I've never bought Wittgenstein's Lion for similar reasons. I am able to communicate with my cat, though it is not easy. We don't need language to do this.

It is also important to note that understanding is not equal. Certainly I understand my cat far better than she understands me. Famously Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are mutually intelligible[0], yet this does not create equal understanding between all parties. Norwegians fair the best while Swedes are out of luck. It probably isn't surprising that this happens even when all speakers are speaking the same language. You can speak in front of 10 people and you may hear 15 different interpretations, none need be what you intended.

Language is messy. It's incredible communication happens with it. But we're smart creatures, and there's ways to establish frames of reference. We have theory of mind, even if we don't all use it. But using it certainly helps. Communication is best when all parties are trying their best to understand one another. Sometimes we confuse that to mean we're trying because we're talking. You're not trying unless you're considering what was intended to be said, despite the words used. To which, that, I agree is the lion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Danish,_Norwegia...

Humans and dogs have evolved together to be cooperative…

would you feel common ground with a predatory fish? Or a plant? An insect colony?

Hardly a fair or realistic comparison.

Domesticated mammalian[1] pet which share 80+% of our DNA and bred and naturally self-selected over few ten thousand generations for their obedience and take fair amount of training from birth is not the same as anything else on earth let alone from another planet.

[1] Domesticating of non mammalian animals is already quite hard with limited true successes, some birds probably come the closest.

And you are comfortable being the dog in this cosmic relationship then?

What if they are telepathic hive minds, able to regrow lost minds like some species on earth regrow limbs, thus having no concept of individual death as such?

Or something like the Cylon resurrection technology, which downloads your memories into the latest fast cloned avatar/physical body?

I'm not sure why you're being down voted. Do others not realize how loud the sun is? Even trying our hardest to send messages it is like playing a rock concert next to a rocket. Loud, but even with the amps to 11 you're gonna just drown out in the background.

Not to mention that lightspeed is slow. Even to Proxima Centari it will take several years for that signal to reach its destination.

This is also the great challenge of SETI. It's quite possible we've already received alien signals but just can't differentiate them from all the noise. I know they say that in space no one can hear you scream, but the sun is screaming at the top of its lungs and it is a thing bigger than you can imagine.

This! I asked JPL/Nasa friends, if we were at Alpha Centuri could we detect Earth signals. Answer: No, not currently.

Please correct me if you have data to the contrary.

>So, to me, the aliens will come to us loud and proud. Balloons and banners.

Charles Stross' Singularity Sky seems the most reasonable to me. Superintelligent computers trade unimaginable technology (their infintely replicable trash) for their most sought after asset (new forms of entertainment) and then just piss off to another world having completely bent our cultural development.

I sincerely hope aliens dont end up being space americans. earth has oil and wmds.

Contracts are useless without a way to enforce them and any aliens that already have the means to enforce them won't bother having us sign contracts.

I agree, the dark forest argument seems rooted in a kind of paranoia bordering on the insane. No sane culture says “we better just exterminate anyone else we come across just in case,” which is essentially the threat that the dark forest is guarding against. And a culture that does act that way is likely to end up exterminating itself.

Where the speed of light is probably law (our universe) there is no way aliens could reach earth. The only possibly scenario where earth is in danger is if we terraform and colonize mars (Venus would also do, or a few other large rocks), then we have a falling out and start a major war. The few survivors would not know if anyone is on Mars, but if so they might still be out to get earth so better be quiet. If you are not already in this solar system you can't get here in a useful timeframe no matter how long lived you are.

Yeah but they clearly didn't do a very good job on Earth so how systematic could they be?

Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful premise for a book which can simply mobilize a plot device to brush this problem aside. However, if we want to bring the conclusions back to reality they have to undergo a customs inspection which flags said plot device.

