As our equipment improves, and as we begin to investigate remote planets without the filter of Earth's atmosphere, we’re going to get increasingly refined analysis of our galactic neighborhood. If it turns out we live in a completely lifeless universal desert, or if we live in a galaxy filled with countless life-filled worlds, either way, human beings will carry on pretty much as they always have. Nonetheless, on the remote chance we someday find a way to actually transit interstellar space, I prefer a universe with many habitable worlds. Allowing the human race multiple bites at the apple, rather than just relying on old Manhome, Planet Dirt, and the lifeless worlds of our solar system, would be a great boon.
A lifeless universe, with neither alien jungles to explore, alien empires to go to war with, or alien princesses to seduce, would be an extremely boring place to inhabit.
And the universe does not seem to like boring, so.
The relative distances and travel-times results in divergent human evolution on the colonised worlds so much that after enough time (no more than a paltry few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, local time) there's no human race as we would recognise it.
Add biomodtech to the mix and the time-scale both shortens and the idea of "human" becomes "ancestors originated at Earth" and nothing more.
Consider how alien different cultures feel to each other already on a Earth, then scale it up to 100 000 worlds across the Milky Way, spearated by thousands of years of travel/communication-time at the least.
The most likely backdrop for a future Star Trek universe would be "interstellar HBD on steroids", yes. Heck, things could get interesting just within our own solar system, given a few centuries of gene-editing and other selection pressures. Anyway, the important takeaway is that green alien space bitches are within our technical capabilities.
Unless the UAPs are waiting for us to invent warp drive, I guess, in which case most of the real estate may be taken.
Unfortunately, the pan-human galactic empire may have the side effect of wiping out (or at least unrecognisably altering) the ecosystems of any life-bearing world we come across. It's hard to imagine our species having the discipline to maintain microbial quarantine for billions of years. But maybe AGI will have taken over by then.
Now add the possibility of drugs and tech allowing humans to essentially live forever to the mix. Brain-in-a-jar, tweaked DNA so that you reset via pseudo-puberty every 50 years back to biological age 20 while retaining your mind, vat-grown spare bodies enabling those with the power and the means to become Legion (not L.E.G.I.O.N. that's a comic book from the 1980s), mind-uploading into VR-space, robot bodies, AI/neuro-interfaces... and more.
Oh my, "what is a human" will either be /the/ question, or something no-one cares about.
With enough fiddling about, maybe a life-form such as the eponymous Thing from Carpenter's movie is the logical end to genetical manipulation: the mind carried dispersed in all the cells, and any cell can be any type and kind of cell, and any biological organism can be replicated and/or consumed for energy.
A billion years out there in some galaxy, maybe there's a final showdown right now, between the ultimate parsecs-wide living world bio-beast and its arch-enemy the pico-bot goop-swarm massing several stellar masses...
Egad, but I do miss playing Traveller with my mates way back when.
Yeah, radical longevity (and related technologies like somatic gene-editing) is the last major ace in the hole for liberalism, in some sense. The future will either be reactionary or transhuman.
Of course, abolishing death would eventually create it's own problems if you still have any non-zero fertility rate. But extending healthy life another 50 years would buy time to solve a lot of other problems.
I think the greatest problem would be people creating copies of themselves. We think we'd get along, but we wouldn't want to take orders from ourselves, and we'd all suffer from impostor-syndrome writ large.
To get real wild, imagine some future Eloise Frankenmusk tweaking hishers DNA so that it acts as an airborne pathogen infecting all other high enough life-forms and hi-jacks the cells' repair&replication cycle so that every infectee becomes a new Eloise Frankenmusk.
Then imagine them going to war with each other over who is the real one, using borderline Lensman-levels of tech.
That's the sad thing about tech: if it can be done, someone will do it, and in some scenarios it only takes one and once for a gamma ray-induced holocaust to seem the only way to be sure.
Loved your point that the only proof acceptable to that UAP skeptic would be unacceptable to any other skeptic. He is making the very unscientific confession that only *subjective* evidence will convince him!
Hoyle & Wickramasinghe's Panspermia theory, indeed any theory that holds that life is common in the universe, contradicts one of the basic (though long obsolete) metaphysical axioms of science: that the universe tends toward disorder, that order, design, intelligence comes only from human beings (or a supernatural God that imposes such from without). Scientists therefore are uncomfortable with the idea that life is an inherent property of the universe, that the universe is replete with life, whether in protostellar clouds or spontaneously arising wherever conditions make it possible. LIfe must be an extremely rare statistical anomaly in order to maintain the exile of God from creation. The mechanists' formula is Determinism + Randomness = Creation. They cannot countenance any kind of teleological principle. I discussed this in a book 20 years ago: https://ascentofhumanity.com/text/chapter-6-08/. The whole chapter is relevant to this discussion.
