There is a third: undecided.
“At the heart of this, is a question any self-respecting scientist will have had to address at some point in their career: ‘is an outlier of a sample a consequence of expected random fluctuation, or is there ultimately a sound reason for its observed discrepancy?’ A sensible answer to this hinges largely on the size of the sample in question, and it should be noted that for interstellar objects we have a sample size of only 3, therefore rendering an attempt to draw inferences from what is observed rather problematic.”
Not only the heart of the question, but of the paper.
Still fun, though!
Even framing this objects actions using human concepts (benign, malign) is very short sighted. It’s possible any alien life experiences complexities were fundamentally unable to comprehend (there’s some good sci fi short stories that explore this).
Possible. But I’d argue unlikely. We can’t make many assumptions about alien life, generally. We can about a technological civilisation that sends out interstellar probes.
Aliens are completely unknowable, that's the thing most fiction trips up on. We don't understand what the hell is going on with other humans. They're like us but different, their motivations sometimes are mysterious or maybe they don't have motivations at all? It's confusing, and those aren't even a different species let alone aliens.
The point is they bothered constructing probes.
My cat isn't constructing space probes. If he up and began doing so this evening, I would be able to conclude certain things about him.
> would be like asking America to account for a discarded Coke can
You're saying you can't conclude anything useful about American culture and civilisation from a discarded Coke can? (As well as the act of casually discarding it.)
> Aliens are completely unknowable, that's the thing most fiction trips up on
Aliens, yes. Aliens who make contact with us, no. The latter is a subset that requires certain attributes and heavily implies others.
Not the op, but I would aver that we have a good chance of concluding false things from the alien version of a discarded Coke can.
Given the subject, I would point to the actor who played the lead role in "The Gods Must Be Crazy" (a story about a discarded coke glass bottle), who did not understand the money he was given for the role: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C7%83xau_ǂToma
Right, why did somebody make this metal cylinder covered in elaborate symbology and then place it here? Was this place of great importance to them? What were they trying to communicate to me by constructing the cylinder and placing it?
It's just a discarded coke can. You are the one who decided it's required to have great significance. If you haven't read "Roadside Picnic" I suggest at least reading a summary.
Could an ant? This is the scale we may be operating on. One of the biggest fallacies with the alien question is that they'd operate on our scale. Let alone "think" as we've observed thinking on earth, but that is another story. Some science fiction has explored this concept based on gravity or metabolism leading to dramatically different scale in either space or time for a species and the implications that brings when meeting a species on a different scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)
> We will make it undecipherable for all who are not yet ready; but we must go further in our caution — so that even a false reading will not be able to supply them with any of the things that they seek but that should be denied them.
"hey zarqzon! someone found the camera you accidentally dropped into that asteroid field while trying to take a selfie with that cool gas giant! damn you were so wasted that time"
"what? I just bought a new one as replacement!"
And from that perspective, "benign" and "malign" aren't that hard to pick up on. They are relative to humanity, and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact it would be pathological to not care about how the intentions are relative to their effect on humanity.
Whatever happens, it's not like we can actually cause an interstellar incident at this phase of our development. Anything that they would interpret as an interstellar incident they were going to anyhow (e.g. "how dare you prevent our probe from eliminating your species?") and that responsibility is on them, not us. You can't blame a toddler that can barely tie their shoelaces for international incidents, likewise for us and interstellar incidents.
You could theoretically be convinced that they are right and resign yourself to death.
If we did have such a thing, extrapolated coherent volition would be solved and that would solve half of the AI alignment problem.
This hypothetical "alien" problem is actually pretty much equivalent to the AI alignment problem. One half is, we don't know what we want, and the other half is, even if we knew... we don't know how to make "them" do what we want.
It's very fashionable to confuse the inability to draw bright shining lines as being unable to define a thing at all, but I don't have much respect for that attitude. Of all the outcomes, "the probe engages in indefinite behavior that we are never able to classify as 'humanly benign' or 'humanly malign'" is such a low percentage that it's something I'll worry about when it happens.
The world is full of concepts we can't draw bright shining lines through. In fact the ones we can are the exceptions. We manage to have definitions even so.
1. Would your assessment of "malign vs benign" depend on knowing which side was disarmed for each conflict, or can you already make an assessment without that information?
