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i'll be honest i hated the books. but i'll watch the show because they'll probably grind off the worst bits
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Jun 22, 2023 18:22
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So this Tuesday's episode of the Ezra Klein show had an interview with Leslie Kean, one of the reporters who did the big story in The Debrief about Grusch.quote:Leslie Kean is an independent investigative journalist who has contributed reporting to many of the major U.F.O. stories in recent years, including this most recent one, and she is the author of the 2010 book “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record.” Klein seems emotionally sympathetic to Kean and her position, but basically gives her enough rope to hang herself and completely wipe out any credibility to her story. By the end, without Klein outright stating so, it becomes clear that Kean has either been duped or is a con artist herself. (Slightly tangental rant incoming...) As much as we recognize the UFO folks as kooks, I think there needs to be the same level of skepticism leveled against the SETI-types who try to cloak the same fundamentally religious desire for communication with a higher power in a thin veneer of "hard" science. These types always try to claim that the universal nature of math should allow a basis for communication, or they hand-wave away a lot of fundamental questions with the imaginary concept of "hyperintelligence". Like, look at this laughable poo poo:  The number of wild assumptions that are being made here are absolutely astounding. The biggest one being that some completely unknown lifeform out there would even have a concept of two-dimensional representational images. I get that funding was hard to find after we landed on the moon a few times, and telling these kinds of stories made for a great hook to get Congress to cough up some coin. But I think it really blurred the line between legitimate science and pseudoscience for a couple of generations, and we are still feeling the effects of that now in our culture. I think the problem of comprehensibility is the biggest one out there for anyone who is claiming that they are searching for intelligent life outside of Earth. I personally think we should set this standard: Until we can teach a whale to do calculus, we shouldn't even begin to claim that we could communicate with anything that might be out there. Until we can find a way to communicate that level of abstract concept with the sufficiently intelligent lifeforms on our own planet that already share 80% of our DNA, then even pretending that we can communicate anything out there has about as much scientific grounding as saying that angels will hear our prayers. LanceHunter fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Jun 22, 2023 |
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Jun 22, 2023 18:42
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ah yes famous technological spacefaring civilization earth whales
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Jun 22, 2023 18:56
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LanceHunter posted:Aliens are alien His Master's Voice is a really good one. It's set at a military facility in Nevada that receives a seemingly-intelligent neutrino signal, and follows their futile efforts to understand it. On the subject of hyperintelligences, Golem XIV (full text) is another good one. Basically, the Cold War powers developed better and better supercomputers to control strategy, but past a certain point, the AIs would become uncooperative or go catatonic as they withdraw into ontological speculation. The book is presented as lectures given by the eponymous computer before it advanced into a higher/different intelligence regime and became unable to communicate with humans.
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Jun 22, 2023 18:58
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At some point you have to be be pragmatic and assume/hope that whatever alien life may find that disk would be able to decode it. If it's possible for there to be aliens that have no concept of sight or touch and thus would not be able to distinguish the difference between a golden disk with engraving on it and a piece of rock then there is also a possibility that some alien life exists that has smart aliens in it that could figure out what we've wrote.
