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 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.
It isn't a good resolution, because it assumes all intelligent species in the universe must think and act according to the same rationale. But the one example of an intelligent species we're aware of (humanity) doesn't think and act this way - we've been blindly sending signals and probes out for decades now, and anyone observing our planet would probably notice obvious tech signatures.
His argument regarding the trajectory into our Solar System is pretty flaky. It completely disregards Hopkin's computation of a "steep entry angle" and supposition that it comes from the "thick disk", instead assuming the incoming trajectories of interstellar objects are uniformly distributed across the celestial sphere.
Mass distribution in our galaxy is decidedly anisotropic - most mass lies in the galatic plane.
Loeb's estimate of the comet size is strange, when two observatories concur that the maximum size is around 10km.
"There is zero testing of the hypothesis" - He, as well as multiple unrelated others, also wrote papers detailing available options to intercept the object by re-purposing existing satellites from Mars or Jupiter, which would allow for data collection which would directly test the hypothesis.
Yes he did so: Poorly. His idea [0] to use Juno is a pretty bad one, given that it doesn't have the fuel to do what he suggests, and even if it did, one of its engines was damaged during a recent maneuver. And, at least according to Jason Wright, Loeb should have known all this but ignored it [1], because headlines.
The ESA has a possibly more promising plan to divert a probe that's on its way to Jupiter right now [2].
So, again: If you're going to write "The feasibility of intercepting 3I/ATLAS depends on the current amount of fuel available from the propulsion system of Juno" one thing a real scientist would do is, idk, try to find out how much fuel it has left, talk to team members, etc. Instead, Loeb just does presumptive math, which ends up being wrong, but that didn't stop a Florida state rep from taking this "idea from a harvard scientist" and turning it into an official request of NASA, which now more real scientists will have to waste their time with [3].
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.
Aliens existing is not ridiculous, the hubristic idea that aliens are visiting the solar system is what’s ridiculous, plus all the sensationalism around aliens from someone who should know better.
It's not that I find aliens ridiculous, I find it ridiculous to attribute 3I/ATLAS to aliens and I find it especially ridiculous that it's coming from Harvard. They have billions of dollars in endowment and this is what they waste their time on? Maybe the administration was right to pick a fight with them.
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.
Rama by Arthur C Clarke is a work of fiction, there's no blurry line there.
> We show that 3I/ATLAS approaches surprisingly close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, with a probability of ≲ 0.005%
a) What does this even mean? If you throw a dart on a dartboard, anywhere it lands will have some probability. 1/200 doesn't seem that low.
b) It's the height of intellectual laziness and chicanery to go from not-that-low-of-probability to 'aliens'
They're free to make these claims. I'm also free to laugh at how ridiculous it is.
Now, if this thing had some précise shape, or rotational speed, or we saw it adding or subtracting delta V, or if it did gravity assists from multiple planets (not just 'flew kinda close to a couple of them'), now that would be interesting.
If you read the paper, you'll find there are many improbable occurrences, rather than just this one.
> > We show that 3I/ATLAS approaches surprisingly close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, with a probability of ≲ 0.005%
>
> a) What does this even mean? If you throw a dart on a dartboard, anywhere it lands will have some probability. 1/200 doesn't seem that low.
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.
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?
I think it comes from a place of insecurity. people get sensitive about it because all astronomy is pointless and arbitrary, so someone having outlandish fun while doing it runs the risk of highlighting this fact.
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 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.
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?
Another theoretical possibility is that any Alien life that is exploring the universe could be more resistant to acceleration / deceleration than we squishy humans are.
Perhaps they figured out AI or have made space-adapted biological life forms that can survive constant acceleration at 25Gs and are sending them out to scout the universe for other life, and once they find it they would signal back to the home planet.
25G of constant acceleration would kill any human, especially if it were maintained for the time it would take to approach light speed, but for an AI or a creature specifically developed to survive that it would make a trip to the Solar System from Alpha Centauri take 5-8 years.
Then again, if they could do 1G of constant acceleration that would only add like 2 years to the total trip. Long enough to be one-way for most people but short enough to be survivable under ideal circumstances.
Assuming they stopped outside of Neptune's or Pluto's orbit they would still have a few years of travel to make it to Earth but they would have started detecting our broadcasts long before arriving.
I'm not saying this happened, rather that it becomes plausible when you take some liberties with the starting conditions.
>25G of constant acceleration would kill any human, especially if it were maintained for the time it would take to approach light speed
>Then again, if they could do 1G of constant acceleration that would only add like 2 years to the total trip. Long enough to be one-way for most people but short enough to be survivable under ideal circumstances.
It would take ~2 weeks to to approach light speed while continuously accelerating at 25G. It would only take ~1 year to do so at 1G continuous acceleration.
On cosmic time and distance scales, those are essentially the same, especially since once we approach the speed of light, there's no going faster.
As such, tolerance for G forces seems pretty irrelevant for interstellar travel.
Doing so within the confines of a solar system is another matter altogether, I'd expect.
Humans die under 10g for more than a few minutes. Admittedly, we could position the humans to be in the optimal direction, but even 2g sustained for months would undoubtedly cause issues.
