aliens?

trigstrigs
in Off Topic Lounge
here's an interesting essay about whether aliens exist and what that means for us humans. not sure if anyone else here cares about this stuff, but this guy had an interesting perspective on it (not that i completely agree with him as i did see flaws in his logic, but still fun to consider).
WHERE ARE THEY? WHY I HOPE THE SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE FINDS NOTHING
Nick Bostrom
Future of Humanity Institute
Faculty of Philosophy & James Martin 21st Century School Oxford University
[Published in the MIT Technology Review, May/June issue (2008): pp. 72‐77]

http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf

Comments

  • MiloMilo
    They're out there . . . it is improbable to the point of impossibility for there to be NO life out there somewhere. The thing is this:

    If they are less advanced than we are, then who needs them?
    If they are MORE advanced, we are likely to be fooked.

    Could not get link to work, by the way.
  • trigstrigs
    Milo wrote: »
    They're out there . . . it is improbable to the point of impossibility for there to be NO life out there somewhere. The thing is this:

    If they are less advanced than we are, then who needs them?
    If they are MORE advanced, we are likely to be fooked.

    Could not get link to work, by the way.

    just tried link and it worked for me. it's a pdf so it might take a minute to load the page maybe.

    the article argues that there could be, what the author refers to, as a "great filter" which works as a probability barrier which necessarily stops civilizations from reaching a certain point. in the words of the article:
    The Great Filter can be thought of as a probability barrier...You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be powerful enough—which is to say, the critical steps must be improbable enough—that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals, at least none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

    he goes on to say that it is most likely a technological barrier of some kind as that would make the most sense. that is, something that necessarily destroys any intelligent life forms that reach that point of evolution.
  • MiloMilo
    The Great Filter? Sounds like something the Peanuts gang might have to clean their pool.
  • GTA PokerGTA Poker
    18mans
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