2. Do you estimate that the other 8 billion humans surely agree with your response to #1?
Agreed. One can think of any number of actions that would be impossible to rate on a benign/malign scale. E.g. as a trivial example: aliens destroy 80% of humanity, which leads to restoration of Earth ecosystems and prevention of the inevitable future war that would destroy 100% of humanity; in 100 years humanity is in a much better position than it would have been if left alone [0] [1]
And that doesn't even include intentions. We often do bad things for good reasons, with good intentions. Malignity includes or infers the intention to cause harm. That may not be present, or the intention may have been benign.
Morality is complicated and subjective. Even judging the outcome of an action as positive or negative is complicated and subjective.
[0] I don't really want to argue whether this is true, possible, etc. Pick your own variant of example where a seemingly-malign action is actually benign in the long term.
[1] Also raises the problem of estimating "better" in this context. Exercise left for the reader.
Parents like to believe that all of their seemingly-malignant actions towards their children are actually that. In reality, they only sometimes are, and it's impossible to tell in advance which ones.
What if we have inadvertently caused tremendous offense via our radio/television/planetary radar signals
If I accidentally step on a bug and squish it, it's surely not good for the bug, but I had no intentions towards it one way or another.
Paraphrasing: if a smart bacterium steps on the battery of one of our space probes and gets destroyed by the heat, the smart bacteria community may think the aliens (we, humans) sent it to them for unfathomable reasons, perhaps to teach them a lesson, but we didn't think of them at all.
And why do we assume that, if humans can have a whole spectrum of motivations from "entirely benign" to "entirely malign," that a presumably-much-more advanced civilization can't?
How should they even know that cars will become globally connected smartphones on wheels first? Smartphones didn't exist. The microchip didn't exist yet. The Internet didnt exist yet. It is impossible to make this combination from the 1960s perspective.
Complex non-linear systems don't work in intuitive ways and minor changes in fundamental variables can chaotically change the system in entirely unexpected ways. Non-linear developments will always be surprising, it doesn't matter how many Youtube videos certain pop scientists are creating.
Ironically we might be in less trouble if they have FTL technology, since that might not require quite the outrageous level of technology you would need to do the journey with the physics that we know. The rocket equation is a harsh mistress.
I think I'd rather deal with the aliens who just have really good rockets. At least we could potentially comprehend the rulebook they play by. Who even knows what the hell the Walkers of Sigma 957 are about?
Perhaps they figured out AI or have made space-adapted biological life forms that can survive constant acceleration at 25Gs and are sending them out to scout the universe for other life, and once they find it they would signal back to the home planet.
25G of constant acceleration would kill any human, especially if it were maintained for the time it would take to approach light speed, but for an AI or a creature specifically developed to survive that it would make a trip to the Solar System from Alpha Centauri take 5-8 years.
Then again, if they could do 1G of constant acceleration that would only add like 2 years to the total trip. Long enough to be one-way for most people but short enough to be survivable under ideal circumstances.
Assuming they stopped outside of Neptune's or Pluto's orbit they would still have a few years of travel to make it to Earth but they would have started detecting our broadcasts long before arriving.
I'm not saying this happened, rather that it becomes plausible when you take some liberties with the starting conditions.
>Then again, if they could do 1G of constant acceleration that would only add like 2 years to the total trip. Long enough to be one-way for most people but short enough to be survivable under ideal circumstances.
It would take ~2 weeks to to approach light speed while continuously accelerating at 25G. It would only take ~1 year to do so at 1G continuous acceleration.
On cosmic time and distance scales, those are essentially the same, especially since once we approach the speed of light, there's no going faster.
As such, tolerance for G forces seems pretty irrelevant for interstellar travel.
Doing so within the confines of a solar system is another matter altogether, I'd expect.
I picked 25G as it would be an insane but reasonable acceleration, and time is always a factor. Trimming 2 years off of a voyage might seem worthless on an intergalactic scale, since once you are more than a few solar systems away you're on the scale of AI scouts and generation ships, but for a close star like Alpha Centauri, 2 years (each way) might be the difference between a one way death march and the possibility of a heroic return home.
With no air?
At 10g, a 150lb man would weigh 1,500 lbs. His heart isn't strong enough to move blood that suddenly weighs 90lbs/gallon that also has to push other blood that also weighs that same amount. His blood vessels, paper thin and easily torn under normal weight, suddenly have 10 times the amount of pressure to resist.
He's fine for a few moments, jet pilots experience short bursts of 10g during flights quite often, occasionally more.
Might pass out after 10-20 seconds, but after 10 minutes, his brain, starved of oxygen and squished under its own weight, ceases to function. His heart or his blood vessels rip and tear from the strain, and his body falls apart inside of its own skin.
