Isn't it primarily for receiving signals rather than sending them? Of course if we ever do receive a convincing signal that appears to come from extraterrestrials, it is nearly unthinkable that no one would send anything back in that direction, so I see your point.
I suspect that any theoretical aliens which would have hostile intentions towards us and could get here to inflict them is going to be able to find us even if we don't go out of our way to make our presence known.
Why would any aliens have any intentions toward us? Why should they care at all? The only resources we have on earth that aren't more easily acquired in space are sitcoms and reality shows.
Populations expand exponentially. To keep growing the population will eventually need resources in space. This leads to more exponential growth and then we are competing for the same space resources as the aliens in a few centuries time. If the aliens sent a medium sized asteroid to impact earth now they would hinder our progress significantly, allowing them the opportunity to get the resources first.
We aren't anywhere near anything resembling competition for space resources.
If we could harness all the resources available around the solar system and beyond, we wouldn't have an energy crisis at all. The problem is actually getting those resources transported. If an alien had means to mine and transport resources, they'd probably have found plenty of other richer resources besides Earth.
Populations can not grow exponentially for a long time, the volume of space you can colonize only grows with the third power of time given that you are limited to the speed of light. And within galaxies it's more like the second power due to the flat shape of galaxies.
With our current rate of population growth, I think about one or two percent per year if I remember correctly, we would only make it a few percent across the Milkyway before running out of resources even if we could travel at the speed of light. You can search my comment history, there is somewhere a more detailed comment with all the numbers and assumptions.
Bottom line is, if you want to colonialize the universe, you either need a population growth rate very close to zero and a lot of patience or you have to beat Einstein.
Or growth and then collapses all over the place. If humans colonize the galaxy (universe is really hard), it will likely look like a growing amoeba than an expanding sphere.
This is an amazing observation. It's not terribly difficult to work out the numbers once it's been pointed out, but I'm not sure if I'd have come up with it on my own.
For others who like this sort of thing, I highly recommend Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel:
Our current rate of population growth is declining, and projected to become negative (for a while) towards the end of this century, before resuming growth at a much slower pace.
Not disagreeing with your conclusion, but assuming the current rate of population growth is relatively meaningless seeing as no reasonable model assumes current growth rates will continue (as it's been steadily changing).
I only used our current population growth rate not because I expect it to remain unchanged but because it is on the order of one percent which is towards the lower end of growth rates one will encounter when looking at all kinds of different things and systems. The important point is that this relatively small growth rate is already way too large. I don't know what you were exactly thinking of when you wrote »[...] before resuming growth at a much slower pace [...]« but maybe one-tenth of a percent?
Unfortunately that is still way too large, to colonialize the Milky Way before hitting resource limits you need it down at one one-thousandth of a percent or so, for the entire universe you need to decrease it several orders of magnitude more. At least on average, if you could use something like cryostasis while travelling through the vast emptiness between stars you could afford times with higher growth rates.
We'll resume growth, at least for some time, largely because it will take longer for everyone to get down below reproductive levels, and for life expectancy to level off.
The first drop basically comes because we have a massive population bulge in the post-war years. The growth the resumes because the drop in population growth worldwide is not yet enough to offset the steady growth in life expectancy in the third world.
But longer term that is likely to end up as another bulge.
In terms of developed countries, most have birth rates below replacement.
Once life expectancy growth worldwide has flattened out enough, and birth rates have declined to e.g. European levels, we can expect the bigger problem to be preventing terminal decline. This map [1] is quite interesting. The blue/light blue parts represents birth rates below replacement. In 2015 France too was below replacement.
About half of the worlds population lived in countries with sub-replacement birth rates as of 2010, and despite the fact that the population growth tilts that towards high population growth countries on a continuous basis, the birth rates of those countries is dropping pretty much across the board, meaning it is likely that the proportion of the worlds population living in sub-replacement countries will actually increase.
E.g. India is expected to drop below replacement this century too, and actually experience population decline (decline lags birth rates, of course, because you need to wait for the generation that's dying off to be larger than the one being born).
So I don't think population growth is a realistic concern when it comes to interstellar exploration. On the contrary.
Our population isn't expanding exponentially. World population grew at 2%/yr in 1960, 1.55% in 1995, 1.25% in 2005, 1.18% in 2015, 1.14% in 2016, and 1.12% this year.
Soon every person we send off the planet will just reduce earth population by 1. We'll be lucky if people reproduce enough to keep the population steady.
It's very interesting actually to see how perceptions lag reality in this respect. People are still largely holding on to the idea that we're headed towards massive overpopulation thanks to exponential growth.
But current projections is a population in the region of 10bn first by the end of the century, with some projections suggesting population decline from as early as 2040 (though that's an outlier). More scenarios predict a peak in the 2070-2100 timeframe; some predict continued, but much reduced growth beyond 2100. As far as I'm aware, though, all reasonable scenarios suggest that the rate of growth will at the very least continue to slow for a long time.
That looks pretty exponential to me. If it no longer looks exponential when looking at the last few years perhaps it's because we're running into resource limits.
s-curves look exponential when you're in the middle of the curve.
It's true that animal populations peak (s-curve) when they hit resource limits (ie: carrying capacity of the environment). But our population has slowed because of education (in particular, education of women)... it's an effect thats been repeated all over the world.
If it were resource limits, we would see things like famine (killing the excess members of the population), rampant disease (which becomes easier to spread when people are closer to each other), etc. We're definitely not there in the developed world; and the 3rd world isnt there either, since they have some of the highest reproductive rates.
Except that the same logic works the other way- what do they have that we would want to mess with them over?
The universe is a big place. Looking around, it seems that the endless-exponential-expansion route hasn’t proven popular with anyone yet. There may just be enough to go around.
It doesn't need to be rational. All it takes is one sufficiently powerful species to decide "better safe than sorry" and lobbing suitable planet killers at any new upstarts they notice.
Anthropomorphising ET is a guess at best. Becoming interstellar likely requires putting your differences aside as a species. You can hardly pour the majority of your resources into survival (space-faring) when you are instead pouring them into extinction (war and pollution).
Just playing devils advocate, but another scenario might be if one side of a warring species annihilates the other, and then takes off into space. What if the Nazis won WW2, and started a space program in the 60s? There could be an alien equivalent of the Third Reich out there colonizing worlds.
War and annihilation is not a sustainable endeavour. Without an enemy and without constant war the Third Reich would likely have fallen apart pretty quickly. It wasn't exactly a utopia and their economy mostly was a large Ponzi scheme predicated on constant war.
Even arguably less aggressive and more successful (in terms of longevity) entities such as the British or the Spanish Empire weren't particularly long-lived on a large timescale.
One could've argued that making seafaring voyages in the 1600s requires putting your differences aside. But instead we had a bunch of barbarians going around extinguishing and enslaving the world =P
Colonization has ruined quite a few people's days, as have poaching, and there have been literal zoos with humans as attractions. An alien species could also have motives that are entirely unrelatable, or even simply cause us harm due to carelessness or mistake. Besides, we don't need to conclusively enumerate each and every reason that someone might have for ruining our party to recognize that it's possible.