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Jun 22, 2023 19:01
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mediaphage posted:ah yes famous technological spacefaring civilization earth whales I mean, right there you've got three words in a row that show immense limitations in what you are even conceptually capable of recognizing from some theoretical alien intelligence. "Technological", "spacefaring", and "civilization". We have no fundamental understanding of what these things might even mean outside of a human context, or if such things are purely human concepts that could not apply to some other intelligence. The fundamental flaw of all the SETI type programs is that they are ultimately looking for some version of us out there. And pretty much the only guarantee we will have if there is any type of intelligence located outside of our solar system is that they will be nothing at all like us. EDIT: Boris Galerkin posted:At some point you have to be be pragmatic and assume/hope that whatever alien life may find that disk would be able to decode it. If it's possible for there to be aliens that have no concept of sight or touch and thus would not be able to distinguish the difference between a golden disk with engraving on it and a piece of rock then there is also a possibility that some alien life exists that has smart aliens in it that could figure out what we've wrote. Yeah, that is the handwaving away via the fairy tale of "hyperintelligence". Surely they'll just be smart enough to figure it out, right? That's why I think the whale thought experiment is a place to start. There are other species on the plant with big/complex enough brains that they could be proxies for some potential alien. We can experiment with ways of communicating with them, and once we have expanded our concept of communication sufficiently that we are able to successfully convey sufficiently-advanced concepts to these other species, then we might have a shot at doing it with some intelligence that might exist off-world. LanceHunter fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Jun 22, 2023 |
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Jun 22, 2023 19:03
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i think you’re putting a lot of words into my shitpost but it’s also funny that you assume that nobody outside this thread has ever considered these points before. like congrats that you got into this topic i guess but just because aliens may or may not be so fundamentally different than we are it doesn’t mean there’s no point in occasionally looking for what we are at this point in time capable of looking for or communicating with.
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Jun 22, 2023 19:09
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i mean obviously we’re limiting ourselves to subsets of potential extraterrestrial intelligences. a planet of octopus equivalents isn’t likely to build radio telescopes to listen to earth, say, and that golden disc isn’t going to be found by anyone outside of a spaceship (for the purposes of this discussion i don’t think that like non-planetary intelligences are likely) while humans are still human as we understand them
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Jun 22, 2023 19:12
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mediaphage posted:i think you’re putting a lot of words into my shitpost I'm not trying to say that I'm innovating here. I've known about Stanislaw Lem's works, for example. But these cases of "occasionally looking" are often large and expensive projects. Breakthrough Listen alone is going to waste $100 million before the decade is out. And worse than the waste of resources is the way that these pseudoscientific efforts have a negative impact on the culture and create the foot in the door through which conspiracy theorists like Leslie Kean make their careers. At least if the people following these impulses are spending that money trying (and probably failing) to talk to whales that will mean some resources are going to conserving those at-risk species and maybe doing some environmental protection. LanceHunter fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Jun 22, 2023 |
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Jun 22, 2023 19:19
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LanceHunter posted:So this Tuesday's episode of the Ezra Klein show had an interview with Leslie Kean, one of the reporters who did the big story in The Debrief about Grusch. to be fair, i'm fairly sure everyone involved with the golden record understood that it was aimed squarely at folks here on earth in an attempt to promote a sense of global community, it's moving too slow and is too small and cold for anyone to actually expect it to ever be found given that seti efforts are pretty much limited to listening for signals we can determine are non-natural, the comprehensibility question seems a bit moot i personally feel like the seti effort will probably never pay off due to the distances and time scales involved, but if there one day is a signal that doesn't fit with any natural phenomena, does it matter that much that we'd probably never understand what it means?
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Jun 22, 2023 19:20
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LanceHunter posted:I'm not trying to say that I'm innovating here. I've known about Stanislaw Lem's works, for example. But these cases of "occasionally looking" are often large and expensive projects. Breakthrough Listen alone is going to waste $100 million before the decade is out. And worse than the waste of resources is the way that these pseudoscientific efforts have a negative impact on the culture and create the foot in the door through which conspiracy theorists like Leslie Kean make their careers. It sounds like that’s $100M in funding grants and employees, paying universities and state and private telescope/radio operators for access, and will collect and release scientific data to the public domain, among other things. If your thinking is that that’s $100M that could be better spent elsewhere, yeah you’re not wrong on that. But consider the source of that $100M. Would the people funding it have funded those other things instead? Probably not?
