Most reasoned take is directly from the paper itself:
"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."
It makes me sad that so many people are seemingly so aggressive against Loeb and his takes on this stuff. Whether things might be aliens or not, people get so upset whenever it's even mentioned as a thought experiment. We should be able to have a bit of fun here and there.
I agree, I mean something like this only has to happen once in our lifetime for everything we know to change overnight. I’m not saying believe anything and everything at face value, but at least question whether immediate knee jerk dismissal of any idea you think you’ve seen before is actually considering the nuance of the specific thing in question or just a learned response.
I think if it was framed more as fiction it would get a better read. The title and the abstract suggest they take this possibility seriously, which is ridiculous.
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.
I think its totally fair to be aggressive in pushing back against abstracts like "and hypothesize that this object could be technological, and possibly hostile as would be expected from the ’Dark Forest’ resolution to the ’Fermi Paradox’".
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.
Intentionality of the path is a good prerequisite of the object being technological, and its hostility is a possibility given the Dark Forest resolution is true (which we can't prove nor disprove). The sentence sounds a bit sensationalist but it seems scientifically valid to me, considering this is an area where we have little more than a bunch of unprovable hypotheses.
When and if alien life is discovered, there’s a high chance the discoverer will be someone who’s spent their career searching for it, rather than someone just stumbling across ironclad proof one fine day.
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.
Any idea why he gets so much pushback, when string theorists get a pass? Is it because "alien tech" is more easy to understand as a concept than Calabi-Yau manifolds?
because of UFO Conspiracy Theorists. When someone says Alien in a serious context, most people immediately associate it with UFO nutjobs.
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.
There's been very few interstellar objects he's claimed as alien, in fact only one - and for onomua (or however it was spelt) he also said the most likely outcome would be a natural object. His expedition to recover metal spheroids from the ocean floor was a fascinating one which garnered a lot of support and I believe still had value in devising methods to recover impact materials from underwater.
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.
If any alien civilizations believe the "Dark Forest" hypothesis, then they will definitely disguise their probes as asteriods and comets. At least, I would.
“If this is the case, then two possibilities follow: first that its intentions are entirely benign and second they are malign.”
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.
If it's malign there's really nothing we can do about it. A technology that can traverse the distance between solar systems is so far outside of our technology that it might as well be magic, and our current level of technology is already adequate to obliterate all life on the surface of the Earth. If you have power to travel interstellar distances the power to obliterate all life on a planet with no warning is trivial.
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.
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. ;-)
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.
I don't believe FTL travel is possible, but if it were, the Fermi Paradox would seem to suggest it isn't obvious or trivial. It might require burning the mass energy of an entire star just to open a wormhole or hacking the matrix and forking the physics engine or sacrificing us to their chaos god patrons or something.
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?
IMO, If FTL was possible, something, somewhere, at some point in time would have engineered a self replicating organism capable of it. These things would be everywhere by now we would see evidence of them.
Also, FTL technology existing would naturally abate the prospects of interstellar war under the Dark Forest theory, because it means FTL communication is possible; and factions that can communicate with each other quickly are far less likely to fight each other. This was, at least in the first book, a (iirc stated) reason why the Dark Forest theory exists.
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 this is the case, then two possibilities follow: first that its intentions are entirely benign and second they are malign.
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?
Because humans are nearly incapable of projecting in a non-linear way. As in, it takes active educated effort. Most predictions you will see are linear extrapolations of what we already know. That's why flying cars were a popular "futuristic" scenario. They can drive now, why shouldn't they be able to fly in 50 years from now? That thought was prevalent in the 60s.
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.
This was a (minor?) plot point in Crichton's "Sphere".
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.
Also Strugatsky's "Roadside Picnic" - the "picnic" in question was a visit of aliens on Earth for unknown reasons. They came, they went, no one has actually seen them but they left their trash on our planet, "artifacts" in zones that are cordoned off by governments of Earth - from infinite batteries to multiplying gels and various gravity fields that will rip you apart in a second.. Like you said, some people ascribe all kinds of intentions to this visit, but most likely it's an encounter with a bug for them - they just left their stuff without as much as noticing us at all.
> If this is the case, then two possibilities follow: first that its intentions are entirely benign and second they are malign
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).
