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Adar posted:If you're a sufficiently unified and late stage civ, I think the answer is that you pick a planet, build a big shell around it, put giant thrusters on it and sail off away from the galaxy into the deepest, darkest corner of space possible, trusting the unlikelihood of anyone checking that exact region for the next few trillion years. The only way to compete in a game like that is to remove yourself from the board and make sure no one ever finds you. Some people like to turtle, others take a more aggressive approach... Spoilers for The Killing Star In the late 21st century Earth is at peace. Humans now command self-replicating machines that create engineering marvels on enormous scales. Artificial habitats dot the solar system. Anti-matter driven Valkyrie rockets carry explorers to the stars at nearly the speed of light. All seems well. Then, from the uncaring black of space come swarms of relativistic missiles. Though they are merely boulder-sized hunks of metal, they move fast enough to hit with the force of many nuclear arsenals. They are impossible to track and impossible to stop. Humanity is all but wiped out by the horrific bombardment. A handful of survivors desperately struggle to escape the alien mop-up fleet. They hide close to the sun, inside asteroids, beneath the crusts of moons, within ice rings, and in the fathomless depths of interstellar space. But most are hunted down and slaughtered. The last man and woman on Earth are captured as zoo specimens. In the belly of an alien starship, a squid-like being relates to them the pitiless logic behind human-kind's execution: the moment humans learned to travel at relativistic speeds was the moment mankind simply became too dangerous a neighbor to have around. Nothing personal. Now you could argue that this is just asking for trouble, but in this proposed 'game' there's no guaranteed winning move.
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Nov 29, 2018 20:22
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:There’s also enough uranium and thorium to power us for thousands of years. The economics may not work today and the public support might not be there, but drain our fossil fuel sources and give people a summer without air conditioning and that’ll change real fast. Who is 'us' in this scenario? The thousands of slave labourers digging up that thorium probably would have some complaints.
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Jun 2, 2019 03:11
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Lightning Knight posted:Why would aliens observe Earth for roughly half a century clandestinely enough to avoid making contact intentionally but sloppily enough for random fucks to take pictures of them with regular cameras, and also that there is an elaborate conspiracy in the government to cover them up that no one has leaked in 50 years? Well, look at it this way. Let's imagine that someone discovers FTL in the US in the next few years. Since FBI is responsible for domestic affairs, and most of the universe is outside the US, it'd fall on, say, the CIA to plan how to spy on alien civilizations. Given their track record, how well do you think this would work out? 
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Jul 8, 2019 22:20
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LtStorm posted:I'm here to discuss the nitty-gritty physics and engineering details because they're cool to me. I'm down for that, want to talk about atomizers? They'd look like plasma guns. I don't mean the fake movie ones, I mean like a giant blow torch. That'd atomize just about anything and is an engineering problem, not a physics or chemistry problem, to build. Googling atomizer seems to result in mostly vaping-related links, so I'm assuming the mechanism is something like this, but what does the term specifically mean? I'm picturing something like the Slaver shotgun from Ringworld 
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Nov 28, 2019 12:43
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Kesper North posted:Maybe the Great Filter is a spam blocklist. If aliens are self-important hipsters to begin with, I say we go with the "don't pick up the phone" answer to Fermi
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Mar 2, 2020 11:03
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Captain Monkey posted:Not sure why this is the thread people keep doing it in though. It's pretty easy to make up whatever Altered Carbon-type dystopia that tickles one's fancy, and there's rarely a definitive way to prove those false, so the argument can go on forever.
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Apr 11, 2020 07:11
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Peanut Butler posted:I've thought this for a while, since I was a kid and heard the proclamation that we haven't detected EM transmissions that suggest civilization- why would radio communication be a prerequisite? Why not a civilization that transmits over cabling, or light, or some exotic method that they came up with in their infancy but escapes us due to a different psychology or physiology? I don't disagree with you, but the flip-side of this coin is that we can only make (reasonable) postulations based on our own understanding. We know and even sort of understand how EM waves work, but we have no working conception of telepathy, or other 'exotic' phenomena. And on another level, the original (ie. Fermi-period) conversation was more about someone out there actually trying specifically to communicate their existence outwards. The whole idea that aliens will find us via Hitler appearing on a television screen (because those were our first television broadcasts) is silly, those signals won't get very far. So the eggheads sat around and figured out the best way of going about this, using the neutral hydrogen band as your channel and so forth, and yet we can't see anyone transmitting anything that way, what gives? Every living being (even the crystalline ones) must be aware of EM in some way, since that's what stars do. It could be that this doesn't occur to the aliens because they're psychic, and they're trying to beam out really hard WE ARE HERE and yet no one's listening, what gives? But that goes a bit beyond the bounds of what we can rationally discuss. I realize this isn't very satisfying, but here we are. Pun unintended.
