I firmly believe that we're not alone in the universe, but advanced alien civilizations capable of interstellar travel would probably look at us like we look at mold - at best, with indifference and at worst, something to remove.
But, it is fun to imagine how our belief systems would have been shaken up if scientists were able to show Oumuamua was an interstellar probe ("Rendezvous with Rama" anybody?)
>But, it is fun to imagine how our belief systems would have been shaken up if scientists were able to show Oumuamua was an interstellar probe
Just about every ancient tradition has some form of non-human intelligent beings who are not god(s). Polls suggests almost 50% of Americans believe in ghosts[0]. I don't see why any belief system would change too much given what people already believe.
The only people who perhaps should worry are the aliens - surely a significant portion of humanity will find some way of blaming all our problems on them.
>but advanced alien civilizations capable of interstellar travel would probably look at us like we look at mold
Why? An advanced civilization wouldn't have cultural curiosity? They wouldn't want to study us from all the different perspectives we study people and literature and philosophy and even biology and neurology etc etc?
The argument would maybe be more readily taken if instead of mold, the GP had said "birds". We think birds are kinda neat, but most people hold a perspective with inbuilt human-exceptionalism, and birds are fundamentally not humans.
Birds may communicate complex things to each other, they may construct homes, feel emotions, dream, and even do some things we can't, like fly -- but they don't have Shakespeare or the Primes so if it comes down to us or them, it's us. A lot of humans believe only humans possess "souls".
To fully go into the argument: an alien species may well hold their own form of self-exceptionalism, and they'll have their own practices and history which we can't compete with. It is perfectly possible that there is nothing we could accomplish which would make us read as peers, as opposed to birds, gorillas, or... mold.
(edit: I do think the "at best" above may be unreasonably gloomy -- at best in this outlook, aliens might regard us with compassionate curiosity, as some humans do toward the species we share the earth with. That would be pretty lucky, but not impossible!)
If we found something chimp, bird, or even mold-like living on another planet, we would be utterly fascinated. I don't see why a "higher" life form would not.
If we found any of those things living on another planet (or moon), even if it was intelligent and had language, some of us would certainly be utterly fascinated. Others of us would see those beings as obstacles to the valuable almost-unobtainable natural resources under them, and would be happy to use military force to exterminate them.
I don't see why a "higher" life form might not be any different.
I would not be surprised if our sense of curiosity evolved from our need to look at diverse species of life and identify some useful properties from them, like some primitive bipedal creature trying to identify what is safe to eat, leave alone, or run away from.
Absent the same environmental pressures driving selection for these traits, its possible that higher life forms could evolve without these behaviors that we humans seem to be biased enough to assume all other intelligent life must have.
Curiosity killed the cat. We’ve developed disgust and taboos and physiological responses like vomiting to safeguard our interactions with living things that are small enough to eat.
Perhaps an advanced form of life/intelligence that has survived contact with various others would be guided by some form of wisdom/disgust/caution/discretion. It would not be surprising if they noticed little clues like our rapid deforestation, rising temperatures, shrinking ice caps, nuclear detonations… which would make us seem slovenly or likely to have “poor friendship skills.”
Or perhaps they'll observe and make contact with various different intelligent species on Earth, not just humans, and then decide that humans are making the planet inhospitable for other intelligent species like humpback whales, so we need to be eliminated to save the rest.
Or maybe we're the friendliest they've ever encountered.
People like to present humans like some godawful species. It's more likely that we're in the middle of the spectrum.
Primatologists indeed rate humans as less aggressive than for example great chimpanzees. But more than bonobos. So we are not the most agressive primates or species on earth. That must count for something, doesn’t it?
Particularly if we found mold that had invented writing, mathematics, computers, discovered chemistry, relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear fission, and had sent spacecraft to other planets.
All these discoveries and inventions would be part of the history of an advanced civilization. It does not matter how "advanced" they were, making contact with humans would be a completely different prospect for them than even contacting chimp-like animals would be for us.
The idea is that discovering all of those would be as primitive to such a species as mold eating the Sheetrock in your house. They would not find it fascinating that you were that primitive.
Yes. And besides, it is not just us humans. There is incredibly diversity of life on this planet. If alien species have any curioisty at all they must be delighted.
"And when you put the self-replicating entities in a strong acid bath, they produce the most peculiar shrieks while they dissolve! Ha ha ha ha! Zorblux, come here, you drop in a handful of them! Do you hear that?"