This isn't really that important. I don't care if the probe is here because of magh'Kveh or because its creators are really motivated to zzzzssszsezesszzesz. What I care about is whether it's going to be benign (which includes just cruising through doing nothing) or malevolent to me. I don't even care if the aliens think they are doing us a favor by coming to a screeching halt, going full-bore at Earth, and converting our ecosystem into a completely different one that they think is "better" for whatever reason. However gurgurvivick that makes them feel, I'm going to classify that as a malign act and take appropriate action... because what else can I even do?
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.
One problem with your assumption here is that "humanity" has no definition of "benign" and "malign".
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.
Sure, and I can't figure out whether the guy who is letting me in to traffic instead of cutting me off is malign or benign, because I lack a definition of those words. Alas, I am doomed to infinite confusion forever.
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.
> One problem with your assumption here is that "humanity" has no definition of "benign" and "malign".
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.
> It’s possible any alien life experiences complexities were fundamentally unable to comprehend
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.
A sufficiently advanced technology might make the construction of probes trivial, so that it has no great significance to its creators - the "Roadside picnic" situation. Our unfathomable advanced technology is their disposable object. "Why did you send us this probe?" would be like asking America to account for a discarded Coke can. "I dunno, probably somebody was thirsty? What the fuck are you asking us for?"
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.
"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"
> 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.
> sufficiently advanced technology might make the construction of probes trivial, so that it has no great significance to its creators
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.
> 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.)
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.
>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.)
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.
Sort of the impetus (which at least gives us a reason unlike the movie adaptation Edge of Tomorrow but is not as important as the impact) in the novella All You Need is Kill.
Related to this is Loeb's proposal to nudge the Juno spacecraft, currently orbiting Jupiter and soon facing EOL, into the path of 3I/Atlas to try to scan it and snap some pictures. I doubt it has enough fuel left, but I hope they're looking into it.
If the probe doesn't have enough fuel to leave Jupiter's orbit, we get a better view of it from here with our much bigger optics.
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/).
Given the difficulty of intercepting it, what are our best options (if any) for getting a decent picture of it? Obviously any data ata ll will be interesting, but I mean something better than a couple of pixels that require a degree in astrophysics to properly appreciate.
Not possible. The least-baddest option I've seen proposed is the Juno probe around Jupiter, but it doesn't have the fuel onboard to achieve the needed velocity, and apparently also had some engine trouble during a previous burn that convinced the team to abort it.
The very same. And also the same guy who claimed ʻOumuamua is likely to be an alien spacecraft.
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.
i do think loeb is nonsensical but is there any a priori reason to think that academia should not speculate about extraterrestrial intelligence in general?
Yes. Most people don't understand either physical and chronological distance enough to understand that contact with an alien civilization, if it exists or ever did exist, is vanishingly unlikely to happen because of time, physical changes to solar systems, distance, the endurance of civilizations, the speed of light, etc. Loeb is pandering to the UFO-susceptible.
"Endurance of civilizations" is the key parameter here. The universe is almost 14 billion years old. Colonizing the Milky Way only takes 1 million years if you can travel 10% of the speed of light. So time and distance aren't significant obstacles for a highly enduring civilization.
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".
Have ever seen anything bigger than a bread box travel at 10% of the speed of light?
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?
> Have ever seen anything bigger than a bread box travel at 10% of the speed of light?
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.
> Colonizing the Milky Way only takes 1 million years if you can travel 10% of the speed of light.
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.
Also a lot of assumptions about mutation rate. Anatomically modern humans appeared 300k years ago. Behaviorally modern humans appeared 50k years ago.
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.
It seems to me that such speciation supports the assumption of endurance. Over time you'd see selection for species which are patient, diligent, fecund star colonizers. Just like medieval Europeans spent decades or centuries building a cathedral, over time you'd select for species which spend centuries working on their next starshot.
>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.
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.
And then do that gargantuan feat more than once, with every colony growing exponentially until it can do it again.
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.
>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.
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."
I don't think too highly of this, from the abstract: Notably, the candidate coincides in time with the Washington D.C. 1952 UFO flyover, and another (a candidate) falls within a day of the peak of the 1954 UFO wave
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).
“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!” — Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces
isnt the chance only for those specific three planets, not any three planets? there are 56 ways to choose three planets from the 8 (sorry pluto) in our solar system, so the probability of passing that close to any three planets is 56x greater
"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."
