Do you believe?
- Thread starter Sliver
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I've got a religion I'd like to sell you
Its a weird one in some ways - fundamental physics are relatively simple compared to the complexities of life but we don't see any real evidence of that kind of thing occurring in an uncontrolled manner but its probably high enough that its very unlikely to happen in any significantly weird way.
Kind of like there are only so many possible variations of say a 64x64 pixel image using 16 different colours but you can run random variations all day long and see little other than pixel noise heh.
Its a slightly fascinating one for me as in theory if you had some system running iterations of say a reasonable resolution image you'd eventually find the blueprints for everything its possible to build and everything its impossible to build heh (and lots of other things) not to mention randomly generating works of Shakespeare.
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I try not to do belief, as a matter of principle. Assuming things are true without any evidence is usually a bad idea.
I think we don't have enough evidence to make a reasonable estimate of the likelihood of each possibility.
It's tempting to assume that since intelligent life can exist and the universe is very big, intelligent life must exist in quite a few places. But we don't know enough to back that assumption up. How likely is abiogenesis? We don't know. How likely is evolution from prokaryote to eukaryote? We don't know. How likely is evolution from single-celled organism to multi-celled organism? We don't know. How likely is evolution of intelligence? We don't know. How likely is it for a biosphere capable of supporting life to exist? We don't know. How likely is it that such a biosphere will remain stable enough for long enough for that evolution to occur? We don't know. How likely is it that intelligent life will progress technologically to at least our level? We don't know. How likely is it that intelligent and technologically advanced life won't be destroyed by internal conflict? We don't know (but we do know that human civilisation and possibly humanity itself could be destroyed by humans already). How likely is it that they would be destroyed by unintentionally destablising their biosphere? We don't know (but we do know that humanity could do it now and is probably already starting to do it). How likely is it that they would be destroyed by a mistake they made? We don't know (but we do know that the ability to do something doesn't necessarily confer the ability to predict all outcomes from it - there was, for example, an engineered organism that might have killed a lot of species of plants had the oversight not been noticed before it was released). Humanity already has enough power through intelligence and technology to make enormous changes without being able to absolutely reliably predict all outcomes of those changes. A hypothetical other species of people with even more advanced technology might well be no more intelligent and wise than we are and thus at a higher risk of unintentionally destroying their own civilisation or even making themselves extinct. On the subject of extinction...how long would a species of people exist for? We don't know that either, so we know even less about the odds of another species of people existing now. It's possible that some people evolved somewhere else a billion years ago and became extinct 100 million years ago. 900 million years is a long run for a species.
There are multiple explanations to resolve the Fermi paradox that the OP refers to. How likely are any of them? That's yet another thing we don't know.
Maybe a civilisation with much more advanced technology than ours no longer emits signals we could detect. Anything detectable from many light-years away is either a deliberate signal or a waste of energy. Maybe the hypothetical more advanced technology of these hypothetical people is advanced enough to be much more efficient and not throw away energy enough to be detected many light-years away. Maybe they're not sending a deliberate signal in our direction because they have no idea we're here. On the scale of even just this galaxy, the volume in which it's even theoretically possible to detect emissions from Earth is hilariously miniscule. There could be a hundred vast interstellar empires in this galaxy alone without any of them having any idea the others exist, let alone one planet with people on it who first started making detectable emissions less than a century ago.
Assuming that people capable of routine interstellar travel did find us, what is the chance that they will be hostile to us? Something else we have no evidence about. Maybe the fact that they reached that level of technology without destroying their own civilisation means that they must be co-operative and wouldn't be hostile. Or maybe they did destroy their civilisation and they're coming here to take our planet because it's the first one they've found that they could live on. Or maybe they're utterly xenophobic anyway. Co-operating with each other doesn't necessarily mean co-operating with another species of people. Maybe they're not hostile to us but decide that we're potentially too dangerous to be allowed to live. Maybe they'll turn up in spaceships that they didn't make and don't understand (the ships were made by a long-extinct species and just drifted into their stellar system), are actually roughly on our level of technology and knowledge and want to combine knowledge. Maybe maybe maybe, we don't know.
The impact on religions would probably vary from religion to religion and between different variations of each religion, but I doubt it would change much. There's no need for religion to make any sense or be consistent even with itself, so evidence of anything is irrelevant to religion. Explanations could and would be created. Or maybe not...maybe the hypothetical people from another world decide they have a religious duty to kill all of us because that was the dominant interpretation of their religion(s).
I think we don't have enough evidence to make a reasonable estimate of the likelihood of each possibility.