It's not pretty, but it would probably be a fairly painless way to go.
Getting back to your question, his ability to breathe is not relevant under those situations. The absence of oxygen would accelerate his demise no more than it would under any other situation.
No. The Grandfather Paradox[0] says nothing of the kind:
The consistency paradox, commonly known as the grandfather paradox, occurs
when the past is changed in any way.[5] The paradox of changing the past
stems from modal logic: if it is necessarily true that the past happened in a
certain way, then it is false and impossible for the past to have occurred in
any other way, so any change to the past would be a paradox.[13] Consistency
paradoxes occur whenever any change to the past is possible.[6]
A common example given is a time traveler killing their grandfather before
their parents' conception, thus preventing the conception of themselves. If
the traveler were not born, they could not kill their grandfather; therefore,
the grandfather proceeds to beget the traveler's ancestor who begets the
traveler. This scenario is self-contradictory.[5] One proposed resolution for
this paradox is that a time traveller can do anything that did happen, but
cannot do anything that did not happen.[5] Another proposed resolution is
simply that time travel is impossible.[14]
Now add in the mass to slow down once you begin to approach your destination.
Which doesn't sound like a lot but its probably as much or more antimatter than exists in the entire solar system, so if it were the fuel then whoever was using it would need to have figured out a method to create and store antimatter in bulk along with the ability to react antimatter as rocket fuel without destroying the rocket its fueling.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_ark
Arguably if you launched the project Orion interstellar ark from the ground you could have pulled the world ending at the same time as well, perfect tripple combo. ;-)
Of note: It might not require the outrageous levels of technology you might expect to accelerate technology to the delta-v 3I/ATLAS is traveling at, simply because there are absolutely star systems near ours already traveling at a pretty large sun-relative delta-v. We get a ton of galaxy-relative velocity for free from our solar system; we just have to shoot the probe at slower solar systems. Putting (and surviving) biological life in there, however, is a different matter.
If you imagine for just a second a future technology that can transmit genuine opinion, intention and feeling in a way that is hard to fake and therefore easy to trust, it should be easy to see how wars could be averted. So any technology that's even a small step in that direction would probably help.
Also, the Dark Forest theory is based on the same game theory principles that said the US needed to nuke the USSR flat by the early 1950s, it should not be used without skepticism.
Nice Heinlein reference
Edit: the book is "The Road not Taken"
There's a scifi story about a civilization stumbling upon how to achieve FTL travel. In the story, the tech is at the same time very simple and very unexpected. Anyways, they go explore the galaxy and invade and conquer with their primitive ships, which are little more than tin buckets. Their weapons technology is on the flintlock gun level.
(A tragic kind of) hilarity ensues when they stumble upon Earth with its completely unexpected, incredibly advanced weaponry. IIRC in the story most civilizations find FTL travel pretty early. Just Earth didn't happen upon it and instead had time to develop advanced weaponry, computers, etc.
https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
FWIW, and reinforcing your point, this is not even remotely true. Humans lack the technology now or in the foreseeable future to destroy the Earth’s biosphere, which would likely require boiling the oceans. There’s a reason we use that as an example of an impossibly large task.
We might be like a primitive tribe facing an attacker with battleships - a technology that might as well be magic, but still one we can adapt to by abandoning the seafront village and retreating into the jungle.
The same is true for them. For every strength there's bigger strength.
What probability are they talking about?
"The likelihood for such a perfect alignment of the orbital angular momentum vector around the Sun for Earth and 3I/ATLAS is π(5◦/57◦)2/(4π) = 2×10−3."
Sloppy sloppy work.
> In the following analysis we assume that 3I/ATLAS is on its current orbit but vary the time-of-entry into the Solar System (or equivalently the time of perihelion), assuming 3I/ATLAS could have come at any time into the Solar System, and happened to do so such that it came within the observed closest approaches of Venus, Mars and Jupiter. The probability of this is 0.005
So exact same trajectory, but analyzed over a long period of time. If it came any earlier or later, it would almost never get this close to exactly those three planets.
Go through the list, Mercury through Pluto, mentally saying "I find ____ interesting" and notice which one gives you an eye roll/chuckle/groan.
Are their trajectories uniformly distributed?
Since they are often small and dark, it's very possible we missed a few.