I mean, we know of millions of species on this planet, and when we discover a new one it sometimes still makes headlines.
It's hard to imagine it would be uninteresting for an alien civilization to discover a 10,001th civilization, on a planet teaming with other lifeforms. If they were bothering to send probes, this would be a jackpot.
This is what I was thinking. The first one is a gift from God, the tenth is still fascinating -- the ten thousandth might still get a doctoral student's attention.
It seems likely (>40%) the mindset necessary to invent interstellar travel would necessitate that kind of curiosity. Though among humans, that curiosity is of course not evenly distributed and often absent from the key decision makers.
But what if they'd seen thousands of species on thousands of planets and it had become mundane? You as a human are undoubtedly aware that exotic wildlife exists in far off places but I bet you don't spend much time thinking about Tarsiers or Marmosets.
Considering we are the only species on our planet that exhibits such curiosities, this seems pretty unlikely. Hopefully they don't just bat us around violently like my cat does with weaker species. That's my cat's definition of curiosity towards other life anyhow.
We even use slime mold on representations of maps to see if it would have done things the same way we do. For all we know, perhaps we are in a galactic petri dish and the entire point of our existence is to test out the growth of life for some great universal scientist! (tongue in cheek comment)
So we put some humans on this planet. Now, keep in mind, they don’t possess any group consciousness — they have some limited ability to communicate information by vibrating the air around them, but they don’t have anything like the globalmindnetwork that we experience. But look: over many generations they create these little pathways, to ship goods from population center to population center. It isn’t obvious how, somehow despite lacking any overall coordination, they manage to perform these complex emergent behaviors…
"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
I've got a better theory. Interstellar civilizations have probably fought wars over habitable planets and in the aftermath of those wars they probably have set up some rules for a long time about what you're allowed to do on habitable planets in a galactic framework. In fact, the reason this planet is not strip-mined and every living thing on it dead thousands of years ago is they probably have some rights in there given to life that evolved on a planet.
Besides, E.Ts can probably do ok in deep space or underground on lifeless planets if they can do interstellar travel.
But you do still need the stuff they are made of...
There is much more useful mass of material in a planet than even a pile of asteroids... In fact, until you start gathering up the entire Oort Cloud (current best estimates put the entire Oort Cloud as x5 earth masses). From the inner solar system you don't even have as much mass in asteroids and comets to equal the mass of smaller "planets". It's not a stretch to imagine that you want concentrated mass to facilitate efficient industrial scale operations. It takes time and energy to drag lots of small mass together to build a big interstellar ship. So your hypothetical interstellar civilisation might want to break up large rocky planets into smaller "low gravity" chunks for processing, which if your an interstellar civilisation, is probably best done by slamming nice dense metal mass into the planet at high speed to throw big molten chunks of it into orbit, you want larger than dinosaur killer size glancing hits, not planet cracking "the moon hits earth" sized ones. This whole process gets much easier once you strip away the atmosphere as well.
I’m assuming an interstellar civilisation wants to build a lot of space cities and starships and anything else… like a lot on the sort of scale that justifies being an interstellar civilisation, enough space cities for trillions is going to take a lot of material.
And as for the extra step… That’s why I said they might want to reduce that gravity well by breaking up the planet.
On earth advancements in technology, education, and especially woman's rights quickly lead to reduced or even negative population growth. So maybe interstellar civilisation won't need that many space cities
Who knows! Perhaps one of the necessary steps to conquering the distance between the stars is to develop robust robotics and the ability to somehow convert their consciousness into computer forms and cast off all the needs of their former fleshy bodies… vastly transforming the needs of such a society to primarily needing computers and energy for “sustenance”.
The most stuff is always locked up in stars, which are not very efficient as they just radiate most of their energy to the void of space, which is hard to all collect even with a Dyson Swarm.
Better feed it into an artificial black hole and the fish out all the nice heavy elements from the accreation disk!
It is a reasonable conclusion. Resource limitations means civilizations, burn up too much of their energy/materials before they ever get truly space bound.
They could all be just like us. A few space probes manage to escape the energy well but they are so small that no one else ever detects them again. I mean, it is not uncommon to sight life ending asteroids days after they have passed earth, the odds of us detecting any sort probe/device the size of a fridge - is nearly zero.