I also misread that. The 0.005% is in relation to this:
> 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.
ATLAS was expanded in 2022, and this object was discovered by the new telescope in Chile - the more we look the more we find. With more survey telescopes coming online (Vera Rubin just recently, Nancy Grace Roman and Xuntian coming soon to name a few), I suspect we'll start seeing quite a few more of these.
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
Imagine you are an FTL space alien in search of other FTL civilizations. Would you parade your FTL tech around? Allow others to study your capabilities? I'd probably send something that could plausibly be identified as a rock. If there are other FTL civilizations out there, I'd like to know everything about them before they know anything about me.
I'm in favor of spending more resources on research projects like building a probe to intercept one of these interstellar objects. It would be worth the investment to go and see, and it looks like the Vera Rubin will give us several targets.
I selfishly would rather invest in mining asteroids so that we may one day be qualified to manipulate their movements and prevent strikes of any planets in our solar system and to get rich of course. Even if it takes a few hundred years to become qualified for such mining that is a tiny blip in this spacetime and could mitigate at least some civilization ending events. The process of heading that direction is likely to result in many advancements in technology and slightly safer playgrounds to develop more intelligent androids assuming they don't get hacked resulting in dragging and flinging 20+ mile wide metal asteroids at us.
We don't quite have the technology. It was spotted a month ago, will cross inside Martian orbit in another 2 months, for another 3 months. The fastest we can get to around Martian orbit is 7 months.
> The fastest we can get to around Martian orbit is 7 months.
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.
Do we have enough headsup on these to even plan such a mission? Was under the impression that by the time we realize they're there, they're already halfway out the door...
What's the minimum time to intercept something like this? Do we need 6 or 7 years, or is 3 years enough?
It’s the universe governing body that any species require AGI to enter into the “circle”. You don’t get AGI, you are not advanced enough to join the group
Or - and I know this isn't a new idea by any means - perhaps AGI is the circle. Perhaps the only life that persists long enough and is robust enough to spread amongst the stars is what we would consider AI or machine intelligence, and flesh and blood beings like ourselves are only considered a necessary precursor to the real thing.
3l/Atlas itself is unlikely to be alien technology, but it is from way outside our solar system and deserves to be examined as closely as possible with every resourse availible, and at this point planning for ways to investigate interstellar objects more closely needs to be figured out......say, blast it with ultra high lasers and see what boils off!
Damn this has everything: universally interesting, wild speculation shoehorned into real science, misunderstanding that all things happening in interstellar scale are unlikely, casually dropping cool big rare terms for space shit
(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
I would bet a large sum that 3I is a natural object, but if it's artificial, I would bet that it's malign.
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.
------------
[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.
You assume evolution is a force that constrains the advance of humanity in some simple survival-of-the-reproductive way, when instead it is an emergent process that no longer operates this way in humans.
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.
If the Federation is not expansionist then the Borg will ultimately control the galaxy.
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.
Fun to think about, but think about this: as soon as we have the tech to start catching sight of these things, we start seeing them yearly.
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.
It's weaponised language that pseudo academics hurl around at each other to try and denigrate the research outputs of other people. In the distant past it had a meaning which was that research was being published in small parts in order to get more academic kudos from it, but now literally all research is published this way based on the judgement of the submitter about what they can get accepted where.
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.
Pretty terrible and dishonest video. The author should feel bad.
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.
Oh, so as part of your concern that it shouldn't be "improper" to think about, discuss, or enjoy Loeb's ideas, you suggest that the author of that video should "feel bad" about criticizing it? Nice, that's really cool of you. Loeb is allowed to enjoy the ideas of it being an alien spaceship about to Dark Forest us, but no one is allowed to push back against it.
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.
the idea of malign intent ignores the physical economic factors that are true everywhere in the universe. The amount of energy it takes to get here from the next closest place, and the necessary probability that there is at least one other planet 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. 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.
Religion is a good example of a solid good reason, even from a human standpoint, for undertaking large projects without a positive expected economic ROI.
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."
A few generations later, that tribe would no longer be recorded in history, wiped out by war and smallpox brought on ships from across the world.
there are large projects, and then there is interstellar travel. imo they aren't comparable or analogous. comparing it to boats is a kind of linear extrapolation or mapping of those effects to the present, whereas the distance between boats and faster than light craft is a non-linear mapping where all the factors contributing to its development really are different.