More seriously, although those stories are a lot of fun, (and also check out his short stories which I felt are better):
It is very unlikely that there is anything out there that is capable of actually coming here, for the same reason it's very unlikely we can ever leave the solar system. A radio "conversation" over many generations - if that's even possible - would be the high point of our civilisation.
Is there any literature that digs deeply into this subject? Ideally by someone far smarter than the average smart person? I've been meaning to read up on this subject...
Well the original post refers to the Three Body Problem series which is a rather interesting take on the topic. The English translations have now been available for a couple of years.
Agreed, unless we haven't gotten a hold of all the physics necessary for trips on that scale. That said, I do think it's overly pessimistic to think that aliens would mistreat us as a matter of course - obviously we've done a lot of that to each other in the past, but I'd like to think that most modern societies (say, Norway, to pick a random example) wouldn't just casually enslave and kill a new tribe. We're at a point in our history where even the idea of colonizing is anathema (not that there isn't plenty of fallout from before that was true...). So I don't have a hard time imagining a species that's thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years ahead of us would have a very different take on interacting with other sentient beings (assuming we make that cut for them).
To add to that point, most colonisation has been about resource capture.If you have technology for inter galactic travel I imagine resource access of the universe becomes abundant. But who knows, maybe we make good pets.
> To add to that point, most colonisation has been about resource capture.
I think you're over-extrapolating. One obvious difference is that colonizers have been exposed to other humans of all kinds, even before colonization. There was nothing about (e.g.) Native American society that you couldn't find in Eurasia + Africa that's even remotely on the same scale as the differences between us and a theoretical alien civilization.
Look no further than the current political climate of the United States, no matter how noble a society there will always be a segment that will act irrationally out of fear and ignorance. That same segment of a superior alien race could easily act to destroy us.
Well, that's certainly about interfering with and exploiting, but not what you'd traditionally call 'colonization' - that is, there aren't masses of US citizens moving in to displace Afghans or Iraqis.
Nothing at all will come of this. There is practically zero chance of ever detecting a signal from the one or two other intelligent species that might be in our galaxy.
But your comment sounds like you are concerned about broadcasting. The chinese (like SETI) are just listening. Of course, we're all broadcasting all the time but, so what? What do we have to fear from being heard?
Let's say 200 billion (suitable) stars. Let's say 20% of them have planets around them. If our own system is in any way typical, we can say that about 2 of those planets can sustain life. Let's say life develops maybe 30% of the time and 'intelligence' 5% of that (I think this is extremely generous). Then let's say technology (meaning they can broadcast radio signals) develops out of 10% of those. The last part is pretty crucial, the "lifetime" of these civilizations. What it means for this discussion is the amount of time they are broadcasting unencrypted radio signals. Let's give them 500 years (again, I think this is really generous). That should give us 6 civilizations in the galaxy at any given time. Sorry but you're just not going to find them.
What if one of these civilizations is an outlier that manages to hang around longer and spread out around the galaxy. Or are you saying that is simply not possible?
What if monkeys fly out of my butt? Anything is possible. I'm saying it's not likely.
It's not likely that any civilization will reach such a technological level.
If one does, it's not likely that spreading around the galaxy colonizing planets will be a priority.
If one does that anyway, it's not likely that they will use unencrypted radio signals for communications.
What if we're the North Sentinel Island ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island ) of the universe? The universe is a really really big place and there are probably plenty of habitable planets, especially with terraforming. We're probably just a little remote violent oddity. The most interesting thing about the earth is probably our DNA. They can get that easily without destroying us.
North Senetinel Island is a anachronism. Much more likely to happen is Hispaniola.
From De Casas: Destruction of the Indies
The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty, as is premention'd, like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv'd, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher'd and harass'd with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard (of which you shall have some account in the following Discourse) that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred. Nay the Isle of Cuba, which extends as far, as Valledolid in Spain is distant from Rome, lies now uncultivated, like a Desert, and intomb'd in its own Ruins. You may also find the Isles of St. John, and Jamaica, both large and fruitful places, unpeopled and desolate. The Lucayan Islands on the North Side, adjacent to Hispaniola and Cuba, which are Sixty in number, or thereabout, together with with those, vulgarly known by the name of the Gigantic Isles, and others, the most infertile whereof, exceeds the Royal Garden of Sevil in fruitfulness, a most Healthful and pleasant Climat, is now laid waste and uninhabited; and whereas, when the Spaniards first arriv'd here, about Five Hundred Thousand Men dwelt in it, they are now cut off, some by slaughter, and others ravished away by Force and Violence, to work in the Mines of Hispanioloa, which was destitute of Native Inhabitants
Whenever "explorers" from distant parts have "discovered" new areas, throughout history the indigenous peoples get badly screwed over. See the history of post-Columbus native Americans. Look at India and China to see what even very advanced civilizations with large populations still get screwed by the invaders.
A large portion of that population loss in the Americas was due to diseases brought from Europe.
But those diseases went through evolution in an environment that's similar to America -- it had the same atmosphere, similar soil, plant life, etc. Even the hosts were similar.
But an alien virus would have none of those things. Chances are it would find earth inhospitable and be completely unable to survive much less spread.
It would be truly remarkable if an alien virus found earth/humans compatible.
There were several waves of smallpox, influenza, measles, mumps, typhus, cholera, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, yellow fever, whooping cough, etc., which ran rampant through the Americas, often simultaneously ripping through the same communities.
I don’t know what native virus you are referring to (citation?), but it is estimated that in many parts of the Americas population collapsed by about 90% in the course of a century or two (sometimes faster), and the scholarly consensus is that this was largely due to Eurasian diseases to which people had no immunity.
The societal collapse brought on by disease also led to internecine war, helping depopulation along. And obviously the numerous instances of genocidal slaughter by Europeans and forced migration later contributed to the final native depopulation of many areas.
Or, we find out that DNA has a common base among the galaxy thanks to panspermia, and that the equation for life is somewhat common, and those galactic viruses work just fine among the flora or fauna of Earth.
Well obviously the Indian government could exterminate the entire indigenous population of North Sentinel Island in an afternoon if they decided that was a good idea. They don't though because we live in an era of enormous plenty and the resources of the island are relatively modest vs the value of just leaving the place alone as a tourist oddity.
Assuming that the resources of the universe are vast, earth will be more valuable as a DNA resource than for gold and slaves. Up until the industrial revolution, the rapidly growing populations of Europe were straining against their resources and were always looking for new gold and slaves plunder to sustain themselves.
The universe has been around for billions of years. Humans are a flash in the pan. We're gnats. Pond scum. Fungus. We're no more interesting than your average gas cloud. We're like tree bark.
I really love a good sci-fi movie about aliens, but the vast majority of them have humans and earth as being something special. To me that looks preposterously unlikely.
Think so? My guess is that we are only sentient in our minds. Compared to a species still around that reached our level a billion years ago, I don't think we would even register as conscious.
It's all speculative, of course, but I tend to think we vastly overestimate how special, unique, important, intelligent, and so forth we actually are. The numbers just don't look like they support it.