The irony of his response points to something rather deep, in fact, which is that very often that which is most deeply convincing at a personal level is the most unconvincing, collectively. There's a sort of attenuation that seems to accompany evidence ... the greater the number of people that can simultaneously access a given datum, the more ambiguous it becomes.
This question of order and entropy is something I've been thinking about a lot, recently. Entropy indeed increases, but this is only fatal in a closed system. But our universe isn't really closed! It's expanding ... Adding new space all the time. That means the capacity for entropy increases. I suspect this is related to the fact that structure grows more complex, rather than less, over time ... that somehow entropy, evolution, information, learning, cosmic expansion, dark energy are all deeply interrelated. I've found a number of papers exploring this...
Yeah, and also there are cosmological theories in which the Big Bang isn't the only source of negentropy, but new matter/energy is constantly being born. In that case we live in a universe of fundamental abundance. I'd be interested if someday you would examine some of the "electric universe" theories and report back to us. I think there is something to them, but they get real dogmatic and my knowledge of physics is inadequate to separate the gold from the dross.
I actually looked pretty deeply into those theories quite a while ago. I used to be quite taken with them. I still think, in a limited sense, EU/plasma cosmology has a lot of extremely important insights, but I've also come to the conclusion that the evidence for expansion is simply too compelling. The EU guys tend to get out over their skis a lot, but the mainstream is too quick to write off some of their insights. The truth is likely found in the union of the two.
That seems right. I think that plasma is a lot harder to model than gravity, because it generates self-organizing nonlinear structures. What is hard to model is left out. Same goes for climate modeling.
It does, but then so does gravity. N-body simulations are very complex. Not as much as MHD, even in the ideal approximation. But still, all those funky looking, spidery cosmic web simulations - that's just gravity.
I will probably out myself as woefully naive, mystical, and unscientific with this one, but in my view evolution and entropy are cyclical components, each giving rise to the other. Picture this like a circle with "order/evolution" at the top, "chaos/entropy" at the bottom, and the curve of the cycle labeled "time and change." All that lives eventually dies. All organic death feeds the organic ecosystem somehow, from fertilizer to food, giving rise to life. Oversimplification? Maybe, but I don't claim to have a Ph.D. in any of the hard sciences. Just a lay hack who once saw the "face of god" in the Mandelbrot set and started thinking of chaos itself (scientifically speaking, not morally/socially) as a type of order so complex that it eluded pattern detection.
Enjoy the contemplation (or the laugh!) as needed.
And yes! I remember reading that chapter. The Ascent of Humanity had a big influence on me. A big takeaway is that so much of what we believe is a choice ... it isn't forced on us by evidence, because that can often point in multiple directions. And there are many questions for which evidence per se is actually impossible.
"Unless I can stick my fingers into those wounds myself, I will not believe he is risen" -- bible stuff, paraphrased. I should preface this by stating openly I'm not a bible believer. I just find the unabashed record of the need for subjective evidence in that story a bit fascinating in this context.
The default axiomatic assumption that we are unique and alone, floating in a cosmic sea of glittering stars (and lifeless planets circling them) is itself a religious conceit in my view, a holdover from an era where mythic lore invested with "absolute truth, don't question it" authoritarianism proffered the view that our existence was nothing less than a six-day miracle, accomplished via fiat forthspeaking by a "one ring to rule them all" entity alleged to have immediately banished us from earthly Paradise for seeking knowledge he reserved entirely for himself. That view held more sway over the minds of men and women than the solid discoveries and postulates of what maths, sciences, and philosophical speculations we had even back when it was canonized.
Clinging to it as an absolute axiom, scientifically, strikes me as just as superstitious, and rejection of the subjective experiences of others while accepting confirmation in the form of having one's own subjective encounter, some sort of metaprophetic "tell" upon the nature of humanity itself. As such, it seems to point to a fatal flaw in our reckoning -- with ourselves, with one another, and ultimately with the whole universe around us -- which easily could serve as its own self-fulfilling Fermi Paradox barricade.
Good article my only question is why call it K2-18b when there's so much better names like Beren, Dejah or Aquilonia or something? The name seems pretty boring to me.
I know I know bad nitpick on my part, anyways knew that this discovery would catch your attention good sir! X)
K for Kepler. K2 because the Kepler mission was extended to Kepler-2 when the reaction wheel failed. 18 because that's the K2 catalogue order. b because it's the first planet found in the system (there's also a second, c; the star is always a).
But yes, more poetic names would be nice, I agree.
I didn’t know that, only glanced over it. Spent the day researching some history of couples in the 1940s.
I must admit that Kepler is a cool name, I like it. Hmmm, Kepler-2 sounds like a Star Wars or Sci-Fi name I withdraw my fussy objection. Next planet should be named something more poetic. The Dejah and the Thoris demand usage.
Heck, we have a bunch of gals that did just that the other day. I saw it on the news. And then they demanded to be given medals of honor or some-such. They would have served mankind better by just baking us some cookies.