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.
This is what is compelling about the abduction angle. In effect that is exactly what a human biologist would do in an alien world: sample the population and study it. You don't need a strong economic incentive to send a field biologist someplace. Things can operate inefficiently in basic research because if one waits for economic viability many findings would not be possible.
I agree that all makes benign much more likely - the Dark Forest arguments mostly come down to "if aliens are as bad as humans (especially as bad as we were hundreds or thousands of years ago), we're doomed".
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...
I think you might be interested in reading about the orthogonality thesis, which addresses exactly that. There is very little reason to believe that advanced technology goes along advancement along the scale of (your own) morality axis.
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.
I don't see why people keep conflating "advanced" technological civilizations with civilizations that happen to be "advanced" within the bounds of that particular person's individual moral worldview.
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.
Earlier discussions here with 100+ comments about Loeb-based ET mischief include:
"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
Most reasoned take is directly from the paper itself:
"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."
It makes me sad that so many people are seemingly so aggressive against Loeb and his takes on this stuff. Whether things might be aliens or not, people get so upset whenever it's even mentioned as a thought experiment. We should be able to have a bit of fun here and there.
I agree, I mean something like this only has to happen once in our lifetime for everything we know to change overnight. I’m not saying believe anything and everything at face value, but at least question whether immediate knee jerk dismissal of any idea you think you’ve seen before is actually considering the nuance of the specific thing in question or just a learned response.
I think if it was framed more as fiction it would get a better read. The title and the abstract suggest they take this possibility seriously, which is ridiculous.
> if it was framed more as fiction
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.
The fact you think aliens are ridiculous in an infinite universe is more ridiculous.
I think its totally fair to be aggressive in pushing back against abstracts like "and hypothesize that this object could be technological, and possibly hostile as would be expected from the ’Dark Forest’ resolution to the ’Fermi Paradox’".
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.
Intentionality of the path is a good prerequisite of the object being technological, and its hostility is a possibility given the Dark Forest resolution is true (which we can't prove nor disprove). The sentence sounds a bit sensationalist but it seems scientifically valid to me, considering this is an area where we have little more than a bunch of unprovable hypotheses.
He is the boy who cried wolf at this point. Every interstellar object is (oops I mean could be) alien artefact.
Also he raised a bunch of funds to dig one up under the ocean and got nothing.
When and if alien life is discovered, there’s a high chance the discoverer will be someone who’s spent their career searching for it, rather than someone just stumbling across ironclad proof one fine day.
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.
Any idea why he gets so much pushback, when string theorists get a pass? Is it because "alien tech" is more easy to understand as a concept than Calabi-Yau manifolds?
because of UFO Conspiracy Theorists. When someone says Alien in a serious context, most people immediately associate it with UFO nutjobs.
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.
There's been very few interstellar objects he's claimed as alien, in fact only one - and for onomua (or however it was spelt) he also said the most likely outcome would be a natural object. His expedition to recover metal spheroids from the ocean floor was a fascinating one which garnered a lot of support and I believe still had value in devising methods to recover impact materials from underwater.
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.
If any alien civilizations believe the "Dark Forest" hypothesis, then they will definitely disguise their probes as asteriods and comets. At least, I would.
“If this is the case, then two possibilities follow: first that its intentions are entirely benign and second they are malign.”
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!
If it's malign there's really nothing we can do about it. A technology that can traverse the distance between solar systems is so far outside of our technology that it might as well be magic, and our current level of technology is already adequate to obliterate all life on the surface of the Earth. If you have power to travel interstellar distances the power to obliterate all life on a planet with no warning is trivial.
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.
Interestingly enough, the same world ending technology can be used for interstellar travel & could have been used since the 1950s!
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. ;-)
> The rocket equation is a harsh mistress.
Nice Heinlein reference
Spoiler alert!
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.
I don't believe FTL travel is possible, but if it were, the Fermi Paradox would seem to suggest it isn't obvious or trivial. It might require burning the mass energy of an entire star just to open a wormhole or hacking the matrix and forking the physics engine or sacrificing us to their chaos god patrons or something.
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?
