NASA’s $8B plan to find extraterrestrial life | Hacker News Reader

NASA’s $8B plan to find extraterrestrial life

arstechnica.com

75 pointssilverdrake1149 comments

The narrative, the drama, of the heroic rich person with single-minded vision is getting old to me. There's even a TV show about a rich guy taking over a police district in a major city - those working-class people who've been working on these problems for their careers are all fools; they need a rich guy and his money (not taxpayer money from their community) to tell them what to do.[0] There are other stories.

Remember that for the Apollo missions, it was a drama of a brave nation working together against the odds, and humble engineers and astronauts.

I also think that this glorification of the wealthy, and the unspoken assumption that it's a sign of merit, is unhealthy for society. I think judging people by their bank book is inaccurate, and pigeon-holes people and ideas into an economic class.

Finally, the less that's paid for by taxes, the more power is shifted to the wealthy. Do we want important decisions made democratically, by taxpayers, or by a few with money. Who gets to say how that new park will look, what medical research we invest in, etc. - the citizens or one guy paying for it?

[0] Maybe an unfair characterization; I've only seen the ads.

Who is the heroic rich person with a vision in this story? I read a story about a determined congressman. Is this comment on the right story?

Subheading: "A congressman, a billionaire movie director, and an unparalleled mission of discovery."

The billionaire is revealed near the end, to keep you reading: "For this mission, he has a secret weapon. During the briefings at JPL, Culberson brought a friend with him, the famed Director James Cameron."

You're right. I skimmed too quickly and misunderstood the role of the billionaire. Sorry, and thanks for pointing it out.

I'd delete the comment if I could.

Invisibility is a stage in life evolution. As predation dominates the universe, life evolves to become invisible from other predators. So we humans are in a stage of evolution that we can be seen, and I consider extremely stupid flashing our position to most advanced forms of life that will anihilate us in a heartbeat.

So our only hope is to find life that is barely advanced, just like algae in a watery planet, or find life that's more advanced than us and say goodbye to our existence. Just like aborigins from America flashing lights to european explorers. We would be extremely lucky to find life in the 100,000 year span that takes species to gain conciousness and develop invisibility. Not that we can't just that's extremely improbable, and dangeorous for there are also more advanced predators watching. That's why we can't find them, they're invisible.

That's my hypothesis.

This thought process, i believe, suffers from viewing humanity too highly. What is the motive for an enormously advanced species annihilating humans/earth/our solar system? On the cosmic scale we are less than pests. Incapable of doing anything short of a slight radio "buzzing" to our most immediate galactic neighbors. This does no stand to change at any point in the immediate future.

How can they trust that we won't try and wipe them out once we achieve a certain level of civilization? Sounds like self preservation to me.

>What is the motive for an enormously advanced species annihilating humans/earth/our solar system?

Here are some assumptions:

* Information limitations imposed by the speed of light mean that there is very little reaction time between the development and firing of a near speed of light weapon and any defensive measures taken. This favors pre-emptive strikes even against a far less advanced civilization. Consider two civilizations 100lys away. In 80 years the less advanced civlization could develop and launch such a weapon. Maybe they already built it and fired it at you 20yrs ago. All your information is both incomplete and 100 years out of date. Striking as early as possible is the only way to be sure that you preempt such an attack.

* Technological process may be an S-curve which allows less advanced species to quickly catch up and reach destructive parity with more advanced species.

We can't know until we find out and by then it is too late. Caution is called for in these circumstances. We should listen and lurk until we have enough data to make reasonable risk assessments.

This still doesn't explain why a civilization with interstellar travel technology would ever want to attack another civilization in the first place. What is to be gained? If you want resources, that's not a problem if you have the ability to travel between star systems. If you're limited by resources, you're not going to be traveling between (or building weapons that can span) star systems. Once you have interstellar flight, you have the ability to easily harvest everything in your star system, and to travel to neighboring systems to harvest whatever you want (or just synthesize what you want, as the energy requirements for transporting raw materials between star systems would be prohibitive compared to that).

>This still doesn't explain why a civilization with interstellar travel technology would ever want to attack another civilization in the first place. What is to be gained?

Safety, security.

These sorts of arguments are not about access to resources, they are about removing as many existential threats as possible.

