domain:city-journal.org
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Texas is freedom land
3m ago
How is this CW?
I guess I should be glad that the final frontier isn’t also, somehow, a referendum on Donald Trump. That impulse is at war with the one that tells me this is dumber than a sack of primitive, ferrous construction equipment.
In unrelated news, have you read The Dark Forest? Not for the apocalyptica. For the galaxy-brained strategy, agreed upon by the best and brightest of all humanity, of giving global power to one shmuck. Truly, something that could never have been created in the Western canon.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4m ago
I don't think Indian soldiers count as "human capital" exactly, and either way we are already at the point in the tech tree where meat soldiers are starting to get obsoleted by drones. As for the other two examples, the Archimedes one seems like a fairy tale, and the Bible "record" does not seem particularly compelling either given that it was written by Israelites as part of a larger book singing the praises of their own wise men, so they would have all the motivation to make up a story to make them look good. Compare the wall of modern fiction where audience/author avatars get abducted by foreign cultures and placed in in improbably influential roles (like the waste heap of isekai manga), or older ones such as Marco Polo's fanciful claim about being made a government official by Kublai Khan's court.
Sloot
6m ago
Impossible; your internalized speciesism is just showing. With their empathy and higher education levels, aliens would beyond such bigotry and would understand that—if not for socioeconomic factors and institutional speciesism—humans would be just as capable as they are.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9m ago
Considering that @hydroacetylene explicitly said, quote, "Earth still produces plenty of geniuses, and indeed plenty of not-genius tier but highly capable engineers, technicians, etc.", I assume that at least he specifically meant creative intellectual ability when talking about "human capital". Whether aliens would be interested in us as slaves for their menial labour is a different question, but that would certainly require certain additional circumstances (such as them having the technology to build us habitats in which we can be employed to do work they need, but not to just automate the same work or terraform our planet for themselves).
Gaashk
14m ago
Sure. That's in the drunk college student, but way way faster realm. Nice to have, provides consumer surplus at free tier or $20/month, but probably not $200/month.
Shrike
15m ago
Often for the kinds of physics described for UAP phenomena the things that would have to be wrong are not, like, the nuances of quantum field theory. It is shit like "conservation of energy was wrong."
Obviously it would depend on the very specific incident in question but a lot of times the claims "requiring" extreme energy fluctuations come from data like radar returns that don't give any insight into the mass of the object being observed or even if it is a material object. A lot of claims about UAP are assumptions stacked on assumptions stacked on assumptions in a trench coat. These trench coats are often based on a core observation that, while very interesting, doesn't prove much if anything about "the laws of physics" and our understanding or lack thereof even if the observation itself is 100% accurate as reported.
(This is without getting into the fact that a lot of weird stuff like warp drives and propellantless space travel are theoretically good physics.)
Quantumfreakonomics
16m ago
Good god it’s a slow news cycle. We’re actually speculating on whether or not a nearby comet is aliens.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19m ago
...Have you never heard of Slavery? The Triangle Trade?
Human capital != creative intellectual ability
If the sentient insectoids could do warehouse work, there would be millions of them in the inland empire in a few years. That goes double for Victorians or Saudis.
Gaashk
25m ago
Word processors already look for typos that are actual words, but don't make sense in the current context, without applying AI. More and better autocorrect is about in line with the original thesis -- they're good at spreadsheet scale tasks, which is useful but not a huge amount of a given person's job. I'm not completely sure what professional editors do, but I think it's probably a bit deeper than looking for typos.
Crowstep
30m ago
Mainstream science told you to mask up and get the covid vaccine too.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1hr ago
You know what, I could die happy if people tried to make a magic dirt argument to aliens about how we could raise their GDP if they just allowed us into their empire, and the aliens just went "Then why didn't you do that already on your own planet?" and hit delete on all of us.
ThenElection
1hr ago
Simply seizing as many resources as possible is an entirely rational decision. If grabby civilizations outcompete nongrabby ones, then those are the ones we'd expect to proliferate in the universe. Even if a civilization is internally nongrabby, if they encounter a grabby one, they're likely to resort to grabbiness as a survival mechanism. (This is why humans should be grabby preemptively; there can never be any kind of effective galactic UN.)
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
Pros: all thinking machines destroyed
Cons: Earth terraformed into another Arrakis so sandworms can produce more spice
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
What are you talking about? Acquiring the civilian population of weaker powers has been a key goal of conquest since ever. The Bible records thé wise men of Israël relocated to act as advisors in Babylon. The Romans were furious when archimedes was slaughtered in the sack of Syracuse. And the British empire used Indian soldiers extensively.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1hr ago
That argument doesn't pass any sort of smell test. Even the wars of conquest and colonization on Earth (like the European Age of Exploration) were typically not motivated in any particular sense by acquisition of human capital, and there the conquerors and the conquered were significantly closer to each other in disposition and in particular capabilities/talent than any presumable spacefaring race would be to us. Instead, it's always acquisition of inanimate resources, or land, or preemptive weakening of a potential enemy. I figure the last one would be by far the most relevant one on a space scale.
