The book is set in the late 21st century, a time when the Earth is beginning to recover from the ravages of humanity's technological adolescence, and also beginning to travel to nearby stars. Suddenly, the Earth and human colonies are bombarded with empty spacecraft at relativistic speeds. Of course, they're almost undetectable, and impossible to stop even if seen (because by the time reaches you, the ship is less than a tenth as far away as it was when the light left it, and may have diverted its path in that time). The result is catastrophic; the impacts on the Earth release enough energy to melt everything on the surface and boil the top five metres off the ocean's surface.

What's really disturbing is the aliens' motivation: simple self-protection. The authors propose that given that we know no details of the appearance or culture of an alien intelligence, we know three things:

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1. Their survival will be more important than our survival. If an alien species has to choose between them and us, they won't choose us. It is difficult to imagine a contrary case; species don't survive by being self-sacrificing.
2. Wimps don't become top dogs. No species makes it to the top by being passive. The species in charge of any given planet will be highly intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary.
3. They will assume that the first two laws apply to us.

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When you combine this with the fact that relativistic bombardment can wipe out a planet-bound species, then any species has to regard any species capable of relativistic travel to be a potential threat to its own survival. How, after all, are they to know who can be trusted? By the time an attack is detected, it will be too late to react (probably too late even to launch a retaliatory strike, even if the victims knew who was attacking them, which they probably wouldn't). So- the most rational response, upon discovering a civilization that is now or soon will be capable of relativistic spaceflight is to exterminate it. The universe is like an infinitely large version of Hobbes' "state of nature", with no end in sight.

Thoughts?

[ 05 April 2004: Message edited by: Mike Keenan ]

I think a paranoid alien neighbour is definitely a scary possibility, but I don't think it's a universal inevitability. There is more in heaven than is dreamt of in that philosophy.

{Aside -- I always thought Hobbes' (and Locke's, et al) state of nature was a rather childish abstraction, probably derived from a creationist origin. The simple fact is that independent actors don't spring up magically from the ground -- they arise from and within the context of pre-existing social communities. It's perhaps useful to posit a state of nature as a thought experiment, but the exigencies of human existence sort of preclude it ever being a real state of affairs.}

[ 05 April 2004: Message edited by: verbatim ]

What good would it be to attack us if that attack took 30,000 years to reach us? Surely within a 1000 years or so we would be able to defend against that sort of attack (remember a spaceship traveling at relativistic speeds could not only cause enormous damage to a large object by hitting it, but could have enormous damage caused to it by hitting a small object . . . put a cloud of dust in its way, and if it hit even one speck, it would be destroyed.

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But, why would a civilization that advanced waste its time trying to travel at relativistic speeds, when it would probably be better spent figuring out how to use bends and warps in space-time to travel the same distances almost instantly, and likely using energies much more obtainable.

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Which leads into my point, which I heard somewhere and forever burst my bubble on the topic of alien civilisations.

The statistical probability of any particular alien life form being at a technological level that even vaugely approximates ours is too small to contemplate. If we knew the average "lifespan" of sentient life forms in the universe (from generation to destruction), then the technological period in which we could even have any hope of having a "contest" of any sort with them would be outlandishly tiny. It would be much more likely to encounter single-celled organisms some distant planet or beings so far beyond us that they would have no need to fear us any more than we might fear a new breed of crustacean we discovered in a deep ocean trench. Of course, they might just destroy us because they wanted our planet, just as we might destroy the crustaceans to use up its habitat.

[ 06 April 2004: Message edited by: Jacob Two-Two ]

And if we do ourselves in, then the next intelligent life-form to evolve somewhere missed us by a million years.

.. and if by some lucky chance there are more than one intelligent species of life in this galaxy, the odds are high that we and they could be at such different stages of development as to make cross-communication useless. They might well regard us as we regard the dolphin - a species to be protected, and clearly intelligent, but with which we are incapable of meaningfully communicating.

[ 06 April 2004: Message edited by: DrConway ]

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Originally posted by Jacob Two-Two:

The statistical probability of any particular alien life form being at a technological level that even vaugely approximates ours is too small to contemplate. If we knew the average "lifespan" of sentient life forms in the universe (from generation to destruction), then the technological period in which we could even have any hope of having a "contest" of any sort with them would be outlandishly tiny. It would be much more likely to encounter single-celled organisms some distant planet or beings so far beyond us that they would have no need to fear us any more than we might fear a new breed of crustacean we discovered in a deep ocean trench. Of course, they might just destroy us because they wanted our planet, just as we might destroy the crustaceans to use up its habitat.

