
Self-replicating alien probes could already be here - fraqed
http://phys.org/news/2013-07-self-replicating-alien-probes.html
======
shameless_1
> ... and may still be here but undetectable to our current technologies.

I recently saw a nature doc where they were raising Panda cubs. Because the
species isn't doing that well and breeding in captivity is problematic they
try to keep them unfamiliar with humans [0]. Keeping them undomesticated, so
to speak. The caretakers wear Panda costumes every time they have to interact
with the cubs. They do the same when raising endangered birds: hand puppets
reduces imprinting with humans [1].

In that respect, I think it's overkill for alien tech to rely on advanced tech
to make themselves undetectable. Look up at the sky. See those Boeing and
Airbus planes? That's how easy it is. Disguise your spacecraft as a reflective
metal tube that leaves a trail of water vapor and you're done.

Disclaimer: I don't actually believe they're among us.

[0]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fXBRKWmICU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fXBRKWmICU)

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XNk...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XNkV02P8Ysc#t=73s)

~~~
sejje
That's how easy it is to fool us, that doesn't mean the standard would hold
true for other potential civilizations.

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s_q_b
Well there is a particular self-replicating set of devices that we already
know in detail. If we're going down this road, have they bothered to think
that maybe we're the self-replicating alien probes?

Disclaimer: Don't believe it for a second, but fun to speculate. Personally I
think the Drake equation, the "Great Filter", etc. are just mathematical
laziness. The chance of life arising is likely just infinitesimally small.
Rare earth hypothesis all the way.

~~~
TausAmmer
You can also think that "Life" is everything. Puddle of mud is life, it have
streams, layers, densities, changes, reacting to environment.

How does one cell in your body knows about you? How does that cell understand
your perception?

Our understanding about life could be exactly like that one small cell
perceives life. I think Life is not a chance, it is just a process that pops
out wherever it can in whatever form it can. Diversity of life is dictated by
environment in it.

A ocean is so complex form of life also. Rocks around Saturn is very complex
form of life.

All it takes is just definition.

~~~
pygy_
"Life" usually refers to an exothermic, self-sustaining phenomenon that can
process, integrate and react to information.

DNA, proteins, membranes, cells, etc. are IMO implementation details.

~~~
shameless_1
"Life" is like "species": different schools/universities/professors hold
different definitions.

Example in this context: a (bio) virus. It has no metabolism, without a host
cell it's completely static. The academic world is kinda split when you ask
someone in the field whether a virus is a living organism or not. According to
one school of thought it's as much alive as a rock.

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lrem
Does it have to be really that "high tech" to be "undetectable"? Today we're
happy if we can detect asteroids of thousands of tons as they're floating
towards us. A probe meant for interstellar travel just doesn't have the energy
to keep flashing all the time. I seriously doubt that we can detect a few tons
of unspecified material, traveling at high speed in some distance from Earth,
with big enough probability. Thus, the only statement we can make is "no probe
designed to make contact was seen in our system in the last <100 years". This
does not sound as such a huge paradox to me.

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scotty79
Arrogant solution to Fermi paradox why we don't see life is that we might be
one of the first civilizations. Life is hard. It took third of the age of
universe for life do develop to the point of touching anything outside the
Earth. And before that to have chemistry we needed first stars to turn into
novas and dust from those novas to mix and re-condense into new stars. It
ought to take some time. Some time for our galaxy to form before that...
There's still a lot of time so it's as I said arrogant claim but we might
belong to the first generation of civilizations in our universe.

~~~
johnchristopher
Or worse. We might belong to the last, too late to the party.

Imagine we develop a bit of tech and find out that space has already been
colonized and exploited. That all the fun is going on strong in the core. That
we are too far away from that core, that there isn't enough energy to harvest
to even travel there or even send something there. That we are born too late
and too far.

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ars
Can you really slingshot around a star? Doesn't that require the star to be
moving relative to your destination?

But aren't the stars more or less moving together? Normally you expect the
outer vs inner ones to move at different speeds, but the whole issue with the
galactic rotation curve is that they are all moving at the same speed.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GalacticRotation2.svg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GalacticRotation2.svg)

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scotty79
> there have been no probe-building civilizations in the Milky Way in the last
> few million years or that the probes are so hi-tech we are unable to detect
> them

I think whoever build such probes is so hi-tech that we won't be able to
detect them.

Can we detect Russell's Teapot yet? We are proud of our telescopes but we are
basically blind to small objects. Especially since such probe could just make
a pass through solar system at 10% light speed.

~~~
pcl
_Russell 's Teapot_

I'd never heard of that before. Turns out it's a metaphor for atheism /
agnosticism. From
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot):

 _[Bertrand] Russell wrote that if he claims that a teapot orbits the Sun
somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, it is nonsensical for him to
expect others to believe him on the grounds that they cannot prove him wrong._

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ronjouch
<semi-spoiler>If _" self-replicating alien probes"_ are your thing, I highly
recommend Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson, an excellent SF classic that is
currently on sale on
[https://www.humblebundle.com/](https://www.humblebundle.com/) as part of the
Humble eBook Bundle 2</semi-spoiler>

~~~
BillyMaize
I second this. I just finished the last book of the trilogy last week and it
was great.