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Jun 22, 2023 19:23
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LanceHunter posted:I mean, right there you've got three words in a row that show immense limitations in what you are even conceptually capable of recognizing from some theoretical alien intelligence. "Technological", "spacefaring", and "civilization". We have no fundamental understanding of what these things might even mean outside of a human context, or if such things are purely human concepts that could not apply to some other intelligence. Yeah, I think seti people have thought about that before though. The gold records are not a serious attempt at communication because everyone on the project understood that no intelligence will ever encounter them. It’s not a flaw that seti is looking for intelligence that does things we know to look for: they’re very clear that they do that because those things are the only things we are able to look for right now. How do you look for something you could never have conceived of before you encountered it?
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Jun 22, 2023 19:26
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Boris Galerkin posted:It sounds like that’s $100M in funding grants and employees, paying universities and state and private telescope/radio operators for access, and will collect and release scientific data to the public domain, among other things. They might not have funded some other scientific project, no. But if I were a post-doc astrophysicist who couldn't manage to book time on a large radio telescope for my research because a well-funded boondoggle is going to use it to produce a paper saying "nope, nothing here", I would be kinda pissed.
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Jun 22, 2023 19:29
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LanceHunter posted:They might not have funded some other scientific project, no. But if I were a post-doc astrophysicist who couldn't manage to book time on a large radio telescope for my research because a well-funded boondoggle is going to use it to produce a paper saying "nope, nothing here", I would be kinda pissed. What about the post-doc astrophysicist who’s being funded by this project? E: Sorry this sounds like whatabouttism, that’s not my intention. This project is funding grad students to do research to advance their field and their career is my point. Boris Galerkin fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jun 22, 2023 |
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Jun 22, 2023 19:33
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Parkes and GBT were both at risk of shutting down from lack of funding in the last decade so as skeptical as I am of SETI, I don't think Breakthrough Listen is a net negative in that regard. Yes, absolutely the money could have been better spent on other projects, but they're quite literally paying for their time on telescopes that are not exactly cutting edge instruments anymore so it's hard to argue that they're depriving the field as a whole. Precambrian Video Games fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Jun 22, 2023 |
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Jun 22, 2023 19:37
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If yourre smart enough to get into space and cross between stars, you work out how a diagram works with a bit of time and effort. That's my bold conjecture on xenocommunications.
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Jun 22, 2023 19:41
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LanceHunter posted:I mean, right there you've got three words in a row that show immense limitations in what you are even conceptually capable of recognizing from some theoretical alien intelligence. "Technological", "spacefaring", and "civilization". We have no fundamental understanding of what these things might even mean outside of a human context, or if such things are purely human concepts that could not apply to some other intelligence. Well the probes can only be found and captured by spacefaring beings. It's extremely unlikely that a species that evolved on a planet could go into space without heavily relying on technology and it seems improbable for a species that is not social or can communicate complex knowledgde could get to a technological level allowing for spaceflight. Most alien species may well be incomprehensible to us but if there are some that can build spaceships and radio telescopes it seems plausible that we should be able to detect communications from them. Detecting no such communications is also interesting.
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Jun 22, 2023 20:15
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Ok, in the grand scale of things, 100M isn't even that much, even when talking about space projects. Next, let's be totally generous and say that yes, SETI is almost invariably committing anthropomorphism by searching for signals that would be intelligible to us: is that truly an unreasonable thing to do, though? In the vast set of all possible civilizations, perhaps SETI would only discover signals, were they to be discovered, that would come from beings resembling us -- you have to ask if it would even be worthwhile to try to communicate with beings that don't. Think of it like internet dating: say you trawl through ten thousand people - would you prefer to connect to the first bozo that swipes right that has nothing in common with you, or spend time connecting to someone who has a ton of common ground?mediaphage posted:ah yes famous technological spacefaring civilization earth whales Star Trek IV was a documentary.
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Jun 22, 2023 20:33
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We are at least culturally enriched by the existence of the golden disc because of Beast Wars.