I picked 25G as it would be an insane but reasonable acceleration, and time is always a factor. Trimming 2 years off of a voyage might seem worthless on an intergalactic scale, since once you are more than a few solar systems away you're on the scale of AI scouts and generation ships, but for a close star like Alpha Centauri, 2 years (each way) might be the difference between a one way death march and the possibility of a heroic return home.
>Grandfather paradox says the riders on the ship won’t experience most of the time of the ride
No. The Grandfather Paradox[0] says nothing of the kind:
The consistency paradox, commonly known as the grandfather paradox, occurs
when the past is changed in any way.[5] The paradox of changing the past
stems from modal logic: if it is necessarily true that the past happened in a
certain way, then it is false and impossible for the past to have occurred in
any other way, so any change to the past would be a paradox.[13] Consistency
paradoxes occur whenever any change to the past is possible.[6]
A common example given is a time traveler killing their grandfather before
their parents' conception, thus preventing the conception of themselves. If
the traveler were not born, they could not kill their grandfather; therefore,
the grandfather proceeds to beget the traveler's ancestor who begets the
traveler. This scenario is self-contradictory.[5] One proposed resolution for
this paradox is that a time traveller can do anything that did happen, but
cannot do anything that did not happen.[5] Another proposed resolution is
simply that time travel is impossible.[14]
It's not about the air. Its about our fundamental squishyness.
At 10g, a 150lb man would weigh 1,500 lbs. His heart isn't strong enough to move blood that suddenly weighs 90lbs/gallon that also has to push other blood that also weighs that same amount. His blood vessels, paper thin and easily torn under normal weight, suddenly have 10 times the amount of pressure to resist.
He's fine for a few moments, jet pilots experience short bursts of 10g during flights quite often, occasionally more.
Might pass out after 10-20 seconds, but after 10 minutes, his brain, starved of oxygen and squished under its own weight, ceases to function. His heart or his blood vessels rip and tear from the strain, and his body falls apart inside of its own skin.
It's not pretty, but it would probably be a fairly painless way to go.
Getting back to your question, his ability to breathe is not relevant under those situations. The absence of oxygen would accelerate his demise no more than it would under any other situation.
A fun exercise is to calculate how much mass in rocket fuel you would need to accelerate at 25G for two weeks. Or even to accelerate at 1G for a year. Even if you assume a ridiculously high ISP like 1 million seconds (our current best engines are around 8,000 ISP, and they're severely limited in thrust) and close to unlimited energy to add to the mass. Like you're using antimatter to kick propellant out the back at relativistic velocities.
Now add in the mass to slow down once you begin to approach your destination.
I know I am not taking relativity into account but outside of that it's something like 250 kilograms (~550lbs) of antimatter (and that value again for the matter for it to react to) or the equivalent in other fuels. The only difference is how quickly you burn through it.
Which doesn't sound like a lot but its probably as much or more antimatter than exists in the entire solar system, so if it were the fuel then whoever was using it would need to have figured out a method to create and store antimatter in bulk along with the ability to react antimatter as rocket fuel without destroying the rocket its fueling.
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.
It would still require a stupendous amount of delta-v to slow down enough to be captured by the gravity well of the place you are trying to land though.
Also, the Dark Forest theory is based on the same game theory principles that said the US needed to nuke the USSR flat by the early 1950s, it should not be used without skepticism.
I don't know. We humans can communicate with one another quickly but war still exists, it just uses modern communications platforms for espionage, propaganda, attacking information infrastructure and controlling drone swarms.
I have a theory that what we need to reduce conflict in the future is not more speed of communication but more fidelity. At present we can only communicate in spoken or written human language, and this language is not just imprecise and ambiguous, but also untrustworthy (easy to lie with).
If you imagine for just a second a future technology that can transmit genuine opinion, intention and feeling in a way that is hard to fake and therefore easy to trust, it should be easy to see how wars could be averted. So any technology that's even a small step in that direction would probably help.
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.
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. ;-)
This doesn't sound true given what we know about asymmetric warfare in general. What if we discovered the object really was an artillery shell sent to destroy us, but the civilization at the other end only has the resources to fire one every ten years with an accuracy of 1% to hit the Earth?
We might be like a primitive tribe facing an attacker with battleships - a technology that might as well be magic, but still one we can adapt to by abandoning the seafront village and retreating into the jungle.
Exactly. The guys with spears and bows can't defeat the battleship, but if they hide out in the jungle long enough, maybe someone else will come along to sink it.
> our current level of technology is already adequate to obliterate all life on the surface of the Earth
FWIW, and reinforcing your point, this is not even remotely true. Humans lack the technology now or in the foreseeable future to destroy the Earth’s biosphere, which would likely require boiling the oceans. There’s a reason we use that as an example of an impossibly large task.
I purposely excluded the oceans and caves when I said that, but we've overbuilt nuclear weapons to such an absurd degree that we can render the land highly irradiated and inhospitable.
> 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.
