Aliens – Stop Looking.
Seth Shostak, SETI mouthpiece and fellow Bay Area-er, is at it again in the astronomy community, contributing an article to Space.com entitled, "When Does SETI Throw in the Towel?" Now, Dr. Shostak. SETI can throw in the towel right now.
Before I go into the arguments, let me refer readers to the excellent Extraterrestrial intelligent beings do not exist, by Dr. Frank Tipler. It was quite a few years ago when I looked up to the stars, with Dr. Tipler's book in my hand, that I realized he was right - the stars are empty, ready to be harvested and spun into pure energy with the help of gravitational singularity goodness. No aliens, green bug-eyed ones or otherwise, are waiting there to be inconvenienced.
The meat of the argument is that all intelligent civilizations will inevitably develop von Neumann, self-replicating probes, and send them out in all directions. When your economy grows to a certain level (like the level ours will be in 50 years if we survive), a von Neumann probe costs no more than a candy bar. Based on the age of the universe and our galaxy in particular, we shouldn't be able to get up in the night and go to the bathroom without stubbing our toe on an alien artifact.
Now to go into Shostak's article:
“At what point would you abandon the search?â€
Answer: never. Believers will never abandon the search. If the aliens aren't swallowing stars right in front of our face, they must be broadcasting on the electromagnetic spectrum. If they aren't broadcasting on the electromagnetic spectrum, they must be sending each other neutrino bursts. If they aren't sending neutrino bursts, they must be somehow manipulating the fabric of spacetime itself to covertly send messages. Like theists, they're willing to bend over backwards to get the assumptions they need to give their belief any chance of success.
I personally think the fiction of the mid-20th century is to blame. When these scientists were kids, aliens were all over the telly, and they were inspired, and they're not going to jettison that inspiration now. Today, there are still aliens on TV, but Interweb killed the alien star, and the primary demographic who buys into UFO cults are of a certain age range, what can be described as middle-aged. Not to say that people of this age are somehow dumber than the new generation, just that their cultural background has more aliens in it, so there's a slightly greater propensity to believe, one that is fading.
Could it be that those of us who still hope to tune in other worlds may be missing some writing on the wall? Some dead-obvious, chiseled text with a simple, if disappointing message: “There are no aliens�
The question seems fair, since SETI’s obvious analogs–the historical voyages of discovery made in the centuries following the Renaissance–were completed in considerably less time than SETI has been beating the cosmic bushes. Columbus spent five weeks finding North America (and he wasn’t even looking). Captain Cook, a true paragon of explorers, and a man who mapped places that Europeans didn’t even know were places, never mounted an expedition that lasted more than three years.
But those analogs are false. The South Pacific, for all its watery wastes, is comprehensible in size. Even Cook’s unimpressive Whitby collier, powered by sailcloth, could cross the Pacific in a matter of months, come about, and cross again in a different direction. His quarry, the islands peppering the ocean like coins scattered onto a living room carpet, signaled their presence by clots of clouds even when the islands themselves were below the horizon.
The SETI wilderness is incomparably larger, obviously, and its quarry is cryptic. Even if there are ten thousand transmitting societies nestled in the arms of the Milky Way, we might need to search millions of star systems before we find one. The actual number of star systems that radio SETI experiments have carefully examined is fewer than a thousand.
This bit is what inspired me to write this post. The SETI advocates are starting to give indications that we'll actually need to go to the stars to find the aliens. Centuari Dreams points out an article on Rasmus Bjørk in The Guardian that exemplifies the trend in this direction, "So much space, so little time: why aliens haven't found us yet". The relevant part:
He found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, - Nasa's current Cassini mission to ****** is plodding along at 32km a second - it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy. His study is reported in New Scientist today. Like humans, alien civilisations could shorten the time to find extra-terrestrials by picking up television and radio broadcasts that might leak from colonised planets. "Even then, unless they can develop an exotic form of transport that gets them across the galaxy in two weeks it's still going to take millions of years to find us," said Mr Bjork. "There are so many stars in the galaxy that probably life could exist elsewhere, but will we ever get in contact with them? Not in our lifetime," he added.
Postulations of ships moving at only 1/10c are moot, because we can easily envision ship designs that send payloads at near-c using no more than a ton or so of antimatter. Not to mention Bjork ignored the possibility of self-replicating probes, but based his calculations on actual civilizations being founded at each star.
Our galaxy is 100,00 light years across - that's it. Our universe is more than 10 billion years old, and the basic building blocks for life have been around nearly Our that long. If the assumptions of the alienites are even vaguely correct, our galaxy should have been colonized and EM-soaked thousands, if not millions of times by now. Centauri Dreams brings up one obvious error in Bjork's arguments:
An obvious objection is that self-replicating probes could do the job much more efficiently and in far less time (Frank Tipler has done interesting work on this question, arriving at times in the millions of years to explore the entire galactic disk). But Bjørk points out the problems with such probes. They might easily move beyond control of the humans who designed them, with fatal consequences. So he bases his study on non-replicating devices, reaching this possible answer to the Fermi Paradox: “We have not yet been contacted by any extraterrestrial civilizations simple because they have not yet had the time to ï¬nd us. Searching the Galaxy for life is a painstakingly slow process.â€
Because self-replicators might move beyond control of the people that design them, all intelligent civilizations across the universe will freeze development on them, forever? I don't think so. Even if such self-replicators do hose their parent civilizations, they should still be out there, ready to optimize us into paperclips, or fonsweebs, or whatever it is they do. Shostak again:
And frankly, it’s conceivable that SETI’s basic assumptions might be proven wrong. Imagine that the new space-based telescopes (COROT and Kepler) currently being deployed to hunt for Earth-size planets around other stars come up empty. That would be a premium-grade bummer. But even if (as widely expected) they do discover rocky worlds, it’s possible that a decade or so down the line, their telescopic successors–atmosphere-sniffing instruments such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder–might fail to find any extrasolar worlds on which life has taken hold.