Personally, I like the plot idea that all of the intelligent aliens know of earth life but intentionally ignore us because they visited in the time of the dinosaurs or even before. There's some material the universe values like how we value oil, and they simply extracted all of it from our solar system. This material allows for whatever sci-fi thing we think is impossible, worm holes, constant acceleration, FTL travel, Dyson sphere material, etc.

They could. However their different way might be worse than our concept.

Though survival of the fittest is likely a law and so they will have a concept of competition between groups of some form (though their definition of groups will be different) simply because those without will be destroyed by the first group that does have that concept.

IIRC the author said there are no meta layers of meaning, it’s just honest to god fiction written to be entertaining. I’m struggling a little myself to accept that for the entire trilogy, but that’s that.

Or, both.

Bold to assume aliens will ascribe to something besides despotism

Haha. Time travel :D

That's what they said 30 years ago

if you like science fiction, you may enjoy reading the bobiverse by dennis e. taylor. it describes exactly that scenario, except that the AI is an uploaded human. but that's pretty much the same thing.

Because hardware never breaks, especially not on galactic timescales, and without resources to perpetually replace failing components.

I'm in an AI cult. Send help. No don't.

well there are two options. without FTL traveling to other stars is impossible and the future won't go beyond communicating with aliens.

so i am being optimistic and hope that FTL is possible.

I don't know about faster than light, but as soon as we have real AI, it will simply be information and should be able to travel at about speed of light.

Star trek-ish idea of massive cooperation between species is desperately naive though. Its secondary-school level of hand-holding and singing kumbayah around fire, and yet it still couldn't evade massive wars that sometimes wiped out entire civilizations.

Lockstep evolution is extremely improbable. Even 1000 years head start is massive, a more realistic one would be tens of millions of years or more.

The space is finite, so is Milky way. Eventually, even if its far in the future, species will compete for resources and energy. The smarter ones realize that problems are easier solved as soon as possible, and we have dark forest stuff. Mankind is slowly also inching in that realization. We should work hard on improving ourselves massively and spreading out before caring whats out there. I simply can't imagine a realistic scenario where there won't be some immediate attack, ie speeding up some very dark asteroid into relativistic speeds, aimed at Earth.

Also, why should xenophoby, racism and similar perks be available only to humanity. Even we can see how deeply flawed creatures we are.

If SETI would be able to catch their signal on Earth, then antenna array in the space aimed at them, far from Earth to prevent our noise could work.

That's not how electromagnetic radiation works.

>Our evolution kinda created that but it doesn't have to apply everywhere.

Presumably any alien species was also shaped by evolution, so is also likely to be similarly competitive. Maybe you can escape your evolutionary past. But maybe not.

I would hope so, but this whole situation reminds me of a quote from the writer William S. Burroughs: "This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games."

It is a bleak view. When I even think about the behaviors of some of the animals (e.g. seals, praying mantises) we share existence with, it seems like it could be accurate. On the positive side, the concept of the infinite game (e.g. culture) is what should give us hope.

It doesn't even apply in this world. There are many examples of a more advanced civilization steamrolling a simpler one, but there are also examples of that not happening. It's by no means an inevitability.

Right; or, since they are not competing with us for resources, they could kill us just for sport.

We could give them everything what we know and they could give us back a relativistic kill missile. No reason to try to conquer a planet if you can just extinguish a protentional threat, which luckily was naive to be useful before extinguishing.

I'd be more concerned about some alien force moving through our part of the galaxy and we get stepped on and squashed like an ant on the pavement.

Shades of "Three body problem".

Yeah but they would need to transfer for a long enough time to be noticed and decoded by the other side, so it would easy to spot and eliminate them quickly. Unless they are a smart cult and managed to make some self unpacking and executing coding which they could send over radio.

I did not, but it looks interesting, thanks for the tip.

I didn't know Proust wrote sf.

When we have a nuclear destruction, and some of us survive, then we will have a problem which we cannot solve easily even today: absolute annihilation of the ozone layer. It won’t be a soft reset at all. If the ozone layer disappeared right now, its consequences would be absolutely catastrophic even with the current civilization completely intact.