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Actually I think this is probably true, and is the major hole in the story. In fact, the two civilizations don't even have to be that far apart before the stronger needn't fear a paranoid attack by the weaker. All that is necessary is that they have dispersed sufficiently into their system's asteroid belt that a first strike can't be counted on to wipe them all out. Ideally, they should then inform their prospective opponent that they have done this. Nothing more, no threats needed, because the opponent would then see that a first strike would fail, and would instead produce a dangerous and possibly vengeful enemy.

A civilization that was far in advance of us would be a different kettle of fish altothether. They'd have little to fear from us, but I suspect that we'd have little to fear from them either, because interstellar distances are so vast that it would be impractical to come after our resources. This might change if some sort of faster-than-light travel is possible, but unless it is, even the most advanced civilization could do little more than send out small colonizing expeditions (on one-way trips). And if they knew of our existence (and how could such a civilization not know about us?) then they'd leave us alone, if for no other reason than that there's likely a lot of other star systems that don't have intelligent life. Sure, they could destroy us if they wanted to, but there'd be plenty of other systems without intelligent life that could be colonized much more easily.

Of course, if such a civilization conquered all the nearby systems, and still needed to expand, then we'd be in trouble, but, again assuming the impossibility of FTL travel, this scenario is probably much less to be feared than you might think (Thomas Disch's disturbing novel The Genocides notwithstanding). The light barrier would make it impractical to use interstellar colonization as a means of relieving population pressure at home, or as a source of additional resources. Any civilization that survives that long will realize that and will thus have learned to manage its resources well enough that any interstellar colonies would be self-sufficient.

Would we still have something to fear from them? Perhaps. Jung apparently thought so, no doubt inspired by what he'd seen of the destruction of non-European cultures. But if they left us alone, I think that the mere fact that we know of their existence should not be as disastrous for us as Jung seems to have thought. After all, we are able to recognize that the existence of extremely advanced civilizations is possible, maybe even likely, so we'd be a bit more prepared for the idea than would a society that had not developed this far. Nevertheless, if they did decide to colonize our system, the effects on our culture would be unpredictable, to say the least. And we can't necessarily count on such a civilization having adopted the Prime Directive.

So what should we do about it? First, I think we should continue to look for evidence of extraterrestrial life, and more specifically extraterrestrial intelligence. Pellegrino and Zebrowski's scenario is to be feared if, and only if, there's a civilization of a similar level of advancement to us within a hundred light years or so. And it's only really to be feared if they're close enough to detect our attempts at relativistic travel (e.g. the gamma rays produced by an annihlation-powered rocket like Pellegrino's Valkeryes). Were that unlikely scenario to be true, then we'd simply have to declare a moratorium on fast interstellar travel until we'd dispersed ourselves well into the asteroid belt, for reasons described above. Once we were sufficiently dispersed that they couldn't count on wiping us all out, we'd be safe.

For more on concerns about contacting extraterrestrial civilizations, look here (actually that whole site is excellent; I spent hours there when I first found it).

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The statistical probability of any particular alien life form being at a technological level that even vaugely approximates ours is too small to contemplate.

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Just love how humans, even in the face of the whole uncharted, unimaginable universe, think that we're the pinnacle of civilization and technological mastery.

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Originally posted by Anchoress:
I don't believe in intelligent life on other planets. I hope, but I don't believe.

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Heaven knows there's barely any intelligent life on

And the accused was charged with contempt of court as well as the other charge(s). This story allegedy took place in Courtenay on Van. Island.

[ 06 April 2004: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

[ 06 April 2004: Message edited by: Mr. Magoo ]

"Beam me up, Scotty!"

There's a political side to this. If we think that we are on the only planet with life on it then, presumably (if we think that life is worth preserving), we have a duty to take care of ourselves and this planet. Life is worth preserving even if it is not our own. And I can't help but think that any advanced life form would share that view...provided their society wasn't divided into warring groups as ours is.

[ 06 April 2004: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

Someone posted about the odds of finding an intellegence that was near our level. Those are the only ones that we could recognize.

Human empires last several hundred years (the US is due to collapse right now to match the average), and after the next collapse it will be a long time before the earth would be able to support a space program of any kind. The time between being able to send radio waves and not being able to will be less than 2 centuries, possibly 1 century. The DarkAges were a fairly small blip compared to the coming die-off (see URL=http://www.dieoff.com]www.dieoff.com[/URL] for details). They were the better part of 1000 years ago. If we assume we will be able to recover in the following 1000 years, then we'll be emitting no more frequently than 10% of the time. Thus the chance that another technologically savy species will be able to detect us is less that 10%, even if we beamed a signal strong enough to be detected directly at them for that entire period.