Fewer civilizations --> fewer risks of nutjob firing a light speed weapon which makes the star which you live around go nova. Stross writes about a Nicoll-Dyson Beam:

>A Nicoll-Dyson beam is what you get when the entire emitted energy of a star is used to pump a myriad of high powered lasers, all pointing in the same direction. You could use it to boost a light sail with a large payload up to a very significant fraction of light-speed in a short time ... and you could use it to vapourize an Earth-mass planet in under an hour, at a range of hundreds of light years. [0]

A civilization which can build a Nicoll-Dyson Beam should be fairly concerned that others may also have this capability.

[0]: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/04/on-the-g...

"predation dominates the universe" -- if they're so advanced, with access to swathes of the universe, why would they bother hunting us? "Just like aborigins from America flashing lights to european explorers." How can a species so advanced be compared to people on sailing ships?

You share that hypothesis with a popular award-winning SF trilogy. My critique of that trilogy is that it doesn't incorporate the concept of present discounted value, which seems to derive from the apparently-universal laws of thermodynamics. If you have the power to destroy nascent interstellar civilizations, and the threat posed by those is their potential to use scarce resources in future, why spend the resources to destroy them now? How do you know they'll live long enough to use those resources? How do you know you'll live long enough to care?

All the predators we've observed, eat their prey to sate a present (or in the case of hibernators, near-future) hunger. We've recently learned how common planets and suns like ours are. Why would any hungry alien civilization drive past all those resources to get to us? We haven't developed anything particularly tasty yet...

Life is tasty and scarce, the rest is lifeless and abundant, and according to universal laws of supply and demand, that which is scarce (life) is more expensive and in higher demand, for whatever reasons unknown to us, yet.

Saying that we're special doesn't make it true. There's no conceivable reason why anything we have now or will have in the foreseeable future would be worth traveling multiple light years to anyone. Perhaps if an attacker could remotely hypnotize us into spending our own resources to send it other resources, that might make us viable prey?

I highly recommend the Three Body Problem trilogy. The second book "Dark Forest" exactly deals with why the universe seems so barren as far as intelligent life goes. The theory is that all intelligent species make the following assumptions:

1. All other intelligent species have the potential to be hostile. Since there are large number of races in the universe, it's guaranteed that there are hostile intelligent species.

2. One is highly unlikely to be or remain the most technologically advanced race in the universe. Even a currently inferior race can suddenly become an existential threat after technology explosion.

3. All intelligent races prioritize their own survival and have reached the first 2 conclusions.

So combining all 3 of those assumptions, one can see the logical step is to assume the universe is a terrifying dark forest filled with dangerous animals. For any resident in such forest it's natural to conceal its own presence, and if anybody reveals their location, they will be immediately eliminated by a more technologically advanced race to insure they will not become a threat. This is true doesn't matter how technologically advanced a race is because there will always be a bigger fish out there somewhere that is trying to do the same thing.

In fact, I can't think of any reasons why we shouldn't take this approach. I'd love to find the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, but I think we are being extremely foolish broadcasting our location to the universe.

I'm more a fan of The Great Filter hypothesis. We're not finding life for the simple reason that in a thousand years, no one will find us; we'll be banging the rocks together again. It might just be that the stage between where we are now, and where we imagine going, is unlikely to be crossed.

Are the two theories mutually exclusive? A dark forest doesn't imply that we aren't capable of destroying ourselves.

A dark forest implies that lots of species advance without destroying themselves. One interpretation of the Great Filter basically states that self-destruction to be an inevitable feature of sufficiently advanced life.

So yes... for the forest to be populated requires the filter to be altered or discarded.

Given the assumption that there are large numbers of intelligent species out there (the universe is vast), unless the Great Filter guarantees that 100% (not 99%, or 99.9%, but 100%) of intelligent species will self-destruct, then these two theories are not mutually exclusive.

Due to the size of the universe (100 billion stars in this galaxy alone), remote possibility has to be treated as absolute certainty, this is why dark forest is such a sound theory.

It seems extremely unlikely that superluminal travel is possible, so at some point intelligent life becomes like magnetic monopoles... maybe they exist, but we're never going to meet while either species is alive. You're ignoring just how huge space is, and how meaningless it would be if a civilization rose and fell a million or a billion light years away.

The Milky Way has a diameter of 100,000 light years, and there are 100 billion stars in this system alone. If only intelligent life arises 1 out of 10 million stars, we are looking at 10,000 civilizations in this milky way alone.

Statistically speaking, even the Milky Way galaxy should be littered with civilizations, with average distances between them measured in dozens of light years, not millions.

It's not so much intelligent life arising that matters... what matters is that they become galactic explorers. Really, there is no obvious reason why any species would want to do that, least of all resources. Besides... maybe life is more rare than that, or maybe intelligent tool users are very rare. After all, a genius that lives in deep oceans of some kind might as well be a clam for all that it might change a life off their planet.

