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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32319 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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, NASA wouldn't be struggling with a budget 2.5% the size of the US militaries.

NASA was never the real space program.

The real space program has always been the NRO.

We aren't seeing a race to build a rail gun on the moon to launch volumes of munitions at high speed toward an enemy armada.

Minor quibble.

Were aliens real, which we could only know by having seen them up close, that'd mean it'd be already too late to resist because anyoen capable of interstellar travel would have AI and replicators, so perfectly able of outproducing Earth in material within a few years given the right minerals. Of which there's plenty out there.

Also, anyone capable of interstellar travel would have no actual reasons to conquer us unless they preserved some completely atavistic instinct for conquest or had religious reasons (enlightening barbarians?). And I don't think preservation of such instinct is likely. People largely self-domesticated themselves and gradually got less violent and adventuring due to civilization.

it'd be already too late to resist because anyone capable of interstellar travel would have AI and replicators,

No, it would be too late because they would have access to interstellar travel.

As much as rationalists like to treat them as a bogey man, fact is that AGI and replicators are a relatively trivial capability (pun intended) compared to being able to bypass fundamental laws of physics.

That said there is the possibility we're living in the Path not Taken timeline where space-time manipulation is actually really simple and humans as a species were just too autistic to figure it out and thus invented radio, radar, and nuclear weapons instead.

compared to being able to bypass fundamental laws of physics.

If you don't age, travel at 1% of lightspeed is doable, easily.

Obviously comparing a theoretical extraterrestrial species with Earth life has plenty of inherent issues, but looking at the handful of species that (at least seem to) experience biological immortality, the most complex is a jellyfish. At least in Earth life it would appear that there might be something incompatible between complex life forms and biological immortality.

There are a few higher animals whose organisms do not break down with age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence#In_vertebrates

That's a very laconic 'if', and as the old SB.com gag goes, for any value of "how many X would it take to beat Y" the answer is "1 at sufficient velocity."

That's not even the point. 1% of the speed of light is achievable, but in any case people don't observe ayys in space, so the idea that they'd have to cover some interstellar void in some "reasonable" time is a mere conjecture. UFOs that figure in these reports allegedly move at tens of Ma. But they screw with laws of physics in the process – no inertia, no exhaust, no friction, no sonic booms, no apparent energy use, no nothing; routine four-figure accelerations in the course of prolonged encounters. If we could figure doing that for macroscopic objects (not to mention housing complex tools or life), it'd be even cooler than interstellar travel.

You are correct, and that right there is part of the reason why I classify AGI as a relatively trivial capability in comparison.

The real space program has always been the NRO.

The real space telescope program has always been the NRO, sure. I remember how dumbfounding it was to learn that Hubble was basically leftovers from a string of spy sats.

But those spy sats have been launched on Delta IV rockets no more exciting than what everyone else uses. If anything NRO input may have set back spaceflight in general, making Space Shuttle requirements even more complicated and underperformance more likely.

Also one could imagine interstellar travel implies FTL, which implies access to physical principles beyond our current science or at least out current and prospective technology, and to energy levels well beyond what our technology is capable of. So I don't think there would be much use in "resistance". That said, I agree that it's unlikely aliens at this point of their development would have any interest or use of conquering humans. That's like human civilization mobilizing to conquer a particular patch of lichen somewhere in northern Canadian forests. What for?

I mean, I agree that we likely have no value to a civilization that can build an Alcubierre drive, but if hyperspace/jump drives/whatever is real then it's because our physics are wrong, not because exotic technology made it that way. We might conceivably only be as far behind such as civilization as the Aztecs were behind the Spanish.

Maybe more like between Aztecs then and the Spanish now. Modern technology - and modern military - has powers that for a pre-technological person would not be otherwise appear possible, such as clairvoyance, instant communication over any distance, power of flight, ability to deliver overwhelmingly destructive strikes at any point within minutes, near invulnerability to most weapons, etc. Maybe 16th century Aztec could conceptualize many of these things - in a way that we could conceptualize FTL - but they certainly wouldn't be able to even imagine how one could achieve such feats, and certainly any resistance they could put up to somebody who can do all that would be doomed from the start. But also, modern Spanish probably wouldn't attack them anyway.

I think you’re underestimating just how extreme the tech difference was. The Spanish brought canon, steel plate, pit bulls, horses, large ships, etc, which were all more or less inconceivable to the Aztecs, much less imitable.

Not Aztecs, but other American tribes adopted horses, guns and other nice stuff pretty quickly, I think, so I don't think they had any serious conceptual barriers with it. One thing when you have a big house that floats - I'm sure they had boats and rafts on the rivers and lakes before, same thing, just bigger - another thing is when this thing flies and drops a volcano on your head. The latter would probably be much harder to deal with.

And we, too, have flying death machines that kill with fire. Not hard to figure out how to deal with.

Our machines can't do FTL. Machines of the civilization that can do FTL probably would be just as far ahead of ours as a ballistic missile is ahead of a spear. With similar chances of mounting a resistance.

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