IMO, If FTL was possible, something, somewhere, at some point in time would have engineered a self replicating organism capable of it. These things would be everywhere by now we would see evidence of them.
Like the plants that grow mattresses. I like it!
Also, FTL technology existing would naturally abate the prospects of interstellar war under the Dark Forest theory, because it means FTL communication is possible; and factions that can communicate with each other quickly are far less likely to fight each other. This was, at least in the first book, a (iirc stated) reason why the Dark Forest theory exists.
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 this is the case, then two possibilities follow: first that its intentions are entirely benign and second they are malign.
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?
Because humans are nearly incapable of projecting in a non-linear way. As in, it takes active educated effort. Most predictions you will see are linear extrapolations of what we already know. That's why flying cars were a popular "futuristic" scenario. They can drive now, why shouldn't they be able to fly in 50 years from now? That thought was prevalent in the 60s.
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.
The best non-linear story I have ever read is "the Machine stops".
And a fourth: irrelevant.
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.
This was a (minor?) plot point in Crichton's "Sphere".
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.
Also Strugatsky's "Roadside Picnic" - the "picnic" in question was a visit of aliens on Earth for unknown reasons. They came, they went, no one has actually seen them but they left their trash on our planet, "artifacts" in zones that are cordoned off by governments of Earth - from infinite batteries to multiplying gels and various gravity fields that will rip you apart in a second.. Like you said, some people ascribe all kinds of intentions to this visit, but most likely it's an encounter with a bug for them - they just left their stuff without as much as noticing us at all.
> If this is the case, then two possibilities follow: first that its intentions are entirely benign and second they are malign
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).
This isn't really that important. I don't care if the probe is here because of magh'Kveh or because its creators are really motivated to zzzzssszsezesszzesz. What I care about is whether it's going to be benign (which includes just cruising through doing nothing) or malevolent to me. I don't even care if the aliens think they are doing us a favor by coming to a screeching halt, going full-bore at Earth, and converting our ecosystem into a completely different one that they think is "better" for whatever reason. However gurgurvivick that makes them feel, I'm going to classify that as a malign act and take appropriate action... because what else can I even do?
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.
One problem with your assumption here is that "humanity" has no definition of "benign" and "malign".
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.
Sure, and I can't figure out whether the guy who is letting me in to traffic instead of cutting me off is malign or benign, because I lack a definition of those words. Alas, I am doomed to infinite confusion forever.
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.
> One problem with your assumption here is that "humanity" has no definition of "benign" and "malign".
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.
I feel confident that we do.
Whatever happens, it's not like we can actually cause an interstellar incident at this phase of our development.
What if we have inadvertently caused tremendous offense via our radio/television/planetary radar signals
> and converting our ecosystem into a completely different one that they think is "better" for whatever reason.
You could theoretically be convinced that they are right and resign yourself to death.
> It’s possible any alien life experiences complexities were fundamentally unable to comprehend
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.
A sufficiently advanced technology might make the construction of probes trivial, so that it has no great significance to its creators - the "Roadside picnic" situation. Our unfathomable advanced technology is their disposable object. "Why did you send us this probe?" would be like asking America to account for a discarded Coke can. "I dunno, probably somebody was thirsty? What the fuck are you asking us for?"
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.
> "Why did you send us this probe?"
"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!"
along similar lines is His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem
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.
> sufficiently advanced technology might make the construction of probes trivial, so that it has no great significance to its creators
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.
> 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.)
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
> The point is they bothered constructing probes.
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.
>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.)
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.
Sort of the impetus (which at least gives us a reason unlike the movie adaptation Edge of Tomorrow but is not as important as the impact) in the novella All You Need is Kill.
We don't even need good sci-fi to explore that idea. We brush against it every day with ChatGPT.
Related to this is Loeb's proposal to nudge the Juno spacecraft, currently orbiting Jupiter and soon facing EOL, into the path of 3I/Atlas to try to scan it and snap some pictures. I doubt it has enough fuel left, but I hope they're looking into it.
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/how-close-can-the-juno-spacecraf...
By now, Avi Loeb's recommendations should count against whatever he's recommending.
Spoken like a true zealot. Not aligning with scientific consensus doesn't make your suggestions worthless.
Even if they have no fuel/not enough fuel, can they at least point it in the right direction? Better than nowt?
