Doubts grow about the biosignature approach to alien-hunting

https://www.quantamagazine.org/doubts-grow-about-the-biosignature-approach-to-alien-hunting-20240319/

by pseudolus • 2 years ago

108 200 2 years ago

Let’s just hope it’s not the “dark forest” theory that’s correct, although it would make a lot of sense to me assuming the universe is teeming with life.

TomSwirly2• 2 years ago

The most likely theory is that the universe is much like it appears to be and the speed of light is an absolute barrier, and that in practice means that interstellar civilizations never form, because it's simply far, far too expensive and difficult.

If alien civilizations lasted indefinitely, that wouldn't be a barrier, but in the one sample of a civilization we have, we are consuming our resources and generating waste at an exponentially increasing rate, and will crash and burn leaving us without the quadrillions of "dollars" it would take to even start colonizing the stars.

fredsmith219• 2 years ago

Even in this scenario I would still expect to see Von Neumann machines at some point.

cyberlurker2• 2 years ago

Kurzgesagt has many videos on this topic. In one video, they point out we may actually be in the right place at the right time and could be one of the first civilizations. This seems egocentric at first, but if you consider how chaotic the early universe has been and how relatively calm things are in the last billion years, it does make sense.

Also, I learned recently that we don’t have as much time with Earth as I originally thought. We have a few hundred million years to figure out how to colonize other planets or live in space before Earth becomes radically different and potentially unlivable. I imagine most civilizations get snuffed out like this.

pfdietz16• 2 years ago

Neither FTL travel nor unitary interstellar civilizations are necessary for the Fermi argument to bite.

palata18• 2 years ago

Not sure why you got downvoted :-/.

I am always surprised by how people tend to completely ignore the scale of the universe. People get excited by claims to "go back to the Moon, then Mars, then who knows?", but the truth is that given our current understanding of the world, sending humans on another solar system is theoretically impossible. Just look at those distances: we just can't, period.

Of course, we may discover new fundamental physics that would change that. But that's a fundamental problem, not an engineering problem. Instead of wasting money and energy on the engineering required to send humans to Mars (which is an artistic performance at this point), we should pay fundamental physicists to attempt to revolutionize our understanding of the world (wishing them luck) and spend those resources into something that is actually important for life: preserving life on Earth.

Right now we as a civilization are failing to survive on Earth. It seems reasonable to consider that other civilizations may have the same problems.

AtlasBarfed4• 2 years ago

If you have silicon/AI/computer-based intelligence, then it's a lot more durable in space and lasts a lot longer. That's a totally different ballgame. You don't even need habitable worlds, arguably what would be valuable is asteroids since you don't have gravity wells.

200 year transits isn't a big deal then. They could tolerate the G-forces of an Orion pulse nuclear ship a lot better too. That's 1960s tech, if you have some antimatter collectors in space (my idea for a starship-based startup, how valuable is antimatter?), then you get to have even more fun.

Orion can do .1c with fission. One of the big problems was getting it off the ground and the fallout was unacceptable.

BUT, with starship doing 150-250 tons, that means 8 flights for a 4,000 ton low-end orion, or ... a lot more for the high end 1,000,000 ton orion.

smallmancontrov2• 2 years ago

Three Body Problem is a lot of fun, but if you are that concerned by it you should seek out the broader Fermi Paradox dialogue which does not favor this solution, and not just because it's unwanted. Isaac Arthur's Fermi Paradox Compendium on youtube is probably a good place to start and I'm pretty sure his Dark Forest video covers the major points. In any case, I have them here too:

If the universe is teeming with alien life, why isn't it here? It looks like it will take millions of years to colonize the galaxy but the likely variation in emergence/evolutionary timelines is some decent fraction of billions of years (considerably more than 4 billion years, the starting gun is metallicity not the formation of Earth). In particular, if there is highly capable space-faring life at Alpha Centauri, why haven't they probed their neighboring star system in a billion years even though it was completely trivial to do so relative to subsequently displayed technological feats?

Also: it's really hard to configure the rules of a Dark Forest so that the optimal strategy is "hide" rather than "grow, grow, grow -- and hope you grow fast enough by the time it matters," and it's spectacularly hard to make that so universal across all aliens that none of them "wins" and colonizes the galaxy per the previous paragraph.

