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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28328 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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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

Dozens of stars show signs of hosting advanced alien civilizations

Two surveys of millions of stars in our galaxy have revealed mysterious spikes in infrared heat coming from dozens of them.

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:

    1. What does the future of our society look in a universe where life is entropically favorable? That is to say, what if life is not rare, and instead happens consistently whenever the right conditions are present for long enough?

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.

    1. What sort of societal organization is optimal for a galaxy in which we can expect to interact with numerous alien civilizations? We have (thankfully) yet to encounter grabby aliens, but the game theory seems logical; in an environment where there are limited resources and an ever-expanding population, conflict is inevitable (by historical earth standards).

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?

    1. If we were to travel to other stars in the distant future, would the expected travel times result in human speciation, or such a long remove that cultural exchange and even biological exchange is kept to a minimum? Or is there an “optimal human”, which genetic engineering and biotech could potentially bring us towards as a local maximum?
    1. Is this all bullshit, and are we alone in the universe, forevermore?
    1. Does anyone have any thoughts on the spate of propellantless propulsion efforts currently being made? Somewhat like perpetual motion machines, or room temperature superconductors, or fusion… This is a topic that has very high expected returns, and thus a high expected gain in fame or financing from lying about experimental results. But I do note that fusion seems to be moving forward; while LK-99 didn’t pan out, there are still groups working on things inspired by it, and it seems like lessons learned are leading to next generation superconductors. My point here is that if the laws of physics allow it, we seem likely to eventually create it… And we are yet to discover a Theory of Everything, so who’s to say whether something like propellantless propulsion is 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.

I think it says something about us that everyone is so interested in aliens, to the point where any kind of speculative "maybe it's aliens" generates insane media hype. And people are willing to support millions of government research funds for this stuff, even though it's unlikely to ever pay off and has no practical purpose, and most people don't generally support that sort of impractical academic research.

This is not an original idea but- are "aliens" taking the place of religion in our society? It feels more "scientific" even though it's still mostly just faith, and you can choose whatever sort of alien-belief suits you best, and hang out with other believers to create art about it.

There was a guy on 90 Day Fiancée who explicitly said to his very religious fiancée that he doesn’t believe in God, but that he does believe in aliens.

Apologies for the Facebook link, couldn’t find it elsewhere: https://facebook.com/90DayFiance/videos/children-to-aliens-90-day-fiance-season-8/414612926588272/

My experience is that a pretty big part of the Christian left(which I was raised adjacent to) gets very into aliens as a replacement for doctrine. Now obviously ancient aliens are stupid in a not-even-pro social way, but they’re a fairly common replacement for taking certain passages in genesis literally.

I think they have. Aliens are given either by technology or by psychic powers the abilities of former polytheistic gods. They can create wonders in the heavens, they can gift us ideas and technology and revelations. And because they have an aura of the scientific about them, even things that we know make little sense get brushed aside because they’re advanced.

And like everything else, it’s used by people with something to gain from the belief. Space agencies and astronomers and astrophysicists use aliens to get funding. The military uses them to hide black projects. History channel gets views by claiming that every weird text in sacred books is really about aliens. It’s a cheap trick but it works where credulous talk of angels, gods, demons, fairies, and orcs would be mocked and dismissed as crazy talk. I find it rather instructive to mentally substitute “angels” in places where people are talking about aliens. Most of the time the story sounds insane at that point, almost exactly like a religion.

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