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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28323 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.

The appeal of alien life is the fantastical and the joy of discovery. We have plumbed the depths of the ocean to only discover funny fish and our stars are just gas and rocks. Limits of physics and biology mean that as humans we will be unable to really experience interaction with extraterrestrial life, all those entities are too far away for a return signal to be parsed by an original sender.

The more likely path of interstellar communication will just be civilization-scale updates, like space PBS. A more fun bit of trolling will be basically pretending to be god. The old video game Star Control had a civilization of spider people manipulated into being torturous lunatics because a race of pranksters in another galsxy used a hyperwave communicator to hijack a planetary broadcaster. With communication being only one way, it just descended into hilarity. Humans could be space gods, commanding aliens to worship all bipeds, but we will never enjoy the spoils of our devotees.

We have plumbed the depths of the ocean to only discover funny fish and our stars are just gas and rocks.

IMO that "just" is doing a lot of work there -- what discovery couldn't be dismissed as "just [containing category]"?

Astrophysics and biologists get a justified kick out of understanding our world and how it works in the larger tapestry of the universe, but the spoils of the Age of Discovery were 'can I eat it' and 'can I fuck it'. If exploring the ocean depths didn't give me super caviar and looking at the pillars of eternity isnt pointing me to the Orion Nebulae fuck factory, then I consider the effort a waste.

Don’t forget ‘can I make money off it’.

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