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Originally posted by Lizard Breath:

Just love how humans, even in the face of the whole uncharted, unimaginable universe, think that we're the pinnacle of civilization and technological mastery.

Sometimes I wish Zeus were still around.

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Speaking for myself, it has nothing to do with thinking humans are the pinnacle of anything. I came by my opinion (which required the reluctant abandonment of twenty-five years of staunch belief in extra-terrestrial intelligence) after seeing a TV show (I think it was Daily Planet), where two scientists (I *think* it was an astrophysicist and an oceanographer, but I don't remember) came up with a computer program that analysed all the variables necessary for the evolution of higher life forms (*not* just the possibility of life).

After considering everything, including the magnitude of the star and the planet's proximity thereto; the range of possible gravities; the acceptable range of rotational speeds; the elemental make-up and availability of particular elements in the planet's crust; the necessity for a magnetic field within a particular range of magnitudes; the eccentricity of the planet's orbit and the tilt of its axis; the presence of an exterior gravitational force (such as the moon), etc etc etc, they concluded that just the possibility of enough of the requirements existing on one planet is infinitesimally small. Factor in that the coexistence of these elements does not guarantee the evolution of higher life forms, and the likelihood of other planets *even with animal life* shrinks to almost zero.

Of course, they could be wrong!

[ 06 April 2004: Message edited by: Anchoress ]

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I don't believe in intelligent life on other planets. I hope, but I don't believe.

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Any intelligent life on other planets would stay away from screwed up humans who have raped their planet.

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Originally posted by Anchoress:

After considering everything, including the magnitude of the star and the planet's proximity thereto; the range of possible gravities; the acceptable range of rotational speeds; the elemental make-up and availability of particular elements in the planet's crust; the necessity for a magnetic field within a particular range of magnitudes; the eccentricity of the planet's orbit and the tilt of its axis; the presence of an exterior gravitational force (such as the moon), etc etc etc, they concluded that just the possibility of enough of the requirements existing on one planet is infinitesimally small. Factor in that the coexistence of these elements does not guarantee the evolution of higher life forms, and the likelihood of other planets *even with animal life* shrinks to almost zero.

Of course, they could be wrong!

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They certainly could. At the bottom of the Drake Equation page that dnuttall linked to, it says:

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In summarizing their discussions, the conference members concluded that the number of communicating planets could range from fewer than 1000 to more than a billion. Most of them thought the higher number a more likely estimate.

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Then again, this page suggests that there might be only 50; in the latter case it could be considered zero as far as anything we could gain (or lose) from contact with aliens, since the nearest one would likely be so far away that we wouldn't cross paths with them for thousands of years. The long and the short of it is, we just don't know.

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Originally posted by DrConway:
So where the blazes are they?

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There's a number of reasons we might not see them even if they're there. Just suppose, for instance, that HF/VHF radio became obsolete, or was eliminated as a delibrate policy, perhaps for reasons hinted at by Pellegrino and Zebrowski, to be replaced by something that wouldn't leak into space? Nearly all of our searches to date have used radio, but if the aliens aren't generating radio signals then our searches wouldn't find them. Of course radio will never become obsolete for astronomy, any more than visible light or UV will, but radio telescopes don't have to generate signals- just receive them. They'd know about us, mind you...

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Originally posted by N. Beltov:

Carl Sagan and other SETI-types notwithstanding, I've always used the working hypothesis that we should assume that we're alone and that our species may never contact extra-terrestrial life.

There's a political side to this. If we think that we are on the only planet with life on it then, presumably (if we think that life is worth preserving), we have a duty to take care of ourselves and this planet. Life is worth preserving even if it is not our own. And I can't help but think that any advanced life form would share that view...provided their society wasn't divided into warring groups as ours is.

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I suppose a strict application of Occam's Razor would require us to assume that they don't exist.

[ 06 April 2004: Message edited by: Mike Keenan ]

Which means that, first, there are an awful lot of chances for that minimal probability to happen. But two, the places it happens will probably be very, very far away. We are probably not talking Sirius here, we're talking hundreds and hundreds of light years to the nearest. And they're probably using either drums or gravity generators to communicate. And even if they've been doing some travelling, there are thousands and thousands of stars closer to them than we are. And if it turns out that no matter how advanced your physics gets, you can't handwave the speed of light, then how much interstellar travel is anyone gonna do? A little bit perhaps, to say they can do it and to get a few eggs into different baskets. But there's not much point beyond that.

