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Comment by goatlover | Hacker News Reader

Do you suppose ascended beings and advanced alien technology are scientific as opposed to plot devices? It's all fictional. Star Trek, Star Gate, Dune, Battlestar Galactica, even plenty of things in the Expanse (Epstein drive, protomolecule tech). Interesting answers means expanding on the rules and story in the fictional universe to provide explanations for mysteries the author(s) set up.

It doesn't mean providing a hard scientific explanation for something that supposed to be beyond our scientific knowledge. Who took out the protomolecule builders and why? Leviathan Falls will likely provide some answers. Same with Death's End giving more details about the Dark Forest. It's an exploration of an idea, not a documentary.

Imagine criticizing Dune because the spice and sand worms aren't based on actual biology.

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"Interesting answers means expanded on the rules and story in the fictional universe to provide explanations for mysteries the author(s) set up."

That's the root cause of our disagreement. I simply call that a good story. On the other hand, to me a book gives "interesting answers" to something if it has something meaningful to say about reality, not just the fictional universe.

In Dune, that would be true for politics and religion but not for sandworm biology.

> That's the root cause of our disagreement. I simply call that a good story. On the other hand, to me a book gives "interesting answers" to something if it has something meaningful to say about reality, not just the fictional universe.

But that's guaranteed to be the case when it comes to aliens, since we don't yet know of any. Even if someone uses a more plausible resolution to the Fermi Paradox in their story, it will still be based on speculation, instead of telling us something about reality, since we simply don't know.

So in the context of ascension and aliens, it's all fictional and down to whether the writer can deliver a creative enough explanation. To use a fantasy example, that didn't work out so well for the Game of Thrones tv show, and might be a reason why GRR Martin is taking so long to finish the books.

That's why the only books that have something meaningful to say about aliens are Solaris and Blindsight.

In case of the fermi paradoxon, I'd add the first two books of Baxter's Manifold series where he offers two distinct explanations, the first one being "it's not a paradox at all, we're truly the first" and "some natural process is killing them off before they can colonize the galaxy".

Solaris is focused around a planetary ocean that's sentient in some manner too alien for humans to understand. That's how Lem sets up the story, because he likes to explore failures to communicate and what it would mean to encounter the truly alien. But it is his setup, and not the result of an actual alien encounter. We don't know whether it would be similarly impossible to communicate with aliens. Maybe Sagan and the SETI folks assume correctly that it is possible.

Both authors assume that what we call "intelligence" and "sentience" is deeply influenced by the environment our species evolved in (plus a billion happenstances) and that therefore any dream of meaningful communication with extraterrestrials is a naive dream.

Now, we don't know if they're right because, as you pointed out, we never met actual aliens. But that doesn't change the fact that their assumptions is based on actual science.

Klingon mating rituals, on the other hand, are not.

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