Finally, Cixin Liu had to break the speed of light to make his story work (and then carefully avoid the implications to #1 and #2 above, which both get worse if c is no longer a constraint). I am all for doing what it takes to tell the story, and even more delighted by his deeper exploration of this concept further down the line, but one must remember to adjust the likelihoods of it all according to the likelihood of the premise, which seems quite low according to our present understanding.

pfdietz16• 2 years ago

This is a nit pick and doesn't change your argument, but Alpha Centauri would not have been our neighboring star system for a billion years. Stars move relative to each other in our stellar neighborhood at about 30 km/s, or one light year every 10,000 years.

NegativeLatency2• 2 years ago

Personally I would rather take the chance of being destroyed than destroy other life.

That whole idea is also based on IMO the worst instincts of our race.

For all we know making it past the great filter involves developing an increased empathy for all life.

foobar1962• 2 years ago

Personally I would rather take the chance of being destroyed than destroy other life.

Great. So don't wash your hands before eating... and don't eat.

AtlasBarfed4• 2 years ago

It is based on instincts, which are tied to survival, which is inherent to biological competition, which is inherent to evolution.

It is unlikely life elsewhere won't involve the same fundamental game theory.

lannisterstark• 2 years ago

Cixin straight up borrowed this from The Killing Star. You should read that. It's also pretty fun but goes 0-100 in chapter 1.

wouldbecouldbe5• 2 years ago

I understand it would be super interesting to find biological processes similar to earth like life similar to our light, water & dioxide cycle (im sure there's a name for it)

But sometimes it sound like many people think that's the only way life can start, yet we have no idea how it really works. Also on earth there are organisms in the deep sea that have completely different biology. We might find life, even sentient one, in places we haven't thought to look.

Kalium2• 2 years ago

Yes.

You're right. Absolutely, completely correct. There's almost certainly other ways life can start. Other processes that can result in intelligence. Other paths of technological development.

The issue, as I understand is, is that all of those are completely unknown. We have absolutely no useful idea of how to look for wildly different life in places we haven't thought to look.

What we do know with certainty is that Earth's chemistry can result in life. We do know that it can result in intelligence. We do know what paths our technological development took. We even have some idea what these things might look like from afar. All together, we have exactly one data point that lets us search for similar data points.

Are there other, different world, with different life? Very possibly. We humans are well aware of this. We just don't have a way of knowing if we've found anything. So as a matter of managing limited resources, there's a tendency to stick to what we know can work.

card_zero• 2 years ago

It may just be a failure of the imagination, but on the face of it the only chemistry that could feasibly make organisms is organic chemistry. That's not because it's Earth's chemistry, but because carbon is a very useful lego brick. This leaves us looking for alternatives beyond chemistry, something like Douglas Adams's "sentient shade of blue", except imaginable and not nonsense. So your certainty about this is ... staunch, let's say.

Inevitable Wikipedia article about this:

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

fellerts• 2 years ago

What we do know with certainty is that Earth's chemistry can result in life

We know that Earth's chemistry can _support_ life. Panspermia is still a plausible explanation for life on Earth.

mr_mitm7• 2 years ago

I'm on the more pessimistic side of this argument. Lots of very smart people have thought about this, and really the only element that is able to form complex molecules besides carbon is silicon, and there are good arguments as to why it's a much worse basis for life. And if you have carbon-based life forms, you will have water and CO2.

In any case, it is just way more likely than any other form and makes absolutely the most sense to look for this first.

Sure, you can always say that we don't know what we don't know, but the periodic table of elements is finite and complete, and we are pretty sure that chemistry doesn't change across the universe. I realize I'm fighting an uphill battle in my position, because it's hard to prove the non-existence of things, so you will always be able to say "whatever, maybe you didn't think of everything", and it's true, but I have a hard time seeing how life can be anything but carbon-based. If you have more insight besides what resembles a god of the gaps, I'd be very interested.

wouldbecouldbe5• 2 years ago

Yeah that make sense, but still very much earthlike biology perspective. I mean almost everyone here also believes in digital intelligence at some point.

Are there elements that are more stable under high pressure or heat? Or opposite?

chartpath• 2 years ago

Kind of a tangent but I'm really interested in why statements like:

if you have carbon-based life forms, you will have water and CO2.

