It's only limiting if you're trying to reach C when traversing the spacetime. But if you're bending spacetime instead, there's no such limitation!
Monthy Python
Because unless we're missing something big, it would be clear that intelligence is either perpetually stuck in their own tiny tiny corner of the universe, or kill themselves off before they can reach the rest of the visible universe.
The following is dependent on the unknown likely duration to perfect evolution, and how it overlaps with unknown (but widely-assumed to be light-speed) travelling limits.
Given appropriate overlap distance of the two, there will inevitably arise the first civilisation to perform the following steps in order:
1) Attain self-mastery of internal planetary conflict and resource management. (Permanently sustainable peace and sustenance.)
2) Use their now abundance of time to perfect mastery of physics as is physically possible (something we know to have barely-conceivable limits in terms of size/scale etc).
3) Traverse the universe looking for any others, who - by not being the first - will therefore likely be behind them in terms of any conceivable aspect.
4) Immediately upon finding them, imprison them virtually in a seemingly "empty" but otherwise identical universe. This forces the same conditions upon them that were known to cause success, and also eliminates all risk of contamination of the existing peaceful equilibrium.
6) Wait.
7) The found species either:
a) achieves mastery of peace and sustainability, at which point contact is initiated as peaceful equals.
b) the species fails and dies.
8) Permanent universal peace is the only possible outcome, no matter how many times the above process is repeated.
Given the age of the universe, and how far we have come in such a short time, to me the above seems a likely resolution to the paradox.
With slight modification, it also explain various unexplained "contacts".
Perhaps the "virtual imprisonment period" does not ideally have a definitive binary on/off, instead is progressive in a reversible way (hence the lack of believability and proof for many "encounters"). Such non-invasive contact events may serve as research/assessment, and non-polluting "helping hands" for those who may be watching and waiting.
It would certainly appear we are very near (relatively speaking), to the point mastery of the physical world, making us likely virtual imprisonment and observation targets.
Whether we can do the peace and sustainability bit remains to be seen.
Frankly, us being the only/first sapient species is by far the most optimistic possibility.
It will be the single most monumental moment in human history.
For others, they’ve seen so many aliens in video games, TV shows, movies, etc. that they will be blasé about it and complain that the aliens in video game X looked more realistic than the real thing.
Others will be interested for a day or two, then will move onto the next new thing on the news cycle.
Others will be so self absorbed by social media that they will only care if they can use footage to make TikTok memes.
Others will be know it all’s that will want to point out to everyone that they always said there was extra terrestrial life and everyone should acknowledge how smart they are.
Others will see this as a great opportunity to write a book in the hopes of striking it rich.
Others are just trying to scrape by and are too worn down, tired, depressed, etc. to pay any attention.
Many people live subsistent lifestyles and don’t have access to news feed to even know it happened.
I would expect exceedingly few to really give this sort of event the acknowledgement it deserves.
AI will advance faster than we can evolve and it will be their universe to play with, not ours.
That also means we need to survive here on Earth, and perhaps change as a species in various aspects in order to even make a small step of becoming an interplanetary and then, in long the run maybe even interstellar species.
P ?= NP is IMO way more significant for a start, to say nothing of questions about consciousness, fusion energy, ways to explore and colonise space, ...
This tells you nothing unless you also know the probability of (intelligent) life emerging on a planet. As far as we can tell it could be very low, and earth could very well be a unique combination of factors that allows it. Remember, there are many more possible deck of 52 cards than there are planets in the universe.
In that case we can't treat our existence as independent of the existence of other nearby civilizations.
Life is not only probable, it's inevitable. Given the proper conditions, it's just a matter of time. And the same happens with intelligent life, it just needs more time without being hit by a meteor.
FWIW, the actual paper does not put it like that. It instead calls it "one of the most profound and fundamental questions posed to science". That seems reasonable.
> Given the number of stars out there, it seems wildly improbable that we are alone, and if we're not then it's anyway going to be basically impossible to communicate with them due to speed of light limitations.
Don't you find it fascinating that we think it's wildly improbable that we are alone, yet have not been able to find other life? I certainly do.
Ignoring the huge philosophical implications intelligent life elsewhere would have, it would also provide some very useful bounds on a bunch of the quantities involved in e.g. Drake's estimate. It would also offer some clues as to whether or not a great filter is likely, and wheter or not it lies ahead of us or behind us. Surely massively important!
> P ?= NP is IMO way more significant for a start
Important, yes, but not a scientific question (it is a mathematical one).
> to say nothing of questions about consciousness, fusion energy, ways to explore and colonise space, ...
A complete understanding of consciousness would also be monumentally important, I agree. But fusion and space exploration? Great, but surely "just" (huge and important) technological advances, rather than fundamental scientific questions?
Given that we can scarcely communicate with a chimpanzee, our nearest living relative, nor fully comprehend how any other species on Earth communicates (those which evolved under the same conditions that we did), I find it totally unsurprising that we're unable to communicate with aliens.
We haven't been looking for very long, and out searches have been very very limited.
In part this has to do with the Fermi Paradox. Are we alone because we're in a protected garden? Alone because the half-life of civilizations is very low? Alone because there is a firewall that takes out all civilizations at a particular level of development (like say climate change)? Maybe if we learn about the firewall we can do something about it? The list of answers to the Fermi Paradox is immense and many of those answers could make a concrete difference to us.
Who is to say that we can't communicate? Some theories of physics might allow for wormholes or something like that (this is not likely at all due to time travel paradoxes, but who knows).
Even just learning about another civilization and measuring the rough properties of the atmosphere of their planet could be a revolution. If we discover that the atmosphere is totally unlike what we have, that a totally new kind of life is possible, we could open up entire new fields of science.