Let's stick with technical nomenclature until the woke mind virus is extinct. The current trend is to give astronomical things obscure and meaningless names from primitive cultures that were never capable of making any discoveries of their own.
The reason the midwit intellectual class can’t entertain the concept of alien intelligence is because their worldview implicitly positions them as not just the smartest beings on the planet now, but on the planet ever, in this solar system ever, in this galaxy ever and in this universe ever. They are therefor the smartest creatures anywhere, ever. They will not dethrone themselves easily or willingly.
Their hubris explains almost all modern political and social phenomena in the same way. You must understand that the smartest people in the universe ever simply can’t be wrong ever, or their worldviews and egos start to collapse with terrifying rapidity, which would leave them staring into the void of their intellectual averageness and unplummable hubris.
Robin Hanson makes a plausible argument that the Fermi paradox is explained by our being very early in the development of the universe. It takes several hard step to reach intelligent life. This early universe is a chaotic, a game of snakes and ladders, mostly snakes now but slowly more ladders over the aeons. The more we learn about the universe the more it's clear we've been lucky indeed. We grew up in a quiet neighbourhood of the universe, a sleepy galaxy and a stable solar system. We are goldilocks in an empty house.
Combine that with my fervent hope that life is ubiquitous, in the next few billion years things are going to get very busy. We're the first. The universe is ours for the taking.
We will build stargates, leave fragments of dangerous technologies strewn about, engineer starts and galaxies, write cryptic inscriptions faroff moons, blast whole fractions of the universe apart in of million year wars. And when finally we end or transcend the new young intelligences will find us and wonder. We will be the elder gods to them.
While the odds are life exists elsewhere, I have believed for some time that the UFOs could be time travellers. I wouldn't be surprised if the weird looking aliens people have described are future humans whose DNA was altered by the jab and other uncontrolled experiments with the genome. The experiments on people might be to collect unaltered DNA by those groups wishing to fix the problem.
Did you miss the Dark Forest solution to the Fermi paradox, or are you considering it represented by furtive UAPs? I am not sure the two scenarios are the same? There might be some overlap I suppose. The Dark Forest says “avoid detection at all costs” but as we have literally broadcast our existence, maybe some brave/rash xenos would come and check up on us furtively. That would be very risky on their part though. Earth might be a honey trap set by bigger badder xenos.
Dark Forest is clever but doesn't work. A large enough telescope - well within the capacity of a Kardashev 1 civilization to build - can see pre-technological worlds quite easily. No one can actually hide.
Ah good rebuttal. I hadn’t heard that one. It is a plank of Dark Forest that each civilisation goes through a brief period of visibility before it understands the need to hide and gains the means to do so. So you are saying - such means are more or less impossible? Or incompatible with maintaining a civilisation.
A few decades ago we knew of no exoplanets, but now we know of thousands. We currently only know of one path to intelligent life, but in time we may discover many more.
You may be greatly underestimating the number of inhabited worlds if the number of objects in the solar system with subsurface oceans (or at least water) is any indication. There might be several such worlds per star.
The galaxy may be filled with the potential for life, but much of that life may be thwarted by circumstances beyond their control. Habitable zones shift. Mars and Venus may have been places with complex life, until they weren't. Life may be locked under miles of ice. (I can imagine some hardy, pioneering species making its way to the surface through cracks in the ice and establishing itself on "land", but we don't see that yet.) A technological civilization on a hycean world would be unable to reach space with chemical rockets. Life may arise on a planet orbiting a star with a short residence on the main sequence, finally achieving intelligence just as their world is doomed by its sun.
I wonder about high radiation environments. They are lethal to us, but could they be places of rapid evolution for other, tougher life forms?
If we can survive the current crises, we may be on the verge of a new age of discovery.
The ice worlds are fascinating cases. Interstellar space is probably full of orphan planets. With enough radioactive heating, you could have chemosynthetic ecosystems buried under miles of ice, perfectly insulated from radiation, happily ignorant of the rest of the universe. I've seen it suggested that these might even be the most common biospheres in the galaxy.
The road of science is well paved with bones. Most often the experts need die before the next section of the road can be built.
You mentioned diastrophism versus continental drift. When I was in school in the late fifties everybody who was anybody knew the shape, etc. of the continents was due to diastrophic forces, wind, water, weather, etc. Gondwana, land masses breaking up, let alone moving around the ocean, just plain silly! I brought up continental drift in a geology class and my grade dropped from an A level to C. The powers that were in the field had built their reputations on diastrophism and that had to die off before drift could be seriously considered.
BTW: I notice the meaning of diastrophism today has been expanded to include continental drift.
Space spores? I wonder what those that know today think about ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.
Continental drift is a really excellent example. The idea came from outside the academy, was fiercely resisted as rank pseudoscience, and then quietly adopted as obviously true with not another word said.