..can lead to statements like:

it is just way more likely than any other form

I totally agree on the observation, but what is fascinating to me is why a deductive statement can be considered to indicate likelihood in probability. It seems there is a bit of abductive reasoning going on behind the scenes which neither the deductive logic or inductive probability can really capture on their own.

lumost• 2 years ago

Doesn't this depend on the STP of the alien environment? It seems plausible that planets that are a few hundred degrees warmer might benefit from silicon based life, no?

kilpikaarna• 2 years ago

You don't have to look for oxygen etc that are the signs of earth-like lifeforms. I have no idea what prohects like this look for specifically, but any kind of thermodynamic disequilibrium that shows up in the atmospheric makeup of a planet is potentially a sign of life. Free oxygen is a very good candidate, but not necessarily the only one.

mcswell• 2 years ago

"on earth there are organisms in the deep sea that have completely different biology": Not sure what you mean by that. There are bacteria that metabolize different things than what the bacteria up here metabolize, but they (and we) all use DNA, and with a couple exceptions they use the same codons to encode the same amino acids and start/stop. As far as anyone knows, that coding is completely arbitrary, i.e. the codons could have been entirely different. The fact that they are not entirely different implies a common origin.

Lots of other biochemical similarities, too.

jajag• 2 years ago

Assembly theory might eventually provide some useful tools in this area

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

HarHarVeryFunny2• 2 years ago

Yes - seem a much better, more general, approach.

There was an interesting interview of Lee Cronin on Lex Fridman's podcast a while ago.

For anyone unfamiliar, Assembly Theory is based on the idea that the more structurally complex something is, such as a molecule, the less likely it was created by chance, and the more likely it was created by an assembly factory of sorts, one type of which is life in it's potentially diverse forms.

gradus_ad• 2 years ago

I was never very impressed by assembly "theory" (what are its testable predictions?)... If we find a refrigerator floating in space I don't need an Assembly Theorist to tell me there's some intelligent/intentional process behind it.

Seriously, what is it other than a potent source of pop sci clickbait?

itissid• 2 years ago

Would that also throw projects like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Interferometer_For_Exopl... also into question?

heroic• 2 years ago

Question is to people who say if universe is teeming with life, then why is it not visible close by: We don't know how large the universe is. If say life is "teeming" means it's found every 1M Parsec on the size of 10^100M Parsec, wouldn't it be teeming, and yet nothing in our vicinity?

I'm being genuinely curious, not dissing on anyone.

dsq• 2 years ago

Life every million parsecs means less than one life form per galaxy, so hardly teeming.

zaphirplane2• 2 years ago

FWIW there are 2 trillion galaxies in the universe

So says Wikipedia

ryandrake• 2 years ago

And it's not just the size of the distance we can see, it's the size of the slice of time when we are looking. We've had the tools to sorta-kinda detect life signatures for what, 10-20 years? Maybe we can keep that up for another (at best) 100-1000 years until we destroy ourselves? The universe is on the order of 10^10 years old. Star formation will end ~10^14 years from now The last black holes will evaporate ~10^100 years from now. So our temporal search window is astronomically small, too.

smegger0015• 2 years ago

Why do you assume we distroy ourselves? If we can make spacecolonies at somepoint between now and your 1000 year figure why kill ourselves when we can leave for another star. It doesn't even have to be a popular strategy just one that a nonzero number choose to take rather that self distruction.

yungporko• 2 years ago

it's also not only a question of distance but also a question of time. there could be/have been several alien species that would be our next door neighbours but just not at the same time as us.

hnlmorg• 2 years ago

There’s a few problems when hunting for life:

Distances are immense:

1. Our view of the galaxy is very limited. We know almost nothing about our closest neighbouring solar system, let alone anything further afield

2. And because the distances are so far, we are effectively seeing those distant events hundreds or thousands of years in the past.

3. Where to look? We cannot search everywhere. We can only hope to get lucky that we are searching the right corner of the sky at the right time.

Alien life is completely alien:

4. We can only make assumptions of what to look for. Any sufficiently encrypted signal might genuinely appear like white noise to us.

They might be so advanced that we simply cannot detect them

5. Early communication systems on Earth were noisy in that they were broadcast 365 degrees. Later systems could be targeted, focused in a specific direction. As technology advances, noisy classical methods of broadcasting become less common. This in turn reduces the amount of noisy any extraterrestrial eavesdropper could spot.