~~~
ronjouch
Oh really? How were episodes 2 and 3? I'm mostly hearing _" good, but not as
good as Spin"_ comments. I'll give them a look then, thanks. Hey, or maybe
just wait till they pop up in an upcoming Humble Bundle :P

~~~
btipling
Axis and Vortex are interesting stories, but very different from the first
one. They become maybe a little bit less interesting with each iteration, but
are still entertaining. The first book is full of mystery and the personal
dynamics of a few people over a large section of their lives and none of the
other books are like that, although some amount of mystery is a piece of each.
I definitely didn't regret reading Vortex or Axis.

~~~
BillyMaize
This exactly. Axis was good and Vortex didn't turn into what I was hoping for
until the very end of the book, but they were both worth it still.

------
flashmob
With advanced tech, there is no need for them to build probes. Eg. use
wormholes to peek in to any location in the universe, or some other
teleportation system. Probably that's why you can't see them. Source: Sci-fi
films.

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novalis78
So, to summarize:

1.) There is no other life form in the galaxy 2.) There is, but their probes
are undetectable 3.) There is, but the probes hide before we reach maturity
3.) All life forms in the universe are of the same biological age as us
(Moore's law)

Did I miss anything?

ad 1.) well, extremely unlikely with a lot of philosophical rammifications ad
2.) possible - we should find out soon ad 3.) unlikely - if there is more than
one alien civilization doing this, one of them would not have had the desire
to hide from us ad 4.) looks more and more like the real deal.

~~~
RivieraKid
"well, extremely unlikely with a lot of philosophical rammifications"

Whether it's likely or unlikely is just a guess, we don't have a good estimate
of the probability. I believe we're the only civilization in the universe.

What do you mean by philosophical rammifications?

------
ddeck
_> the fact that we have not detected or seen any evidence of alien probes in
the solar system suggests there have been no probe-building civilizations in
the Milky Way in the last few million years_

How does that compute exactly?

There are ~300 billion stars in the Milky Way, which is ~100k light years
across. I can't even begin to think about the travelling salesman problem
involved, but even with many probes, many civilizations, and travelling close
to the speed of light, I'm guessing it would take some serious time to get
around to visiting each star.

~~~
Luc
Self-replicating, though. Exponential growth in number of probes.

~~~
ddeck
Sure, but the conclusion drawn was that it indicated "no probe-building
civilizations"

~~~
scotty79
I think "probe" in that conclusion was a shorthand for "self-replicating space
probe built for the purpose of utilizing exponential growth for scouting
galaxy in reasonable time"

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3327
I think the high tech his article is talking about is a few orders of
magnitude greater than the imagination and thoughts of the comments mentioned
so far. Think of technology that assemble from dust, factory probes that can
detect elements and generate children from the bare elements in interstellar
space. Or technology that could create and collapse Stars.

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iamthepieman
This is a really interesting idea presented in a miserable article. It feels
like it's just rehashing sci-fi tropes. and there's no discussion of the "
_The new calculations, reported in the International Journal of Astrobiology_
"

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vaporeyes
I have always been of the mind that if they wanted to come here they would
have already and it wouldn't be pleasant.

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zavulon
As long as they're programmed correctly, and not like the probes in Star
Control II, I have no issue.

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Gravityloss
wouldn't capturing enough mass to create a duplicate probe at least halve your
speed?

~~~
scotty79
Probe would probably accelerate up to its max speed compensating for speed
loss.

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cristianpascu
_Cancer_ has long been cured. But big pharma companies will loose their
profits if they release the cure. And since we don't see any cure, that proves
that big pharma companies hold it secret. Hence _cancer_ has been cured.

THEY ARE HERE!

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DanielBMarkham
Don't want to take us too far out into pseudo-science land, but any kind of
contact with an alien probe would most likely be intermittent and not
reproducible. For those reasons, even if we observed it in nearby planetary
space or in the atmosphere I'm not sure anybody would take the observation
seriously. Along those lines, I've always thought the Rendlesham Forest
incident[1] sounded the most to me like a story of an autonomous, perhaps
self-replicating probe.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident)

------
speeder
Sometimes I wonder why we don't do this ourselves...

If we start now (and I think we can reach faster than 10% of c) we can learn
about 3 stars I guess in our lifetime!

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zeckalpha
Viruses?

~~~
scotty79
Did you see recently any virus that is able to propel itself through
interstellar space or replicate there? Viruses are just tiny chemical programs
that hijack replication system existing in their environment. But there has to
be some replication system to hijack.

~~~
zeckalpha
Viruses could travel via asteroids.

~~~
scotty79
Travel, but not replicate. The only idea I can come up with to fit viruses
into exponentially self-replicating alien probe goes like this:

Life is abundant in universe, chemistry everywhere leads to DNA, and life
mostly comes out of DNA. Smart aliens designed viruses to travel by asteroids.
Those asteroids at some points meet planets with life. Viruses hijack this
life to replicate themselves and change the life to develop intelligence.
Intelligence that will eventually develop and use technology powerful enough
to blow up whole planet. That event will release cloud of asteroids containing
viruses that will infect other life bearing planets.

I don't like this idea. It's slow and has many assumptions that I don't
believe are true.

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TausAmmer
Well, if you break narrow thinking that only high tech(electricity/metal)
civilizations can explore galaxies. Everything is forces interacting each
other and one object can only interact with so many other object, but totally
not interact with anything else beyond its capabilities of understand,
perceive/see/hear. Everything could be crawling of life we do not
perceive/understand/detect.

Humans operate in very narrow band of frequencies, thanks to technology we
widened the band but it also presented us with new problem/revelations. Some
made religion from science and ran into a wall.

"Earth" was so intelligent to grow people. If Seed is intelligent to grow
plant, why not earth?