An ant is objectively an inferior lifeform compared to us. Smaller, weaker, less intelligent.
But there are still human beings that dedicate their life to study them. And we find unique and interesting features in them. I don't think this would be different if a more developed life form would study.
Supposing, that this life form still has some curiosity left. But if they lived so long that everything is boring to them, it's not our fault that they wouldn't find us interesting. :-)
Inferiority is an inherently subjective notion. That it is inferior to be smaller, weaker and less intelligent reflects your values, not some sort of universal score sheet.
No, but valuation wasn't what OP and I were getting at. OP said "We're no more interesting than your average gas cloud." and that we are nothing special.
I disagreed and said that even in the eye of much more powerful or advanced species, we would still be considered a curiosity.
At least to some. It's entirely possible that we could be blown away by the next being. But at least some members of the same species would regret that.
Of course we are. We don't like reality, it's cruel and harsh, so we twist reality all the time to make us look and feel better and special.
Just one example - why do all hollywood scifi movies have everything happening in US? I presume it looks OK to you, but ridiculous to anyone outside. World is much bigger (and more interesting) than just US.
I presume, to developed aliens, we would be like neanderthals or less. Primitive, cruel, not thinking much, acting more on emotional impulses. Yepp, that's our world and societies of today.
Do you know that the Sentinel Islanders aren't as crazy as they seem? The vast majority of hunter-gatherer societies are quickly wiped out when agricultural ones show up. This isn't even something that only happened in the distant past. Even today, in Brazil, farmers massacre natives for their land.
Why do we need so much land? Don't we have enough? But our numbers have grown exponentially. And even though we don't need that much land at the moment, there's still some small positive economic value to more land. And so the natives lose.
A similar thing applies to civilizations. The universe only seems big until you factor in exponential growth. Even if humanity could travel a fraction of the speed of light. Give us a few hundred thousand years, and we would settle and overpopulate every planet in this galaxy. And be on our way to the next one.
There are other reasons aliens would want to stop us. If they value human life at all, they might have completely alien moral systems and want to impose them on us. Human society is pretty awful with lots of suffering. No moral aliens would leave us alone to our own devices. But do we really want to get stuck being ruled over by them forever with no autonomy?
If they don't value human life, we are really screwed. In the future we could expand and advance and become a threat to them. It costs them nothing to exterminate us and prevents any future conflicts or costs we might cause them. So why not?
Humans would do all of those things. Maybe aliens would, too, because they respond to the same incentives and threats, but perhaps a prerequisite for cosmic fecundity is a more mature outlook.
I mean, a human could spend their entire life locating and exterminating ant colonies, and ants would fear that about us if they could conceive it, but we generally have better things to do with our time. (Of course if we're in the way...)
If ETs are able to travel around the Galaxy at faster than light speed that means that they have have the ability to harness absolutely enormous amounts of energy. Probably each Extra Terrestrial ship has multiple Tsar bombs worth of energy at their disposal. Their society must have developed some sort of maturity to make war and violence obsolete, much like World War has become less prevalent with the advent of the atomic age or they would have annihilated themselves early on.
Totally agree on this point. I mean, if we could as humans as a race come together and figure out how to live on this planet together, imagine what we could do.
Also good point to remember is maybe the aliens are nothing like we imagine they are, maybe they are already here and we just as a agreed collective don't yet have the capacity to sense this. There are many stories of people communicating with ETs already, if people did some research and had the capacity to understand more of the spiritual nature of things we would already see this on a global scale I believe.
> Their society must have developed some sort of maturity to make war and violence obsolete
Why "must?" That just sounds like an assumption based on what you want to be true. It is just as likely that a civilization you describe exists but has the exact same type and frequency of internal squabbles that humans do.
With that much power, "internal squabbles" equals mutual annihilation. Just imagine if terrorists could easily make their own thermonuclear weapon etc.
There is 0 reason to believe that evolution is in any way whatsoever unique to Earth based species. And if it's not then it's an extremely safe assumption that every other species that's developed, or will develop, is going to have a similar background.
Things that overcome and eat other things stay alive to reproduce and propagate. Those that can't, cease to exist. This very fundamental aspect of nature implies that there will always exist some selection bias towards aggressive predatory behavior among the most successful products of evolution. It's interesting to consider that the 'morality' of herbivore vs carnivore is an entirely human conception. Go back far enough and humans and grass share a common ancestor. We just evolved in different directions.
In any case the development of higher intelligence enables us to overcome and suppress or evolutionary instincts. But I imagine these instincts will always be a part of us. I see no reasonable way a highly advanced species could have ever evolved without them. And while the media and other players sensationalize violence, the reality is we live in what is likely the single most peaceful era of civilization - ever.
Try to imagine that in WW2 around 70 million people died from a world population of 2.3 billion. That's more than 3% of the entire world's population killed. Scaled up to present day population that would be more than 231,000,000 killed. Since we suck at understanding such huge numbers. Let's convert that in 9/11s. That would be more than 77,000 9/11 scale events. In other words imagine we had a 9/11 scale event every single day for 211 years. That's how many people died in WW2. Today we in the developed western world freak out about 60 people dying, and a single 9/11 is a world shaking event. And go back to things like the Mongol invasions - they were on the order of 300% more deadly the world's population than WW2 was. One can only imagine the actions within prehistory among isolated populations. Perspective.
> Things that overcome and eat other things stay alive to reproduce and propagate.
It is our assumption that all "life" has to "eat" and "reproduce."
Life could get energy from stars or other ambient sources.
Life could be an entire "species" consisting of just a single individual.
Life could be an species whose members are spontaneously "born" or "created" at a single source, without requiring any action from each other.
Life could come in the form of a ..thing.. that converts other unrelated living creatures to become a part of it. Say, something like a virus, that imparts intelligence and a common goal to any organism it "infects."
>Today we in the developed western world freak out about 60 people dying, and a single 9/11 is a world shaking event.
Keyword being Western - if the killings don't happen there they somehow don't count. Around 400,000 people died in Syrian war - that's 2% dead count out of 20 million of pre-war population; pretty close to what you mentioned is WW2 level.
>Scaled up to present day population that would be more than 231,000,000 killed
The fact that we by random chance managed to avoid a global war in the last 70 years doesn't mean that when it finally hits the death tally won't be 231,000,000. In fact, I'd say it's going to be much higher.
No, we haven't been. Of the signals that escape the ionosphere, all are indistinguishable from background noise by the time they reach Alpha Centauri. We're only really broadcasting within the solar system and a little beyond.
Even if we had been broadcasting a very strong signal from the first radio experiment in all directions into space, that would still be less than 0.1% of the galaxy.
We're fine. Aliens aren't watching The Honeymooners.
Concrete is not what most buildings are constructed out of in the USA. Steel at the tall end, wood at the shorter end, some brick here and there, whereas china is concrete for the vast majority of buildings. This is like saying Chinese ate more chicken feet in 2016 than Americans did over the last 100 years.
It’s not clear what you’re saying. Are you implying that the chinese don’t build with anything but concrete? That’s still an absolutely ridiculous amount of concrete to pour. Or, it’s not actually clear if you disagree with the thesis so much as the argument.
