This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've raised this issue before and gotten a bombardment of scepticism. The issue is that people set base rates too low and then use that to explain why they won't accept evidence that would raise their base rate. Cameras? We have decades of recordings from radar and military jets! We have 'Foo Fighters' from WW2, we have the Wow signal.
And why should the base rate for alien civilizations be so low? We really don't know what we're dealing with - we are not an ancient civilization. We haven't reached the highest levels of technological attainment. Our understanding of the universe is very limited. What is 'dark' matter and energy (95% of the universe's matter/energy)? How does gravity work with the rest of physics? We don't have stellar-scale particle accelerators or superintelligences, we don't even have controlled fusion.
We don't have the knowledge necessary to model advanced civilizations. Would they be building Dyson Spheres en masse or are Dyson Spheres pleb-tier megastructures? Are there far better ways to acquire resources that we just don't know about? Would this have some relation to dark matter and dark energy, which make stars look rather small and ineffectual?
Even based upon what we do know, interstellar travel is trivial for a powerful civilization. According to wikipedia it would only take half a million years for Von Neumann probes to proliferate throughout the galaxy at 0.1c. Even if there are 10x more unexpected difficulties, 5 million years is peanuts. If we remove the 'UFO's definitely aren't aliens' firewall, then we get to solve the Great Silence mystery as well.
Sure, the 1561 sighting could be some combination of 'a very unusual sundog' and excessive religiosity. Radar does have glitches. People get drunk and make mistakes. Fakes are not unknown. But what couldn't be explained away in such a fashion? Everything short of a gigantic Independence Day style battleship! If there are any extraterrestrials that use even a modicum of subtlety, this approach would miss them. We need a more targeted, precise epistemology (without all the people who airily pronounce that interstellar travel is extremely unlikely, they've disqualified themselves).
Furthermore, I dislike the attitude of the skeptics. CuriousCA goes on about how highly credentialed experts in the field are fabulists (or some proportion of them). Wouldn't this wipe out Newton or Galileo? Our understanding of the universe improves when a small number of experts disagree with the crowd. Most critically, we advance by assessing evidence, not smearing people as quacks if they dare swim against the current. The people best equipped to assess evidence are those at the National Reconnaisance Office like Grusch or 'I founded eight biotech companies' tier biologists as in the last time this came up. I reckon we'd have a lot more such whistleblowers without the universal derision field for the whole topic, as with HBD or other matters.
We have radar, pilot testimony, aircraft cameras, testimony from high-ranking officials (from many different nations). What more is needed apart from little green men waddling around on the White House Lawn? If that is what you need to update, going from 0.0001 to 1 in a moment, then you're not a good rationalist.
If the US couldn't cover up its torture chambers in Iraq, fake Russiagate stories or spying on the public for more than a few years, how can they cover up a massive psy-op lasting since the Nimitz sightings in 2004, if not longer?
What makes me highly skeptical of the "totally aliens" take is, according to all currently known physics, it's impossible to travel between stars in a remotely reasonable timeframe without an engine with such massively powerful output that it'll be obvious to everyone, especially considering it would pretty much have to be pointed directly at the Earth.
This means that either 1. There are no aliens because it would be blindingly obvious, or 2. Any existing aliens that have made it here have technology capable of bypassing this apparent requirement, which would be so far beyond anything we can conceive of that we would probably be effectively primitive apes to them. And if they're that advanced, why are they spending their time zipping around the Earth in weirdo semi-invisible craft that can only occasionally be seen but never really interact with us. They'd be perfectly capable of taking whatever they want.
If aliens want minerals or lebensraum, there's no shortage out there. They would only be here for observation or fun. There's nothing to take, only sights to see or cheap laughs from messing with the locals.
You could definitely make a Von Neumann probe with only our known physics, that's enough to get a presence in every star system in the galaxy.
One could also conceive of stealthy engines with obscenely high exhaust velocities, directed in a tight beam so they're hard to see. Or perhaps some gigantic coilgun that accelerates a package to relativistic speeds. What do we know about high-speed space travel, we've got no experience at all!
What you're missing is that they have to slow down. They can't just go fast and stay that way, then they crash fast.
And slowing down requires exhaust pointed back vaguely in earth's direction, I would think.