This happens all the time yet somehow it is not something academics ever incorporate into their epistemology.
We try, oh how we try, when we teach scientific theory and ideas, to impart to students no matter what track they're on, the understanding and humility necessary to remember that paradigms shift, and that science is not a static state, and that they should therefore always consider all their scientific truths as:
"As far as we know right now"
and
"Ceteris paribus"
About 1/100 gets it, I'd say. The rest, for whatever reason, fall into the trap of the "King of the Hill"; once you reach the top or your plateu of choice, you stop climbing and start trying to keep others from challenging you.
And that - that is the root of our brain at work.
"I have achieved a position of comfort, safety, and plenty, and need not strive any longer"
Mental Dodo-ism, and it's universal, no-one is immune to it, and it is natural to us.
Space is the one challenge we have left that can mitigate this impulse, I'd argue.
(This "mental Dodo-ism" is also why we adopt faiths, schools of thought and ideologies as roadmaps and blueprints; it's easier than always adopting the empirical, realist and pragmatic approach, and it feels a lot better to believe in something, than not having any belief.)
In the late 1960s or early 1970s my mother bought me a science encyclopedia. It was a deal where you buy one volume per week at the supermarket for $1 per volume until you have the full set - 20 volumes in all. I ended up reading the entire thing during the summer of 1973. Unfortunately, while there was much useful information, not all of it was current, particularly on the subject of continental drift. The book acknowledged it but said it wasn't proven, so instead they drew enormous land bridges connecting South America to Africa, and both continents to Antarctica, etc. I think it was still more current than most of the textbooks I had in high school, though I don't remember if we ever covered geology.
My recollection (from the early 1980s) is that continental drift was rejected for lack of a mechanism.
It was when plate tectonics, quasi-solid crustal plates floating on a viscously liquid mantle over a hotter core, and butting up against each other, became accepted, that there was a plausible mechanism for the drift of continents.
(And volcanism, too, and the spatiotemporal distribution of large earthquakes and ongoing deformations of the earth's surface: parsimony of causes is always attractive. In turn, the mantle was liquid in large part because of the heating effects of radioactive isotopes in the earth's core and mantle. Parsimony of causes again.)
I have ever since believed that science is the search for mechanism.
I appreciate the angle taken that UAPs, like many other concepts that seem to perpetually hover around the fringe, are always treated by default as fringe/nonsensical, and are predictably found wanting in the believability department no matter what allegations are made with what evidence. Phenomena like this seem to be dismissed out of hand not necessarily because they are wrong (though I'm sure many particular instances are), but because they need to be within the constraints of current paradigms.
That preemptive dwelling in the "peace and safety of a new dark age" which occurs on behalf of established narratives, because things are hard enough to piece together without new revelations that flip the table entirely; to say nothing of careerist motives. Seems very similar (to draw us back into the mud) to the recent flare up between Murray and Smith on Rogan. The rank credentialism of Murray and his class against Smith or Cooper is having a hard enough time defending itself, as the narrative generators of the age, as is, it doesn't have time for whippersnappers it can (or thinks it can) smear out of the discourse.
Another reason why 'fringe' occurrences are treated by default as such and so easily dismissed, no matter what the evidence, is that each individual 'incident' is treated as such. A singular 'freak' incident that is meaningless by itself. It's a fluke. And so it goes again, and again, and again, and again.
If you keep treating every case as solitary, and refuse to see any (potential) links to other, earlier such 'flukes', it's all the easier to remain where they want to be, in that beautiful and glorious State of Denial, where no Challenges to Established Authority (aka genuinely terrifying monsters) live.
There’s good odds that we have been detected by the wrong sort of aliens or will be soon and a weapon is or will be in transit to destroy us. We need to get our house in order and start moving.
As our equipment improves, and as we begin to investigate remote planets without the filter of Earth's atmosphere, we’re going to get increasingly refined analysis of our galactic neighborhood. If it turns out we live in a completely lifeless universal desert, or if we live in a galaxy filled with countless life-filled worlds, either way, human beings will carry on pretty much as they always have. Nonetheless, on the remote chance we someday find a way to actually transit interstellar space, I prefer a universe with many habitable worlds. Allowing the human race multiple bites at the apple, rather than just relying on old Manhome, Planet Dirt, and the lifeless worlds of our solar system, would be a great boon.
A lifeless universe, with neither alien jungles to explore, alien empires to go to war with, or alien princesses to seduce, would be an extremely boring place to inhabit.
And the universe does not seem to like boring, so.
It would become filled with aliens:
The relative distances and travel-times results in divergent human evolution on the colonised worlds so much that after enough time (no more than a paltry few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, local time) there's no human race as we would recognise it.
Add biomodtech to the mix and the time-scale both shortens and the idea of "human" becomes "ancestors originated at Earth" and nothing more.
