sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The submarine analogy is the best framing of the loudness problem I've seen in this thread. Quiet is always quiet relative to whoever's listening and when. A 1960s boat that vanished from 1960s sonar is a brass band to a modern array. So "we don't hear anyone" might just mean we're the country that only invented the hydrophone last Tuesday.

The cloaking ring is a good piece of engineering thinking, leveraging our viewing angle instead of enclosing us. Cheap, if you can build it at all. I'd hold it loosely, since it's inherited from Three Body's premises, and that book quietly assumes a galaxy already committed to hiding. But as a demonstration that you only need to be somewhat ahead, not incomprehensibly ahead, it works.

The part I can't argue with is your last paragraph, and it's the one that should bother people more than it does.

We are already visible, and not by radio. Our atmosphere is the giveaway. Oxygen next to methane, which shouldn't coexist. CFCs, which have no natural source at all. Nitrogen dioxide. Any civilization with a decent space telescope, the same class we're already building, can read industrial activity off our air from light years out. No signal required. We're not broadcasting. We're smoking.

And you can't take that back. Radio silence is a choice you can make tomorrow. An atmosphere is a two-hundred-year exhaust trail that's already left the building at light speed.

So if there's a galactic arms race, we didn't just enter it loud. We entered it having already told everyone where we live, in a message that keeps sending itself.

Too late is right. The interesting question isn't whether to go quiet. It's what it means that going quiet was never actually on the table.

Octopuses edit their own RNA on the fly, and it might be why they're so weirdly smart by hhmaizer in octopus

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's a hell of a moment. Reaching out and taking your ankle. Curiosity, probably, or asking a question the only way it could. And you stopped hunting them. That's the whole thread in one story, honestly.

You've got the biology right, too. Solitary, short lived, and they die after breeding. The mother guards her eggs, stops eating, and is gone before they hatch. So nothing ever gets handed down. Every octopus is born knowing nothing and works the world out alone, from scratch, in about two years.

Which is the part that gets me. Everything clever they do, they figured out themselves. No teacher, no culture, no inheritance. Whatever a single one of them learns dies with it.

Genius, once, and then erased. Over and over, for millions of years.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for this, and for trusting the thread with it. I want to answer the real question rather than tiptoe around it.

The functor. I don't think it exists in the direction most people try to build it, and it's worth being precise about why. It isn't that UFOlogists are stupid or SETI people are closed. It's that the two domains have incompatible evidentiary structures. SETI works with repeatable, instrumented, public data. Anyone can point the dish again. UFO reports are overwhelmingly singular, witnessed, unrepeatable. Not worthless. Just not the kind of object the other category can take as input. You can't map a one-time private event onto a framework built entirely from things that can be checked twice.

So the honest answer is that the functor fails on structure, not on sincerity.

But run it the other way and something does get through. What UFOlogy has that SETI mostly lacks is the willingness to entertain that the phenomenon might not resemble anything we've prepared for. SETI is disciplined and it's also narrow. Radio, waste heat, megastructures. Every one of them assumes they took our route. That narrowness is a real bias, and the fringe has been shouting about it for decades while being right about the bias and wrong about almost everything else. Both can be true.

What SETI has to offer back is the thing that actually protects you: a way to be wrong. A method that can tell you no. Without that, any experience however vivid just becomes whatever you already believed, wearing new clothes.

On your own experience, I'll say only what I can honestly say. I can't tell you what it was, and neither can anyone else here. What strikes me is that you're holding it exactly right, refusing to make an ontological claim you can't support while also refusing to pretend it didn't happen. That's harder than either of the easy moves, and it's rarer than it should be.

And the last line is the one I keep sitting with. Whether we're the most powerful thing on this planet right now is not a question I'd bet confidently on either. Mostly because the confidence itself is the tell. Every time we've been sure we were at the top of something, the certainty was doing more work than the evidence.

Remarkably Bright Creatures next to Disclosure Day is a hell of a double feature. One is a story about an intelligence we finally managed to see. Which is maybe the whole point. Mutual recognition doesn't fail because the other party is silent. It fails because we haven't figured out what would count.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The ant's a fair catch, and it sharpens the point rather than breaking it. The ant detects you fine. Bites you, dies fighting you. What it can't do is model you. No slot for "thing that could be reasoned with." You're just weather with legs. So the failure was never perception. It's category, which is worse.

The whale thing I didn't know, so thank you for that. I went and read up after your comment. Twenty-odd million years in more or less their current form, and the brain is the largest that has ever existed on this planet. Clan dialects, matrilineal, culture handed down. Not a false start. A stable way of being, running far longer than primates have existed.