With all due respect, I don't think you understand what the "worst case" scenario looks like for global warming, and how close we are to that scenario. For reference, check out figure 1 in this nature article [1].

That has warming by 2300 as 8C in an "emissions continue current trends" path.

Here's chatgpt giving a picture of what 8C warming looks like. Speculative, hallucinations, caveat emptor, etc...but to give a sense of proportion this, last time the earth was 8C *cooler* than now, ice covered 25% of the planet:

> At +8°C, Earth is fundamentally transformed. Large parts of today’s populated zones—South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, southern Europe, the southern U.S.—are functionally uninhabitable for humans outdoors. Wet-bulb temperatures regularly exceed survivable limits. Agriculture collapses across the subtropics; even mechanized, climate-controlled farming is marginal. Most of the world’s food comes from high-latitude regions: a narrow band across northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia. Sea levels are dozens of meters higher, drowning coastal megacities; Miami, New York, Shanghai, and London are gone. Phoenix is lifeless desert. Seattle is coastal tundra, wetter but still survivable.

> Civilization persists only in fragments. Mass migration and resource wars have rewritten borders. Population is a fraction of 21st-century levels. Global trade, universities, and modern governance are mostly memories. Local, self-sufficient polities dominate. The United States as an institution likely dissolves or transforms beyond recognition—2 out of 10 chance of recognizable survival. Harvard or MIT survive, if at all, as digital archives or autonomous AI-driven knowledge systems—3 out of 10. The world would still have people and culture, but not civilization as we know it.

Edit: I would appreciate knowing why I'm getting downvoted when I added citations for *possible* warming paths (from nature!). Yes, the chatgpt explanation is speculative but I mean, look at the thread we're discussing.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-020-0121-5

In Carl Sagan's Cosmos, he talks about how many advanced civilizations could be out there capable of radio astronomy, and how as in our own experience, we have the capability to wipe out own civilization, so that would also be a factor in other advanced civilizations and could act as a limiting factor. There are many such factors other than nuclear destruction that could impact all functioning of an advanced society, rendering it nonviable.

The idea has nothing to do with "doom scrolling". Go watch some Cosmos...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsl9f83P0Ys

It was also before we'd burned all the easily accessible fossil fuels.

It's probably worth considering that across a sufficiently large distance, they effectively no longer exist. Their signals haven't reached you, and with the increasing speed of the universe's expansion, they will never reach you. Eventually, everything will be expanding at well beyond the speed of light, so short of being able to cut through space and time, we're not reaching any of these destinations. For all intents and purposes, they don't exist for us. We'll never see any evidence, nor could we ever see any evidence.

So in reality, there is a maximum distance we need to consider - the distance where any signal would have any chance of reaching a detectable region.

But besides, this still misses the most important part. Until 10 billion years ago, stars were much too big and poor in metals and unstable. We didn't have an earth until 5 billion years ago. It was inhospitable to life for a LONG time. We've only had multicellular organisms of any kind for 800M years. Our star is unusually calm, meaning we don't have to worry about being bleached every 5 million years or whatever.

I've said this a couple times in this conversation, but the best guess is honestly that we're the forerunners.

I have no doubt that civilizations are out there. Maybe a handful, maybe nearing infinity. But out there.

The problem is "out there" is so far away, we are all isolated on our own island worlds. An ocean of space so vast we cannot meaningfully traverse it with probes or radio, to say nothing of manned interstellar flight.

But it never gets boring for me to imagine what other civilizations there might be, and how they might be different from us and from each other.

You're right, but it doesn't matter - we're finding evidence of absence everywhere we look.

(Again, please note that I'm only speaking to technological civilizations; I fully believe the universe is teeming with microbial life.)

Probably thousands of years from now, but I do wonder when people will stop using "the universe is too vast to know anything" as an excuse. We've still got people pretending the ocean is an enormous, occluded mystery.