Consider how alien different cultures feel to each other already on a Earth, then scale it up to 100 000 worlds across the Milky Way, spearated by thousands of years of travel/communication-time at the least.
We will have aliens!
The most likely backdrop for a future Star Trek universe would be "interstellar HBD on steroids", yes. Heck, things could get interesting just within our own solar system, given a few centuries of gene-editing and other selection pressures. Anyway, the important takeaway is that green alien space bitches are within our technical capabilities.
Unless the UAPs are waiting for us to invent warp drive, I guess, in which case most of the real estate may be taken.
Unfortunately, the pan-human galactic empire may have the side effect of wiping out (or at least unrecognisably altering) the ecosystems of any life-bearing world we come across. It's hard to imagine our species having the discipline to maintain microbial quarantine for billions of years. But maybe AGI will have taken over by then.
Now add the possibility of drugs and tech allowing humans to essentially live forever to the mix. Brain-in-a-jar, tweaked DNA so that you reset via pseudo-puberty every 50 years back to biological age 20 while retaining your mind, vat-grown spare bodies enabling those with the power and the means to become Legion (not L.E.G.I.O.N. that's a comic book from the 1980s), mind-uploading into VR-space, robot bodies, AI/neuro-interfaces... and more.
Oh my, "what is a human" will either be /the/ question, or something no-one cares about.
With enough fiddling about, maybe a life-form such as the eponymous Thing from Carpenter's movie is the logical end to genetical manipulation: the mind carried dispersed in all the cells, and any cell can be any type and kind of cell, and any biological organism can be replicated and/or consumed for energy.
A billion years out there in some galaxy, maybe there's a final showdown right now, between the ultimate parsecs-wide living world bio-beast and its arch-enemy the pico-bot goop-swarm massing several stellar masses...
Egad, but I do miss playing Traveller with my mates way back when.
Yeah, radical longevity (and related technologies like somatic gene-editing) is the last major ace in the hole for liberalism, in some sense. The future will either be reactionary or transhuman.
Of course, abolishing death would eventually create it's own problems if you still have any non-zero fertility rate. But extending healthy life another 50 years would buy time to solve a lot of other problems.
I think the greatest problem would be people creating copies of themselves. We think we'd get along, but we wouldn't want to take orders from ourselves, and we'd all suffer from impostor-syndrome writ large.
To get real wild, imagine some future Eloise Frankenmusk tweaking hishers DNA so that it acts as an airborne pathogen infecting all other high enough life-forms and hi-jacks the cells' repair&replication cycle so that every infectee becomes a new Eloise Frankenmusk.
Then imagine them going to war with each other over who is the real one, using borderline Lensman-levels of tech.
That's the sad thing about tech: if it can be done, someone will do it, and in some scenarios it only takes one and once for a gamma ray-induced holocaust to seem the only way to be sure.
One way or the other, yes.
Dejah Thoris and the Heliumetic aero-fleet may be out there …
Loved your point that the only proof acceptable to that UAP skeptic would be unacceptable to any other skeptic. He is making the very unscientific confession that only *subjective* evidence will convince him!
Hoyle & Wickramasinghe's Panspermia theory, indeed any theory that holds that life is common in the universe, contradicts one of the basic (though long obsolete) metaphysical axioms of science: that the universe tends toward disorder, that order, design, intelligence comes only from human beings (or a supernatural God that imposes such from without). Scientists therefore are uncomfortable with the idea that life is an inherent property of the universe, that the universe is replete with life, whether in protostellar clouds or spontaneously arising wherever conditions make it possible. LIfe must be an extremely rare statistical anomaly in order to maintain the exile of God from creation. The mechanists' formula is Determinism + Randomness = Creation. They cannot countenance any kind of teleological principle. I discussed this in a book 20 years ago: https://ascentofhumanity.com/text/chapter-6-08/. The whole chapter is relevant to this discussion.
The irony of his response points to something rather deep, in fact, which is that very often that which is most deeply convincing at a personal level is the most unconvincing, collectively. There's a sort of attenuation that seems to accompany evidence ... the greater the number of people that can simultaneously access a given datum, the more ambiguous it becomes.
This question of order and entropy is something I've been thinking about a lot, recently. Entropy indeed increases, but this is only fatal in a closed system. But our universe isn't really closed! It's expanding ... Adding new space all the time. That means the capacity for entropy increases. I suspect this is related to the fact that structure grows more complex, rather than less, over time ... that somehow entropy, evolution, information, learning, cosmic expansion, dark energy are all deeply interrelated. I've found a number of papers exploring this...
I learned something today and helped expand the universe!
Yeah, and also there are cosmological theories in which the Big Bang isn't the only source of negentropy, but new matter/energy is constantly being born. In that case we live in a universe of fundamental abundance. I'd be interested if someday you would examine some of the "electric universe" theories and report back to us. I think there is something to them, but they get real dogmatic and my knowledge of physics is inadequate to separate the gold from the dross.