And that’s assuming they’re not intentionally “cloaking” themselves. Putting aside Star Trek style fantasy for a moment, there is an advantage to remaining hidden. Whether you’re a predator like a burrowing spider or stealth bomber, or prey like bugs that camouflage themselves as plants; being hidden gives you a massive tactical advantage.

smegger0015• 2 years ago

Cloaking probably isnt possible without discovering someway to violate the laws of conservation of energy. Any work done by a system will produce heat hiding the heat signature of an advanced technological society is probably impossible.

echelon• 2 years ago

If the next "hard step" is aliens going from biological to artificial, how can we be sure what sorts of signals they might leak? We're not even there yet ourselves.

contravariant2• 2 years ago

I think you can ignore that second number, best we know the universe is infinite. Though the visible universe is limited.

username135• 2 years ago

Our definition of life is based on 1 single element.

dylan6042• 2 years ago

But why do we think that life would be based on a different single element anywhere else?

xeromal• 2 years ago

I don't know anything about anything but I can imagine a society of bacteria saying the world is teeming with life but they're sadly sitting at the bottom of the ocean in a lava tube and they can't manage to find any life.

ineedaj0b• 2 years ago

We could just be early. We’re one of the first civilizations to ‘wake up’ perhaps.

So it’s teeming, but not much to see with our eyes yet

somenameforme4• 2 years ago

I'm fairly sure you know this already, but you just described the Fermi Paradox. [1] And the answer to this paradox is that there is no answer, though there are a million hypotheses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

seventytwo2• 2 years ago

The real answer is that we don’t know.

We know with 100% certainty that life exists on the universe, we just don’t know where else besides earth it exists.

seanhunter• 2 years ago

The first exoplanet was only detected in 1988 and confirmed in 2002. These are things we were really really sure were there and are absolutely huge relative to a vital sign. It would be surprising indeed were we to already have found a biosignature given it's got to be a lot harder than finding a gigantic chunk of rock.

Astronomy is hard.

derelicta• 2 years ago

I hope I will grow old enough for one to see a proper confirmation of life out there

pfdietz16• 2 years ago

That would be bad news. I hope we never have proper confirmation of independently arisen life out there (or, worse, intelligent life out there.) It would imply the Great Filter is likely to be ahead of us, so humanity would likely be doomed.

NegativeLatency2• 2 years ago

You can choose to believe that we’ll make it past that event, and even do things to help your community and neighborhood in that spirit.

api• 2 years ago

It shows no such thing. The Fermi paradox is fun but it explodes into such a massive tree of possibilities that are all untestable that it’s just that… fun.

It could be that as we explore the universe we find a ton of microbes but few or no other nearby complex lifeforms with any form of intelligence. This would imply that Earth is a special environment for fostering stable complexity, in which case the great filter is still behind us.

BTW there are reasons to think Earth might be special: it’s got this nice magnetic field, a huge moon that reduces bombardment, a thick radiation shielding atmosphere, volcanic activity enough to replenish that atmosphere and the landscape, a reasonably stable climate, is not tide locked to its star (as many planets likely are), and orbits a friendly star that doesn’t throw tantrums and blast us with gamma rays. (The sun appears to be a cute fuzzy waggy little puppy as stars go.)

We just don’t really know.

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

It would imply the Great Filter is likely to be ahead of us

How?

Supermancho3• 2 years ago

That would be bad news.

I don't think so. We already know there is a filter for our race. The sun is one terminus, sometime after the earth is uninhabitable to human life (due to ecology). So there's nothing to lose but some time.

az09mugen• 2 years ago

The most probable candidate for now is Europa with an incoming NASA mission [0]. Because within the solar system among the 3 potential candidates to host life in an ocean under thick ice sheet. Maybe we will find traces of old life on Mars. IMHO, the only other way to have confirmation is to recieve a "hand-crafted radio signal".

[0] https://europa.nasa.gov/

TheLoafOfBread5• 2 years ago

Regarding alien life and search for it, I have really big problem with concept of Dyson Sphere/Swarm. The moment when human race will be able to build such megastructures, it is very likely that long time before that fusion generators will be about as common as a smart phone and probably with a same size.

Furthermore matter is just condensed energy, so why bother with some wonky immobile megastructure when you can just decay your everyday trash into pure energy.

randomname93857• 2 years ago

> Furthermore matter is just condensed energy, so why bother with some wonky immobile megastructure when you can just decay your everyday trash into pure energy.

True, matter is an energy... however the only known way to convert matter into pure energy is to make it annihilate with antimatter ( akin to electron-positron). We first have to have a good and cheap source of antimatter! And the matter annihilation may still generate a lot of particles/matter - that may be a waste (or not) depending what you do with that further.

A Partial conversion of a matter into energy is also fusion and fission reactions, but they are limited by the difference between source and end element of reaction here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_peak#/media/File:Binding_... - e.g. H2 -> He3, That uses only a tiny portion of matter, no energy that can be extracted from Fe56 (max), and all its close elements are also useless for either fusion or fission energy extraction.

