Why is there not even an American or European regulation in place for this? I get that 30 years ago, nobody wanted to talk about this topic out of fear of not be taken seriously anymore. But the more scientific insights we got during the last 30 years, the more likely it seems that our Earth and our solar system is not an extreme outlier, but the norm and that the same is true for life.
Aren't we creating "Wow! signals" all the time when we communicate with the Voyager probes or with Mars rovers?
Isn't the problem only getting worse over time?Just assume we have a Mars colony in a few decades, isn't the interplanetary internet constantly giving away that there`s intelligent life here if it's done by radio waves instead of directed lasers?
Well, I think about why there isn't much point in it? >Too late We've already broadcast enough.
Aiden James
While it is possible that we are already detected, I won't be as pessimistic as saying that all intelligent life must have already seen us. We should just keep the risk as low as we could
Wyatt Davis
Too late, honestly. At some point, someone will hear our shitty radio, see our shitty TV and then how much of a mistake the Internet was.
Chase Reed
Radio is too useful to ban. But we _are_ decreasing broadcasting. More and more stuff goes by optical fiber. And, in order to make maximum use of the EM spectrum, phones are very weak and can only send/receive to nearest cell-tower. So the same frequency can be re-used 20 miles away without interfering.
The main "danger", if you want to call it that, is radar. Even that will decrease with the trend to phase out ground control and just let aircraft use GPS.
Ian Lopez
I for one welcome the alien faggots
Wyatt Ross
It's the hard science fiction user.
Daniel Gutierrez
Aren't our radio waves weak enough that they'll just get drowned out by CBR before they realistically have any chance of hitting an alien civilization?
I agree with your image though, OP, but I think it's important to emphasize that we're not just projecting this Hollywood-driven "OMG aliens r bad because sci-fi!!" mentality. Alien civilizations aren't overwhelmingly likely to be hostile towards other civilizations because they're big bad Nazguls looking for lab rats or an exotic food source, but because they are simply concerned with their own survival and cannot trust the motivations of others. And even if they inwardly could, they cannot trust that said other can trust their trust, etc. etc. When these kinds of chains of suspicion are present, the go-to alternative for predicting someone's behavior is to look at what is in their best interest which almost universally is to survive indefinitely which, in a universe with finite matter, means eliminating competition.
Robert Foster
>Aren't our radio waves weak enough that they'll just get drowned out by CBR before they realistically have any chance of hitting an alien civilization?
I have no idea how bad our current EM emissions really are, just wanted to make a point that we should care that we are not too easily detected. If just a handful of photons hit something with the surface area of Earth, maybe that is already enough for a very advanced civilization to detect it.
But yeah, the lower the dose, the lower the risk. I'm only a little worried about the signals we have sent already and mostly worried about the decades centuries to come. Worst case in that regard would be a Dyson sphere, everybody would see there's a lot of infrared but no visible light. But way more near-term, there are ideas to reflect or deflect sunlight, e.g. to divert it from Earth to cool it a bit, to direct it to the Martina poles, etc. Stuff like that could also be detectable. We should just think about how easily things can be detected with everything we do.
William Brown
Oh and much more near term, namely in the past, people were actively broadcasting to tell aliens we are here. This stuff should be illegal, the SETI institute should be much more regulated. It's really disturbing that no regulator cares about shit like this.
>The broadcast was particularly powerful because it used Arecibo’s megawatt transmitter attached to its 305 meter antenna. The latter concentrates the transmitter energy by beaming it into a very small patch of sky. The emission was equivalent to a 20 trillion watt omnidirectional broadcast, and would be detectable by a SETI experiment just about anywhere in the galaxy, assuming a receiving antenna similar in size to Arecibo’s.
Yeah not much we can do about that except pray they didn't hit anything.
John Torres
The CBR is really weak. Serious SETI began after someone realized a signal transmitted from Arecibo could be picked by someone else's Arecibo somewhere near the center of the galaxy.
Fortunately, for the fearful, Interstellar flight is difficult. But not absolutely impossible. > en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Valkyrie Pellegrino, one of the authors of the concept, turned it into a novel. Relativistic spacecraft can _seriously_ damage a planet!
Pellegrino (in honor of Asimov) opened his novel with Three Laws about how aliens can be expected to behave. Their survival is more important than our survival. Wimps don't become top dogs. No species makes it to the top by being passive. They will be intelligent, aggressive, and ruthless if necessary. They will assume the first two laws apply to us.
