
My dad launched the quest to find alien intelligence - 8bitsrule
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/06/father-launched-quest-find-alien-intelligence-changed-astronomy/
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TheOtherHobbes
Ants can live in the middle of a city and have no idea what a city is, what
humans are, or what human culture is - including the Internet.

They're physically surrounded by a far more advanced civilisation and it's
literally invisible to them because it's incomprehensible to the ant mind, and
it doesn't communicate by leaving scent trails.

We could be living inside the alien equivalent and we'd have no idea either,
because we wouldn't be able to see it - never mind understand it. Maybe once
every few million years something random and inexplicable would happen, but
that would be all the evidence we'd get.

~~~
slickrick216
Ants aren’t capable of meta cognition though. While I agree the analogy is
useful it sort of falls down when you apply it to something else. Like birds
or dogs. They clearly know humans exist and how they can be manipulated or
contacted. The species difference argument at that level then results in a
different conclusion, that yes we can communicate but we are probably not all
that interesting. Expanding on this birds and dogs don’t know human
motivations. We probably don’t understand how alien aliens are. We can barely
understand the motivations of others in our immediate social circle. The
question we should ask ourselves then is what motivates aliens and how do we
trigger that motivation to initiate contact (carefully).

~~~
soulofmischief
I think OP chose ants because of the scale involved. Ants form full-fledged
civilizations which occupy relatively small volumes of space compared to human
civilizations (population size non-withstanding) and even when building around
man-made structures, they might not be able to recognize these structures as
non-natural.

~~~
slickrick216
Yeah it could be a one and/or combination of things. We can’t really know.
It’s hard to think of aliens that are so advanced that couldn’t conceptualise
us, do they not have fiction? If a species were born post physical or with
capabilities that seemed advanced though then I think the ants analogy does
apply. Something like space whales in Star Trek to us it’s intergalactic
travel to them it’s swimming.

~~~
soulofmischief
Hot take: Dark matter is space whales.

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badRNG
The silence from SETI is deafening. I'm not even amateurishly familiar with
astronomy, but I remember setting up SETI@Home when I got my first computer,
and remember slowly realizing that the universe seemingly isn't "teeming" with
intelligent life. Maybe something is out there, but out of reach, or
deliberately silent? Maybe we are alone in this huge universe?

It does feel at least a little depressing that discovery of extraterrestrial
intelligence seems unlikely in my lifetime. Maybe even out of the cards for
humanity. I have to wonder if building communications devices (or "devices" in
general) is a uniquely human thing that simply wouldn't matter to an
intelligence that evolved some other way.

~~~
usmannk
> Maybe something is out there, but out of reach, or deliberately silent?

Have you read The Three Body Problem series by Cixin Liu? It's a terrific (and
recently quite famous + awarded) sci fi trilogy that explores this idea. That
all sufficiently advanced civilizations have learned to be extremely radio
silent in order to escape detection. Reason being that they all eventually
conclude that, from a game theoretic standpoint, the only reasonable thing to
do when you detect another civilization is to eliminate them before they do
you.

~~~
01100011
This assumes that alien civilizations purely see us as competition and not an
organism they can achieve synergy with.

What if organisms could choose other ways of allying and joining together?
What if, say, you had the strong, dominant, ambitious sub-population of a race
trying to ally with other strong, dominant, ambitious life forms without
thought to race? What if the organisms in the universe which favored peace
decided to seek each other out and unite for a common cause?

~~~
nordsieck
> What if organisms could choose other ways of allying and joining together?
> What if, say, you had the strong, dominant, ambitious sub-population of a
> race trying to ally with other strong, dominant, ambitious life forms
> without thought to race? What if the organisms in the universe which favored
> peace decided to seek each other out and unite for a common cause?

That could be true.

Judging by history, that's not a very good bet. Peace sort of works among
humans, in part because we are so close genetically. But Pre-WWI Europe showed
that you can't engineer peace even by inter-marrying rulers.

Stepping away from humans a small amount, even today people regularly eat
primates of various sorts (i.e. "bush meat").

Why do you think humans would ever make peace with alien cultures?

~~~
zamfi
> Why do you think humans would ever make peace with alien cultures?

Great question. Maybe we need interstellar mutually-assured destruction. Seems
to be the only thing, short of dominance, that has worked to preserve
peace(-ish).

~~~
nordsieck
> Maybe we need interstellar mutually-assured destruction. Seems to be the
> only thing, short of dominance, that has worked to preserve peace(-ish).

It seems unlikely to me that when 2 alien cultures meet, that their technology
levels are so similar that MAD is possible.

~~~
Jetroid
It might not need to be about technology, but biology, à la War Of The Worlds.

