes persist for many many generations and each success opens the door for more failures, but also more successes. Or for another analogy, let's examine the metaphor about the tornado going through a junkyard and building a 747. Assuming the pieces of the 747 exist, but they are just mechanically disassembled (The tornado is strictly a mechanical process in this analogy) and you allow successes to persist, a 747 will be constructed relatively rapidly, and not only that, but the construction becomes inevitable. Or another example on a smaller scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bnj1sPfo4Ek tl;dr a billion years is a LONG time, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable imo.
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Feb 26, 2021 08:40
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cool well this thread gave me an existential crisis
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Feb 26, 2021 18:40
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low key sex master posted:cool well this thread gave me an existential crisis mission accomplished
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Feb 26, 2021 19:01
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low key sex master posted:cool well this thread gave me an existential crisis Try this one: You are the result of an unbroken chain of successfully living things that extends back to the very first self-replicating RNA molecules that evolved on the face of some clay shore 4 billion years ago, but that doesn't matter because this rock will turn into a dead greenhouse in 500-1000 million years and nothing you do will ever matter in the long run.
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Feb 26, 2021 19:28
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mycomancy posted:Try this one: Eat Arby's
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Feb 26, 2021 20:08
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The answer to the Fermi paradox is easy: Life is out there but unimaginably alien. Intelligence via upright walking for us was a weird fluke that massively reduced survivability (birthing is the worst due to hips, tree mobility way better than waking around like a dickhead) for a very long time. Of the several language-using families, it’s only us and corvids that are tool users and we’re the only tool makers. SETI can only search for radio-users and of the billions of species of this planet, there is only one of those. Moreover, this topic is steeped in anthropocentrism. First up the idea that an intelligent life capable of using radios, would use radios is totally baseless. Sight and sound, broadcast, culture, need only be primary to humans. There is nothing requiring radio for a species to be interplanetary. Radio seems easy to us but what if it isn’t, or what if hyperradio is actually simple as poo poo but we’re too loving dumb so we get nothing. Here’s a thought: radio was invented in a time of relative peace, then applied pretty soon after to WWI, in pretty basic form. WWII saw encryption over radio with one time cyphers and Enigma. The Cold War saw numbers stations. Modern covert communication now sees massive use of steganography, not just hiding the message but hiding the fact a message has been sent. If we did slightly more wars, we’d probably need to find a way to communicate without telling enemies that someone is sending messages. If we had been smarter, we would have done that from the start, build it into the tech so even civilian applications would only see static if they weren’t authorised, like cable TV. On a broader note, the story of modern biology is whenever anyone looked at somewhere totally inhospitable to life as they knew it but still had an entropy gradient, they found it. They just weren’t looking because they didn’t think to. But that’s just carbon, DNA, plural, multilcellular, atoms, time, space-based life. If you just need an entropy gradient, they’re everywhere and in everything. There are probably memetic life forms whose cells are us. Stars are probably teeming with life, made out of magnetic fields or plasma. Weather patterns. Mountains. Black holes. Stock markets. Quantum foam. Inside mathematical concepts. Sound waves. Light waves. Sand on the beach. Inside this post. A cubic meter of dirt from your backyard has a dozen unidentified species. Life is everywhere, we are just terrible at looking for it.
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Feb 26, 2021 21:44
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I don't really disagree with your post but if you have spaceflight (or really, anything that requires you to coordinate over a decent distance) you probably have radio, and unless you're really paranoid it's probably prohibitively difficult to hide the fact that you're using radio entirely. Even if you communicate by smell, or spore clouds, or viral payloads, you're probably going to find a use for talking to your buddies at c rather than having to wait until they come back and fart at you, and of the ways you could communicate radio is probably the easiest, cheapest, and most forgiving. You're right in that there's no real way to know, but provided we at least kind of have an idea about what reality is there are some assumptions that are safer to make about aliens than others: they'll probably know some math, physics, and chemistry, and included therein is probably radio. There's always the chance that we missed something very basic and skipped over undetectable hyperspace broadcasting or something, but I think that's kind of a stretch. Maybe there are electromagnetic entities in the solar corona who have rich and profound inner lives, but I think that's neither here nor there where the Fermi paradox is concerned, because it (and the Drake equation, for that matter) is specifically concerned with communicative civilizations
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Feb 26, 2021 22:36
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also while i freely admit i think there's prolly prokaryotes out there, suggesting that life's everywhere because it's everywhere on earth doesn't track. it's everywhere here because we know life started at least here (barring some out there seeding / panspermian hypothesis).
