Where exactly is the closest alien civilization located?
“No results found”
look at galaxies
It’s free real estate
What would be the scariest possible answer to this?
I feel like finding out either “disturbingly close” or “far enough away that we’d never reach it before the heat death of the universe” would both be pretty terrifying answers. Or even if the answer somehow turned out to be “there aren’t any”
I feel like the scariest answer is very close by, within a hundred light-years or so. This would imply that alien civilizations are extremely common (because the average distance between civilizations depends on how rare they are, it’s hypothetically possible I suppose for intelligent life to be very rare and yet have two examples very close by, but it’s very unlikely). That would have implications for the Fermi paradox (for those unfamiliar, this is basically the question of “given the universe is so old and huge, why haven’t we seen any aliens out there”). Namely, it would basically rule out the rare earth hypothesis, or versions of the great filter that occur before the development of civilization, and the next leading candidate for the answer would be versions of the great filter scenario that occur after civilization has developed, and before it gets space-fairing to a significant degree (because we’d probably be able to see signs of intelligence in a sufficiently developed solar system). That would imply that basically no civilization ever survives much past our current level, despite probably billions of tries (since civilizations are so incredibly common in this scenario).
Very far away implies the reverse, either life is very rare to begin with, or it rarely reaches civilization, in which case we’re probably already past the great filter if there is one, and so have less to worry about. It is a bit frustrating in that we’d basically never know anything about aliens beyond the extremely vague notion of what corner of the universe they exist in, but nothing particularly scary in my opinion. It also means we have no reason to worry about if these or any other aliens are hostile or not, because hostilities over that distance are presumably impossible unless we’re wrong about ftl travel not being possible.
None at all implies one of two things that I can think of: if the universe is finite (the question didn’t just limit the answer to aliens within the observable universe and somehow we just magically get the answer, so if there is more universe beyond the cosmological event horizon, and the closest aliens exist there, we should still know), then it’s basically the same as far away aliens, it just means civilizations are so incredibly rare that most universes don’t contain one at any given time. If the universe is infinite, though, and none of that infinite universe contains aliens anywhere, then that means that the probability of intelligent life existing is zero (because given infinite tries, anything with a finite chance of occuring eventually occurs). The problem of course is that we exist, so in that scenario, it would pretty much imply that we are not naturally occurring, and are created by something else (presumably something that exists outside the universe). This could be a religious sort of scenario, like having some sort of creator god who only creates life once, or something like the simulation hypothesis (in which case I guess aliens would exist, but asking where would be useless because they’d be outside of our universe and spacetime).
“The call is coming from inside your house”
Honestly, I think the scariest answer would be the moon.
Think about it. It’s been this mythic symbol for different human civs over the eons. We’ve literally been there. To find out we had some shy neighbors just hanging out right there, somehow unobserved after all this time… brrr.
That’s what I was thinking too. I think at this point, we’re pretty darn sure there’s no alien civilization on the moon. For there to be one suggests very possibly it’s purposefully hiding from us. That’s the scariest idea, I think. If it’s just a little further away, we can assume that they aren’t trying to hide. But the moon is too close and too well studied for a civilization to be there without likely some advanced method of hiding.
“There are four to seven alien civilizations equidistant to Earth, depending on the phase of orbit between the various star systems.”
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It’s been done a lot of times, with wildly different results. The problem is that to get a final number like that, you have to make some absolutely wild guesses with almost no meaningful information to estimate, such as the probability of the first cell developing on a planet with absolutely ideal conditions for it to happen. We can’t even really say that we even have a single data point on this, because we don’t even know necessarily how ideal the conditions on earth were during that time, or how many times it happened but never replicated. That’s not even touching on the more lofty questions like, are cells even necessary for life? Depending on what numbers you pull out of thin air for these questions, you could come up with a million civilizations in the Milky Way, or almost none in the entire universe. That’s the really scary part: we don’t even know what we don’t know.