You need a specific formula, and you need to include, "Does not extinguish own existence" at some point between, "Gets tech" and "masters galaxy and becomes threat to all life in universe". That really sounds more farfetched than just... the kind of competitive organisms that make it as far as we do, die off for one reason or another before they dominate a galaxy.

All of this assumes there's a benefit to being hostile.

I can imagine many quirks of the universe that would moot that point: teraforming is a lot harder & more necessary than we expect, superluminal travel is impossible, civilizations composed of multiple species outcompete single species, ecological niches are distinct enough that there is little competition, advanced technology renders moot our assumptions about scarcity and inherent competition...

When hypothesizing post-seismic shift, the future tends to be orthogonal to our modern expectations as opposed to a simple extension of them. I can see machine intelligences hosted in Dyson spheres chuckling about our space opera sci-fi obsession with capturing planets.

What if we decide to invade what seems to be small civilization, and it turns out to be a colony of a much larger civilization or alliance? What if it's a honeypot?

Maybe the best strategy is to make as many allies as possible expecting that some day that would increase the odds of surviving a hostile contact with a other civilizations or other threats...

Our understanding of life and the universe is limited. Our current version of the Drake equation is really off, and we do not have an answer to the Fermi paradox. Collaborate or compete are usually context sensitive decisions. The best thing to do is bounded to our understanding of game theory, which is a field full of open questions.

Drake equation always bothered me when used in argument of contact probability, because it doesn't take into account time. Yes, there might have been billions of extraterrestrial civilizations, but that doesn't mean there are currently ones that 1) already can communicate or receive EM waves, and 2) not yet deprecated use of EM waves. Oh and there's also speed of light issue.

If you actually read the trilogy I mentioned, by "elimination" the author doesn't mean an invasion. The advanced races literally manipulates laws of physics to its extreme to remotely wipe out star systems without ever exposing themselves.

The methods range from rudimentary ones like turning the star of a system nova to god like ones like dropping the dimension level of a region of space from 3D to 2D.

Yes, it's a fantastic series of reading :)

>What if we decide to invade what seems to be small civilization... What if it's a honeypot?

A plot twist like this would make a movie like "Avatar" very interesting: humans invade a beautiful moon with a seemingly backwards indigenous civilization so they can steal its natural resources, it turns out it's a honeypot (or a protectorate) of some far more advanced civilization, which then decides to wipe out all of humanity. I think this would be a great movie, though there wouldn't be a sequel (at least not one with any humans in it).

Beautiful read, that's my line of thought. Thanks for the recommendation. There is also 'Three worlds collide' that deals with the prisoners dilemma of shooting first, another fantastic read albeit shorter.

All settlements and encampments made use of fire so it is not unlikely that they just found each other in that way through smoke. Then, the native American population was prepared to handle Europeans militarily, but not from an immunological standpoint. Many conquests were achieved by amplification through local tribes (e.g: fall of Tenochtitlan, largest native settlement was achieved through a force composed of only 4% Europeans, the rest were Tlaxcalans). Incans were contacted during a civil war. The fiercest resistance was offered by the Mapuche tribe in southern Chile (Arauco War, which ended in 1810).

Then, life hasn't evolved to become invisible to predators, it has just evolved to survive. e.g: grass hasn't evolved to become invisible to goats. Then, a predator cannot survive if all the preys die. If they're too efficient at killing or too large in numbers they eventually exhaust their food source, just like the cuckoo birds cannot do their trick in every nest and some parasites are better off by not killing their host.

If a civilization wanted to spread its reach, interstellar travel and conquer is the worst possible way.

We're highly optimized for life on earth, and can assume alien life would be the same for their home planet.

Evolution from simple life I think would be the easiest way to colonize. It would take a while but the life that develops would be optimal for that planet's conditions without any terra-forming

With advanced enough technology, I would think terraforming would be far faster and easier than waiting for evolution. And if you've achieved interstellar flight, than I don't think it's a bad assumption to assume you now have the tech for terraforming.

The most famous "tool" used in this field is the drake equation.

If you cut the product to the fraction of those planets, fl, that actually can develop life, you have a much higher probability than the one you get with the full equation, or by accounting {fi} or {fi,fc} too.

So from a strictly statistical p.o.w. that's something more likely to happen.

What has to be considered in the evaluation of the possible threat is that the way our brain is used to think, the interspecific competition model, the r/k strategy are all based on two assumption: limited resources and competition.