Indeed, I was hoping the article would mention so-called hypertelescopes, and it did. Last year I wrote a quickie on the topic for Wisegeek.com. Hypertelescopes are distributed telescopes that combine data from arrays to perform aperture synthesis - basically, faking a ginormous telescope. Instead of building a lens 1000 km across, you float a thousand stations within a 1000 km area, and cross-reference their data. Using this technology, we will be able to get km, and then subkilometer resolution of planets 10 light years away or more. Brian Wang has more on this.
Luckily, hypertelescopes may finally put the nail in the coffin of SETI - perhaps 100 years from now. We will be able to see even the simplest of flora, if they exist in large numbers on exoplanets. (Though what we should really be looking for are Dyson spheres or disappearing stars, and as far as we can tell, there are absolutely none.) After we look at a good thousand earth-sized objects and see nothing there but vast, dead wastes, we'll start getting used to the idea that we are truly, actually alone.
For the lamest excuses of all, there is always Digg:
For intelligent life in our galaxy alone, the chances are at least one in a 100 billion because we exist(philosophers need not reply), There could be many civillizations out there that are billions of years old, and probably communicate by some other means.
Their technology could be so advanced that it is spiritual, supernatural and magical.
(imagine what can become of this technology us humans have today)
We're probably being protected by them by galactic law( a.k.a Spiritual Law)hint hint.
Hint hint! Your supernatural fantasies have no place in scientific discourse! Hint hint! Another:
A blanket statement that "There are no Aliens" is rather retarded.
There are a LOT of assumptions being made:
-The aliens are more advanced than us
-Aliens have faster than light communications
-The aliens are listening at all
-Maybe they are replying we just don't have the technology to detected and decode it.
-Maybe they are there and they don't want anything to do with us.Then of course you have things like:
-The universe is roughly 12 billion years old, earth is 4.5 billion; That's lot of time to transcend.
-There are no black holes intercepting signals
-They are in the same galaxy.There is a LOT of space out there. Billions upon billions of stars. To think 1 small planet in 1 galaxy is the only one to produce life is statistically ridiculous.
This reply combines all the assumptions that people use to justify their alien desires. The assumption that some aliens are more advanced than us is correct. FTL communications is not necessary to send signals out. We have statistical tests that could easily distinguish intelligent signals from background noise, no matter how different their culture is. Whether they're listening or not, they'll send out tons of noise. The Prime Directive is stupid.
As another poster points out, because the sample set of life is 1, the standard deviation is infinite, so there is no reason for us to think that the vastness of the cosmos implies anything about the probability of life. It's that intuitive feeling of the universe being big that causes people to think that there must somehow be aliens. But that bigness is merely big to us. The configuration space is so much larger, and indeed, most atomic configurations are not realized in this universe. People's intuition is as if there is some cosmic arbiter that says, "okay, it's been 100 billion planets, time to seed this one with life now!" Why at 100 billion? Why not seed life on every 10^10^123 planets, instead of merely every 10^11? The multiverse is infinite. There can be an infinite number of intelligent civilizations, each living alone in their own universe. To think that the vastness of space implies the presence of aliens is itself statistically ridiculous.
See my other post on this topic:
Aliens - There Are None.
January 19th, 2007 - 01:20
I don’t see anything wrong in *searching*. It is not like it costs $500 billion a year like the U.S. army.
It might just be that life is extremely rare, and intelligent life even more rare. It would be more stupid to just stop searching because the odds might be low.
January 19th, 2007 - 01:36
the arguments you put forward have nothing to do with scientific discourse either. why can’t you accept for a moment that not every scientific theory postulated (especially when it comes to cosmology) is correct? no matter what you think about the matter of aliens existing or not, it is not ok to launch a bashing like this essentially based on your or tipler’s gut feeling only. i think it is a typical example of anthropocentric thinking to claim that EVERY civilization MUST develop replicators at some point etc. this only stems from the fact that we have a hard time imagining life forms so vastly different from what we are that the concept of replication itself probably doesn’t make sense to them.
but aside from any pseudo-scientific argumentation in that area, i want to emphasize that i found it very unprofessional of you to practically denounce folks of SETI (and their ilk) as dogmatic retards, in the same breath writing something like “the multiverse is infinite”, which indeed might be something you believe in, but which in the end is only one among many THEORIES trying to fill in the large black holes in our understanding of physics. you denounce everyone putting forward arguments for their case as being influenced by fiction and tv shows, which is insulting at best.
“We have statistical tests that could easily distinguish intelligent signals from background noise, no matter how different their culture is”
really? how do you know? you are postulating “facts” which are just as devoid of true scientific argument as everything put forward by the “other side”, really. we do not know everything, and since popper we also know that we essentially can never be absolutely sure about what we know either, so how can you decisively make a claim like that?
on the matter of being able to scour planets light-years away be the km, i remain sceptical. please think for a moment about how little we know about our own solar system, and that some scientists see a fair chance of life existing under the surface of Europa. this moon is in the immediate vincinity of earth when it comes to cosmic scales, and still everyone was surprised when it was recently proven to show volcanic activity.
just to make sure, i am AGAINST the SETI project, and i do not believe in flying saucers.
michael, i really appreciate your blog, and i think you mostly write relevant and good entries. your tendency to imply that everyone deviating from what you think is scientific fact is an imbecile fool (which is somehting you often did previously, in the context of AI and other topics) deteriorates the good quality of your writing and gives it a sense of amateurism.
January 19th, 2007 - 01:53
I wasn’t saying that Shostak was deviating from scientific fact. The digg commenter was.
Haha. Yeah. In all fairness, they’re also influenced by Carl Sagan. Though he did have a TV-show, it was non-fiction.
Information that codes a signal is different than microwave background radiation. A signal is a nonrandom information arrangement. It tends to have much, much lower entropy than background noise. For more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory.
Google, etc.
Thank you.