In other words, we MIGHT be dangerous someday. The only way to be safe is to annihilate us ASAP. This is paranoia. But I don't see any way to absolutely prove he's wrong. "Even paranoids have enemies."
If some unforeseen technical breakthrough makes star travel as easy as it is on TV and in the movies, that would be different. We could examine other civilizations at leisure before deciding what to do.
Charles Carter
It'll be a long time before those signals reach any alien intelligence. Even longer before they could do anything about it. I'm more worried about Humanity making it to the end of the 21st century -- or even to the end of the Trump administration!
Jose Scott
I think the calculus shifts somewhat if a species proceeds to a post-biological phase, where the speed of light to average lifespan ratio is greatly reduced.
Jonathan Wilson
Would make interstellar flight easier. As would exploring the galaxy with robotic von Neumann probes. Makes no difference to the "kill them first" theory. Computers can be destroyed like anything else.
Adam Bennett
Its not a problem since we are the most advanced beings in our galaxy.
Alexander Gutierrez
Revised meme incase you want to use it. It feels like there is zero awareness and/or seriousness for this topic. Everyone has been afraid of AI for a couple of months, but ETI (extra terrestrial intelligence) should also be considered as a thread (even though we most likely won't see any of it in our lifetime)
Nathaniel Mitchell
It's likely that we'll be a space borne species by the time the tungsten rods @ .8 C hit earth
Blake Miller
Interstellar travel isn't possible so it doesn't matter.
William Rogers
>be alien civilization >receive transmission sent from Earth a couple thousand years ago >don't know how advanced they are by now >don't know how advanced they will be by the time your missile would hit them >don't know how many backup planets capable of retaliation they have/will have in a couple thousand years >still bomb them, risking detection by other civilizations and retaliation from humans
Adam Davis
To be advanced civilization you need to avoid destructive tendencies through highly developed ethics and morality.
Alien civilizations are no threat to us - those who are will be peaceful, and those that will be lack the means to threaten us.
It might be better idea to look at ourselves and what we are doing to our planet.
John James
>It might be better idea to look at ourselves and what we are doing to our planet Like how we use all life to benefit us? How we hold pigs and cows and chicken? Or how most of humanity has always used beings of the same species to benefit them in forms of slavery?
Or how the more technologically advanced humans colonized about every spot on the earth that had less advanced humans?
I don't even think that any other animal here on earth would behave differently if they had the intelligence and power. About every evolution that takes place in an environment with scarce resources (so every environment) would lead to behavior like this.
Christopher Moore
implying by the time theyll hit something we wont already die in the 10th world war
Joshua Morris
This is Frank Drake, the responsible person behind the Arecibo message that sent a radio message so strong that all of the M13 galaxy will notice it if they have the telescopes we have. He could turn out to be literally worse than Hitler. Not killing a few dozen people, but possibly all of earthly life with it's 4 billion years of evolution. This will show in a few 100,000 years.
Noah Anderson
As if a more intelligent civilization would even care about us. If a society were to figure out ftl (Which is most likely impossible no matter how much pop sci tells you it is) speed travel, they would probably be able to also simulate any experiments they wanted. Why would they bother wasting precious energy going to a rock where everyone is likely dead by the time they get there when instead they can just simulate it at home?
Blake Ortiz
Veeky Forums is so fucking retarded all of you should leave forever
Kayden Gonzalez
Because we might become a threat to them at some point thanks to the unpredictable growth curve of technological progress.
Eli Gomez
>MFW just finished Three Body Problem trilogy
OP is right. There is a dark forest out there are we are a child lighting a bonfire.
Adrian Parker
If life is considered to be the galactic norm why do we assume other civilizations will be crazy advanced and already have interstellar travel and bombardment?
Ryan Sanchez
Because we're more depressed about being alone than we area afraid of possible problems stemming from one day not being alone.
Jose Bell
Why would an intelligent species see us as a threat, it is always better to compromise anyhow.(We are talking about a highly evolved society here not some backwards early AD era tribe who didn't even know to wash their hands or shit away from their food.) Even in today's time it's far cheaper and more beneficial to let third world countries industrialize rather than going to war with them. I'm sure if humans understand this principle then they could too. Do you seriously believe even if they had a hate boner for newly sprouted intelligent life they would waste energy to eliminate them when the universe is already doing it for them? By the time they get to our planet, we would have probably either destroyed ourselves, the planet killed intelligent life off, an asteroid smacked us, or we would have been vaporized by a gamma ray burst. Sounds like a waste of time to me honestly.