It's tempting to assume that since intelligent life can exist and the universe is very big, intelligent life must exist in quite a few places. But we don't know enough to back that assumption up. How likely is abiogenesis? We don't know. How likely is evolution from prokaryote to eukaryote? We don't know. How likely is evolution from single-celled organism to multi-celled organism? We don't know. How likely is evolution of intelligence? We don't know. How likely is it for a biosphere capable of supporting life to exist? We don't know. How likely is it that such a biosphere will remain stable enough for long enough for that evolution to occur? We don't know. How likely is it that intelligent life will progress technologically to at least our level? We don't know. How likely is it that intelligent and technologically advanced life won't be destroyed by internal conflict? We don't know (but we do know that human civilisation and possibly humanity itself could be destroyed by humans already). How likely is it that they would be destroyed by unintentionally destablising their biosphere? We don't know (but we do know that humanity could do it now and is probably already starting to do it). How likely is it that they would be destroyed by a mistake they made? We don't know (but we do know that the ability to do something doesn't necessarily confer the ability to predict all outcomes from it - there was, for example, an engineered organism that might have killed a lot of species of plants had the oversight not been noticed before it was released). Humanity already has enough power through intelligence and technology to make enormous changes without being able to absolutely reliably predict all outcomes of those changes. A hypothetical other species of people with even more advanced technology might well be no more intelligent and wise than we are and thus at a higher risk of unintentionally destroying their own civilisation or even making themselves extinct. On the subject of extinction...how long would a species of people exist for? We don't know that either, so we know even less about the odds of another species of people existing now. It's possible that some people evolved somewhere else a billion years ago and became extinct 100 million years ago. 900 million years is a long run for a species.
There are multiple explanations to resolve the Fermi paradox that the OP refers to. How likely are any of them? That's yet another thing we don't know.
Maybe a civilisation with much more advanced technology than ours no longer emits signals we could detect. Anything detectable from many light-years away is either a deliberate signal or a waste of energy. Maybe the hypothetical more advanced technology of these hypothetical people is advanced enough to be much more efficient and not throw away energy enough to be detected many light-years away. Maybe they're not sending a deliberate signal in our direction because they have no idea we're here. On the scale of even just this galaxy, the volume in which it's even theoretically possible to detect emissions from Earth is hilariously miniscule. There could be a hundred vast interstellar empires in this galaxy alone without any of them having any idea the others exist, let alone one planet with people on it who first started making detectable emissions less than a century ago.
Assuming that people capable of routine interstellar travel did find us, what is the chance that they will be hostile to us? Something else we have no evidence about. Maybe the fact that they reached that level of technology without destroying their own civilisation means that they must be co-operative and wouldn't be hostile. Or maybe they did destroy their civilisation and they're coming here to take our planet because it's the first one they've found that they could live on. Or maybe they're utterly xenophobic anyway. Co-operating with each other doesn't necessarily mean co-operating with another species of people. Maybe they're not hostile to us but decide that we're potentially too dangerous to be allowed to live. Maybe they'll turn up in spaceships that they didn't make and don't understand (the ships were made by a long-extinct species and just drifted into their stellar system), are actually roughly on our level of technology and knowledge and want to combine knowledge. Maybe maybe maybe, we don't know.
The impact on religions would probably vary from religion to religion and between different variations of each religion, but I doubt it would change much. There's no need for religion to make any sense or be consistent even with itself, so evidence of anything is irrelevant to religion. Explanations could and would be created. Or maybe not...maybe the hypothetical people from another world decide they have a religious duty to kill all of us because that was the dominant interpretation of their religion(s).
Largely how I see it - and IMO we are hideously unprepared should it ever happen.
I agree...but how could we prepare?
If they came to us, they would have the technology to reliably cross interstellar space and a workaround for the speed of limit limit and time dilation (you can't do it otherwise unless you're OK with trips lasting thousands of years and very weird variations in time, which would remove the "reliably" aspect). If they have that high a level of technology, I think we can't be prepared.
If they intended to kill us, we would be dead before we even knew they were here. They wouldn't even need any advanced weaponry. All they'd have to do is push a tiny fraction of the asteroid belt at us, which would be trivial with that high a level of technology. We could just about do it with our level of technology! A thousand major asteroid impacts and game over for humanity (and probably all life on Earth). But they'd probably have the technology to do it in a faster and more complex way. They can warp spacetime, create large completely sealed self-sustaining environments and power them for thousands of light-years. They could probably kill humanity in a dozen different ways before breakfast. It would be a bigger mismatch than a group of people 50,000 years ago with stone-tipped spears against a modern air force.
If they intended to interact with us peacefully, we'd probably still be screwed by the enormous mismatch. Things have never gone well when people with even relatively tiny differences in levels of technology met even when there wasn't any hostile intent. This would be much worse. Hello, your entire civilisation, knowledge and technology is completely obsolete. None of it matters any more. Have a nice day. On top of that, there would be a very good chance that they would have a higher average level of intelligence than humans...but humans would have enough intelligence to know that they could never catch up.
Technology isn't everything and like you said there are possibilities like they acquired rather than developed that technology and might not have the same level of development overall and/or they might be hostile but lack actual experience engaging another civilisation and be beatable if we were prepared to fight back even without technical parity.