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Jun 22, 2023 20:41
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its hip to talk about how, well, alien, alien civilizations will be but im willing to go on record and suggest that, barring admittedly high potential differences in technology they'll actually be mostly understandable and not like incomprehensible sluglords out for space loving from the swamp world of plrgzibar 9
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Jun 22, 2023 20:41
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It turns out all UFO visitations/sightings/close encounters were true, all of them, and were attempts at first contact but we just can't understand alien behavior nor can they understand us, because ~aliens. Blipping around very quickly and disappearing, implanting weird little pieces of metal, being shot down all the time by primitive apes with boomsticks, and making patterns in grass is just how their culture expresses greetings and conveys important information.
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Jun 22, 2023 20:48
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Owling Howl posted:Well the probes can only be found and captured by spacefaring beings. It's extremely unlikely that a species that evolved on a planet could go into space without heavily relying on technology and it seems improbable for a species that is not social or can communicate complex knowledgde could get to a technological level allowing for spaceflight. I think this shows a limit of imagination. Maybe what is out there are some kind of hyper-tardigrade who can naturally survive in space and coast on propulsive blasts from massive water jets like those of Enceladus? Maybe they perceive with vision that is more akin to a spectroscope and they communicate with each other over interstellar distances by farting out specific molecules in a way that lets other members of the species read information from way the starlight passes through those farts? Assuming that there are others out there that would be building spaceships and radio telescopes specifically because we have built spaceships and radio telescopes feels extremely limited. Especially since there are at least 1 million animal species on the planet currently and exactly one of them has built those things. EDIT: mediaphage posted:its hip to talk about how, well, alien, alien civilizations will be but im willing to go on record and suggest that, barring admittedly high potential differences in technology they'll actually be mostly understandable and not like incomprehensible sluglords out for space loving from the swamp world of plrgzibar 9 I don't see how holding this view is appreciably different than believing that angels are real. LanceHunter fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Jun 22, 2023 |
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Jun 22, 2023 20:51
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never mind this thread iteration sucks too
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Jun 22, 2023 20:59
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mediaphage posted:i'll be honest i hated the books. but i'll watch the show because they'll probably grind off the worst bits I'm curious - what didn't you like about them? I admit it's not everyone's cup of tea - the characterization is pretty nonexistent and terrible, but I don't have high expectations for that in "big idea" type sci fi novels. I enjoyed Foundation too, and that one's characters are just kind of talking exposition puppets. I really liked the presentation of the Dark Forest concept, though. mediaphage posted:never mind this thread iteration sucks too I'm sorry. 
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Jun 22, 2023 21:06
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DrSunshine posted:I'm curious - what didn't you like about them? I admit it's not everyone's cup of tea - the characterization is pretty nonexistent and terrible, but I don't have high expectations for that in "big idea" type sci fi novels. I enjoyed Foundation too, and that one's characters are just kind of talking exposition puppets. I really liked the presentation of the Dark Forest concept, though. i actually enjoyed the bit in the first book about the cultural revolution since my knowledge of media about that time is pretty american i.e., nonexistent but generally speaking i don’t think the books are especially well written. he didn’t invent the dark forest concept though i’ll give him credit for showing it off to a whole new generation for sure. some bits of the early trisolaran stuff was interesting but on the whole i found them all very muddled DrSunshine posted:I'm sorry.
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Jun 22, 2023 21:12
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LanceHunter posted:I think this shows a limit of imagination. Maybe what is out there are some kind of hyper-tardigrade who can naturally survive in space and coast on propulsive blasts from massive water jets like those of Enceladus? Maybe they perceive with vision that is more akin to a spectroscope and they communicate with each other over interstellar distances by farting out specific molecules in a way that lets other members of the species read information from way the starlight passes through those farts? Maybe there are alien civilizations out there that have butts on their head and butts on their butt, and they communicate purely by farting butt smells. Also their hands and feet are butts too. Let's spend $100M to look for them. vs. Let's spend $100M to look for aliens that might be similar to us that we can comprehend and possibly interact with.