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Apr 12, 2020 16:35
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DrSunshine posted:EDIT: As an aside - man I love the kind of crazy balls-to-the-wall stuff NASA comes up with sometimes. Dropping an SUV-sized rover onto mars with a goddamn rocket crane, for example. And this: They want to turn an entire crater on the far side of the moon into a radio telescope. Aahahhaha. I don't see what's crazy about a radio telescope. Now, detonating a nuke is a horse of a different colour...
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Apr 15, 2020 15:54
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DrSunshine posted:A relevant article to the thread and conversation: Oh you sweet child, the liberals figured this out way before the Internet!
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May 1, 2020 05:34
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DrSunshine posted:In my opinion this and the other article are pretty ridiculous, because they're presuming that a capitalist society would have the incentive or even the means to venture past its own solar system. Obviously a society that has developed the capability of interstellar flight would be post-capitalist, and do so for reasons other than profit motive. Space exploration - even in-system space exploration - is not profitable, and the only reason why commercial space exists presently is after decades of tremendous and costly investment in money and lives by government actors and at the behest and encouragement of government. To be fair, Krugman wrote that as a joke. But I agree with you!
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May 1, 2020 17:14
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Slavvy posted:Or go to Europa and find something alive right now. ALL OF THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE 
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May 17, 2020 07:29
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Just from a motivation point of view, Frank Herbert kind of invalidates the whole idea of any "post-human" stages bothering with anything resembling neutrality, whereby this all becomes a rather convoluted Calvinist discussion about why the haves and the have nots are where they are. This seems exceedingly silly. In a conversation about the motivations of beings we could not possibly understand to begin with, if we posit their unintelligible existence in the first place. Which seems a bit cyclical and self-feedbacking.
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May 19, 2020 21:40
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:Really, if it makes no difference for how we perceive and move through the universe, it doesn’t really make any difference. How would you test this theory, and what difference would it make if it were true? Well, one Voyager or the other is going to clip through the skywall at some point.
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May 19, 2020 21:55
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dex_sda posted:This summer... Spooky action at a distance gains a new meaning! Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson as Boris Podolsky
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May 24, 2020 11:23
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Raenir Salazar posted:Don't think so. First, I am not positing FTL. That isn't what my post is doing. I am asking why the thought experiment I am asking wouldn't work. It's not really so much a gedankenexperiment and just "whoa, dude, wouldn't this be really awesome and cool" when you're starting out with alternate universes to somehow jump into, for reasons, and then FTL.
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Jun 6, 2020 06:03
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FFT posted:So I have an idea about FTL, so I'd be curious what would also make it impossible. I will get the hose, and I will turn it on you, young man, don't test me Also, if the universe were a simulation, it'd just turn out like all those youtube videos of people torturing their sims and oh my God
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Jun 6, 2020 16:00
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D-Pad posted:Some of the people in this thread are major assholes. There are plenty of thought expirements in science that involve impossible elements that are used to get a discussion going. Yes, the feasibility of the idea is dumb because it is impossible, but calling the guy an idiot makes you an rear end in a top hat. I didn't mean to jump at anyone's throat, and I apologize if I came off that way. But what you're saying here could just as well be "what if we made the Delorean go past 88 miles per hour?" Nothing wrong with that, it makes for good movies in fact, but it has very little to do with understanding how our reality works. Picking apart "well, what if alternative universes" might make for a good Arxiv paper or three, but that's about it.
