Do you think any aliens exist in the universe?

[skepticalbip]

Yes, this is the nasty one. Fermi's Paradox strongly suggests that civilization is inherently self-destructive.

That seems to make an awfully big assumption or maybe several big assumptions. To me Fermi's Paradox strongly suggests that there is a hell of a lot that we don't know.

We are based with two basic possibilities:

1) Intelligent aliens do not colonize.

2) No intelligent aliens capable of colonizing arise.

#1 leaves the question of why do they all stay home? This seems unlikely.

#2 leaves the question of why they don't. While we are not capable of it yet there is no reason to think it's something that can't be done in the not too distant future. No aliens reach this point--which says it's either incredibly unlikely to reach where we are now, or it's incredibly unlikely to go from where we are now to starfaring.

Thus either we have faced a barrier in history that was exceedingly hard to cross (observer effect--only the planets that cross the barrier can observe the situation, so us being a billions-to-one longshot isn't unreasonable) or we will face such a barrier in the near future.

With only one data point any speculation of the general is exactly that, wild speculation. If there are aliens then there is no reason to assume that they would act like humans or like you imagine humans will act in the future.

Of course speculation can be an enjoyable exercise but it is an error to mistake the speculation for reality.

 

[excreationist]

Starfaring is fairly pointless for short-lived species, and there’s good reason to think that humans are at the high end of the individual longevity spectrum, whose driver is evolution.

I think posthumans will live a lot longer than our species currently does. They could each live for many thousands of years. It's only been several decades yet humans have already sent probes around a lot of the solar system. Mormons believe that some of them will have planets to themselves - this might also be appealing to some posthumans.

Becoming a K2 civilisation assumes that the energy available to a K1 civilisation will become insufficient; But if that civilisation has a stable population and isn’t expanding beyond its own solar system, why would they need all that energy?

Maybe build another Earth (like in a Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Matrioshka brains, get fuel for faster-than-light warp drives, etc.

 

[bilby]

Starfaring is fairly pointless for short-lived species, and there’s good reason to think that humans are at the high end of the individual longevity spectrum, whose driver is evolution.

I think posthumans will live a lot longer than our species currently does. They could each live for many thousands of years. It's only been several decades yet humans have already sent probes around a lot of the solar system. Mormons believe that some of them will have planets to themselves - this might also be appealing to some posthumans.

Becoming a K2 civilisation assumes that the energy available to a K1 civilisation will become insufficient; But if that civilisation has a stable population and isn’t expanding beyond its own solar system, why would they need all that energy?

Maybe build another Earth (like in a Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Matrioshka brains, get fuel for faster-than-light warp drives, etc.

If population is stable and interstellar travel undesirable, why would they do these things?

FTL is physically impossible anyway. You might as well argue that they needn’t become a K2 civilisation, because they can get all the energy they need from their perpetual motion machines.

 

[excreationist]

If population is stable and interstellar travel undesirable, why would they do these things?

As they say "everybody wants to rule the world" - so some rich posthumans might want to build their own Earth.... or build Matrioshka brains to create simulations where they rule the world.

FTL is physically impossible anyway. You might as well argue that they needn’t become a K2 civilisation, because they can get all the energy they need from their perpetual motion machines.

Check this out:

Scientists Announce a Physical Warp Drive Is Now Possible. Seriously.

Humans are one step closer to traveling at faster-than-light speeds.

www.popularmechanics.com

 

[steve_bank]

It is really very simple. Substitute solar sails for canvas sails. Stock up on water, cheese, and beef jerky. Seal the ship. And away you go.

Keep pointed to a star and hope you hit something before the crew matinees.

Life support, propulsion, and just as important navigation.

In ST one enters coordinates,hits the go button, travels light years, and stops at the exact location.

I can't figure out what it rns when Kirk says 'All stop!'. Relative to what?

 

[Jarhyn]

Have we asked, ever, how old these earth like exoplanets are, geologically speaking?

Maybe we should start our searches towards older such planets, in the 4-5 billion year old range.

Is there a way to estimate the age of a stellar body, or would we need to be able to date it's rocks?

At any rate I expect they are either distant, young, working on improving their own shit, or painting rocks with shit that does tera forming on particular types of bodies likely to need the help that eventually shits out intelligent life with genetic memories, and not be so particularly persistent as a life form until they can repeat the cycle, and make peace with the locals.

If the expectation of painting space rocks is the ticket, it would take... Well, maybe a hundred years before we get to that point?

But if we really want to find anything interesting, we should be trying to catch things that are "just passing through, from elsewhere".

Or even "from elsewhere, but here now."

Still, I think for the next thousand years, we should probably focus on fixing what we have and building up energy stores for what will be a true space age.

