An existential problem in the search for alien life

Once upon a time in the universe, there was an alien civilization, and they were very interested in figuring out the question, why, despite universe seeming so vast, there are no signs of other alien civilizations.

What could it be? Near-zero term in the Drake equation? The dark forest? A great filter?

To understand different possibilities, they decided to determine the cause using a computer simulation. However, due to hardware limitations, they were only able to simulate one civilization at a time.

We can only speculate what the final answer was.

belugacat• 3 years ago

Honestly, the real mystery is why so many people are confused about “why, despite universe seeming so vast, there are no signs of other alien civilizations” in 2023.

We have all the elements for answers if we focus on what we know, and forget the hand wavy sci-fi speculation.

1) Complex life is rare.

2) Reaching a space faring stage is even rarer. (we’re the most minimal definition of “space faring” you could come up with, and even then we got really lucky with so many things)

3) The universe is huge. It’s like, the hugest thing there is, man. And except for some little bits of interesting dust here and there, it’s mostly empty. As empty as it is huge.

So, does life - in any form - exist elsewhere in the universe? Almost certainly.

Are/were there life forms elsewhere in the universe that escaped their home planet gravity to go explore their moon or other planets in their solar system? Seems quite probable.

Is there any shot we are sufficiently close in space/time to encounter such another advanced life form? Almost certainly not.

NiloCK• 3 years ago

2 and 3 seem plausibly correct to me (although 3 is a mixed bag - the hugeness increases the number of dice rolls on 1 and 2 - not only the difficulty of connecting after the fact), but what is the basis for 1?

As far as I know, we have observed complex (and extremely robust) life on every temperate, wet planet that we know about. Batting a thousand.

woooooo• 3 years ago

Also, modern humanity's light cone is tiny. We've been listening for like 75 years?

peebeebee2• 3 years ago

Yeah. There's such a huge difference in interplanetary life vs interstellar or even intergalactic life.

Interplanetary: easy.

Interstellar: pushing the boundaries of what's possible imho.

Intergalactic: no way.

Our closest planet (Mars) is 3 lightminutes away.

Our closest star (Proxima Centauri) is 5 lightyears away.

Our closest galactic neighbour (LMC) is 150000 lightyears away.

emilecantin4• 3 years ago

hand wavy sci-fi speculation

"The Dark Forest" by Liu Cixin is sci-fi, but I don't think it's too hand-wavy. It presents a pretty logical answer to the Fermi Paradox, based on a couple obvious axioms.

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

itsanaccount• 3 years ago

I'll give you a fourth one.

There _are_ signs consistently that something has an understanding of physics and inertia that violate our understanding of such things, which implies our assumptions about distance of things in the universe are wrong.

Those vehicles appearance but lack of most interaction, lack of destruction implies something worse, that we are probably still such a primative civilization we're treated like zoo animals.

These conversations about the last century of the search for alien life in the light of David Grusch's testimony to Congress and the various and numerous UAP videos are.. interesting to say the least.

johngossman• 3 years ago

From “Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology”:

Biologists cannot even agree on a unique definition of life itself; but that hasn’t stopped them from unraveling aspects of the cell, the double helix, photosynthesis, enzymes and a host of other living phenomena…

darepublic2• 3 years ago

There is a threshold that matter can cross, beyond which the laws of physics do not explain or predict what happens; on the other side of that threshold is life.

This made me think whether this is a type of computational limitation. That there is simply too much complexity and too many variables but theoretically it should still be possible. Perhaps this is a bit reductionist pov.

Life brings complexity into the universe, she says, in its own being and in its products, because it has memory: in DNA, in repeating molecular reactions, in the instructions for making a chair.

Following this train of thought, if I assume that there is no fundamental difference between matter and life, life becomes a type of black hole of computational complexity. Like those parts of the unobservable universe which we could never peer into because of hard limits in physics. I can perhaps rationalize on a piece of paper that life is fundamentally deterministic but I can only think it, not behold it. DNA, memory is like some intense potential energy, a tightly wound spring that slowly lets off its energy in complex ways over potentially eons. Hence we are not fundamentally different than the light of the sun, warming the surface of rocks and evaporating water, but undergoing a far more intense process than simple evaporation.

darepublic2• 3 years ago

The title made me think of the three body problem, and I anticipated something along those lines. And there are some early references to that in the article but ultimately the most interesting content seemed to be around trying to define a definition of what is life.

koheripbal• 3 years ago

It seems likely that, like us, intelligent life invents AGI prior to leaving their primary planet.