How good was Inspectah Decks album?
I can’t answer that one, but his stuff with Czarface is killer
who’s throwing his trash in my trash can?
Not sure why you were being downvoted. That’s more of a legit question than the one about BMW owners not using turn signals.
Have a protest upvote!
Bill McNeal has entered the chat.
Someone actually was once offered the opportunity to ask such a question. Here is the question that was asked:
- What is the content of the pair in which the first half is the best question I can ask, and the second half is the answer to that question?
Here is the answer received:
- The best question you can ask is the question you just asked, and the answer to that question is the one you are receiving now.
Considering the asker didn’t get any benefit out of the answer to that question, this is definetly not “the best question” he could ask. So your proposed answer to this question is wrong. The question itself though, is the best one I’ve heard so far.
You could easily modify that question to qualify “best” in a more useful way.
“most beneficial for my well being”
“most beneficial for humanity’s long term well being”
“maximally beneficial to human progress”
“maximally conducive to bring about the total destruction of reality by the Old Ones”
“best way to a smoothie”
Etc.
If you want to game the system, the best way to do it would be to ask something that has a ridiculously long answer so you can get the most information possible out of it. For example you could ask, “what are the full contents of the largest, most useful collection of knowledge humanity will ever have, condensed down small enough for us to process?” That’d probably get you a futuristic multi-petabyte hard drive that can still plug into your computer and has a version of Wikipedia from like 10,000 years in the future.
The monkey’s finger curls down as a lossy algorithm is applied.
Yeah. A lower limit was never set in the wording of the question, so the answer would likely be “Perpetuate your species as long as possible”
How is perpetuating the species useful? It serves no real purpose and doesn’t really help people much. True utility comes from the mitigation of suffering.
Yeah, but you can’t prosper if you don’t exist.
You can’t suffer or experience the deprivation of prosperity either.
what are the next winning lottery numbers?
Gotta be more specific or you’ll get monkey-pawed. The next winning lottery number is 42. At the bingo hall of the assisted living facility in Fargo, North Dakota.
If their gonna go monkeys paw on my ass, it’s gonna happen no matter how specific I get. you can’t outsmart wish-granters, they literally bend fate to their will.
also sorry for nitpicking, but a real monkeys paw would be something like:
“the way you find out the winning lotto numbers is by a lawyer knocking on your door and saying your son died horrifically and he left you this lotto ticket in his will.”
the numbers would get you your million dollar jackpot, your wish would be fully granted, you just won’t want it anymore because of the price you paid for it. winning $50 from some granny’s bingo Hall instead of the thing you actually wished for is hardly a consequence at all, more like a prank a genie would pull just to fuck with you. monkeys paws are more cruel than that.
Winner, winner, hot dog dinner
U will answer me and give me the correct answer, right?
What if he they say “No” :o
So I ask, when will controlled fusion be realized, and then go short the NASDAQ.
Can our current models of computing truly create AGI?
Considering that computers are Turing complete, yes they can, by definition. They can be used to compute anything that can be computed. The question you’re probably really asking is can we make a functional agi with current technology. In a practical sense, no, in a theoretical sense, yes. In practice we can’t because we don’t know how. That knowledge is a form of technology that we haven’t developed yet, though we may have all or most of the pieces available right now. We know that our computers should be able to do it, given enough memory and processing power, but hardware alone doesn’t make an intelligence. You need the software too, and we just don’t know how to make the leap from single purpose tools to general intelligence. Think of it like an airplane. We had all the pieces necessary to make one long before we ever did. We saw birds do it and tried to copy them. We had metal, wood, rope, rubber, cloth, everything you need physically to build a self propelled flying machine, for hundreds or thousands of years, but we didn’t have the underlying principles, a working theory for how to put them together just so. That’s where we are with agi. We have all the raw materials, and some of the complex pieces, but we’re missing things that prevent us from taking that final step into a true agi, however limited.
