This is how you get Dark Forest strikes

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MsJack
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This is how you get Dark Forest strikes

Post by MsJack »

BA, Classics, Brigham Young University
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honorentheos
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Re: This is how you get Dark Forest strikes

Post by honorentheos »

From the link:

Jamilah Hah is also involved in the BITG project. She thinks that the benefits of contacting aliens outweigh the potential risks.

"Stephen Hawking's quote is absolutely inspiring and my personal conclusion was that any species capable of understanding and interpreting our message will likely be equally if not more intelligent and wary of our existence," she told Newsweek.

"Thus, as long as contact is approached with a clear sign of peace, it can be assumed that the hopeful possibilities and discoveries that come alongside communication outweigh the risk."


When I read that I thought, "Is this person twelve years old or something?" A Google search later and actually, yeah, not much older than that.

Phew. Kids. Here's hoping for a quick, unforeseeable death and not the one where we get regular reports of an approaching alien fleet ready to Cortez us.
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Dr. Shades
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Re: This is how you get Dark Forest strikes

Post by Dr. Shades »

Please refrain from committing "link and run."

Also, what the Hell is a "Dark Forest strike??"
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Re: This is how you get Dark Forest strikes

Post by MeDotOrg »

Here's what I don't get: Earthlings send radio waves out into the Universe. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, is 4.3 light years away, which is 25,278,089,091,000 miles. For comparison, it is 238,900 miles to the moon. It takes about 3 days to get to the moon. Let's call it 80,000 miles a day. That's 315,976,113 days to get to Alpha Centauri. So around 865,000 years. Space/time is the fabric of the universe. If you're made out of matter, the faster you go through space, the slower you go through time.

Keep in mind Alpha Centauri is our closest star system. If sentient life capable of interstellar communication exists in 2 adjacent star systems at the same time, what are the chances that we are the only 2 star systems with life capable of interstellar communication? We are at end of the spiral arm in our galaxy.

Carl Sagan wrote a book called Contact, where he postulated that the earliest TV signals to be received in outer space were likely Adolf Hitler opening in 1936 Olympics.

The planet earth is not going to go radio wave silent just because someone might be listening. Whether or not we broadcast specifically to introduce ourselves to other planets, we are messily spilling radio waves all over the universe every day. We advertise our existence, whether we want to or not.
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Re: This is how you get Dark Forest strikes

Post by honorentheos »

MeDotOrg wrote:
Tue Apr 05, 2022 7:59 am
Here's what I don't get: Earthlings send radio waves out into the Universe. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, is 4.3 light years away, which is 25,278,089,091,000 miles. For comparison, it is 238,900 miles to the moon. It takes about 3 days to get to the moon. Let's call it 80,000 miles a day. That's 315,976,113 days to get to Alpha Centauri. So around 865,000 years. Space/time is the fabric of the universe. If you're made out of matter, the faster you go through space, the slower you go through time.

Keep in mind Alpha Centauri is our closest star system. If sentient life capable of interstellar communication exists in 2 adjacent star systems at the same time, what are the chances that we are the only 2 star systems with life capable of interstellar communication? We are at end of the spiral arm in our galaxy.

Carl Sagan wrote a book called Contact, where he postulated that the earliest TV signals to be received in outer space were likely Adolf Hitler opening in 1936 Olympics.

The planet earth is not going to go radio wave silent just because someone might be listening. Whether or not we broadcast specifically to introduce ourselves to other planets, we are messily spilling radio waves all over the universe every day. We advertise our existence, whether we want to or not.
My understanding is there's more to it given signal strength weakening as the signal travels outward eventually becomes indistinguishable from cosmic background noise. In the scifi story from which the term "Dark Forest" derives, the events leading to Earth's discovery involved a scientific accident where a rebellious, nihilistic Chinese scientist discovered a means of amplifying the signal using the sun which resulted in a massive burst signal being sent. But even then, the alien civilization that first received it sent out a return signal seeking a reply before they could identify the location of the source.