Sigh, it’s too boring to write for free *and* be super-nice to everyone I think is wrong. When I write actual reports or papers I try to be more deadpan about it.
January 19th, 2007 - 08:17
I’m reminded of the broken clock that’s right twice a day, but in reverse. This must be one of the two times you’re just plain wrong because usually you’re brilliant.
I also suspect you, yourself, don’t believe SETI is pointless either.
Let me reason it out this way. If, as you say, SETI is useless and a waste of time, you should, in theory, be willing to make a substantial — not huge, just enough to keep it interesting, say $100 — bet that SETI will not uncover extraterrestrial intelligence. After all, that’s the crux of it, innit?
Would you be willing to make such a wager?
I usually hesitate to appeal to the “wanna-make-a-bet” response, (usually because I have no money) but SETI pays off — EVEN IF there are no ETs — because SETI fires the imagination. It’s far better PR than still-more footage of astronauts repairing a satellite.
January 19th, 2007 - 08:28
Hi Michael, provocative post as usual. You make some good points, but I have to side with much of the comments above. In science, falsification and negative data points are just as important as their affirming counterparts. The thesis is: there is no data to find. How do we prove this thesis? We search for data and *expect* a negative result. That’s the scientific method.
Second, as Milan Cirkovic has noted, SETI is important from a transhumanist perspective. As he notes in his paper, On the Importance of SETI for Transhumanism,
It is argued that astrobiology in general, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in particular, are of foremost importance for the transhumanist endeavor. It is sketched how one can show incompleteness, at best, of the arguments usually cited in support of the uniqueness of human intelligence in the Galactic context. In addition to the arguments conventionally cited in support of SETI, and which can be easily cast in the form in which their significance for the future of humanity is manifest, a specific class of phase-transition models of development of complex life and intelligence, suggests another powerful motivation: a very practical issue of strategic information in the great strife for creating values out of the Galactic material resources.
In other words, SETI may come to prove or deny the phase transition model of the Universe in which we live at a special time in cosmological history when advanced ETI’s begin to saturate the Galaxy.
January 19th, 2007 - 10:15
I don’t mind SETI. It is cheap and funded mostly be donations like from Paul Allen. I think they have a lot of multi-use science as well. Figuring out better radiotelescope arrays etc…
I think they advance the field and the science of radiotelescopes which can also be used to look at that part of the spectrum.
The hypertelescope arrays, with magnetically inflated lens, and nulling satellites besides being able to resolve worlds looking for life but would also lay bare in sharp detail what is in our galaxy and the bring the universe into sharper view. There would be fantastic science and knowledge from that. In terms of inspiration, images of millions/billions of other solar systems would do it.
10-15 years for terrestrial planet finders and world imagers if they get their funding re-approved.
15-40 years to the more advanced scopes if we make the right choices.
The sending probes out at random is flawed because we can scout everything out in detail before sending anything.
The other aspect is why just probe and scout when we can develop and colonize. As you mention in the second paragraph, until someone else shows up to stake a claim, the stars, planets and space are ours to use.
January 19th, 2007 - 11:01
To deny the existence of extra terrestrial life at this stage would be very premature. My guess is that there isn’t any currently existing life within our solar system except on earth, but I could be proven wrong about that.
Only when a substantial proportion of observable space has been listened to in detail over a significant amount of time would we be able to conclude that the existence of other technological civilizations was unlikely. However, even this doesn’t rule out the possibility that there may have been alien civilizations in the past who ruled themselves out via their own set of existential risks.
January 19th, 2007 - 12:05
i have two additional points to make from a technical perspective:
1. it is incredibly difficult to even cover parts of the electromagnetic spectrum if you do not know where to search. i think the SETI people assume something like the wavelength of hydrogen for certain reasons, which again is probably a good idea if you search for other humans out there. when it comes to possibly vastly different intellects, this assumption just might be too narrow.
2. to claim that it is somehow easy to detect arbitrary signals in noise is just wrong. even rather trivial communications systems like cdma2000 or UMTS use spread spectrum techniques to distribute the spectral energy over a large frequency band, which already makes them difficult to detect, which is why spread spectrum is popular in military applications. a further step is ultra wideband (UWB) which spreads signals over a bandwidth of up to a few GHz, flattening them essentially below the background noise floor. lacking a specialized receiver, you stand practically no chance of detecting those signals. if you like to speculate, alien lifeforms with a perception of time probably very different from ours (probably because of vastly larger lifespans) might opt to transfer ultra-short (in the order of femtosecs) pulses, modulated over extreme time spans, their spectral densities being practically zero. if you have say one pulse of a few femotsecs per hour or even day with spectral power well below the noise floor, even the most advanced detection techniques we currently have are helpless. sure, the entropy would be lower, but significant only at an observation interval of months or years.
the argument that any predictions beyond the singularity are futile shows up often in this blog, and i fully agree. so we really should not claim that we can detect communication signal no matter how other civilizations, possibly post-singularity, opt to modulate/generate them.
January 19th, 2007 - 14:10
Nice work. You have put out some really interesting articles lately Michael. Keep it up!
January 19th, 2007 - 14:29
“The SETI wilderness is incomparably larger, obviously,”
Conveniently ignoring the blatantly obvious fact that the vast majority of this wilderness is empty space and need not be searched.
“He found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, – Nasa’s current Cassini mission to ****** is plodding along at 32km a second – it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy.”
The galaxy has a 100,000 ly diameter, so 4% of it is 4,000 ly, and it would take 40,000 years to cross at 1/10th C. Someone did their math wrong, methinks.
“that send payloads at c”
Anything moving at c would create an instant shockwave that would move through spacetime at c, destroying all matter. Not to mention that it would take infinite amounts of energy.
“it’s possible that a decade or so down the line,”
If you actually believe that the government will continue to fund this mission as currently envisioned over the time span of a full decade, I’d like to make you an offer on this bridge I’ve been trying to sell….