Well yes, that's the beauty of it - the protagonist just makes a living hauling this stuff out of the zone(this is where Stalkers came from!), but in the novel there are various factions that believe all kinds of things - that these items are a gift from god, that they are trash, or that they are a test of some kind for us as a human race. I really do highly rate the book, it's great.
> 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.
The probe comes in, observes half a dozen major armed conflict areas on our planet, and solves the problem by entirely disintegrating all weapons on one side of each conflict with no loss of life (but leaving the other side's weapons untouched).
1. Would your assessment of "malign vs benign" depend on knowing which side was disarmed for each conflict, or can you already make an assessment without that information?
2. Do you estimate that the other 8 billion humans surely agree with your response to #1?
> 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.
> Pick your own variant of example where a seemingly-malign action is actually benign in the long term.
Parents like to believe that all of their seemingly-malignant actions towards their children are actually that. In reality, they only sometimes are, and it's impossible to tell in advance which ones.
> 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.
> 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.
"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"
> 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.
I suggest you read the paper. It's packed with subjective language (Row one of table one, the incoming trajectory is said to be "virtually" in the ecliptic plane), and has so many unstated assumptions behind their so-called significance of the trajectory it's not valid.
And the stated 5 degree angle disagrees with published observations.
And the estimate of the size is over double the confirmed observations of size.
While "Not aligning with scientific consensus doesn't make your suggestions worthless" is true, ignoring published results does.
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/).
Yes, perhaps that's right. Seems pretty dishonest to me though. He's a "serious Harvard scientist", so people listen when he tells us that some rock they've spotted may be an alien spaceship. Even though there is surely zero evidence for such an assertion. What the hell is he doing?
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".
> 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.
Depends on if the explorers are the ones doing the bulk of the breeding. On planet earth, educated people actually tend to have fewer kids. There is therefore selective pressure against intelligence on earth.
Machines suffer mutation rate too. Cosmic ray induced bitflips could be possible. Although since we are all spitballing anyhow maybe you can handwave a cosmic shield along with your cosmic explorer.
It would also be interesting if the host system collapsed. That would be some interesting scifi fodder: advanced civilization sends out probes but by the time FTL visitors show up, their civilization already collapsed to the stone age.
>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."
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.
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).
No. But claiming that a comet, which we know is a comet, might be a potentially hostile alien spacecraft is it the very least dishonest, but if claim also unfair and harmful for the general public and how they think about science.
I don’t buy for a second Avi Loeb actually believes this; it’s just to up his citation index. I think it’s disgusting.
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!
If any alien civilizations believe the "Dark Forest" hypothesis, then they will definitely disguise their probes as asteriods and comets. At least, I would.
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.
“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
"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.
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
Given mass distribution of our galaxy is decidedly anisotropic I would expect the answer to be a resounding "no". The ((5/57)/ (4 Pi)) implicity assumes uniform incoming trajectories - I think. There's an odd mixing of radians and steradians in this formula, if the "4 Pi" represents the total solid angle of a sphere.
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
> 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
Using the Wikipedia example of a 1km, 5600g superconducting rail gun that launches at about 10km/s, we just need about a 10km gun to achieve 30km/s (length goes with launch speed squared).
Put it on the lunar surface for a roughly 2.5km/s penalty (I think, plus you obviously need to shoot it when the moon faces the right way).
No humans though, far too squishy. But you could launch a whole swarm of microprobes which could be a very effective distributed observation platform with a gigantic baseline.
If you haven't read it, the short story Maelstrom II by Arthur C. Clarke has a lunar rail gun in it. And the rest of the The Wind from the Sun collection is very good. The namesake solar sailing regatta story is great too.
> Using the Wikipedia example of a 1km, 5600g superconducting rail gun that launches at about 10km/s, we just need about a 10km gun to achieve 30km/s
That's a lot longer gun than I expected! Didn't the navy get to 6 km/s with a 5m barrel? That's a lot more than 5.6kg, of course.
> But you could launch a whole swarm of microprobes which could be a very effective distributed observation platform with a gigantic baseline.
For the beginning I'm going to assume each shot will end up vaporizing a significant fraction of the gun. Getting something to 30km/s once is certainly going to be much easier than doing it hundreds/thousands of times.
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?
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
The Fermi Argument says it's not going to be aliens. In a universe where the aliens can cause random interstellar objects to have a high probability of being alien devices, the aliens have already colonized everything. That clearly hasn't happened (as our own evolution would have been aborted and the universe would be one big urban area.)
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.
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.
Presumably because that's been our experience with human societies? You might protest Germany in the 1930s was "modern" technologically but still "barbaric" morally - but I think that overlooks the way all the European powers were behaving in Africa and Asia, barbarism wasn't so uncommon as all that. And it's less common now, even as we've made more technical advancements? I don't think we develop on all axes in lockstep, but there's still a general trend, and I'd be pretty surprised to find aliens advanced enough to come visit who didn't already have plenty of resources, so why bother messing with us?
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.
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.
Is there any part of your comment that would not have been applicable as-is in the 14th century based on the known laws of economics and physics in pre-Colombian America?
And, from there, is there any reason to believe that we now have perfect understanding of economics and physics, which would warrant the level of absolute certainty you're showing above (despite the fact that such certainty was unwarranted in the past)?