I actually looked pretty deeply into those theories quite a while ago. I used to be quite taken with them. I still think, in a limited sense, EU/plasma cosmology has a lot of extremely important insights, but I've also come to the conclusion that the evidence for expansion is simply too compelling. The EU guys tend to get out over their skis a lot, but the mainstream is too quick to write off some of their insights. The truth is likely found in the union of the two.
That seems right. I think that plasma is a lot harder to model than gravity, because it generates self-organizing nonlinear structures. What is hard to model is left out. Same goes for climate modeling.
It does, but then so does gravity. N-body simulations are very complex. Not as much as MHD, even in the ideal approximation. But still, all those funky looking, spidery cosmic web simulations - that's just gravity.
I will probably out myself as woefully naive, mystical, and unscientific with this one, but in my view evolution and entropy are cyclical components, each giving rise to the other. Picture this like a circle with "order/evolution" at the top, "chaos/entropy" at the bottom, and the curve of the cycle labeled "time and change." All that lives eventually dies. All organic death feeds the organic ecosystem somehow, from fertilizer to food, giving rise to life. Oversimplification? Maybe, but I don't claim to have a Ph.D. in any of the hard sciences. Just a lay hack who once saw the "face of god" in the Mandelbrot set and started thinking of chaos itself (scientifically speaking, not morally/socially) as a type of order so complex that it eluded pattern detection.
Enjoy the contemplation (or the laugh!) as needed.
The Mandelbrot Set blew my end. I think about it a lot...
My MIND. Fucking autocorrect.
I knew what you meant.
They should call it automistaker instead!
Autocorrupt
And yes! I remember reading that chapter. The Ascent of Humanity had a big influence on me. A big takeaway is that so much of what we believe is a choice ... it isn't forced on us by evidence, because that can often point in multiple directions. And there are many questions for which evidence per se is actually impossible.
"Unless I can stick my fingers into those wounds myself, I will not believe he is risen" -- bible stuff, paraphrased. I should preface this by stating openly I'm not a bible believer. I just find the unabashed record of the need for subjective evidence in that story a bit fascinating in this context.
The default axiomatic assumption that we are unique and alone, floating in a cosmic sea of glittering stars (and lifeless planets circling them) is itself a religious conceit in my view, a holdover from an era where mythic lore invested with "absolute truth, don't question it" authoritarianism proffered the view that our existence was nothing less than a six-day miracle, accomplished via fiat forthspeaking by a "one ring to rule them all" entity alleged to have immediately banished us from earthly Paradise for seeking knowledge he reserved entirely for himself. That view held more sway over the minds of men and women than the solid discoveries and postulates of what maths, sciences, and philosophical speculations we had even back when it was canonized.
Clinging to it as an absolute axiom, scientifically, strikes me as just as superstitious, and rejection of the subjective experiences of others while accepting confirmation in the form of having one's own subjective encounter, some sort of metaprophetic "tell" upon the nature of humanity itself. As such, it seems to point to a fatal flaw in our reckoning -- with ourselves, with one another, and ultimately with the whole universe around us -- which easily could serve as its own self-fulfilling Fermi Paradox barricade.
It's worth considering, at least.
Good article my only question is why call it K2-18b when there's so much better names like Beren, Dejah or Aquilonia or something? The name seems pretty boring to me.
I know I know bad nitpick on my part, anyways knew that this discovery would catch your attention good sir! X)
K for Kepler. K2 because the Kepler mission was extended to Kepler-2 when the reaction wheel failed. 18 because that's the K2 catalogue order. b because it's the first planet found in the system (there's also a second, c; the star is always a).
But yes, more poetic names would be nice, I agree.
I didn’t know that, only glanced over it. Spent the day researching some history of couples in the 1940s.
I must admit that Kepler is a cool name, I like it. Hmmm, Kepler-2 sounds like a Star Wars or Sci-Fi name I withdraw my fussy objection. Next planet should be named something more poetic. The Dejah and the Thoris demand usage.
Land on it, then you get to name it. 😁
Oh good point, let me just go astronaut suit up, and get some training in or a billion dollars ;). lol nice rejoinder Gilgamech it made my morning.
Heck, we have a bunch of gals that did just that the other day. I saw it on the news. And then they demanded to be given medals of honor or some-such. They would have served mankind better by just baking us some cookies.
Or spreading the news about my fantasy-serials and then baking cookies.
Save a cool name for the first rock out there CONFIRMED to have life on it. There are way more lifeless rocks than cool names to go around.
Lmao good point good sir.
exactly, its "that over there 46" until the planet is worth dedicating a name to.
Basically, yes.
Let's stick with technical nomenclature until the woke mind virus is extinct. The current trend is to give astronomical things obscure and meaningless names from primitive cultures that were never capable of making any discoveries of their own.