The most obvious way to communicate is to put out basic facts about the universe, like say the energy states of your favorite atoms or something like that. What if their version of the basic facts is thousands of years ahead of ours? Physics works off of very little evidence, a small nudge toward the right answer is all that it would take to change everything.
Even if we can't communicate in a lifetime or two, maybe we can communicate over the span of 200 years. Imagine what could be learned through an exchange with a culture that has followed a totally technological and scientific arc. We could be in a local minima missing really important things about the universe.
We're in a pretty crappy place when it comes to AI. We know how to do some things, but the overall picture of figuring out what intelligence is, we're in the dark about that. We don't even know how to ask the right questions. Access to a totally different intelligence would change that completely.
I could go on from fields like linguistics, to psychology, everything that communicating with an alien species touches upon would be revolutionized. Imagine how chemistry would change if we knew for sure that ammonia-based life was possible? We would invest massive sums and figure it all out, and all it would take is a bit of knowledge about the gross statistics of their atmosphere.
And we're just scratching the surface.
* alone because there was no need to simulate a second intelligent species
* alone because there was no desire to simulate a second intelligent species
* alone because there were not enough resources to simulate a second intelligent species
That is an odd thing. The one that I'm curious about is the drum-banging for spotting (probably highly simple) lifeforms on places like Mars. Given the ability of rocks to hop planets, it's a totally reasonable thing to find I think as you don't even need from-scratch bootstrapping.
I expect it's partly a product of PR departments as you have to keep the public engaged, not unlike the occasional production of aesthetically pleasing images.
It seems to me that it's enough to push for off-planet permanent human settlement. Heck, given the long-term possibilities of AI and von Neumann probes, distance isn't even an unassailable problem, you just have to change your time horizons.
And putting some resources into that research is a good idea, even just for what we learned about our own planet thanks to having a different context.
Or having an interesting question for people to become interested in adjacent research at least.
What better way to keep an intelligent species from escaping than limiting the velocity of information transfer and putting everything interesting at distances that are large multiples of the maximum velocity.
In other words, maybe the simulation architect doesn't want us to escape and find (contaminate) the other experiments? :)
In time, as the expansion of the universe accelerates fast enough, not even light will keep up to get across.
Perfect total airgap.
I can't explain why, but ants are some of my favourite animals.
Is humanity even generating enough radio signals that may be even remotely possible to detect on Alpha Centauri (4.367 light years away)?
(Feel free to downvote me, flag, etc., for speaking heresy.)
Saying that we're alone because we haven't heard back after emitting radio waves for only 130 years is like being at a point in space, looking half an inch around us (1.3 cm) in all directions and declaring that Occam's Razor says there's probably nothing within a radius of 2,900 miles (4,650 km).
Does that seem reasonable? :-)
Uniquely sentient across time and distance, impossible.
Can anyone comment on this? What is the idea of such a beacon?
It's a good series at first, but gets very woo-woo by the end.
Spoilers:
All aliens are actively hostile to others. Any civilizations they find, they destroy.
Ultimately, every species is biologically trained to propagate itself, consuming resources and expanding presence, unless there are other external factors governing (for example, long gestation periods, limited offspring, etc)
So, advanced civilizations might put communication mechanisms in convenient places to contact inferior species.
Stable elements are not scare, life is scarce. I would hope that any civilization advanced enough to travel the verse would be able to strip mine the elements it needs from lifeless rocks and leave planets with life alone.
Bezos is right that we should ultimately move resource extraction to space.
Grouped by planet, we have a sample size of 1.
It's not obvious to me that this would apply to xenobiology.
(It's not even totally obvious that it applies on Earth - other species live a much more synergistic lifestyle than humans do)
IMHO that's how we will detect the aliens, by spotting one of their megastructures or their side effects (waste heat, gravitational effects, light blocking, stray directional coms traffic, etc.), not by getting any targeted message handed to us on a platter.
Could be we are seeing some of that now, thinking it's a some kind of a weird but natural phenomenon.
Satellite data? What Satellite data? What do you define as "close enough radius"? Why?
It's funny how movies always show a telescope operator falling asleep listening to deep space as if that's what he does every day and every night....
... and then the reality of these papers showing that SETI does very brief checks for a handful of hours (11hrs in this case) maybe once per year, and only looking in one direction, and only at a narrow frequency band.
I love it, because the silly fantastic odds of the system finding anything, much less of that thing showing up while a person happens to have the headphones on and not be distracted, are just Indiana Jones level entertaining to me. I’ll buy in every time. :D
To me it seems plausibile that other life forms that are probably not even based on dna are very likely to be imperceptible to us, the same way we are to ants.
Thus I’d like to think the universe is probably our cage and we’ll never possess the mental capacity to distinguish alien beings from actual natural phenomena.
So if we are like ants in the universe, then the reality we are in is probably insanely complex - we are just interacting with the little slice of it we can interpret, just like the ants.
In the story, a character proposes that humans are effectively like frightened forest critters with no ability to understand the nature of the seemingly magical rubbish that extraterrestrial picnickers could have left behind after a brief stop on Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic#Plot_introduct...
[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/how-far-from-earth-could-...
What is our interstellar beaming frequency? At what power? Why else would there be any signals between 0.7 and 93 that aren't -300dB down? Radio waves spread. And scatter.
You're going to travel in the mountains in a remote region of a planet with no ionosphere. You want to eat your meals while listening to music. Do you take a shortwave radio or an FM radio?
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We're looking for the lost keys under the streetlight.
In that case if you wanted to colonize another planet you’d have to look for an empty one, or you’d have to erase the whole native ecosystem and start over. Looking for an empty planet might be a lot easier, therefore expansionist civilizations might be specifically avoiding inhabited planets. Maybe?