“aperture synthesis”
I think interferometry is the technical term. And you don’t need a thousand telescopes; the VLA, for instance, has only 27.
“we will be able to get km, and then subkilometer resolution of planets 10 light years away or more.”
Wow. Just… just… wow. That’s equivalent to seeing a TV on the surface of *****. We haven’t even mapped the Earth at that kind of resolution, let alone *****. Do you have a source?
“I don’t see anything wrong in *searching*. It is not like it costs $500 billion a year like the U.S. army.”
The US Army uses government funding, which is very abundant and often wasted. SETI uses nonprofit science funding, which is very scarce, as anyone writing grant proposals can tell you.
“It would be more stupid to just stop searching because the odds might be low.”
Then why aren’t you busy searching for the billion-dollar Spanish treasure that could be buried in your backyard? Sure, the odds are low, but it’s worth it, right?
“that not every scientific theory postulated (especially when it comes to cosmology) is correct?”
He just spent several pages bashing a theory, in case you didn’t notice.
“launch a bashing like this”
So you did notice. How did you rationalize the contradiction?
“thinking to claim that EVERY civilization MUST develop replicators at some point”
A basic law of probability is that the probability of any non-impossible event happening at least once goes to 1 as time goes to infinity. We know that replicators are possible because we have bazillions of working examples on Earth, so therefore any civilization will develop replicators given enough time. QED.
“that the concept of replication itself probably doesn’t make sense to them.”
The only way for intelligent life to arise naturally is through evolution, which requires replication. If you have a workable alternative to evolution, please explain it.
“one among many THEORIES”
This sounds identical to creationist propaganda. Damn non-scientists pretending to know what they’re doing.
“really? how do you know? you are postulating “facts†which are just as devoid of true scientific argument”
Because these tests are MATHEMATICALLY PROVEN, which means they’re as definite as the Pythagorean Theorem.
“and since popper we also know that we essentially can never be absolutely sure about what we know either”
We cannot be absolutely certain the sky is blue, so therefore the sky is green. More creationist propaganda tactics.
“and still everyone was surprised when it was recently proven to show volcanic activity.”
Volcanic activity is not detectable from telescopes. And this was proven by the Apollo Project, which does not qualify as “recent”.
“say $100 — bet that SETI will not uncover extraterrestrial intelligence.”
I, for one, would be willing to make such a wager, if I had $100 to spend.
“because SETI fires the imagination.”
Yup. After all, the first thing we need for science PR is for people’s imaginations to get in the way and start screwing cosmology up. You cannot explain Einstein’s theory of relativity through pop culture and imagination.
“a substantial proportion of observable space has been listened to in detail over a significant amount of time”
It has, we’ve had radio for a hundred years now and SETI for over thirty. No dice.
“it is incredibly difficult to even cover parts of the electromagnetic spectrum if you do not know where to search.”
The sky has already been mapped out in all wavelengths, any large radio beacons indicative of technological civilization would be obvious.
January 19th, 2007 - 16:57
You’re right, I don’t. As Brian points out, it’s multi-use science and funded by individuals. It tickles peoples’ brains, etc. Cirkovic’s paper is also relevant. But provocative posts encourage people to comment more.
Yes.
Tom – here’s the source, scroll to the near the bottom where they mention a 100,000km-wide neutron star imager.
Great comments, everyone.
January 19th, 2007 - 19:49
Any civilization capable of contacting us must have achieved post-Singularity levels of technical sophistication. But if it survived its own Singularity, it must have created and executed a successful version of Friendliness as all unFriendly civilizations are doomed. These Friendly aliens capable of reaching us would have means and the will to save humans from disease, fear and scarcity. But since death still exists in our world we’re left with two possibilities. Alien civilizations exist(ed) somewhere but have collapsed or they are stuck in either pre- or post-Singularity unFriendliness. The other possibility is that humans are simply the first intelligent beings in the universe. In either case, there’s little benefit to searching for aliens even if they exist and are intelligent. If it’s safe to meet them, they will contact us first. If it’s not safe to meet them (or their by-products), we will probably be prevented from being aware of their existence anyway.
January 19th, 2007 - 19:49
Michael, you said:
Information that codes a signal is different than microwave background radiation. A signal is a nonrandom information arrangement. It tends to have much, much lower entropy than background noise. For more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
Low entropy would mean the signal is not being encoded efficiently. Though one should really speak of the entropy of a probability distribution, not a signal. So when you say “that signal has low entropy,” you really mean, “I can predict what the next bit will be” (the entropy of a probability distribution is just the negative of your expected Bayesian Score).
See also arithmetic coding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding).
January 19th, 2007 - 20:23
Heartland, best comment yet. Friendly post-Singularity civilizations send emissaries outwards at close to the speed of light, always. There is no way that they would turn in on themselves completely, a la John Smart’s MEST compression, because that would mean ignoring all other potentially intelligent beings in the universe, and the cost of sending out Friendly von Neumann probes in all directions is close to nothing.
Peter, thanks for correcting me there…you’re right, “low entropy” isn’t what I meant. What I did mean was a variety of entropy distinctly different from background electromagnetic noise.
January 19th, 2007 - 23:34
Keep in mind that aliens would have not have human-like morality, and an alien-Friendly AI is not necessarily a human-Friendly AI (although it might be; maybe extrapolated humans would decide to build CEVs for aliens, and some extrapolated aliens might do likewise).
Heartland: you didn’t mention the possibility of an expanding unFriendly post-Singularity bubble. Whether or not a paperclip maximizer (for example) would choose to expand would be a function of whether it could manufacture paperclips more effectively by doing so. I currently think it would, but that depends on the laws of physics.
January 20th, 2007 - 00:31
” These Friendly aliens capable of reaching us would have means and the will to save humans from disease, fear and scarcity.” Quite a strong assumption.