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Feb 26, 2021 22:41
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anyway here is my solution to the fermi paradox because no one asked: in the long term no one with half a brain spends any real time on planets, and eventually stops loving with stars altogether it's hard to get anything done at the bottom of a gravity well, and they're annoyingly prone to poo poo like ecosphere collapse, impact events, rampaging pathogens, megavolcanoes, etc. etc. You get one little grey goo outbreak and that's your whole poo poo gone. So instead you live in space habitats, probably close enough to your star to slup up plenty of free energy but even this isn't strictly necessary. Much more comfortable in habitats, and way safer. Somebody's fusion reactor melts down or you get bopped with a relativistic weapon from a lovely neighbor? It'll ruin your weekend for sure but it doesn't mean extinction because you're spread throughout the inner system, at least. Eventually though you mature enough to realize that shuffling around matter is for barbarians and perverts and if you want to actually get serious about living in the universe for any appreciable amount of time stars just aren't going to cut it, so you pack your bags and head towards the nearest supermassive black hole to wait for things to cool down long enough to build your deep time black-hole-powered supercomputer to upload yourself into. So if you want to find any aliens go poking around sag a*. Good luck detecting any comprehensible em spectra communications from down there, though 
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Feb 26, 2021 23:00
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They're not here for the same reason we're not there.
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Feb 27, 2021 00:45
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Fermi Paradox solved: God is real.
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Feb 27, 2021 00:52
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chaosbreather posted:Moreover, this topic is steeped in anthropocentrism. First up the idea that an intelligent life capable of using radios, would use radios is totally baseless. Sight and sound, broadcast, culture, need only be primary to humans. There is nothing requiring radio for a species to be interplanetary. Radio seems easy to us but what if it isn’t, or what if hyperradio is actually simple as poo poo but we’re too loving dumb so we get nothing. Radio is a fundamental property of elctro-magnetism and every star and most planets of sufficient size will have a magnetic field. If you are postulating a spacefaring race that doesn't understand magnets and the relation between magnetism and electricity, you aren't grounded in the physical universe that we actually exist in, you are just describing a cut-rate sci-fi plot and betraying your own ignorance. You also betray your lack of understanding between radio, a way to communicate, and the fairly difficult problem of real-time coding/decoding, and then immediately jumping into magical thinking of communicating across a distance that is impossible to detect except by anyone except the designated receiver. The fact remains that radio was developed because it was useful, it will be useful to any society that has beings that wish to communicate in a way that their innate communication capability cannot. It remains useful even without magical abilities.