If the probe doesn't have enough fuel to leave Jupiter's orbit, we get a better view of it from here with our much bigger optics.
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/).
Scott Manley just posted a video:
"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...)
Given the difficulty of intercepting it, what are our best options (if any) for getting a decent picture of it? Obviously any data ata ll will be interesting, but I mean something better than a couple of pixels that require a degree in astrophysics to properly appreciate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnpCdi_evE4 this is kinda cool, ish.
Not possible. The least-baddest option I've seen proposed is the Juno probe around Jupiter, but it doesn't have the fuel onboard to achieve the needed velocity, and apparently also had some engine trouble during a previous burn that convinced the team to abort it.
Loeb. That sounds familiar - is this the same Loeb who was hunting for molten alien rocket fragments on the sea floor? What happened to that?
If I recall, he found a few small bits of metal and declared victory.
I get the impression he's doing real science but using outrageous ideas to gain funding.
The tiny metal spheres stuff was interesting even though it's not aliens.
The very same. And also the same guy who claimed ʻOumuamua is likely to be an alien spacecraft.
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.
i do think loeb is nonsensical but is there any a priori reason to think that academia should not speculate about extraterrestrial intelligence in general?
Yes. Most people don't understand either physical and chronological distance enough to understand that contact with an alien civilization, if it exists or ever did exist, is vanishingly unlikely to happen because of time, physical changes to solar systems, distance, the endurance of civilizations, the speed of light, etc. Loeb is pandering to the UFO-susceptible.
"Endurance of civilizations" is the key parameter here. The universe is almost 14 billion years old. Colonizing the Milky Way only takes 1 million years if you can travel 10% of the speed of light. So time and distance aren't significant obstacles for a highly enduring civilization.
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".
Have ever seen anything bigger than a bread box travel at 10% of the speed of light?
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?
> Have ever seen anything bigger than a bread box travel at 10% of the speed of light?
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.
> Colonizing the Milky Way only takes 1 million years if you can travel 10% of the speed of light.
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.
Also a lot of assumptions about mutation rate. Anatomically modern humans appeared 300k years ago. Behaviorally modern humans appeared 50k years ago.
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.
I'd expect the first exploration to be done by machines, and digital transfer of the controlling instance would remove almost all drift.
It seems to me that such speciation supports the assumption of endurance. Over time you'd see selection for species which are patient, diligent, fecund star colonizers. Just like medieval Europeans spent decades or centuries building a cathedral, over time you'd select for species which spend centuries working on their next starshot.
"Over time you'd see selection for species which are patient, diligent, fecund star colonizers."
Or for species that excel at command-deck politics.
>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.
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’s unknown.
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.
And then do that gargantuan feat more than once, with every colony growing exponentially until it can do it again.
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.
>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.
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."
what do you think of this?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394040040_Aligned_m...
I don't think too highly of this, from the abstract: Notably, the candidate coincides in time with the Washington D.C. 1952 UFO flyover, and another (a candidate) falls within a day of the peak of the 1954 UFO wave
wow. ok. didn't even look at the data.
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).
We have no idea. There are multiple unknown parameters in that sentence.
We can’t say it’s likely or unlikely.
The only reason is us declaring it seacular matter
That's academic freedom for you.
Does Loeb plan to apply this thesis to every interstellar object ?
Not just interstellar ones, also any rock you might find on the ocean floor..
The three known interstellar object to pass through the solar system were 1I/ʻOumuamua, 2I/Borisov and now 3I/ATLAS.
Did he give Borisov this treatment? It seems not, so then the answer is "no, only about two thirds of them".
Even so, the probability that Loeb will hint that 4I/whatever could be a probe approaches certainty.
Seems like it, why not. The paper says it is provided as a guide for future interstellar object.
> We show that 3I/ATLAS approaches surprisingly close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, with a probability of ≲ 0.005%.
What probability are they talking about?
“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!” — Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces
If you take a random trajectory through our solar system, your chance to pass this close to three planets is < 0.005%.
isnt the chance only for those specific three planets, not any three planets? there are 56 ways to choose three planets from the 8 (sorry pluto) in our solar system, so the probability of passing that close to any three planets is 56x greater
Specifically a random angle.
"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.
I also misread that. The 0.005% is in relation to this:
> 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.
The aliens are going to be so annoyed when they realise they missed the interesting one.
