The Search for Alien Tech | Hacker News Reader

The Search for Alien Tech

aeon.co

63 pointsthe-mitr32 comments

Lately I’ve been binging on live solo performances from early in the careers of songwriter/musicians who went on to bigger, flashier things. (Elton John, Old Grey Whistle Test, 1971; Greg Lake, Cal Jam, 1974; etc.) A recurring comment has been the expression of gratitude to have been alive in the same “blip” of time as the creator/performer and to have seen them perform during their prime.

There’s a sense that in the history of the creation of music, the living presence of the creator/performer wasn’t huge until recently, surely due to acceleration of distribution and access via broadcast media, and remained so for a decade or two (bobby sox, fainting at the sight of Elvis, Beatlemania, etc.). Then, as music has become more mediated through electronics (click, autotune, synth, DAW, etc., etc.) arguably the importance of the presence of the creator/performer themselves has increasingly been buffered, muffled or otherwise reduced.

This helps me understand SETI and the Fermi Paradox. We’re not just looking for music, we’re looking for the pure signal of Elton between Reg and Captain Fantastic, maybe a 3 year window out of his 60 as a performer, and out of billions of years on the cosmic timeline. Before that he wasn’t on the radar; after it he became part of the background noise.

“bingeing” - doh - tac

> There’s a sense that in the history of the creation of music, the living presence of the creator/performer wasn’t huge until recently, surely due to acceleration of distribution and access via broadcast media, and remained so for a decade or two (bobby sox, fainting at the sight of Elvis, Beatlemania, etc.).

You might read up on how far J.S. Bach walked to listen to Buxtehude perform/improvise on the organ.

But did he buy the tour chemise? \m/

I'd bet that he not only incorporated what he heard into the fabric of his "post-tour" compositions (hee hee), but that several someones have written dissertations on what and how he wove it in.

I'd check myself but there's too much Bach.

Lisztomania was actually coined in 1844!

Solar panels and CFCs in exoplanets? They are too confined to our current development stage here on Earth. Not that civilizations don't use them, ours does. But they are toys for the blink of an eye in cosmological time. The search makes more sense when it is for structures that, by their very function, are designed to last longer and span multiple stellar systems. Communication networks, and more precisely communication hubs next to dark objects moving in trajectories of low curvature--wandering planets and the like. If there are people in advanced alien civilizations, they don't travel in spaceships.

I don't understand how everyone thinks we'll spread out across the universe when "going inward" kind of makes more sense. We can't go faster than light, but we can simulate things and we keep getting better at that. What if we never really leave and just turn our planet into a big computer so we can live any kind of existence we can imagine (but we can't leave to interfere with others and we can only ever see things around us that already happened). I think we're stuck here in some fundamental ways, and other aliens probably figured this out too so they're living in high density planet sized computers.

Why not both?

Diaspora is a hard science fiction novel by the Australian writer Greg Egan which first appeared in print in 1997. ... the citizens, intelligence as disembodied computer software running entirely within simulated reality-based communities known as polises. These represent the majority by far of "humanity" in the novel...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)

===

Fall; or, Dodge in Hell is a 2019 speculative fiction novel by American author Neal Stephenson. The book explores mind uploading to the Cloud...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell

Some might say we already done that, and here we are. A grand simulation.

asteroids

The speed of light isn’t a blocker if we can figure out how to live slower and longer (and maybe going inward is a part of learning to tolerate long stretches of time). If a lifespan was 1,000,000 years, a 40 year journey to alpha centauri at 10% the speed of light wouldn’t seem too long.

I don't know if meat can last 1,000,000 years, but if we can get rid of the meat then maybe we'll be able to befriend that rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotation ago, wants to be friendly again.

> I don't know if meat can last 1,000,000 year

It doesnt, you dont last even one of your lifetime. Almost every-cell in your body will be replaced around 10 times in your life.

If you can hack body to repair itself (no ageing) time is no limit really.

Going inward without physical protection/distribution won't work unless we can "live" without matter, are we humans then or spirits?

Computers don't function without matter. You don't have to transfer your brain into anything. We don't transfer our brain (at least directly) into our children, and yet, after we die, humanity still survives. Sentient computers would in a way be our children.

  > If there are people in advanced alien civilizations, they don't travel in spaceships.

They're not made of meat, so likely not limited to travel through C space.

> If there are people in advanced alien civilizations, they don't travel in spaceships.

I must point out that you start your argument by criticizing an assumption and then you make a big assumption. We don't know what an interstellar spaceship looks like. If we can build one and push it to 0.25c, we can reach the next star in 40 years, acceleration and braking included, and we are relatively fragile and short-lived constructs.

Life support requirements for aliens could be anything, from a forest or an aquarium full of water to a computer running a simulated crew in a simulated environment, blueprints to start rebuilding bodies after they arrive being optional depending on their requirements to interact with the physical world.

We really can't rule anything out, as their motivations, technologies, and requirements are not human.

>> We really can't rule anything out, as their motivations, technologies, and requirements are not human.

But the quest isn't to detect all alien life, just any. The really alien stuff, the stuff we cannot comprehend, we cannot detect. So we start with the sorts of things we might be able to detect. By doing so we have already made all sorts of assumptions and that is ok because it is the only way forwards. Yes, we might miss a civilization that does not live on a planet with an atmosphere, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep looking at atmosphere signatures.

Even the things we can’t understand how they do, or why, should be detectable, as long as they are unnatural enough.

>forest or an aquarium full of water to a computer running a simulated crew in a simulated environment, blueprints to start rebuilding bodies after they arrive

You make a big assumption that they are even organic.

My best guess is that all organic life is ultimately displaced by AI. ....so the "ship" is the alien - not that the alien is IN the ship.

In that case, the ship won’t need any life support.

One could imagine a bit more advanced gene hacking tech that would allow to stop ageing and promote body regeneration. There are animals on the earth that do that (both not age and no cancers).

With that timespan of journey does not seem so important.

Although aliens would most likely be nothing like us, the best speculation guesses about the travel can only be based on general idea of humans and our limits, as thats only reference point. So while those arguments are prone to human centric points of view I usually side with them.

Good chance for me to mention the excellent book ‘Cosmos and Culture’, again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25566085

its been found :)

https://lispers.org/

“For starters, looking for alien tech on Earth is probably a waste of time. ‘It’s a geologically active place, and, on top of that, life destroys everything quickly here,’ says Wright.” That’s a pretty harsh reaction for someone interested in evidence of alien life. We have good evidence of UAPs (UFOs) that are non-human technology flying around our own atmosphere. I do hope the search for technosignatures finds evidence, but I think that Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project will end up finding incontrovertible evidence soon.

I think you might be getting downvoted for saying "We have good evidence" while not providing any.

Sure, maybe a better word would’ve been we have “circumstantial” evidence of UAPs. Of course the current evidence is not enough to definitively state what these UAP are, or even enough to convince most people on here that UAP are even “real”. However, I would argue there is enough there that further scientific research is worthwhile. Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project costs less than $2 million, and if we can capture evidence of UAP then we can begin to better understand whether these are some sort of craft, or an unknown natural atmospheric phenomena. It’s frustrating to see other scientists against this type of research.

As someone who has no dog in this fight, can I get a link to some of the circumstantial evidence you mentioned? It sounds interesting, at least.

Citation needed.

For Good Evidence you mean low quality photos and videos that proves nothing ? Why an advanced civilization would travel half way across the galaxy to show itself careless in our skies ? I think if some alien civilization already discover us they will : attack or make contact or study from distance without we even know what they were doing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com