Very good point. Of course, names can be changed.
Thank you Warlord, this was an enjoyable science excursion.
Are you already familiar with C. S. Lewis’s essay “Religion and Rocketry”? If not, I think you will appreciate it.
No, I haven't read it, though I have read the space trilogy. Similar?
Some echos, but mostly different. "Religion and Rocketry" deals with the theological implications (and non-implications) of extraterrestrial life.
I seem to recall those theological implications playing a very large role in the trilogy.
Quite a large role, yes!
In the space trilogy, Lewis explores one possible option deeply.
Religion and Rocketry is more general. He discusses the "scientific" debooonking of Christianity based on whatever cosmology is currently in fashion:
"Life is a freak accident and we are alone in a cold and empty universe. Given that, how ridiculous to believe in a personal god!"
Oh wait, new paradigm just dropped -
"The universe is teeming with life and we must be only one of myriad intelligent species. Given that, how ridiculous to believe in a personal god!"
The reason the midwit intellectual class can’t entertain the concept of alien intelligence is because their worldview implicitly positions them as not just the smartest beings on the planet now, but on the planet ever, in this solar system ever, in this galaxy ever and in this universe ever. They are therefor the smartest creatures anywhere, ever. They will not dethrone themselves easily or willingly.
Their hubris explains almost all modern political and social phenomena in the same way. You must understand that the smartest people in the universe ever simply can’t be wrong ever, or their worldviews and egos start to collapse with terrifying rapidity, which would leave them staring into the void of their intellectual averageness and unplummable hubris.
Robin Hanson makes a plausible argument that the Fermi paradox is explained by our being very early in the development of the universe. It takes several hard step to reach intelligent life. This early universe is a chaotic, a game of snakes and ladders, mostly snakes now but slowly more ladders over the aeons. The more we learn about the universe the more it's clear we've been lucky indeed. We grew up in a quiet neighbourhood of the universe, a sleepy galaxy and a stable solar system. We are goldilocks in an empty house.
Combine that with my fervent hope that life is ubiquitous, in the next few billion years things are going to get very busy. We're the first. The universe is ours for the taking.
We will build stargates, leave fragments of dangerous technologies strewn about, engineer starts and galaxies, write cryptic inscriptions faroff moons, blast whole fractions of the universe apart in of million year wars. And when finally we end or transcend the new young intelligences will find us and wonder. We will be the elder gods to them.
Yes, that's an interesting argument. I would not count on it being true.
While the odds are life exists elsewhere, I have believed for some time that the UFOs could be time travellers. I wouldn't be surprised if the weird looking aliens people have described are future humans whose DNA was altered by the jab and other uncontrolled experiments with the genome. The experiments on people might be to collect unaltered DNA by those groups wishing to fix the problem.
Your daily reminder that the only good bug is a dead bug. I hereby name this rock Klendathu.
Did you miss the Dark Forest solution to the Fermi paradox, or are you considering it represented by furtive UAPs? I am not sure the two scenarios are the same? There might be some overlap I suppose. The Dark Forest says “avoid detection at all costs” but as we have literally broadcast our existence, maybe some brave/rash xenos would come and check up on us furtively. That would be very risky on their part though. Earth might be a honey trap set by bigger badder xenos.
Dark Forest is clever but doesn't work. A large enough telescope - well within the capacity of a Kardashev 1 civilization to build - can see pre-technological worlds quite easily. No one can actually hide.
Ah good rebuttal. I hadn’t heard that one. It is a plank of Dark Forest that each civilisation goes through a brief period of visibility before it understands the need to hide and gains the means to do so. So you are saying - such means are more or less impossible? Or incompatible with maintaining a civilisation.
A few decades ago we knew of no exoplanets, but now we know of thousands. We currently only know of one path to intelligent life, but in time we may discover many more.
You may be greatly underestimating the number of inhabited worlds if the number of objects in the solar system with subsurface oceans (or at least water) is any indication. There might be several such worlds per star.
The galaxy may be filled with the potential for life, but much of that life may be thwarted by circumstances beyond their control. Habitable zones shift. Mars and Venus may have been places with complex life, until they weren't. Life may be locked under miles of ice. (I can imagine some hardy, pioneering species making its way to the surface through cracks in the ice and establishing itself on "land", but we don't see that yet.) A technological civilization on a hycean world would be unable to reach space with chemical rockets. Life may arise on a planet orbiting a star with a short residence on the main sequence, finally achieving intelligence just as their world is doomed by its sun.
I wonder about high radiation environments. They are lethal to us, but could they be places of rapid evolution for other, tougher life forms?
If we can survive the current crises, we may be on the verge of a new age of discovery.
The ice worlds are fascinating cases. Interstellar space is probably full of orphan planets. With enough radioactive heating, you could have chemosynthetic ecosystems buried under miles of ice, perfectly insulated from radiation, happily ignorant of the rest of the universe. I've seen it suggested that these might even be the most common biospheres in the galaxy.