No matter how tempting the straight line, I will not make the joke.
You've written too much or too little. The Internet demands to hear it.
How many objects go through our solar state each year? More than 200?
Are their trajectories uniformly distributed?
We don't know! We only got the telescopes to look for them with any chance of success in 2017. Since then, we saw three.
Since they are often small and dark, it's very possible we missed a few.
ATLAS was expanded in 2022, and this object was discovered by the new telescope in Chile - the more we look the more we find. With more survey telescopes coming online (Vera Rubin just recently, Nancy Grace Roman and Xuntian coming soon to name a few), I suspect we'll start seeing quite a few more of these.
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
Evidently not the probability of all the other coincidences that could be the basis of post hoc ergo propter hoc analysis.
I noticed that about the orbit as well. It does seem a little surprising.
I think it's a natural object.
I think it's much more likely that space aliens have FTL. Unless it's the klingons.
Imagine you are an FTL space alien in search of other FTL civilizations. Would you parade your FTL tech around? Allow others to study your capabilities? I'd probably send something that could plausibly be identified as a rock. If there are other FTL civilizations out there, I'd like to know everything about them before they know anything about me.
is it reasonable to assume an FTL civilization to be so dumb to mistake a spacescraft for a rock?
I don’t know if ours is an FTL civ or not, but I do think a large number of us are mistaking our own spaceship[0] for a rock.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth
Based on their approach graphs, if it is an intercept probe it seems like the target is Mars.
Off-by-one :)
The data of the aliens was outdated by a few billion years
Unless that's where they want to put their base of operations.
I'm in favor of spending more resources on research projects like building a probe to intercept one of these interstellar objects. It would be worth the investment to go and see, and it looks like the Vera Rubin will give us several targets.
I selfishly would rather invest in mining asteroids so that we may one day be qualified to manipulate their movements and prevent strikes of any planets in our solar system and to get rich of course. Even if it takes a few hundred years to become qualified for such mining that is a tiny blip in this spacetime and could mitigate at least some civilization ending events. The process of heading that direction is likely to result in many advancements in technology and slightly safer playgrounds to develop more intelligent androids assuming they don't get hacked resulting in dragging and flinging 20+ mile wide metal asteroids at us.
> It would be worth the investment to go and see
Why? I’d rather we continue surveying from a distance while sending probes to places we know will be interesting, like Titan and Europa.
Well, we probably have resources for both (as The Humanity).
> we probably have resources for both
In the long run, yes. Possibly even in the medium term. In the short term, no--we're limited by our technological capability.
If it is a probe, its waiting to be intercepted and contacted, because this is how sentient space-worthy species find about each other.
https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/siren-waters
> because this is how sentient space-worthy species find about each other.
Care to share any examples?
We don't quite have the technology. It was spotted a month ago, will cross inside Martian orbit in another 2 months, for another 3 months. The fastest we can get to around Martian orbit is 7 months.
> The fastest we can get to around Martian orbit is 7 months.
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.
Viking probes got there in about 11 months. You might be thrown off by an AI artifact.
We don't have the technology to catch up to this one, but what could we do with the next one that's detected earlier?
Do we have enough headsup on these to even plan such a mission? Was under the impression that by the time we realize they're there, they're already halfway out the door...
What's the minimum time to intercept something like this? Do we need 6 or 7 years, or is 3 years enough?
Feasibility of a Spacecraft Flyby with the Third Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44649150
Intercepting 3I/Atlas at Its Closest Approach to Jupiter with Juno Spacecraft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44717239
what's stopping you?
Maybe we are getting close to AGI then
Yes, but how did they know that before arriving?
It’s the universe governing body that any species require AGI to enter into the “circle”. You don’t get AGI, you are not advanced enough to join the group
Yes, but it's the AGI they want to talk to. Not it's monkey brained creators
Based on current estimated trajectory, Jupiter is getting AGI before us though.
How?
... and they're delivering our membership card
Or - and I know this isn't a new idea by any means - perhaps AGI is the circle. Perhaps the only life that persists long enough and is robust enough to spread amongst the stars is what we would consider AI or machine intelligence, and flesh and blood beings like ourselves are only considered a necessary precursor to the real thing.
Oooh yes and this proud sibling is racing to the birth of its earth agi brother.
Fun to think about.
