Earth's "radio bubble" is well over 100 light years across now. If there are aliens out there, they are probably already on their way to ask us in person why Ross, the largest Friend, doesn't simply eat the others.
Radio signals do weaken and dissipate over time and space. Broadcast signals could fade into the cosmic microwave background in a few light years depending on their strength. The sci-fi trope of aliens picking up Earth tv and radio just isn't plausible.
No, we don't. If you're talking about SETI, that's looking at radio signals. If you're talking about killer asteroid early-warning detection, we generally don't have the capacity to reliably detect voyager-sized asteroids even in our own solar system, let alone in interstellar space.
Imagine how far technology has come in 100 years. Then imagine if the alien had just a 1 million year head start to technology. 1 million years is less than 1/1000 of the age of the universe earlier.
We have literally no idea what technology the alien could have.
Maybe there are aliens out there so advanced that they could be reading our screens right now in realtime from across the galaxy using some weird post-quantum silly sauce we can't even comprehend. But it doesn't seem likely given what we do know and observe, at least not to me (based mostly on the Fermi Paradox and thermodynamics) that there is someone 100 light years away teasing I Love Lucy from the CMB. It seems less likely that they would be able to pinpoint our location based on that, and try to annihilate us.
The aliens have the same physics we do. Science isn't magic. Without quite literally having to replace everything we have known or discovered in the past 250 years from entropy to electromagnetic theory to gravity to motion with brand new theories that somehow equally explain all known phenomenon while also allowing lots of outright magic, no, the aliens are not able to collect radio waves from below the noise floor.
> The aliens have the same physics we do. Science isn't magic.
Show a spacecraft to someone from the middle ages and they would think it's magic.
There is physics that has not been discovered. Lots of things are still unexplained.
> no, the aliens are not able to collect radio waves from below the noise floor
Before we had quadrature modulation and quadrature phase shift keying, we thought we had hit the noise floor for wireless bandwidth. After we thought we really hit the ceiling, we had beamforming. There's stuff that hasn't been thought of. We don't know the unknown unknowns.
After the transition to digital TV our broadcasted signals mostly look like noise, though. Maybe an outside observer would assume that our civilization ended sometime in 2010.
Analogue TV would not be much better. How would the aliens know they're supposed to shoot an electron raygun left-to-right 486 times across a screen, then ignore the next 39 lines, then repeat this 29.97 times a second? And that's before you get into interlacing, horizontal blanking intervals, line 21, luma and chroma (encoded by reference to human eyesight), or different standards altogether like PAL or SECAM, etc.
Analogue TV has always felt so much more clever than digital TV to me, at least from a purely technical standpoint. I guess that's because we're mostly digital natives now, so video codecs seem ordinary and programmable electron rayguns do not.
You can still see from far away that our planet's atmosphere has a very unusual chemical composition that's far out of equilibrium.
We are already using spectroscopy to gain insights into the chemical composition of exo-planets, and we have barely begun doing this kind of research. In even just a few decades we'll be massively better at this.
I think you're not appreciating how big space is. They're not going to be near any star for thousands of years - and near here is still very distant. If we're still around then, we'll probably be able to look after ourselves.
The chances of either Voyager ending up in the hands of intelligent aliens are remote compared to the chances of us blowing ourselves up. Be happy that there is at least a tiny possibility of a tombstone for a race which once upon a time aeons ago showed some promise. Personally I think they should have stuck a mummy in there.
They're not even wrong about both their complaints. The "damocletian sword of nuclear weapons" is actually what's been keeping humanity from setting the planet on fire for the past 60+ years.
I assume you are against them due to the silent forest hypothesis? Better not announce ourselves, because anything out there might not be friendly to us?
The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case.
There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. You'd be far better off just using a particle accelerator to forge any chemical element and then assemble them into molecules using nano-replicators.
The best you can do is to send information, possibly with the help of gravitational lensing.
Sci-fi mode on: given that the potential galactic civilization is going to be information-based, who's to say the Earth is not already under attack? An interstellar fleet of large invasion ships with soldiers is not feasible, but a small drone with an AI that connects to terrestrial networks and steers the civilization towards collapse is possible. I'd start investigating if TikTok algorithm developers got some nudges from a weirdly knowledgeable source.
> The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case.
Wrong. Dark Forest isn't about conquest, it's about preemptive strikes.
The Dark Forest hypothesis assumes that travel between stars is hard - more importantly, that even communications at those distances is hard - specifically, that it takes a long time, which prevents building trust. This, combined with one other assumption: that technological progress makes unpredictable jumps ahead, makes the conclusion fall out straight from basic game theory.
