If all goes well, clearly one of the most important scientific inventions of my lifetime…
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Agreed. I have always had an interest in the Cosmos since the days of Carl Sagan and now Neil Degrasse Tyson. The mass and distances are overwhelming. Two hundred billion galaxies (maybe more), trillions of stars and planets, stars that are 1000x bigger than the sun, perhaps multiple universes. Just mind boggling. I’m hoping we detect alien civilizations before I take my last breath.
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I kinda hope we don’t
I mean, it would be amazing. Cool. Mind blowing…all of that
But I am a big believer in the Great Filter answer to the Fermi Paradox. I also believe the Drake Equation is something that is completely manipulative intentionally and unintentionally by bias.
Long story short
- Large numbers dont necessarily mean that other life and civilizations are inevitable.(Drake Equation, Cosmos etc)
2.Fermi asked “Where is everyone?” His point being if the Drake Equation variables were set to where ET life should be out there…well, they’ve had 14 Billion years to do it…why aren’t we even seeing the slightest EM emissions of that after looking for a long time?
- Possibly because technological civilizations develop similarly and go through a series of crises regarding use of tech that are civilization extinction level crises…over and over through very long periods of time until none or extremely few make it through this filtering process.
Thusly getting to the contact idea. Human history shows a repeating scenario of a lower tech civilization meeting a higher tech civilization…and being wiped out or enslaved by them. Detection of ET life will invariably lead to an attempt at contact, which has the potential to be a Filtering Event
I love Star Trek and all it stands for. It is inspirational and thought provoking. It is also very very naive.
So far we have made it through Filter 1…nukes. Maybe not given how destabilizing an orbital Hypersonic mother craft truly is. When the Generals come out and talk about stuff like that in public, like they have now, it is always for more money as the goal. But it also can be out of concern, and I think it might be, unlike the stupid Bomber Gap and Missile Gap BS of the 60s.
Filter 2 is AI. This was chosen by far most often as the one thing they are afraid will become a civilizational threat by a panel of Really Smart and Connected scientists. Not just Terminator type stuff, or “Grey goo” ( malignant, self replicating nanotechnology, look that up it’s interesting) but really The Singularity, which looks to be inevitable.
Once we create self learning AI that jumps from not smarter than us to smarter than us, that trend keeps going, exponentially. Things we can’t even imagine, not under our control, probably without wisdom or morals, developing exponentially faster. That is incredibly not good.
The Webb is going to be amazing. And helpful. But I hope it doesn’t find ET life.
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Yes, in short order it will determine humans are a threat and waste of natural resources.
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Great post Weas. You think about all the same shit that I do lol. I love Star trek too, but I’ve watched way too may Kurzgesagt videos. I think there’s no good outcome from AI. I read a paper once that compared AI becoming smarter than us to the way we are with dogs. Dogs are pretty smart, pretty awesome, but total up the sum accomplishments of every dog in the history of dogs, and just by getting up and walking down your driveway, you’ve eclipsed their entire civilisation. That’s how we are going to be to AI, like dogs. That always stuck with me.
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And the idea that we were simply designed: ID theory as in an intelligent designer…, but that’s just me….
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And how many Moore’s Law like doublings does it take an AI twice as smart as us to become a million tines smarter than us. Then a billion…Where is The Designer on that scale?
AI is actually as terrifying a subject as there is, regardless of being a Believer or not, being scientifically inclined and literate or not.
I mean Im sure it’ll be happy just optimizing air traffic control and sowing patterns on farms and stuff like that.
I haven’t seen those videos, @Canucklehead or heard that analogy, but its spot on
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Agree with the AI thing…. Scary
Hey! Those are pretty great videos!
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Yeah! Him and CGP Grey are two of my fav youtube channels.
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Automation, it’s a tool to produce abundance with little effort. Yep, and it’s happening rather quickly. I went to youtube to see if I could get a date when this was released, from the comment section it say’s 10 months, I’m sure there have been changes since then that would belong in the video. Thanks for the share.
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That video is actually from 2014!
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Intelligent life surely exists throughout the universe. That doesn’t mean they will develop space flight or interstellar travel.
To survive, humanity will need to establish homeostasis with our environment. I think we will need to dramatically decrease our population was well as artificially evolve the species (combination of eugenics and technology).
We need to get off the planet. Eventually our sun will expire and we need to get out of the solar system before that time.
Artificial intelligence w/o artificial wisdom and compassion and empathy? What are the odds that the AI will be able to understand and thus incorporate the human experience?
Update… NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the agency’s successor to the famous Hubble telescope, is scheduled to launch no earlier than Dec. 24, 2021.
The James Webb Space Telescope will launch on an Ariane 5 rocket from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana.
Space.com will share live updates about the new space observatory before, during and after the launch here.
I nerd about these things also. But it’s the darker side of AI and ET life that spook me, like Roko’s Basilisk or the Dark Forest hypothesis.
But odds are we’ll blow ourselves up before either of those things occur.
And maybe none of it matters because there’s a strong chance we are in a simulation anyway.
Back to the topic: Logically, Great Filter makes the most sense, as @Weaselpuppy laid out. I’ve also read it could be a timing thing with the birth of our planet, planetary location, etc (basically we’ve had a head start).
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I could see that being a real possibility. Not fully convinced, but leaning that way 65-35 these days. I mean just look at twitter, this can’t be real.
And in sports, I saw a man dominate a womens swim meet last week in several categories. The girls were 10-15 seconds behind the dude in every skill, but for that event he claimed to be a women and won several gold medals. Gotta be a simulation at this point.
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I attended a wedding this summer. The guy sitting next to me said he was from LA and working for Northrop Grumman. Asked him what he was doing for them. Said he was an engineer working on the James Webb Space Telescope.
What blew my mind was his excitement at the possibility of “looking back in time” to what they hoped would be the origination of the cosmos.
He said the telescope remains in orbit (behind the dark side of the moon?) so it can stay as cold as possible. (It’s infrared and can see the faintest heat signatures in the universe so long as the heat signature is warmer than the telescope itself. So the JWST is cooled to 0 kelvins or -459.7 F. It will be able to see 100 times further than Hubble.
Just incredible stuff. You guys are evoking memories of one of my favorite films, Interstellar. So many metaphors of the divine in that flick.
If it turns out there is a Intelligent Designer- God, (I believe less faith is required to believe there is a God than to believe we randomly came into existence by sheer random luck), I can’t begin to imagine what ending up in the presence of that cosmic Originator will be like. Mind-blowing.
As an aside, if you’re curious and open minded, read “The Weight of Glory” by CS Lewis. You will get to follow the logic of a genius atheist who eventually renounced his belief in the non-existence of God and poured his life’s work into seeking a connection with the God he strongly suspected was really there. It’s the greatest single piece on the topic I’ve ever read. Let me know if any of you read it (link). Would love your thoughts on it. The transcribed address in the book by the same name is something like 20 pages. here, it’s 8 pages: https://www.wheelersburg.net/Downloads/Lewis%20Glory.pdf
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Interesting…
It finally launched, now the waiting for it to deploy begins.