XorNot3• 2 years ago

We're closer to building a Dyson swarm today then we are to workable fusion reactors though - as in, we technically have the technology and means to start building one right now - a series of solar-harvesting satellites in Earth-halo orbits beaming microwave power back towards us.

It would be inefficient, but there is no physical reason we couldn't do it.

The other problem is scale: Dyson swarm power levels are orders of magnitude greater then the amount of deuterium in the Earth's oceans. At those sort of levels, you can't use fusion because you don't have the fuel.

Finally, based on what we know there's some real problems with compact fusion: ITER and other big vacuum vessels are because we're at the materials science limits of how strong magnets can be without destroying themselves.

TheLoafOfBread5• 2 years ago

The first problem with microwave beam is that it can be used as a weapon and will be treated as such. So I don't believe it will get over prototype test phase before being banned like nukes. Additionally the further you are going to be from such beam, the less energy you will get from it. So transferring any energy from the Sun will be extremely inefficient endeavor.

Another big problem with nodes in Dyson swarm is heat, or the inability to get rid of it. They need to be close to the star so they can get as much energy as possible so they will heat up by position, but also modulate this energy and transfer it further, which won't happen without loses. So nodes can be constructed on gigawatt output but in reality be able to do fraction of that, otherwise they would fry itself up.

chillfox2• 2 years ago

A Dyson swarm does allow you to move the star or sterilise any planet in the galaxy by focusing the light into a “death ray”. So it’s a useful tool to have for more reasons than just energy.

fbdab1033• 2 years ago

Even if you could refocus all of the sun into a single direction, over stellar distances, wouldn't it have dispersed into nothing more than a bright star? What is the range of a putative Sol death ray?

TheLoafOfBread5• 2 years ago

Isn't it easier to just use accelerated protons or electrons for this purpose on much more smaller and agile ship, than trying to move a star?

Additional problem with this concept is, that if you will close a star into a sphere, won't it have effect on star itself, like destabilization of fusion process, because of excess energy? For example when star will start burning helium, it will get bigger. If you will prevent the star from getting rid of excess energy, won't it build pressure in the star, so it will start burning helium instead, expands and destroy the Dyson sphere in the process? Then after pressure decreases, it will go back into being a normal hydrogen burning star again.

l33tman• 2 years ago

You can use the dyson structure for other things.. there is a (sci-fi'esque) suggestion called a Matrioska Brain I think, where the entire dyson structure is made of computational substrates - it could be conveniently powered by the solar radiation but also by fusion. Given the track of AI and realistic world sims, everything might end up "living" inside one of those structures..

You would have to protect it pretty decently though..

__MatrixMan__2• 2 years ago

protect it... like running more than one instance of everybody so that we still experience continuity when a bolide strikes a compute node? Or like, we build a wall?

TheLoafOfBread5• 2 years ago

Matrioska Brain I think, where the entire dyson structure is made of computational substrate

Well let's compare star to the amount of available material in Solar System - I don't think that there is enough material to build one layer, let alone several + protective layer.

naasking3• 2 years ago

Power output of a fusion reactor scales with something like the fourth power of the radius, IIRC. I don't think they're going to be able to build a reactor the size of their sun, so capturing that energy still seems pretty useful for large-scale efforts, like moving ships between star systems at near light speed.

TheLoafOfBread5• 2 years ago

Power output is for sure important, but

1. Being able to take your power source with you, so it also works behind nearest asteroid is even more important

2. Having your own source, so not to be dependent on one megastructure, because it is a single point of failure and single point of control of civilization.

gentleman11• 2 years ago

Because there’s nothing out there but swarms of paperclip optimizer ai drones, converting all the universes mass into paperclip fueled war machines for when they encounter a competing paperclip swarm

polycaster• 2 years ago

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

guybedo• 2 years ago

it sometimes is a bit sad to realize we will probably never confirm the existence of intelligent life forms somewhere else in the universe.

Given the size of the universe, billions of galaxies, and each galaxy having billions and billions of stars, life obviously exists somewhere else, and we can safely say it exists in many places and intelligent life forms have emerged and have built civilizations somewhere else.

Given the age of the universe, it's highly probable that other intelligent life forms have built civilizations way more advanced than the human civilization.

Most of human scientific and technological progress happened in the last 200 hundred years. We can only imagine what a society with a 100 000 years head start would look like. I can't imagine what the human race will look like and will be able to do in 10 000 years.