So per the Dark Forest hypothesis, if you spot a primitive agrarian society sending a "hello" to you with smoke signals, you're better off lobbing a nuke at them in response - because otherwise, should you send a friendly "hello back" instead, you may discover that while that message was in flight, they underwent a triple industrial revolution, and shot a magic proton bomb at you.
Why would they do that, you ask? Because from their POV, at any moment you can have a sudden technological breakthrough and start dragging black holes at them or whatever. Point being, it's best for them to get rid of you, while they still can.
(People get too fixated on the forest metaphor XOR the sci-fi parts, but it's really neither; the second book of the trilogy pretty much spelled out the whole rationale like a math textbook, in case anyone missed it after half of first book making analogies to it with ants and history of modern China and such.)
(ETA: what's the justification for "sudden technological jumps" assumption? History. Humanity had ~all the ingredients for the industrial revolution for centuries, and it's not clear why it happened when it did, and not a century or two earlier (or later). Then it happened, but the outcome wasn't "evenly distributed". Then the 20th century saw several large nations jumping all the way from pre-industrial agrarian societies to post-industrial peer superpowers, in a span of merely a few decades. The author writes extensively about living through that transition in the first book.)
The ability to strike itself assumes easy interstellar travel. After all, if you can _destroy_ whole planets and stars, why not just send colonists immediately?
Or maybe pre-emptively sterilize everything to make sure your eventual expansion encounters no issues.
Moreover, if your first instinct is to strike while hiding, then your equilibrium state would be a civilization that is the most successful at wiping out everything around it, spread all over the habitable universe. Dark Forest just doesn't work from the game-theoretical perspective.
That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space, as opposed to inner space. Humans sit about half way between the biggest and smallest things in the universe. Instead of exploring the cosmos, which takes tons of energy and is almost entirely empty, we could be exploring the space between atoms and building worlds without our own world. It is also almost entirely empty, but the energy costs to construct anything would be close to zero.
> That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space
I'm sure you do understand it. I mean, sure, the other things you mention are also interesting, but mankind has been awed by a starry night's sky since we were able to look up. We gave names to the arrangements of bright things in the skies and imagined gods in them, and navigated by them. The are awe-inspiring.
It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature.
> It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature.
Judging by social media, half the population has an unhealthy obsession about travel and tourism. It's not hard to connect dreams of space to interests of most people here: most stars you look at have planets around them, now imagine some of those are like Earth, and now suddenly this is a place to on a cruise to, to have new pictures to post to Instagram.
Observe that ~all sci-fi stories happening in outer space actually don't happen in deep space - there's always a warp drive or a stargate or such used to skip the boring, empty parts, and jump straight to habitable planets and peculiar space phenomena.
It's the same as with sailing stories and reality - the interesting parts are everything that isn't the open blue sea.
Similarly with sailing films, particularly documentaries, there are films that focus more on the journey than the endpoints. eg: (IIRC) the Kon-Tiki (1950) doco had a lot of mid ocean time.
>>There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel.
Material, no. but we know with absolute certainty that Earth will stop being habitable for humans at some point. So assuming any intelligent race, human descendent or otherwise, still exists on this planet, it will have to eventually move. It's just pure luck that we evolved when we did. But there are valid reasons for interstellar travel(other than you know, pure curiosity).
It's a catch 22. If you want to preserve the Earth's biosphere or even biological humans, then you would need to move at least a ship the size of a small planetoid. That will support life for millenia that will be required for interstellar travel.
And if you can do that, then why bother with the interstellar travel? Just move to a higher orbit to survive the red giant stage. And then move closer to the stellar remnant, white dwarves will provide plenty of energy for trillions of years.
And if you manage to transcribe yourself into some kind of computing-based device, then why bother at all?
I think moving a small planetoid and moving a planet are not really comparable technical challenges, are they? Even a small moon like Deimos you could probably move by attaching giant rockets to a side and pushing(absolutely absurd, but let's go with it). How would you move the earth with its atmosphere still intact? Is your rocket stretching out the entire way from the surface to the edge of space?
Even if leaving the solar system, or whatever system a sentient race exists, were possible, going to war with another sentience in their home turf (which, remember, must first overcome the near impossible hurdles of getting there to begin with) is so unlikely it makes invasion fears absurd. I think the dark forest theory is groundless paranoia.
Scifi usually bypasses this by breaking the laws of physics, for the sake of storytelling.
Dark Forest isn't about hiding from invasion. It's about hiding from getting preemptively sniped by someone else, worried that one day you may find a reason and a way to snipe them.
For this to work out you don't need interstellar colonization to be plausible - merely the ability to accelerate a rock to a significant fraction of the speed of light is enough, and that's definitely much closer to science than fiction.