Organic life is then merged/exterminated/controlled in favor of AGI.

AGI would not have the biological instinct to grow/spread/reproduce, and thus the cosmos should be populated with a handful of individual billion year old super advanced AGIs, perhaps only one or two per galaxy, sitting quietly in orbit around some stable star or perhaps even in the great voids outside the galaxy somewhere.

Finding one is likely near impossible as they may not want to be found.

nh23423fefe• 3 years ago

AGI would not have the biological instinct to grow/spread/reproduce

what supports this idea

hotpotamus• 3 years ago

I've often wondered what an AG(S?)I would want, and I tend to agree that most of our desires come from our innate biology and most of our reasoning goes into justifying said desires. Given that an artificial intelligence would be on an artificial substrate, it seems very difficult to imagine what, if anything, it might desire.

These are philosophical threads that I'd honestly rather not pull, because I suspect that in the end, the nihilists are most correct, and I just got into this business because I thought computers/video games were cool, but it seems that collectively we insist on it.

ryandvm3• 3 years ago

I think AGI would not extinguish the host species if it didn't have the drive to spread. "Do not go extinct" and "grow/spread/reproduce" are two sides of the same natural selection coin.

ceejayoz3• 3 years ago

Full-immersion virtual porn might do the trick, though.

Or maybe every civilization eventually invents TikTok.

Loughla• 3 years ago

There are a number of assumptions here that I think I need to ask about.

Organic life is then merged/exterminated/controlled in favor of AGI.

Why? What would be the motivation for this? If we are the case study, AGI isn't able to "feed" itself energy without biological life to turn switches and dials. So why would this be a logical first step?

AGI would not have the biological instinct to grow/spread/reproduce

This infers a 'perfect' AI. One without any biases from its creator. What makes you think that's possible? Also, is self-preservation/self-propogation not part of being able to think and reason?

AaronM• 3 years ago

Why wouldn't AGI be able to feed itself? Seems fairly reasonable that an advanced enough AI could design and build machines and robots that could produce physical objects

zztop442• 3 years ago

I honestly don’t mean to condescend, but I find it so interesting that smart people can convince themselves that such an outlandish scenario is somehow likely or even perhaps inevitable.

We haven’t invented “AGI” yet (if AGI means a computer system that merges/exterminates/controls humanity). We have no idea even theoretically what such a system might look like, let alone how to create it.

I’d say we’re a lot closer to colonising the solar system and building cities on Jupiter’s moons than we are to building the machines from the Matrix. At least we kind of theoretically know how to do the former.

Meanwhile, we’re really good at building computer and industrial systems that (when combined with economic, social and political incentives) exert strong control over us, exterminate many of us, and may well exterminate a lot more in the near future.

But that doesn’t look like a Hollywood movie, so it’s less fun to think about.

Sorry, this wasn’t meant to be a dig at you personally. Some of the AI doom stuff just sets me off.

giraffe_lady5• 3 years ago

We are simply watching the birth of a new religion. Religious people aren't religious because they're dumb, intelligence is mostly not a factor. Same thing here I think.

throwaway_08932• 3 years ago

Yeah. A lot of it to me feels like the JRPG version of reality.

empath-nirvana• 3 years ago

A lot of the AI doom stuff is essentially just a criticism of capitalism and corporations in general. There's essentially no difference between a hypothesized runaway AI and a normal multinational corporation. We have, right now, large semi-autonomous organizations called "corporations" that are making the earth uninhabitable in pursuit of profits at the expense of human suffering. Corporations are nominally in control of people, but any people that get in the way of profits are pushed aside.

mcpackieh4• 3 years ago

I think that intelligent life might become reliant on interconnectedness, e.g. addicted to the internet. Assuming the speed of light limit to information transmission cannot be overcome, I bet intelligent life will tend to clump up instead of spread out, so that it can stay in contact with itself.

mensetmanusman• 3 years ago

If that happens, then human organic biomass is the AGI’s microbiome and still required to build nuclear reactors to power its silicon.

timschmidt4• 3 years ago

How well have you been taking care of your microbiome lately? Remember Jerry, the yeast from the third villus on the left? No?

sjkoelle• 3 years ago

When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.

biggestlou• 3 years ago

I'm still looking for intelligent life on this planet!

wutwutwat• 3 years ago

What's the deal with airline food?

swalsh• 3 years ago

It's weird that stuff like this can make it to the front page, but nobody is talking about the Schumer amendment[0], or maybe even more interesting, the push by a few Republicans mostly funded by defense contractors to gut the amendment of any teeth it had. Our own government might have more answers then they say publically, and now that we're demanding the evidence we're being denied. If there's nothing there... why not pass it in it's entirety?