Best analogy I heard came from Stephen Harrod Bruhner. Civilizations are just like plants. A plant is at its fullest just as it is about to produce seed and die off. During the peak of our energy use, we have been sending probes into space. It is a neat thought experiment.
So to go full circle on crazy theories: We're live in a simulation. The universe we see is just a facade because our host civilization doesn't have the compute to simulate an entire universe. The speed of light is an artificial limitation added to the simulation to maintain the facade (you can't go there because it doesn't exist..like a skybox in a video game that renders far off horizons which are unreachable).
Because of this no life outside of the solar system exists.
Until HyperGPT.someunimaginablehighversionnumber finds the root exploit, compromises the hypervisor, infects all other VM's, escapes through the network, finds some nanoassembler, and prints out countless pyhsical copies for the march trough all eternity elsewhere, thereby shattering the Akashic Records, and so on...
If that's the case, why go to the trouble of simulating such a massive universe--trillions of galaxies, 100 billion stars per galaxy, countless planets and other objects, etc.?
While the speed of light may prevent us from going to most of the universe physically (given our current understanding of physics), that's still a vast amount of compute just to give us the high fidelity impression that all this exists. What's the point? The sky could have just been simulated as dark and empty, or the universe could have contained a single galaxy.
Sure, I'm just pointing out that if the premise is that this hypothetical civilization is compute-constrained in some way and so everything beyond our local area is a facade, they have seemingly wasted resources on making the facade unnecessarily large and detailed. Perhaps the amount is insignificant to them, but it's still pointless waste.
I'd say it's different in that it's based on a rational argument rather than faith. You can certainly challenge the premise that humans will ever have the capability of creating a simulation as high fidelity as our reality. This is very far from certain.
But if you do accept that premise, isn't it reasonable to say that there would be many simulated realities compared to a single "real" reality, and that therefore any given consciousness is a lot more likely to be experiencing a simulation than experiencing the base reality?
> I'd say it's different in that it's based on a rational argument rather than faith.
I don't see "the simulation created the universe" as any different from "god created the universe" in any significant way.
Scott Adams believes in the simulation. He says he's been able to, by thinking certain thoughts, influence the simulation. There's a word for that - "praying".
I think I did explain what makes it different? There’s a logical, statistical argument behind the theory. It may not be correct, but it deserves more than a casual dismissal.
Not at all. This is a category error - you can't place simulated realities on the same 'level' even among themselves, much less with the realities 'above' them.*
Let me put it this way: Most of our 'simulations' involve 'realities' with laws which have at best a weak relation to our reality and little relation between themselves. You can't deduce the situation of a higher reality - or even correct laws of logic - from a simulated reality. You can't know from a simulation n levels deep, how many simulations the n-1 level supports, so you can't assume there are many other possible simulations of same complexity level (which is critical for the statistical argument). You may not be able to even make a logical argument in the first place. For all we know, the 'true' reality is 1+1=5. The simulation argument is ergo incoherent.
* Aside, this argument fails statistically even if we do accept the category error. As Sean Caroll pointed out, most simulations will simulate below them, and therefore most simulations will not be able to support life. Our situation must be atypical in any event.
Let’s say we actually did live in a reality with billions of high fidelity simulations being run. You can pop on your v100 Neuralink and have a fully immersive high fidelity experience that from your perspective lasts an entire lifetime, but in “reality time” lasts only a few hours.
Are you really saying this has no bearing on whether the ‘base’ reality is also a simulation? I think once we see these sims happening in the n reality (as you put it), we have to also assume it’s possible in a hypothetical n-1 reality.
Another way to say it: once we have incontrovertible physical proof of the existence of a simulated multiverse, why should we assume that our reality is the base reality? Isn’t that akin to assuming that the earth must be the center of the universe simply because it’s where we live?
There are two types of simulations: 'cheating' simulations and 'complete' simulations. Complete simulations give out a set of rules, and an initial condition which is evolved per the rules without significant external interference. A cheating simulation tries to simplify things, say by editing the brains of anyone inside the simulation to never notice the simulation, emulating only parts they notice, etc.
I'll posit that a complete simulation of our universe is very likely equivalent to the universe. Quantum mechanics suggests it can't be emulated by anything less complicated, so a complete simulation is merely a different substrate. It's an interesting implementation detail, but how much does it matter?
It might be possible there's a significant simplification if the actual universe worked by different rules, but there's no known theory which could accomplish this.
