Wheelchair Guy vs Mr. Skeptic
- Thread starter Glassfan
- Start date
You could watch the show, Stephen Hanking's Universe, on the Discovery Channel.
I must say i particularly like the title of this thread. Stephen Hawking gets reduced to some "wheelchair guy". I can imagine him googling "wheelchair guy" in an attempt to feel better about himself by looking at anonymous paraplegics, and then seeing himself come up instead :/
Back on topic, i think that although an alien encounter does not have to mimic that of the Spanish conquistadores in the new world, it will undoubtedly have a similar significance in respect to it being a colossal and defining event in the history of the less developed entities. And since those would be us, i fear it will make our history and development even less stable.
"Wheelchair Guy" is an old Simpson's reference.
Conflict does seem to be the norm on our planet. I'm reminded of many nature documentaries where animals come together and just attack and eat each other. I remember, for instance, The Savage Garden with the late Leslie Nielsen, where this shrew - the smallest mammal - prowelled it's territory and assaulted, killed and ate everything there.
Now as intelligent, civilized people, we don't always follow nature. When I married my wife, I didn't kill off her cubs so she'd go into estrus and have my offspring (Lions)(apology to wife...), but we often do show the aggression of animals when we meet strangers in other parts of the world. If we landed on other planets, might we not hunt lesser animals? If a really advanced civilization came here to earth, might they treat us like inferior animals?
They need not even attack us. Just the casual disregard of superior beings who want to "terraform" our planet would be disasterous to us.
The general feeling is that since we've only just reached levels of technology where the question of extraterestrial contact has even begun, then most civilizations are probably be more advanced. Like when you graduate and go out and try to get a job - most jobseekers you're competing with will be older and more experienced..
When we do meet ET, ten things could happen and nine of them are bad.
Hawking is off his rocker here. While I agree that alien life needn't be peaceful, I'm really really skeptical that FTL is possible, or that there's intelligent life living concurrent to our civilization within a reasonable distance of interstellar travel.
Their diseases would have a completely -- truly completely -- different evolutionary history. There's absolutely no reason to think alien life would be based on DNA, would form proteins like ours, store and transmit information in the same manner. An alien disease / parasite / infection would be like trying trying to plug the internet into and old fashioned typewriter.
They might be able to engineer a virus / disease / whatever by studying us and Earth, but even then, it'd take some time to learn a completely different system. Perhaps like trying to program in a new language.
Their diseases would have a completely -- truly completely -- different evolutionary history. There's absolutely no reason to think alien life would be based on DNA, would form proteins like ours, store and transmit information in the same manner. An alien disease / parasite / infection would be like trying trying to plug the internet into and old fashioned typewriter.
They might be able to engineer a virus / disease / whatever by studying us and Earth, but even then, it'd take some time to learn a completely different system. Perhaps like trying to program in a new language.
Good point, they would not share our diseases. But their planetary exploitation might be terminal to us.
FTL would not be necessary, just near-FTL. The relativistic effects would make their trip brief. And of course, a sufficiently advanced technology would seem like magic to us (Clarke)
Nick Carpathia
Unleash the HAARP
No guarantees, they could still fill a niche within our ecosystems. Life is life, it finds locations of low entropy and transforms them into high entropy to help themselves survive and propagate. Remember, our immune systems co-evolved alongside all those weird viruses and bacterias out there. Something our bodies were never selected to recognise but still capable of of breaking down macromolecules to release energy could completely destabilise us and our ecosystem.
But I agree with the idea that the light cones of us and aliens may never ever intersect considering the sheer scale of the universe.
Nick Carpathia
Unleash the HAARP
In that case, the sheer energy budget you'd need for 'near FTL', versus the cost-benefit of accelerating the mass of a mature civilization, pretty much makes it imposible.
As I said before, if you want to colonise deep space, send out von Neumans. Use a k-selector strategy, shoot your spores in every direction, make them capable of fabbing your mature civilization. We fleshies may never leave this solar system.