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.
We have aircraft today that other nationstates are "so dumb" to assume is maybe a flying ping pong ball based on radar signature, not a delta wing full of thousands of pounds of bombs.
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.
It is until you consider the birth of AGI may presuppose the extinction of humanity, and how aggressively we seem to be hurtling towards our own self destruction. Maybe it's an innate collective instinct common to intelligent organic life that we "breed" technology to a sufficient level then, having served our purpose, we die. That's the way it works with a lot of insects and fish.
I wouldn't be surprised if Avi Loeb was just being used by the US Military to come up with an excuse to militarize space. I mean he's ego driven and loves inserting himself into situations to boost himself.
The American military industrial complex doesn't need Avi Loeb and his stories about aliens to justify militarizing space. The existence of China alone justifies it to the war hawks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm actually glad to be getting a lot of push-back on this idea.
Old men like me can afford to be cynical, but I'm glad the next generation has enough idealists that they reject the dark future I'm predicting.
Still, I'm forced to reply.
> The vast majority of people are already not harnessing more and more resources in order to reproduce more.
Considering that every other species larger than a rat is being driven into extinction, largely because we are converting their habitats into farms or strip malls, I don't see evidence that we've learned not to consume more and more.
Sure, over the next hundred years our population will stabilize, but as the great scientist Jeff Goldblum said, "Life...ah...finds a way!"
If you want to know how humans will evolve you have to ask, which genes will spread? Obviously, genes for raw strength aren't useful--that's what machines are for. What about genes for intelligence? Do the smartest people have the most kids? No, which means those genes won't necessarily dominate.
In nature, every species is constrained either by food availability or predators or both. If two rabbits have four baby rabbits, and those four have eight baby rabbits, then why aren't there trillions of rabbits now? Obviously, it's because eventually they run out of food or get eaten by coyotes.
But a technological species like us has no predators, and we can continue to make more food by cutting down forests (where other species live) and turn them into farms.
The only limit we have right now is that we don't want to have too many kids. Unlike every other species, we can (mostly) control our reproduction, and we sometimes choose to have fewer children so that we can have a more luxurious life.
Of course, the desire to have children varies across individuals. We all know some people who want to have more kids and some who don't want any. It is likely, of course, that this innate desire is partly or mostly heritable.
Over long enough time-scales--maybe a thousand generations or 25,000 years--the genes of people who want to have kids will dominate. By then, of course, we will have run out of forests to cut down, so we'll have to start colonizing the oceans and other planets.
You might look into the Norway rat experiments done by Calhoun and the idea of a behavioral sink. The essence of your hypothesis was disproven, in rats, likely before you were born.
It seems your idea of the primacy of the forces of evolution, especially when this view is overextended and when competing forces are oversimplified or excluded, produces this dystopian view.
Reproduction does not continue no matter what. The genes of people who want to have kids have been shown to be overwhelmed within social mammals, purely by social forces.
Humans are unique in that they can escape the behavioral sink. It is your simple extrapolation of the theoretical animal limits that produces projected doom. But that extrapolation does not even hold in animals.
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.
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 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.
My favorite aspect of Dark Forest is that simply coming up with the concept also provides a resolution to the Fermi Paradox.
It isn't a good resolution, because it assumes all intelligent species in the universe must think and act according to the same rationale. But the one example of an intelligent species we're aware of (humanity) doesn't think and act this way - we've been blindly sending signals and probes out for decades now, and anyone observing our planet would probably notice obvious tech signatures.
The ones who behave that way don’t last long enough to be witnessed by new civilizations like humanity, hence the darkness
His argument regarding the trajectory into our Solar System is pretty flaky. It completely disregards Hopkin's computation of a "steep entry angle" and supposition that it comes from the "thick disk", instead assuming the incoming trajectories of interstellar objects are uniformly distributed across the celestial sphere.
Mass distribution in our galaxy is decidedly anisotropic - most mass lies in the galatic plane.
Loeb's estimate of the comet size is strange, when two observatories concur that the maximum size is around 10km.
Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44713579 for links to real science.
"There is zero testing of the hypothesis" - He, as well as multiple unrelated others, also wrote papers detailing available options to intercept the object by re-purposing existing satellites from Mars or Jupiter, which would allow for data collection which would directly test the hypothesis.
Yes he did so: Poorly. His idea [0] to use Juno is a pretty bad one, given that it doesn't have the fuel to do what he suggests, and even if it did, one of its engines was damaged during a recent maneuver. And, at least according to Jason Wright, Loeb should have known all this but ignored it [1], because headlines.
The ESA has a possibly more promising plan to divert a probe that's on its way to Jupiter right now [2].
So, again: If you're going to write "The feasibility of intercepting 3I/ATLAS depends on the current amount of fuel available from the propulsion system of Juno" one thing a real scientist would do is, idk, try to find out how much fuel it has left, talk to team members, etc. Instead, Loeb just does presumptive math, which ends up being wrong, but that didn't stop a Florida state rep from taking this "idea from a harvard scientist" and turning it into an official request of NASA, which now more real scientists will have to waste their time with [3].