Anyway, by the time the signal of Hitler opening the 1936 games reached Alpha Centaury it was well below the dB of the cosmic background radiation.
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Re: This is how you get Dark Forest strikes

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I met this guy who claimed to be an alien the other day when I was walking back from my car to watch my son's baseball game. He used the tried and true spin of telling the woman he was trying to pick up that he could predict the future by claiming that I wouldn't believe his claims. Sure enough when he claimed to be an alien, I didn't believe him .... game set and match. I wonder if the trick worked?
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Re: This is how you get Dark Forest strikes

Post by Dr. Shades »

Dr Exiled wrote:
Wed Apr 06, 2022 3:05 am
I wonder if the trick worked?
I doubt it. An alien wouldn't have romantic interest in a human female.
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Re: This is how you get Dark Forest strikes

Post by Analytics »

I tend to think we are alone.

First, our planet is a lot more special and rare than most people think. Consider:

1- The planet needs to belong to a star that burns in a slow, stable way in a time and place where there have been multiple supernova to create heavier elements
2- That star needs to be in the galaxy's outer-suburbs so that it isn't too close to the chaos surrounding black holes
3- The solar system probably needs to have some huge outer planets to protect it against most deadly meteors
4- We need a rocky, wet planet that is big enough to hold oxygen and nitrogen but too small to hold hydrogen and helium. It needs to be in the habitable zone with a huge moon and plate tectonics. Probably.

Finding a planet with all of that is extremely rare. But once you get a planet like that, what are the chances organic life will come into existence? On our planet, that has happened only once. All life on earth is related, tracing back to a single primitive prokaryotic cell. That has profound implications for the Drake formula. The fact we cannot point to multiple trees of life on our planet that all independently came into existence means that even if a planet has all the right stuff, it is still extraordinarily unlikely that primitive life will come into being.

Another key step in our evolutionary history was evolving from simple prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic cells with a nucleus and mitochondria. Despite a gazillion opportunity to evolve this way over billions of years, this key step only happened once.

According to Wikipedia, Eukaryotes evolved into multi-cellular organisms about 25 times, but only one of those multi-cellular organisms evolved into animals, that includes things like sponges, starfish, flatworms, and us. That happened only once.

But let's say there is a perfect planet (I'm sure there are many), and against all odds prokaryotic life develops, and against all odds the prokaryotic life evolves into eukaryotic life, and against all odds the eukaryotic life evolves into animals. What are the chances an animal will evolve to the point of being able to create radio telescopes and satellites? Of the tens of millions of species that have existed on this planet, only one has gotten anywhere near the point of being able to create radio technology. Just us. And we have come very near extinction a few times, and we existed for hundreds of thousands of years before the tumblers fell into place that caused us to start seriously developing technology. If we didn't do it, is there any chance that dolphins or bees or octopi or whatever would evolve to use technology the way we do? I don't see it. It's a total fluke that we survived and figured out how to do what we do.

Given this long string of unique events, each of which could have happened countless trillions of times but each only happened once, it's really hard for me to imagine there is somebody out there with a radio telescope pointed towards us. Yes, I'm sure there is something like prokaryotic life out there. And there is probably something like eukaryotic life out there. There could even be a few animals. But animals that happened to evolve to the point of mastering electromagnetic waves?

We could be quite alone.
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Re: This is how you get Dark Forest strikes

Post by Dr Exiled »

Dr. Shades wrote:
Wed Apr 06, 2022 5:40 am
Dr Exiled wrote:
Wed Apr 06, 2022 3:05 am
I wonder if the trick worked?
I doubt it. An alien wouldn't have romantic interest in a human female.
Aliens coming here to impregnate our women and then take over? There has to be some psy-fi movie/book somewhere with this as a plot line.
Myth is misused by the powerful to subjugate the masses all too often.
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Re: This is how you get Dark Forest strikes

Post by Res Ipsa »

Dr. Shades wrote:
Tue Apr 05, 2022 6:54 am
Please refrain from committing "link and run."

Also, what the Hell is a "Dark Forest strike??"
It’s from the second book of the trilogy that begins with the Three Body Problem. In the book, advanced alien races that discover the existence of other planets with intelligent life simply obliterate the planet as a survival strategy.
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