Why We'll Never Meet Aliens 629
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."
We've already met one (Score:3, Funny)
Re:We've already met one (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We've already met one (Score:5, Funny)
Why is this here? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why is this here? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Then tells us how THEY know
Re:Why is this here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the saddest part is that people think computers make people smarter. In truth, computers make people less smart due to not requiring to know as much nor be able to process as much information.
i.e. "Just Google it."
Re:Why is this here? (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends on people I guess. For some of us, it actually makes people more knowledgeable . I learned a heck lot more researching designs for my OTA antenna system just by lurking in forums and reading Wikis for a month than in my whole RF Communications year back in CEGEP. My library network only has *one* book on antenna design for the whole Montreal island, and it's been rented out for at least 2 weeks now...
But for most users, I tend to agree.
Re: (Score:3)
And then they dare to say this: "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."
Re:Why is this here? (Score:5, Interesting)
The summary begs several questions, actually.
One, how can they presume our mental state would be significantly altered by unknown future technology. History would presume to suggest the opposite of what they suggest, actually. Our ingrained drive for exploring the unknown that we had in the days of sailing ships certainly wasn't quashed with the advent of steamships, or then again by airplanes, rocket ships, etc. and the drive for knowledge that we had in the days of stone tablets wasn't quashed by the invention of paper, the printing press, or the internet. If anything, these advances have only increased our drive to know what's out there.
Two, why would it necessarily take a time span long enough for our universal culture of inquisitiveness to fundamentally shift in order to develop FTL? There is no reason to say it absolutely won't happen before that arbitrary time. We already have theories such as Alcubierrie's suggesting that it isn't necessarily an impossibility, and even if it took 100 years for that theory to be put to practice it's presumptuous to say that drive in our psyche would definitely cease in that short a blip of our history.
Three, even if technological advancements did reduce our exploratory drive, what is to say that similar advancement would affect an alien mind in the same way? As the answer could be such advancements would affect us the same as us, the opposite of us, or something different entirely in equal probabilities, the question itself is therefore meaningless and all we can do is hope that they have the same drive for inquisitiveness as we do in the first place. Or not. Depending on the kind of Sci Fi you watch/read.
Re:Why is this here? (Score:5, Funny)
And that's why I love Slashdot - news for philosophers and hypothetical matters.
Re: (Score:3)
well the summary expects that MOTIVE is directly a function of "smart" and that the more smarter you are the less motivated you are to do thinks just for fucks sake.
of course it doesn't go like that - if they did, earth would be pretty boring already. it's saying that if you can wank you no longer would be motivated to fuck. which I guess is just fine considering that the summary is just on shrooms intellectual wanking.
Re:Why is this here? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry to be pedantic, but unless I missed it, you pointed out only potentially factual errors in the original, not any logical fallacies. So while it certainly raises some questions, it does not "beg" any in your example. (Though I think a thorough analysis of TFA's original premise could find some petitio principii in the author's logic.)
Here is a good explanation of why that is so. [google.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Well.. They have webcams on Mount Everest now, so I could see why no one climbs it any more..
I am going to have to disagree with the author. Fundamentally, you can not advance your technology, or pretty much anything, without a drive for exploration in one form, or another.
Re:Why is this here? (Score:5, Insightful)
The premise of the summary is fatally flawed in and of itself. It starts by equating the accessibility and breadth of knowledge to intelligence, and special* intelligence at that. In making the assumption, it posits that a species with greater intelligence would not be interested in the same things that species with lower intelligence would.
To begin with, knowledge and intelligence are two very different domains. Having greater knowledge is not equivalent to possessing greater intellectual ability, and it is an even further stretch to equate it with special intelligence. Yes, greater intelligence implies greater breadth of knowledge, but this is true only individually. And the relationship between the two is an implication, not an equivalence.
Secondly, there is nothing indicative in our historical (we know our history, right?) record to even remotely indicate that we as a species has grown more intelligent over time. In fact, I would argue that the distribution of intelligence among the popuplation today is the same as (or even skewed in the negative direction) 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, 5000 years ago, and 10,000 years ago. The local maxima and minima with respect to time are also unchanged. What's changed in the past 500 years that resulted in the exponential progress of our society is a sudden stability in our record-keeping ability, which has lead to us collectively retain more knowledge, and disseminate this knowledge more easily. Essentially, we as a species are not reinventing the wheel all the time, and thus we can spend our time progressing other aspects of our lives.