Hopefully we humans get a mission ready to go that will allow to go and have a look when a suitable one turns up with enough notice. Presumably one that isn't nailing though quite so fast as 3I/ATLAS (ʻOumuamua and Borisov were about half the speed each - about 30km/s). Annoyingly the speeds mean that really all you can do is a very fast flyby, unless you are incredibly lucky with trajectories, the object moves very slowly or we can ship a truly massive amount of "rapid" (e.g. not ion engines if you want to catch it this side of the heliopause) delta-v to orbit.
The rocket equation is really not on our side here if we wanted use chemical means. If you have a specific impulse of 300 seconds, you basically cannot get a 100kg probe to 30km/s delta-v without a slingshot. 100 tonnes of fuel gets you to about 20km/s, 2000 tonnes gets you to 30km/s. And a craft that holds 2000 tonnes of fuel probably masses more than 100kg.
Maybe the better bet is a really good sunshield and then everyone works on their cardiac health so they can see the intercept in 30 year's time, and even then it's a blink-and-you-miss-it flyby at over 20km/s: http://orbitsimulator.com/BA/lyra.gif
Or, hear me out, we built an orbital rail gun.
Using the Wikipedia example of a 1km, 5600g superconducting rail gun that launches at about 10km/s, we just need about a 10km gun to achieve 30km/s (length goes with launch speed squared).
Put it on the lunar surface for a roughly 2.5km/s penalty (I think, plus you obviously need to shoot it when the moon faces the right way).
No humans though, far too squishy. But you could launch a whole swarm of microprobes which could be a very effective distributed observation platform with a gigantic baseline.
If you haven't read it, the short story Maelstrom II by Arthur C. Clarke has a lunar rail gun in it. And the rest of the The Wind from the Sun collection is very good. The namesake solar sailing regatta story is great too.
That's a lot longer gun than I expected! Didn't the navy get to 6 km/s with a 5m barrel? That's a lot more than 5.6kg, of course.
> But you could launch a whole swarm of microprobes which could be a very effective distributed observation platform with a gigantic baseline.
For the beginning I'm going to assume each shot will end up vaporizing a significant fraction of the gun. Getting something to 30km/s once is certainly going to be much easier than doing it hundreds/thousands of times.
Why? I’d rather we continue surveying from a distance while sending probes to places we know will be interesting, like Titan and Europa.
In the long run, yes. Possibly even in the medium term. In the short term, no--we're limited by our technological capability.
Care to share any examples?
This is not accurate. Viking got there in <4 months, and we have the technology to do it even faster, if needed. The long duration transits are often the least energy (Hohmann transfer) and that's why we use them. Planetary alignment is also a big factor.
Anyway, there are currently proposals to have probes lingering in high orbits and intercept interstellar visitors (maybe not as fast as 3I), and Rubin should give us plenty of targets when it gets online.
As an interesting tidbit, 3I was found in the Rubin data ~2weeks before it was spotted. Should be a perfect exercise in refining the discovery algorithms.
What's the minimum time to intercept something like this? Do we need 6 or 7 years, or is 3 years enough?
Intercepting 3I/Atlas at Its Closest Approach to Jupiter with Juno Spacecraft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44717239
This was much more interesting: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas
I don’t know what Harvard is doing lately, but perhaps they ought not to talk about astronomy anymore if this nonsense is all they can contribute to the discussion.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394040040_Aligned_m...
the crazy thing is that you are so biased against these researchers that you have even shut out the possibility that these (and the DC UFOs) are extremely high formation flying USAF vehicles (for example).
Given our massive uncertainty about the endurance/motives/etc. of super-advanced starfaring civiliations, I don't think it's justified to say that alien interlopers are "vanishingly unlikely".
This statement comes up all the time as if it automatically wins any discussion of alien civilizations. It contains a number of huge possibly specious assumptions. The first and most obvious is that even a long-lived civilization could construct a technology allowing a non-trivial amount of mass to accelerate to 0.1c and more importantly decelerate at the destination to a relative velocity of zero to facilitate the colonization.
A species beginning colonization on one end of the galaxy might not be the same species at all by the time it reached the other end of the galaxy a million years later. There might be a whole spectrum of new species that emerged along the way.
Or for species that excel at command-deck politics.
It would also be interesting if the host system collapsed. That would be some interesting scifi fodder: advanced civilization sends out probes but by the time FTL visitors show up, their civilization already collapsed to the stone age.
We haven’t been back to the moon. Maybe some much more advanced civilization would do one star shot, found one colony, and be like awesome now we are in two solar systems and that’s enough.