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Feb 27, 2021 05:02
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ate poo poo on live tv posted:Radio is a fundamental property of elctro-magnetism and every star and most planets of sufficient size will have a magnetic field. If you are postulating a spacefaring race that doesn't understand magnets and the relation between magnetism and electricity, you aren't grounded in the physical universe that we actually exist in, you are just describing a cut-rate sci-fi plot and betraying your own ignorance. As a pro tip, if you're trying to call someone else ignorant, it really helps your argument if you can spell the thing you're trying to lecture them on. Your argument here really doesn't hold any water, either. The very fact "elctro-magnetism" is naturally occurring means that species evolve to take advantage of them, right? Like homing birds, for example. And our EM traffic has hosed up migration patterns for poo poo-tons of birds. We don't really give a poo poo about that, because we're not birds. But having a compass in your brain is a pretty great survival advantage, and there's no reason a tool-using species couldn't have that trait. If manmade radio waves made everyone dizzy and disoriented, there's no way they'd gain popularity for broadcast. We understand gamma radiation perfectly but we sure as poo poo don't use that for cellphones. As to my stealth-first argument, as I intimated, even humanity could have done it that way. All it would take for the civilian invention of radio to not be inevitable would be the type of censorship that all world powers do on a regular basis. If radio was invented by a top secret advanced research agency like DARPA rather than a couple of different civilians, a totally normal thing for governments to spend money on, then they would have absolutely kept it secret as an information superweapon. If Marconi was the only inventor, but during Mussolini's reign, it seems likely the fascists would confiscate the technology for the same reasons. Then, would be completely rational to not field that superweapon until they could ensure that recievers confiscated by the enemy wouldn't betray transmitters. No magical elements are required here for reliable signal camouflage, just continually adjusting the transmitting frequency probably be plenty enough to fool SETI / the enemy. There's also anthropocentrism in the idea that every society believes new technology is good and should be adopted broadly and quickly by everyone. That's purely a post-war attitude, created by the rise of advertising, with some precursors in the Victorian era that were far from universal. The Romans, for example, despised new technology, distrusting new poo poo pretty much entirely, only adapting and making new advances in the military. Its the height of hubris to assume your attitudes, in the minority as they are, must be inevitable for all life everywhere, when they aren't even shared by loving Mennonites. chaosbreather fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Feb 27, 2021 |
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Feb 27, 2021 05:53
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SETI searches being done today are looking for advertised radio beams that would be deliberately sent out. We don't try to eavesdrop because it would be practically impossible at any reasonable distance. Since we want to find a deliberate contact attempt the radio signals we calibrate around are where the optimal energy efficiency for broadcasting exists, a few ghz, in the microwave band. We look for frequencies like 21cm which have special physical meaning thats separated from human social pieces. For SETI to work we would need a powerful radio beam to fall directly on the solar system and even then we're talking about 100 or 1000 light years of realistic distance. We might be capable of seeing signals from 10⁵ stars with our very best radio telescopes. Compare to 10¹² stars in the milky way.
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Feb 27, 2021 09:02
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chaosbreather posted:If manmade radio waves made everyone dizzy and disoriented, there's no way they'd gain popularity for broadcast. This is the part that belies your fundamental misunderstanding. All energy that is transmitted through space can be considered "radio waves," or specifically EM waves. The "manmade" part is immaterial. The principles of radio work at all frequencies of the EM spectrum. If the current FCC broadcast spectrum caused problems for human society, we would have simply chosen a different band of frequencies, there is an infinite number of to choose from. quote:No magical elements are required here for reliable signal camouflage, just continually adjusting the transmitting frequency probably be plenty enough to fool SETI / the enemy. quote:There's also anthropocentrism in the idea that every society believes new technology is good and should be adopted broadly and quickly by everyone Salt Fish posted:SETI searches being done today are looking for advertised radio beams that would be deliberately sent out. We don't try to eavesdrop because it would be practically impossible at any reasonable distance. For SETI specifically yes, but for radio-telescopes, we are looking at much broader signals. Any radio signals that are detected and don't fall within what we consider "natural" phenomenon, get looked at much more closely (eventually, we only have so many telescopes, and space is pretty big I'm told). If we started picking up alien Hitler starting a global war in some far-off solar system, that would stick out like a sore-thumb compared to anything else we have observed so far. ate shit on live tv fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Feb 27, 2021 |
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Feb 27, 2021 09:05
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Thats not really true. For an ordinary TV broadcast on earth the signal is going to be too weak to detect even at the closest stars. Eventually you'd just be collecting single photons and it would be impossible with any technology to discover information in the signal. In practical energy terms you have to ask why some alien would be beaming signals out at a strength where they're interpretable at multiple light years distance. It wouldn't be by accident.
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Feb 27, 2021 09:39
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Fiddler on the Reef posted:which makes me wonder why our planet hasn’t already been occupied before we evolved. crap. How would we know it if an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization lived on our planet 100 million years ago? What evidence would remain of their passing?