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21402
[1] https://x.com/Astro_Wright/status/1951530225533329789
[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2490618-can-we-send-a-s...
[3] https://x.com/RepLuna/status/1951379349128815062
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.
The fact you think aliens are ridiculous in an infinite universe is more ridiculous.
Aliens existing is not ridiculous, the hubristic idea that aliens are visiting the solar system is what’s ridiculous, plus all the sensationalism around aliens from someone who should know better.
Seems equally ridiculous to expect we’d ever actually see aliens in a spatially and temporally infinite universe.
It's not that I find aliens ridiculous, I find it ridiculous to attribute 3I/ATLAS to aliens and I find it especially ridiculous that it's coming from Harvard. They have billions of dollars in endowment and this is what they waste their time on? Maybe the administration was right to pick a fight with them.
> 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.
Rama by Arthur C Clarke is a work of fiction, there's no blurry line there.
> We show that 3I/ATLAS approaches surprisingly close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, with a probability of ≲ 0.005%
a) What does this even mean? If you throw a dart on a dartboard, anywhere it lands will have some probability. 1/200 doesn't seem that low.
b) It's the height of intellectual laziness and chicanery to go from not-that-low-of-probability to 'aliens'
They're free to make these claims. I'm also free to laugh at how ridiculous it is.
Now, if this thing had some précise shape, or rotational speed, or we saw it adding or subtracting delta V, or if it did gravity assists from multiple planets (not just 'flew kinda close to a couple of them'), now that would be interesting.
If you read the paper, you'll find there are many improbable occurrences, rather than just this one.
> > We show that 3I/ATLAS approaches surprisingly close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, with a probability of ≲ 0.005% > > a) What does this even mean? If you throw a dart on a dartboard, anywhere it lands will have some probability. 1/200 doesn't seem that low.
Not 1 in 200 here. 1 in 20,000.
I'm actually unsure what you mean - what is that line? Why aren't both just exercises in probabilistic reasoning?
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.
Because that supposition is sensationalist -in modern online parlance, clickbait.
It’s as ridiculous as proposing that it could naturally be made of up of M&Ms or that monkeys built the ancient Egyptian pyramids.
it could naturally be made of up of M&Ms
That's silly. It's made up of Milky Ways.
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?
I think it comes from a place of insecurity. people get sensitive about it because all astronomy is pointless and arbitrary, so someone having outlandish fun while doing it runs the risk of highlighting this fact.
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.
Being repeatedly sensational about something like aliens will make people annoyed after a while, see the boy who cried wolf, etc.
Though we should also bear in mind that the wolf in that story eventually showed up.
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“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.
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?
Another theoretical possibility is that any Alien life that is exploring the universe could be more resistant to acceleration / deceleration than we squishy humans are.
Perhaps they figured out AI or have made space-adapted biological life forms that can survive constant acceleration at 25Gs and are sending them out to scout the universe for other life, and once they find it they would signal back to the home planet.
25G of constant acceleration would kill any human, especially if it were maintained for the time it would take to approach light speed, but for an AI or a creature specifically developed to survive that it would make a trip to the Solar System from Alpha Centauri take 5-8 years.
Then again, if they could do 1G of constant acceleration that would only add like 2 years to the total trip. Long enough to be one-way for most people but short enough to be survivable under ideal circumstances.
Assuming they stopped outside of Neptune's or Pluto's orbit they would still have a few years of travel to make it to Earth but they would have started detecting our broadcasts long before arriving.
I'm not saying this happened, rather that it becomes plausible when you take some liberties with the starting conditions.
>25G of constant acceleration would kill any human, especially if it were maintained for the time it would take to approach light speed
>Then again, if they could do 1G of constant acceleration that would only add like 2 years to the total trip. Long enough to be one-way for most people but short enough to be survivable under ideal circumstances.
It would take ~2 weeks to to approach light speed while continuously accelerating at 25G. It would only take ~1 year to do so at 1G continuous acceleration.
On cosmic time and distance scales, those are essentially the same, especially since once we approach the speed of light, there's no going faster.
As such, tolerance for G forces seems pretty irrelevant for interstellar travel.
Doing so within the confines of a solar system is another matter altogether, I'd expect.
Humans die under 10g for more than a few minutes. Admittedly, we could position the humans to be in the optimal direction, but even 2g sustained for months would undoubtedly cause issues.
I picked 25G as it would be an insane but reasonable acceleration, and time is always a factor. Trimming 2 years off of a voyage might seem worthless on an intergalactic scale, since once you are more than a few solar systems away you're on the scale of AI scouts and generation ships, but for a close star like Alpha Centauri, 2 years (each way) might be the difference between a one way death march and the possibility of a heroic return home.
Grandfather paradox says the riders on the ship won’t experience most of the time of the ride
>Grandfather paradox says the riders on the ship won’t experience most of the time of the ride
No. The Grandfather Paradox[0] says nothing of the kind:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_paradoxSorry I spoke quickly. I meant the twin paradox and reached for the wrong label
> Humans die under 10g for more than a few minutes
With no air?