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After considering everything, including the magnitude of the star and the planet's proximity thereto; the range of possible gravities; the acceptable range of rotational speeds; the elemental make-up and availability of particular elements in the planet's crust; the necessity for a magnetic field within a particular range of magnitudes; the eccentricity of the planet's orbit and the tilt of its axis; the presence of an exterior gravitational force (such as the moon), etc etc etc, they concluded that just the possibility of enough of the requirements existing on one planet is infinitesimally small. Factor in that the coexistence of these elements does not guarantee the evolution of higher life forms, and the likelihood of other planets *even with animal life* shrinks to almost zero.

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There's an emerging school of philosophy that posits the ridiculous enormity of the universe is necessary in order to produce just one sentient species.

Now that's a disturbing idea.

[ 07 April 2004: Message edited by: JimmyBrogan ]

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Originally posted by dnuttall:
Only because we haven't found it yet. We'll keep looking, though.

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Originally posted by Mike Keenan:

As regards the idea of self-replicating probes (von Neumann machines), that might not be a good idea.
. . . because they'd convert the entire mass of the galaxy into copies of themselves within a couple of million years. This would be a Bad Thing (TM).

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So build in a limit. Say you want a few thousand probes and only feel like building a few. If you tell each probe to build six, and then each time one builds a probe it builds them with instructions to build one less probe than its instructions said, then (not including probes that die before they build more) each probe will give rise to a shitload but nothing like an infinite number.
1st probe builds 6
6 probes build 5 each -- 35
35 probes build 4 --140
140 probes build 3 -- 420
420 probes build 2 -- 840
840 probes build 1 -- 840 more
Grand total = 840 + 840 + 420 + 140 + 35 + 6 + 1
= 2282 probes end up existing from building one.

If you need a bigger number, start from 7. But clearly for any useful number of probes, the number of iterations is small enough that if you're careful about the robustness of that particular instruction there's pretty much no chance of them ditching it and doing runaway replication instead.

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Originally posted by Mike Keenan:
Interesting idea, kind of like the telomeres on mammalian chromosomes. And I guess if you kept the number low enough you'd minimize the risk of a mutation that "immortalizes" the line of probes, in the same way that a cell line can be "immortalized", leading to cancer. Could it be made fail-safe, though?

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I have no friggin' idea what you people are talking about.

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Originally posted by Mike Keenan:
Could it be made fail-safe, though?

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I think you're probably right about the chances of it happening in the first place, though. So maybe it is worthwhile to consider something like this.

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Just love how humans, even in the face of the whole uncharted, unimaginable universe, think that we're the pinnacle of civilization and technological mastery.

Sometimes I wish Zeus were still around.

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Despite all our paranoia of the other, the only thing that is going to destroy the human race is the human race.

[ 09 April 2004: Message edited by: WingNut ]

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Originally posted by Mike Keenan:
A better way of saying it is, "right now, the most likely thing to destroy the human race is the human race". So naturally we should be giving the lion's share of the attention to environmental problems.

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The question is whether we will recover.

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The only way the planet will recover if we don't.

I really think that mankind can(has) royally messed up the planet, comitting suicide at the same time and taking many other species with us.

I think we should reach out across the vastness of space in effort to establish communications or more with other intelligent life.

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Originally posted by clersal:

The only way the planet will recover if we don't.

I really think that mankind can(has) royally messed up the planet, comitting suicide at the same time and taking many other species with us.

Will the planet survive? Maybe become another Mars. Very dead.

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Not necessarily. The Earth has had a lot of big dieoffs in the past. The impact that wiped out the dinosaurs was the most famous, but even worse was the mass extinction at the end of the Cambrian- over 90% of all species on Earth were wiped out. Eventually the handful of surviving organisms evolved into other forms, and the Earth's biodiversity was restored.

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Not necessarily. The Earth has had a lot of big dieoffs in the past. The impact that wiped out the dinosaurs was the most famous, but even worse was the mass extinction at the end of the Cambrian- over 90% of all species on Earth were wiped out. Eventually the handful of surviving organisms evolved into other forms, and the Earth's biodiversity was restored.

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I'm not sure that intelligent life is all that assured:

When I was in university, I read a lot of Stephen Jay Gould and I have to say I agree with him in his frustration about our common axiom of evolutionary "progress". The idea of inevitable progress comes directly from the European Judeo-Christian background of modern science.

Soon after Darwin's "Origin of Species", with its misundersting of the struggle for existence...likely stemming from the term "nature, red in tooth and claw", European scientists began to theorize about the ladder of life...conveniently classifying other ethnic groups . It was a belief system that dove-tailed nicely with European colonialism as they both developed.

(the history of science is every bit as important as science itself)

Until you accidentally evolve self-conscious intelligence like our own, nature can be pretty value neutral.