Energy budget is an excellent way to look at it. Drake's assumptions include that higher races will have greater energy resources - fusion, antimatter, things we haven't even dreamed about. And what would be the payoff? Why would they want to spend the energy to come here? Maybe to teach, mentor lesser races. Maybe to hunt and have fun with us.
Von Neumans! I'd forgotten. So they send self-replicating machines here, which dig up the planet to build a gazillion copies of themselves and move on. The machines will have even less compassion then the aliens. And earth becomes a used-up waste.
Nick Carpathia
Unleash the HAARP
Nope. Fusion still needs alot of mass. Antimatter is merely storage. Whether or not it's possible to engineer down the mass of these systems for a deep space craft is debatable.
As for VNs, well, I wouldn't worry about them resource-wise. If you're interstellar capable, then there is almost nothing of value on the bottom of a gravity well. The escape velocity of a planet is expensive, much better cost-benefit to mine asteroids.
One more thing, VNs are by definition life. There is no fundemental difference between us and a hypothetical VN except that the latter can colonise deep space.
As for VNs, well, I wouldn't worry about them resource-wise. If you're interstellar capable, then there is almost nothing of value on the bottom of a gravity well. The escape velocity of a planet is expensive, much better cost-benefit to mine asteroids.
One more thing, VNs are by definition life. There is no fundemental difference between us and a hypothetical VN except that the latter can colonise deep space.
NASA's fusion drive designs gather interstellar hydrogen as it sails through space. The real point is that an advanced civilization will have drives we haven't imagined, anymore than Columbus could have imagined twitter.
As for VNs being life, would you grant them intelligence? That's what we're talking about here, intelligent extraterrestrials visiting or contacting us.
Nick Carpathia
Unleash the HAARP
No evidence it's even possible to break the light speed limit. And ramscoops don't work, the drag from interstellar hydrogen outweighs the thrust you fusing it.
As for intelligence, what is it good for? On one hand, it's pretty good for adapting to different environments. On the other hand, we're headed straight for a population boom and crash once our ecosystem is sufficiently wrecked because so much of our behaviour is atavism from our evolutionary history. So no, I don't think our hypothetical space-faring VNs will have behaviours that resemble what we consider intelligence.
Singularity
Infinite Density
I searched for any article, but couldn't find one. I found a good article by David Brin that I quoted earlier in the thread, with a lot of source references. Hawking seem to give lectures, sell books, make TV shows and give interviews only
I didn't really have any opinion on the topic beyond "why bother". But after having read Brin's article I have taken a more pragmatic "why risk it" stance.
So, you simply decline to entertain the notion that an advanced civilization is actually advanced. That's O.K., Shermer vs Hawking is more about motive than means anyway.
I'm surprised everyone took the news of SETI's mothballing so calmly. I don't remember an angst thread.
Nick Carpathia
Unleash the HAARP
Hmm, not the greatest of points I've ever tried to make. They're probably what we'd consider amoral cultureless jerks. Which is probably what you'd select for if you're going for economy.
Being an optimist at heart, I might say four out of five, but that is my general viewpoint, yeah.
Nick Carpathia
Unleash the HAARP
Gonna quote someone:
Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligencespiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.
Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?
Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.
It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.
To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat?
Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space.
We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stoppeduntil my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment.
But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conqueredor adapted to they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one.
And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?
Great book great writer.
Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligencespiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.
Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?
Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.
It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.
To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat?
Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space.
We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stoppeduntil my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment.
But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conqueredor adapted to they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one.
And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?
Great book great writer.
At that point, it's a gamble. 50% is a terrible choice, but suppose there's a 50% chance that they're less advanced and a 50% chance that they're more advanced. If they're less advanced, being prudent and cautious won't matter. We can deal with them when we encounter them (as long as our tech curve is faster than theirs, or if we have enough of a head start). However, there's still a 50% chance that they're more advanced. In which case, being prudent will pay off, and we have to hope (or strive) to reach some type of power parity before an encounter is forced between the two groups.