Supposing travelling in space is something difficult/time-consuming and supposing each planet may tend towards the emergence of a dominant species, those two constraints would be relaxed: hence the coexistence of not directly interacting species may be circumstantially possibile.

Lately I've been thinking... however improbable this is, what if we are the first intelligent species in the Universe?

I mean, not saying that because I think we are special, but just wondering what would it mean if we were "the first" (for some relatively-local value of first)?

Are there any hard sci-fi stories about this? or has anyone given any thought about it? or would it be a very boring outcome?

I think it ends up being a relatively boring outcome, because then it would very strongly imply that some previous step between organic sludge, and intelligent tool users is very VERY unlikely to occur. It would be good news in a sense, because it would imply nothing sinister about our future by comparison to past species, but it would be lonely.

In the best estimate, I suppose you've seen that version of humanity in the various "Ancients" or "Proteans" and other first races in sci-fi.

Conversely I've always wondered what the effect on the zeitgeist would be if we discovered the ruins of an obviously advanced civilisation.

Like an Earth-like habitable zone planet who's atmosphere was heavily contaminated with fission byproducts.

It would probably enforce the idea of The Great Filter[1]. It would also show that it's not uncommon for civilizations to develop similarly to humans. I would argue that the concept of war is a very human concept and doesn't necessarily have to apply to alien live which developed completely independently of Earth life.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

I think it would have less long-term impacts than many would like to thin. Human nature isn't so easily changed, and over time people who don't want to believe in the discovery simply won't. We still have flat-earthers and moon hoaxers, this needn't be any different. Even assuming that people believe it, when faced with the reality of the hard choices to be made in changing our course, how long would it take to rationalize the fear away?

Not long, I suspect, except for the usual people who would have been reasonably concerned before any such discovery.

This is well trodden ground. Start with the Fermi paradox: statistically there is a very large amount of stuff in the universe, so even low probability things like life should be out there, but currently don't appear to be.

The wikipedia page has a nice collection of reasons including yours: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Boring? I think that emerging as the first intelligent life in a universe this old is so unlikely that divine creation would be the only reasonable explanation. A whole new can of worms!

I think it's much more likely that other intelligent life is observing us.

I guess the alternative is the anthropic principle: we must be the first intelligent life otherwise we would have been destroyed by now.

Nah, but either interstellar travel has not been invented anywhere in the universe or there are more interesting/threatening things discovered by those who have invented it. Given that there may be a lot of intelligent life in the universe, isn't it a pretty narcissistic idea that we would be at all interesting to other life-forms?

We're a boring planet in the sticks, and we poisoned our planet with radiation. I'd bet we're in a list of planets to avoid.

It's hard to say exactly since we haven't detected life on exoplanets, and don't know yet how common it is, but just looking at this star system alone, we appear to inhabit an extremely interesting planet if you're a scientist interested in natural life-forms (both plant and animal) and geological processes. All the other planets in this system are utterly lifeless and barren as far as we can tell, and certainly don't have the diversity of ecosystems and climates that Earth has. The problem with this planet is all the humans ruining it, so I'm a little surprised some aliens haven't decided to wipe out the human pests so they can preserve this planet as a sort-of nature museum. That leads me to believe that the number of alien civilizations out there that have achieved not only spaceflight, but more importantly interstellar flight, is vanishingly small or even non-existent. It could very well be that there's no actual way of going faster than light-speed, so civilizations simply don't bother much with it, except maybe trying to visit their nearest neighbor stars (something we're still quite far from achieving), so if interstellar-capable civilizations do exist, they could be so rare that none have been able to travel here and find us.

>Are there any hard sci-fi stories about this?

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

We might be the first or the most advanced (somebody has to be), but that doesn't preclude other lower species in other planets from existing, yet we have found nothing. And as being the first and only, well that's a universillion times less probable.

Let's hope they find some trace of intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!

(Mangled Monty Python)

> A MacBook Pro operating at full capacity, 24 hours a day, would consume about that much energy in a month.

What a bizarre restatement of its battery capacity -- I wouldn't think MacBook Pro power consumption is something people have an intuitive understanding of. Why not an iPhone? Or a light bulb? Or just compare it to the battery capacity of devices deployed on Mars in the past? Seems like the writer just looked around his desk for a good comparison and his eyes settled on the device that he happened to be typing on.

But how many libraries of congress does it consume? The people want to know.

For those interested in this topic, I recommend "Astrobiology: A Very Short Introduction" by David Catling. Catling details nine celestial bodies in the solar system that could potentially harbor life.

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