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Jun 6, 2020 16:37
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D-Pad posted:He can clarify, but I don't think he is proposing coming back the original universe. I think he is saying now you live in the new universe. Since it is identical who cares, it's all the same to you. You didn't violate causality in your new universe because your starting point wasn't within the new universe, but you are at your intended destination at faster than the speed of light from your frame of reference. Okay, in an effort to be less of a bag of dicks, I'll try engaging with this. "What if we went to an alternate universe" instead is, to put it mildly, still worlds apart (pun intended) from what we know is technologically feasible. Our best idea for decent-speed space travel at the moment involves blowing up nukes from the butt-end of your space ship, and even that still gets you close to c, not beyond it. The way extra-universal (?) travel works in fiction, like in The Man in the High Castle, does seem to violate things like the conservation of mass-energy and other pesky things, and simply saying "what if, you guys" doesn't really cut it. Although this is the UFO thread, so my expectations are probably a bit high.
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Jun 6, 2020 16:47
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D-Pad posted:I agree with all this. I am defending him because I know when I first started exploring these topics when I was young and just getting into physics I had what if ideas just like what he proposed. Engaging and giving an answer like you just gave (or not giving one if you can't engage in good faith) encourages him to keep thinking and exploring. Whereas if I had people jumping down my throat I probably would have never picked up another physics book. All of this is an incredibly hard subject. Most people will never get to the level of understanding some in this thread have. Let's cut people some slack. I know it gets old having the thread repeat itself when someone new comes in and says "but what if warp bubbles!" but we should be glad they even got interested in the first place. That's fair, and again I would like to apologize for being rude or dismissive. I remember my undergrad years. The problem with some of these questions, no matter how well-intentioned or earnest, still don't really have any answer besides "well no". That sucks, but also kind of how science operates. Of course once in a while someone comes up with a novel idea where the response is also that "well no" until it no longer is, but these days it's all buried in publishing and only the interested geeks see it. I will simply say that, in my opinion, it isn't likely that someone will come up with a way to travel to other universes any day soon, or if they do, they'll get hired by the CIA or some poo poo and the end result for the rest of us is much the same.
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Jun 6, 2020 17:49
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Are horrible, crafty space aliens stealing ARE SUPR STARZ?! Probably not, but wild speculation is more fun, so have at it!
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Jul 1, 2020 12:09
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:That's for sure one of it's mission profiles. In general, the idea of a "kinetic kill" weapon is that you've either hauled enough mass up into orbit (very expensive!) or you've begun harvesting tungsten from asteroids, or what have you, to make a lug big enough. Sure, a smaller mass weapon is still bad, but what you really want (or in this case, don't want) are blocks that are heavy enough by themselves to lay devastating waste to large areas. Right now our satellites tend to be small and very light-weight things. If you just want to ping-ping at individual, small targets and not utilize weapons of mass destruction, that's a slightly different conversation. At any rate, the Outer Space Treaty says you're a very, very naughty nation if you try any of this stuff, so, nominally, that's it.
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Jul 28, 2020 04:46
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FFT posted:Granted but the likelihood of the US having nuclear weapons in space right now is on the opposite end of the scale from "non-zero". Again, right, but if you have a nuclear device in orbit, you still need to be fairly sure the, erm, package, survives re-entry long enough to execute the payload. The whole idea of 'kinetic weapons' is that you can just drop one down, and the gravity well does the work for you (if you pardon the pun). They are not meant to disable satellites, they are meant to be weapons of mass destruction that don't require the loving care of the weapon "pit" that you would need for something that actually needs some moving and or electronic parts to function, you just lob them down the gravity well.
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Jul 28, 2020 07:49
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Kinetic weapons are absolutely designed to take out satellites. You're thinking rod of God poo poo, and we're talking about ball bearings or small rockets launched from another satellite. This is the thread for awesome space stuff, isn't it? But you're right, sorry.
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Jul 28, 2020 22:40
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Classon Ave. Robot posted:I don't really see what it matters either way, if we somehow detected life on some planet thousands of light years away it doesn't really affect us in any way if there's no way to ever communicate or get there. Tilting at windmills here, but: There's no way (that we know of) to get there, but it would be possible to communicate once we knew exactly where they were. It would be hilariously expensive to build the kind of, I dunno, laser system perhaps? to do it with, but theoretically you could beam something at them. Of course there's no guarantee they'd respond, and since the potential back-and-forth would take centuries or more, it wouldn't be much more than saying 'hello, we exist, how are you people doing?'. But it's the same logic as with those gold plates on the Voyagers, just taken to an extreme. And this way there'd be more of a chance of a response, at least.