Yes, to the dead reply to my answer. Chinese build mostly with concrete unless the building is over around 30 stories tall, then they have to use steel of course. The reason they use so much concrete is that it’s cheap, and they can use lots of unskilled migrant labor. Remember, china builds as much to keep poor farmers employed as much as it does to actually create the structure. The drawback to this approach is that overbuilding is required and the structure become decrepit more quickly.
The USA uses less concrete for opposite reasons: wood is plentiful, skilled workers to build with steel are also plentiful, and anyways, you can’t import cheap Chinese or Indian workers to build in concrete like the Middle East and Singapore does.
I read once that at its coal burning peak China opened one completely operational coal burning power station every day. Now they are closing them just as fast and switching to green power.
If extra-terrestrial being are using communications technology we haven't reached yet, which I feel is the case for faster-than-light communications, then we have a long time to go yet.
Wow. A fantastically written article. I have a hard time buying the pessimism that intergalactic contact is doomed to end in conflict, but it's not like anyone really knows.
Now, the bit about chaos on earth if we do find others... Yeah, that's scary.
Yeah, seems like it would be all too much work to have a conflict with an alien species. I mean, why even bother? We're probably pretty early to the civilization party anyway.
I agree that the pessimism is disheartening, but looking at the limited data we have, is there any evidence of an intelligent species (e.g. humans) discovering the presence of another intelligent species (e.g. humans) without conflict soon thereafter?
Not a fan of extrapolating from single data points, but it's the best we've got for now.
I think it will likely go beyond that. If aliens are hyper intelligent they probably go well beyond sentience to something else and may not even consider us “conscious” (or whatever they have)
Then think about how we human treat much lower life forms. For example, a plant. We have no ethical issue mowing down a paddock of plants because we don’t see them as equal life forms. We have mostly no ethical issue of killing millions of cattle/sheep for mostly the same reasons.
When there’s a large intelligence differential, the smarter one might not even try and communicate
Plenty of humans treat animals with respect. I see people like spiritual leaders as being far more conscious than political leaders or sociopath CEO’s.
I don’t think this increased ethics is some weird quirk of spiritual leaders, but rather a deep feature of true intelligence.
It would take a lot of energy and computional capacity to make it all the way across deep space. I don’t see how a species could do that if it were fighting itself at home.
If it’s not fighting itself at home, why? Dictatorships are unstable because there’s always someone else who wants to be on top. The only way I can imagine a stable societ with that much reach is if the society contains individual members who care
ahout each other.
A house divided against itself will not stand, and a social network at war with itself can never reach the stars.
If you imagine how different humanity would have to be for us to get out that far, we’d have to all be concerned with the welfare of all humans. Once empathy reaches critical mass, the bodhisattva vow becomes an obviously correct moral imperative. I think of it like a schelling point for sufficiently introspective intelligent minds.
Once you’ve expanded empathy to all humans, you can’t stop there. He only way to truly care
about all humans - in all their myriad forms and oddities - is to care about all beings.
until we run out of resources, develop a plan to terraform the planet, which is incompatible with the original biosphere, and wholesale destroy all life on that planet.
If it ever got to us vs them, we haven't evolved past choosing us first.
The problem is that even some remote robots left alive guarantee a second strike on the attacker. So any dark forrest strike would have to be engulfing the whole solar system.
I think we would detect such events by now.
Unless you can manage to disguise your strike as a "natural" disaster. The Pulsars rotation angle just tiled and the rays emitted cooked the system.
A tragic accident in a unjust, unfeeling universe.
May they rest in pieces.
Look at the intelligent life we know about on earth. Elephants, dolphins, whales, primates, dogs, etc...
How do we treat those life forms? By and large: Like shit.
How are we, as a species, going to handle "new" life forms... intelligent life forms... advanced life forms... that can "bite back" if we try to treat them like our own earth bound life forms?
I would say, as a standard answer, hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
Humanity... has a large contingent that embodies the worst.
This article is a bit unfair to the dark-forest conception of interstellar life. The axiom that Liu put forward was not about some inherently expansionist nature of intelligent life, but about the difficulty of communication and understanding. It takes two round-trips to communicate, but a small multiple of one for a species that can launch an attack that moves at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. And such attacks may be fast enough, or hard enough to detect, that second-strike capability is impossible.
In his books he explicitly compares this to the prisoner's dilemma - maybe you yourself don't want to expand beyond your own star system, but as soon as you know another species exists, you know that if they are hostile and do find you, they will destroy you before you know there's any threat. And so you are incentivized to attack when the other civilization has not yet been alerted to your presence.
> it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival.
How about
> it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of another. The hunters are strangers who do not trust each other (or even have a language in common), so can respond with long dangerous negotiations to establish good intent, or with a swift bullet. Everyone knows this, and acts accordingly. The stable state is pre-emptive strikes, zero trust, maximum hostility.
This is a very "me vs them" individual bias vision. It assumes every individual civilization can take another with a "single" obliterating bullet like some street gang conflict.
In practice we are ant colonies in that dark forest. Unless you can understand enough the rumblings of another civilization, you don't know how far they've expanded. They may have fully functional, fast replicating colonies in one of the trillions of Oort cloud objects and you just pissed them off by trashing their historical sites.
We could go insane hypothesizing destruction on light-years bubble scales, but then you can rest assured other civilizations are now aware of your existence and will take note of your undesirable quality as neighbor.
A good answer, though I am merely summarising what I understand of Liu Cixin's argument.
Yes, across interstellar distances, a single strike with a very high velocity object might take out a planetary civilisation before they could react. But as you say, that might not be enough.
It's even worse than "you don't know how far they've expanded", even a fast strike from nearby on the cosmic scale can take hundreds of years, and you can't know how far they will have expanded by then.
I think it also makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of interstellar warfare - mainly that against a single-system enemy, attacks are quick and destructive enough - and hard enough to defend against - to destroy all ability to retaliate with high certainty. A sort of MAD gone wrong, with an attacker not having to even worry about the possibility of a second strike by the more resilient elements of enemy forces.
The addendum is that Liu believed it would be very difficult for, if not impossible, for a civilization to hold together across a long enough distance. This was shown when the original interception ships floated far enough and started attacking each other, throwing out pre-emptive strikes when communications broke down and resources were needed.
>The axiom that Liu put forward was not about some inherently expansionist nature of intelligent life
Huh? All the other stuff you said is perfectly true, but in addition to that, there's an axiom in his book explicitly stating that "civilization continuously grows and expands."
Previously, you talked about chains of suspicion (Liu's term for it). It was couched in a denial of there being any expansionist nature of civilizations. All the other things you said were exactly right, but, at the same time, Liu did indeed suggest expansionist tendencies of civilizations as an axiom for understanding Dark Forest theory.
And now you're saying expansion is relevant to relative strength or weakness of civilizations? You seem to be clarifying what is meant by expansion. But we can define expansion however. My point was more that expansion, however defined was definitely included among Liu's axioms.
the three body problem was a horrible book. The whole notion of detecting signals from other civilizations is not a novel concept in Sci-fi world. There are much better articulated & compelling examples from other science fiction works..