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Feb 27, 2021 13:24
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ate poo poo on live tv posted:This is the part that belies your fundamental misunderstanding. All energy that is transmitted through space can be considered "radio waves," or specifically EM waves. The "manmade" part is immaterial. The principles of radio work at all frequencies of the EM spectrum. If the current FCC broadcast spectrum caused problems for human society, we would have simply chosen a different band of frequencies, there is an infinite number of to choose from. I’m pretty sure you’re trolling but it’s so high effort that I don’t really care, I like thinking about this stuff and having a sounding board, even if you are an insulting one. Man made transmissions are unnatural, so they would definitionally be different from the background noise your body evolved to be comfortable in. We are sensitive to an extraordinary range of sounds. Once you have a sense, it seems like it’s basically free to enhance that sense. Intelligence is incredibly complex so it has to be a late stage development, so if we were on a trajectory that had radio sense, it makes sense that by the time we had intelligence we’d be sensible to as big of a range our biology could handle. Furthermore, if a new type of technology started making people sick as soon as you turn it on, it doesn’t seem likely people would say “what if we adjust this then we can play sick tunes”. Most people will “say gently caress, we should stay away from that”. Important crazy people would say “yum yum new weapon”. quote:This is just straight up wrong. How do you think FM radio works? I think that anyone looking to detect communication would use a spectrum analyser to look at and correlate bursts at any specific frequency. So if you rotated frequencies in such a way that it distributed those communications across those frequencies it would eliminate those spikes, making the signal far less obvious in the noise. SETI or a terrestrial adversary wouldn’t be initially concerned with modulation but detection of signal at all. chaosbreather fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Feb 27, 2021 |
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Feb 27, 2021 14:29
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Speleothing posted:How would we know it if an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization lived on our planet 100 million years ago? What evidence would remain of their passing? That civ lived on Antarctica, and when the ice sheet melts it will release horrors that make World War II look like a gorilla dominance conflict.
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Feb 27, 2021 16:04
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Salt Fish posted:Thats not really true. For an ordinary TV broadcast on earth the signal is going to be too weak to detect even at the closest stars. Eventually you'd just be collecting single photons and it would be impossible with any technology to discover information in the signal. In practical energy terms you have to ask why some alien would be beaming signals out at a strength where they're interpretable at multiple light years distance. It wouldn't be by accident. Agreed. I don't mean we'd necessarily see alien Hitler and be able to interpret the broadcast's meaning. But if the origin signal were strong enough, or close enough, what we picked up would be obviously "different" from background radiation and other naturally generated phenomenon. If it's too far away or was too weak we wouldn't pick it up at all, or rather it would be indistinguishable from the usual noise.
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Feb 27, 2021 16:08
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chaosbreather posted:Moreover, this topic is steeped in anthropocentrism. First up the idea that an intelligent life capable of using radios, would use radios is totally baseless. Sight and sound, broadcast, culture, need only be primary to humans. There is nothing requiring radio for a species to be interplanetary. Radio seems easy to us but what if it isn’t This reminded me of this sci fi short story "The Road Not Taken" quote:The story is told through limited third person point of view, with most of the story concerning a single Roxolani captain, Togram. During a routine journey of conquest, they happen upon Earth. The Roxolani anticipate a simple and rewarding campaign, as they can detect no use of gravity manipulation, the cornerstone of their civilization. Humanity is awed by the invaders, as the maneuverability granted by that technology suggests the rest of their civilization is equally impressive. But as they begin their assault, things take a turn for the absurd—the Roxolani attack with matchlock weapons and black powder explosives. Humans retaliate with automatic weapons and missiles. The battle is short, and most of the invaders are killed. A few are captured alive. Maybe we're going to be the Fermi Paradox for the rest of the galazy.