A solar system is huge. It’s probably a lot easier to terraform terrestrial planets or build a living Dyson swarm of Stanford toruses than build a starship. Certainly easier than building more than one starship. The human race could probably expand for hundreds of thousands of years in this solar system before we would ever feel any actual pressure to go elsewhere.
There are over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way alone. Your statement might be true for 99% of civs, yet the remaining 1% are still gigacolonizers.
>It’s probably a lot easier to terraform terrestrial planets or build a living Dyson swarm of Stanford toruses than build a starship. Certainly easier than building more than one starship. The human race could probably expand for hundreds of thousands of years in this solar system before we would ever feel any actual pressure to go elsewhere.
If you're Kardashev type 2, what are you going to do with all of that energy anyways? Why not give your Stanford toruses sublight engines, and turn them into superfast interstellar cruise ships full of amenities? Lawnchair Larry said it well: "A man can't just sit around."
Is there any reason to believe this should be impossible, in principle?
Note my use of the word "impossible", as opposed to "extremely difficult". The colonization timeline is still the same order of magnitude if it takes 100,000 years of research and engineering to crack the problem. Think about what humanity has achieved in the past 50 years, then multiply by 2000.
It can equally be possible, impossible or not worth it.
Interstellar rocks crashing at you with velocity of 0.1c might hurt a lot.
I would not like my government spending 99% of everybodies income for 100 generations, just to send one human to proxima centauri.
Growth and efficiency gains are not guaranteed, and will eventually stop. (If you take the mass of universe, put it into mc^2, and assume 5% energy consumption increase per year you get 2k years to consume whole universe worth of energy)
We can’t just assume that humans will reach Proxima Centauri.
Also your timeline presumes self replicating spaceships exist or could exist. Have you ever thought about what kind of spaceship could mine metals, smelt them, make glass, build a chip fab etc?
The sort of technological capabilities we have today would sound laughable to people a mere thousand years ago. Who knows what will be doable in a few million years, which is a blink in the grand scheme of the cosmos.
We can’t say it’s likely or unlikely.
I don’t buy for a second Avi Loeb actually believes this; it’s just to up his citation index. I think it’s disgusting.
The tiny metal spheres stuff was interesting even though it's not aliens.
Did he give Borisov this treatment? It seems not, so then the answer is "no, only about two thirds of them".
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/how-close-can-the-juno-spacecraf...
Sure, the closest approach of 3I/Atlas to Jupiter is 53.56±0.45 Gm, the closest approach of 3I/Atlas to Earth is 268.98±0.3 Gm — but we have more and better sensors down here.
For photographs in particular, Juno's JunoCam is spectacularly bad, because "it was put on board primarily for public science and outreach, to increase public engagement, with all images available on NASA's website" — while it can be used for actual science, at the orbital apsis (8.1 Gm) it has a worse resolution, when looking at Jupiter, than Hubble gets of Jupiter from LEO (a distance of ~600 Gm for https://esahubble.org/images/heic0910q/).
And the stated 5 degree angle disagrees with published observations.
And the estimate of the size is over double the confirmed observations of size.
While "Not aligning with scientific consensus doesn't make your suggestions worthless" is true, ignoring published results does.
"We strongly emphasize that this paper is largely a pedagogical exercise, with interesting discoveries and strange serendipities, worthy of a record in the scientific literature. By far the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet, and the authors await the astronomical data to support this likely origin."
At some point, however fact-based, every speculation is a form of fiction, so the line is blurry ...
> The title and the abstract suggest they take this possibility seriously, which is ridiculous.
... but I'd say it's I think the idea is to take some serious and very realistic bits that have a vanishingly low probability ...
> We show that 3I/ATLAS approaches surprisingly close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, with a probability of ≲ 0.005%
... and then walk from there as rigorously as possible.
As they say, "largely a pedagogical exercise".
There's still a line between the hardest hard sci-fi story about a Boltzmann brain and a fact-based thought experiment computing probabilities for a giant marshmallow to spontaneously appear in the vacuum of space.
> We show that 3I/ATLAS approaches surprisingly close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, with a probability of ≲ 0.005%
a) What does this even mean? If you throw a dart on a dartboard, anywhere it lands will have some probability. 1/200 doesn't seem that low.
b) It's the height of intellectual laziness and chicanery to go from not-that-low-of-probability to 'aliens'
They're free to make these claims. I'm also free to laugh at how ridiculous it is.
Now, if this thing had some précise shape, or rotational speed, or we saw it adding or subtracting delta V, or if it did gravity assists from multiple planets (not just 'flew kinda close to a couple of them'), now that would be interesting.
