Alien Contact

[Ichingcarpenter]

[Warren DeMontague]

1. Eh. (Warning: About to take this more seriously than I should)

I get Watterson's point, but the reflexively down-on-humanity bit gets a little old. Are we perfect, blameless, faultless? No. But neither are we worthless, shitty, and laden with "sin", original or otherwise.

Would intelligent velociraptors be doing a better job? Maybe. Maybe not.

I think the reason intelligent life hasn't tried to contact us is because the universe is REAL FUCKIN' BIG.

And I think humans are pretty fucking cool- warts and all.

[longship]

2. But just maybe...

We haven't made contact with ET because life is a bitch and as life becomes intelligent it also becomes too self-serving. If we are a model (the Copernican principle -- we're not special, but typical) maybe intelligent life faces the challenges we do and don't come through.

The Kepler mission shows that there's a minimum of 17 billion planets. But Kepler was only 4 years into its mission when it broke. That was the bare minimum to discover Earth. Kepler was biased like every other planet search science has been. It discovers the largest and closest planets. It's selection bias due to Kepler's technique, the limit of its photometer, and the fact that it failed four years into the mission.

I think there are planets orbiting all but the largest stars, which tend to blow off all planetary stuff and quickly die spectacularly in supernovae.

The vast proportion of stars are small red dwarfs which live not billions of years like the Sun but a trillion years. If a planet resides in an area conducive to life around such a star, it is likely that that life has had a head start of billions of years.

But as Enrico Fermi asked, "Where are they?" Your answer is as good as any. It's a fucking long distance between stars. Even if one is optimistic about intelligence in the universe, the travel between civilizations is a huge cost in both energy and time.

There's probably no warp drives. Life is trapped by nature's limits, and its dangers. The Fermi paradox is solved because it's too damned difficult to travel to other star systems. Star Trek is fiction.

But damn! Only an ignorant buffoon would claim that they're not out there.

[Warren DeMontague]

3. for sure they're out there.

I think it's a function- perhaps a natural one, all things considered- of our brains to overestimate the importance or central-ness of our place in the cosmos. "Why haven't they contacted us yet" there could be a myriad of reasons, starting with, we may not be that big of a deal or that noticeable or any of it.

Also, any intelligent life looking at the earth from more than 10,000 LY away isn't going to see much in the way of civilization. Anyone closer who sent us a message, may still have it en route.

And there's no guarantee that, if other intelligences DID try to communicate with us, there'd be any basis for understanding. It could be like you trying to talk to the cells on your big toe. The levels aren't right. We've got, arguably, other intelligent species- marine mammals, elephants, others- here on Earth and we're pretty limited, so far, in our ability to communicate with them- and we share mammalian biology.

So who knows. But I agree, it's a fool's bet to argue that "it's not out there".

[MillennialDem]

5. There are no warp drives, but it's not *that difficult* to travel to other stars

Yes I am well aware of the vast distances between stars. They can be bridged by using relatively clean nuclear bombs (nuclear pulse propulsion) and moreover, increasing human (or alien) lifespans to indefinite, ie eliminating cancer and heart disease entirely. A trip to one's local group of stars can all occur in under 1000 years, but like I said the members of such a civilization would have indefinite lifespan...

This would more or less limit space travel for purposes of traveling to other stars for relocation, rather than for sight seeing.

[demwing]

10. Interesting. Immortal star travelers?

We have met the Gods, and they are us...

[MillennialDem]

11. Not immortal. Could still be killed, just able to cure diseases and aging. A gun or knife to the

brain would still be fatal.

I think it's far more likely, if FTL drive is possible... that near immortality would be achieved first.

[demwing]

13. Explain the difference to a primitive human

Either way, the near immortal traveler from space would be considered a God.

Is that how the story started?

[dickthegrouch]

7. Kepler didn't fail: we disabled it

to keep you idiot humans from discovering us until you're really ready.

[Ichingcarpenter]

9. A modified Zoo Hypothesis

A modified Zoo Hypothesis becomes a more appealing answer to the Fermi Paradox. The time between the emergence of the first civilization within the Milky Way and all subsequent civilizations could be enormous.

Monte Carlo simulation shows the first few inter-arrival times between emergent civilizations would be similar in length to geologic epochs on Earth. Just what could a civilization do with a ten-million, one-hundred-million, or half-billion-year head start?


aA100-million-year time advantage over the next oldest civilization, then it is conceivable that they could be in the singular position of being able to control, monitor, influence or isolate the emergence of every civilization that follows within their sphere of influence.