As far as I know there is still a big ongoing debate about if there is something fundmental to intelligence that is not just calculations.
There’s no reason to believe they can’t. We’re just not there yet.
As far as I know there is still a big ongoing debate about if there is something fundmental to intelligence that is not just calculations.
That’s mostly a philosophical debate. If we create something that is perfectly indistinguishable from actual intelligence, I would call it actual intelligence, but the philosophers might not.
Well that is still very much a scientific and relevant debate.
Some people will tell you that ChatGPT is intelligent but just because it can write like an intelligent person does not make it intelligent.
I am perfectly willing to be, but haven’t currently been, convinced that there is a real distinction between natural and artificial intelligence. Until I am convinced though, I’m going to assume there’s no inherent quality about our brain that makes it irreproducible by technology.
ChatGPT emulates intelligence pretty well, but you can still tell the difference between it and a human. So I would say again, we’re not at the point of AGI yet.
But let me ask you, what is the difference between a machine that is perfectly capable of writing intelligent responses to questions and a human writing intelligent responses to questions? (Assuming we’re only measuring intelligence, not things like having a digestive system.) Could you think of a way to tell the two apart, only being able to ask questions to them and receive their responses?
Does collatz conjecture always return to 4-2-1 loop with any arbitrary number?
What fundamentals do we believe in, but are unknowingly incorrect?
Will Lemmy have less politics in Active tab at any point?
I’d resolve one of those mathematical conjectures that have bounty on them. The proof would simply be that the answer to my question was quaranteed to be true due to the OP’s implication.
Wonderful idea, here’s a list of some of them for anyone that’s curious.
Don’t solve just one, ask “what are the solutions to the problems listed here?” and get all of them at once.
How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?
“What is love?”
No. I can predict the responses to this.
Zero points in tennis.
(Fine. I’ll do it)
Oh baby, don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. No more.
“Definition: ‘Love’ is making a shot to the knees of a target 120 kilometres away using an Aratech sniper rifle with a tri-light scope. […] [L]ove is knowing your target, putting them in your targeting reticle, and together, achieving a singular purpose against statistically long odds.”
“Explain the technology needed for interstellar and intergalactic travel.”
What’s gonna suck is that the answer is going to be a generation ship and it’s gonna have to survive a loooong time on the way to its destination.
I think that’s our current understanding but not some omnipotent being. The physics of “FTL” kind of check out with a literal star’s/Dyson sphere’s worth of energy.
I meant more of the idea that the answer was it’s impossible
That’s not a question
Yeah it is. You can put a question mark at the end if you want but the result is the same unless this is an asshole genie.
—> JFK
Who were the sea people and what really happened with the bronze age collapse?
Every time I am reminded of this, I have to do a deep dive into it again. Its so weird how we know basically nothing about it.
The bronze age collapse was likely caused by widespread draught from what I’ve read. The evidence points to the sea people being a conglomeration of neighboring groups who took to the sea raiding for survival.
That’s a theory I’ve heard too, but I want to know for sure. Or as sure as one can be with history.
That still doesn’t really explain, why so many civilizations collapsed over such a relatively wide geographical range.
It especially doesn’t explain, why so many of them just seem to have vanished almost over night.
Widespread draught and climate change aren’t localized events.
From memory one hypothesis was that tin had become an essential trade good that was required for making bronze, and therefore using bronze for many of the times’ high-level technological innovations, especially construction tools, weapons, and for ships.
However, tin is rare, and at the time, there were only a few disparate sources of tin. It’s suggested the middle east sourced most of its tin from China via the silk road, and Ancient Greeks were getting theirs from deep inland European sources (possibly near Hungary, Brittany in France, or Cornwall in England).
This was fine during settled and undisturbed times, as the very long, convoluted trade routes prospered and grew.
But they were very susceptible to disruption during unsettled times, and it wouldn’t have taken taken much to be disrupted by large movements of nomadic warring raiders or groups of peoples, or particularly terrible famines or natural disasters located across critical trade routes.