Thus as the premise itself is false with regards to the human species, the remainder does not follow. Now, to extrapolate this to supposedly alien beings would be an incredible stretch either way. In fact, I would go as far as to say that attempting to do so would be entering the realm of theology, i.e. unsubstantiated, even ignorant speculation. You might as well say that we will never make contact with aliens because the FSM is keeping them away, and be just about as accurate.
* read, speci-al, or pertaining to the species.
The Dolphins and Mice ... (Score:4, Funny)
Flying Cars (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Flying Cars (Score:4, Interesting)
What people don't realize is a fundamental change in technology. In the past decade, technology hasn't advanced much for people. However, technology made to contain/alert/report/log/monitor/spy/lock out people has been the main push by most companies, be it DRM, data mining, data sold to advertisers, click tracking, sifting through E-mail and other communications for keywords, locked down devices and so on.
We may not have moon bases, we may not have brain implants, but if one can extrapolate from today's technology, what will be the thing that we will have is shackles and prisons unimaginable today. Perhaps Dune style pain-amplifiers which are turned on should someone pass an opinion threshold, or mandatory "re-education", Clockwork Orange style should someone dislike the latest celebrity by a certain margin.
The '70s were about tech. The '90s were about networked communication. This decade seems to be about control, surveillance, and containment of the population.
Re: (Score:3)
A practical and affordable flying car? Yes, we seem to have missed the mark on that. But even if we hadn't, there are a lot of collateral obstacles to actually "putting one in every garage". For example, I know far too many people who should not be driving a car, let alone an aircraft.
Moon base? I think the obstacles were much more political than technological. It's been almost 44 years since the first maned Moon landing (and safe return on the first try). Politics shut that program down Realistically, we o
Wow, this is stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
"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."
Re:Wow, this is stupid. (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, but see, the point of the article is that, unlike all the rest of us, this guy actually is smart enough to predict exactly how our 1000-times-smarter hyper-advanced post-human descendants will think.
Re: Wow, this is stupid. (Score:3)
Re: Wow, this is stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Wow, this is stupid. (Score:5, Funny)
Based upon the fact there's no Unobtainium on our planet, I suspect they've already been here and taken it all.
Can we tag articles as !news or opinion please? (Score:4, Interesting)
lame (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Bacteria (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ..
They would come to earth for the same reason (Score:3)
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".
Re: (Score:2)
I prefer the scenario postulated in the film Liquid Sky. Aliens would come to Earth looking for drugs.
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What we know is that when travel is difficult, few people do it. What we also know is that even when travel is near impossible, and even deadly, a few want to do it anyway. So we know, at least from the human point of view, if space travel every become a real possibility, meaning more than a few people to
Paul Tyma will be proven wrong in 20 years. (Score:3, Funny)
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??"
Depends on what they want (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
You are right. My prediction is, we *will* be visited by aliens. Aliens with the intent to serve man...
Why spend lifetimes getting to other stars (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
What do you think people will be doing on an interstellar voyage? Maybe someday we'll have a breakthrough on interstellar travel, but I think the 1000 year spaceship seems much more probable. And that's 1000 years without anywhere to go on vacation. 1000 years where nothing new ever happens. I can tell ya, whoever gets off that ship and arrives on a new planet is going to be damn good at Tetris.
Andy Rooney (Score:3)
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*
Re: (Score:2)
Jerry Seinfeld should deliver all the TED talks.
This article made me dumber (Score:2, Insightful)
Self defeating argument (Score:2)
What a load of crap. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Congrats! (Score:2)
I'm not convinced. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Remember Stanislav Petrov? (Score:3)
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 [wikipedia.org].
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
Reasons to make the trip (Score:2)
- 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
What if wow man like wooow? (Score:2)
Actually if *anything* remains it might be the concept of "want", having goals is pretty central to the definition of intelligence.
I call bullshit... (Score:2)
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.
Space Tourists (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe they'll just stop over here for a roadside picnic. ;)
3 reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:3 reasons (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know if this was meant as snark or not, but that's one of the very real possibilities.
I once heard that you couldn't have life like us until you were around a third-generation star like ours, because the environment would be to metal-poor. Wait long enough for our sun, then wait long enough for planets, the wait a while for life, and here we are.
According to that assertion, we're reasonably early on the scene, given what we know about stellar evolution. But even "reasonably early" may be a highly variable thing, leaving lots of room for slop. Maybe a few of them would even be uploads of Ray Kurzweil.