The road of science is well paved with bones. Most often the experts need die before the next section of the road can be built.
You mentioned diastrophism versus continental drift. When I was in school in the late fifties everybody who was anybody knew the shape, etc. of the continents was due to diastrophic forces, wind, water, weather, etc. Gondwana, land masses breaking up, let alone moving around the ocean, just plain silly! I brought up continental drift in a geology class and my grade dropped from an A level to C. The powers that were in the field had built their reputations on diastrophism and that had to die off before drift could be seriously considered.
BTW: I notice the meaning of diastrophism today has been expanded to include continental drift.
Space spores? I wonder what those that know today think about ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.
Continental drift is a really excellent example. The idea came from outside the academy, was fiercely resisted as rank pseudoscience, and then quietly adopted as obviously true with not another word said.
This happens all the time yet somehow it is not something academics ever incorporate into their epistemology.
We try, oh how we try, when we teach scientific theory and ideas, to impart to students no matter what track they're on, the understanding and humility necessary to remember that paradigms shift, and that science is not a static state, and that they should therefore always consider all their scientific truths as:
"As far as we know right now"
and
"Ceteris paribus"
About 1/100 gets it, I'd say. The rest, for whatever reason, fall into the trap of the "King of the Hill"; once you reach the top or your plateu of choice, you stop climbing and start trying to keep others from challenging you.
And that - that is the root of our brain at work.
"I have achieved a position of comfort, safety, and plenty, and need not strive any longer"
Mental Dodo-ism, and it's universal, no-one is immune to it, and it is natural to us.
Space is the one challenge we have left that can mitigate this impulse, I'd argue.
(This "mental Dodo-ism" is also why we adopt faiths, schools of thought and ideologies as roadmaps and blueprints; it's easier than always adopting the empirical, realist and pragmatic approach, and it feels a lot better to believe in something, than not having any belief.)
In the late 1960s or early 1970s my mother bought me a science encyclopedia. It was a deal where you buy one volume per week at the supermarket for $1 per volume until you have the full set - 20 volumes in all. I ended up reading the entire thing during the summer of 1973. Unfortunately, while there was much useful information, not all of it was current, particularly on the subject of continental drift. The book acknowledged it but said it wasn't proven, so instead they drew enormous land bridges connecting South America to Africa, and both continents to Antarctica, etc. I think it was still more current than most of the textbooks I had in high school, though I don't remember if we ever covered geology.
My recollection (from the early 1980s) is that continental drift was rejected for lack of a mechanism.
It was when plate tectonics, quasi-solid crustal plates floating on a viscously liquid mantle over a hotter core, and butting up against each other, became accepted, that there was a plausible mechanism for the drift of continents.
(And volcanism, too, and the spatiotemporal distribution of large earthquakes and ongoing deformations of the earth's surface: parsimony of causes is always attractive. In turn, the mantle was liquid in large part because of the heating effects of radioactive isotopes in the earth's core and mantle. Parsimony of causes again.)
I have ever since believed that science is the search for mechanism.
I appreciate the angle taken that UAPs, like many other concepts that seem to perpetually hover around the fringe, are always treated by default as fringe/nonsensical, and are predictably found wanting in the believability department no matter what allegations are made with what evidence. Phenomena like this seem to be dismissed out of hand not necessarily because they are wrong (though I'm sure many particular instances are), but because they need to be within the constraints of current paradigms.
That preemptive dwelling in the "peace and safety of a new dark age" which occurs on behalf of established narratives, because things are hard enough to piece together without new revelations that flip the table entirely; to say nothing of careerist motives. Seems very similar (to draw us back into the mud) to the recent flare up between Murray and Smith on Rogan. The rank credentialism of Murray and his class against Smith or Cooper is having a hard enough time defending itself, as the narrative generators of the age, as is, it doesn't have time for whippersnappers it can (or thinks it can) smear out of the discourse.
Another reason why 'fringe' occurrences are treated by default as such and so easily dismissed, no matter what the evidence, is that each individual 'incident' is treated as such. A singular 'freak' incident that is meaningless by itself. It's a fluke. And so it goes again, and again, and again, and again.
If you keep treating every case as solitary, and refuse to see any (potential) links to other, earlier such 'flukes', it's all the easier to remain where they want to be, in that beautiful and glorious State of Denial, where no Challenges to Established Authority (aka genuinely terrifying monsters) live.
An apt comparison. The psychological mechanisms at play are very similar.
There’s good odds that we have been detected by the wrong sort of aliens or will be soon and a weapon is or will be in transit to destroy us. We need to get our house in order and start moving.
The Nostromo is on its way to investigate.
We SOOO need a large, synthetic aperture, interferometric telescope.
Good stuff. I always thought that the Fermi Paradox was far too smug: the universe is really big