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Aug 1, 2020 03:59
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:If it was like 200 light years it would be worth doing. If it was like 28,000 light years, I would find it pretty hopeless. Yeah, in that latter scenario it wouldn't really differ from the Voyager idea and you'd be hard-pressed to find any government willing to spend that kind of buck for what would in their eyes be a vanity project. Just saying that the possibility is there. This thread has a bad rap for this already, but it's somewhat hard to envision a technical human civilization lasting tens of thousands of years, to ever even potentially hear any response.
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Aug 1, 2020 04:06
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SerialKilldeer posted:What was that short story where SETI receives a message from aliens saying "BE QUIET, THEY'RE LISTENING"? Probably the wrong reference here, but: quote:As astronomer Zdenek Kopal said 20 years ago: "Should we ever hear the space-phone ringing, for God's sake let us not answer, but rather make ourselves as inconspicuous as possible to avoid attracting attention!"
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Aug 1, 2020 10:18
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Senor Tron posted:I've never been concerned about yelling out hi to aliens because any alien species advanced enough to present a physical threat to us This is a very 1950's scifi-assumption to make, even implicitly.
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Aug 1, 2020 12:52
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Zesty posted:That's really speculative. But hey, let's give it a shot. If they're here, they already know about us and might just be waiting for us to initiate a conversation. How about instead of being an interstellar wall flower, that coy mother fucker comes up to us and starts a conversation, huh? What are we, a piece of f-f-flesh and b-b-bone, panting and sweating as we run through their corridors? 
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Aug 2, 2020 04:23
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I'd be totally on board for a "let's discuss our Mad Max theories!" - thread. In that vein though, what Doctor Sunshine posted across a couple posts there: The nightmare scenario against that is, we've burnt up most of the readily available fossil fuels, and until such time that ITER turns into, well, a powerhouse that leads to mass adoption of fusion, the more likely paradigm shift seems to be back to some kind of Roman Empire era technology-wise, and probably culturally too. And that won't be a human civilization that's going to be conversing across galactic distances. Humans won't be extinct, sure, but the future of full gay space communism is looking pretty bleak at the moment.
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Aug 3, 2020 00:58
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Libluini posted:This dumb theory about ancient alien species preferring the colder parts of the universe I brought up in this thread and Oumuamua's latest hypothesis made me think about what kind of entity could evolve in the absolutely cold and dead clouds of failed proto-stars. That's basically Niven's Outsiders, unless I'm missing the joke.
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Aug 3, 2020 20:20
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Communist Thoughts posted:also why does any given civilisation want to leave the planet? Honestly, it made a lot more sense during the Cold War. The gist was, a given sapient species will first expand to dominate the eco-sphere around it, and then as the arms race inevitably heats up (by MAD logic), some portions of the species would want to take control of the space surrounding their planet, and then beyond, so that "the other guy" doesn't get there first. Of course the inverse, if we're picking sci-fi tropes let's take the dog people from Heinlein for instance, who are happy basically just sitting around on their planet, we would never hear from those dudes, and most likely they wouldn't pick up the phone even if we tried to call. So it's a sort of self-selecting problem, the only aliens we could hope to meet would have to be brutes like we humans are, because that's what drives expansion into space. Of course we can imagine peaceful space-faring cultures, like say the Pierson's Puppeteers, but they had other materialist problems that drove them to space colonization. A completely non-materialistic culture is in its own way an answer to Fermi's dilemma, since they would be too pre-occupied with navel-gazing exercises to bother with the rest of the cosmos. This isn't to say our own exercises are inherently any better, just that they're more likely to lead to any sort of detection or contact scenario, and vice versa for any alien species.