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Feb 27, 2021 16:39
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ate poo poo on live tv posted:Agreed. I don't mean we'd necessarily see alien Hitler and be able to interpret the broadcast's meaning. But if the origin signal were strong enough, or close enough, what we picked up would be obviously "different" from background radiation and other naturally generated phenomenon. If it's too far away or was too weak we wouldn't pick it up at all, or rather it would be indistinguishable from the usual noise. This whole post is extremely relevant: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39571/how-far-away-would-an-alien-civilization-need-to-be-for-us-to-not-notice-them
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Feb 27, 2021 16:54
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chaosbreather posted:As a pro tip, if you're trying to call someone else ignorant, it really helps your argument if you can spell the thing you're trying to lecture them on. Your argument here really doesn't hold any water, either. The very fact "elctro-magnetism" is naturally occurring means that species evolve to take advantage of them, right? Like homing birds, for example. And our EM traffic has hosed up migration patterns for poo poo-tons of birds. We don't really give a poo poo about that, because we're not birds. But having a compass in your brain is a pretty great survival advantage, and there's no reason a tool-using species couldn't have that trait. If manmade radio waves made everyone dizzy and disoriented, there's no way they'd gain popularity for broadcast. We understand gamma radiation perfectly but we sure as poo poo don't use that for cellphones. You're really jumping through a ton of hoops to hypothesize a complex but incurious civilization who is physically harmed by radio waves, and yeah I guess if someone out there was that weird they wouldn't pop up on SETI but this is a numbers game, and to assume that many or even most advanced civilizations would never develop or utilize radio transmitters is totally outrageous. If you can work metal and generate electricity you can build a radio, and if Marconi didn't, someone else would have. If DARPA creeps did first and kept it secret there's no way, outside of some sort of omnipresent police state that suppresses all civilian technology, that they'd be able to keep it secret for too long. Even if our hypothetical aliens found no use for radio or somehow short circuited their own technological development and got quantum tunneling communicators before they invented the radio transmitter, they know about radio because they know about the EM spectrum because they know anything at all about physics. Radio is not complex. Detecting radio waves and emitting radio waves is not difficult science for a technologically developed spacefaring civilization, and has a variety of extremely obvious uses. We can make these statements pretty safely about a broad swathe of what intelligent civilizations would look like. It's why SETI looking for radio signals isn't a bad idea, and it's why SETI looking for structured radio signals isn't a bad idea also: if you're intelligent enough to build things like civilizations and radio transmitters, you probably know a little about math. You probably also know a little bit about the universe around you. You probably also figure that anyone out there capable of communication can piece this together too, and so if you want to talk you should probably make your communications look like communication instead of naturally occurring phenomena, and you should probably send it over the cheap, easy, reliable thing everyone probably figures out first. I gotta say though, your point about adopting new technology and the Romans makes absolutely no sense. Yes, our modern day fetish for technology is new and weird, but there has never been a human civilization that abhorred new tools and techniques in any serious way, despite insignificant conclaves like your Mennonites. Regardless of what Roman citizens felt or didn't feel during a certain period in the history of Rome, Rome as a whole was a wellspring of technological advancement. To say nothing of other cultures that existed before Rome, were contemporaneous with Rome, and came into being after Rome fell -- all of which had scores of different attitudes about this or that throughout the course of their existence. I don't know if you want to argue that not thinking the exact same thing as every generation that ever came before you is "anthropocentric", but I think that it's way more likely that attitudes, tastes, modes of production and organization are dynamic within and without a society, not to mention within the brains (or other thinking apparatus) of sentient, sapient beings capable of building societies. Pentecoastal Elites fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Feb 27, 2021 |
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Feb 27, 2021 17:23
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Phanatic posted:This whole post is extremely relevant: nice post, and it supports what im saying. "We might be able to detect the presence of an EM radiation spectrum that does not match either the cosmic background radiation or what you would expect from natural processes in a solar system. " though i admit i was very optimistic in my detection capability.
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Feb 27, 2021 22:58
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chaosbreather posted:he Romans, for example, despised new technology, distrusting new poo poo pretty much entirely, only adapting and making new advances in the military. Its the height of hubris to assume your attitudes, in the minority as they are, must be inevitable for all life everywhere, when they aren't even shared by loving Mennonites. Lol that's totally inaccurate. Try reading de Aquius, Romans were fine with the advance of technology, and considered themselves in the modern day better off than 'the ancients' of a couple centuries ago, who had technologically inferior infrastructure
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Feb 28, 2021 20:05
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there's a hilarious Harry Turtledove short story called "The Road Not Taken" in which Earth is invaded by aliens. The aliens land on Earth, are approached by a human delegation, and kill them with muskets. The conceit is that interstellar travel is hilariously easy and pretty much every civilization discovers it around their Renaissance, and then they go out a-conquering and stagnate a bit technologically. Humanity just ... missed it. The invaders are easily routed on account of muskets not being as good as tanks or automatic rifles, and the story ends with two of the aliens realizing with horror that humanity now knows about the road not taken and will become the new conquerors.