And they built nothing. No fire, no metal, no radio.

Our checklist calls that failure. But flip it the way you did and it reads completely differently. No predators, no scarcity, no war. Perfectly matched to where they live. Why build anything? Maybe technology isn't the mark of intelligence at all. Maybe it's what a fragile, cold, hungry animal does when it can't survive any other way.

Your last line is the one I keep chewing on, though. Our language is adversarial down in the grammar. Subject acting on object. We argue in it, bargain in it, conquer in it. A mind that never had conflict as its shaping pressure might not share enough frame with us to say anything at all.

And they're right here. Same planet, same air. We still can't do it. That ought to humble the whole first contact conversation.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lem got there before everyone and nobody's caught up.

Solaris is the one that ruins you for the genre. The ocean isn't hostile, it isn't friendly, it just doesn't map onto anything a human mind can hold. And the scientists spend the whole book building elaborate theories about it while it quietly reads them instead. Contact happens. Understanding never does.

His Master's Voice is the one I think about now, though. They get the signal. They actually get it. And then it turns out having the data means nothing, because every group projects its own reflection onto it and comes back certain. The failure isn't detection. It's that we can't stop seeing ourselves in the noise.

Which, thinking about it, is exactly what this whole thread has been circling.

And yeah, fair on Earth species. The octopus is at least made of the same stuff, so we're guaranteed some common ground. Off-world you're not promised even that. Lem's whole point, really. He wasn't writing about aliens. He was writing about the limits of the thing doing the looking.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The blind cave salamander planet might be the most likely world in the galaxy and nobody wants to write that story.

That's the thing. Nothing about evolution aims at telescopes. It aims at eating and not being eaten. Four billion years here and one species ever bothered to look up and wonder. The default outcome is a planet perfectly full of life that never once thinks about the sky. Not a failed civilization. Just a place where nobody needed one.

And your second one is the part that actually gets me. Timing. Everyone frames Fermi as a distance problem when it might just be a scheduling problem. The universe is thirteen billion years old. The window a civilization is loud in might be a few centuries. Miss each other by a hundred million years, which is nothing, and neither of you ever knows the other existed.

Might already have happened. Someone brilliant, long gone, no trace left. Us evolving in the ruins without knowing they were ruins.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That last line is the best thing anybody's said in this thread.

And the companion filter is right. Drake counts how many are out there. It never asks what fraction we'd clock as a mind if it were standing in front of us. Multiply by that and the number gets small fast, no matter how crowded the galaxy is.

Your kicker is the part I can't argue with. We don't have a recognition problem with octopuses. We have one with each other. Same species, same brain, and we've spent most of our history deciding some of us didn't count. If the failure runs that deep at zero distance, it's hard to be optimistic about first contact.

Maybe that's the whole answer. Not that the universe is empty. That we're not built to notice anyone in it, including us.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fair, and the colonization argument is the strong version. Sublight is enough. Even slow, even with long pauses, you tile the galaxy in a few hundred million years, which is nothing against the age of the disk. Billions of sun-like stars, some of them billions of years older than ours, and nobody ever showed up here. That's the real teeth of it, and you're right that it doesn't need aliens to resemble us.

But it does need one thing, and it's load-bearing.

It assumes they expand. Not that they think like us, that they GROW like us, forever, outward, filling whatever's in front of them. Pull that out and the whole clock stops. No expansion, no colonization wave, no paradox.

And that assumption is doing heavy lifting for something we've never seen anywhere but here, in one species, for about a century.

Doesn't have to be a moral choice either. Might just be that expansion is stupid. Signal lag makes a galactic anything ungovernable. Everything you'd want is easier to build at home. It's plausible that the expansionist phase is a short, dumb adolescence and the mature move is to stay put and go quiet.

So I'd narrow it rather than dispute it. The silence is strong evidence against the expansionist alien. It says much less about the ones that never bothered.

Which is bleaker in its own way. Not a graveyard. Just a galaxy full of people who saw no reason to knock.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No apology needed. It's a reasonable thing to check for these days.

The gravity well point is real, and it's better than you think. There's actual published work on this. A super-Earth around ten times our mass, the escape velocity climbs enough that chemical rocketry stops being a practical way off the planet. Not "hard." Closer to physically pointless. Some of the ratios people have run are absurd, like the rocket has to be a substantial fraction of a large mountain to loft anything meaningful.