> > We show that 3I/ATLAS approaches surprisingly close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, with a probability of ≲ 0.005% > > a) What does this even mean? If you throw a dart on a dartboard, anywhere it lands will have some probability. 1/200 doesn't seem that low.
Not 1 in 200 here. 1 in 20,000.
There is zero testing of either the hypothesis that it is technological or that it is hostile. At best, the methodology he employs in the paper could be argued to test the hypothesis that its path through our solar system is synthetic and intentional; but that's it, and that's also not remotely close to what he said.
The ESA has a possibly more promising plan to divert a probe that's on its way to Jupiter right now [2].
So, again: If you're going to write "The feasibility of intercepting 3I/ATLAS depends on the current amount of fuel available from the propulsion system of Juno" one thing a real scientist would do is, idk, try to find out how much fuel it has left, talk to team members, etc. Instead, Loeb just does presumptive math, which ends up being wrong, but that didn't stop a Florida state rep from taking this "idea from a harvard scientist" and turning it into an official request of NASA, which now more real scientists will have to waste their time with [3].
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21402
[1] https://x.com/Astro_Wright/status/1951530225533329789
[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2490618-can-we-send-a-s...
Mass distribution in our galaxy is decidedly anisotropic - most mass lies in the galatic plane.
Loeb's estimate of the comet size is strange, when two observatories concur that the maximum size is around 10km.
Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44713579 for links to real science.
Also he raised a bunch of funds to dig one up under the ocean and got nothing.
I’m inclined to let those searchers speculate in public. If society’s rule is that you can’t even speculate about X until you have proof, it will hold back science significantly. History has many such examples of forbidden speculation leading to long delays.
String theory has not really made its debut in the conspiracy crowd afaik. I think "Quantum-___" has done so, especially with the "collapse of the wavefunction through the observer" it has so many esoteric people raving.
String theory is so meaningless to the normal person.
So really it's the same thing, he gets a lot of aggressive pushback online for mentioning 'aliens', but generally speaking nothing he says or does is actually that baseless.
It’s as ridiculous as proposing that it could naturally be made of up of M&Ms or that monkeys built the ancient Egyptian pyramids.
That's silly. It's made up of Milky Ways.
"Interstellar Comet 3/I Atlas - Probably Isn't An Alien Spaceship" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MafmhXwPgmo
(It has more to do with why we can't send a probe to investigate 3/I Atlas...)
Fun to think about.
I for one welcome our machine overlords.
given the effort involved and the alternatives, the only possible reason to contact us is benevolent. also, if there is a single other civilization within range of contacting us, statistically and necessarily, there are also millions, if not billions of others to choose from.
No, there is no malign intent. Even considering it reveals some very mid reasoning. We are very likely emerging up the evolutionary scale to become the stupidest intelligent thing in the universe, but only just over the line of what passes for intelligence among space faring civilizations. The only concievable risk is from ourselves.
That seems extremely unlikely, we're far from advanced enough to send a probe to another solar system, by the time we are, I'd like to think we'll be even less likely to want to exterminate or enslave anyone...
These are not the same things and "advancing" on one axis does not require "advancing" on the other axis, even taking into account the fact that beyond a certain point, one person's moral viewpoints are not necessarily universalizable in the Kantian sense.
All points of that 2D graph are available.
Edit: also I think you're misreading the Dark Forest concept. They're not saying those aliens are "as bad as [us]". It's rather akin to a prisoner's dilemma. The logic is:
#1. if only one actor is paranoid enough and strong enough, they will proactively get rid of whoever speaks up.
From this axiom comes the logical conclusion that, since we cannot be sure to avoid detection forever, the only viable survival mechanism is to be paranoid ourselves and get rid of others before they become strong enough and can enforce axiom #1.
And even amongst humans there are many other such factors (ego of the current leader, etc.)
You're also making economic assumptions that might be wrong at an advanced enough level of technology.
