Uhh aliens would be inevitably universally omnicidal just in case some other aliens are omnicidal, shut up nerd
yes thank god someone else is saying it. everyone always acts like it's the smartest shit they've ever heard when it's pretty poorly thought out.
what if you were a civilization that made von neumann probes and sent them out to every star system in 100 light years. If you found someone with technology you don't have to send the signal directly back to your home world, you can bounce it between a dozen probes at different stars before sending it home and no one will know where you live.
these nerds have never heard of a VPN I guess.
pretty sure they all have vpns because of youtube ads but don't understand how they work or why
Part of the plot of the book Chindi, actually. Humanity discovers a stealth observation satellite that's hundreds of thousands of years old, of alien make, and follows its broadcast path along multiple other satellites in multiple other systems, before discovering a gargantuan automated museum ship sent off by a forgotten civilization as part of a millenia-long documentation project.
That's the premise, not the plot. Bunch of scifi existentialism happens around all that
all alien theories are pretty :so-true: brained, IMO. Until we have a better picture of how common life is or isn't, and how long it typically lasts or doesn't before being wiped out by cosmic phenomena, any answer to Fermi's Paradox is just people projecting their vibe onto the question. Star Trek is an optimistic answer, Dark Forest a pessimistic one, etc.
I never liked speculation about alien life because it's far too anthropocentric. They assume intelligent life would even care about space exploration or that humans would actually recognize them as intelligent. Imagine if the nearest intelligent species are sentient trees that communicate with each other through dispersion of pollen. They could have an entire tree society, and we wouldn't see them as anything more than a bunch of trees. And for that matter, they wouldn't recognize us as intelligent either. As far as those trees are concerned, humans aren't that functionally different from a squirrel. Obviously, a bunch of trees would have little to no motivation to develop space travel and why would they?
Colonizers love to come up with narratives about how genocide is actually inevitable
kind of a miss - its from a fiction series by a Chinese author. But Americans do love to apply this specific case from a work of fiction to be universal.
eh - I wasn't the biggest fan of the series. I read and somewhat enjoyed three body problem, but the way that exposition was introduced with a VR video game was weird to me, and then he totally misrepresents the Alpha Centauri system. Alpha Centauri A/B are in a close binary and Proxima is so far out that there is still some discussion on if it's actually gravitationally bound to the system. It's a very stable stellar system and not at all like how it's depicted. I would've rather had the extrasolar system just be some unnamed trinary system rather than specifically saying it's A Cent but totally misrepresenting it. IMO it's on the level of depicting Australians as literally being upside down.
It kinda ruins the series as serious speculative work if they get well-known physics like that so wrong.
Also book two has a really weird start and I couldn't really get through his search for the perfect girl section before just putting the series down as a whole.
Also book two has a really weird start and I couldn’t really get through his search for the perfect girl section before just putting the series down as a whole.
lmao this was also my experience with book 2
There was a slim chance that homo sapient would die crossing the Indian Ocean or pacific, yet we're here. Intelligence means taking risks, we ought to take a leap of faith that others are friendly. In my pov, the risk is small because I don't think there are other intelligences out there that both a) have the ability to speak to us and b) have any reason to (and also c I don't think there are other intelligent species in our future light cone).
Trisolaris is a metaphor for the US.
They are inevitably going to war with China. Any explicitly defensive measures will be considered as a threat (The wall-facer bit). The Sophon is a misinformation network. Trisolaris forced humans to live on only a small part of the planet , America will make most of the planet uninhabitable if it continues in its current path.
The Sophon is the CIA/Mossad sabotaging and assassinating scientists all over the world to prevent competition. If the US can't have fusion power, nobody can.
Weren't the environmentalist earth people with "President Xi, bring out the nukes" energy?
I always preferred the Veil of Madness theory, where we're in the middle of a space anomaly which drives all sophonts violently insane, and we're the only species which has ever formed a functional(-ish) civilization within that zone.
I didn't know what this was so I googled it and read "The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches..." and this already sounds like the dorkiest bullshit ever
For me its really cringe, I prefer the solution that says we are likely the first aliens because of the age and lack of (any) neibors in the universe but how its interesting is how they use a statistical model to prove that.
I'm fully UAP-pilled at this point and I think that it's actually Fermi's non-paradox. Where are the aliens? Why don't we see them? Well, they're here, but not particularly interested in talking to us, and people have seen them flying around, but we've all collectively put up cognitive blinders and decided that talking about them means risking our careers, so I guess we've just been ignoring them for the past 80 years.
