The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules
document is now in effect.
UAP/UFO Phenomenon: It's not aliens, until it is.
Posts
“AaaaaaAAAAAaaaaah!”
Every time.
Your Ad Here! Reasonable Rates!
Gorillas: Exist
Cabals: Exist
Lizards: Exist
Gorilla cabals using ancient lizard technology to soar the skies is, mathematically anyway, more likely.
Has anyone ever seen a gorilla in the same room as a pilot? Eh!?
I haven't heard that about the recently declassified ones, myself?
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
Also the fermi paradox to memory is just real bad science in general. Part of which is because of what you outlined - the assumptions it makes about life are that it's life we would recognize as life
Like there is shit going on with trees that is fascinating interms of how they link up over massive areas and share information. None of us are leaping to say trees are intelligent, sentient life, but it's still fascianting. And that's something we can visibly recognize as still being "Alive" by our standards - tehre could be reproductive plasma patterns in the sun with their own cutlure and everything else and we'd never know because... what would we even start looking for?
"Life" on earth is a fantastically narrow slice of the possibility space.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803/greetings-people-of-earth/act-two-6
You must listen to this if you have not. H. Jon Benjamin.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I prefer this YouTube version:
The universe is big - like, "Holy Fucking Shit" big.
Is there alien life out there? Probably.
Is there intelligent alien life out there? Maybe.
Is there intelligent alien life out there capable of traveling interstellar distances? Maybe.
But did that intelligent, space-faring alien life find this tiny blue mote of dust called Earth amidst a nigh-infinite sea of stars and decided to.... what? Come flash its tail-lights and do loop-de-loops for yokels?
Probably not.
And here I thought it was a long way down the road to the chemist’s. But that’s just peanuts compared to space!
Considering the long odds to get to the final point, I'm not sure why that's the one that's a problem.
Trust, I don't find 99% of ufo stories convincing, but if aliens are at all like us, I don't see 'they acted stupid' as disqualifying. If anything, I'd be reassured. We have some pretty smart people that can design some really awesome technology that allows us to communicate across the world with the tap of a button and have access to more information than we know what to do with, and when the rest of us apes got a hold of it we immediately started to use it to make cat memes and sell porn. So I can totally believe if there's civilizations out there like us that have interstellar technology, there's also plenty of them that are capable of misusing it.
I don't believe it's true, but if it was, I would not be all that surprised to learn that some of these more credible sightings were the result of aliens doing the equivalent of driving donuts in a nature preserve.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
This requires you to presume that these aliens have reached a point where interstellar space ships are the equivalent of cars. Because by this same token we can assume that an extraterrestrial version of NASA would not be fucking around as ours does not.
And also that they have always fucked around only enough to be seen by mostly small groups of people and never in a way that can be definitively proven.
Edit: Like, I think we can use North
Sentinel Island as a decently analogous situation. TLDR there is an island in the Indian Ocean with an uncontacted tribe on it and legally people aren't allowed to go there but they do and get attacked every time. It's a whole thing and is super interesting but for this discussion we can consider the flyovers done by anthropologists to be the equivalent of the traditional UFO. People on the ground will see it but there is no lasting evidence beyond eye witness testimony. But then there are also ship wrecks that end up near or on the island. The people, both in the past and up to today, who do try to visit it leave enough physical evidence that I doubt the people there have the level of doubt about our existence as we do about UFOs.
I mean, if we're assuming the wild circumstance where 1) aliens exist and 2) interstellar travel is something they can do, that technology being common for them wouldn't be that much more of a stretch.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
It's just weird that we seem to exclusively get their drunk drivers.
Extrapolating from a single data point is ALWAYS dangerous at best, and comically absurd a lot of the times. We haven't even made it to Mars, or established any kind of serious off world colony and we're constantly on the verge of annihilating ourselves, and it looks like we may have finally done so climatogically. If we do manage to do so in the next 50-100 years, that means on an interstellar scale we'd be effectively invisible. That bodes poorly both if we're near the center of the distribution or the "technically good" end of the spectrum.
We're Space Florida
I feel like if we end up clawing our way out of our gravity well in a durable manner it’s going to be despite our own nature and using up the very last bits of chemical energy storage laid down by the past several mass extinctions to get some kind of long-term energy solution flywheel spinning. Like, 2-3% chance of success kind of stuff.
What if that’s the part of our situation that’s the mean? Lots of life, plenty of recognizably sentient life even, all stuck in places where by the time you figure out that the really high energy-density shit you pull out of the ground is a) finite in quantity and b) important for more than drag racing and running smelters, it’s too late to do anything about it?
A dozen billion worlds with a brief history of technological progress followed by a long tail of subsistence agriculture, leaving behind a shell of radio emissions too faint to detect and maybe a plaque on an airless world in their system. Our plaque has Richard Nixon’s signature on it!
Your Ad Here! Reasonable Rates!
Though NASA has been crashing probes into the surface of Mars deliberately and accidentally for decades for example so "not fucking around" is rather relative.
