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In the spirit of bringing life into the thread, I thought I’d share something a little different.
https://archive.ph/96KCm
A summary won’t do it justice, and I encourage anyone interested to read the linked article; it’s not long. In short, though, researchers checked out approximately 5 million stars (in our galaxy—close enough to look well at and potentially one day visit) for anomalous ratios of infrared heat to light. The idea here is that if a star is giving off a lot of light that is being captured, it will heat whatever is doing the capturing up significantly. This is suggested to be possibly due to either unusual debris fields around these stars, which would be unexpected due to their age (most planetary collisions happening early on in a solar system’s lifetime, and these stars being older)… Or due to large amounts of sun-orbiting satellites soaking up solar power, a Dyson swarm. Our exoplanet imaging is still very much in its infancy, and we have already discovered planets that seem to bear biosignatures. The latter explanation is plausible, at least.
This is pretty far from standard culture-war fare, but I suspect that there are enough rationalists and futurists here to find it interesting. There are also a few potential links:
This implies that there is either a way through the theorized AI apocalypse, or perhaps that silicon-based life continues growing after taking over from carbon-based life (the “biological boot loader” thesis). While I’m rather attached to my carbon-based existence, it’s at least heartening that in this scenario something is still happening after AI takes over; the spark of life hasn’t left the universe. Unless all that power is going to making paperclips, I suppose.
Does it make sense to enforce population control on a cosmic scale, discouraging humans from expanding to other stars to avoid conflict? Could the “dark forest” hypothesis make sense, where offense is favored over defense and civilizations hide as much as possible?
Mods, I apologize in advance if this is insufficiently culture-war adjacent to deserve posting here. I didn’t think it worthy of its own thread, and feel like it’s perhaps healthy for the Motte to have some fresh topics as well. I’m a devoted lurker and thought I should do my part.
Edit- My list got butchered. Trying to fix it, but it seems the method I chose of writing multiple paragraphs after a question is disfavored.
Assuming our current understanding of physics holds, much of this doesn’t matter. If there are Taelons 100 million ly away from us, it is highly unlikely they’d care about us. We don’t have anything they don’t already have. So hiding makes no sense — it would take them millions of years to get here, for no gain. You can find most of the material in our solar system in thousands of other places much closer to the alien planets and can extract them without having to mess with people or other animals.
And from the other end, it’s all speculative. The aliens are undoubtedly weirder than we can possibly imagine, and our views on culture and government are largely based on our own history. And I’m not sure what these aliens have to do with AI. Maybe they solved the alignment issue, or maybe they destroyed all their AI and have been huffing Spice. They might have stalled on on technology before AGI. We don’t know anything and frankly can’t know anything. We found some odd chemical signatures, that’s it. Trying to pointlessly speculate on what this means for the future of space travel, propulsion, AGI, or alien human relationships is premature in my view. This might be something interesting, but it might not.
Milky way diameter is only around 100 thousand ly, the closest Andromeda galaxy is 2,4 million ly. Even Voyager is travelling around 1 ly/18,000 yeas so it can get to the edge of the galaxy in around 900 million years. Parker Solar Probe, which is fastest moving man-made object has ten times the velocity, so it could travel to the edge of the galaxy in tens of millions of years.
Any sufficiently old civilization - let's say tens or hundreds of millions of years old - could reasonably have a probe in every star system in the Galaxy even with our current propulsion technology with no problem and it could even explore other galaxies if it is 1 billion years or older.
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We extensively study all sorts of animal and microbial species here on earth, simply out of curiosity, even though these species don't "have anything" for us. Sometimes this research leads to medical advancements, but usually it doesn't. Most academic research is in the same boat. There's no "practical" reason to study obscure religious treatises from late antiquity, or the cultural practices of a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa, but people do it anyway.
Maybe. But if they are, then that means that we'd be impossibly weird to them! Which would make us rather more interesting.
Of course, it's an open empirical question whether aliens would find any value in studying us or interacting with us. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. But thinking that humans couldn't possibly be interesting to a scientifically advanced alien intelligence is just as much of an unfounded bias as thinking that humans are always at the center of the universe.
Studying and interacting is much different than expending considerable resources on something, which in turn is much different than waging war or making large economic investments in something. Sure, we spend money on researching things out of curiosity already, but it's not a lot. Numbers are hard to come by, but one figure I saw says we spent about $7.2 billion on botanical research in 2013. However, the context of this figure was talking about money spent on crop science research, and I'd be willing to bet that the money spent on projects like some professor studying rare ferns of Appalachia is much less than what we're spending on more practical applications. If an alien civilization were to visit earth from the distances described, it would be an incredibly costly mission with no guarantee of success. My guess is that if they wanted to study us they'd send unmanned vehicles first, then maybe a small research party like at the beginning of E.T. I highly doubt they'd come here with cargo ships ready to exchange resources for technology, let alone bring an army to mount a full-scale invasion. After all, we've been sending stuff into space for 60 years and we still haven't got past the curiosity stage yet, with the exception of satellites that are within driving distance. We certainly haven't gotten to the point where it makes sense to start mining the moon or something similar, and that's practically right on top of us in astronomical terms.
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