If we get visitors, they will probably be hard to find, unless they're all grown up now.

Still, bring me one, it says hi to me in an unambiguous and objectively verifiable way and we'll talk.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Starfaring is fairly pointless for short-lived species, and there’s good reason to think that humans are at the high end of the individual longevity spectrum, whose driver is evolution.

And we will never increase our lifespan?

Becoming a K2 civilisation assumes that the energy available to a K1 civilisation will become insufficient; But if that civilisation has a stable population and isn’t expanding beyond its own solar system, why would they need all that energy?

A lot of the assumptions made about the total energy consumption of advanced civilisations in the twentieth century were made with the implicit belief in continuing exponential growth in population - something the we now observe to have been a short term ‘blip’ in human history, and not the inevitable result of decreasing infant mortality that it was believed to be in the mid-C20th.

So long as any segment of the population favors growth and there's no strong reason against it the growers will outbreed the non-growers. Thus societies will grow to their resource limit.

 

[bilby]

Starfaring is fairly pointless for short-lived species, and there’s good reason to think that humans are at the high end of the individual longevity spectrum, whose driver is evolution.

And we will never increase our lifespan?

We already did. It seems to be extremely difficult to increase it any further; We evolved to be temporary, and it’s a systemic feature.

Becoming a K2 civilisation assumes that the energy available to a K1 civilisation will become insufficient; But if that civilisation has a stable population and isn’t expanding beyond its own solar system, why would they need all that energy?

A lot of the assumptions made about the total energy consumption of advanced civilisations in the twentieth century were made with the implicit belief in continuing exponential growth in population - something the we now observe to have been a short term ‘blip’ in human history, and not the inevitable result of decreasing infant mortality that it was believed to be in the mid-C20th.

So long as any segment of the population favors growth and there's no strong reason against it the growers will outbreed the non-growers. Thus societies will grow to their resource limit.

Sure. Nice hypotheses you have there.

It would be a shame if the demographic reality of the last sixty years were to refute it.

 

[excreationist]

And we will never increase our lifespan?

We already did. It seems to be extremely difficult to increase it any further; We evolved to be temporary, and it’s a systemic feature.

If AI can master genetic engineering it would be able to create beings that don't unnecessarily age after they've matured. There is also the possibility of uploading minds into computers that can exist for very long lengths of time. These can be known as "posthumans".

 

[bilby]

And we will never increase our lifespan?

We already did. It seems to be extremely difficult to increase it any further; We evolved to be temporary, and it’s a systemic feature.

If AI can master genetic engineering it would be able to create beings that don't unnecessarily age after they've matured. There is also the possibility of uploading minds into computers that can exist for very long lengths of time. These can be known as "posthumans".

This is known as ‘speculation’ or ‘fantasy’.

It might one day become a reality, but then again, it might not.

 

[excreationist]

If AI can master genetic engineering it would be able to create beings that don't unnecessarily age after they've matured. There is also the possibility of uploading minds into computers that can exist for very long lengths of time. These can be known as "posthumans".

This is known as ‘speculation’ or ‘fantasy’.

It might one day become a reality, but then again, it might not.

AI can already simulate "protein folding"

Artificial intelligence powers protein-folding predictions

Deep-learning algorithms such as AlphaFold2 and RoseTTAFold can now predict a protein’s 3D shape from its linear sequence — a huge boon to structural biologists.

www.nature.com

I think it would be eventually possible for an AI to start with a DNA sequence and simulate the output of it.... it's just a matter of computation ability - though machine learning can make things a lot more efficient.

Here are examples of non-straight forward things AI can currently achieve:

Amazing new AI system - GPT-3 and generating images from text

GPT-3 is based on 175 billion weights such as a lot of Internet content... It can be used in many novel ways... It is pretty good at comprehending natural language - though sometimes has problems.... https://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html Recently it was used to...

iidb.org

 

[excreationist]

A colony on Mars would have to first be able to survive independently. Can such a colony survive? A good test before wasting billions to put them there to die would be to try to see if a colony could survive and prosper, isolated from support on Antarctica where living conditions are much, much more survivable.

I was just watching a video about a facility 1km below Yorkshire:

It is really high tech. It is a lot more efficient to have an isolated facility right near a city than having to travel to Antarctica a lot....

 

[skepticalbip]

A colony on Mars would have to first be able to survive independently. Can such a colony survive? A good test before wasting billions to put them there to die would be to try to see if a colony could survive and prosper, isolated from support on Antarctica where living conditions are much, much more survivable.

I was just watching a video about a facility 1km below Yorkshire:
It is really high tech. It is a lot more efficient to have an isolated facility right near a city than having to travel to Antarctica a lot....