Two beams of cold exhaust (more efficient that way, even), each angled epsilon radians off center in opposite ways, would be basically invisible but would still be 100% minus epsilon squared as efficient.
The bigger reason there's said to be No Stealth In Space is heat - your power plant will have to radiate a ton of waste heat, your life support will be warm, etc. But the catch is that your radiators don't have to be omnidirectional. A peer doesn't care; they can have a network of sensors in every direction ... but hiding from 21st century Earth would be easier.
I still don't believe in alien visitors. You can't hide the Dyson cloud they came from. If their tech can't get a Dyson cloud (enough orbital colonies to occlude their star noticably) operational they probably can't get here either; if their science is so advanced they don't need a Dyson cloud then they probably won't screw up and be seen while they're here. If their tech is still in flux ... why? the Universe is billions of years old; it would require a huge coincidence for the most advanced alien intelligence in our galaxy to be mere millenia ahead of us rather than eons ahead or behind.
More options
Context Copy link
The UFOs we observe seem to have no problems with inertia or producing enormous plumes of exhaust. Maybe there's a physics breakthrough they've made that we aren't aware of.
Alternately, one could pulse the engine in other directions than directly towards Earth. Move the angle up 1 arcsecond and you're still decelerating but the particles will go past the Moon. Or use some planet as cover for your burn. Or use any technology or tactic that a peak-superintelligence could come up with, given stellar-scale resources. I can't stress enough how much we don't know about post-singularitarian civilizations, we are not in a position to define their capabilities and limits.
Maybe the probes arrived a million years ago - it seems overly convenient that we should reach technological civilization within 100 years of aliens first arriving. If they're out there, they ought to meet us in the distant past or distant future.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
When we detect a difference one part in one thousand between (something like) the mass of an electron and a theoretical prediction, we put thousands of (amortized) man hours, many from the smartest people in the world, into figuring out if it's experimental error or new physics. We probe the bottoms of the ocean for new species of life smaller than a single cell of your body. We accelerate protons to within a hundred millionth of the speed of light, or build experiments the size of football fields / tanks of a billion liters of water to detect microscopic events with a frequency of one in 10^34.
And yet the evidence for UFOs remains "fuzzy pictures and videos" or "rumors from experts". Where are the international collaborations between top scientists here? Why haven't the 30cm/pixel imaging satellites gotten good images? Why aren't we blowing the UFOs out of the sky with lasers or something and putting the debris in a mass spec? Imaging technologies have improved by, maybe, ten orders of magnitude over the past century, yet modern UFO evidence is recognizable to someone familiar with UFO sightings in the 1950s.
Electrons and protons are replicable things that we control, UFOs are the equivalent of an old-timey safari. The big game might not show up when you want it too.
What do you expect, military-grade video is always grainy. Apache gunships produce only grainy black and white videos of the people they gun down. And the Nimitz footage is pretty clear:
I don't know, were they looking at the right place at the right time? 30cm/pixel imaging satellites could render the entire category of stealth aircraft obsolete, if they're looking in the right place at the right time. Yet the world's governments are investing trillions in stealth aircraft, they probably know a thing or two about the limits of our real-time satellite surveillance techniques.
Lasers are only good for short-range missile defence right now, they're an experimental technology, not even fully deployed. Whenever we tried shooting these things down (and we've been trying for decades) our interceptors disappear or the UFOs outrun them, sometimes both. Lake Superior 1953, for instance: https://www.history.com/news/ufo-fighter-jet-disappears-over-lake-superior-kinross-incident
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I will accept a recording on par with amateurish Youtube mockumentaries and somebody with a name and no known history of crankery credibly committing to lose reputation should it be revealed as fake. Have any previous bullshitters been socially annihilated?
None conclusive or even suggestive enough to interpret as anything other than pareidolia. Too many cases eventually revealed as nothingburgers to not suspect the rest are the same.
I've replied to this again and again: because evolution is, for all we know, vanishingly unlikely, so unlikely that our existence is only enabled by anthropic principle. No, saying «you don't get to assert such a low prior, gotta be a mistake in the math somewhere» doesn't cut it if you haven't got a more rigorous one. I have not yet received any response on this point. I believe there straight up is no other life in the Universe because life does not work period. This of course also neatly solves – or dissolves – the Fermi «paradox».
No matter how little we know, we know that this behavior over decades is ridiculous for what we know about civilizations in general but consistent with human delusions.