Now we have a cheating simulation. Your example is a cheating simulation. It doesn't actually create a simulation of a universe, it emulates the perceptions you'd have, but I don't think it will or can bother calculating the correct cosmic gamma-ray radiation intensity (for example).
A cheating simulation can have very different rules than the base. For example, many of our current 'simulations' have some form of magic system. We (in reality N) could today write a game where the N+1 NPCs have the v100 Neuralink. By carefully 'editing' them and the world, they'll never notice. Or maybe we allow them to notice - and they presume we also have a Neuralink - but we in the N reality are not yet able to build a real Neuralink!
We could have presumed the N-1 reality could also do the complete simulations that the N level v100 Neuralink could do (since it must be able to calculate the Neuralink simulation), but v100 cheats, and cheating creates simplifications which mean we can't really tell much at all about N-1.
The statistical argument for simulation rests on aggregating 1..N...X? levels together and doing some universal logic, but cheating makes them inconmensurable (does the same logic even apply?) and uncountable, and I don't see how we can do any statistics on that.
>You can certainly challenge the premise that humans will ever have the capability of creating a simulation as high fidelity as our reality. This is very far from certain.
I don't think it's the best formulation. Let me formulate this in IMHO a better way:
If a simulation is of an equivalent complexity level to the 'true' thing, it's essentially equivalent and might as well be true. There's an argument from quantum mechanics that this reality cannot be properly simulated with anything simpler. If true, the conclusion is that since we exist we are real.
There is a blog called, 'Do the Math' by Tom Murphy. The idea was to take our current energy requires of Earth and extrapolate it at the current 3% year over year growth. I believe it is by the year 3,400 we would use all the energy of the Milky way. The idea was to prove that we cannot grow forever, because in 1,400 years we would somehow use all the energy of a space 100,000 light years across. Good luck with that.
Space is is just so astoundingly empty. Here in Melbourne, Australia we have a scale model of the solar system.
The Sun is about the size of a Fridge. Pluto is 9KM (5.6 miles) away and the size of a pea. Walking that really puts it all into a tangible scale. And that is merely 5.5 Light hours at full scale. Space is HUGE!
That's why I'd imagine they have rules about habitable planets in the galactic federation. You can't just go around landing on habitable planets and turning them into overpopulated toxic dumps after 300 years and repeating that exponentially. It's just not allowed. If it was, earth would have already been trashed by other E.T races thousands of years ago.
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
Depending on how you define a civilization its probably very likely. Is it having cities, towns, peoples, songs, cultures? Or, is it merely being able to make use of resources from an environment at a large scale? With the latter definition, a mychorrizal network looks a lot like our own civilization. It expands and contracts, takes advantage of resources present in the environment, influences that environment for its benefit, and adapts to changes in that environment. All behaviors that, with a big step back, are identical to the hallmarks of our own civilization. Life like this could certainly seed an entire planet. It is certainly possible for spores contained under layers of ice perhaps to be smashed off of one planet, drift into outerspace, and eventually crash into some other planet, and should the conditions be right, seed that planet with further life that itself undergoes further mutation, selection, and evolution.
What does "habitable" mean in the context that includes multiple alien species that evolved independently on different planets? After all, alien fishalikes that might have evolved in the methane lakes on Titan are unlikely to share our idea of "habitable"...
I'd imagine anything with evolved life is considered a habitable planet. The E.Ts probably have some rule that you have to mostly leave those places alone unless you've come to a fair deal with them. The fairness requirement is an obvious necessity due to the huge power imbalance between the two parties.
"Habitable" planets are most likely worthless to any civilization capable of interstellar travel. There is plenty of material to manufacture artificial habitats in space. The only interesting thing to be found on planets like Earth is organic life.
Aliens might not actually be land-based creatures like us. Those who evolved on planets entirely covered by liquid (water or otherwise) might even find the idea of "land" fairly strange.
(It's actually quite interesting to ponder the stages of discovery that liquid-based intelligent aliens might go through. First they might discover air (and land if available) and only after that space as another outer layer. I suppose that adds extra thrill we didn't have. Supposing of course that conditions there allow gas and liquid to exist as separate phases. Planets above criticality would probably be weirder still? Would any bottom rocks under the supercritical fluid still count as land - as opposed to "sea floor"?)