Before man, if our earliest ape ancestors had been forced into competition for scarce resources against wolves...would the apes have won (remember early ape fossils are pretty tiny)?

And just because the wolves would have won...does that ipso facto (jeez, been awhile...hope I just used that right!)...anyway would that mean ipso facto that *wolves* would have evolved into an intelligent species? Our anthrocentric view, the value we place in ourselves...biases our view. But there isn't really any such guarantee.

The biggest thing about evolution that people seem to forget is luck.

Evolution progress through selection on random mutations. Quite simply, if a mutation arises that can be inherited - and if it isn't immediately lethal to the organism, as most mutn's are - if it can be inherited it goes through the test of survival of the fittest:

Does the mutation provide benefits to the offspring ***within its current environment***? If so, it gets passed on.

But is there anything ineherent in the environment that would produce the conditions necessary for a species to get onto the path towards some future intelligence?

And then, even when an organism has mutations that provide it a better chance of survival a further layer of luck. The environment has to remain conducive to that organism.

Say you have the perfect evolved fish. What if that fish lives in an inland sea that dries up due to tectonic uplift...did being the perfect fish help?

Our earliest fossil evidence for life is about 3.5 billion years old. The first era of life ended 450 million years ago with the explosion of multicellular life forms (Pre-Cambrian explosion, see Gould's "Its a Wonderful Life" - itself a wonderful book). But think about it: for 3 BILLION (!) years, the only organisms on this planet were single celled. Multi-celled organisms were an accident, if the exact sequence of random mutations, luck,and environment needed took that long to happen...why not longer? Or not at all in the lifetime of the Sun...

But we *do* assume the inevitability of intelligence. Its part of our cultural story. How many of you see variations on this theme:

Of course, first its always a white man. But second, it wasn't a ladder like that at all. That ladder is the image that captures our cultural assumption.

That is the sort of image that is reflective of our scientific mythology....

Different species of Hominids co-existed for 100's of thousands of years on the African continent...contrary to what was once believed. We didn't compete each "older" species into extinction, at least not for some time.

Lastly on progess: In evolution, species that are heavily specialized tend to be the least adaptable, the least likely to evolve into new species and more likely to simply go exctinct.

Maybe in a way our (malingant?) cultural specialization will soon bring about similar results?
(terrible job of proofreading sheesh!)

[ 03 September 2004: Message edited by: britchestoobig ]

Evolution does indeed tend to produce specialization over time, but there are many ways of specialization that have nothing to do with intelligence. Some ciliates- like Paramecium- have the most sophisticated cell structures of all known lifeforms, but I doubt one of them has ever posted on babble, never mind written the Critique of Pure Reason. Ants, bees, and termites have developed social behaviour that is far more sophisticated than their apparent intelligence would seem to allow- by "simple" hardwired behavioural patterns.

But Gould has said something else (sorry, I can't find the reference right now). He said, more or less, that social evolution involves Lamarckian aspects not found in biological evolution. Organisms appear not to be able to influence the way their genes mutate, but we have at least some control over how our memes mutate. (I don't think Gould used the term "memes", BTW, because Dawkins coined the term and they didn't like each other very much).

So if this is the case, intelligence might yet turn out to be adaptive... if we can learn to manage it better than we do right now. Fortunately, the way culture evolves seems to allow an outside chance that we will.

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A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein

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But Lamarkian doesn't mean guaranteed...nor does it mean "better".

Say our current hyper-growth phase leads to a burnout (bad pun) before we develope viable alternatives to oil. As others on babble have worried about it, given the current situation we could be looking at a Dark Age.

But herein lies the rub, if the resources that lead to our specialized technological culture have been exhausted who's to say our Dark Age2 grandchildren will be able to develope into a more sophisticated culture? Lamarkian evolution would allow them to develope culturally, and even technologically...but they may never be able to make large enough intuitive leaps to solve the problems that currently elude *us* at our highest point of human technological sophistication (and we with all our oil, all our copper and aluminum)?

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(because while I say I don't believe in alien civ's I'd be major BS'ing if I said I didn't find it as interesting as the rest of you) Quick aside on another point made above :

When you say that other civilizations might be "millions of years" more advanced than us...what does that mean? Does technology necessarily steadily improve?

Are there physical limits to what can be done? The question of light speed is familiar, but what about energy sources...anything better than hydrogen fusion? Any weapons better than fusion bombs? How far can we go on improving materials - are their millions of years of possible improvements on molecular structure?

Good thread!

[ 03 September 2004: Message edited by: britchestoobig ]

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Originally posted by britchestoobig:
You're right about Lamarkian evolution and human culture...