And as states and cities likely isolated themselves behind city walls to protect themselves from the strife of the time, this only would have decreased trade even more, and suddenly they would no longer have the ability to make the essential tools and weapons their societies had become reliant on, in the numbers required, right when those nations needed them most.
This would have been especially ruinous if those nomadic raiding tribes, or groups of unknown origin like the Sea Peoples, had access to iron technology, which required only one more easily sourced metal, iron. Pure copper weapons, due to lack of tin to make bronze, would have been fairly ineffective against iron or bronze equivalents.
It’s a hypothesis, and not “proven”, but I’d say it’s a fairly plausible explanation for what likely happened.
Oh boy, one I can actually point to a legit answer to for someone in this thread.
It’s way too long for a comment, but the TLDR is:
Ramses II captured twelve groups of Anatolian tribes following Kadesh, one for each son with him.
After Ramses II is dead, at least one of those tribes (the Lukka) are fighting in a one day war against his son Merneptah alongside other sea peoples (this is the first connection between these tribes and the sea) and Libya. Notably, a number of the sea peoples in this battle were oddly recorded as being without foreskins.
You actually see this event in Homer, when Odysseus tells about a one day battle immediately after Troy against Egypt where he is taken captive, parties in Egypt for seven years until a “certain Phrygian” shows up and tries to ransom him to Libya.
Seven years after that one day battle against Merneptah is when the usurper Amenmesse (referred to as Mose in Papyrus Salt 124) takes Egypt for 3 years.
Ramses III talks about the end of the 19th dynasty as having been characterized by the city governors making decisions and the gods having been made like men. Both fairly Phonecian features, given the city state governance and the euhemerism of the Phonecian mythos reported by Philo of Byblos from around the time of the Trojan War.
Ramses III later claims to have forcibly relocated the sea peoples into the Levant, though as can be seen in places like Ashkelon they’d already conquered and set a foothold there as well.
In particular, there was supposedly a commander named Mopsus/Muksus who had conquered Ashkelon, and who you later see the rulers of the Denyen sea peoples in Adana crediting their ancestry to in 8th century BCE bilinguals.
Do any of these features maybe ring some bells?
Twelve tribes? No foreskins? Captured into Egypt?
How about a bunch of pre-Greek peoples sailing around the Mediterranean on ships?
Part of the problem is that the surviving oral histories of this period seem to have underwent extensive reworking, with a particular focus on ethnocentrism such that the Argonautica is solely about Greeks and the Biblical Exodus is only about Israelites.
The two stores share surprising details, like how in the Argonautica the prophet Mopsus died as they wandered by foot back from a battle in North Africa, similar to how the prophet Moses died in the desert as they were wandering by foot back from North Africa. In fact, right after this happens in the Argonautica it tells of a local sheepherder killing one of their elite warriors with the cast of a stone, similar to the Biblical story of a sheepherder killing an elite sea peoples warrior with the cast of a stone (thought to be reappropriated into the Davidic story but not originally about him).
In fact, one of the two ways of Hellenizing the name Joshua is Jason.
A problem was Homer’s combining the Mycenaean conquest of Anatolia with the later retaking of Wilusa from the Hittites screwed up all the later Greek chronologies (depending on the sources, Perseus is his own ancestor), so the Greeks thought their Argonautica period was before Troy.
But after the conquest of Alexander, when multiple cultural sources were all being considered together, you had scholars suddenly realizing they were looking at shared history, such as Atrapanus of Alexandria having Moses on the Argos teaching Orpheus the mysteries, or Hecataeus of Adbera’s version of the Exodus story that had multiple different peoples all being exiled from Egypt, including the Phonecian Cadmus or Libyan Danaus.