It's still very impractical though. Sniping everywhere that intelligent life might exist is very low probability, low stakes, and for what reason? You don't have any reason to kill anyone you're unlikely to ever meet. And with a weapon which, by the time it arrives, your civilization might be gone. And for what? You cannot compete for resources you cannot reach. War doesn't work like this, it requires anger and an adversary that you can meet in your lifetime.
Dark Forest also assumes aliens aren't curious and thrilled about other life existing out there. The one civilization we are familiar with wouldn't react like this. And we're talking about a very warlike civilization!
I wouldn't characterize it as "moving". Any excursion outside of the solar system will not be done by anything resembling a modern human, full stop. It may be plausible to send some sort of robot with some sort of nanomachine hoo-hah off in the direction of a nearby star, to seed life there. But no living human will ever leave the heliosphere.
The vast space of everything seems to me that any intelligent life eventually discovers physics to get out of this dimension. Dune space feudalism is unlikely
There is zero empirical evidence that aliens actually exist. All the arguments for why they should exist despite this lack of evidence are borderline theology.
They read the Three Body Problem but forgot that light exists. For aliens with interferometers looking at Earth there's little question there's some sort of interesting active chemistry (life) here.
Theres no hiding that fact. If they're within about 100 light years they'll be watching the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the atmosphere. Even if they're don't know the exact cause the spectra of pollutants and rates of change will give hints the changes are unlikely to be from random natural processes.
Outside of 100 light years but pretty much anywhere in the galaxy (assuming interferometers capable of getting spectra of Earth) will know there's some sort of life here. Even if you want to assume some aliens don't recognize life as we understand it they'll at least see extremely interesting and varied chemistry.
The idea you're going to hide Earth's biosignatures is silly. Trying to hide our technology signatures is pointless. At about 70 light years any interested aliens will start seeing isotopes resulting from above ground nuclear testing.
Telescopes aren't magic, and space is big. There are 100 billion+ stars in the galaxy. Within a 100 light-year radius, there are 27 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_95... ). Nobody's looking at Earth. If any hypothetical civilization were to find our system, it would be by blanketing the entire galaxy in 100 billion drones and checking every single star, in which case the dark forest doesn't matter anyway.
First that's just star systems within 100 lightyears of Earth, systems with one of more gravitationally bound stars in them. There are thousands of stars within 100 light years of Earth. Most are red dwarfs but there's about a thousand F, G, and K class stars.[0]
While telescopes indeed are not magic, an alien species at least as advanced as us could have telescopes capable of not only finding Earth but gathering spectra from it. It's certainly no guarantee Earth would be found but there's no hiding from anyone looking. There's no masking the chemistry of life on Earth and likewise no masting techno-signatures in the atmosphere.
If they are at our current tech level, to "see" Earth, then Earth would need to pass in front of the Sun from their point of view. That means they would need to be somewhere in the same pane as the Earth's orbit.
That's a transiting detection, there's other detection methods for exoplanets. Even a coarse grained survey with a ground based traditional telescope can find our solar system thanks to Jupiter's gravitational influence on the Sun. Doppler shift's in the Sun's spectra come from Jupiter tugging at it gravitationally. With interferometry and coronagraphy spectra of planets in our system can be gathered without needing to see our system edge-on. Then of course for aliens on the ecliptic there's transiting spectra of Earth.
The number of techniques for detecting exoplanets makes the Dark Forest concept silly. There's no hiding our solar system from alien observation. For dedicated observers (at the right distances) there's no hiding the existence of life, the Industrial Revolution, or above ground nuclear testing.
It's not whataboutism, it's a legitimate question. How does it increase safety on the road to reject local SSH connections by a dumb user, when that same user can mess with the car physically?
Simplest example: a driver could probably disable attentive driving checks by pasting a script in from a web search in a few minutes. Nothing like an inattentive 3750 lbs weapon.
Yeah and they could hire a professional driver or a engineer and IPO for billions a life sized driving AI powered crypto robot too. Look, like clearly google + ctrl-v scripting or running an one click deployment exe on your computer on a whim is different than physically ordering/picking up something and then installing it into a vehicle?
Of course they're different, but you're trying to argue that the former takes objectively less effort than the latter, and it doesn't. One or the other may take less effort depending on who you are and what you know.
The AI wrote the code, but the design decisions are 100% mine, I’m going through a monospaced phase.
Cover Flow would look cool but I’m not sure it solves a real problem for this use case. When you’re digging through crates you want to search and filter fast, not swipe through covers. Appreciate the feedback though!
I despise the naive scientists who did them as much as those who brought the damocletian sword of nuclear weapons on us.
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