I suspect that probably hundreds of millions of years ago someone sent out Von Neumann probes into the Milky Way and set up a listening post at every solar system. I'm pretty doubtful of FTL travel, it's probably really difficult to move any significant amount of mass around the galaxy, but these probes are low mass and can operate on very long timescales. But that's why you don't see alien colonists or invaders here. And the fact that they've been here for such a long time means that they're probably very aware of these monkeys down here who just learned how to turn chemical energy into heat energy and again into mechanical energy but might not be that interested in talking to us until we can do something a little bit more interesting than that.
I see this as really plasable, if you got a link I want listen to this theory more, one fear I have is life is so common human life becomes meaningless to any advanced species, which it probely already is but idk I wouldn't want to leave people in the mud but I guess the material conditions of being advanced would probley say it doesn't matter and isn't a good Idea to uplift or save any doomed planet.
I've been enjoying John Michael Godier's content recently
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HldbkIydeXc
For the stuff about Von Neumann probes and the Fermi Paradox just do your own reading on what interests you there. Generally speaking it's just deep time stuff. Human civilization is about 12000 years old, anatomically modern humans emerged a few hundred thousand years ago? I think between 100,000 and 300,00 years ago. We don't really know when humans first started using language but it's assumed to be before they left Africa 60,000 years before now.
The dinosaurs died 65 million years ago, so 200x the length of time since the first humans. The Earth is 4 billion years old, or 60x longer than the time since the dinosaurs died, and the universe is 14 billion years old.
The Fermi Paradox, Von Neumann probe stuff is that a system of self-replicating spacecraft could colonize the entire galaxy in half a million years or so. Even if it took 10 million years, that's fairly short in terms of the history of life here. So like why hasn't it happened?
Also I'd recommend looking into the UAP stuff. It's objectively pretty weird. I wrote a comment about this the other week, but the US government basically has said that there are mechanical flying objects of unknown origin performing crazy maneuvers in the atmosphere. I'm not super inclined to take the US security state at face value, but it's also a weird thing to claim.
https://hexbear.net/post/200168/comment/2519901
One hand, of course the US military is lying about UAP's to justify more funding.
On the other hand ... they wouldn't need to lie about anything to get more funding. And there's a lot of military personel insisting on these unexplainable air craft being real. There's reports of hundreds of encounters and near-misses going back decades. Obama and Clinton have basically said there's something inexplicable showing up during navy piloting exercises. So why? They could already get all the money in the world by going "China China China!!!" So why orchestrate such a massive and sprawling conspiracy?
I'm kinda gripped by the UAP thing because it doesn't seem like the usual lies our government and media come up with. It ... kinda seems real. But what the fuck is it then?
ON THE OTHER HAND ... if Americans are worrying about space aliens infiltrating the government then they're not worrying about capitalism being the actual cause of our problems. So maybe it really is just a way of muddling peoples material worldviews with pure hokum.
ON THE OTHERRRRR HAND .... again ... it would be the most successful fabricated conspiracy ever if that were the case. If George Bush fully orchestrated 9/11 from a bunker, that would require fewer people involved in a lifetime of lying and silence compared to the number of air force pilots and navy personnel and politicians and three-letter-agency contractors all insisting something is defying the laws of physics right off our coast every day for decades.
... I genuinely don't know what to think about it.
I don't think China or Russia or even the US has technology that could pull off what the UAP's are shown to be doing. Maybe China has found a way to scramble American sensors and radars and cameras to trick them into detecting something that isn't there .... but for several decades now? It just doesn't add up.
There's no obvious answer to this.
i KNOW. It kinda makes me insane.
I just don't really get it for justifying funding. Like if you take the Nimitz encounter (which was like 15 years ago) there's no way you can look at that and think it's the Chinese, just based on the capability they're claiming.
I put this in my other comment, but it's like skipping the WMD fabrication and jumping to "we need to invade Iraq cause Saddam Hussein has Santa Claus held hostage"
If they're genuinely ET propes, they might not exist to make contact at all. They might only exist to monitor and/or test military capabilities. I don't think first encounter is going to involve little green men walking out of a saucer in DC, it's going to be a downed automated surveillance device from a civilization that might not even exist anymore.
Assuming these things are real at all...