A man from the 14th century Americas might understandably believe that
"the idea of malign intent ignores the physical economic factors that are true everywhere on this planet. The amount of energy it takes to get here from across the Atlantic, and the necessary probability that there is at least one other country with every element we have, in much higher quantities, and closer to them, precludes any motive to wipe us out. Given the effort involved and the alternatives, the only possible reason to contact us is benevolent."
the analogy to 14th century Americas would be that aliens arrive, have technology for resource extraction, this disrupts the economics of the existing civilization, which then orients itself to this new technological power and factions compete to dominate brokerage of it among themselves, or to destroy it. the aliens need to secure their resource supply lines from the native factions, and when there is no peace to be had, they fight the way they know how, which wipes most of them out, or they leave and come back in a more evolved millenium.
the cultures that were strong enough to adapt, survived. the ones that weren't able to adapt, died. in a sense it was a case of the meek inheriting the earth, where natives who fought against alien technology lost, and the people in ones that adapted, lived to survive to today.
but the comparison breaks down when you substitute boats for craft capable of relativistic speeds. the sophistication required to do faster than light travel is too high to make unforced errors like that, imo.
And, from there, is there any reason to believe that we now have perfect understanding of economics and physics, which would warrant the level of absolute certainty you're showing above (despite the fact that such certainty was unwarranted in the past)?
I think it's much more likely that space aliens have FTL. Unless it's the klingons.
The first thing you discover when you invent FTL is that you’re the last civilisation to invent FTL.
When it comes to alien civilizations, the probability is that they are millions of years more advanced than us.[1]
Millions of years is enough for natural genetic change to have an impact, and we already know what that impact will be: individuals that have more offsprings will spread through the population and displace individuals with fewer offsprings.[2]
But if you're a technological species, the only limit to having more offsprings is competition with other members of your species.[3]
In effect, over a million-year time-scale, you get into an arms-race to harness as much power/energy as possible to prevent others from killing you and to kill others who are using resources you need.[4]
So if any alien civilization deliberately decides to visit Earth, you can be pretty sure that their intentions are hostile. Maybe, if they are hydrogen-breathers who evolved on gas giants, they will leave Earth for last. But if they are carbon-based, oxygen breathers, they will squash us like bugs.
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[1]: Imagine that, over the 10 billion-year history of the galaxy, 100 civilizations appear. What's the chance that a randomly chosen civilization (say, the closest one to us) is less than 1 million years old? Using a Poisson distribution, the chance is 0.01%: a 1 in 10,000 chance.
[2]: This is just a restatement of Darwin's theory. Note that Darwin's theory holds even for intelligent/technological people. E.g., imagine some civilization decides that 2.1 kids is the limit because that yields a stable society. That civilization will be destroyed by one that has no such limit, because the latter civilization will have a need for more resources and will have the power to take it. After millions of years, only expanding civilizations will be left because they will have destroyed all the others.
[3]: Non-technological species are limited by their environment. Ants cannot colonize the ocean or the moon. But technological humans can. Our only limit is physics and other humans.
[4]: As long as there is more than 1 civilization, there will be competition because, over millions of years, the galaxy is a zero-sum arena. If one civilization expands to a star system, then the other one cannot. [And, as I said earlier, if one expands but one doesn't, the expanding one will take over.]
The only possible benign scenario is if there are very few civilizations who don't compete with each other. But in that scenario, they wouldn't be sending probes to our solar system.
If there is only one galactic civilization it will either be the Borg or a Federation so violent that it destroyed the Borg—basically a Mirror Universe Federation.
Either way I don’t like our chances.
What you have proposed as the only path, we have, in our limited time on this planet, already proven false. The vast majority of people are already not harnessing more and more resources in order to reproduce more.
Old men like me can afford to be cynical, but I'm glad the next generation has enough idealists that they reject the dark future I'm predicting.
Still, I'm forced to reply.
> The vast majority of people are already not harnessing more and more resources in order to reproduce more.
Considering that every other species larger than a rat is being driven into extinction, largely because we are converting their habitats into farms or strip malls, I don't see evidence that we've learned not to consume more and more.
Sure, over the next hundred years our population will stabilize, but as the great scientist Jeff Goldblum said, "Life...ah...finds a way!"
If you want to know how humans will evolve you have to ask, which genes will spread? Obviously, genes for raw strength aren't useful--that's what machines are for. What about genes for intelligence? Do the smartest people have the most kids? No, which means those genes won't necessarily dominate.
In nature, every species is constrained either by food availability or predators or both. If two rabbits have four baby rabbits, and those four have eight baby rabbits, then why aren't there trillions of rabbits now? Obviously, it's because eventually they run out of food or get eaten by coyotes.
But a technological species like us has no predators, and we can continue to make more food by cutting down forests (where other species live) and turn them into farms.
The only limit we have right now is that we don't want to have too many kids. Unlike every other species, we can (mostly) control our reproduction, and we sometimes choose to have fewer children so that we can have a more luxurious life.