If you want some first contact stories that are better (IMO) than The Three Body Problem, try:
- Blindsight by Peter Watts (cannot recommend this strongly enough)
- The Forge of God and sequel Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear
- Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
- Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
I appreciated getting a non-Western take on one of the most durable SF tropes in the Three Body Problem, but I didn't much enjoy it overall, and didn't read the sequels. It didn't hang together logically for me. The aliens could have built orbital habitats in their home system faster and easier than finding a replacement planet, even if they couldn't directly fix the problems of their home planet. Also I had a hard time squaring the aliens' (believable, hard-SF) colony ship capabilities with their magical, completely-beyond-known-physics "sophons" that they sent ahead.
Anyone know anything about the credibility of the Disclosure Project[1]? I think something like 100+ ex-service personnel testified under oath that they'd witnessed UFO activity.
If 100+ people testified to seeing me do something illegal, a court would convict me (barring exceptional counter-evidence).
Having researched things as best I can I am now of the opinion they're already here, based mainly on the number, diversity and credibility of witnesses (e.g. ex-military personnel, former nuclear military personnel, Air Force, etc, not that any I know anything beyond that).
I looked over some of them, and this isn't very reliable. Eyewitness reports aren't terribly credible in the best of situations. Eyewitness reports of people in stressful careers often working long overnight hours aren't credible at all.
Our memories are terrible, our brains make stuff up when confused, and sleep deprived dreams are very hard to distinguish from reality. Add in the large amount of amphetamines used in the military during that period, the very secretive weapons testing going on, and things like MK-ULTRA and these seem really far fetched.
So, if we can't trust their memories in those occasions (which I agree is problematic), why are we trusting them with doing their jobs under such conditions?
I'd like to add that it might not be that all events happened under strenuous (personal) situations (and who knows how much evidence like recordings or other stuff might have been buried)
> why are we trusting them with doing their jobs under such conditions?
Process, process, process. Or "train as you'll fight" in more bellicose terms. Drill and rote is the only way to get fallible humans to do the correct thing regardless of environment and conditions.
However it's when things occur for which there's no process in place that you need flexible, quick-thinking NCOs and officers. And that's achieved by constantly putting them into those scenarios, as the British Army learned in its 'small conflicts' since WW2. Analyse, assess, plan and react within minutes.
Unfortunately the higher echelons seldom retain that capability after years in stuffy corridors. It would be interesting to study the proportion of UFO "affirmations" originating from sharp-end military personnel versus desk-jockeys. I reckon the latter will be the vast majority.
Their jobs rarely include remembering exactly what happened at three AM on a certain night. Plus, these claims are often one event over years of working this job, you can't expect perfection out of people.
Strenuous situations just make eyewitness accounts more likely to be terrible, our brain can screw up for no reason at all. Or a mundane reason, like skipping breakfast.
This makes claims of contact with aliens giving us advanced technology. I can imagine all sorts of possibly buried evidence that would make me believe that. Until some of it comes out, the eyewitness accounts are not reliable evidence.
> people in stressful careers often working long overnight hours
Doesn't look like that's the case for all of those witnesses. A lot of them seem like engineers - people that are paid for their minds (including their memory), rather than their head count.
UFOs on radar have a wide range of non-alien explanations, military testing or some bizarre weather event that happens incredibly infrequently for example. I will readily admit there are probably radar readings that no one can explain. That doesn't even count as proof of alien contact, and using that to support the claims made by the disclosure project is madness.
The main problem I have with analogy to a court of law is witnesses corroboration only works if all the witnesses are describing the same event, or are at least a series of deeply interrelated specific events local on a particular person or place or entity.
If witnesses are all talking about a series of separate events all over the globe at different times that aren't associated with each other, those claims are all systematically vulnerable to biases and don't serve to reinforce one another.
Think about this - since mid 2000-2010 we have 1 or 2 billions of smartphone users (and a few hundred millions of older phones with cameras). And those billions of people have been using them for over a decade. Now the question - where are the photos of anything extraterrestrial?
And no, secrecy doesn't apply here really. People manage to take pics of secret military hardware, of terrorist leaders, of practically anything anywhere.
Well I did watch a film on Netflix ("UFOs: The Best Evidence Ever (Caught on Tape)"), but even in that it was obvious some was CGI - they had analysed it and reported it as such.
It's quite an old documentary so videos are pre-smartphones and pre-widespread availability of CGI software. But that'd be the other problem. If you search for "UFO" on Youtube there's loads of footage, but it could all just be CGId.
If these are real, is it alien or highly advanced Earth tech? It doesn't really matter from the perspective of if these aircraft are able to manoeuvre how they are reported to, the tech is obviously centuries ahead of what is publicly acknowledged and available now.
Our problem is that we have very limited imagination (and sensitivities) when interacting with other sentient beings even here, on earth. For example, cetaceans evolved in the environment where vision is limited. Hence, dolphins and whales do not have emotional facial expresssions that are so important for human primates. It confuses us when interacting with them, are they sad, happy, in pain? We have no idea. Next, is our profound inability to understand their complex acoustic communication, there is no Rosetta stone, and we are completely lost again. Any race to communicate with aliens should start with decoding non-human communication systems here on earth (shameless plug, anyone is interested to support our tiny fledging startup?)
Finally, the recent situation with rescuing last living vaquita dolphins in Mexico once again demonstrated that humans have hard time imagining umwelt of other species. The plan was to capture remaining vaquitas and to put them in protected sea pens. Without any doubt, human intentions are good here, but as we often do, we go full steam, brute force into the situation. As a result, captured vaquita died from capture myopathy. This animal is shy, cryptic, and it cannot handle being surrounded by scary , noisy giants, touching it, grabbing it with its appendages, despite the fact that "giants" have all good intentions. This example is very relevant to thinking how we should interact with possible "others" or handle the signal, if it will be received one day. Even with all good intentions, we can still create chaos and danger, simply because we cannot understand "others" and how they see, experience the world.
I'd never heard of vaquitas. Incredible that yet again a species is terribly threatened due to Chinese fertility treatments.
> But like all cetaceans, the vaquita breathes air, making the gillnets deadly. The nets are set to trap another endangered species, the totoaba. This fish’s swim bladder is used in Chinese medicine to make a soup believed to boost fertility—and demand has skyrocketed in recent years.
Somehow I am sure that some governments have already made contact with ET intelligence. This will be revealed in a few decades may be, when world is ready for it. A conspiracy theory but something unknown gives me the confidence and belief.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadIf we could harness all the resources available around the solar system and beyond, we wouldn't have an energy crisis at all. The problem is actually getting those resources transported. If an alien had means to mine and transport resources, they'd probably have found plenty of other richer resources besides Earth.
With our current rate of population growth, I think about one or two percent per year if I remember correctly, we would only make it a few percent across the Milkyway before running out of resources even if we could travel at the speed of light. You can search my comment history, there is somewhere a more detailed comment with all the numbers and assumptions.