Of course if you want say UFO's are the equivalent of alien cars and crashed UFO's happen at the frequency Grusch is claiming and for similar causes and similar rates or lower as airplane crashes, then that would require there to be tens to hundreds of thousands of alien spacecraft flying around earth's skies at any given time. So the question becomes why aren't sightings proportional to the claimed crashes as any random person should be able to go outside and see dozens per day if there really were that many around.
Depends on what you're trying to answer. If it's "is there life that we can actually communicate with?" then yeah, it's a good qualification to make.
But you can imagine a universe teeming with life, and each instance of life trying to hunt for other life, but they're all so fundamentally different from one another that it makes IDing them challenging.
I would consider it valuable information to know that there's a planet 50 light years away that has an advanced civilization watching the skies, but the civilization is sentient rocks with life spans of tens of thousands of years that has difficulty conceptualizing intelligent life that only lives part of a century.
What you're suggesting isn't akin to the development of the first plane at all. It's akin to making up a whole new set of physics that have never, ever been observed in a controlled environment or even hinted at in theoretical physics.
You're missing like the entire biotech revolution. We can print DNA on demand now. We then hijack biological process to easy replicate these super complex molecules at scale. The only reason we don't hear more about this is because we've been used to decades of "Breakthrough Drugs" that might as well be actual magic for all that people understand them.
Yeah, sequencing the human genome was a momentous achievement at its time. Same for things like building CERN and the things we’ve been able to learn from it.
It is entirely possible that ten thousand years from now our posthuman space-whale ancestors will still be limited by the speed of light during the great war with the black hole empire of EternaMusk Mind X.
This is on point. There's a lot of misunderstanding of the Fermi paradox, but at it's core it just asks some really simple questions that leads to an interesting conclusion. Given that we know:
1) Life on Earth exists
2) The size of the habitable galactic disk
3) Reasonable speeds of sub-light travel (between 1-10% of C)
4) And presuming that the Earth itself isn't special
You can calculate that a space faring civilization can reach basically any point in the habitable disk within 250,000 to 2,500,000 years. Which is a blink of an eye in galactic terms. So Fermi's conclusion is -- if there are space faring civilizations...where are they? There should be evidence for them since they've probably happened not once but many times in the galaxy. Which is why people look for "escapes" and resolutions to the Fermi paradox. We get "great filter" conclusions and the like, but there's also other reasonable explanations as disappointing as they may be, such as the interstellar medium being too hostile to life such that it's not traversable.
What's nice is that JWST has confirmed that at least one assumption of the Fermi paradox (that the earth is not special) seems to be incorrect. It does appear that our type of planet with vast quantities of water deposits, in the habitable zone, with a single moon orbiting a single yellow star is rare. It may simply be the case that there are very few planets even capable of birthing complex intelligent life to begin with and we just happen to be the first.
Near constant warfare did nothing to stop European colonization. Is colonization of the solar system going to be an Expanse/Gundam style shit show of tragedy and exploitation and not a Star Trek post scarcity utopia? Absolutely, but that won't actually slow humanity down in expanding to and consuming everything it can get it's hands on. As for extinction here on Earth, I think it would actually take an incredibly deadly and sudden event to pose a real risk of that. And even the most dire climate change projections are not that. Humanity has now the means to adapt to extreme conditions. Billions would die but humanity would continue.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/contraband-corned-beef-and-the-gemini-iii-mission/
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/26/8646675/apollo-10-turd-poop
The idea of von Neumann machines isn't to send one probe to the other side of the galaxy in one shot. You send a batch of probes to only the nearest stars within a few light years of your home planet. Those probes self replicate on site and send a new batch out to the next nearest stars and so on. The number of stars reached increases exponentially, eventually covering the entire galaxy in a few million years, but each probe only needs to function 500-1000 years or so at 1% c. If you can hit 10% c, it only needs to last 50-100 years, and even the Voyager spacecraft are still functional after nearly 50 years.
Especially if portable fusion isn’t terribly possible. Just the need to stop and pick up fuel in order to synthesize food/energy for to keep people alive/computers running would put a 1% light speed ship far below 1% light speed.
The big takeaway should be that mass and bytes (or qbits) are several orders of magnitude apart in how hard they are to shlep about.
No matter how hard it’s going to be to digitise human consciousness, the resultant reduction in mass means digitised humans (for example in Charlie Stross’ coke-can sized starship) will outpace generation ships or cryogenic arks.
And given a few breakthroughs the digitised humans might launch before anyone can even really start building a meat-carrying starship.
There’s lots of bumps in the road for uploading, for sure. But we’re getting better at digital stuff and quantum computing all the time, and the rocket equation isn’t giving freebies.
Some things are just going to take time. You want to go find a near-Earth asteroid to anchor a space elevator or rotating skyhook? That’ll be a decade or two, while Moore’s law keeps being applied to AI (which, realistically, needs a lot more computing increases than just Moore’s law, but you get my point.
Space is hard *and* slow.