Give us a thousand years and we could easily have robot probes scouring the galaxy, building a few more at each suitable spot. They could cover the galaxy in a few million years.
A few million years sounds like a lot to us, but against a galactic timescale it's a drop in the bucket. The same applies to someone a few million years ahead of us. Compared to stellar evolution, planetary formation, and evolution it's a drop in the bucket.
your assuming something ridiculous (Score:2)
You're projecting , too. (Score:2)
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.
Speaking of tiny viewpoints.... (Score:2)
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...)
Access to machine knowledge is weakening us (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, and civilization means most of us no longer get all our own food from scratch. So?
Fallbacks are nice, but keep in mind that many of these "failures" are still way above what we could have done without the technology in the first place. They just look worse because we're used to better.
Tried to leave a comment on the blog... (Score:2)
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.
Why? Its common knowlege (Score:2)
The reason that aliens want to come here is that they need suitable hosts in which to insert their larvae.
This is... really dumb. (Score:2)
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.
So, how is this argument different? (Score:2)
How is this argument different from "The singularity, because reasons, and beyond that, nothing is knowable"?
We don't WANT to meet aliens (Score:2)
Aliens would be as interested in us as... (Score:3)
about as much as Europeans were interested in the Africans.
But that did not stop them from coming to Africa.
What about the selection effect? (Score:3)
"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.
Neither Toclafane nor Borg... (Score:2)
Fundamental flaw in the article (Score:2)
Smart? (Score:2)
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
Tyma isn't smart enough to . . . (Score:2)
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 abl
I'd agree with one tangential point (Score:3)
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.
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Cthulu is not evil, just amoral or uncaring.
And little microorganisms: http://science.ubc.ca/news/697 [science.ubc.ca]
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cthulhu style evil and wish our destruction / consumption
Cthulhu doesn't wish our destruction or consumption. He just doesn't care how many people get stomped on or consumed, because people are utterly insignificant and unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
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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 o
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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.
Re:the only thing worth coming for (Score:5, Interesting)
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Ha, fighting & killing.
Like they're going to come to earth before every living thing is dead.
Re:the only thing worth coming for (Score:4, Insightful)
"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."
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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.
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Re:the only thing worth coming for (Score:5, Funny)
No, food. Human is a delicacy in some regions of the galaxy.
Don't eat the ones on the northwest continent (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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So all that anal probing was actually marinade injections?
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No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
You're stating this as if you are omnipotent.
A few hundred thousand years ago, a sling was the most powerful launch device known. It could launch a rock dozens of feet.
About 60,000 years ago, a bow and arrow could launch a projectile hundreds of feet.
A couple hundred years ago, a cannon could launch a projectile thousands of feet.
Just over 100 years ago, man learned to fly.
About 70 years ago, the largest release of power ever known to man until that point in the first nuclear explosion.
About 50 years ago, the first man left the confines of Earth.
About 40 years ago, the first man step foot on another astronomical object.
You have never left Earth. You are standing on the Earth with knowledge of the workings of a slingshot, trying to predict what we will learn about our universe in the future.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, yes, well what are you doing? At best the opposite argument is "well, we always somehow advanced, it will never change", which is quite ridiculous. I mean, go ahead and SHOW ME an FTL drive or some 'magical' supply of fantastic amounts of energy. While we certainly don't know everything by a long shot we're coming closer and closer to a good approximation of understanding what is and isn't possible. There are NO indications whatsoever that FTL etc are possible. Without that sort of 'impossibilium' to p
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
He's not predicting that FTL, etc will be possible. He's saying that you're wrong for declaring it to be absolutely impossible.
Seriously, all of those things he listed would be described as "the sort of 'technology' required is simply magic and can't exist" in the past, yet they came about. The reality is that we don't know what's possible and making sweeping statements like yours is just a sign of hubris and ignorance. You can wrap your mind around the concept that not knowing how something can be possible doesn't mean it's absolutely impossible and making categorical statements like yours only paints you as a fool?
