If good real estate is rare, and travel is difficult but possible, it follows that intelligent alien life would a) send out probes, b) take samples, c) design a killer bug to wipe out the main threat, and d) send slow boats with an occupying and settlement force once the main threat was gone. It’s pretty much what H.G Wells foresaw, that wars are expensive and difficult, but engineered bugs are small and efficient. Either that or the Wake the Nanobots Up.
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Came to say the same. All are super reasonable (and in line with the science and evidence) except this one.
Not only is there zero evidence of extraterrestrial intelligences sending probes, there’s every reason to believe this is physically impossible. All our science points to this violating every law of physics we have. You have to be willing to believe there’s an entirely new physics that we’ve somehow yet had zero inkling of to believe this is possible.
This statement is also conveniently unfalsifiable, which red flags it right off the table immediately. These probes are undetectable? Well, so is the invisible dragon in my garage (with apologies to Mr. Sagan).
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While I don’t think it’s especially likely that alien space probes are constantly monitoring us, we should also probably have some humility about what we don’t know yet about physics. The study of quantum physics is less than a century old and it’s highly unlikely that we’ve already learned every relevant fact and physical law about how our universe works in that time. What we do know is quite freaky and we’re only just starting to wrap out heads around the implications. For example, a wormhole that you could send a spaceship through would be very difficult to build (if possible at all) but sending a quantum-entangled subatomic particle through a teensy-tiny wormhole that only exists for a fraction of a second might be something that an advanced civilization has figured out.
Even without wormholes you can easily shoot subatomic particles at very high speeds with a particle accelerator, and if you’d managed to make stable, entangled particles that would give you instantaneous feedback that might allow you to collect data at very great distances.
Most of these concepts (let alone the physical laws) didn’t even exist a century ago, when there was still a lot of serious scientific debate as to whether or not it would be possible to send humans into space. We don’t know what we don’t know.
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You would not. Entangled particles let you collapse wave functions at great distance, but always in a way that you can’t send any information with them. Imagine putting black and white cats in identical boxes and separating them…if you open one and find a white cat, now you instantaneously know the other has a black cat, but that doesn’t let you communicate anything.
Everything in physics so far still limits information to the speed of light, with causality paradoxes inevitable otherwise, though of course you can theoretically shape spacetime in a way that there are shortcuts between distant points possible under that constraint.
Personally I would encourage a lot of humility about physics when we don’t understand what 95% of the universe is made of, but also not put too much faith that those boundaries will go away. Most of our own inventions copy other things we see out there in the universe. We haven’t really seen anything to suggest superluminal speeds or time travel happen, so while there could be clever ways of making those happen that don’t occur naturally, I wouldn’t really bet on it.
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Couldn’t the very act of collapsing wave functions at a distance be useful though?
“Hey buddy, take care of these boxes for me while I’m away on a trip. If one opens up and a cat pops out that’s my signal that I arrived safely. If two pop open that means I got a flat somewhere and need a tow. If twelve pop open that’s my signal that I’m on my way home so order some beer and tacos for me.”
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I don’t think so. Just because you know there is a black cat in the other box doesn’t mean the person on the other end has suddenly discovered anything about it. Heck, in the multi-world interpretation you haven’t actually changed anything, just discovered which of the worlds you are in…and so far as I know all the predictions are the same regardless of which interpretation you use.
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Maybe they come here looking for God, like a space pilgrimage. They have reached a high degree of technological evolution, but still have many things tormenting their lives. They seek simpler folk who may have answers to their spiritual yearnings.
Prime directive?
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TIL that cats in boxes are undetectable alien probes!
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Scientists are the most humble people you’ll ever meet. Not a single one would ever claim we understand everything about anything or that we’re ever 100% correct about anything.
However, there’s still enormous evidence from all different directions (math, cosmology, particle physics, EM physics, etc) pointing to such feats as sending probes over interstellar distances being impossible.
It’s not likely the case that some weird thing about quantum mechanics will make this possible. It’s the case that we’d have to be completely wrong about everything for this to be possible.
People who doubt this usually just haven’t read enough of our current physics to understand how confident we can be about this. Space enthusiasts insert optimism into their gaps in knowledge about this stuff.
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Scientists are just like everyone else. Some did the Tuskegee experiments. Some did the Nazi experiments. Some are doing uncontrolled experiments on the atmosphere right now.
There’s more than enough arrogance and hubris to go around for everyone.
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James Watson, famous scientist and publisher of Rosalind Franklin’s work on the structure of DNA, was not that humble.
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So you think the entire physics, cosmology, and math science communities are Nazi scientists? Come on. That’s a horrible thing to say in this context.
There was no reason to go there in a simple discussion about the current state of scientific consensus with regard to interstellar travel.
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You guys are all citing individuals. I’m talking about the scientific consensus of the entire community and system of science over the past 50 years. The science is independent of the individuals creating it- that’s the whole point.
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Ok, I have to disagree with you there. The physics for interstellar travel don’t necessarily require any exotic technology or relativistic speeds at all. Two probes that we built in the 1970’s have already left our solar system, after all. (NASA considers passing the heliopause to be in interstellar space.) It just requires working with vast timescales that we’re not used to, but that might be perfectly reasonable to life forms that evolved differently from us. A probe traveling the speed of the Voyager probes could theoretically reach proxima centauri in just 100,000 years or so.
Okay, you know what I meant. No civilization is waiting around thousands of years to get data back from their probes.
Is it Score Cheap Points Day in this thread? Did I miss a memo?
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No, I honestly didn’t know what you meant, and frankly asserting that “no civilization is waiting thousands of years to get back data” is one hell of an assumption about the motivations of alien civilizations. Very close-minded thinking, frankly.
No, but they’re not all perfect, humble human beings. Being a scientist doesn’t magically make one immune to all the very real failings we’re all prone to!
Is there any reason to elevant an entire group of people to some exalted status that the rest of us are prone to?
Which is made up of people - human beings. NO group of human beings is immune to hubris, no matter what their profession. None. No one is saying scientists are all nazis, we’re saying that they’re not all humble and always correct about everything. 
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Did I say that? Good grief.
This thread has spiralled out of control very quickly so I’ll leave you all to it.
Yeah. Kind of. Replace scientists with any other group, and I suspect you would reject that argument and rightly so.
There are plenty of arrogant assholes who are scientists who would very much claim to understand plenty of things outside of their actually knowledge.
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