Interesting but I don't see that it has any relevance to the question. A self sufficient colony would have to be able to produce its own energy, oxygen, food, water, clothing, repair parts, etc. rather than relying on constant resupply from Earth. People can survive almost anywhere if they have everything they need supplied but, if they can't produce what they need themselves, they will die when the supplies are used up.

I suggested an Antarctic colony just as a minimal test case because it is cold (though not as cold as Mars) and bleak like Mars. The colonists would have an opportunity to use any resources they could find on Antarctica to survive. An Antarctic colony wouldn't even have to worry about producing their oxygen and water. If they couldn't survive and prosper independently on Antarctica for 10 years producing everything they need then there is no way they could survive on Mars.

 

[excreationist]

Interesting but I don't see that it has any relevance to the question.

It would be a lot cheaper to make the Boulby Underground Laboratory become self-sufficient than to do it on Antarctica. The description of the video says "Boulby is the perfect analogue to an alien planet and specifically Mars" (note that Musk also wants the Mars base to be underground).

A self sufficient colony would have to be able to produce its own energy, oxygen, food, water, clothing, repair parts, etc. rather than relying on constant resupply from Earth. People can survive almost anywhere if they have everything they need supplied but, if they can't produce what they need themselves, they will die when the supplies are used up.

The main thing is that there are enough survivors and that they can reproduce for long enough. They would probably be able to go back to Earth to scavenge things. They might lose some technologies like the Greek's Antikythera Mechanism

Researchers Re-Create the Antikythera Mechanism, the World's Oldest Computer

Discovered in the remains of a 2,000-year-old shipwreck, the Antikythera Mechanism been described as "the most sophisticated mechanism known from the ancient world. Nothing as complex is known for the next thousand years." New researchers believe they've finally recreated what's often considered...

thenewstack.io

 

[skepticalbip]

You obviously either didn't read or didn't understand my post. Living in a tube and surviving on supplies provided from Earth is not an independent colony. A colony producing everything they need is a self sufficient colony.

Some colonies in the 1600s died after they supplies were used up because they couldn't produce the supplies they needed. Some were able to become self sufficient.

 

[excreationist]

You obviously either didn't read or didn't understand my post. Living in a tube and surviving on supplies provided from Earth is not an independent colony. A colony producing everything they need is a self sufficient colony.

What if a million people were living on Mars? What if they could produce/access all of the oxygen, water and food they needed? What if they had enough to survive on their own for centuries? It's not perfect but the main purpose is for humans to survive a catastrophe on Earth - I mean they might lose some technologies....

 

[skepticalbip]

You obviously either didn't read or didn't understand my post. Living in a tube and surviving on supplies provided from Earth is not an independent colony. A colony producing everything they need is a self sufficient colony.

What if a million people were living on Mars? What if they could produce/access all of the oxygen, water and food they needed? What if they had enough to survive on their own for centuries? It's not perfect but the main purpose is for humans to survive a catastrophe on Earth - I mean they might lose some technologies....

What if those million people were sent to Mars and couldn't produce what they need to survive so all died? Don't you think a little test colony in a severe environment to see if they could survive and prosper (where people could be rescued if necessary) would be preferable before sending a million people to die?

 

[excreationist]

What if those million people were sent to Mars and couldn't produce what they need to survive so all died? Don't you think a little test colony in a severe environment to see if they could survive and prosper (where people could be saved if necessary) would be preferable to sending a million people to die?

The video said "Boulby is the perfect analogue to an alien planet and specifically Mars". I don't think Antarctica is relevant to Mars - and it would make it a lot easier to obtain oxygen and water. On Mars they could do tests to see how well they can obtain oxygen and water and then there is the food.... I think they could do a lot of research and it would be quite reliable in working out if it is going to be successful - and also try to factor in the worst case scenario.

 

[steve_bank]

You obviously either didn't read or didn't understand my post. Living in a tube and surviving on supplies provided from Earth is not an independent colony. A colony producing everything they need is a self sufficient colony.

Some colonies in the 1600s died after they supplies were used up because they couldn't produce the supplies they needed. Some were able to become self sufficient.

Good comparison to American colonlials.

 

[SIB]

I do.

I am limiting what I am saying to the cosmic web structure. Or wherever our type of matter is collecting. Medium stars form the upper few rows of the P.T. Water is everywhere. Carbon is going to be everywhere. Along with a bunch of other stuff.

Looking at time: if life started on earth like they say, around 3.5 billion years, that is pretty quick to me. Its almost 1/4 of the life of the universe, and that just Earth.

So in short, based on size and time, yes, there is probably life elsewhere. But not in our air space.