But Lamarkian doesn't mean guaranteed...nor does it mean "better".

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No, of course not. But it offers the possibility of improving many orders of magnitude faster than would be possible by genetic evolution. Whether this will be fast enough to get us out of the mess we're in right now remains to be seen. I still have hope that it might.

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Say our current hyper-growth phase leads to a burnout (bad pun) before we develope viable alternatives to oil. As others on babble have worried about it, given the current situation we could be looking at a Dark Age.

But herein lies the rub, if the resources that lead to our specialized technological culture have been exhausted who's to say our Dark Age2 grandchildren will be able to develope into a more sophisticated culture? Lamarkian evolution would allow them to develope culturally, and even technologically...but they may never be able to make large enough intuitive leaps to solve the problems that currently elude *us* at our highest point of human technological sophistication (and we with all our oil, all our copper and aluminum)?

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Again, I don't know. It's an open question. And given that we don't know, we'd be well advised to avoid testing that hypothesis.

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When you say that other civilizations might be "millions of years" more advanced than us...what does that mean? Does technology necessarily steadily improve?

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No, not necessarily. But if interstellar travel is ever possible (I'm not counting on FTL, but travel at relativistic speeds still seems to me to be a possibility) then any civilization who develops it may well produce numerous "daughter civilizations", which will then evolve in virtual isolation (barring FTL travel or communication, of course). It is likely that some of those will continue to develop technologically. And biological evolution will continue as well, though the selection pressures will change (and possibly be subject to conscious influence, if genetic engineering becomes sufficiently well understood).

Representatives of a civilization millions of years older than ours could be extremely diverse- one colony might be enormously advanced technologically and/or socially, while another might revert to a level of development ranging from barbarism, to feudalism, to... They might be "like us but smarter", or they might be something we simply don't have the concepts to describe.

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Are there physical limits to what can be done? The question of light speed is familiar, but what about energy sources...anything better than hydrogen fusion? Any weapons better than fusion bombs? How far can we go on improving materials - are their millions of years of possible improvements on molecular structure?

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Better than fusion bombs? A rather odd use of the word "better", but I suppose that cobalt bombs might fit the bill. Good way to sterilize a planet so that you could terraform it in a century or so.

Pellegrino has expressed concern that the development of interstellar spaceflight might turn out to be a bad thing, because the different isolated societies might turn out to be a threat to one another in the same way he imagines different species would.

John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes (1953) gives a similarly pessimistic account of the compatability of two intelligent species.

[ 04 September 2004: Message edited by: Mike Keenan ]

I don't know. That's easy enough to say. But what are the odds that the first interstellar species we make contact with are as desperate as we are or will be in the future?. I'd say that if they're that technologically advanced to travel or send projectiles our way, then why should they bother doing something as immoral/amoral as wiping us out ?. I know, it doesn't fit with all those sci-fi movies we've viewed as kids where the U.S. or Japanese military has to pull out all the stops to save us.

A mathematician once estimated the number of earth-like planets out there. In this universe and galaxies that we know exist, he suggested that there could exist as many as 13 million earths for every human being.

Radio emissions travel indefinitely. But the message of the signal breaks up after a time, depending on how powerful it is (wattage), frequency and the integrity.

This is why it is so hard for radio telescopes to decipher background static, solar radiation (which can in some cases scramble radio signals), quasars, pulsars etc. Apparently a leading US astronomer in the early 20th century got a look at various flashing lights in space and interpreted these as beacon lights from deep space craft. What they are in fact are pulsars.

What is used in the Star Trek galaxy is sub-space communication via accessing what's called a "tachyon grid." It's not all-super fantasy. Apparently, it's been mathematically concluded that the existence of tachyons is quite possible (although physically they have never been identified). These are sub-atomic particles that supposedly exist in a state of flux between matter and energy (like most sub-atomic particles) and travel faster than light, since they have no measurable mass.

That can make communication almost instantaneous over hundreds of light years.

However, harnessing this would take fission, converting matter to energy in sub-space in a controlled manner and organizing the tachyons in a way that can carry a signal, transmitting it in the right direction at the right frequency, and then turning the energy back into matter at the sub-space level without losing or distorting the signal and transferring it to photons/electrons where it can be heard or seen.

Even if it's possible, the technology to do this is but a gleam in some sci-fi writers' eyes. Don't expect to see it any time soon.

As for life on other planets, I do believe it's possible, and, if it does exist, it just makes sense given the size and diversity of the universe. But also given that our solar system is way out on the edge of an arm of the galaxy, where distances between stars is so great and interaction so remote, it may be so far away that we will never find it, and it won't find us, assuming it is even there and it is looking.

