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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4055 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 14, 2024

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NHI

We had LLMs show up with comparable-to-human levels of intelligence and the religious don't seem to particularly care.

At any rate, unless we discover a reason why traveling interstellar distances, at close to relativistic speeds or even FTL, is possible without obvious signatures, or a source of energy that accounts for the most abundant one (all those stars freely dissipating their energy into the void without doing useful work with it), I have no reason to think that UAPs are convincing evidence of extraterrestrial, advanced intelligence.

The fact we have twinkling stars in the night sky is sufficient claim against that, and if all our telescopes and space surveys are lying to us, I don't care what a bunch of sensors on a fighter jet or grainy videos claim.

all our telescopes and space surveys are lying to us

We're lying to the telescopes. The telescopes say there's something massively wrong with our model of the universe - dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of the universe's energy. That leaves a lot of space for aliens to dwell, likely rendering stars obsolete. From energy alone, they're pretty irrelevant, merely a subset of that 5% conventional matter.

In theory we could burn wood for fuel for energy but in practice it's a hassle and inefficient compared to proper energy sources. Perhaps stars are similar. Green Man Intergalactic could make 20% returns on a Dyson Swarm but 35% on a dark energy plant, he'll choose the latter every single time.

Either stars and all known baryonic matter are peanuts compared to the real structure of the universe or general relativity is seriously broken. Regardless, we aren't in a good position to say 'there are no aliens/no FTL' given we clearly don't understand what's going on out there.

Well, LLMs are usually not thought to be conscious or moral agents in the usual sense. I assume that the religious would be more likely to have trouble with other creatures, depending on the variety of religion in question (but see C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy). If you think, for example, that it was essential that God become human, hence Jesus Christ, well, aliens might be out of luck. But if you just require obedience or something, there seems to be no problem.

Of course, many of the religious do believe in non-human intelligences in the form of angels/demons.

I’m suggesting something beyond the status quo. A continuation of more videos being released, more government officials making statements, perhaps a formal declaration by states.

That’s my whole point. I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.

Do you expect "the Science crowd" (i.e. the majority of Westerners) to not believe aliens exist even if they literally Show Us The Aliens?

That’s my whole point. I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.

A Russian family that had cut all contacts to civilization and lived in the woods as hermits figured out Sputnik from seeing a new "star" that moved very fast across the sky. There's a lot of very observable new things you can make happen if you want and have the technology for it.

I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.

That sounds more like a failure of imagination than anything else. I can imagine several thousand different things that could convince me, or anyone with half a brain, to take the possibility of contact by aliens with interstellar capabilities seriously.

They could hijack terrestrial comms. Shoot lasers from the moon or Jupiter. Submit proofs of a dozen unsolved mathematical conjectures. Land a million drones in every major city. Detonate gigaton antimatter explosives in interplanetary space. Targeted surgical strikes on every nuclear silo. Drop a blue whale on the White House lawn. Overload our neutrino detectors and graviton wave observatories with waves encoding pi in base 10. Or just display the drive signatures of their ships slowing down from relativistic speeds, as would be obvious to any backyard astronomer unless they have a means of propulsion that doesn't emit visible radiation.

What leaves me entirely unconvinced is weird artifacts on sensors or even competent eye-witness footage. Interstellar aliens would need a very perverse and specific modus operandi for that to be their first way of making themselves known, let alone lack the competence to be so obvious.

IIRC- and take this with a grain of salt because my most advanced science class was geology for nonscience majors- every hypothesized FTL drive leaves some kind of telltale signature at the end, too. So even aliens that figured out how to make an alcubierre drive work give off a telltale signature that we should have picked up if they’re anywhere in the neighborhood.

An Alcubierre Drive has a nasty tendency to accumulate all the space dust/debris the vessel encounters along the way, which is eventually liberated eventually, as you need to smooth out the bubble of warped space-time at the end of your journey.

So the braking resembles the blast from a relativistic shotgun, I don't recall figures on the magnitude of the energy released, or carried by the projectiles, but it's probably not a good idea to point it at anything inhabited. Maybe dumping it into a star might work. Either way, I suspect we would notice if it happened anywhere important within the orbit of Pluto.

Yeah, that’s what I was referring to, but I think krasnikov tubes and the fringe-but-math-works hyperspace theories also suggest there’d be some weird anomalies at the exit- and wormholes are a weird and noticeable anomaly.

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