Bottom line is, if you want to colonialize the universe, you either need a population growth rate very close to zero and a lot of patience or you have to beat Einstein.
EDIT: Here [1] is the mentioned comment.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13638012
For others who like this sort of thing, I highly recommend Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel:
http://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g
Not disagreeing with your conclusion, but assuming the current rate of population growth is relatively meaningless seeing as no reasonable model assumes current growth rates will continue (as it's been steadily changing).
Unfortunately that is still way too large, to colonialize the Milky Way before hitting resource limits you need it down at one one-thousandth of a percent or so, for the entire universe you need to decrease it several orders of magnitude more. At least on average, if you could use something like cryostasis while travelling through the vast emptiness between stars you could afford times with higher growth rates.
The first drop basically comes because we have a massive population bulge in the post-war years. The growth the resumes because the drop in population growth worldwide is not yet enough to offset the steady growth in life expectancy in the third world.
But longer term that is likely to end up as another bulge.
In terms of developed countries, most have birth rates below replacement.
Once life expectancy growth worldwide has flattened out enough, and birth rates have declined to e.g. European levels, we can expect the bigger problem to be preventing terminal decline. This map [1] is quite interesting. The blue/light blue parts represents birth rates below replacement. In 2015 France too was below replacement.
About half of the worlds population lived in countries with sub-replacement birth rates as of 2010, and despite the fact that the population growth tilts that towards high population growth countries on a continuous basis, the birth rates of those countries is dropping pretty much across the board, meaning it is likely that the proportion of the worlds population living in sub-replacement countries will actually increase.
E.g. India is expected to drop below replacement this century too, and actually experience population decline (decline lags birth rates, of course, because you need to wait for the generation that's dying off to be larger than the one being born).
So I don't think population growth is a realistic concern when it comes to interstellar exploration. On the contrary.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/med...
Our population isn't expanding exponentially. World population grew at 2%/yr in 1960, 1.55% in 1995, 1.25% in 2005, 1.18% in 2015, 1.14% in 2016, and 1.12% this year.
Soon every person we send off the planet will just reduce earth population by 1. We'll be lucky if people reproduce enough to keep the population steady.
But current projections is a population in the region of 10bn first by the end of the century, with some projections suggesting population decline from as early as 2040 (though that's an outlier). More scenarios predict a peak in the 2070-2100 timeframe; some predict continued, but much reduced growth beyond 2100. As far as I'm aware, though, all reasonable scenarios suggest that the rate of growth will at the very least continue to slow for a long time.
That looks pretty exponential to me. If it no longer looks exponential when looking at the last few years perhaps it's because we're running into resource limits.
It's true that animal populations peak (s-curve) when they hit resource limits (ie: carrying capacity of the environment). But our population has slowed because of education (in particular, education of women)... it's an effect thats been repeated all over the world.
If it were resource limits, we would see things like famine (killing the excess members of the population), rampant disease (which becomes easier to spread when people are closer to each other), etc. We're definitely not there in the developed world; and the 3rd world isnt there either, since they have some of the highest reproductive rates.
The universe is a big place. Looking around, it seems that the endless-exponential-expansion route hasn’t proven popular with anyone yet. There may just be enough to go around.
It doesn't need to be rational. All it takes is one sufficiently powerful species to decide "better safe than sorry" and lobbing suitable planet killers at any new upstarts they notice.
Now that you know it's there, don't you feel like expending the time, energy, and resources necessary to travel there so you can step on it?
Even arguably less aggressive and more successful (in terms of longevity) entities such as the British or the Spanish Empire weren't particularly long-lived on a large timescale.
It is very unlikely that there is anything out there that is capable of actually coming here, for the same reason it's very unlikely we can ever leave the solar system. A radio "conversation" over many generations - if that's even possible - would be the high point of our civilisation.
I think you're over-extrapolating. One obvious difference is that colonizers have been exposed to other humans of all kinds, even before colonization. There was nothing about (e.g.) Native American society that you couldn't find in Eurasia + Africa that's even remotely on the same scale as the differences between us and a theoretical alien civilization.
http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
But your comment sounds like you are concerned about broadcasting. The chinese (like SETI) are just listening. Of course, we're all broadcasting all the time but, so what? What do we have to fear from being heard?
Massive spoilers of the second and first books: https://books.google.com/books?id=ThKrDgAAQBAJ&pg=PT163&lpg=...
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/18127/dark-fo...
What are you basing this on? I'd like to see your Drake equation variables.
It's not likely that any civilization will reach such a technological level. If one does, it's not likely that spreading around the galaxy colonizing planets will be a priority. If one does that anyway, it's not likely that they will use unencrypted radio signals for communications.
But, no, not impossible.
From De Casas: Destruction of the Indies
The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty, as is premention'd, like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv'd, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher'd and harass'd with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard (of which you shall have some account in the following Discourse) that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred. Nay the Isle of Cuba, which extends as far, as Valledolid in Spain is distant from Rome, lies now uncultivated, like a Desert, and intomb'd in its own Ruins. You may also find the Isles of St. John, and Jamaica, both large and fruitful places, unpeopled and desolate. The Lucayan Islands on the North Side, adjacent to Hispaniola and Cuba, which are Sixty in number, or thereabout, together with with those, vulgarly known by the name of the Gigantic Isles, and others, the most infertile whereof, exceeds the Royal Garden of Sevil in fruitfulness, a most Healthful and pleasant Climat, is now laid waste and uninhabited; and whereas, when the Spaniards first arriv'd here, about Five Hundred Thousand Men dwelt in it, they are now cut off, some by slaughter, and others ravished away by Force and Violence, to work in the Mines of Hispanioloa, which was destitute of Native Inhabitants
Whenever "explorers" from distant parts have "discovered" new areas, throughout history the indigenous peoples get badly screwed over. See the history of post-Columbus native Americans. Look at India and China to see what even very advanced civilizations with large populations still get screwed by the invaders.
But those diseases went through evolution in an environment that's similar to America -- it had the same atmosphere, similar soil, plant life, etc. Even the hosts were similar.
But an alien virus would have none of those things. Chances are it would find earth inhospitable and be completely unable to survive much less spread.
It would be truly remarkable if an alien virus found earth/humans compatible.
The vast majority was caused by an ill-timed native viral hemorrhagic fever, not European diseases.
I don’t know what native virus you are referring to (citation?), but it is estimated that in many parts of the Americas population collapsed by about 90% in the course of a century or two (sometimes faster), and the scholarly consensus is that this was largely due to Eurasian diseases to which people had no immunity.
The societal collapse brought on by disease also led to internecine war, helping depopulation along. And obviously the numerous instances of genocidal slaughter by Europeans and forced migration later contributed to the final native depopulation of many areas.
Assuming that the resources of the universe are vast, earth will be more valuable as a DNA resource than for gold and slaves. Up until the industrial revolution, the rapidly growing populations of Europe were straining against their resources and were always looking for new gold and slaves plunder to sustain themselves.
The universe has been around for billions of years. Humans are a flash in the pan. We're gnats. Pond scum. Fungus. We're no more interesting than your average gas cloud. We're like tree bark.