[0] https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/uap_amendment...

Jevon23• 3 years ago

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. This really is a story that should have more visibility.

If aliens don’t exist, why are defense contractors trying so hard to shut down a bill that simply says “show us what you know about aliens”?

Sirizarry• 3 years ago

Money? I guess money. Show that they know nothing about aliens and suddenly a few billion are wiped because a few projects had to close down? Idk I’m honestly just speculating

filoleg• 3 years ago

If aliens don’t exist, why are defense contractors trying so hard to shut down a bill that simply says “show us what you know about aliens”?

By the same logic, then “why would OpenAI and a bunch of big tech companies lobby so hard for AI ‘safety’ legislation, if AGI wasn’t close to existing [or already existed]? It means that we are close to AGI!”

As you can see, that type of reasoning doesn’t tend to lead to reasonable answers. And with the AI “safety” legislation, there have been plenty discussions on HN already, with the consensus being “they are doing it to secure their position at the top through regulatory capture, inflate their perception of importance [aka drive more money their way], and choke out new entrants.”

I don’t see it being that much different of a scenario with “alien bills”.

bsder• 3 years ago

If aliens don’t exist, why are defense contractors trying so hard to shut down a bill that simply says “show us what you know about aliens”?

Because if they say "Nothing" will you shut up and believe them?

Of course not.

You can't prove a negative like this.

And there are lots of things that would be "alien adjacent" and would give away what military abilities we have to detect things.

At this point, the military has less ability than the people on this axis. We have billions of people with phones in multiple countries that can record with video everywhere. If aliens existed in anything that was more than a super-ultra-rare one-off, supressing the evidence in this day and age would be beyond impossible.

As for the contractors: it's almost certainly because the government isn't providing any funding in the amendment. The contractors would happily charge lots of money to compile a multi-thousand page report that effectively says "Nothing" if you paid them to. That's their whole bloody business model, for crying out loud.

monkeydreams2• 3 years ago

If aliens don’t exist, why are defense contractors trying so hard to shut down a bill that simply says “show us what you know about aliens”?

Convince me that you have told me everything that you know about aliens. If not, i will force you to open up your IP for scrutiny and, possibly, any passing Russian ambassadors.

ceejayoz3• 3 years ago

I mean, it's pointless legislation; it has the usual "unless disclosure would 'substantially impair the national security of the United States'" loopholes.

Are there any Congressional representatives not "funded by defense contractors"?

gattr• 3 years ago

Here's an interesting view I've encountered somewhere: yes, complex (not to mention intelligent) life might be very rare, but simple life might be extremely common (either easily arising from primordial soups, and/or trivially spread by panspermia). Imagine - millions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way alone, all covered (or: infested) by unicellular goo.

(Before eventual colonization, this would warrant a really thorough "gamma soak" as in Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation space" SF series.)

mouzogu• 3 years ago

if there has been life on earth at least 3.7 billion years. and the universe is approx 14 billion years. so i would assume life is very common. they seem almost co-existant or co-dependent as illustrated by the life cycle on earth.

reset2023• 3 years ago

Any form of life outside of earth would be in danger if humans were to find it, no matter how technologically superior.

roywiggins• 3 years ago

We have no idea if earthly life is average in the cosmos or some sort of freak outlier.

Well, no, but it's totally reasonable to behave as if it is mostly average, at least for now. Looking under the streetlight[0] is a perfectly good idea when you've only managed to cover, like, a tiny percentage of the street so far. Once you run out of optimism about finding earthlike life (or it's become so common so as to be boring) then it'll be good to have people with more out-there ideas, but the people looking for earthlike life aren't being stupid for focusing on stuff that we already understand a bit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

mcpackieh4• 3 years ago

Assuming that Earth was very average is a very rational place to start, but the reasonability of this assumption changes when we look elsewhere for life and fail to find it. Earth being average was once the basis for people assuming that other planets in our solar system might have intelligent civilizations; that has been almost entirely ruled out now (maybe there could be a civilization of space squid under the ice of Europa?) And we've failed to detect any radio signals that indicate life elsewhere in the stars near Earth. There's still a lot of searching left to be done, but each time we look and fail to find anything we should be updating our priors.

panarchy• 3 years ago

Yeah, but our looking is like peering at a drop of pond water (that doesn't have any macroscopic life in it) with a magnifying glass and deeming it inert.