Some of those stories have remarkable overlap to this period too, despite their late character. For example the story of Danaus, Lybian brother to the Pharoh with 50 sons who later becomes leader of the Greeks, is pretty interesting in light of Ramses II’s forensic report describing him as appearing like a Lybian Berber given he had 48-50 recorded sons. You have oddities like Herodotus’s crediting the multi-day women only Thesmophoria festival to the daughters of Danaus fleeing Egypt, and you have a reference to a multi-day women only ritual in Judges 11 where it’s explained with what’s effectively the story of Idomenus’s return home from the Trojan War.
The problem is that even myth which contains kernels of truth also contains lots of kernels of BS, and between survivorship biases and anchoring biases, the picture of these periods is extremely muddied. Just look at how little attention the Greek and Egyptian accounts of the Exodus narrative get from scholars relative to the amount of attention the Biblical version gets.
Archeology may gradually help. For example, Yigael Yadin’s theory that the Denyen sea peoples were the lost tribe of Dan given the reference of Dan “staying on their ships” in Judges 5 may be strengthened by the recent discovery of Aegean style pottery made with local clay in Tel Dan.
This theory is particularly interesting given the “House of Mopsus” of the Denyen relative to the story in Judges 18 where a descendant of Moses becomes the priest for the tribe of Dan contrary to all the stuff about how it needs to be a descendant of Aaron. As well, you can see in Ezekiel 27:19 where Greece and Dan are trading together with Tyre, with the goods mentioned as in line with Adana’s relative geography. The Denyen and the neighboring Ahhiyawa might be a good fit for who was being referred to here, and given the exact same form for Dan as when mentioned as staying on their ships, the Denyen become a compelling match for the tribe.
Another interesting archeological detail is the imported bees from Anatolia in 10th-9th century BCE Tel Rehov.
My broad guess looking at the many different accounts was that the various peoples brought into Egypt under Ramses II had Merneptah either exile foreigners or deny previous land rights to them after he took power, which led to the Lybian war. After losing that, the surviving tribes (who had greater allegiance to each other and reclaiming a home in Egypt as opposed to individual countries of origin) went back and conquered much of their homelands in what were effectively populist uprisings (conveniently often at times of destabilization from famine and natural disaster) raising enough of an army doing so they were able to successfully take all of Egypt a few years later. They ultimately couldn’t hold it, left and continued to conquer areas of the Mediterranean until finally becoming fractured enough a generation or two later that they were beaten by Ramses III and individual tribes kept extremely fractured and partial retellings of the events which took on increasingly mythical form as time went on and changed specifics as power dynamics shifted or the myths were absorbed into other cultures.
Give it another 20 years or so, and I think you’ll have a lot more of an official answer to your question than you might have previously expected to end up with. There’s enough there, particularly in light of recent archeology, that I doubt the status quo collective shrug will hold much longer.
Holy shit. What a comment, thank you!
Wow. Always neat to learn something new.
Thanks for sharing (although I am unqualified to confirm or contest your evaluation/understanding, it does ring a few bells with tidbits I knew).
Did she love me?
At the time probably yes, now we don’t know/probably not. Note that love is complicated and has different types like there is passionate love and companionate love. Passionate love rises quickly within 6 months to 1.5 years, it reaches its peak. Then it goes down hill and within 7 years it goes to its lowest point. This happens to everybody not just you, naturally this love converts into companionate love over this time and when that does not happen it needs to end. Companionate love is slow in rising but it is also more lasting. Two main components of companionate love are 1) emotional intimacy - ability to share anything 2) commitment - that feeling that it is YOUR responsibility to help them if they need something. Any action that violates these will result in losing love.
Some actions that hurt love: lying, hiding things, feeling you’re the only one who cares etc.
Know this, true love or companionate love is something both people nurture and grow, you cannot do it all on your own. If it ended then something went wrong, maybe nobody was at fault.
Take your time and heal my friend.
Thank you for that.
I played with the same question as the comment you answered and in a way your answer helped me. I just wanted to say thank you. So: thank you kind stranger.