Hawking talks about Natives vs. Europeans. Power differentials could easily be like comparing the dodo to Europeans.
Here is what I think I know about the big bang:
It happened about 13 billion years ago and created our universe.
It left us with a lot of clumps of Hydrogen, to be my knowledge the big bang did not create heavy elements which are critical to life, like say carbon, silicon or oxygen.
The first generation of stars did this over the course of their Lifetime and then expelled them in a nova, 5-10 billion years later. hence I do not believe any first generation stars had life.
Planets orbiting Second generation stars like our sun do have access to heavier elements which make life possible and If I remember correctly it still took something like 2 billion years for the earth stabilize enough for life to develop. It then took life on earth another 2 billion years to become large. In short I think we could be the first planet to develop intelligence. Or at least in the running.
65 million years ago a raptor species was believe to be, well on it way to intelligence when, ... well the universe decided to try something else.
What I'm I getting at? Well Earth is sort of a Goldilocks planet, We have liquid water, water in abundance, A large moon which stabilizes our orbit leading to stable seasons, we have not been fried by a nearby nova, We have a strong magnetic core to reduce background radiation. And even with this Earth has experienced several global extinction events which wiped out much of life,with a bias towards wiping out large creatures.
Once the advance of radio is reach, I do not see an intelligent race discontinuing its use. The absence of radio signals from space tend to make me believe that either we are the first, or that other civilization are at the same level as us. It would take, 100,000 years for signals cross the galaxy, although how far away it would be detectable is not something I know. What is telling though is at the .1 the speed of light, something we could do if we were willing to spend the resources, it would take less than 1,000,000 years to colonize the entire galaxy. Dinosaurs dominated Earth for longer than that time span. If ET is colonizing where is he?
It happened about 13 billion years ago and created our universe.
It left us with a lot of clumps of Hydrogen, to be my knowledge the big bang did not create heavy elements which are critical to life, like say carbon, silicon or oxygen.
The first generation of stars did this over the course of their Lifetime and then expelled them in a nova, 5-10 billion years later. hence I do not believe any first generation stars had life.
Planets orbiting Second generation stars like our sun do have access to heavier elements which make life possible and If I remember correctly it still took something like 2 billion years for the earth stabilize enough for life to develop. It then took life on earth another 2 billion years to become large. In short I think we could be the first planet to develop intelligence. Or at least in the running.
65 million years ago a raptor species was believe to be, well on it way to intelligence when, ... well the universe decided to try something else.
What I'm I getting at? Well Earth is sort of a Goldilocks planet, We have liquid water, water in abundance, A large moon which stabilizes our orbit leading to stable seasons, we have not been fried by a nearby nova, We have a strong magnetic core to reduce background radiation. And even with this Earth has experienced several global extinction events which wiped out much of life,with a bias towards wiping out large creatures.
Once the advance of radio is reach, I do not see an intelligent race discontinuing its use. The absence of radio signals from space tend to make me believe that either we are the first, or that other civilization are at the same level as us. It would take, 100,000 years for signals cross the galaxy, although how far away it would be detectable is not something I know. What is telling though is at the .1 the speed of light, something we could do if we were willing to spend the resources, it would take less than 1,000,000 years to colonize the entire galaxy. Dinosaurs dominated Earth for longer than that time span. If ET is colonizing where is he?
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
You could have hoped the same thing about people who figured out how to cross the Atlantic ocean a couple hundred years ago.
I'm not saying that every single intelligent civilization out there is going to be bloodthirsty, but they're been through millions of years of "survival of the fittest" conditions, just as we have.. that, and there's resources on this planet.
They had to overcome millions of years of evolutionary pressures, just as we did... and just as any other species on this planet had to. And look at what happens when a species that's able to compete more/better/more effectively gets introduced into a habitat with a species that's not as good at it.
You don't really know what an alien intelligent species would be like. Perhaps they have by nature more means in their disposal, or their nature makes scientific thought come more intuitively than in humans. In such a case they would not have had been faced with similar hindrances in their progress