Evan Collins
I don't understand the connection you are making. Life being the norm makes it even more likely that there are civilizations far more advanced than ours, simply because to assume we lie too far away from the mean in terms of technological sophistication is unreasonable from a statistical point of view.
Oliver Powell
You are assuming technological advancement doesn't have that much of a limit to it's growth.
Cameron Martinez
Im saying how do we know that were not at the upper levels of galactic technology though? Where does the assumption of aliens having figured out interstellar travel/warfare come from? Why do we assume they wouldnt be just as scared shitless of us doing that to them?
Wyatt King
Sure. Say SpaceX, a corporation at the end of the day, went to one of the earth-like planets and found a funny ape-like specie there. They use hand axes and stuff and there language is a bit primitive.
Humans will start living there to research them. Perhaps they will be catalogued as intelligent apes. And surely even if they are not exploited for fun and profit, remember that the space flight is being commercialized, their whole evolution will be turned upside down.
The very same can happen with humans. The other race doesn't even need to be hostile towards us, just indifference and neglect is enough.
Aiden Smith
>Im saying how do we know that were not at the upper levels of galactic technology though? Standard cosmology model (Lambda CDM) assumes the Copernican Principle that we aren't special. If we were at "the upper levels" of technology then we'd be special, which is a shit guess to make because there are more cases where a given thing isn't special than cases where that given thing is special. In the absence of any evidence you should guess we're average, not above average.
Wyatt Powell
I think it's reasonable to assume there are at least a handful of civilizations out there for whom the task of sending such a missile our way is really not that big of a deal. And I think it's also reasonable to assume that if a civilization that was not at this level got a hold of our location, they could relay it out into the cosmos, being pretty sure that one of those big dogs will send a missile towards it just to be safe.
No, just that we are not near that limit.
>how do we know that were not at the upper levels of galactic technology There's simply no good reason to think that. It's possible but very unlikely, and we should base our policies based on what is most likely.
>There's simply no good reason to think that. It's possible but very unlikely, and we should base our policies based on what is most likely. What's most likely is that there is no way any fucking aliens are getting to our planet. FTL is a meme and they can't even hear our transmissions. The only way they would know about us is a more advanced version of the stuff we already have peering at our planet as it passes between them and the sun. You can't magic away the fucking inverse square law.
Justin Cruz
Brainlet here, why do you ignore the fermi/dyson theory? At this point I am convinced there aren't any technologically advanced aliens in our universe. Or if there are, they are so non-expansionist that they might as well not exist.
Andrew Richardson
>In the absence of any evidence you should guess we're average, not above average. This
For whatever reason, it has been crazy in science to not assume that we are very special, a very rare and extreme outlier. E.g. Galileo was crazy for saying earth might not be so special that everything including the sun circles around us and that the earth is not the socket of the firmament. Just 10 years ago few people dared to deviate from the idea that our Earth and our solar system with it's planets is something very special and rare. When asking the questions "could there be planets around other stars as well? Even rocky ones? Even rocky ones in the habitable zone?", you had to do it very carefully and with full of self-doubt in order to still be taken seriously. While we don't fully know about the frequencies yet, it appears plausible that our solar system is just the norm, that most stars have planets and a good portion of them also have habitable ones. The same overcaution still goes on when discussing life. The standard standpoint you have to take is that we are about the only life in universe or at least an extreme outlier. From this standpoint you can cautiously and doubtfully argue that we might not be such an extreme outlier.
So yeah, the standard assumption is always that we are an extreme outlier. But if you just have one sample of sample size 1, you should assume that this sample comes from the center of an unknown frequency distribution and not from a far out tail, to maximize the likelihood of your assumption.
Ryder Howard
intelligent life will most likely be able to produce clones and EI capable of high IQ LOL
Oliver Price
underrated
Julian Reed
>Hiding from yourself What a crazy but interesting thought
Jose Morgan
So you think there are Nazis living at the backside of the Moon?
William Peterson
Light energy falls off after a certain time right? So after while our signals won’t be decipherable from background noise.
Asher Thomas
I'm not going to hedge my bets just because it's possible there might be some hostile civilization out there that's going to exterminate the entire planet. We need to get as loud as possible in the hopes that some benevolent and helpful civilization gives us FTL travel and other technologies so we can get the fuck off this planet.
I am not going to die on the same planet where the most powerful country in the world was run by Donald Trump.