If we (or, better: someone less sentimental, like the Victorians, the Saudis or the Chinese) went to Alpha Centauri and discovered a race of sentient insectoids somewhere around the development and intellectual level of Aboriginal Australians at the time of contact (but without aesthetics or ethics that are appealing or recognisable to us), do you actually think we would be integrating them for insectoid capital, as opposed to keeping a few specimens for study and either declaring the place a nature preserve or exterminating them and proceeding to colonise or strip-mine the place?
Drinniol
1hr ago
It doesn't take much effort for a civilization higher on the scale from us to send a kinetic kill vehicle.
Indeed, the idea of an interstellar invasion is ridiculous. Preemptive extermination of all other intelligences, however, makes a disturbing amount of sense from a game theoretic perspective.
birb_cromble
1hr ago
Based on a current understanding of physics, the only reason to launch an invasion would be to acquire the population as human capital for empire building
We're all going to be shocked and disappointed when we end up being collector's items, like a peculiar cultivar of tulip.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
1hr ago
Easier said than done.
You misunderstand: that norm is enforced merely by intentionally refusing to prioritize your version of safety.
reasons like "but predators are online" sound a lot like "I don't let my kid outside after 3 o'clock because a stranger might come and snatch her."
Yes, which is why they're both treated as absurd by psychologically-healthy individuals. Interestingly, the latter is espoused by more parents than it would naturally be since the stranger is far more likely to be the State, which is far more dangerous.
because arguably, kids shouldn't even be on the Internet at all
It is interesting to see the parallels between how our culture seeks to treat children and how fundamentalist Islamic cultures seek to treat women. I'm not convinced it's good for their personal development, but personal development is not a terminal value in these cultures and "but muh risk of predation" is merely a fig leaf over that.
faceh
1hr ago
Or Von Neumann probes that were launched from so far away that there was no intelligent life on the planet at the time they were originally launched.
wingdingspringking
1hr ago
Long term I agree. The problem is, there is a high correlation right now between prices in the crypto space. A sudden plunge anywhere could cause a plunge everywhere. In theory BTC could bounce right back as the others collapse, but that isn't a forgone conclusion. It could just as easily take a major hit.
faceh
1hr ago
The gap between us and interstellar capable aliens is like gap between us and insects, and we usually do not go on long trips just to stomp on bugs.
Uh, point in of fact, I ABSOLUTELY go out of my way to kill ant colonies that pop up in my lawn, and I do so using more 'sophisticated' methods than stomping them.
And if I were worried about the ants teching up enough to pose a danger to me and my dog, I'd be even more vigilant about it.
Is there any rational motive for alien invasion? Usual science fiction tropes: "they want our water/women/fresh meat" are ludicrous, but there is a possibility.
I'm thinking a relativistic kill missile is more likely. But on the offchance want to preserve the planet mostly intact, they just have to set us back to the bronze age or so.
I've been watching Isaac Arthur videos for like 10 years now, so I have seen a lot of 'imaginable' if not plausible scenarios for how Alien invasions could play out.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1hr ago
Since space optimism is rather common in the Ratsphere, I suppose it falls to me to articulate the opposing view, and to elaborate a little bit on why I find space (or at least, the prospect of space colonization) to be rather boring.
The human mind is currently the most interesting object in the known universe. All of the human minds are already here, on earth. We don't need to go out into space to find them.
Space of course has a lot of, well, space, in which humans can propagate and live their lives. But space colonization won't fundamentally change human nature. Humans on Mars will still love, laugh, cry, and die. They'll just be doing those things... in space. Thinking that that changes the fundamental calculus would be like saying that a painting becomes more interesting when you magnify it 100x and put it on a billboard. It's still the exact same painting. Just bigger.
There is certainly something to be said for the drama of scientific discovery, and the challenges of surviving in a harsh environment. But this is still just one potential drama among many, only one potential object of study among many.
I of course recognize the utilitarian value of space colonization in terms of hedging against extinction risks on earth. But this strikes me as essentially an administrative detail. Not unlike paying your taxes, or moving into a new apartment because your landlord is kicking you out of your current one. More like something to be managed, rather than an object of fascination in its own right. There seems to be something importantly different going on in the psychology of the dedicated space optimists: they are attracted to expansion as such, effervescence, projection, power for power's sake, and most importantly, size.
Literally EVERYTHING ELSE in the universe is out there in space. Whatever you really care about or want, there's more of it out there.
Well, no, there's not much out there right now. Admittedly phenomena like neutron stars are extremely interesting, exotic planet compositions can make planets interesting in their own right even in the absence of life, etc. I am extremely grateful that we have scientists who are dedicated to expanding our knowledge of these phenomena. But in the last analysis, I still don't find these phenomena to be as interesting as other people.
Of course, if we were to discover that there are other conscious intelligent beings in the universe, then everything would change. Suddenly, we may not be the most interesting things in the universe anymore. We would have to make every possible effort to study them, with great haste. But you already said that you think we're probably alone. So it's unclear what you expect to find out there; besides, as already stated, the satisfaction of the utilitarian aim of preserving and multiplying what we already have.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Earth still produces plenty of geniuses, and indeed plenty of not-genius tier but highly capable engineers, technicians, etc.
benmmurphy
1hr ago
Aliens have been following LLM progress and are involved in their own Butlerian Jihad.
More likely to be the other way round, don't you think? People who feel a compulsive need to travel are going to be drawn to occupations that let them do so. Combine that with the tendency of children to do the same job as their parents et voila.
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