Of course, the desire to have children varies across individuals. We all know some people who want to have more kids and some who don't want any. It is likely, of course, that this innate desire is partly or mostly heritable.
Over long enough time-scales--maybe a thousand generations or 25,000 years--the genes of people who want to have kids will dominate. By then, of course, we will have run out of forests to cut down, so we'll have to start colonizing the oceans and other planets.
But like I said, I'm just a cynical old man.
It seems your idea of the primacy of the forces of evolution, especially when this view is overextended and when competing forces are oversimplified or excluded, produces this dystopian view.
Reproduction does not continue no matter what. The genes of people who want to have kids have been shown to be overwhelmed within social mammals, purely by social forces.
Humans are unique in that they can escape the behavioral sink. It is your simple extrapolation of the theoretical animal limits that produces projected doom. But that extrapolation does not even hold in animals.
(but why would optimum mission be a head on collision? and not getting something flying its near trajectory at near speed?)
If i didn't know so much about how broken the world is already, this is like life path defining stuff
Clearly the best mission would be to shoot something to something it into mars so we can check it out someday.
Then after that success, be inspired to fill the whole outer solar system with somethings, capable of redirecting everything into mars for later catching or eventually murdering all musk's future offspring
"A Harvard Astronomer on the Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18923591
and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21948804
the above on the same 2019 article, but others can be found
etc
People with fear will deny the existence of something that they do not comprehend so that they do not have to mentally deal with it in any way
Mistletoe•6mo ago
RajT88•6mo ago
While that does not automatically suggest that they are not technological, they are not likely to be hostile.* We've likely lived through tens of thousands of them passing through.
*Unless you subscribe to the "they are among us" viewpoint. That crazy well has no bottom.
Teever•6mo ago
One of the authors (Abraham Loeb) is well known for writing salami-sliced papers that have tenuous and non-testable premises.
You should be skeptical of anything he writes after watching this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI&t=1440s
SideburnsOfDoom•6mo ago
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/astronomer-avi-lo...
https://earthsky.org/space/oumuamua-a-comet-avi-loeb-respond...
Here's Loeb on space dust - was it Aliens?
https://www.livescience.com/space/extraterrestrial-life/alie...
He's doing what he usually does. It's fun to think about, but not to be taken too seriously or regarded as anything unique.
Mistletoe•6mo ago
Teever•6mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit
sgt101•6mo ago
In this case Loeb seems to have decided to delight in publishing out-there ideas, probably with a bit of a mission to open up debate and widen the range of acceptable topics in the field of astronomy for younger less established researchers. Basically, he's at a point in his career where he simply doesn't care what anyone things of him and his research and so he's spending credit so that if someone younger and more at risk than him comes up with a startling idea they will hopefully be more likely to share it.
I think it's a good thing, obviously a bunch of people really don't.
s1artibartfast•6mo ago
They they throw up the following quote, omitting the first half. then bash him thinking this is the only explanation.
>Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that ‘Oumuamua is a lightsail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment'
I think it speaks to a greater dispute about what topics are proper to think about, discuss, or even enjoy.
827a•6mo ago
There's no such thing as a "dispute" about what ideas are proper to discuss and enjoy. There might be a dispute concerning leveraging Harvard credentials and a Harvard domain name to distribute playtime fun math with no basis in observational reality, because the first thing every article written about this paper will now say is "Harvard researcher" [1]. That's academic misconduct. Go start a substack; I'm sure Joe Rogan would love to have you on a guest, and you might even get Netflix to give you a show [2]. Three beautiful avenues available to even the most crackpot individuals; way more profitable, too.
Loeb states "there has been to-date absolutely no sign from spectroscopic analysis of cometary activity on 3I/ATLAS." A week later: Look at that, its ejecting water and is almost definitely a comet [3].
If you walk into a doctor's appointment with a tummy ache, and the doctor says "well, its probably just food poisoning, but wouldn't it be a fun exercise to pretend its stomach cancer?"; be serious, do you believe that is an appropriate way for a doctor to behave? Why would anyone think that any professional in any field, most of all at a respected institution like Harvard, should be held to such low standards of behavior? Discussion and postulation is awesome and fine, but if you can't consider the implications of your authority and the choice of medium, you won't have either for very long.
[1] https://www.wionews.com/trending/when-will-alien-invasion-on...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Apocalypse
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14916
s1artibartfast•6mo ago
We probably have very different expectations. Why do you care and what is the perceived harm?