Lots of things seem arrogant to lots of people, but without some logical basis, it's worth ignoring.

This is an ad hominem argument. It attacks a position not because it's wrong, but because if you advance it you're a bad person.

So... Like Contact?

Is possible, and easy if one accelerates at 1 G for half the trip, then decelerates at 1 G for half the trip. Conventional nuclear fission AND fusion rocket engines, like NERVA, already exist and are flight-certified. 1 light year could be traveled in 2 pilot years.

What is SciFi today may become the reality in the future.

The iconic flip-type TriCorder telecommunicator of Star Trek, became the inspiration of the world's first portable cellular phone (first of which was the DynaTac, quickly followed by MicroTac and StarTac (world's first portable flip phone, and yup, that name is not a coincidence)) by Motorola (more famous iteration later as the iconic Moto Razr). Motorola engineer Martin Cooper said that watching Captain Kirk using his communicator on the television show Star Trek inspired him with a stunning idea -- to develop a handheld mobile phone.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/motorola-startac-rainbow-ce...

Star Trek's teleportation may have been SciFi, but Quantum teleportation has been proven to be doable in reality.

https://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-science/first-demonstrat...

https://www.aol.com/articles/oxford-physicists-achieve-telep...

Iron Man's Arc Reactor is a fusion reactor and pure sci-fi, but the Chinese and Americans are racing to build the first viable fusion reactors. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a64704814/ch...

Did you know that Radar was invented during experiments with radio waves for "Death Ray Gun" weaponry? A death ray is a theoretical particle beam or electromagnetic weapon that gained popularity in science fiction during the 1920s and 1930s after inventors like Nikola Tesla claimed to have developed one. British scientists, asked to evaluate the feasibility of a radio-wave "death ray gun" (supposedly being developed by the Nazis) finally concluded it was impossible, but realized the same principles could be used for aircraft detection.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-41188464

Galileo was jailed (put under house arrest, till he died of ill health) for his "blasphemous" statements concerning Heliocentricity, etc., but ancient Hindus have known and documented (in their Vedic texts) about Multiverse, Observer Effect, Illusory nature of Reality (e.g., modern science confirms that touch is an illusion of reality, we really cannot touch anything: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TDgey6g65X0) , and fundamentals of mathematics and science since thousands of years, many centuries or millennia before such concepts became understood and accepted by Western scientists or theorists.

Human flight was considered an impossible fantasy, until the Wright Brothers made it a reality.

Space flight was unproven until the Soviets made it a reality.

Did you know that scientists estimated the mass of all matter and all energy of this Universe, but they believe it accounts only for 5% of the content of the Universe? The remaining 95% of this Universe is unknown, but scientists believe it to be comprised of anti-matter and anti-energy, which are not yet understood properly by modern science. SciFi concept, this may seem, but that's the prevailing scientific theory.

Now think about this idea.. What if an advanced alien species, were made of anti-matter and using anti-energy? Would their technology obey the laws of physics as our modern science understands? Would they be able to travel across the galaxy faster than we humans deem possible with our limited understanding of how the Universe works?

'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic', according to Arthur C. Clarke's third law.

The aliens, if they exist, will certainly powerful enough to destroy humanity's paltry defenses (and our satellites will be first to fall during an alien invasion), but you are right, they won't bother negotiating or defeating us, they will simply annihilate humanity (via biological weaponry, perhaps), terraform this beautiful bountiful Earth to suit their needs, and use it as they deem fit.

For all of humanity's much vaunted intelligence, we really haven't bothered to unitedly plan for any threats from space, natural or otherwise.

If advanced alien beings did visit Earth in the past, they could be easily have become worshipped as Gods by the humans of that time.

Earth is such a tiny speck in the vast emptiness of space, that unless galaxy colonising aliens are capable of traveling in spaceships at FTL (faster than light) speeds, it may indeed take them hundreds or thousands or millions of years to pass by Earth again on their next sweep through the Goldilocks planets in their terraforming list in this corner of the Universe.

