Ask HN: What evidence would convince you of intelligent extra-terrestrial life?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25337469
I'm personally doubting this story, but the more interesting question is what level of evidence would I personally need to see to believe. With Hollywood SFX, I've already "seen" all sorts of aliens and miraculous occurrences. Combine that with Deep Fakery, and the hurdle gets quite high for evidence needed to accept intelligent alien life, besides just the regular improbability of alien civilizations. What would you need to see or experience to be convinced? A single report in the NY Times (or your favorite mass media outlet or a paper in "Nature")? Multiple weeks/months/years of second hand reporting (e.g. stories in the popular or scientific media) of a "Contact" (the movie) like situation? Second-hand reports from someone you know and trust? Personally touching / witnessing a physical artifact built to alien specifications?
45 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadAs for evidence: I just needs something as tangible as the covid vaccines... some proof that makes it believable it's not just some company trying to get research dollars.
I remember being really excited 25 (25!) years ago when a very intelligent professor I knew convinced me that evidence was plentiful (verified by high-ranking military) but it had to be kept under wraps as not to cause a public panic: they'd dole the information out slowly.
That's a tired story now. So I'd just need evidence more than just "trust us, we're high-ranking".
i.e. time and space can be as large as you like if life's everywhere you look.
What explanation do you think is most likely to explain the fermi paradox?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...
[1] http://gpsinformation.net/main/gpspower.htm
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=500W+*+%28distance+to+...
I think we will sooner than most people expect. And once we can do that we may also be able to start building a remote factory to build other probes and expand farther. Then it's only a matter of a few million years and we will have expanded to most stars in the Milky Way.
Is it:
1. Us finding relics on earth or else where of a long dead alien civilization?
2. Us being monitored by an advanced race of ET?
3. Them living amongst us?
4. Them influencing us, dealing with world governments?
I guess each scenario will require different types of proof.
I'm not sure how to proceed without defining scope.
However, since we've had decent tools to look for signs of life for decades and found nothing, for any one person to say they secretly made contact years ago is an 'extraordinary claim'.
I suspect that the universe, as a whole, only became hospitable to life recently. Probably many planets spawned organisms around the same time Earth did. That means nearly all of them are too many light years away for signs of their intelligent life to have reached us.
That wouldn't provide evidence of whether it was humans or other intelligent life that created that technology.
Obviously this doesn't immediately require extraterrestrials, but, given the lack of evidence or workable theory that life is original to earth, I'd say Occam's Razor leads that way.
It is interesting how this viewpoint I hold changes how I consume UFO news. There's a whole lot of BS and misinformation in the area, and a lot of crazy people, and a few apparently credible people (like Tom Delong and his To The Stars Academy board) who occasionally still mange to lapse into bizarreness despite otherwise sounding pretty reasonable if you fail to reject the basic premise.
What any human has to say about it has no evidentiary value at all. Speculation, reports of personal experience, interpretations of strange infrared events in the sky, interdimensional transmogrification - no value.
The intelligence found in the processes in mammalian genomes, how complex they are - to understand, let alone invent - tells me that we ourselves are just beginning to understand what 'intelligent' is. Until we are, we might not see it right in front of us.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems
I’d be convinced by that. Kinda hard to fake it.
Of course if it turned up on one of my camping trips to introduce itself I'd believe, but would just keep it to myself.
I could imagine meeting it again at a public function and we exchange knowing nods; 'Dude', etc.
It's very likely to need a space suit and couldn't drink beer.
Otherwise They should be trying to grab as much energy as possible, for whatever is it they want to do (as should we) and we should see at least some galaxies going partially dark.
There was a paper I can't find that addressed this somewhat. It said that the energy stars burn is a small part (<1%?) of what they contain in total mass/energy, so it might make sense and harvest that energy later. (The paper did not explain a method for efficient matter/energy conversion but I think black holes can do that?)
That paper didn't fully convince me but it's one of very few arguments that tries to address what I think is the core issue. (At least a few species will want as much energy as they can get.)
This sort of reasoning was developed in the late 20th century, when economies and populations were rapidly growing everywhere and it seemed like this was just a law of nature. We’re already seeing population growth decline (or reverse) in developed nations, and economic growth has turned out to be much more contingent lately, to say the least. We should probably reconsider the argument that an industrial civilization necessarily develops to building Dyson spheres if the like, when we expect a long-term stable human population of <20B and 2% GDP growth for the foreseeable future.
Beyond that, even, is it really unthinkable that a civilization would decide that at some point it had enough stuff for any conceivable purpose? There are other aspects of the 20th-century cultural mindset at work there, too, I suspect.
1> Meeting them myself, for an extended conversation, and way to chat in the future.
2> Theory of everything, and how that gets manifested into the technology they used to get here.
3> My own craft to go, with supplies and directions for a road trip to say hi and visit.
He covers most of the popular theories - the zoo hypothesis, the great filter, aliens hiding from us, inter-planet communication being unsolvably hard, life being extremely rare, our planet having uncommon characteristics, alien life being fundamentally different to life on Earth in a way we can't comprehend, etc. and the common rebuttals - we haven't seen or heard signs of intergalactic civilizations (which we believe we know how to detect at this point), von Neumann probes haven't come to dismantle us, different alien societies would likely have different goals and outcomes (which invalidates the many theories that are worded like "civilization will always eventually ____"), etc. It's pretty thorough and a very fun read if you're into that stuff.
Notably, though, one theory he doesn't address in too much detail is the idea that evidence exists but is rare enough that it can be covered up effectively and not all governments have it (so there doesn't need to be global cooperation). Throughout the book his stance is basically "it's a hard fact that we have no evidence of aliens", which is obviously at odds with conspiracy theories about coverups. Despite not generally being a conspiracy theory guy, I personally lean in this direction because after reading his book, the other solutions in which aliens do exist don't seem particularly appealing and I do hope that aliens are real. He also shares his own preferred alien-less solution at the end, which I found to be a bit somber but very reasonable.
As for the question in this thread, I'd be convinced if any one major government (US, China, Russia, Germany, France, etc.) officially acknowledges it. It could be that they decide to come out and share the evidence they have. Or, perhaps more likely, it could be that something happens that's substantial and compelling enough to convince a huge amount of people that aliens are real, and the government is forced to respond with a confirmation, which I would treat as the moment of certainty.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180506.If_the_Universe_I...
However, in order to be absolutely convinced that such life was visiting Earth I think I'd need quite a lot of evidence.
An alien race, that is so advanced, that it can force us to live in a certain way and change the course of humanity, for every human on Earth, all at once. So there is no doubt whatsoever.
PS: For those who haven't read it, I highly recommend it.
Some random civil servant from some random country slinging random stories? Zero interest in hearing them. Life's too short to click links for that sort of stuff, let alone engage with it.