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Mar 1, 2021 01:08
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Run, Kodos, he’s got a board with a nail in it!
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Mar 1, 2021 04:38
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I reckon it's some degree of 'great filter' / 'we're special' combination that makes spacefaring life less common than first estimated. Not so much a great filter where civilisations create their own destruction before they get off their rocks because of a technological race condition, but rather that intelligence as we see it is a knife-edge balancing act, and humankind is near to the maxima of ability as a result of intelligence. If humans were a little less intelligent or a little less social, I don't think we'd have seen nearly the same the scientific advancement we have achieved. We'd either be unable to come up with the advancements, or too tribal to come together to benefit from collaboration. This would have a knock-on effect and I don't think we would've ended up in a situation where we're capable of rocketing out of our gravity well. Conversely, it wouldn't surprise me at all if a hypothetical creature with more intelligence than us found itself too burdened by its intelligence - for example, struggling with existential crisis, etc. - and ended up wiping itself out. Alternatively, I could easily believe that the biological foundations of what produces intellect quickly end up producing side-effects that inhibit achieving outcomes. For example, incredibly bright people quite often struggle with depression, etc. due to their intellect. Additionally, neurodevelopmental conditions such as ASD seem to correlate at least to some degree with intelligence, with more extreme cases quickly become limiting. It sort of seems to my lay-view that intellect itself could become too overwhelming and quickly begin to put a handbrake on a species' development. Human brains are also incredibly expensive. We use about 20% of our total energy intake to power them. These days that's easy to handle, but a super-brain with even a bit higher energy requirement might quickly cause a species to struggle to find enough energy in its early era, before it's had a chance to really develop all of that scientific advancement that leads the surplus of modern food production. I admit I'm completely talking out of my arse, with no formal or informal education here. You might also argue that evolution will select for the intellectual maxima we might find ourselves in, but it's not precise and may over- or under-step the sweet spot that we hit that leads to tools, agriculture, settlements, industrialised society, etc. I would not be surprised if there's lots of relatively happy dolphin- or ape-level lifeforms just chilling around, and that we were extremely lucky in our rapid development. Maybe you need to fast forward several tens of billions of years more to see many more crop up?
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Mar 1, 2021 09:53
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Speleothing posted:How would we know it if an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization lived on our planet 100 million years ago? What evidence would remain of their passing? I would expect they would leave some trash on the moon. Depending on what you mean by "live" here, there might be some life forms that are not like everything else (maybe at least some bacteria. If earth life would completely eradicate them, they probably wouldn't live here in the first place)
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Mar 1, 2021 16:28
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commando in tophat posted:I would expect they would leave some trash on the moon. We'd have to go digging on the moon to find it though. It wouldn't be visible at all.
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Mar 1, 2021 17:23
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spacetoaster posted:We'd have to go digging on the moon to find it though. It wouldn't be visible at all. I meant some bigger trash, like some storage building or whatever large that wouldn't be completely covered with dust (how much cm of dust was added to moon in 100m years? If they've taken everything with them then of course we will find nothing)
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Mar 1, 2021 18:32
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commando in tophat posted:I meant some bigger trash, like some storage building or whatever large that wouldn't be completely covered with dust (how much cm of dust was added to moon in 100m years? If they've taken everything with them then of course we will find nothing) The moon gets hit with several tons of meteorites every day. I don't think a large building would last 1,000 years. Much less 100,000,000. I was doing a map course in the military back in the 90's and was walking through a forest. According to the old rear end map I had from the 70's I was actually on what used to be a airport. And sure enough, several inches under the dirt was old crumbled up concrete from the runway. I know the moon doesn't have trees and weather patterns to destroy whatever might be built there, but I imagine all those meteor impacts would break down anything and cover it with soil pretty easily given enough time. spacetoaster fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Mar 1, 2021 |
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Mar 1, 2021 21:10
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I don't know about this number you have, but surely it must be the far side only? It's pretty hard to wiggle a meteor in between the earth and the near side.
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Mar 1, 2021 21:48
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