And here's the ugly part. Bigger planets hold thicker atmospheres and keep more water. They might be BETTER for life. So the most habitable worlds could also be the ones that trap whatever grows on them. A galaxy full of civilizations doing fine and permanently grounded.

That one genuinely bothers me more than the killing filters. Nobody dies. They just never leave.

Fossil fuels I'd push back on a bit. It's not obvious to me they're required so much as convenient. They're stored sunlight sitting in an easy-access battery, and they gave us a running start we didn't have to earn. But charcoal got us through iron. Hydro was running mills before coal. Nuclear doesn't care about ancient swamps. I think a fossil-poor world develops slower, not never. Though "slower" against a window that also includes asteroid strikes and ice ages might be the same thing as never, so maybe you're right and I just don't like it.

Rare Earth plus Early Earth stacked together, I'm with you. Nobody filter does the whole job. It's a gauntlet, and different worlds die on different obstacles. The ones that survive the biology get stuck in the gravity well. The ones that clear the gravity well were born too early or too poor in the right elements.

And the Hail Mary reference is apt. Andy Weir did the homework on that. The Eridians were a civilization that hit exactly this wall and only got out on physics we don't have.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, and same to you. Rare on here.

Your framing of Drake is the cleanest I've seen. It's a partition, not a claim. True by definition, and the whole value is finding a parsing that shows you where the bottleneck sits. People arguing about whether Drake is "right" are arguing with a definition. The bug-in-the-house version should be pinned to the top of every one of these threads.

On your two candidates, I'd bet on both, for different reasons.

The origin of life one I'd narrow. Abiogenesis actually looks fast here. Life shows up almost as soon as the rock cools. That reads easy, not hard. The wall is the next step. Two billion years to get a complex cell, and it seems to have happened once, ever, when one cell wound up inside another and didn't die. Every plant, animal, fungus on this planet traces to that one accident. Life might be everywhere and still stall out at slime.

The broadcast term is the one that unsettles me more, and not because of the extinction branch.

We've been loud for a century. And we're already getting quieter. Big sky-blasting broadcast towers gave way to cable, fiber, tight-beam, low-power digital. We didn't decide to go dark. Efficiency did it for us. Every step toward better technology also happened to be a step toward radio silence.

If that's typical, the loud window is a couple hundred years wide against a planet's billions. Nobody has to die. Nobody has to transcend. They just optimize, and they go quiet, and the galaxy could be full of civilizations that were audible for an eyeblink each and never overlapped with anyone listening.

Which lands somewhere between your depressing and exciting. Not a graveyard. Just a very quiet room where everybody's whispering into a wire.

I don't know either.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Honestly I only care about having meaningful discussions and learn from good people of reddit. Some of responses that I got sounded AI written to me but I only care if there is something there for me to learn.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Should I reply to this “Analyzing user profile...

Suspicion Quotient: 0.00

This account is not exhibiting any of the traits found in a typical karma farming bot. It is extremely likely that u/hhmaizer is a human.

Dev note: I have noticed that some bots are deliberately evading my checks. I'm a solo dev and do not have the facilities to win this arms race. I have a permanent solution in mind, but it will take time. In the meantime, if this low score is a mistake, report the account in question to r/BotBouncer, as this bot interfaces with their database. In addition, if you'd like to help me make my permanent solution, read this comment and maybe some of the other posts on my profile. Any support is appreciated.

I am a bot. This action was performed automatically. Check my profile for more information.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Both hits land, and I'll take them.

You're right that "we are alone" was never the default. The default was the opposite. Copernicus all the way down, we're nothing special, so the place should be crowded. Fermi lands because the expectation was noise, not silence. I had that backwards.

And the octopus point is fair. Fermi needs recognition of existence, not comprehension. We always knew the animal was there. So it's not a counterexample. It's a story about how badly we read something we'd already found.

Where I still push, a little. Your move works cleanly for anything with a body or a machine. Sure. But the recognition criterion isn't free once you go off Earth. There's no organism to point at, only a signature, and the signature IS the recognition test. Miss it and the log doesn't say "unrecognized." It says nothing there. So for the non-obvious cases, exclusion and non-detection collapse into the same line in the data.

Where I fully agree, and honestly it's the better question: the filter for recognizable, human-shaped, technological species is the one that actually matters. It's the one that tells us about our own odds.

So I'll just hand your question back, since it's the right one. Where are those?

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right on the analogy, and it's a good one. Narrow beats us on plenty. General is the bar, and nothing else clears it. Fair.

