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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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eXXon posted:That link is broken, which makes it a little ironic that you quoted yourself about it for emphasis without even explaining what it was. I just double-checked, and the link definitely works. It's a PDF of the full Biosignatures as revealed by spectropolarimetry of Earthshine letter (since Nature just has the abstract). Also, goddamn. The UFO guys are coming from inside the thread.
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Jun 23, 2023 14:25
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I AM GRANDO posted:It’s just a sign of the ongoing collapse of a decadent empire, like how Romans got really into fortune-telling near the end. Nah. This kind of stuff just comes and goes in cultures. Hell, the British went through a long, deeply superstitious phase (encouraged by King "witchcraft is real" James I) right before their empire took over a large chunk of the world.
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Jun 23, 2023 15:55
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mediaphage posted:i don’t particularly see it as optimism, few if any of the answers i proffered were what i would consider to be good. Nah, it's still psychologically optimistic. It's in the same vein as conspiracy theorists who may believe that the world is controlled by secret malevolent forces, but who are ultimately comforted by those beliefs (since they think they know what is really going on). All these latest reports are clearly the work of obvious grifters and their gullible hangers-on.
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Jun 23, 2023 17:46
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Quorum posted:I suspect the most influential factor is that the population that's provided most of the sourcing is people who have not only gone into defense intelligence but then into the subfield of "weird aerial poo poo analysis." All else being equal, I'd expect that population to be more prone to motivated reasoning about aliens than the average human-- and the average human isn't all that great to begin with. Yeah. For comparison, there are OSINT folks focused on non-proliferation who have done some loving ingenious work using only publicly-available data. Like figuring out how to detect missile launches through statistical analysis to find patterns in the deviations of GPS signals in ground stations caused by disturbances in the ionosphere: https://twitter.com/ArmsControlWonk/status/1593452824670576640?s=20 So the fact that these reports are only coming from a very small subset of folks who are all claiming that their evidence is classified just reeks of bullshit.
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Jun 23, 2023 18:48
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mobby_6kl posted:It's cool and I love the vehicles but man 2 minutes in microgravity is super underwhelming. What's the main limiting factor that's preventing them from going higher? It seems like there's plenty of space for more fuel so they should be able to accelerate it quite a bit more than that. The main limiting factor? A bunch of ex-Boeing/Lockheed Martin people in their management ranks who are used to slow-rolling everything to keep the paychecks flowing.
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Jun 29, 2023 22:32
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