I don't think they could cover up actual aliens they'd fuck it up
they did fuck it up though. That's why we "know" about them (plenty of unexplainable sightings pre-deepfake era, testimonies from at least somewhat credible people, mysterious and coincidentally lining up legends from various cultures, Sumerian Ubaid figurines, etc)
Like, if we're talking about it and loads of people actually believe it, then they fucked up. They couldn't cover it up.
now, if aliens DON'T exist, then it means the believers are wrong and there's a bunch of weird shit happening out there in terms of weather phenomena and hidden military tech that we can't even dream of, and other stuff.
there's also a lot of UFO activity that's happened outside the US's borders. I was just watching something on UFO culture in Japan, the Brazilian and French governments both have their own investigations of UFO/UAP stuff, there's some crazy stories from the Soviet era about UFOs messing with their nuclear weapons.
This feels the most likely to me. Universe is sooooooooo big, can't be empty, but it's also sooooooooo big that Marvin the Martian isn't doing a pop in on us.
Change the framework and it sounds very stupid too.
"The protean environment is a dark forest. Every prokaryotic cell is an armed hunter stalking through the magma vents like a ghost, gently pushing aside clouds..."
Omisidal aliens but so bad at being omicidal they never accidentally omniside themselves.
We are omnicidal and and there is like a 50-50 chance our species will last long enough to be noticeable on a geological timescale
You'd also have geological strata of artificial particles like concrete/asphalt/polymers and ice core records of air pollutants.
and ice core records of air pollutants.
those won't exist in 2 centuries (probably sooner)
Are the caps bound to totally melt or just the surface ice and glaciers? Permafrost is dummy thicc.
Antarctica used to have palm trees at one point in history.
It's possible that it was closer to the equator during this time, I haven't figured out where exactly its position would be. It's also possible that as you said, there was some ice in some spots. But being that
- the effects of ALREADY PRESENT CO2 haven't even manifested yet
- we are still adding more CO2 on top of that
- the amount of CO2 we're adding is increasing
I feel like it's safer to say that Antarctica will eventually be almost ice-free.
Well that sucks. I was planning on moving there and becoming a desperate cannibal warlord.
distinctive isotopic signature
the isotopes from nuclear testing has already been raised by geologists as the 'golden spike' of the anthropocene, I'm sure an interstellar species would be able to notice it already if they cared to look
We may end up being a really thin layer but the huge amount of climate/environmental change that humanity has produced should be pretty fucking noticable.
There was recently a paper put out. The silurian hypothesis. The earth is real good at forgetting. If the dinosaurs had tech of around ournlevel there is a good chance no evidence of it would survive till now
You'd think, but all the oil was still in the ground between then and today, so if they did have civilization it was not industrial, or they too would've chugged that energy dense slurp juice
Most oil available today formed from carbonaceous era biomatter that was buried or stored anoxically before cellulose digestion evolved, and 70% of reserves were available 252-66 million years ago. Dinosaur civilization would have had access to oil. If it did exist it wasn't industrial. Probably no settlements at all, since we'd be able to identify graveyards (if they buried their dead, which occurs in nature without the dedicated land lots) and midden heaps. Middens particularly would be perfect fossilization environments since they're typically anoxic and tend to become strata over time. We've left a bigger global impact in the strata than the K-T line that marks the sudden end of all dinosaur fossils.
I am deeply impressed somebody here had that on deck. I don't know if I agree with your claim about lack of settlements just based on the ammount of speculation we'd have to out in that one. The rest seems just spot on though.
it also makes no fuckin sense as a metaphor. U ever been in a dark forest? it's loud as fuck.
Clearly we haven't made contact with intelligent life because aliens are super horny and too busy bumping cosmic uglies. I call it the Spermi Paradox.
We need to build an intergalactic volcel police force. It will be humanity's contribution to the stars.
:volcel-judge: :louverture-shining: :posad: :mao-aggro-shining: :volcel-judge:
If capitalism is not a great filter, the universe is likely a dark forest, or at least should be treated as one until communist aliens are found.
If capitalism is a great filter, contact with aliens is humanity's best hope of not blowing itself up.
If capitalism is a great filter,
It has to be. I mean, how does a capitalist society without the automation needed to permanently consolidate power over its underclasses and or replace them expand into space without collapsing? And that level of automation would lead to a collapse anyway. It just doesn't seem likely for a capitalist civilization to become spacefaring.
communist aliens [...] contact with aliens is humanity’s best hope
:posadas:
i will say, it take one america to fuck up the peace of a world, who's to say the same wont bare out if you go bigger?