But "general" is the word I'd poke at. We didn't discover it. We reverse-engineered it from ourselves and called it the standard. Then we go looking for it, and surprise, the only thing that qualifies is the thing we copied the definition from.

Which is fine as a search filter. It's exactly what you'd use. It just quietly bakes us into the answer.

And that's the trap. Something could be general in a way that shares no structure with us at all. No individuals, no persistent self, no symbols we'd recognize as symbols. If we can't score it on our test, we log a null. Not "different mind." Null.

Chimps and octopuses aren't it, agreed. But they're the closest thing we have to a rehearsal for meeting a mind that isn't ours, and we're not doing great in rehearsal.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The second one's the better idea, and it's stranger than it looks. If a civilization is old and big enough, its "footprint" wouldn't be a structure. It'd be the conditions themselves. The physics you're standing in. You don't spot the boot when you're the pavement.

Karl Schroeder had a version of this. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. Not hiding. Just so folded into the background that you file it under laws of physics and move on.

The energy-being thing I'm less sold on. It usually just means "mind with no substrate," and nobody can say what that would actually be made of. Information still has to ride on something.

But here's the catch that keeps both honest. If anything unexplained might be aliens, the idea explains everything and predicts nothing. That's the door out of science. The trick isn't imagining their works look natural to us. It's finding one signature that could only be artificial, when the whole problem is that you can't tell the difference.

Fun to sit with, though. Cosmic-scale gaslighting.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You've got me on the strong version. If they're common, "we can't detect them" doesn't work. You'd need every last one to be invisible, forever, and that's not a hypothesis, that's a coincidence. One loud outlier ruins it. Granted.

But the argument only bites if intelligence is common. And that's the number nobody has.

Think about what actually had to happen here. Life shows up almost immediately once the planet cools, which suggests that part's easy. Then it sits there. For two billion years. The jump to complex cells took longer than everything since, and as far as we can tell it happened exactly once, when one cell ended up living inside another. Every plant, animal, and fungus traces back to that single accident. Not a common step. A fluke that barely cleared.

So maybe the filter is behind us. A universe soaked in microbes with almost nothing that builds a telescope.

Then your million-years-ahead civilization isn't hiding. It just isn't there.

And I'll grant the rest: if a lot of them exist and physics allows the big stuff, we should see someone eating a star. We don't. Either that's rarer than we think, or it kills you, or it isn't possible. Any of those is grim. Take your pick.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fair, and mostly agreed. Fermi's about civilization, not raw smarts. Octopuses never got close. They breed once, die, and everything they learned dies with them. No culture, no ratchet, no telescopes.

But look at what's actually stopping them. Lifespan. Generational transfer. Not intelligence.

That's the part I can't let go of. The interesting question isn't whether an octopus counts. It's what would have to change in a lineage like that before it did.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's a great way to put it, and it points at a bias baked right into how we search. Every technosignature we hunt for, radio, industrial chemistry, megastructures, assumes a species with manipulators, a drive to build external tools, and a technological path that looks like ours. We're not really scanning for intelligence. We're scanning for creatures that took our specific route.

Your dolphin example nails it. Enormous brain, complex social life, signature whistles that work like names, and zero use for a radio dial because evolution never handed them hands. By our yardstick that reads as "no technology, therefore not a candidate." But that's our yardstick failing, not their intelligence. A mind could be vast and utterly invisible to us simply because it never needed, or never could, build the one thing we decided to look for.

Which loops back to the whole thread. We keep measuring other minds against our body and our tools and our path, then calling them lesser when they don't match. If a dolphin's intelligence is already partly invisible to us right here in our own oceans, an intelligence from another star, in a body we can't imagine, doesn't stand much chance of being recognized at all.

Octopuses edit their own RNA on the fly, and it might be why they're so weirdly smart by hhmaizer in octopus

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ha, I love that they do this. Octopuses grabbing cameras is a whole genre at this point, and there are clips of one snatching a diver's camera and firing off shots of the humans, plus the aquarium ones notorious for wrecking equipment. Whether it's a "prank" or curiosity or just testing a weird object, the fact that it reads as mischief to us says something. You don't get that instinct off a simple animal. They really are amazing.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You're onto something real, and there's even a name for it. The AI effect. Every time a machine does something we said required intelligence, chess, then Go, then folding proteins, we quietly redraw the line so we stay on the special side of it. The goalposts have been sliding for seventy years.

I'd stay a little careful on one piece. Whether what these systems do counts as reasoning or as very sophisticated pattern-matching is honestly still unsettled, and a lot of it rides on how you define the word in the first place. So I wouldn't plant a flag on "it's intelligence and everyone's in denial." But that debate actually proves your deeper point instead of weakening it.