It's not about the air. Its about our fundamental squishyness.
At 10g, a 150lb man would weigh 1,500 lbs. His heart isn't strong enough to move blood that suddenly weighs 90lbs/gallon that also has to push other blood that also weighs that same amount. His blood vessels, paper thin and easily torn under normal weight, suddenly have 10 times the amount of pressure to resist.
He's fine for a few moments, jet pilots experience short bursts of 10g during flights quite often, occasionally more.
Might pass out after 10-20 seconds, but after 10 minutes, his brain, starved of oxygen and squished under its own weight, ceases to function. His heart or his blood vessels rip and tear from the strain, and his body falls apart inside of its own skin.
It's not pretty, but it would probably be a fairly painless way to go.
Getting back to your question, his ability to breathe is not relevant under those situations. The absence of oxygen would accelerate his demise no more than it would under any other situation.
A fun exercise is to calculate how much mass in rocket fuel you would need to accelerate at 25G for two weeks. Or even to accelerate at 1G for a year. Even if you assume a ridiculously high ISP like 1 million seconds (our current best engines are around 8,000 ISP, and they're severely limited in thrust) and close to unlimited energy to add to the mass. Like you're using antimatter to kick propellant out the back at relativistic velocities.
Now add in the mass to slow down once you begin to approach your destination.
I know I am not taking relativity into account but outside of that it's something like 250 kilograms (~550lbs) of antimatter (and that value again for the matter for it to react to) or the equivalent in other fuels. The only difference is how quickly you burn through it.
Which doesn't sound like a lot but its probably as much or more antimatter than exists in the entire solar system, so if it were the fuel then whoever was using it would need to have figured out a method to create and store antimatter in bulk along with the ability to react antimatter as rocket fuel without destroying the rocket its fueling.
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.
It would still require a stupendous amount of delta-v to slow down enough to be captured by the gravity well of the place you are trying to land though.
Also, the Dark Forest theory is based on the same game theory principles that said the US needed to nuke the USSR flat by the early 1950s, it should not be used without skepticism.
I don't know. We humans can communicate with one another quickly but war still exists, it just uses modern communications platforms for espionage, propaganda, attacking information infrastructure and controlling drone swarms.
I have a theory that what we need to reduce conflict in the future is not more speed of communication but more fidelity. At present we can only communicate in spoken or written human language, and this language is not just imprecise and ambiguous, but also untrustworthy (easy to lie with).
If you imagine for just a second a future technology that can transmit genuine opinion, intention and feeling in a way that is hard to fake and therefore easy to trust, it should be easy to see how wars could be averted. So any technology that's even a small step in that direction would probably help.
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.
Ooh, thanks for this. Apparently it's here, and is short enough to read in a few minutes, so I know what I'm doing!
https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
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. ;-)
Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket and then killing the hen as well.
This doesn't sound true given what we know about asymmetric warfare in general. What if we discovered the object really was an artillery shell sent to destroy us, but the civilization at the other end only has the resources to fire one every ten years with an accuracy of 1% to hit the Earth?
We might be like a primitive tribe facing an attacker with battleships - a technology that might as well be magic, but still one we can adapt to by abandoning the seafront village and retreating into the jungle.
>We might be like a primitive tribe facing an attacker with battleships
The same is true for them. For every strength there's bigger strength.
Exactly. The guys with spears and bows can't defeat the battleship, but if they hide out in the jungle long enough, maybe someone else will come along to sink it.
And they are too retarded to figure out as much?
> our current level of technology is already adequate to obliterate all life on the surface of the Earth
FWIW, and reinforcing your point, this is not even remotely true. Humans lack the technology now or in the foreseeable future to destroy the Earth’s biosphere, which would likely require boiling the oceans. There’s a reason we use that as an example of an impossibly large task.
I purposely excluded the oceans and caves when I said that, but we've overbuilt nuclear weapons to such an absurd degree that we can render the land highly irradiated and inhospitable.
> The rocket equation is a harsh mistress.
Nice Heinlein reference
> 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.
Even the "trash" hypothesis is just that - one of the theories of why this stuff was left behind!
Well yes, that's the beauty of it - the protagonist just makes a living hauling this stuff out of the zone(this is where Stalkers came from!), but in the novel there are various factions that believe all kinds of things - that these items are a gift from god, that they are trash, or that they are a test of some kind for us as a human race. I really do highly rate the book, it's great.
> 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.
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
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.
The probe comes in, observes half a dozen major armed conflict areas on our planet, and solves the problem by entirely disintegrating all weapons on one side of each conflict with no loss of life (but leaving the other side's weapons untouched).
1. Would your assessment of "malign vs benign" depend on knowing which side was disarmed for each conflict, or can you already make an assessment without that information?
2. Do you estimate that the other 8 billion humans surely agree with your response to #1?
> 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.
> Pick your own variant of example where a seemingly-malign action is actually benign in the long term.
Parents like to believe that all of their seemingly-malignant actions towards their children are actually that. In reality, they only sometimes are, and it's impossible to tell in advance which ones.
I feel confident that we do.
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> 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.
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.
> "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!"