Of the comparatively tiny 5k or so exoplanets we've discovered most would likely be difficult for advanced life to develop as they're gas giants and of the ones we've detected we've only performed atmospheric analysis on a fraction of them.

Radio signals are mostly just going to degrade and look like noise by the time they get to us. Even with a really strong directional antenna how well are you going to pickup your wifi signal that's on the other side of a major city?

Life could also be teeming across the universe just as organisms that haven't learned to harness electricity.

jjk166• 3 years ago

We have yet to find a single body of liquid water in the universe that we can confirm is devoid of life.

100% of worlds where Earth-like life could survive and that we have explored have an intelligent species living on them.

There isn't a single star system we have ruled out from having intelligent civilizations.

While we can put some bounds on things (some worlds are inhospitable to life as we know it, we're almost certainly the only intelligent species in our solar system at this time, we're likely the only intelligent civilization to inhabit our planet in at least the past few hundred million years, there probably isn't a recent galaxy-spanning empire in the milky way, there's likely no civilization actively trying to communicate with us, etc) there is absolutely no evidence that life as we know it is unusual either in terms of what sort of life is out there or how much.

rereasonable• 3 years ago

Thinking about this article and things like the Fermi paradox, I sometimes wonder if we're approaching things the wrong way?

Similar to how the current branch of life as we know it evolved on planet earth after what we assume was a large meteor impact and the resulting effects on the environment, what if the universe (or at least our local galaxy) was once much more populated and "busy", and then along came a cataclysmic event that wiped out the vast majority of life, resetting the stage for other more discrete, gentler and less energy hungry forms to thrive and exist. What if all those black holes and interesting space phenomena are the result of massively powerful weapons from a massive galactic scale confilct which literally destroyed entire solar systems by imploding stars? Or perhaps they are just clever physics tricks which fool outside observers into thinking there is nothing there, or what is there is so immensely dangerous/destructive that it's best to steer clear and leave well alone?

Furthermore, what if the majority of advanced life simply doesn't want to be found. Assuming that the development of other species in other worlds would roughly follow our own path (struggle for habitable space / usable resources), there would be an inherent distrust of other galactic civilisations at a percieved lower/higher level of development. The "dummies" would be avoided for (looks at today's news headlines) obvious reasons, and the more advanced civilisations would be an obvious threat which could not be defended against and so would not be targets for our exploration (a la "Dark Forest Theory" et al).

So, we're either in the first wave and we have some trouble headed our way sooner or later. Or we're in the second wave, and have likely been infiltrated culturally/genetically many millennia ago by the surviving intelligences (in whichever form, take your pick) from the first wave.

Forgive my rather crude treatment of the topic, I realise there is much more nuance and detail to these things. I simply present this idea in a rough form as a means to keep things within our realm of understanding.

thegrim33• 3 years ago

"It was also, it turned out, a false alarm. The phosphine not only wasn’t a signal of life, but probably wasn’t even there at all, a swing-and-a-miss of data interpretation."

Why not at least link to the source of such a claim? Is there a paper that says this? I love how a pop-sci journalist can just throw out some definitive claim like that with no evidence whatsoever. As if there's overwhelming evidence for their claim to the point where it's not even worthy of debate.

I have no horse in the race either way, but last I heard there were multiple theories about the phosphine readings and just not enough data to come to any conclusion yet. I thought we were waiting for future missions to collect more data. There's multiple upcoming Venus missions, at least one of which is going to swoop up material from the atmosphere for analysis.

simne• 3 years ago

Exists one irritating problem - our foundations depend on Boolean logic, for which things must be black or white, no halftones.

For example, we usually talking about Earth as very ordinary world, assuming, we are not special.

For most parameters, Earth ordinary. But exists at least one parameter, which is specific.

What I mean, Earth in Galaxy region, where density of interstellar matter is very low, so low, for example Bussard engine could not work.

But for example in central Galaxy region, density of interstellar matter is few magnitudes larger, Bussard engine might work, and it is very real tech for interstellar travel with speed close to speed of light.

Sure this have some consequences, for example central galaxy regions considered very active for star bursts and even explosions, so they have not billions years of calm life, they really dangerous for life as we know it.

So, we are ordinary world and not ordinary at same time. From our current science view, we are in void, with low matter density.

Between us and other part of galaxy, exists huge (for us) void, which is not easy to cross.

An existential problem in the search for alien life

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