alt Hacker NewsI wonder about all the extraterrestrial AI swarms that have already imaged earth.
Surely it has happened. They must have all spotted our planet millions of years ago and must be watching us with a continuous high-resolution feed. They've seen our dinosaurs. Their interest will really be piqued when they finally see us invent electricity, though that might be some time in the future for them.
Perhaps even gravitational lensing is primitive to them. Perhaps they're able to break and manipulate physics and peer directly into our light cone, breaking the speed of light. Perhaps through direct wormholes they're already here - computronium in the very oxygen atoms that surround us. In rock silicates, in the air you breathe, in your hemes, in your brain. Calculating.
But perhaps we're the only intelligent species in the entire universe. That is also a possibility. Some big names in astrophysics, such as David Kipping, suggest strongly that we should not rule out that hypothesis. I find his suggestions haunting and beautiful at the same time. You need to watch his videos, and this is a good start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqEmYU8Y_rI
And finally, it may be that we're all just a historical simulation. Or maybe that's ascribing too much importance to ourselves. Maybe we're just a slop simulation on some AI's plaything, existing for no reason at all. Background NPCs with self-importance, ephemeral existences. But procedural generation at scale isn't really all too different from the laws of the physical universe itself.
The scale of the universe fills me with awe. Every time I think about it, my worries about random algo-rage and clickbait fades away to nothing. It deeply contextualizes our short time here.
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>But perhaps we're the only intelligent species in the entire universe. That is also a possibility. Some big names in astrophysics, such as David Kipping, suggest strongly that we should not rule out that hypothesis
They may be planted by alien AI to lull us into false sense of security.
As Lynn Margulis reminded us we are not the main show. Our individual intelligence is highly over rated. The brain itself is kludge upon kludge accumulating over thousands of years, to solve problems that keep changing with time and environmental changes. Its quite a piece of crap actually if you tabulate all the accumulated junk. We arent as interesting as we think we are. Some of the tech and knowledge generated might be interesting. But compare it with to photosynthesis or butterfly metamorphosis or the fact that microbes can double their population in a few hours, all of which is happening without needing any human intelligence. So they may very well be watching but are more curious about a rose or a redwood tree than all the random and superficial activity the chimp brain produces.
I doubt any new physics will be needed, just computational imaging, meta-optics, very long baselines (multi AU, or even light years).
If they let me watch the videos of our dinosaurs, I would happily let them use my hemes for their calculations.
This comment encapsulates how poorly we humans are at accepting unknowns. For me, that explains a lot of our belief systems. The fact we can’t just take the unknown but instead have to fill in the blanks with what ifs. and create a narrative like we know anything about the unknown thing. It helps us feel like we understand it more. That’s literally how religions and a lot of other things get created, it’s a pattern, then the logical person sees the patterns and say it’s a simulation. A quite predictable filling of another blank.