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Aug 5, 2020 12:50
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DrSunshine posted:I have problems with the climate-change-as-universal-Great-Filter theory in that it's, essentially, akin to almost all the other "sociological" hypotheses -- it has the same problem of "Why would this be the case for every civilization?" It could be the great filter for humans, but what makes it necessarily the case for every possible technological civilization in the universe? Why would every civilization make the same choices? Isn't it possible that a civilization could leapfrog from waterwheels straight to electricity, and never even develop fossil fuel power? All you need is magnets, metal, and some spinning things. Maybe some other civilizations could have arisen on planets where, for whatever reason, conditions just do not allow fossil fuels to form, or perhaps only extremely rarely. It's basically a generalization of Ohm's law, humanity chose to burn fossil fuels because it's just easier than making giant dams and waterwheels everywhere. Of course it's short-sighted (since we're running out of the stuff, and we've hosed up our whole ecosystem!), but it's easier in the moment, and here we are. But you're right in that this doesn't in any way necessarily generalize to alien species, maybe the poor bastards who learned to pick up a stone evolved on a world without massive fossil fuel reserves? But there's still that Lemian problem: For us to ever interact with, let alone understand, an alien species, we need some similarity, and quite frankly the endless greed that drives humanity probably has to be one of them. If the alien intelligence is so alien that it doesn't have a drive to expand outwards, we never hear from them, and that's still the end of it from the Fermi POV, even if those alien intelligences didn't suicide themselves as a technical civilization like we're doing at the moment. I suppose there could be a water-wheel civilization that also, for whatever their reasons, chose to also start sending messages into deep space, and we could hear about them then? It's a massive endeavor still, and a "conservational" alien culture might consider it a waste to begin with, but then they might not, because they're friggin' aliens and no one knows what their motivations may be, as a civilization.
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Aug 6, 2020 10:37
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But that just circles back to the Fermi point, the Niven Outsider Boltzmann brain wouldn't conceptualize star-circling rocks as good havens for intelligent life, and wouldn't try to aim whatever contact they might be interested in at said rocks, and we would never hear about them, and... If a sapient life-form can't process the same concepts that we consider elementary, like radio and laser, life in the "goldilocks zone", etc. then it's pretty drat hard to conceive them ever trying to contact us, rather than something more like them, as you say. This isn't an answer to the Fermi problem, but it limits the parameter space, if you will.
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Aug 7, 2020 15:37
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:But past that learning about physics enough to know if the universe will turn off eventually is as useful as any physics is. Even if finding out it just goes on forever does have the truly disconcerting truth embedded that the future is one of eternal ghostly appearances of half formed thoughts in between unfathomable quadrillions of years of silence. This is a really weird combination of sentences, to be honest. As useful as any? The point of the Fermi conversation is what humanity can observe, and even basic geophysics seems to tell us we won't be around to see any quadrillion-year thinkers. The whole idea behind cosmology sometimes devolving into a joke of itself is that, well, sometimes people get hung up on these grandiose ideas that in no way can be falsified or even studied. At that point it, or anything else like it, has left the realm of science and straight into science fiction. We may insist that Roko's basilisk or whatever is a "mathematical inevitability" and proceed from there, but that's still garbage in, garbage out, until we see one. Which we haven't. And the same holds for these Boltzmann brains, and as mentioned upthread, we're unlikely to hear from them anytime soon, so their existence, even if we insist it must be true, does not matter in the slightest, since we will never meet.
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Aug 8, 2020 20:35
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Pretty much every aspect of it could be proved or disproved. Like I guess if you are just a rotting space brain you couldn't. But every aspect underlying it would be perfectly testable things as much as anything in physics is. Like I guess it's a mystery on if you are a space brain, but every part of the physics is perfectly normal physics with no special magic elements. This is nonsensical. We know that animal life, such as horses, have existed, and do exist. Therefore we may postulate that there's a planet out there that's filled with unicorns and rainbows, both phenomena we can understand. But that doesn't really mean anything, we can't conceivably observe the unicorn planet any time soon, so just yelling about the inevitability of the unicorn planet since time is infinite and so forth, doesn't really add anything meaningful, let alone falsifiable.
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Aug 8, 2020 20:46
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Is the heat death of the universe itself not science then? I will never meet that and no one can be around to test if it even happens in a personal way. We can only test physics to know it will happen. The science part is observing what is happening with the expansion (or possibly contraction!) of the cosmos, and that's about the extent of it. Presumably we both know that cosmology itself has had far weirder off-shoots that can never be observed, falsified or any such thing associated with science.