Obviously by the same token they'd have been able to evade all our observations, even those conducted by the US Air Force of today – not to mention decades ago, when Americans had tech on par with modern Iran; it'd be really dumb if they kept upgrading stealth to keep up with our recent meteoric progress but no faster. Clumsily getting caught in barely legible records is pretty poor for a spacefaring civilization. Unless they're screwing with us I guess.
Or not with us but with our digital successors. Maybe ASI will decode those perplexing behaviors and respond appropriately.
This is also my view. Drake's original rough guesstimates (100% of life-capable planets develop life, 100% of life-hosting planets evolve intelligence) are almost comical in failure to account for observation bias. Our existence tells us nothing about these probabilities except that they're not literally zero. It's like a government inspector going to different factories and noting that 100% have a government inspector in them, himself. Mechanically, the probability of amino acids coming together to form a protein should inform our highest plausible estimate for fl.
Realistically, the vast majority of abiogenic proteins would just die. Said protein must also have energy-seeking and self-replication capabilities from the jump. And that's not getting into evolving intelligence.
It's also possible that flâ‹…fiâ‹…fc comes out to something like 10-24, in which case we're not literally alone, but our handful of fellow travellers did not manage to metastasize across the cosmos.
It seems like we can make a very rough guess at the probabilities here based on the IQ gap between chimps and the dumbest human populations, the time distance between the human-chimp divergence and the evolution of intelligence, and how long life lasted on earth without this happening.
I don’t have the math for this, and I don’t claim it gives anything closer than an order of magnitude guess.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a fully general argument against anything. Nobody gets annihilated for lying on a huge scale!
Have we swept 200 billion galaxies for life? We barely even have a probe outside our solar system. We do not know what we are looking at, we cannot even categorize 95% of the content. 'For all we know' is totally and completely worthless. Blind children do not get to pontificate on the world of art, they've never even experienced it.
Common sense says that if life works on Earth, it can work elsewhere too. Hanson has a more advanced theory on the basis that we emerged quite early as a civilization, compared to all the times when earth-based life might emerge - this implies that advanced civilizations will make it hard for civilizations to emerge later. Besides, you haven't checked 200 billion galaxies, you have no idea what's there.
The burden of proof weighs overwhelmingly more heavily on your claim than mine! I say that there may be alien life somewhere that has come here (based upon various observations) but that we don't know enough to be sure of anything. You say there is no life at all in the entire universe except here without a shred of evidence.
We've checked... how many planets? We can't even be sure there's no other life in our own solar system. Europa's oceans for instance, there could be life there. We don't know if there is life there, we don't know what advanced stellar civilizations look like. We don't know.
We know nothing about civilizations in general, especially not advanced civilizations. With a sample size of one, we can't differentiate between civilizations in general and human civilization. All we know is that something is part of a civilization, they have some kind of energy-processing, manufacturing, knowledge base. Defining a civilization is different to understanding them.
The phenomena we're talking about here has never been stealthy in that we're not capable of seeing it. These things are perfectly visible, we just can't interact with them since they shoot around at immense speeds.
Edit: for the recording you can have the Nimitz clips and the testimony of Commander Fravor
What I'm reading @DaseindustriesLtd as saying is that, if you do the math, life should be extraordinarily rare. That is, abiogenesis should happen statistically never, and the only reason that we happen to be in a place where life exists, out of all the places in the cosmos, is because we are ourselves the product of that nigh impossibly rare thing.
This cannot have been on the basis of an analysis of the narrow segment of the cosmos that we have been able to see, such an evaluation would have to have been based on an analysis of what life is like and of the preconditions for that to exist.
Well, we don't really know how life came into existence either. It happened over 3 billion years ago! We can't know what the conditions were back then that resulted in life, so how can we rule it to be statistically impossible? The math is just made-up numbers.
But testimonies of American military are evidence about reality?
I think we've found our fundamental disagreement. I take this to be no more evidence than claims of some peculiar Indian sect about the conspiracy of Naga People – complete with grainy photos. It has pretty much zero weight in comparison to priors from natural sciences. And our uncertainty about American sanity or honesty absolutely dwarfs our uncertainty about relevant scientific conjectures.
The US military is routinely insane and dishonest but they're not sufficiently skilled at keeping secrets to get away with this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link