January 20th, 2007 - 01:30
Peter de Blanc:
A paperclip maximizer has obvious reasons for consuming every galaxy in sight, but it’s not even necessary for the UFAI to have a utility function explicitly satisfied by controlling ever-larger amounts of space or matter. If you’re an UFAI that’s still optimizing anything physical (you haven’t dropped out of spacetime entirely or done something equally exotic), taking over as much matter as possible in every direction is always a good idea. Having outposts that can radio you at c can give you valuable warnings to protect you from probes from other, stronger UFAIs attacking you with probes moving at merely 99.9999% of c. Even if the probes are unstoppable, the outposts will let you know which way you should run, possibly buying you enough time to invent countermeasures. This works as a preventative measure as well: if it’s impossible to stop competing UFAIs once they get going, then it’s all the more important to crush human-level civilizations before they invent something that can hurt you.
Even if we ignore the possibility of competing UFAIs, you have problems stemming from QM: You can never drive the probability of anything down to exactly zero. There is *always* the possibility that a profoundly unlikely coincidence will make every proton in your ******* Brain simultaneously decay, so it pays to have a backup at Alpha Centauri that can put you back together. There is *always* a possibility that the harmless hydrogen cloud 10^40 lightyears away will spontaneously rearrange its atoms into an optimization process stronger than you, so it pays to overwrite it with nanobots designed to minimize that probability.
January 20th, 2007 - 03:09
It’s simple Michael. The arguments put forward by those that claim there aren’t extraterrestrial civilizations are just as much pure speculation as the arguments that there are.
The point is we have to look. SETI is one way of looking. That’s how science is done.
And as randpost says, it’s a damn sight cheaper than a lot of the other things we spend money on.
It occurs to me that there might be another way we could look. We could sift through the dust of our biosphere looking for nanoscopic alien technology. Extraterrestrial nanomachines may have been monitoring our planetary evolution for billions of years and we’d be none the wiser.
January 20th, 2007 - 09:51
“profoundly unlikely coincidence will make every proton in your ******* Brain simultaneously decay,”
This violates conservation of baryon number; no such violation has ever been observed in any experiment.
January 20th, 2007 - 11:54
“As another poster points out, because the sample set of life is 1, the standard deviation is infinite, so there is no reason for us to think that the vastness of the cosmos implies anything about the probability of life.”
Then again, the sample set of singularities is zero…
January 20th, 2007 - 12:11
“A basic law of probability is that the probability of any non-impossible event happening at least once goes to 1 as time goes to infinity.”
yes. but as far as i am informed, significantly less than infinite time has passed since the beginning of time. on the topic of replicators and evolution, you have a point.
“This sounds identical to creationist propaganda. Damn non-scientists pretending to know what they’re doing.”
this sounds identical to sophism. maybe you are aware of the fact that there are even contradictory theories out there, so it is hardly possible that all of them are “correct”, in whatever that means in a post-popper world. i stop right here as i realize your argumentation is along the same line as michaels. i am not a religious idiot just because i am not of your opinion. neither am i not a scientist, for that matter. why accuse me of using “creationist propaganda tactics”? i was merely stating what i thought was obvious: that any theory, to qualify as being scientific, must be falsifyable. if that qualifies me as a “creationist”, then let it be your opinion.
January 20th, 2007 - 19:22
“even contradictory theories out there, so it is hardly possible that all of them are “correct—
I’m sorry, I must have misinterpreted you. It’s a classical creationist propaganda tactic to say “Well, evolution is only a THEORY, which means creationism must be just as viable an explanation for life”, playing off popular human psychology.
January 20th, 2007 - 22:42
Peter de Blanc: “Keep in mind that aliens would have not have human-like morality, and an alien-Friendly AI is not necessarily a human-Friendly AI (although it might be; maybe extrapolated humans would decide to build CEVs for aliens, and some extrapolated aliens might do likewise).”
I’m well aware of that. The assumption that alien-Friendliness would be human-Friendly rests on a suspicion that Friendliness must be species-universal in order to work. This view, in turn, relies on a suspicion that anything not-universal is unstable and leads to unFriendliness. (For example, I would consider laws of physics universal and stable). This suggest that only civilizations with species-universal versions of Friendliness survive. I admit this is all speculation and I might be proven wrong about any of them. It’s also a different, much bigger, debate that Michael might not want to see play out on his blog about aliens and SETI.
Peter de Blanc: “you didn’t mention the possibility of an expanding unFriendly post-Singularity bubble.”
I mentioned unFriendly civilizations and their unFriendly by-products implying things exaclty like paperclip-maximizers.
There are many possibilities branching out from either “we are not alone” and “we are alone,” as I pointed out. We could go on and on talking about details but the main point, however, is that, IMO, no matter which branch we choose, there is no benefit in looking for aliens regardless of whether the aliens exist or not. It appears logically impossible for SETI to find any evidence of existing alien civilization more advanced than our own which defeats the whole point of SETI. If smarter-than-any-human things exist, they will control whether we know about them. And if our planet is on schedule to be turned into paperclips, then sooner or later we will know that anyway without SETI’s help. :-)
January 21st, 2007 - 11:01
Tom McCabe:
I was aware that proton decay was controversial, and used protons precisely because their half-life has to be so incredibly long. After reading up a bit more on it, I see now how little theoretical evidence there is for proton decay at any half-life, so I probably won’t be using that example in the future. Thanks.
January 22nd, 2007 - 19:15
Peter de Blanc: “…it’s all the more important to crush human-level civilizations before they invent something that can hurt you.”
Agreed, ETI could have a stake in seeing that
machinery they’ve set into motion is not interefered with.
One could wildly speculate that the magnum opus of post-singularity ETI was the prevention of the early collapse of the Universe, and that
“dark energy” (for example, see Report of the Dark Energy Task Force ) is possibly a “smoking gun” for ETI activity.