I really love a good sci-fi movie about aliens, but the vast majority of them have humans and earth as being something special. To me that looks preposterously unlikely.
It's all speculative, of course, but I tend to think we vastly overestimate how special, unique, important, intelligent, and so forth we actually are. The numbers just don't look like they support it.
An ant is objectively an inferior lifeform compared to us. Smaller, weaker, less intelligent.
But there are still human beings that dedicate their life to study them. And we find unique and interesting features in them. I don't think this would be different if a more developed life form would study.
Supposing, that this life form still has some curiosity left. But if they lived so long that everything is boring to them, it's not our fault that they wouldn't find us interesting. :-)
Doesn't tell you much at all about how much we value rocks.
I disagreed and said that even in the eye of much more powerful or advanced species, we would still be considered a curiosity.
At least to some. It's entirely possible that we could be blown away by the next being. But at least some members of the same species would regret that.
Where else would we be sentient?
Uh, no. I'm pretty sure we qualify as sentient.
Just one example - why do all hollywood scifi movies have everything happening in US? I presume it looks OK to you, but ridiculous to anyone outside. World is much bigger (and more interesting) than just US.
I presume, to developed aliens, we would be like neanderthals or less. Primitive, cruel, not thinking much, acting more on emotional impulses. Yepp, that's our world and societies of today.
Why do we need so much land? Don't we have enough? But our numbers have grown exponentially. And even though we don't need that much land at the moment, there's still some small positive economic value to more land. And so the natives lose.
A similar thing applies to civilizations. The universe only seems big until you factor in exponential growth. Even if humanity could travel a fraction of the speed of light. Give us a few hundred thousand years, and we would settle and overpopulate every planet in this galaxy. And be on our way to the next one.
There are other reasons aliens would want to stop us. If they value human life at all, they might have completely alien moral systems and want to impose them on us. Human society is pretty awful with lots of suffering. No moral aliens would leave us alone to our own devices. But do we really want to get stuck being ruled over by them forever with no autonomy?
If they don't value human life, we are really screwed. In the future we could expand and advance and become a threat to them. It costs them nothing to exterminate us and prevents any future conflicts or costs we might cause them. So why not?
I mean, a human could spend their entire life locating and exterminating ant colonies, and ants would fear that about us if they could conceive it, but we generally have better things to do with our time. (Of course if we're in the way...)
Also good point to remember is maybe the aliens are nothing like we imagine they are, maybe they are already here and we just as a agreed collective don't yet have the capacity to sense this. There are many stories of people communicating with ETs already, if people did some research and had the capacity to understand more of the spiritual nature of things we would already see this on a global scale I believe.
Why "must?" That just sounds like an assumption based on what you want to be true. It is just as likely that a civilization you describe exists but has the exact same type and frequency of internal squabbles that humans do.
Nothing costs nothing. Interstellar travel has to be expensive in any kind of form, whether resources or time. There's no free lunch for anyone.
Things that overcome and eat other things stay alive to reproduce and propagate. Those that can't, cease to exist. This very fundamental aspect of nature implies that there will always exist some selection bias towards aggressive predatory behavior among the most successful products of evolution. It's interesting to consider that the 'morality' of herbivore vs carnivore is an entirely human conception. Go back far enough and humans and grass share a common ancestor. We just evolved in different directions.
In any case the development of higher intelligence enables us to overcome and suppress or evolutionary instincts. But I imagine these instincts will always be a part of us. I see no reasonable way a highly advanced species could have ever evolved without them. And while the media and other players sensationalize violence, the reality is we live in what is likely the single most peaceful era of civilization - ever.
Try to imagine that in WW2 around 70 million people died from a world population of 2.3 billion. That's more than 3% of the entire world's population killed. Scaled up to present day population that would be more than 231,000,000 killed. Since we suck at understanding such huge numbers. Let's convert that in 9/11s. That would be more than 77,000 9/11 scale events. In other words imagine we had a 9/11 scale event every single day for 211 years. That's how many people died in WW2. Today we in the developed western world freak out about 60 people dying, and a single 9/11 is a world shaking event. And go back to things like the Mongol invasions - they were on the order of 300% more deadly the world's population than WW2 was. One can only imagine the actions within prehistory among isolated populations. Perspective.
It is our assumption that all "life" has to "eat" and "reproduce."
Life could get energy from stars or other ambient sources.
Life could be an entire "species" consisting of just a single individual.
Life could be an species whose members are spontaneously "born" or "created" at a single source, without requiring any action from each other.
Life could come in the form of a ..thing.. that converts other unrelated living creatures to become a part of it. Say, something like a virus, that imparts intelligence and a common goal to any organism it "infects."
Keyword being Western - if the killings don't happen there they somehow don't count. Around 400,000 people died in Syrian war - that's 2% dead count out of 20 million of pre-war population; pretty close to what you mentioned is WW2 level.
>Scaled up to present day population that would be more than 231,000,000 killed
The fact that we by random chance managed to avoid a global war in the last 70 years doesn't mean that when it finally hits the death tally won't be 231,000,000. In fact, I'd say it's going to be much higher.
Even if we had been broadcasting a very strong signal from the first radio experiment in all directions into space, that would still be less than 0.1% of the galaxy.
We're fine. Aliens aren't watching The Honeymooners.
“China poured more concrete from 2011 to 2013 than America did during the entire 20th century.“
China appears to not be slowing down.
The USA uses less concrete for opposite reasons: wood is plentiful, skilled workers to build with steel are also plentiful, and anyways, you can’t import cheap Chinese or Indian workers to build in concrete like the Middle East and Singapore does.
Now, the bit about chaos on earth if we do find others... Yeah, that's scary.
Not a fan of extrapolating from single data points, but it's the best we've got for now.
Then think about how we human treat much lower life forms. For example, a plant. We have no ethical issue mowing down a paddock of plants because we don’t see them as equal life forms. We have mostly no ethical issue of killing millions of cattle/sheep for mostly the same reasons.
When there’s a large intelligence differential, the smarter one might not even try and communicate
Plenty of humans treat animals with respect. I see people like spiritual leaders as being far more conscious than political leaders or sociopath CEO’s.
I don’t think this increased ethics is some weird quirk of spiritual leaders, but rather a deep feature of true intelligence.
It would take a lot of energy and computional capacity to make it all the way across deep space. I don’t see how a species could do that if it were fighting itself at home.
If it’s not fighting itself at home, why? Dictatorships are unstable because there’s always someone else who wants to be on top. The only way I can imagine a stable societ with that much reach is if the society contains individual members who care ahout each other.
A house divided against itself will not stand, and a social network at war with itself can never reach the stars.
If you imagine how different humanity would have to be for us to get out that far, we’d have to all be concerned with the welfare of all humans. Once empathy reaches critical mass, the bodhisattva vow becomes an obviously correct moral imperative. I think of it like a schelling point for sufficiently introspective intelligent minds.
Once you’ve expanded empathy to all humans, you can’t stop there. He only way to truly care about all humans - in all their myriad forms and oddities - is to care about all beings.