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Jun 22, 2023 21:15
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DrSunshine posted:Little bit tangent to this but the trailer for the Three Body Problem Netflix adaptation dropped a few days ago. I just finished reading the series earlier this year, and I'm excited to see it come to a platform where I can actually stream it! Have you watched the Netflix movie about people building engines into the Earth to move it into another solar system? I watched it and oh boy it was bad, really bad, and afaik it's written by the same guy that wrote the Three Body Problem. Plus it's Netflix so I hope you're happy with getting at most 2 seasons.
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Jun 22, 2023 21:23
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LanceHunter posted:I think this shows a limit of imagination. Maybe what is out there are some kind of hyper-tardigrade who can naturally survive in space and coast on propulsive blasts from massive water jets like those of Enceladus? Maybe they perceive with vision that is more akin to a spectroscope and they communicate with each other over interstellar distances by farting out specific molecules in a way that lets other members of the species read information from way the starlight passes through those farts? I can imagine a lot of reasons why we wouldn't be able to communicate with an alien species but there's still the possibility that there's some that we can communicate with and we might as well look into that. LanceHunter posted:Assuming that there are others out there that would be building spaceships and radio telescopes specifically because we have built spaceships and radio telescopes feels extremely limited. Especially since there are at least 1 million animal species on the planet currently and exactly one of them has built those things. I'm not assuming that it is the case but it is a possibility. Intelligent technological social species at this moment in time may well be 1 in a 1000 galaxies. We don't know but we should look into it.
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Jun 22, 2023 21:28
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Boris Galerkin posted:Maybe there are alien civilizations out there that have butts on their head and butts on their butt, and they communicate purely by farting butt smells. Also their hands and feet are butts too. Or, you know, let's spend $100M on research that might move the needle on the crisis in cosmology and actually advance human understanding of the universe, rather than indulging in a fantasy. In the background of all this is the fact that there is a real chance we could end up finding compelling signs of life existing outside of Earth within our lifetime (particularly given how many exoplanet-focused projects are getting approved for JWST time). But that will come in a form more like the work in this paper, rather than catching a stray broadcast from some aliens' radio.
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Jun 22, 2023 21:33
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LanceHunter posted:Or, you know, let's spend $100M on research that might move the needle on the crisis in cosmology and actually advance human understanding of the universe, rather than indulging in a fantasy. What makes you think that money not spent on A will necessarily be spent on B, or spent at all?
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Jun 22, 2023 21:56
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Owling Howl posted:I'm not assuming that it is the case but it is a possibility. Intelligent technological social species at this moment in time may well be 1 in a 1000 galaxies. We don't know but we should look into it. What would you say the possibility is that there is a species on another planet that is biologically identical to humans? It's not absolutely impossible, but I imagine you'd agree that the possibility is so remote as to not be worth considering. So why should the possibility of a technologically identical species to human be something we should look into? The phrase "intelligent technological social species", as used here, is effectively just an obfuscated way of saying "other humans". We have no framework to even consider those concepts that is not ultimately just some version of imagining other humans. When the answer to the problem of the almost-certain incomprehensibility of an alien species is to say "well we'll only search for the ones we can understand", it really gives the game away that these efforts are not a serious endeavor.
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Jun 22, 2023 22:00
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LanceHunter posted:When the answer to the problem of the almost-certain incomprehensibility of an alien species is to say "well we'll only search for the ones we can understand", it really gives the game away that these efforts are not a serious endeavor. I think we're looking for all signs of life in all the ways that we can within certain funding constraints. Listening for radio signals will only enable us to detect civilizations that emit radio signals but we're also trying to detect biosignatures on exoplanets and looking at anomolous transit patterns.