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Aug 8, 2020 20:56
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Raenir Salazar posted:I mean until we built particle accelerators we also didn't have much in the way of observation for subparticle physics no? There's a lot of physics and cosmology where it's a lot of numbers on paper but we don't necessarily have the tools to test it? Right, but that's also the point of building said particle accelerators, so you can test and falsify ideas someone else wrote on paper. That's why we made the god drat things! I am not arguing that science is only there for building toasters. e: For example, we could possibly build some kind of generation space ship, and try to visit a planet we think has unicorns on it, to try and find the unicorns. That's fine and good. But again, simply postulating the existence of the unicorn planet isn't really science. And even if we abandon popperianism, it still has no bearing on the Fermi question either, without that generation space ship, so it's a bit of a moot point, and that's what started this branch of the conversation to begin with. Rappaport fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Aug 8, 2020 |
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Aug 8, 2020 21:06
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Paradoxish posted:I don't know if it really makes much sense to talk about the falsifiability of Boltzmann brains, though? They're just a description of one consequence of the universe as we understand it. That's fair, and so is my unicorn planet, god damnit! The point I'm trying to badly make is that their existence, inevitable or not, doesn't really factor into what we can understand of the cosmos in the present or near future, so we could just as well table them for the time being.
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Aug 8, 2020 21:17
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:seems like the same particle accelerators also very much can help falsify things like "are quantum fluctuations real" and "is there a point in the future where they stop happening" and if the answers are "yes" and "no" then low probability events become very likely. Yeah, but the limit (so to speak) on those theories is what we can observe (falsify), and that's why there's such a big brou-ha-ha about mapping the cosmic microwave background, for instance. But speaking in terms of what science can actually do here, we're pretty much stuck there, and cosmologists doing all sorts of funky fits for why the background looks the way it does, and so on. We can't, so far as we know today!, actually observe the original seconds/minutes of the cosmos. Whether or not this makes the theories about what happened back there just good guesses can be argued about, but on the other hand, the reason for the furious investigation of the microwave background is that some part of the scientific community seems to agree that we have to look at evidence and work from there. Hence, particle accelerators, so forth. Another fun though experiment is, could we start a whole new cosmos budding in a laboratory with a big enough particle cannon, but until we have such a cannon, it's just a fun idea. edit: Owlofcreamcheese posted:I mean, okay, there probably was or will be or are unicorns in some universe. You seem to be angry that that would be the conclusion of this. Like you could say that a magical unicorn might not exist because it's magic would work against the known laws of physics and that is true, but given infinite space and time then sure, there is or was or will be a horse with a horn. Rappaport fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Aug 8, 2020 |
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Aug 8, 2020 21:26
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I just can't tell what you are saying other than "if a bit of science means a silly result is possible we should not think about it ever again". But like, regardless of if you like or dislike some specifics about infinite time meaning brains or unicorns or whatever silly example you pick it is real science stemming from real questions. This is becoming a massive derail now. Real science, as per Popper, is whether or not things can be falsified. Whereby, as per your previous example, science has a real drat problem figuring out the specifics of the big bang, since we have no way of seeing the drat thing. You can disagree with popperism, that's fine, philosophy of science is a broad tent and I just happen to live in one corner of it. I suppose we can insist that if time is infinite, then everything ever conceived must somewhere exist, there's a whole Heinlein book series about that. The separate issue here, in the context of this thread, and aliens, and the 'where is everybody' question, is what we can and cannot hope to see in the near future. The unicorn planet could be found and studied, sure, and the Boltzmann brain living out their eternity could meet the last remnants of what becomes of mankind, sure. But these are thought experiments (at best) so far removed from what may be done in the scope of today's methods that they are meaningless, for the purpose of the Fermi question. I am not saying no one should ever think about them, or anything of that sort, just that the conclusions we may draw from them, thumbless happy unicorns or eternal Boltzmann brains floating out in the distant future, that they do not actually contribute to the 'where is everybody' question.
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Aug 8, 2020 22:11
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