>I couldn't imagine worshipping aliens even if they were powerful enough to be indistinguishable from gods.

A lot of other people seem to be happy worshipping humans of rather limited intelligence right now.

Are you religious?

If yes you are already worshipping and imaginary concept. At least with aliens you would have some kind of connection with reality.

If not the word god is not really a part of the vocabulary.

I think Avi knows what he's doing, and he wants other scientists to dismiss him in public, so he gets an audience.

However, there is a chance he could be underestimating that audience, or at least part of it.

Finding a new type of comet is a scientific breakthrough, and I think his work points in that direction (still a guess from him though, but an educated one). He is trying to cake up those potential genuine discovers with sloppy sensacionalist makeup on top, and that's why I call it a circus.

If in a few months we confirm that 3I/ATLAS is a new kind of comet, he could use the papers he wrote to say he found evidence of that new type first, and also described its landmark characteristics. It would "legitimize" him. But the alien stuff would probably continue to be garbage. He can then say the scientists were skeptics, but he was right.

Now, what angle the aliens narrative serve? Why would a scientist subject himself to being a clown? I don't exactly know. In his case, I don't think it's good stuff.

I chose Tabby's Star to satirize him because my description of a mothership deploying an origami-like occluder matches the overall conclusion from the research at the time (a disturbed exomoon). It's an object from that system that changed is shape. In fact, "disturbed exosatellite" and "unfolding mothership from a planet" are quite compatible descriptions. What matters here is epistemology (we can't know if it's natural or not). Also, it's a good demonstration that we (general public non-astronomers) don't need his antics to imagine things.

You should see the movie Don't Look Up. It is even more painfully accurate portrayal of our times, and it eeriely explains why the world's richest men are building and testing rockets and spaceships. (Answer: No, it ain't merely for space tourism or mere profits. They know their misdeeds will ruin the Earth one day, so they are preparing a Plan B.)

we'd probably be encouraged to spread/cohabit with other species

I will do my part to find out which humanoid-like species are genetically compatible with as wide of coverage humanly possible.

Unless we will find some Space Nazis like Qu from All Tomorrows.

So, how does the story go? Only earth is blessed by god, because Jesus crashed here, and all the alien races are toast because they didn’t have a chance to learn about Christ, Savior of the strange bipeds from Earth?

I’m sure they came up with an elaborate story how Jesus loves sentient mollusks from Alpha Centauri, but I hope most people are smart enough to realise how little sense it all makes. I for one am curious how this plays out, if I’m lucky enough to witness it.

As it sounds like you know, it would be great if you can articulate the boundaries of a prototypical intelligence agency mandate. Because then it should be a cinch to describe why ‘communication from a foreign power of as-yet indeterminate technology advancment relative to modern day superpowers to (checks notes) members of any of the 200 some odd nation-states on the planet who can afford operating a radio telescope’ doesn’t fall within that mandate

The "Men in Black" thing predates the comedy films and the comics they were based on. They are (true or not) a persistent element in UFO abduction stories.

"The term is generic, as it is used for any unusual, threatening or strangely behaved individual whose appearance on the scene can be linked in some fashion with a UFO sighting."

Some stories dont even posit them as being from the government, just designed to give that impression. Some reckon alien hybrids. Even in the MiB films they were separate and just controlled the government largely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_black

Its a general fear of government intervention.

If you are asking on what legal basis this fear is founded. I don't think there needs to be one. Lots of governments do illegal stuff. Suits are the classic G man look. They dont need "Jurisdiction" to dress in a suit and harass SETI.

Well obviously they'd be employed by the oil companies to suppress knowledge of advanced energy sources.

I see the speak-first,research-never is strong with this one.

—-

https://www.public.news/p/pentagon-is-illegally-hiding-secre...