From the cited Report:
“Over the last several years scientists have accumulated conclusive evidence that the
Universe is expanding ever more rapidly. Within the framework of the standard
cosmological model, this implies that 70% of the universe is composed of a new,
mysterious dark energy, which unlike any known form of matter or energy, counters the
attractive force of gravity. Dark energy ranks as one of the most important discoveries in
cosmology, with profound implications for astronomy, high-energy theory, general
relativity, and string theory.”
January 22nd, 2007 - 22:11
Or, another reason to stop looking: They have already found us, determined that we are dangerous, and quarantined us. It’s as believable as anything else. And who needs science when we have our imagination!
January 23rd, 2007 - 05:50
I find the (I was going to type “attacks” but instead I’ll type) criticisms of “imagination” and its dismissal over “science” to be alarming.
All science requires imagination. It’s not a dirty word. Take a completely worn-out example: Star Trek. Look at Dr. McCoy’s hypospray. Someone imagined that, and then someone, with scientific training, built the current-day analog.
Someone wrote in a comment “Yup. After all, the first thing we need for science PR is for people’s imaginations to get in the way and start screwing cosmology up. You cannot explain Einstein’s theory of relativity through pop culture and imagination.”
Imagination doesn’t screw things up. Not imagining does the screwing up. Hmm, here I am, doing my research on viruses. I clock in, do the research, then I go home. I never, ever let my mind drift and imagine what sort of horrible weapon this could be perverted into. Nope. Not me.
As to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Guess what? For most people, the Einsteinian vs. the Newtonian vs. the Geocentric universe is the same thing. Not because they’re stupid, but because they’re never going to leave the planet. If I commuted at a substantial fraction of c, yes indeedy, I’d be concerned about relativity. Granted, I can’t explain Einstein’s theory of relativity through pop culture and imagination. But I’m not interested in doing that because the only people who need to understand the details of Einstein’s theory are the people who need it for their work and research.
Which do you think is going to get more funding for science? “Here it is folks, painless injections. No more jabs from needles.” or “Okay, I need you to imagine, I mean, to consider, a sub-atomic particle of standard model, traveling at [insert equations 1 through 72]…”
So can we have a little less of the “people are the problem, them and their stupid messing up with cosmology” kind of complaining? People, for the most part, are the ones funding science, and if scientists can’t come up with ways to make the science useful, then maybe, just maybe the science isn’t really very useful, at least for terrestrial, immediate needs.
But yes, yes, almost all people are tupid, and couldn’t we just round ‘em all up and shoot ‘em in the heads, so that the privileged elite can turn to matters of the mind and be left to do our high-handed, important research that has no applications to real-world problems…
January 23rd, 2007 - 14:20
“People, for the most part, are the ones funding science,”
The government funds science out of tax money; very few people will ever donate to fund science directly. The Planetary Society was hard pressed to come up with $4 million for Cosmos 1; in comparison, NASA’s budget is something like $15,000 million.
“Imagination doesn’t screw things up. Not imagining does the screwing up.”
I’m not referring to researchers imagining the possibilities of their research; I’m referring to Mr. Average Joe hearing something on the Sci-Fi channel about aliens and GR and then imagining up his own fictional cosmology. Sure, it isn’t the primary cause of All That Is Evil, but it can’t help.
“this implies that 70% of the universe is composed of a new,
mysterious dark energy, ”
Okay, going over Eliezer’s checklist for mysterious answers to mysterious questions:
“encapsulating the mystery as a substance”
Check. Higher-than-expected recession velocities are caused by this mysterious “dark energy” stuff that permeates space, just like “ether”.
“First, the explanation acts as a curiosity-stopper rather than an anticipation-controller.”
Check. Astronomers ask “why?” and the answer is “dark energy”. Dark energy doesn’t make us anticipate different results for any as-yet-unperformed experiments (to my knowledge, anyway).
“Second, the hypothesis has no moving parts – the model is not a specific complex mechanism, but a blankly solid substance or force.”
Check. Nobody, to my knowledge, has any idea of how this “dark energy” stuff works in terms of things we already know about; there is no mechanism.
“Third, those who proffer the explanation cherish their ignorance; they speak proudly of how the phenomenon defeats ordinary science or is unlike merely mundane phenomena.”
Half-check. Nobody treats “dark energy” as being outside science, but it is supposed to be something totally new, outside anything we have ever measured or encountered before.
“Fourth, even after the answer is given, the phenomenon is still a mystery and possesses the same quality of sacred inexplicability that it had at the start.”
Check. We know no more about the universe now then we did before this “dark energy” stuff was proposed as a way of explaining various recession velocity results.
Hmmm, that’s four-and-a-half out of five.
January 23rd, 2007 - 22:40
I concur with Tom McCabe. With all due respect, his position(s), as is often the case, is the most sensible (imho…)
January 24th, 2007 - 08:24
“The government funds science out of tax money; very few people will ever donate to fund science directly. The Planetary Society was hard pressed to come up with $4 million for Cosmos 1; in comparison, NASA’s budget is something like $15,000 million.”
I still think you’re putting the cart before the horse and conflating two separate issues. Very few people ever donate to fund science directly because science ISN’T a charity. What do I do, write out a check payable to “Science”? Good luck, Science, cashing that at the liquor store.
Science is a business. No one (except Prof. Farnsworth from Futurama) sits down and invents something useless. Anyone inventing thinks they’re inventing something useful, something needed. That means profit usually because people will pay for what they need. If not profit for the inventor, then profit for the people who swindled him or her out of the invention.
Capitalism, for all its faults, is an excellent evolutionary tool for everyday science (computers, cars, refrigerators, televisions). And that leads to the fringe science (astrophysics, telescopes, space missions, etc.) And some of that ends up advancing everyday science.
Better, faster, stronger, because everyone and their uncle wants to have the newest computer, the newest car, the newest whatever. How’d we get that better material? Oh, they developed it during the Apollo Program.