Whilst I doubt that (all of?) our viruses would have any effect on them (as
they require our own cells to reproduce - aliens are unlikely to have a
similar makeup), but things like funguses and bacteria could be very very bad
for them.

~~~
kadoban
Seems fairly unlikely though.

Random bacteria and fungii that are introduced to humans don't kill us all
off. Bacteria especially are everywhere, it stands to reason that over all of
the exploring, investigating and just plain spreading that we do, we'd
encounter some bacteria that are new to a population. If those had any great
chance of killing us off, shouldn't at least local examples exist of that
happening?

Instead I think what we see are the organisms that affect us are those that
coevolve with either us or with related species. We're killed by the things we
spend a lot of time with, not random out-of-context bacteria that's never seen
a mammal before.

If that's true of us, seems hard to say why it wouldn't be true of aliens, no?

~~~
zamfi
> it stands to reason that over all of the exploring, investigating and just
> plain spreading that we do, we'd encounter some bacteria that are new to a
> population. If those had any great chance of killing us off, shouldn't at
> least local examples exist of that happening?

We have examples of exactly this! It was very bad:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics)

~~~
kadoban
Those were diseases already in humans moving to an untouched population of
humans, not what I was talking about.

A bacterium that hasn't seem humans before is pretty unlikely to be able to do
anything to us. One that hasn't even been in mammals before is even less
likely, etc.

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yyyk
SETI never made much sense as a means to find aliens. As a means to get
funding and interest in radioastronomy, by spinning more than a bit on the
chances of it ever working, it made a lot of sense.

A radio signal could be either intentional or unintentional. An unintentional
signal being found is extremely unlikely. Radio isn't very useful for
interplanetary communication, so the purpose must be local. But every
civilization would have the desire to conserve energy, and it takes a very
little time (compared to galaxy-scale distances) to improve it to the point
it's very weak. Humanity switched very quickly from weak radio signals
(because the power sources were weak) to very weak radio signals (because we
knew better what we were doing) to digital. That's a very short time frame and
a weak signal. Not likely to be detected.

As for an intentional signal, well, if a powerful enough alien wants to be
noticed, it will be. One could always come up with weird scenarios ("they want
to test us so they're intentionally sending weak signals") but that's a very
double edged sword ("they want to test us to see if they need to exterminate
us") which doesn't justify SETI.

~~~
lowmemcpu
> As a means to get funding and interest in radioastronomy, by spinning more
> than a bit on the chances of it ever working, it made a lot of sense.

This sent me looking for the total half-century $ cost of SETI, but couldn't
find it. Have any idea if that's been calculated?

~~~
yyyk
I didn't find much, but I have an idea for calculation:

* Most of their projects have a relatively static cost[0] year-by-year.

* The big variable is SETI@home. From the SETI PoV it's zero-cost, but that's not the case for society (compute, electricity, pollution).

It's not difficult to find TFLOPS estimates via BOINC or wiki. Translating
that back to cost is rather difficult, for me at least. Most people did not
buy computers for this. Network bandwidth cost is also difficult to estimate.
I suspect main component is power for processing. But electricity estimates
vary widely depending on hardware used, I dunno how to estimate the average
consumption per TLOPS.

[0] [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-cost-of-
operating-S...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-cost-of-operating-
SETI-Is-it-worth-the-money)

------
jph
Dr. Drake is especially famous for the Drake Equation (as the article
mentions) which is a fascinating way to think about how many intelligent
civilizations might be findable.

[https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1350/are-we-alone-in-the-
un...](https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1350/are-we-alone-in-the-universe-
revisiting-the-drake-equation/)

~~~
zokula
I would bet a million dollars that there are no other intelligent
civilizations in the universe.

~~~
s1artibartfast
I would take that bet. The observable universe is estimated to have 10^21
stars and the actual universe is infinite.

~~~
warent
I'm not sure what you mean by the "actual universe" but there's no proof that
space is infinite. Unfathomably vast yes, but still finite.

~~~
mnjn
Isn't space itself continuously expanding?

~~~
mathdev
Expansion of space doesn’t preclude the universe being infinite.

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markus_zhang
I actually have a theory about why we don't see (any) alien society at the
moment.

Step 1: recognize that all life needs to consume energy from somewhere
(regardless of Carbon based or AI ones)

Step 2: realize that albeit the total energy contained in the universe is
probably going to be enough for any civilization out there, regardless of
type, the total amount of energy that the CURRENT TECH LEVEL allows to
harvester is never going to be really large enough to treat it as infinity.

Step 3: assume that some individuals of any civilization wants to grab as much
energy for itself as possible.

Step 4: Combine 2 and 3, and we reach the conclusion that the said individuals
will always try to bar others from gaining enough energy, which means an
expansion of the gap between the "rich" and "poor", and most importantly lead
to a shrink of education of the "poor"s can benefit from, and ultimately
destroy the "tech base" of any civilization. The "tech base" is the least
amount of individuals that can generate some tech/science genius like
Einstein/Newton who can propel the civilization forward greatly.