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I think the various AC's that have responded already have summarized things nicely, to reiterate:
1) FTL is LOGICALLY impossible. This is off the table. We may not fully understand the way the universe works but we have logically demonstrated that either there is FTL and no causality and no common universal laws of physics which apply within every reference frame equally (IE the laws of physics would change whenever you accellerated) or FTL is impossible. No appeal to "we don't know enough, we're ignorant" can get around this, Einstein did not leave ANY 'get out of jail free card' ways to get around it. No, not wormholes, they'd break down causality too, nor the 'Alcubierre Drive' which ALSO breaks down causality, etc. You can try to assume there are some sort of parallel worlds or something you can access via some handwavium tech, but frankly why not just posit that the right ritual enacted at the right phase of the Moon will open a door into Elfland? Nobody can EVER 'prove' such things don't exist, but you care to bet?
2) As for the "well, things always seem difficult until we do them", I would just like to point out what the 2nd AC said "...if it's at all possible, represents an intellectual and operational barrier an order of magnitude higher than anything mankind has encountered so far." except said AC is wrong in one sense. It isn't AN order of magnitude harder. All the list of things that were listed by JWSmythe above are maybe an order of magnitude, at most, harder than things that were done before them. Going from being able to travel to Mars to being able to travel to Alpha Centauri in something even roughly like the same time frame (IE less than a decades long journey) with a human crew is 12 orders of magnitude harder. Not ONE but TWELVE.
That's the thing people regularly fail to understand. They've been brought up on a steady diet of space opera/Star Trek where starships woosh around through space like its nothing and a trip to the next star system is like a jaunt to the next highway exit. THAT is surely fantasy. Even if some sort of FTL, or something nearly as good, proved to exist it would perforce have to be incredibly difficult to achieve, else natural phenomena would already exist which recapitulated the necessary phenomena for us to observe. The energies required must be beyond even what is achieved in the presence of billion solar mass black holes and such. No hint of such things is evident.
Perhaps our Universe was created by a prankster. It certainly seems like the limitations we face are such that the promise of surmounting them must always seem barely out of reach, but I think the prankster did a good job.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You don't need FTL. Its easy to imagine a fission or fusion powered rocket that could reach 0.1C - this is not far from what we can imagine now. That leaves you with a trip of centuries to millenia. That might be completely reasonable to an advanced race that either has a naturally long lifespan, or which has solved the problem of ageing. Depending on their technology they might be able to bring enough of their information technology with them to stay interested for the trip.
Re: (Score:3)
"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."
So there's no point in debating "why", because you've already decided that no possible value of "why" can satisfy the conditions you've assumed to be true. Your logic has run rings 'round me.
But let's say you're right. Let's look at human psychology, instead. Do humans ever undertake incredi
It's something people don't want to hear. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm simply explicating the SCALE of the power requirements for interstellar travel, which are clearly huge. It has NOTHING to do with the universe being "made of energy", it has to do with the amount of power you have available to you to use. By your reasoning the Earth is "made of energy" and thus the human race has no energy problem, right?
I answered what? Read it again. The Solar System is made up of nothing but hydrogen and helium basically, with a minor impurity of C, O, N, and a very minor contamination of other atoms. Every other system is made of that stuff too. As the author of the original blog pointed out, if you have the tech to cross interstellar space, then you clearly can simply make whatever you want out of what you have at home.
Yes, you could run out of matter, but do you realize how incredibly hard that would be? Jupiter has 1000x the mass of Earth. In fact Earth is a very tiny fraction of the mass of all the planets. By the time you were running out you'd be at Kardeshev level 2 (10+ orders of magnitude beyond using all the energy on Earth, which is many orders of magnitude beyond us), would you really need to GO anywhere for more? It seems kinda unlikely, and again would be a bad investment (you'd never get the energy invested back).
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, of course that does ultimately come up at some level, the "then why bother to do anything in the first place" argument. HOWEVER, if you look at the human race's progress it seems to be almost exclusively in the direction of overall greater efficiency and an increase in our collective share of the energy throughput of the biosphere. We learned to chip flint and light fire because it was easier and more efficient. We learned to plant crops and hurd animals for the same reason, etc. This process might wel
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Rings round the second gas giant. It's the interstellar equivalent of the yellow jack [wikipedia.org].
I for one wouldn't want to visit anywhere that was infected with us. Euuwww!
Re:Neighbors (Score:5, Interesting)
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}
Re: (Score:3)
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" ne
Re:Neighbors (Score:4, Interesting)
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. [terrybisson.com] (full text at the link)
A thousand years more advanced? How about ten million years more advanced? [slashdot.org] 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.
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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
Re:They will still come... (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans taste about the same as pigs. I wouldn't call that the finest delicacy.
Bacon comes from pigs. Pigs are fucking delicious.