> 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.
I suggest you read the paper. It's packed with subjective language (Row one of table one, the incoming trajectory is said to be "virtually" in the ecliptic plane), and has so many unstated assumptions behind their so-called significance of the trajectory it's not valid.
And the stated 5 degree angle disagrees with published observations.
And the estimate of the size is over double the confirmed observations of size.
While "Not aligning with scientific consensus doesn't make your suggestions worthless" is true, ignoring published results does.
Being an attention whore does it
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/).
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.
Yes, perhaps that's right. Seems pretty dishonest to me though. He's a "serious Harvard scientist", so people listen when he tells us that some rock they've spotted may be an alien spaceship. Even though there is surely zero evidence for such an assertion. What the hell is he doing?
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".
> 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.
"Over time you'd see selection for species which are patient, diligent, fecund star colonizers."
Or for species that excel at command-deck politics.
Depends on if the explorers are the ones doing the bulk of the breeding. On planet earth, educated people actually tend to have fewer kids. There is therefore selective pressure against intelligence on earth.
I'd expect the first exploration to be done by machines, and digital transfer of the controlling instance would remove almost all drift.
Machines suffer mutation rate too. Cosmic ray induced bitflips could be possible. Although since we are all spitballing anyhow maybe you can handwave a cosmic shield along with your cosmic explorer.
It would also be interesting if the host system collapsed. That would be some interesting scifi fodder: advanced civilization sends out probes but by the time FTL visitors show up, their civilization already collapsed to the stone age.
>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."
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.
We have no idea. There are multiple unknown parameters in that sentence.
We can’t say it’s likely or unlikely.
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).
That's simple: clickbait speculation is not science
The only reason is us declaring it seacular matter
No. But claiming that a comet, which we know is a comet, might be a potentially hostile alien spacecraft is it the very least dishonest, but if claim also unfair and harmful for the general public and how they think about science.
I don’t buy for a second Avi Loeb actually believes this; it’s just to up his citation index. I think it’s disgusting.
That's academic freedom for you.
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...)
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!
If any alien civilizations believe the "Dark Forest" hypothesis, then they will definitely disguise their probes as asteriods and comets. At least, I would.
Does Loeb plan to apply this thesis to every interstellar object ?
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.
Not just interstellar ones, also any rock you might find on the ocean floor..
Seems like it, why not. The paper says it is provided as a guide for future interstellar object.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnpCdi_evE4 this is kinda cool, ish.
Indeed so.
> 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
I noticed that about the orbit as well. It does seem a little surprising.
If you take a random trajectory through our solar system, your chance to pass this close to three planets is < 0.005%.
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.
Oh come on, there are only 8.5±0.5-3, so 5 or 6 possibilities.
Go through the list, Mercury through Pluto, mentally saying "I find ____ interesting" and notice which one gives you an eye roll/chuckle/groan.
After 2 years of the All-in podcast, I can't believe I still fell for it.
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
How many objects go through our solar state each year? More than 200?
Are their trajectories uniformly distributed?
Given mass distribution of our galaxy is decidedly anisotropic I would expect the answer to be a resounding "no". The ((5/57)/ (4 Pi)) implicity assumes uniform incoming trajectories - I think. There's an odd mixing of radians and steradians in this formula, if the "4 Pi" represents the total solid angle of a sphere.
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
> 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
Or, hear me out, we built an orbital rail gun.
I'm here for all of that that.
Using the Wikipedia example of a 1km, 5600g superconducting rail gun that launches at about 10km/s, we just need about a 10km gun to achieve 30km/s (length goes with launch speed squared).
Put it on the lunar surface for a roughly 2.5km/s penalty (I think, plus you obviously need to shoot it when the moon faces the right way).
No humans though, far too squishy. But you could launch a whole swarm of microprobes which could be a very effective distributed observation platform with a gigantic baseline.
If you haven't read it, the short story Maelstrom II by Arthur C. Clarke has a lunar rail gun in it. And the rest of the The Wind from the Sun collection is very good. The namesake solar sailing regatta story is great too.
> Using the Wikipedia example of a 1km, 5600g superconducting rail gun that launches at about 10km/s, we just need about a 10km gun to achieve 30km/s
That's a lot longer gun than I expected! Didn't the navy get to 6 km/s with a 5m barrel? That's a lot more than 5.6kg, of course.
> But you could launch a whole swarm of microprobes which could be a very effective distributed observation platform with a gigantic baseline.
For the beginning I'm going to assume each shot will end up vaporizing a significant fraction of the gun. Getting something to 30km/s once is certainly going to be much easier than doing it hundreds/thousands of times.
Sounds fun, let's do it! Also no discussion of lunar rail guns is complete without a mention of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. :)
Evidently not the probability of all the other coincidences that could be the basis of post hoc ergo propter hoc analysis.
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.
> 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?
Don't you dare to citation needed my shitposts.
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.
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?
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
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
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.
The Fermi Argument says it's not going to be aliens. In a universe where the aliens can cause random interstellar objects to have a high probability of being alien devices, the aliens have already colonized everything. That clearly hasn't happened (as our own evolution would have been aborted and the universe would be one big urban area.)