And br*tain before it, you think there could be space anglos?
Or what if anglos are in fact reptilian aliens?
How can space anglos exist and be stable without turning into the Borg?
I don't understand how you think something like America could ever "scale" into space without collapsing from the contradictions.
america is built on something just as fucked up and will lead to something even more fucked up, it doesn't have to be "america" but we should know something like this can happen
You are acting as if there wasn't any specific reasons for America existing the way that it does now. Of which is certainly not true. :lenin-cat: Those specific reasons for something like America's existence should not apply well to space.
This is no different then asking "but what if the aliens were not rational beings." Which is a useless question that could literally mean anything. Why not :spongebob-party: aliens? It genuinely makes more logical sense then the Daleks your imagining.
Edit: how could they be simultaneously rational enough to construct a civilization that is stable over incomprehensible distances yet be irrational enough to consider genocide as a solution?
I don't understand how you could type omnicidal bikini bottom and not realise this is not a useful or particularly coherent line of questioning. When you take human rationality out of the question this becomes a topic a toddler could contribute to as well as anyone else and you might as well just imagine demon fairies that ride tigers into land battles for stones. Except that those tigers cannot fly into space and so they need to build space ships with math of which they need a rationality we can comprehend to do.
You uh, never explained how they are getting to space without math though. Which you kinda have to do if you want the idea that aliens that are complex life and not literally wizards are just eldrich beings incomprehensible to the mind to make any sort of sense. I understand if you find the fantasy of aliens being unthinkable weird compelling but even the fact that they are uh you know life already put them into a box. Its a massive box yes it still has walls. There are things that aliens have to be to not just be Supernatural creatures. Lenin did not see an alien but we have all seen life.
A bee colony that learned calculus isn’t going to be worrying about the limits of late-stage capitalism on its growth, for example.
You seem to be missing my point that if something can evolve to learn calculus it is no longer incomprehensible and it has to evolve specifically to be able to do that shrinking the box even more.
Edit: Intelligence of that level has only been seen once in the entire lifespan of this planet of billions of species of every variety, suggesting that our type of intelligence is a very niche trait shrinking that box even more.
Yea, it seems our only disagreement right now is how much variation rather then the aliens being incomprehensible which is too subjective even if you were to use the earth as an example.
I'd like to believe there's some wide world of aliens out there, but it's just more likely we exist at different periods in time and never interact. 🙁
Yeah its the time factor people often forget when taking about this stuff. Human civilisation has been around for a blink of an eye in universe time, and even less with any kind of alien contacting capacity. Plus fuck knows if we are gonna be around in 1000 years let alone 1 million. The chance of 2 technologically advanced civs lining up in both space and time is pretty small i reckon.
Well what kills them off? A galaxy where everyone's hiding from the school shooter seems less depressing than a galaxy where the last 10,000 species to reach our level of development all did species-level suicide.
Also, any type of world destroying fleet or kinetic/missile would be a broadcast signal to these other supposedly omnicidal aliens.
Also the civilization itself assuming it was not extremely decentralized which would make the endless splinter civilizations targets, which would generate more detectable heat...
For an interesting take/deconstruction of the dark forest theory, read Blindsight by Peter Watts
I felt that the way it handled first contact as the opposite of an inevitable conflict from an inherently hostile alien life form, but rather that the aliens want absolutely nothing to do with humans after contact, despite being aware of humanity's existence for a long time. Maybe "deconstruction" isn't quite the right term. Either way, I felt that it subverted the dark forest trope as depicted in other works like Killing Star and Run to the Stars where one civilization, upon discovery of another immediately sets out to kill the other. In Blindsight there was no immediate hostile response, they just kept to themselves, and, as humanity encroached on their claim in space, they politely told them to fuck off as they had no interest in contact or communication, nor, crucially, the ability to do so.
That's correct, our collective radio signals from our day to day comms, as well as our later attempts to directly hail them were a meaningless clutter that sapped useful time and energy attempting to decipher them, so in essence, the communication itself was a form of attack. They set up a Chinese room to stave off potential attempts to establish direct contact and carried on. I think firefall was just the Crown's attempt to figure out where the hell these attacks (telecommunications) were coming from and beam back the data.
There's a scifi trilogy called Conquerers that is about a first contact conflict that starts because the human ship sends out a radio buoy that causes the lizard people and their ghost ancestors physical pain that they decide is a preemptive attack.