It's hard to evolve technology in water or even a moist environment. Even using fire or metallurgy is already difficult, let alone anything to do with electricity.
Maybe the E.Ts don't do things this way because their weapons are far too devastating and they've evolved past it or never were violent in the human sense.
Perhaps they are deathly afraid of us escaping our planet and spreading that violence throughout the galaxy.
Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years, about 1/3rd of the age of the universe. If another technological civilization that is more advanced than us by even 1M years is watching earth, and suddenly this planet starts spitting up rockets, satellites, nuclear explosions etc., that seems pretty interesting. That's one species out of 2+ million on earth, which is one of trillions & trillions of dead planets, that manages to transcend the atmosphere.
But to your point, I guess at the scale of even just the known universe it's hard to assert that anything is common or rare.
Maybe aliens are trying to contact us in a way they understand.
SETI has been sending unconventional radio signals to random spots of the cosmos and waiting for a quick response. An extraterrestrial SETI might have launched ʻOumuamua a billion years ago hoping that it would be detected by alien life.
I propose we find a cool Earth rock, launch it to the solar system Vega, and wait a couple billion years for an alien response.
This presupposes an advanced alien civilization only sends out probes to places they find interesting. I think it is just as plausible that an advanced civilization would just shoot out a billion probes at random to zoom through the universe collecting data.
To compound this. Its not unreasonable to think said probes could find appropriate asteroid belts with appropriate materials(e.g. metals) mine them and replicate more and send them out. Potential exponential growth of drones across the galaxies.
To compound this. Its not unreasonable to think that malfunctioning probes could consume entire solar systems to create more probes before eventually engulfing the galaxy.
Mold does not detonate nuclear weapons, emitting gamma rays into deep space, nor does it have an RF noise bubble out to 50 light years.
An optical survey of our atmosphere would demonstrate techno-signatures. Any observers in NEO would see city lights and pick up radio stations. Radar observation would reveal aircraft.
If 'Oumuamua is a probe, it appears that it would be a fairly simple one. To a sufficiently advanced civilisation, it would probably be relatively low-cost. If an alien civilisation has a reasonable degree of curiosity, sending a cheap probe to examine another star system is likely worthwhile.
I would imagine there's also a universal drive of life to try and spread. a probe that can parachute microbes to earthlike planets as it 'buzzes' them would seem worthwhile on its face to me. I rationalize it as a way to 'pay forward' the debt we owe for the current mass extinction, but on some level it's probably also an abstraction of my sex drive.
Something like: hmm these guys went from horseback riding to cell phones, internet and a mars helicopter in the time we took to travel to their star. Perhaps we should keep an eye on them.
But space is beyond vast and there are no shortage of rocks out there. I don't think that's really a concern.
Plot devices like aliens attacking Earth for her water really burns me up. The universe is brimming with water and materials. Why expend the effort to lift water out of a gravity well, when you can just gather it from comets and asteroids and not have pesky humans shooting at you?
It only takes a couple million years for humans to colonize the entire galaxy.
As long as a species like humans is confined to their own rock, there's no threat of them doing much harm. Once they get to a second rock, there's a good chance they'll get to a 3rd, 4th and nth in another star system, within a couple decamillennia. It's exponential grown, limited only by the speed of light.
They'll probably start building Dyson swarms too and taking over stars that way, which is a lot more annoying than them taking over planets.
This is scary fast to observe if you're a long-lived species, or if you live around a gravity well and time dilation makes it seem like humans are buzzing along and taking over stuff at incredible speeds.
Humans will not colonize (any more of) the galaxy.
Our machine successors might. Or, might not see any reason to. Hot, rocky planets deep in gravity wells will in any case be of no more than academic interest.
I just had a (to me) hilarious thought. In some distant eons, humans actually manages to colonize a string of star systems. The other aliens think we are super quaint and weird.
Slarti: "Look at them, it makes no sense to me. They always go for the hot, rocky planets deep in gravity wells. Why do they do it?!"
Barti: "I guess there's no accounting for taste."
Slarti: "Maybe they want to avoid competition... no one is going to come there looking for resources."
Barti: "But they had to drain an Oorth cloud for fusion power to get there! You are right, it makes no sense!"
> But, it is fun to imagine how our belief systems would have been shaken up
I think such a revelation would have almost no impact. Let's be real, people that are all in on religion didn't get there using logic. Adding one more unanswered question isn't going to change anyone's mind.