People, in fact, do “donate” to science. If you’ve got stock in pharmaceutical, oil, food, communication companies, you are giving money to science. You expect a return on that money, though. But that’s almost inevitable because science pays off — cash money — almost every time, if it’s given enough time to do so.
Also, concerning Joe Average and his wrong cosmology. I still blame science and its lack of PR for that. Consider:
Religion, boiled down to the essence, is this:
A business that sells a product that doesn’t exist: an almighty superbeing who can keep you alive forever if you’re good enough. That superbeing can also perform miracles.
The business takes in billions every year and pays no money in taxes. Its proponents can utter the most ridiculous statements (transubstantiation, live eternal, the soul, etc.) and are respected and revered for such idiocy.
With very few exceptions, when one of that business’ sales staff falls ill, science — not faith or divine intervention — is utilized. Then, after a trained technician (surgeon) saves the life of the salesperson, the standard response is to thank the almighty being.
That’s what good PR gives you: people lining up to have their money and will stolen.
If science had PR like religion has PR, the first moon landing would have been about five hundred years ago. Christopher Reeve would have been in the hospital for twenty minutes after his neck snapped, everyone would have enough to eat, and everyone would look about 20, with smooth, carefree faces.
Off my soap box, now.
January 24th, 2007 - 11:53
Why get your own blog when you can blog in the comments section of Accelerating Future?
January 24th, 2007 - 18:38
“Very few people ever donate to fund science directly because science ISN’T a charity. What do I do, write out a check payable to “Scienceâ€? Good luck, Science, cashing that at the liquor store.”
Then how am I supposed to donate $10 for AIDS research? Write out a $10 check to AIDS? How can a virus cash a check? Would a virus cash a check if it could?
Come on. There are dozens of nonprofit organizations that are dedicated to science and you know it. None of them, to my knowledge, have billion-dollar budgets or significant political clout.
“Science is a business. No one (except Prof. Farnsworth from Futurama) sits down and invents something useless.”
Except at, er, what do you call those things? With all the scientists and professors? Oh yes, universities, which are NOT supported by donations from the general public, but by tutiton, tax money and endowments from rich guys.
“And that leads to the fringe science”
Fringe science does not just magically appear when the technology base is in place. We have had the technology for, say, NTRs for fifty full years now, and we haven’t even built a single NTR-powered rocket.
“Oh, they developed it during the Apollo Program.”
I strongly suspect that a great deal of NASA “spinoffs” are made up or at least exaggerated for PR purposes. The NASA website names the cordless appliance, for instance, as an Apollo “spinoff”; exactly how Apollo helped develop little battery-powered gadgets is beyond me.
“If you’ve got stock in pharmaceutical, oil, food, communication companies, you are giving money to science.”
Giving?! How exactly is making an investment in a company, with an expectation of monetary return, “giving” to science? Out of all the factors people consider when investing, appreciation, dividends, liquidity, and security are probably the top four; science is maybe down in there somewhere between OSHA and meat inspection.
“That’s what good PR gives you: people lining up to have their money and will stolen.”
Agreed. Science needs much better PR; however, religion gets its PR from, basically, scamming people, and I think most scientists are too ethical to do that.
“Why get your own blog when you can blog in the comments section of Accelerating Future?”
Heh. It’s much easier to reply to something than to write about something from scratch, methinks.
January 25th, 2007 - 13:01
It was an interesting article, and if the assumptions made were true I’d agree. But it makes a lot of the same leaps that seti does in their assumptions of alien life. In particular, a very heavy dose of anthropomorphism when thinking about aliens. I don’t know if you’ve studied primate behaviour very heavily, but far too much of human morality and thought is just that of a brainy great ape to extrapolate anything about ourselves into actual alien life.
The assumptions about technology are a bit strong as well. Far too many for me to be comfortable with. We don’t even know if self replicating machines are possible, which makes it seem a bit odd to dismiss intelligent alien life for any reason relating to it.
All in all, I have to say that this struck me as very similar to religious debate. Take unproven assumptions, and then build a wonderfully logical structure on top of it. Which is great if the assumption is true, but if it’s not, the entire logic structure falls down as well. Which is the main reason why scientific experimentation has produced so much, while pure philosophy moves into the realm of the practical at only rare occasion. Thought experiments can be fun, but in the end they’re worthless without experimentation. Which is what seti is doing. I think they’re methods are a bit flawed, but I applaud anyone for actually testing their ideas rather than assuming it’s right because it seems good.
January 25th, 2007 - 18:11
“We don’t even know if self replicating machines are possible,”
We are self-replicating machines, remember? Along with the I-don’t-know-how-many-zillion bacteria? And the dogs, cats, cows, grass, trees, bushes, squirrels, fish, frogs, mosquitoes, dragonflies, beetles, et cetera, et cetera ad nauseam?
February 14th, 2007 - 10:30
You cannot not say “supernatural” means are a retarded argument. There is nothing supernatural, but there might be technologies and ways of communication, that to us they will seem supernatural. Cmon!
March 8th, 2007 - 16:25
“we should really be looking for are Dyson spheres or disappearing stars, and as far as we can tell, there are absolutely none.”
http://www.planetary.org/news/2004/0323_Can_a_Stars_Glow_Reveal_an_Advanced.html
This says that 33 out of 539 old stars surveyed appear to have a dyson sphere of unknown origin. Is there more current information about this?
And the Von Neumann theory is complete garbage.
Any intelligence in some kind of technological free-for-all would destroy itself with land bound replicators long before interstellar replicators.
A Von Neumann device would never be sent on purpose… way too much information sent back. (probably a hypertelescope and controlled devices would be common.) A Von Neumann device would be reckless, yet pointless.
BUT, anyone here will be able to build one in 50 years?? So, I will be able to send out interstellar spaceships all willy nilly, no questions asked? They would be recognized as a threat and destroyed immediately. Uncontrollable self replicating spaceships all sending back pirate broadcasts.. Yea, that sounds like it would get far.