But I think "life" may have a whole lot broader definition than we're used to. There may be life; it may even be "intelligent" by our definition. But it is by necessity compatible to us in terms of communication or evolution.

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Originally posted by Fidel:

I don't know. That's easy enough to say. But what are the odds that the first interstellar species we make contact with are as desperate as we are or will be in the future?. I'd say that if they're that technologically advanced to travel or send projectiles our way, then why should they bother doing something as immoral/amoral as wiping us out ?. I know, it doesn't fit with all those sci-fi movies we've viewed as kids where the U.S. or Japanese military has to pull out all the stops to save us.

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You might well be right. If the civilizations' points of origin are far enough apart, then by the time they actually encounter one another they will likely have colonized a number of planets in different star systems, so annihlation ceases to be a good strategy (since you could miss a colony somewhere, which might wreak furious vengeance on your own civilization).

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A mathematician once estimated the number of earth-like planets out there. In this universe and galaxies that we know exist, he suggested that there could exist as many as 13 million earths for every human being.

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A more useful question is how many advanced civilizations might exist in our own galaxy. There's something called the Drake Equation that addresses the question. Very hard to come to any conclusive answer, given the unknown factors. Interesting, though.

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And string theorists are suggesting that parallel universes may exist afterall. Eleven of them!. They're calling it the theory of everything.

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Originally posted by Mike Keenan:

The idea of a "theory of everything" has been around for a fair bit of time, ever since they discovered inconsistencies between general relativity and quantum mechanics (don't ask me what the inconsistencies are, I'm just taking the physicists' word on this one). Some way must be found to reconcile them, by modifying relativity, quantum mechanics, or both. String theories are one possible solution to this problem, but I haven't a clue how to properly judge them on their own merits.

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Neither do I, really. As far as I can tell, there are physicists working to develop particle accelerator experiments in at least two world locations right now. There is a very large particle accelerator tube being built somewhere in Europe at great cost and will provide some advantages over an American one being used now. They plan to observe previously unknown components of "dark matter" thought to comprise a large portion of all matter in the universe.

I believe that quantum physics is currently used to measure and describe particle, or sub-atomic physics. Relativity theory is used more in measuring interstellar phenemenon on a very large scale.

String theory seeks to unify the two general areas of physics into a grand unified theory...I think.

General relativity involves the study of gravity, and thus very BIG objects. Quantum mechanics involves the study of electromagnetism as well as the weak and strong nuclear forces and so deals with very SMALL objects.

Since microscopic particles do not feel much of any kind of gravitational interaction with each other, gravity is effectively ignored on the quantum scale.

Similarly, because quantum effects are virtually nil on the large scale (we do not see ice cubes in a glass of water suddenly appear outside the cup, as we would if quantum tunnelling was evident on a macroscopic scale), general relativity can ignore quantum mechanical effects when dealing with large masses and the distortions of spacetime that such masses produce.

And so GR and QM are two solitudes each in their own domain.

But try to put them together and it doesn't work. A quantum mechanical description of gravity using the same process as you use for quantizing electromagnetism produces nonsense results. Part of why this is, is because on extremely small scales, the universe is not a smooth spacetime continuum as GR posits. Instead, it's a violent foam of particles appearing, disappearing, moving about, and in general frantically blipping in and out from one moment to the next. However, we see a smooth spacetime continuum on large scales because this foam "averages out" to zero. This is a bit of a hand-waving explanation, I admit, but just trust me.

This is the fundamental incompatibility that people can't shunt over, get around, or do away with unless there's something wrong with the conception of the building blocks of matter.

String theory shows why quantum mechanics is likely incorrect as to the basic nature of matter, and its new description exactly wipes out the nonsense results from a quantum description of gravity. For the curious, the argument runs as follows:

In quantum mechanics, basic particles like the electron, mu meson, and tau as well as the quarks are all treated as essentially pointlike objects with no spatial extent except that due to the inevitable smearing out of their wavefunctions as a result of the uncertainty principle. This description is OK, but is part of why quantizing gravity messes things up. If you instead take the equally reasonable view that the fundamental particles are spatially extended by a small amount, i.e. they are NOT the most fundamental building blocks of matter, this wipes out the problem of quantizing gravity.

Very powerful stuff.

[ 04 September 2004: Message edited by: DrConway ]

So I'll just randomly interject.

After all those pessimistic scenarios, novels and stories presented at the beginning, may I recommend "First Contact".

The accelerating expansion of the universe was unknown 10 years ago. Physicist have been running for cover ever since.