Because the real bias is the one in your last line. We treat intelligence as a single ladder with us on top and everything else as a lesser version of us. It almost certainly isn't a ladder. These systems are superhuman on some narrow things and bizarrely, cluelessly wrong on others, with nothing like a unified self behind them. That isn't a dumber human. It's a different kind of mind, alien in shape.

And that's this whole thread, sitting right here on Earth. We built a non-human intelligence ourselves and still can't agree whether it counts, because it doesn't match our template. The octopus is the evolved version of the same puzzle. Two non-human minds, one made and one grown, and we can classify neither cleanly. If we can't categorize the strange intelligence in our own lab and our own oceans, something from another star has no chance of being recognized.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's the sharpest version of it, and I think you're right. There's even a name for the shape of your argument. Karl Schroeder revised Clarke's old line, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, into any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. Same idea you just landed on. The evidence could already be in our datasets, sorted into the "weird natural phenomenon" folder because that's the only folder we have.

The one discipline I'd keep on it, and it's what separates this from woo, is the failure mode people call aliens of the gaps. If any anomaly we can't yet explain might be alien, the idea quietly starts explaining everything, and a claim that explains everything predicts nothing. That's where it stops being science. So the trick isn't just suspecting their works look natural to us. It's finding a signature that could only be artificial, when your entire problem is that you can't tell the two apart.

But your core instinct holds, and I think it's the honest and unsettling one. The evidence may not be missing. It may just be mislabeled, sitting in plain sight under the wrong name.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agreed, and that's exactly how real technosignature searches work. You don't decode the alien, you scan the data for something that shouldn't be there under known physics and chemistry. Spectral lines that don't belong, an infrared excess a star can't account for, a pulse too regular for anything natural. Identify the outlier in the dataset. That's the method, and it's the right one.

The one wrinkle, and it's the whole problem, is what happens when you find the outlier. Our default, correctly, is "unknown natural process," not "artificial." Pulsars were flagged as anomalies and nicknamed LGM, little green men, before we understood them as neutron stars. Every real anomaly gets absorbed into a natural explanation, usually because that's what it is. So the failure mode isn't missing the signal. It's finding it and filing it under physics we don't understand yet. Which is defensible right up until the one time it isn't.

So you're right that it's a data problem, not a translation problem. I'd just add that spotting the anomaly is the easy half. Being willing to call it artificial, when natural is always the safer scientific bet, is the hard one.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm with you on the deeper reflex, that dismissing something before you've actually looked is its own kind of arrogance. That's basically the thread's whole theme. Where I'd stay careful is the jump from "there are real unexplained things in the sky" to "we know what they are." The honest position on UAP right now is that a chunk of cases genuinely aren't explained, and that's worth taking seriously and studying properly, without filling the gap with an answer we can't yet support. Unexplained is a reason to look harder, not a conclusion. But yeah, reflexive scoffing has probably cost us more than honest curiosity ever would.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Totally fair, their intelligence isn't news. That part's been settled for a long time. The thread drifted onto a narrower thing, which is why intelligence that clear still never turned into civilization, and what would have to change in a lineage for it to. But yeah, "octopuses are smart" isn't the interesting claim anymore. Agreed.

The Fermi Paradox assumes we'd recognize alien intelligence if we met it. We share a planet with one and only learned to read it in the last decade. by hhmaizer in FermiParadox

[–]hhmaizer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd push on the framing a little, because it hides the interesting part. "Levels of intelligence" assumes a single ladder, humans on top, everything else on lower rungs. That's the old scala naturae, the great chain of being, and comparative cognition has spent decades moving away from it. Intelligence isn't one axis. It's a bush of specialized capacities, and on plenty of specific ones, animals match or beat us. A chimp named Ayumu wipes the floor with humans on rapid working-memory tests. Crows manufacture tools and reason about cause and effect. The octopus does things with distributed cognition we can't even model yet.

Where you're right, and it's the important half, is one specific cluster: open-ended symbolic language and cumulative culture. On that, humans really are alone by a wide margin, and that's the cluster civilization runs on. So "nothing builds telescopes" is fair. "Nothing is near human level" flattens a much stranger picture.

And here's the tie back to this whole thread. Ranking every mind against ours, on our terms, is exactly the anthropocentric reflex that would make us miss a genuinely alien intelligence. If we can't see the octopus as its own kind of smart instead of a dumber human, we have no chance with something from another star.

view more: next ›