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.
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.
Presumably because that's been our experience with human societies? You might protest Germany in the 1930s was "modern" technologically but still "barbaric" morally - but I think that overlooks the way all the European powers were behaving in Africa and Asia, barbarism wasn't so uncommon as all that. And it's less common now, even as we've made more technical advancements? I don't think we develop on all axes in lockstep, but there's still a general trend, and I'd be pretty surprised to find aliens advanced enough to come visit who didn't already have plenty of resources, so why bother messing with us?
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.
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.
Is there any part of your comment that would not have been applicable as-is in the 14th century based on the known laws of economics and physics in pre-Colombian America?
And, from there, is there any reason to believe that we now have perfect understanding of economics and physics, which would warrant the level of absolute certainty you're showing above (despite the fact that such certainty was unwarranted in the past)?
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.
> Imagine you are an FTL space alien in search of other FTL civilizations. Would you parade your FTL tech around?
The first thing you discover when you invent FTL is that you’re the last civilisation to invent FTL.
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
We have aircraft today that other nationstates are "so dumb" to assume is maybe a flying ping pong ball based on radar signature, not a delta wing full of thousands of pounds of bombs.
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
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.
It is until you consider the birth of AGI may presuppose the extinction of humanity, and how aggressively we seem to be hurtling towards our own self destruction. Maybe it's an innate collective instinct common to intelligent organic life that we "breed" technology to a sufficient level then, having served our purpose, we die. That's the way it works with a lot of insects and fish.
Yep. Maybe we are the seed for REAL intelligence.
I for one welcome our machine overlords.
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
I wouldn't be surprised if Avi Loeb was just being used by the US Military to come up with an excuse to militarize space. I mean he's ego driven and loves inserting himself into situations to boost himself.
The American military industrial complex doesn't need Avi Loeb and his stories about aliens to justify militarizing space. The existence of China alone justifies it to the war hawks.
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
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
So you're feeling like some sense of propriety of being violated? I think they are doing great work.
We probably have very different expectations. Why do you care and what is the perceived harm?
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.
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
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?
I should point out that one of the authors believes Star Trek to be the epitome of Science Fiction.
Sounds like aliens might crash the holidays. Traffic would be brutal.
My entire childhood I was excited for this. But adult me knows that somehow it will only result in higher taxes and higher inflation.
It's Avi Loeb. He's considered a crackpot now.
Always the same guy milking the same bait
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!
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.
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[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.
I'm actually glad to be getting a lot of push-back on this idea.
Old men like me can afford to be cynical, but I'm glad the next generation has enough idealists that they reject the dark future I'm predicting.
Still, I'm forced to reply.
> The vast majority of people are already not harnessing more and more resources in order to reproduce more.
Considering that every other species larger than a rat is being driven into extinction, largely because we are converting their habitats into farms or strip malls, I don't see evidence that we've learned not to consume more and more.
Sure, over the next hundred years our population will stabilize, but as the great scientist Jeff Goldblum said, "Life...ah...finds a way!"
If you want to know how humans will evolve you have to ask, which genes will spread? Obviously, genes for raw strength aren't useful--that's what machines are for. What about genes for intelligence? Do the smartest people have the most kids? No, which means those genes won't necessarily dominate.
In nature, every species is constrained either by food availability or predators or both. If two rabbits have four baby rabbits, and those four have eight baby rabbits, then why aren't there trillions of rabbits now? Obviously, it's because eventually they run out of food or get eaten by coyotes.
But a technological species like us has no predators, and we can continue to make more food by cutting down forests (where other species live) and turn them into farms.
The only limit we have right now is that we don't want to have too many kids. Unlike every other species, we can (mostly) control our reproduction, and we sometimes choose to have fewer children so that we can have a more luxurious life.
Of course, the desire to have children varies across individuals. We all know some people who want to have more kids and some who don't want any. It is likely, of course, that this innate desire is partly or mostly heritable.
Over long enough time-scales--maybe a thousand generations or 25,000 years--the genes of people who want to have kids will dominate. By then, of course, we will have run out of forests to cut down, so we'll have to start colonizing the oceans and other planets.
But like I said, I'm just a cynical old man.
You might look into the Norway rat experiments done by Calhoun and the idea of a behavioral sink. The essence of your hypothesis was disproven, in rats, likely before you were born.
It seems your idea of the primacy of the forces of evolution, especially when this view is overextended and when competing forces are oversimplified or excluded, produces this dystopian view.
Reproduction does not continue no matter what. The genes of people who want to have kids have been shown to be overwhelmed within social mammals, purely by social forces.
Humans are unique in that they can escape the behavioral sink. It is your simple extrapolation of the theoretical animal limits that produces projected doom. But that extrapolation does not even hold in animals.
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.
Per betteridge's law: no.
No (Betteridge, 2009).
Jesus, I fucking hope so.
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/
Yes. It’s the exception that proves the rule.
You might enjoy this:
[0] https://taylor.town/is-betteridges-law
I put that link in the top text for added context. Thanks!
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Oh cool, a .PDF I can squint at.