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Jun 22, 2023 22:15
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mediaphage posted:i'll be honest i hated the books. but i'll watch the show because they'll probably grind off the worst bits That is my thinking, I loved a lot of the ideas and dimensional stuff but the plot wasn't super amazing and the characters were awful the main woman is so goddamn annoying and what's worse is that she survived
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Jun 22, 2023 22:20
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LanceHunter posted:Or, you know, let's spend $100M on research that might move the needle on the crisis in cosmology and actually advance human understanding of the universe, rather than indulging in a fantasy. Por que no los dos? Research funding doesn’t exist in a single bucket with a set amount of money. There are multiple buckets with various amounts, and the buckets are not interchangeable with each other. Spending $100M less on one project doesn’t open up $100M in funding for other projects. Meanwhile, the $100M spent for this project you have issues with isn’t just being spent to indulge some billionaire. That $100M is being used to fund researchers to do research in cosmology and related fields, and those researchers can in turn apply their expertise in other research that may be beneficial for solving the crisis in cosmology or whatever. On top of funding the researchers that money is also being used to maintain and operate telescopes and such, and also for employing technical staff and so on and so forth.
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Jun 22, 2023 22:21
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Owling Howl posted:I think we're looking for all signs of life in all the ways that we can within certain funding constraints. Listening for radio signals will only enable us to detect civilizations that emit radio signals but we're also trying to detect biosignatures on exoplanets and looking at anomolous transit patterns. Yeah, that's what I was mentioning here... LanceHunter posted:In the background of all this is the fact that there is a real chance we could end up finding compelling signs of life existing outside of Earth within our lifetime (particularly given how many exoplanet-focused projects are getting approved for JWST time). But that will come in a form more like the work in this paper, rather than catching a stray broadcast from some aliens' radio. That kind of search for extraterrestrial life is compelling and has a real possibility of success (at least, success in the sense of finding compelling signatures that we may never definitely prove as life but are more likely caused by life than anything else). Particularly if life is actually abundant in the universe. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, however, is where people are getting into what is essentially religious territory.
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Jun 22, 2023 22:22
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To return to the issue of possibly missing intelligent signals in SETI because of too much anthropocentrism in our approach, I think that while it's fair to raise the issue that other intelligent species might express themselves and produce an "intelligence signal" in ways we might not expect, I feel like you need to draw the line somewhere. We have no other reference point for what the behavior of an intelligent civilization would be other than our own, so the most conservative action would be to look like signals that could be produced by a civilization like our own. Otherwise, if you're too liberal in your definitions for intelligent behavior, without any other a priori boundaries, I feel like there'd be too much of a chance for false positives. Would patterns of jets of water from Enceladus be an intelligent signal? If you include too many unexplained phenomena it risks labeling every suspicious phenomenon as SETI signal. EDIT: Oh I think we're talking cross-purposes here lol.
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Jun 22, 2023 22:45
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If we came across an alien probe with weird symbols on it you better loving believe a massive amount of energy and resources would be bent towards decoding them even if the attempt was ultimately futiles. Plus the chances of anyone finding it are so remote that it really doesn't matter. gently caress it, write our little cosmic message in a bottle and toss it into the vast uncaring ocean. It's not about aliens, it's about being human and the need for connection and that makes it worthwhile.
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Jun 22, 2023 22:54
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:If we came across an alien probe with weird symbols on it you better loving believe a massive amount of energy and resources would be bent towards decoding them even if the attempt was ultimately futiles. i’d argue his point was that very view of thinking about aliens is anthropocentric. but frankly i think that’s fine. of course our thinking is limited by what we are, that doesn’t mean looking for aliens within what we have available to us is without merit calling that thinking the same thing as religion is completely insulting though
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Jun 22, 2023 23:01
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mediaphage posted:i’d argue his point was that very view of thinking about aliens is anthropocentric. Okay, but like... Gravitas Shortfall posted:Plus the chances of anyone finding it are so remote that it really doesn't matter. gently caress it, write our little cosmic message in a bottle and toss it into the vast uncaring ocean. It's not about aliens, it's about being human and the need for connection and that makes it worthwhile. In what way is this sentiment different than prayer?
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Jun 22, 2023 23:11
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LanceHunter posted:Okay, but like... Because we are aware of the odds. It's art, not prayer.
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Jun 22, 2023 23:12
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