If it ever got to us vs them, we haven't evolved past choosing us first.
I have an easy time buying it.
Look at the intelligent life we know about on earth. Elephants, dolphins, whales, primates, dogs, etc...
How do we treat those life forms? By and large: Like shit.
How are we, as a species, going to handle "new" life forms... intelligent life forms... advanced life forms... that can "bite back" if we try to treat them like our own earth bound life forms?
I would say, as a standard answer, hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
Humanity... has a large contingent that embodies the worst.
In his books he explicitly compares this to the prisoner's dilemma - maybe you yourself don't want to expand beyond your own star system, but as soon as you know another species exists, you know that if they are hostile and do find you, they will destroy you before you know there's any threat. And so you are incentivized to attack when the other civilization has not yet been alerted to your presence.
> it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival.
How about
> it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of another. The hunters are strangers who do not trust each other (or even have a language in common), so can respond with long dangerous negotiations to establish good intent, or with a swift bullet. Everyone knows this, and acts accordingly. The stable state is pre-emptive strikes, zero trust, maximum hostility.
In practice we are ant colonies in that dark forest. Unless you can understand enough the rumblings of another civilization, you don't know how far they've expanded. They may have fully functional, fast replicating colonies in one of the trillions of Oort cloud objects and you just pissed them off by trashing their historical sites.
We could go insane hypothesizing destruction on light-years bubble scales, but then you can rest assured other civilizations are now aware of your existence and will take note of your undesirable quality as neighbor.
Yes, across interstellar distances, a single strike with a very high velocity object might take out a planetary civilisation before they could react. But as you say, that might not be enough.
It's even worse than "you don't know how far they've expanded", even a fast strike from nearby on the cosmic scale can take hundreds of years, and you can't know how far they will have expanded by then.
I think it also makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of interstellar warfare - mainly that against a single-system enemy, attacks are quick and destructive enough - and hard enough to defend against - to destroy all ability to retaliate with high certainty. A sort of MAD gone wrong, with an attacker not having to even worry about the possibility of a second strike by the more resilient elements of enemy forces.
Huh? All the other stuff you said is perfectly true, but in addition to that, there's an axiom in his book explicitly stating that "civilization continuously grows and expands."
Previously, you talked about chains of suspicion (Liu's term for it). It was couched in a denial of there being any expansionist nature of civilizations. All the other things you said were exactly right, but, at the same time, Liu did indeed suggest expansionist tendencies of civilizations as an axiom for understanding Dark Forest theory.
And now you're saying expansion is relevant to relative strength or weakness of civilizations? You seem to be clarifying what is meant by expansion. But we can define expansion however. My point was more that expansion, however defined was definitely included among Liu's axioms.
- Blindsight by Peter Watts (cannot recommend this strongly enough)
- The Forge of God and sequel Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear
- Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
- Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
I appreciated getting a non-Western take on one of the most durable SF tropes in the Three Body Problem, but I didn't much enjoy it overall, and didn't read the sequels. It didn't hang together logically for me. The aliens could have built orbital habitats in their home system faster and easier than finding a replacement planet, even if they couldn't directly fix the problems of their home planet. Also I had a hard time squaring the aliens' (believable, hard-SF) colony ship capabilities with their magical, completely-beyond-known-physics "sophons" that they sent ahead.
Gateway by Frederic Pohl is also a great brush-with-aliens book although technically not first contact.
As far as recommendations go, Mote in God's Eye is hard to beat.
EDIT: oh, did you perhaps misread "cannot recommend this strongly enough" as "cannot recommend this"? That would make sense.
If 100+ people testified to seeing me do something illegal, a court would convict me (barring exceptional counter-evidence).
Having researched things as best I can I am now of the opinion they're already here, based mainly on the number, diversity and credibility of witnesses (e.g. ex-military personnel, former nuclear military personnel, Air Force, etc, not that any I know anything beyond that).
[1] http://www.disclosureproject.org
Our memories are terrible, our brains make stuff up when confused, and sleep deprived dreams are very hard to distinguish from reality. Add in the large amount of amphetamines used in the military during that period, the very secretive weapons testing going on, and things like MK-ULTRA and these seem really far fetched.
I'd like to add that it might not be that all events happened under strenuous (personal) situations (and who knows how much evidence like recordings or other stuff might have been buried)
Process, process, process. Or "train as you'll fight" in more bellicose terms. Drill and rote is the only way to get fallible humans to do the correct thing regardless of environment and conditions.
However it's when things occur for which there's no process in place that you need flexible, quick-thinking NCOs and officers. And that's achieved by constantly putting them into those scenarios, as the British Army learned in its 'small conflicts' since WW2. Analyse, assess, plan and react within minutes.
Unfortunately the higher echelons seldom retain that capability after years in stuffy corridors. It would be interesting to study the proportion of UFO "affirmations" originating from sharp-end military personnel versus desk-jockeys. I reckon the latter will be the vast majority.
Strenuous situations just make eyewitness accounts more likely to be terrible, our brain can screw up for no reason at all. Or a mundane reason, like skipping breakfast.
This makes claims of contact with aliens giving us advanced technology. I can imagine all sorts of possibly buried evidence that would make me believe that. Until some of it comes out, the eyewitness accounts are not reliable evidence.
Doesn't look like that's the case for all of those witnesses. A lot of them seem like engineers - people that are paid for their minds (including their memory), rather than their head count.
http://www.disclosureproject.org/access/aboutexecsumm.shtml
If witnesses are all talking about a series of separate events all over the globe at different times that aren't associated with each other, those claims are all systematically vulnerable to biases and don't serve to reinforce one another.
And no, secrecy doesn't apply here really. People manage to take pics of secret military hardware, of terrorist leaders, of practically anything anywhere.
It's quite an old documentary so videos are pre-smartphones and pre-widespread availability of CGI software. But that'd be the other problem. If you search for "UFO" on Youtube there's loads of footage, but it could all just be CGId.
If these are real, is it alien or highly advanced Earth tech? It doesn't really matter from the perspective of if these aircraft are able to manoeuvre how they are reported to, the tech is obviously centuries ahead of what is publicly acknowledged and available now.
Finally, the recent situation with rescuing last living vaquita dolphins in Mexico once again demonstrated that humans have hard time imagining umwelt of other species. The plan was to capture remaining vaquitas and to put them in protected sea pens. Without any doubt, human intentions are good here, but as we often do, we go full steam, brute force into the situation. As a result, captured vaquita died from capture myopathy. This animal is shy, cryptic, and it cannot handle being surrounded by scary , noisy giants, touching it, grabbing it with its appendages, despite the fact that "giants" have all good intentions. This example is very relevant to thinking how we should interact with possible "others" or handle the signal, if it will be received one day. Even with all good intentions, we can still create chaos and danger, simply because we cannot understand "others" and how they see, experience the world.
> But like all cetaceans, the vaquita breathes air, making the gillnets deadly. The nets are set to trap another endangered species, the totoaba. This fish’s swim bladder is used in Chinese medicine to make a soup believed to boost fertility—and demand has skyrocketed in recent years.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/navy-use-dolphins-...