As to how we should be prepared that is a much bigger topic but its an area that is way down the list of priorities but maybe that isn't very prudent.
Maybe right now there are numerous people debating the Earth problem - is it more ethical for them to step in and use their superior technology and power to stop pollution and war and many medical problems on Earth or is it more ethical for them to not interfere? Maybe it's the topic of the day in conferences, student halls and pubs. Or maybe they noticed us a hundred years ago and now we're a boring footnote few of them think about.
Soldato
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The most pertinent issue is that we measure the potential for and nature of life existing elsewhere in the universe; not only our by own reference knowledge and understanding but our desires and imagination.
This is a few thousand years, culminating in the last couple of hundred years of more advanced scientific process and philosophical thought. We have only really peaked in the last 50-70 years.
In the context of the universe, it isn't even a blink of an eye.
Our universe could be a function within an infinitely large body of universes; that to another form of life may be the equivalent scale of our quarks to us.
We clearly have a creator; if not God nor another sentient race then as a minimum, it's our universe as a function of probability kick-starting the process of life.
This is a few thousand years, culminating in the last couple of hundred years of more advanced scientific process and philosophical thought. We have only really peaked in the last 50-70 years.
In the context of the universe, it isn't even a blink of an eye.
Our universe could be a function within an infinitely large body of universes; that to another form of life may be the equivalent scale of our quarks to us.
We clearly have a creator; if not God nor another sentient race then as a minimum, it's our universe as a function of probability kick-starting the process of life.
not really the same though is it?
instant self-contradiction.
I don't know why people seem to keep assuming this. Sure, Hawking says we should be wary about the kind of signals we are sending out to space, because whoever answers back may not be friendly when we take into account our own gory history of occupation, greed and warfare. but humans are special (for better or for worse) - We let emotions and greed get in the way of everything. Currency ultimately rules the entire planet. Intelligent life in the universe probably don't have those issues, as those are things that don't need to exist for them.
To travel the huge distances of the universe requires harnessing immense power. Something we can't even fathom right now. That kind of technology requires intelligence on another level, or artificial intelligence. The latter is what we humans fear the most. No thanks to Sci-Fi, robot uprisings are always in the back of the mind for many of us these days
In reality, many don't think this will be an issue at all. An intelligent species sprawling the universe most likely won't be hostile.
Think about it this way, if there is intelligent life out there exploring the stars, then why would they need to be hostile? They are more likely to be scientific in nature. They have unlimited resources at their disposal given that they can jump around the universe.
well, you could make some comparisions w/ us. when we first came up w/ nuclear power one of the the first things we did w/ it was bomb a country.
"Think about it this way, if there is intelligent life out there exploring the stars, then why would they need to be hostile?" For the same reason we were intelligent life exploring our own planet, and the first thing we did when we found new lands was subjugate/eradicate the natives and rape the place of anything precious before declaring the territory for our own.
Some interesting comments and some moronic opinions. Still, keep it coming guys as the conversation is interesting. Cough mrk cough.
It's a topic which is fascinating and daunting in equal measure. If you've got a spare hour or so, there's a great blog article on Wait But Why about this subject and the Fermi Paradox.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
In a way yes, people are willing to believe significant intelligent life forms exist beyond planet earth even if it is directly unobservable.
Of course not
But yeah there must be. Some simple, some complex, I'd love some to be found in my lifetime, but that requires in our solar system.
It love to know what nature's other solutions are for DNA. Or if it works in completely different way!
Then there's the simulation idea. Which doesn't actually sound obscene to me. In which case.. Probably not lol
But yeah there must be. Some simple, some complex, I'd love some to be found in my lifetime, but that requires in our solar system.
It love to know what nature's other solutions are for DNA. Or if it works in completely different way!
Then there's the simulation idea. Which doesn't actually sound obscene to me. In which case.. Probably not lol
Type three is along the lines of The Inhibitors in the books by Alistair Reynolds & another possibility.
In the books, when life forms set off into space they eventually found ancient technological devices.
Upon doing anything to these, it turns out they're there solely to grab the attention of any space faring races & will send a message to wake up the Inhibitors.
Once that is done, the Inhibitors will head to that device & wipe out any signs of advanced life, track down where they came from & cleanse the planet of life.
This was done to prevent space faring races, because of the Dawn War, in which space farers just went about killing/fighting to grab hold of the rapidly diminishing resources. The Inhibitors, sick of all of that, opted to prevent life from getting any further than localised space faring & therefore preventing another massive battle.
As good a reason as any as to why no other signs of life have been discovered elsewhere.
Soldato
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The universe is just so utterly and incomprehensibly vast that there is no doubt in my mind that there is life out there somewhere.
As to whether it is little green men in flying saucers, I seriously doubt it
As to whether it is little green men in flying saucers, I seriously doubt it