Comments by "" (@zachrodan7543) on "Cool Worlds"
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I think the radio waterhole seems more likely to yield a detection than anything else. if we assume that the aliens sending the signals are advanced enough to be engaging in long-range space travel, and we assume they have the same sort of selfishness seen in virtually all life on earth (which is a driving force behind natural selection; there is a tendency, at least on earth, for lifeforms to prioritize the survival of themselves and their progeny above all else.), aliens likely do use targetted signals for communications (more energy efficient than sending the signal in all directions, assuming you know where to aim). however, these are likely meant primarily as one-way communications, at least beyond a certain distance, due to the time-delay caused by the universal speed limit.
there are only two ways we pick up on such a signal: either it is aimed at us, or it is aimed at everywhere.
if the signal is aimed at us, the question is why. it seems inefficient to try and pulse all the planets that you find in the hopes that they are paying attention, and what purpose does it serve for you? unless you know a civilization is there to recieve it, it seems like it would be too resource intensive to send signals into the potential void that often. and they might have no more reason to believe us to be here than we do to believe that they are in whatever specific location they call home. we haven't seen any sign of them, and we probably know of more exoplanets that could support life than we could afford to try and ping this way, and the same logic works in reverse.
instead, it seems much more likely for us to pick up a signal if it is aimed at "everywhere" (or some non-trivial subset of "everywhere" which happens to include us). again, the question is why such a signal would be sent: what reason could aliens have for trying to send a signal in as many directions as possible, as efficiently as possible? the only thing that comes to mind for me is a sort of distress signal/info dump: "our ship is in a situation where we can no longer proceed with what we set out to do. here is what caused our crisis, so that whoever out there happens to receive this message knows not to make the same mistake as us. if our home planet happens to recieve this message, this is our current location."
the most logical way I can think of for such a message to be sent out is by spinning the transmitter around in a circle. this would likely result in us detecting it as something akin to a pulsar, but with an artificial message encoded amid the pulses of the beam sweeping over us.
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5:32 I have a different reason why I believe that no alien civilization would want to annihilate other civilizations they discover the existence of: such a warmongering civilization would likely not be able to pull itself back from the nuclear stage of civilization. (heck, our ability to do so feels like it is on the brink of being tested by the war in Ukraine, what with putin's periodic threats to use nuclear weaponry). Much as one of the factors in the drake equation is the probability that a civilization avoids killing itself, any civilization which does manage to make it past that stage of being smart enough to destroy themselves but not smart enough to know better, on the other end of that phase is going to have enough common sense and brinkmanship to not risk having weapons that are capable of destroying themselves just lying around. an assumption of psychological and philosophical concepts like "enlightenment" and "benevolence" do not factor into the picture, as those may be strictly human concepts. but self-preservation is likely a necessary motivator for any advanced civilization to have. (this is the value of existence you described when looking at it in a game theory context)
6:45 if we are nothing but an anthill to them, then what do they care if we send out a signal into the cosmos. we are an anthill on the other side of the universe, so far away and so limited in ability that the only way we could ever cause problems for them is if they came to us, and if they find us a nuisance at that point, we are doing them and ourselves a favor by telling them we are here, so that they don't show up here only to find us being unexpected pests: if you know a potential house has a pest problem, you are likely going to look for a different house, rather than go to the trouble of eliminating the pests.
the main counterargument I make to the idea that we are exposing ourselves to undue risk by broadcasting our existence, like natives inviting colonists onto their land, is as follows: we are protected from their trying to mess with us directly by the speed of light: assuming that ftl is impossible (which our current scientific understanding suggests to be the case), the only way they can interact with us that isn't an impractical waste of resources is by sending communications back and forth with us. and if they are interested in our planet because of the resources, we can probably assume they already knew enough about our resources before our message, as that is the most likely reason why they would be listening in our direction to begin with. space is really big, and we are but one tiny planet, taking up an incredibly minute portion of the possible directions they could be looking in. admittedly, this means that it seems odd to expect them to be looking at us in the first place, but it also means that we might want to assume that whoever is recieving broadcasted messages from earth already knows about the chemical composition of our atmosphere and such, and already suspects our planet might have the potential for intelligent life.
in response to your argument that an advanced civilization might not learn anything by contacting us, that they couldn't gain by simply observing us: I say observe away. if we are but ants in someone else's ant farm, let them study us: it means they are less likely to destroy us (although they may occasionally introduce new challenges to see how we respond)
regarding the game theory equation, I think it worth noting that the energy cost for the aliens to annihilate us could quite possibly mean that such a strategy would only be worthwhile if they believe that other civilizations that they might need to annihilate are percieved by them to sufficiently scarce: unless they have access to a level of energy which we cannot fathom, there is a limit to how affordable it would be for them to attack us. However, if they believe the number of other civilizations which they might need to destroy from a distance to be too scarce, they would likely not bother with investing in such a weapon to begin with: those resources could be used for more productive pursuits than killing a civilization which may or may not exist and broadcast in the first place. you don't create a weapon if you have nobody to use it against.
looking through my arguments here, I am only noticing a few major assumptions I am making:
1. they value their continued existence. (this seems reasonable to assume, as a civilization likely does not last long without an intent to continue to exist; self-preservation is not a passive pursuit).
2. they have limited resources at their disposal.
3. in order to destroy us, they would need to use a massive amount of energy. much of that energy would just go towards getting their weapon of planetary destruction to reach us in the first place, regardless of if it is a laser or a missile (missiles seem less likely, as the travel time for it to reach us means we are more likely to detect it and concoct a countermeasure).
overall, I believe we absolutely should broadcast our existence. the one caveat i'll add is that if/when we are visited by aliens, let's maybe not try to dissect the guests.
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On the other hand, there is also the possibility of them being benevolent. it is a gamble, and our current information on the outcome is so incomplete that our only real means to try and calculate what might happen is to consider how we might respond if we were the recievers; based on the assumption that our societal timeline of development is not unique, but is instead a good estimate of what benchmarks need to be passed on the way towards space: one such benchmark is the willingness to hear the opinions of those from other societies. people bring up the idea of the aliens trying to eradicate us and take over our planet, because that is what we used to do here on earth when finding a new civilization we had not yet discovered. however, it is worth noting that even by the time we were starting to travel into space, and certainly by the present when we are starting to think about how we might conceivably manage to travel between the stars in the extreme hypothetical, we consider the conquering and eradication of native peoples as having been a bad move by our ancestors. we could not have reached this point of being able to consider long-range space travel without having first come to terms with the value of learning from those of different backgrounds to gain further insight on new ways to approach a problem. By not seeking the alien perspectives that might be out there, we are actively working against our pursuit of knowledge. Additionally, I think it is safe to say that any civilization that was able to work out how to go beyond the bounds of its planet has to have developed a deep scientific curiosity about the universe for them to have bothered considering the possibility of aliens, or even the question of what lies beyond the sky. assuming that alien lifeforms still had to evolve from something akin to the early single-celled organisms of earth, they would not have the ability to detect and respond to our signals anyways unless they had enough curiousity to ask what happens if you go further and further away from the surface of their planet.
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