Sounds like aliens might crash the holidays. Traffic would be brutal.
3l/Atlas itself is unlikely to be alien technology, but it is from way outside our solar system and deserves to be examined as closely as possible with every resourse availible, and at this point planning for ways to investigate interstellar objects more closely needs to be figured out......say, blast it with ultra high lasers and see what boils off!
Damn this has everything: universally interesting, wild speculation shoehorned into real science, misunderstanding that all things happening in interstellar scale are unlikely, casually dropping cool big rare terms for space shit
(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
I would bet a large sum that 3I is a natural object, but if it's artificial, I would bet that it's malign.
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.
------------
[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.
You assume evolution is a force that constrains the advance of humanity in some simple survival-of-the-reproductive way, when instead it is an emergent process that no longer operates this way in humans.
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.
A United Federation of Planets would condemn such exploitative barbaric interaction.
If the Federation is not expansionist then the Borg will ultimately control the galaxy.
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.
I hope this gets some discussion here. A fascinating paper to think about.
Fun to think about, but think about this: as soon as we have the tech to start catching sight of these things, we start seeing them yearly.
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.
It really isn't.
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
What is a salami-sliced paper?
It's weaponised language that pseudo academics hurl around at each other to try and denigrate the research outputs of other people. In the distant past it had a meaning which was that research was being published in small parts in order to get more academic kudos from it, but now literally all research is published this way based on the judgement of the submitter about what they can get accepted where.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics#Salami_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit
Pretty terrible and dishonest video. The author should feel bad.
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.
Oh, so as part of your concern that it shouldn't be "improper" to think about, discuss, or enjoy Loeb's ideas, you suggest that the author of that video should "feel bad" about criticizing it? Nice, that's really cool of you. Loeb is allowed to enjoy the ideas of it being an alien spaceship about to Dark Forest us, but no one is allowed to push back against it.
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
Yes, this. Here's Loeb 2 years ago on Oumuamua - was it Aliens?
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.
More importantly, do we need to reach for aliens everytime something slightly out of the ordinary happens in the night sky? (No, we do not).
How is pretentiousness more important?
They read Rendez-vous with Rama one time too much.
I just picked up the book this week so it was curious timing to see this post!
the idea of malign intent ignores the physical economic factors that are true everywhere in the universe. The amount of energy it takes to get here from the next closest place, and the necessary probability that there is at least one other planet 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. 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.
Religion is a good example of a solid good reason, even from a human standpoint, for undertaking large projects without a positive expected economic ROI.
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
A few generations later, that tribe would no longer be recorded in history, wiped out by war and smallpox brought on ships from across the world.there are large projects, and then there is interstellar travel. imo they aren't comparable or analogous. comparing it to boats is a kind of linear extrapolation or mapping of those effects to the present, whereas the distance between boats and faster than light craft is a non-linear mapping where all the factors contributing to its development really are different.
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.
This is what is compelling about the abduction angle. In effect that is exactly what a human biologist would do in an alien world: sample the population and study it. You don't need a strong economic incentive to send a field biologist someplace. Things can operate inefficiently in basic research because if one waits for economic viability many findings would not be possible.
I agree that all makes benign much more likely - the Dark Forest arguments mostly come down to "if aliens are as bad as humans (especially as bad as we were hundreds or thousands of years ago), we're doomed".
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...
I think you might be interested in reading about the orthogonality thesis, which addresses exactly that. There is very little reason to believe that advanced technology goes along advancement along the scale of (your own) morality axis.
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.
I don't see why people keep conflating "advanced" technological civilizations with civilizations that happen to be "advanced" within the bounds of that particular person's individual moral worldview.
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.
It's Avi Loeb. He's considered a crackpot now.
Jesus, I fucking hope so.
Per betteridge's law: no.
No (Betteridge, 2009).
If anything ends in a question mark, the answer is likely "no".
This was much more interesting: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas
If news articles end with a question mark. A little refinement upon your claim
Inevitably this makes people write headlines like "Is Betteridge's Law Valid?"
https://hekint.org/2024/06/03/is-betteridges-law-valid/
You might enjoy this:
[0] https://taylor.town/is-betteridges-law
Yes. It’s the exception that proves the rule.
I put that link in the top text for added context. Thanks!
Oh cool, a .PDF I can squint at.