Step 5: I'd argue that this destruction of "tech base" almost surely occurs
before the civilization reaches the point that general AI (or whatever that
can substitute the original "tech base") arrives.

Step 6: Tech/Science advances slowly afterwards and ultimately the
civilization won't reach very far into the depth of the universe.

~~~
RobertRoberts
A purely scientific view says there is just as much proof of aliens as any
other "never found" element or being that we have "believed" existed. This
includes all fairy tales and religions.

Its incredibly sad to see so many intelligent people spend very real money and
time on fantasies... Not for entertainment but instead under the guise of
seeking scientific truth.

~~~
p1necone
I think alien life is a step more likely than those other things. "Alien life"
is much broader of a concept than fairy tales, and we have one piece of hard
evidence for it's possibility in our own existence - it's not just made up out
of thin air like say, dragons or unicorns.

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remir
_Drake reasoned that if planets like Earth orbited stars like the sun, then
those worlds might be populated by civilizations advanced enough to broadcast
their presence to the cosmos. His logic made sense: For the last century,
Earthlings have been making these sorts of announcements all the time in the
form of TV and radio broadcasts, military radar, and other communications that
leak into space._

His logic made sense in the context of an adolescent civilization. We
broadcast stuff, so if there are other civilizations out there, surely they
would do the same, right?

Doubtful, because that's too risky. Why would anybody want to attract
attention to themselves?

~~~
danielheath
Not just risky; it's expensive.

Our radio waves are much, much quieter as all the networks switch from analog
broadcast to digital and from low-density-long-range to high-density-short-
range.

~~~
phreeza
I think the most detectable radio signals would come from stuff like early
warning radar, not communications, anyway. Not sure if those can be compressed
in a meaningful way.

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CRUDite
I have a pet idea that if star lifting or some stellar engineering is used and
it were to alter emission spectra in some detectable way that we could look
for clusters of stars with the same altered emission, or just clusters of
stars with some non normal emissions. At least it would be possible to scan
alot of the sky quickly with a method like this. I suppose i dont know enough
about stellar spectra to know if fingerprints like this could be out there

~~~
bena
You need to back that one up.

You're basically saying: "Assume we can eventually manipulate stars, then this
follows".

And while that may be true, I'm not willing to grant you your first
assumption. Why do you think anyone will be able to engineer a star? What do
we have today that makes you think we can manipulate something that we can't
even get within a million miles of.

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gattr
As regards frequency of civilizations occurring, I've read recently an
interesting take: when we look at the Earth, each of the following milestones
seems exponentially more difficult (i.e., probability density is far smaller
for each):

\- simple unicellular organisms to eukaryotes (~2 billion years)

\- eukaryotes to multicellular lifeforms (~a few hundred million years)

\- humans + consciousness + language + prehensile limbs (only a couple of
million / a few hundred thousand years ago?)

In addition, if panspermia (exchange of biological material via
meteorites/comets etc.) is in fact effective, the conclusion was: Earth-like
planets may very well be (almost) universally covered (infested?) with one or
another kind of unicellular goo; but only some tiny fraction has anything more
interesting, and we could be one of the handful - or even the first technical
civilization in the Milky Way.

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est31
Thread about a similar topic from 1 day ago, 152 comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23588469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23588469)

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SeekingMeaning
[http://archive.vn/fWFeM](http://archive.vn/fWFeM)

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peteoria
He should focus on the postal servers. Half of them are aliens, and the other
half are retired man in black agents.

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shahbaby
I suspect that the answer to the fermi paradox is closely linked to AI.

~~~
CRUDite
Consider when skynet goes live..the others will start talking to it!

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cletus
So I'm going to rehash somewhat some comments I've left on similar threads to
this. The thought on this apparent lack of alien technological civilizations
has advanced a lot since 1960 (when SETI began; from the article). I still see
a lot of people stick to ideas that really don't hold up to scrutiny. The two
core issues are:

1\. We will find alien civilizations by their radio signals; and

2\. The limiting factor on alien civilizations are Earthlike planets.

(1) is the flaw in SETI. The general argument against this goes something like
this:

1\. Planets are efficient ways to store matter (in that gravity binds it
together) but are highly inefficient in creating living area or collecting a
star's energy;

2\. Entering and leaving a gravity well is expensive (in energy terms);

3\. Gravity can be trivially replicated with centrifugal force using materials
we already have (eg stainless steel).

4\. Within 1000 years we will be capable of building space habitats that solve
the above 3 problems;

5\. As a consequence of the above, the natural tendency for any growing
civilization will be to encompass a star with orbiting habitats.