They call this universal anti-gravity 'dark energy', which should give you a clue about how much is understood about it. I mean if it's driving everything in the universe apart faster and faster every second then there's got to be exponentially more dark energy coming into existence every second to accomplish this feat.

We have progressed to a point where our questions get a little bit better, but real answers continue to be illusive.

[ 04 September 2004: Message edited by: JimmyBrogan ]

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1) The natural resources on Mars are poor and will soon begin to run out. Mars is faced with two inexorable alternatives: either its socialist civilisation will enter a phase of degeneration i.e. take the path to its destruction, or it will save itself at the expense of the widened exploitation of the natural resources of other planets. Already in 35 years the shortage of resources will adversely affect it.

2) There is no choice. What is necessary is the immediate colonisation of Earth and Venus. Earth would be preferable; there may not be enough time and energy for Venus. But Earth is populated by the human race, with whom it is impossible to reach a Peaceful agreement because of biopsychic incompatibility — this was shown by the experiment on Leonid N.

3) Strictly logical calculation shows (as one of the heroes of the novel says) that sooner or later, 'after long hesitation and the fruitless and agonising squandering of our energy, the matter will inevitably lead to the same formulation of the problem which we, as conscious beings who foresee the course of events, should accept from the very beginning: the colonisation of Earth requires the complete extermination of earthly mankind . . .'

The conclusion: if the Martian — higher — form of socialism is to survive and flourish, it must sacrifice the lower — earthly — form of life.

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The novel is Red Star by A. Bogdanov, someone whom Lenin wrote about in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as having 'gone off the rails'...

Edited to add: Eventually, Martian love of humans saves the day. How Feuerbachian!

I found this in an essay by Ewald Ilyenkov

The Metaphysics of Positivism - Ilyenkov, E

[ 04 September 2004: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

Have any of you read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson? I got it from the library this summer as a brain-candy book and quickly discovered that the author's intention was to allude the problems of our near future.

Aliens who could travel at the speed of light or close to it would benefit from the relativistic effects of time delation. So a thousand year journey would seem like hours to the people on board who, the theory goes, would not age.

But their commanders at home would. So would their relatives friends and societies. For their to be any social cohesion in a civilization with light speed capability they would also have to be virtually immortal or at minimum have very , very long lifespans - say at least a million years for the civilization to have any extra solar system scope.

Long lived sentient beings would either go mad with boredom or develop a much higher conciousness and have not only vast knowledge and power but also wisdom.

Why would they destroy other lifeforms holus bolus?

A couple of movies that illustrate this type of thing are the origional "Stargate" and another little regarded alien abbduction "true story" film "Fire in the Sky".

In the latter the aliens are amphibian-like and have an interest in DNA and life forms. Amphibians like some frogs can suspend their life functions for years. So this lends a certain veracity to the idea that a star hopping race of aliens would have to genetically engineer capacities for long life and some autonomic form of suspended animation.

Would they not also look to avoid destroying the equivalent of a galactic "rainforest" like earth? Would they not have a great reverence for life and its diversity for practical as well as spiritual reasons?

The negative suppositions were used in the movie "Independence Day" but the problem is that the energy trade-off doesn't work. To get across the vast reaches of space to simply plunder a planetary system is not cost effective from an energy efficiency point of view. In advances technological planets you have the same problem as the locusts of the US army are having in Iraq and had in Vietnam. A peaceful civilization is more productive and will provide more of the essentials through some form of trade rather than through imperialism.

I guess the question for SETI and others is then why haven't the social eqiuivalents of the phonecians showed up?

[ 05 September 2004: Message edited by: DonnyBGood ]

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Originally posted by DonnyBGood:
I think that these suppositions are false.

Aliens who could travel at the speed of light or close to it would benefit from the relativistic effects of time delation. So a thousand year journey would seem like hours to the people on board who, the theory goes, would not age.

But their commanders at home would. So would their relatives friends and societies. For their to be any social cohesion in a civilization with light speed capability they would also have to be virtually immortal or at minimum have very , very long lifespans - say at least a million years for the civilization to have any extra solar system scope.

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I never got into it but there was a TV series a few years ago that started off with this premise only have it to morph into some sort of aliens-with-a-secret-agenda-of -conquest type thing. Was it - hmm - Babylon 5?

Oh well.

And I'm only half a century old. What havoc would 10,000 centuries play on memory?

[ 05 September 2004: Message edited by: DonnyBGood ]

However, in the second season they fired the main character and did some stupid plot kludges and the show became a completely mindless "youth-oriented action series." It was tragic.

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...he's a much better writer than an actor actually...

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