May 17th, 2007 - 10:11
“Any civilization capable of contacting us must have achieved post-Singularity levels of technical sophistication.”
This assumes an awful lot. For one thing, it assumes that the Singularity is inevitable for every civilization.
Now, whether or not it’s inevitable for humans is somewhat debateable, though I’m sure the majority of humans would eventually upload.
However, humans are very prone to existential crises, to fearing death that is not immediately imminent, etc. These are traits that last I checked, we’ve no scientific proof are common outside our own species here on Earth (especially the existential crises).
So basically – to borrow a term from the other posters here – you’re being highly anthrocentric, assuming that ALL species that gain enough intelligence to have say, computers and radios and television, are going to inevitably head towards Singularity.
How do we know that they won’t be far more passive and accepting when it comes to each individual’s death? Or that they won’t be ruled by a group that feels such a way, and refuses to allow Singularity to happen?
And how can you be so sure that a species can’t technologically stagnate before it ever reaches Singularity?
I say this precisely because of your choice of words: “post-Singularity”. Even technical sophistication beyond our own does not equal Singularity.
“But if it survived its own Singularity, it must have created and executed a successful version of Friendliness as all unFriendly civilizations are doomed.”
Perhaps I should be reading here more often, as I’m not entirely sure what “Friendliness” means, though I get the implication that it is a Friendly AI?
In any case, once again you assume things that might not be true of non-human species. Maybe they don’t have true AI. Even if they can copy their brains, who says they need true AI? As I recall, true AI is essentially life in digital form (save possibly for the lack of reproduction in some cases), what if the idea of it creeps them out too much?Or what if it just never occured to them to create AIs?
“These Friendly aliens capable of reaching us would have means and the will to save humans from disease, fear and scarcity.”
You assume these hypothetical aliens would
a.) be able to find us because of “post-Singularity” tech that EVEN WE do not have yet. Who says intelligent aliens would be as advanced as us, let alone more so? There’s absolutely positively no guarantee of that.
b.)That they won’t be xenophobic. Maybe they like each other, but they fear us (hell, even we’ve always speculated, since just about the time we concieved of space aliens, the fictional Martians would be conquerers and destroyers; even today, SF is full of nasty alien species trying to conquer us, the Stargate series alone has had the Replicators, the Goa’uld in their many factions, the Ori, etc., and that’s a series that also has had almost countless peaceful extraterrestrial societies as well, from the Nox and the Ascended Ancients to simple villagers who’ve settled on some distant planet). Or maybe, just maybe, they don’t give a flying crap what happens to anybody but themselves. Once again you assume that not only would they be social amongst themselves, they would also have the human-like urge to share the wealth with other species… which isn’t exactly universal even in humans, in case you hadn’t noticed.
c.)Save us from scarcity of what? Food, water, shelter? Hell, WE could do that, but we haven’t. Give me one good reason another species would have to bother, other than “out of the goodness of their 10-chambered hearts”
d.)Disease? Please. Ever read War of the Worlds? OK, so it’s old SF. But the point of the power of viruses and bacteria in bringing down the mighty and not-previously-exposed might well have merit. We ourselves haven’t defeated the HIV yet and even in your own situation the aliens have reached Singularity… meaning no medical research anymore, since there would be no bodies to take care of! And that’s assuming they’d be able to make heads or tails out of our anatomy and biology in the first place. Or, once again, CARE.
e.)Right. Because irrational human emotions haphazzardly evolved over the course of millions upon millions of years can be erased as soon as we find out that not only are we not alone, but the other people are smarter, better, AND immortal! Fear comes in many shades, my friend, and shaking existing concepts of the universe right upside down is going to CAUSE fear, not erase it, at least in a great number of people, it would. And what about the fear that hey, even humans aren’t this nice to each other what evidence do we have that the aliens are that much better than us socially? And of course, there’s a great number of other insecurities that are common to humans. Fear is natural. It evolved to help keep us alive, and is rooted deep in the lower brain, in the fastest, oldest parts of our minds. Any species that could “get rid of fear” would have to do it chemically, in short, and that would CREEP ME OUT, I dunno about you. In any case, even if the old fears go away, new ones will pop up, or perhaps the old ones will irrationally come back; trust me, humans can always find something to fear.
“But since death still exists in our world we’re left with two possibilities. Alien civilizations exist(ed) somewhere but have collapsed or they are stuck in either pre- or post-Singularity unFriendliness. The other possibility is that humans are simply the first intelligent beings in the universe.”
Uh, what about “we’re not alone, but we’re the most advanced”?
What about “Singularity has never happened before in a race that could reach us this soon”?
What about “Their methods of reaching Singularity won’t work on us”?
What about “They don’t give a crap about anybody else”?
That’s at least four other possibilities.
Somebody lacks analytical imagination, methinks. :P
” In either case, there’s little benefit to searching for aliens even if they exist and are intelligent.”
See above. Also, the more we find out about the universe, the more knowledgeable we’ll be about it, and that can never hurt, can it?
Also, as noted, if it weren’t for SETI a lot of the advancements in radio telescopes would not be in existence right now.
“If it’s safe to meet them, they will contact us first.”
What if it’s safe, but FTL is completely impossible for them, as there is a great deal of evidence to support? Hell, what if they are so fragile outside of their own environment – and so specialized within it – that they don’t dare leave it? We’re pretty good at compensating when we go out to space, but even we haven’t yet managed to perfect long-term space travel that’s biologically safe for us, what if their needs are far greater than ours and they figured there was just no point? And what if they’re intelligent but have never had a need for radio waves and thus have no idea we exist?
Again: you are very lacking in analytical imagination.
“If it’s not safe to meet them (or their by-products), we will probably be prevented from being aware of their existence anyway.”
In what world does that sentence make any kind of sense?
May 20th, 2012 - 07:42
Thanks for the auspicious writeup. It in truth became a amusement account it. Look complicated to more introduced agreeable within you! However, exactly how should we keep up a correspondence?