6\. Artificial structures orbiting a star, even if they're just energy
collectors, would be incredibly obvious to any observer from a huge distance
and would be far easier to detect than radio transmissions similar to what we
do today. The tl'dr of this is that the only way to get rid of heat in space
is to radiate it away. The signature of this is a function of the temperature
of the object and for a huge range of temperatures this is in the IR spectrum
and this huge IR signature without a corresponding visible light output is
what makes it "obvious".

The first radio transmission occurred 120 years ago. In 1000 years (and
possibly well before them) we'll be beyond them in terms of the signature
alien civilizations would detect (in that, they'd see our IR signature first).
This is of course the blink of a cosmological eye so what we're really doing
is hoping to see civilizations who are at the same point we are, which is
incredibly unlikely.

This ties into (2). I even saw Neal degrasse Tyson make this mistake in a talk
where he posits the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that civilizations run out
of planets and die out.

Planets are likely important as a cradle of life and the number of suitable
planets is likely a filter of some sort but irrelevant in the long term. A
star with no planetary system at all can easily be a home to a Kardashev-2
civilization. Matter can be extracted from stars directly (as a side note,
extracting Helium to avoid the star going supernova is likely a useful side
benefit) and/or constructed with particle accelerators (and all that energy).

What I find compelling about this argument is that it's /almost/ just an
engineering problem (albeit a huge one) rather than one requiring huge
advances in technology and/or "new physics". Steel is sufficient to build
O'Neil cylinders and solar power is a sufficient energy source for all this
(ie it's not predicated on the viability of commercial fusion power
generation, which I for one am not yet convinced of, and if it is viable
everything gets a whole lot easier).

The other attractive part of this is how it can be done.in a piecemeal
fashion, meaning you can build one orbital, the another, and another and
another. Certain other megastructures are much more "all or nothing" (eg
ringworlds).

The above is the classic Dyson Swarm, originally called a Dyson Sphere but
Swarm tends to be the common name now as a bunch of people have assumed
(incorrectly) that a Dyson Sphere is a rigid sphere. Dyson never suggested
that and no known or even theorized material could support a rigid sphere that
large.

People tend to hone in to one issue or another with the above. A popular one
is about waste heat. "What if they recycle it?" So with perfect recycling
they've violated thermodynamics so we're just talking about increasing
efficiency, at which point you've just reduced your IR signature, not
eliminated it.

The natural consequence of all this is that we are relatively alone and likely
the only technological species at or above our technology level within our
cone of effect in the Milky Way.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Oh hey snap! I’m from Adelaide, currently living in Launceston.

Tiny aside, and because I like dreaming about actually building these
structures:

I work with metal everyday and hold a trade certificate in metal fabrication /
engineering.

You don’t need to go to stainless steels to achieve great strength.

There are a range of carbon steels available that have up to four times the
tensile strength of regular Grade 250 steel used in most structural steel
applications. The _250_ refers to 250 mega pascal tensile yield strength.
Ultimate tensile strength increases after yield as the steel work-hardens, but
that’s what makes steel such a great building material: it yields and
_increases_ in strength before failing. Anyway, I digress.

See for example Bisalloy’s range of high tensile structural steels:
[https://www.bisalloy.com.au/product/bisalloy-
structural/](https://www.bisalloy.com.au/product/bisalloy-structural/)

The strength of these steels comes from the addiction of higher amounts of
carbon, manganese, chromium, and molybdenum, but in far smaller quantities
than required to make _stainless_ steels.

You might want stainless steels for some exposed parts for corrosion and
radiation resistance, but these are unlikely to be the main structural
components due to the relative rarity and cost of the main alloying elements.

~~~
cletus
So I'm not metallurgist but my impression is that stainless steel is used as
an example because it's readily available, relatively cheap to produce and
sufficiently effective. A number of megastructures require much greater
tensile strength than that (eg space elevator). Sometimes those materials are
theoretical, sometimes not and even when not, often we've yet to produce them
in sufficient quantities for such a large engineering effrot.

But stainless steel cylinders? There's no in our technology to produce those
(although producing them in space or on an airless world like the Moon or
Mercury might be a challenge given our reliance on oxygen refining steel).

I don't know if there are any issues with having different alloys (eg carbon
steel and stainless steel) in contact with each other. I know with other
metals this can be an issue. But again, I'm no expert.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I’m saying I don’t believe there’s any real strength benefits from adding
large amounts of chromium and nickel.

316 (marine / medics grade) stainless has a yield stength if about 600Mpa,
whereas high tensile carbon steels exceed that, and adding enough chromium to
make corrosion resistant stainless steel makes it a pain in the bottom to work
with.

You don’t need to add all that expensive chromium (11%+) to obtain high
strength steels.

Dissimilar metals in contact with each other are a problem because they form a
battery due to moisture and solutes, thereby causing electrolysis. This would
be much less of an issue in the vacuum of space.

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RTV7
s

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coldtea
So, will he return the taxpayer money?

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yters
I thought we cannot detect intelligent design?