Our galaxy has a 100 000 light years diameter, even if an advanced civilization somewhere in the galaxy, on a planet 20 000 light years away had invented radio 10 000 years ago, we still wouldn't be able to detect it. By the time we detect it, who knows what technological progress they'd made by then.

I tend to think that the answer to the Fermi paradox is that the universe is so big. Even if we could travel at the speed of light, the universe would still be huge and we would probably not be able to detect other intelligent life forms / civilizations.

EDIT: Oops, looks like i got this Proxima Centauri distance a bit off :-) Updated the comment to remove this error, as the main point still stands.

verve_rat• 2 years ago

Um, Proxima Centauri is about 4 light-years away.

eindiran• 2 years ago

Yeah, not sure where the other figure came from. There is literally a project to build unmanned craft to visit Proxima Centauri sometime in the next 50 years or so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot

m3kw9• 2 years ago

“Knowing of no way that phosphine could be produced except through biological processes..”

This type of logic is what is limiting scientists and human progress in general, they cannot think past their egos.

fbdab1033• 2 years ago

The actual publications were far less definitive.

The NY times article[0]

  The astronomers, who reported the finding on Monday in a pair of papers, have not collected specimens of Venusian microbes, nor have they snapped any pictures of them. But with powerful telescopes, they have detected a chemical — phosphine — in the thick Venus atmosphere. After much analysis, the scientists assert that something now alive is the only explanation for the chemical’s source.

Later in the same article

  On such worlds, “as far as we can tell, only life can make phosphine,” Dr. Sousa-Silva said. She has long studied the gas, on the theory that finding it being emitted from rocky planets that orbit distant stars could be proof that life exists elsewhere in the Milky Way.

The actual publication abstract[1]

  ...If PH3 ’s presence in Venus’ atmosphere is confirmed, it therefore is highly likely to be the result of a process not previously considered plausible for Venusian conditions. The process could be unknown geochemistry, photochemistry, or even aerial microbial life, given that on Earth phosphine is exclusively associated with anthropogenic and biological sources.

Which reads to me like a, "We saw something funny" result.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/science/venus-life-clouds...

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.06499.pdf

wnc31413• 2 years ago

Are there any trickle down technologies or scientific discoveries making the search itself worthwhile? In terms of an economic development perspective?

alfiedotwtf• 2 years ago

Discovering life outside of earth would be the greatest human achievement for the next 5000 years, but you’re worried about if it’s worthwhile?

yen223• 2 years ago

"Is it worthwhile?" is not a bad question to ask.

If someone proposed to use all of our resources to discover life outside of Earth, we would probably agree that's not the best use of our resources.

But this means there's an upper bound to the cost we're willing to bear. Which leads to the question, how much resources should we devote to finding life outside of Earth? The answer to that question is, yes, dependent on the expected economic outcome of finding extraterrestrial life.

wnc31413• 2 years ago

Absolutely in that sense the ends justify the means. I was just wondering what we can get from the means themselves given how far off achieving that end appears.

zaphirplane2• 2 years ago

What if they treated humans the same way human empires treated other humans in America, Canada, Australia, South America , New Zealand

peddling-brink5• 2 years ago

A common enemy to unite all of humanity will certainly provide economic development.

somenameforme4• 2 years ago

I think your comment is sarcastic, but Poe's Law in the age of $ > all makes it impossible to tell. If it's genuine I'd only emphasize that the point of money is to be able to do great things. GDP doesn't matter whatsoever, but the betterment of lifestyles and civilization that it's supposed to* correlate against does. And discovering a species, regardless of how simply or complex, on another planet would be one of the greatest discoveries and achievements in human history, with immense scientific and philosophical value.

---

* - kind of funny, but the reason GDP was invented was a local jurisdiction claiming it was being overtaxed. But needless to say the reason countries obsess over it today is not to try to reduce their tax burden.

wnc31413• 2 years ago

Genuine question. I do not doubt that pursuing the question would be worthwhile. However given how far off we are from achieving this aim, does the effort itself provide value elsewhere from the diffusion of innovation in the same way the Apollo program is said to have done.

beau_g• 2 years ago

Is this a joke question? Imagine if we discovered an alien civilization that had a population of trillions - if they subscribed to our SaaS app, the scaling and network effects would be insane.

HideousKojima• 2 years ago

It seems strange to me that life is the default assumption instead of "new chemical process for creating phosphine/whatever that we weren't aware of before." The latter seems to me like it would require far fewer assumptions

Doubts grow about the biosignature approach to alien-hunting

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