the writing sounds like scientific capitalism. the author is throwing around statements as fact which there is no way of knowing conclusively, bringing down the credibility of the entire article.
do you think a force or being so advanced as to make it here would have any trouble camouflaging itself? then i guess you would also assume taxi service exists in heaven. how arrogant and self-centric of a species the human can be!
Reading comprehension... Read the section talking about the secret alien club, where he states that, though it is possible, there is no way to go further along on that speculation, so, as a good scientist does, he sets it aside as a possibility, but not a factor in the deductions.
Essentially he himself states, if there is an alien race or 2 watching us in secret, then it's a moot point, but if there isn't, then here is the logical deductions we can assume.
yeah i wasn't about to read any further after the first page states it and other unknowables as fact. this is poor journalism and not up to every reader to continue reading this hyperbole to the end as it doesn't warrant it. i'm not looking to dive into a feature with hooks here, this is a science journal after all.
once you know it's a viable possibility, how could being "unknowingly unobserved" be moot? i'm sure you'd define it moot if an illuminati-type overseer was pulling the strings without anyone on earth having a clue? it's not moot on a higher level despite anyone's awareness or lack of it on this one. this is the same line of thought that deemed aerosol safe for the ozone in experiments at sea level...
at this point I have to point out that flaming the author after reading less then 20% of the article is just being a retard. generally I force myself to read an entire article before commenting. especially when I am finding fault in it.
The author is too preoccupied with placement of the Great Filter along the evolutionary path of some species. In all fairness, if you choose to 'roll the dice' at all possible points in a civilization's development to define a future, then be consistent. The Great Filter would have the same rules of probability attached to it. The 'it' event could happen early, later, or possibly never. With that being said, what happens (happened) to another civilization may not apply to us.
1. Aliens that are capable of interstellar travel and megaconstruction could exist but we can't figure it out.
- the farther away they are then the sooner they would have had to perform their showy displays. Andromeda or farther means less than 2 million years ago would not have light to us yet
- Our ability to look at light from far off places is pathetic. We are still discovering Pluto and larger size objects in our own solar system. In the last century we figured out that Galaxies existed and were not Nebula. What does the presence or absence of light from stars tell us about big civilizations. they could make dyson spheres and we would not detect it. If they chose to hide or camaflage their Dyson spheres "just in case". We would not know. There are billion light year voids. What do we make of those ? We do not know what is natural and what is not. We look and we assume natural processes. Aliens could have created the billion light year void. Yet we would be clueless
2. Why don't they visit or talk ?
How many people try to be Dr. Doolittle to animals ? Jane Goodall only lived with a small group of gorillas. What is the percentage of animals dolphins or apes that have clear contact with humans. There are those animals that live with us pets, vermin, zoo animals etc... But the animals in the wild ? Almost none.
More tech can be mean less need to communicate or interact with less tech advanced life.
If intelligent life is not special then why would we being one many far behind them in tech matter and be worth talking to/visiting etc...
"but they would send robots to monitor everything" Why ? do we have cameras on every petridish or anthill or rats nest ? They could evolve over millions of years into something. Perhaps, but we don't care.
So it all boils down to we should not think that we know more than we do and they may not care.
So we should just carry on and if we really want to know what is happening out there we have to get better detection gear (hypertelescopes and world imagers) and also go out and see what is happening.
Furthermore, using a similar comparison, I would imagine given our desire to advance ourselves by using brain enhancing supplements etc, I am sure given future understanding we will modify and augment our bodies and brains to the point that we become unrecognisable to people today. Afterall, if you could make yourself 10 times smarter, why wouldn't you? What about 1000x smarter, or a million? Continue that modification and augmentation of intelligence and a means to house that intelligence (ie not just "wetware") and in a few million years (let alone a few billion) a "human" would be as interested in people today as we are in ants or lesser forms of life.
So when ants communicate via smell and do smell searches for other lifeforms and find no smells like the ones they use, are they correct in concluding that they are the only intelligent life form? From that perspective their attitude would be arrogant or possibly just humorously short sighted.
So we may continue to be an amusing pasttime for a small minority of interested aliens who choose to slow their thoughts a million fold or more to listen to the signals we send into space. Perhaps they are the alien entymologists, though few in number, who find it interesting to see how this colony of primitive life works. Maybe one day they go to the effort to make an ancient device that is so slow and primitive that it sends signals using simple modulated electromagnetic waves at very low frequencies, a communication so outdated and inefficient that these lifeforms, using their most advanced technology, may just be able to detect it as more than noise, just to see what the humans do in response.
The idea of 'brain- enhancement' making us a 'million times more intelligent' than we are now is an extremely problematic notion to me. What would it mean for a writer to be 'smarter' than Shakespeare: or a painter 'smarter' than Rembrandt? Perhaps the kind of brain- power we can enhance only relates to certain kinds of human activities. And other powers we have which connect very much with our own experience of life cannot really be 'measured' or 'enhanced'. So my secret hope is that the 'superminds' created by enhancement in a few decades from now may nonetheless put with the presence of a few people who happen to be human.
Lately, I'm trying to get myself to stop using the word "smart" altogether, because I think it's actually a form of mental laziness -- the equivalent of somebody saying that some food is "good for you."
Instead, when I think of someone I consider "smart", I push myself to refine my understanding a bit: Are they more knowledgable (i.e., they know a lot of facts)? Quick witted? Clever? Creative? Sophisticated? Perceptive? Empathetic?
These are all forms of being "smart." To be sure, there is definitely some overlap - but I think that it's more productive to talk in these more precise terms. But maybe that's just because I'm stupid. :)
If other civilizations developed millions or even billions of years ago, they have probably clashed while expanding eons ago. End results? (1) Mutual destruction, (2) domination (3) coexistence. (2) and (3) would endure till the next clash. I believe coexistence will be the probable end outcome. In this coexistence, they may have reached some ground rules (not secret ones, by the way) as how to handle new possibilities of future clashes. That affects us - minimize interference is something even we try to do with tribes in the Amazon, for example. SETI doesn't detect their communication? Spread spectrum, cryptography - good cryptography can only be considered good if it cannot be distinguished from noise. We already have the cloaking technology discussed. No pattern recognition algorithm would discover a pattern in Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) - unless you have the key - at least in the current state of technology.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
johnalphonse
78
inaccurate authorial conclusions
do you think a force or being so advanced as to make it here would have any trouble camouflaging itself? then i guess you would also assume taxi service exists in heaven. how arrogant and self-centric of a species the human can be!