This is analogous to what happens on Earth within our own civilization on a daily basis, in that everyone born on this planet is born into a pre-existing system of familial associations, customs, traditions and laws that were already long established before our birth and which we have little or no control over.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis


I just thought the cartoon was neat considering the world situation. However
the toon generated conversation I didn't anticipate which is cool.


I read Doris Lessing back in the 70s who was a Noble Prize winning author. She dealt with Women's issue and my wife ask me to read her.

Well I read her book and looked for others
She changed her total themes and did a
five book series on Science fiction called
Canopus in Argos: Archives


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canopus_in_Argos

The Zoo Hypothesis is also strong with the writer and scientist Arthur C Clarke in numerous books and short stories as with
Frank Herbert.



Clarke's Three Laws are

three "laws" of prediction
formulated by the British writer Arthur C. Clarke.


They are:

1.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.


2.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[longship]

14. Well, that presumes that interstellar travel is something one would do, or could do.

The first delves into alien psychology, always a risky endeavor; the second is the domain of physics. I won't risk speculating on psych.

But the physics we know today suggests that it would take a long time commitment to accomplish it. Of course, this was the core of Fermi's argument. In a billions years old galaxy there is sufficient time for an advanced civilization to colonize the entire galaxy (even if there aren't warp drives). So where are they?

Either they don't care (psych again) or it's just that difficult. I don't go along with the hypothesis that other life doesn't exist. There is also the hypothesis that we are the most advanced, or nearly so.

I guess we'll have to wait for Klaatu to land at the Ellipse in DC. I'd bet we'd find an unoccupied probe first. Just a wild guess.

Nice response, my friend.

Regards.

[Civilization2]

4. The ET invasion happened decades ago. They are now terraforming,. warming the planet,. .

I tend to vacillate on the utility of humans,. amazingly beautiful, terrible destructive, jury is still out.

Also; we are not the only intelligent life even here on earth, although we often forget this;

“Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.” - Terence McKenna

[Warren DeMontague]

12. I guess that's the other thing. Maybe -and maybe this is a bad thing-I try to take the long/zen view

on questions of "creative" versus "destructive". The only constant is change- creation and destruction are both subsets inside that, and creation often = destruction (and vice/versa) ... the jury is always out because there is no "final" resolution.

I'm not explaining myself well, but it's kind of like the Buddhist idea of reality being a house on fire. We are something that is happening, when we are gone something else will happen.

[Posteritatis]

6. Agreed. (nt)

[LongTomH]

8. About that 'no warp drives' thing..........

There are some quite serious people willing to debate that with you. Last week's Starship Congress for the Icarus Interstellar Project included talks by Dr. Harold 'Sonny' White, who's working on a laboratory demonstration of warp bubbles and Marc Millis, head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project in the '90s / early '00s.

There were also some interesting talks on SETI. Just as with warp drives, not everyone is willing to be pessimistic about the possibility of contact. One really interesting talk had the long-winded title: Dr. Thomas Hair: Provocative radio transients and base rate bias: A Bayesian argument for conservatism. The abstract for the talk:

Most searches for alien radio transmissions have focused on finding omni-directional or purposefully earth-directed beams of enduring duration. However, most of the interesting signals so far detected have been transient and non-repeatable in nature. These signals could very well be the first data points in an ever-growing data base of such signals used to construct a probabilistic argument for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. This paper looks at the effect base rate bias could have on deciding which signals to include in such an archive based upon the likely assumption that our ability to discern natural from artificial signals will be less than perfect.

One of the most interesting transient signals was the Wow! signal detected by SETI researchers using Ohio State University's 'Big Ear' radio telescope. That signal was so intense and bore so many of the characteristics SETI researchers were looking for, that radio astronomer Jerry Ehrman was moved to write 'Wow!' in the margins of the graph paper:



The Wow! signal lasted 72 seconds while the radio telescope scanned across the area of the sky it was coming from.

Problem! It never repeated; despite other searches on the same coordinates. There have been other "transient, non-repeatable" signals detected at radio observatories worldwide. Dr. Hair speculates that the Wow! signal and others may be communications between home systems and colonies, or between home systems and starships.

Icarus Interstellar has Starship Congress coverage as day-long sessions on their YouTube channel. Here is the Day 3 session, with the talks on warp drives and Dr. Hair's SETI talk:

They've promised to break out individual sessions later. I'll post some of those as they become available.