Life... in outer space!

[Coin]

@arkandel said in Life... in outer space!:

@coin Hrm? Linear doesn't only mean something is sequential, but also that it extends along a straight line.

So on a X/Y graph plotting advancement over time, human progress is anything but linear. It'd be full of long flat plateaus, raising now and then, going down a couple of times and there'd be a few spikes in the mix as well.

Edit: Look at this shit!

That's cuz you see it as a sline that spikes when advancement happens, while I was viewing it as a line that simply does not continue UNTIL advancement happens.

[Thenomain]

I have a stupid sci-fi theory that lives in my head, that I kind of like:

You know the gray aliens? Those are us from the future. That's how long it will take us to work it out, knowing by that time we'll be commonly screwing with our own biology. We might as well be aliens to ourselves, tho I wouldn't say as we are to ants as I would ourselves to early Neanderthal, or similar hominid.

The idea that any civilization can survive for thousands of years drives my scientific self insane, because we can't even keep a moderately small civilization going for a few hundred years without it fracturing.

It also reminds me that the sentiment is moot if we don't try to get off this planet.

Then I just get depressed.

[Coin]

@thenomain said in Life... in outer space!:

I have a stupid sci-fi theory that lives in my head, that I kind of like:

You know the gray aliens? Those are us from the future. That's how long it will take us to work it out, knowing by that time we'll be commonly screwing with our own biology. We might as well be aliens to ourselves, tho I wouldn't say as we are to ants as I would ourselves to early Neanderthal, or similar hominid.

The idea that any civilization can survive for thousands of years drives my scientific self insane, because we can't even keep a moderately small civilization going for a few hundred years without it fracturing.

It also reminds me that the sentiment is moot if we don't try to get off this planet.

Then I just get depressed.

You should watch Fringe.

[Tinuviel]

@thenomain said in Life... in outer space!:

any civilization can survive for thousands of years

Things get... weird depending on how you determine one civilisation from another. Egypt lasted that long, but the line where one would draw civilisation distinctions is fuzzy-wuzzy.

[Ganymede]

@tinuviel said in Life... in outer space!:

Things get... weird depending on how you determine one civilisation from another. Egypt lasted that long, but the line where one would draw civilisation distinctions is fuzzy-wuzzy.

China.

[Tinuviel]

@ganymede True, but generally we (general we, not us we) consider 'Egypt' to be one behemoth that lasted from X to Y. China broke up, reformed, broke up, reformed, had a few revolutions... there are periods more easy to point at and say "that's a different civilisation."

[Coin]

Gosh, guess it's time to define "civilization". XD

[Tinuviel]

@coin Gooooood luck with that.

[Arkandel]

@coin said in Life... in outer space!:

Gosh, guess it's time to define "civilization". XD

All I know about civilization is I'm always one more turn away from playing just one more turn and it's 3 am and I have to work tomorrow and shit.

[Thenomain]

@tinuviel said in Life... in outer space!:

@ganymede True, but generally we (general we, not us we) consider 'Egypt' to be one behemoth that lasted from X to Y.

This would be wrong, and is my second example of a civilization that could not hold together more than a few hundred years at a time. The difference between Egypt and China one of modern governance.

I tried to give cues to what I meant by indicating that contacting another planet would require resources and organization and permission from whatever structure of culture is going on. The ability is not enough, though it is the most important part.

==

This is why I can't get into most fantasy authors, by the way. I'm my own killjoy.

[Arkandel]

@thenomain Why must a future (or alien) civilization be stagnant and monolithic?

Just because our friendly alien friends have ascended to light wave forms it doesn't mean that has to be the end of the road for their evolution, or that their society has reached its final form or... anything.

[Thenomain]

@arkandel

I...don't think I said it did?

I think that Star Trek answered this question in Voyager, in one of the very few interesting things it did. Of course it did it with the Q.

[Ominous]

@arkandel

[bored]

@coin said in Life... in outer space!:

This presumes that advancement in technology comes qwith a consistent and uninterrupted understanding of how that advancement came to be, but we're talking about a hypothetical civilization/species that has thrived technologically for (if we're using the hypothetical Planet X from the OP link) billions of years. It's easy for mne to imagine them communicating in a way that makes our communication seem painfully and impossibly primitive, much the same way we see ants communicating. Ants communicate via pheromones, IIRC, something that the ancestors of humans may or may not have done--we certainly didn't always communicate via verbal speech and writing.

Why this shouldn't be the case? Did we forget how telegraphs worked when we invented the phone? Sure, we might not read every ancient ideograph perfectly, but we recognize them as language. And that loss is only because they predate certain milestones of information-storage technology. Why can't we store everything going forward? Hasn't the internet already largely solved this one, and won't it also improve?

If you're implying that there are cataclysms that wipe out the civilization's memory, that seems like a really delicate scenario (one that really eats into the numbers even on a big numbers scale): they have to destroy nearly all records as well as kill enough of the population that the living knowledge is erased without wiping out the species... Then the species has to advance back to and beyond the same point without retreading any of the same ground but instead creating an entirely different history of technology?

Or am I flat out missing something you're suggesting, here?

I feel like your assumption also includes that the civilization stops evolving biologically once it starts developing technology, but that's probably not right either. In the past, what, million years, we've evolved quite a lot--imagine what we might look like, be like, how we might communicate and process basic thought in a billion years.

I think the biology is relatively irrelevant. Billions of years, emphases aside, isn't impressive on that scale: life on earth is on that order of magnitude, and per @arkandel's link, there's diminishing returns. The first couple billion get us through various celluar stages and into complex life, but a couple hundred million also only turned giant murder-chickens to smaller nugget-ready versions. That's not much to brag about in a quarter of a billion years, makes it dubious that you get 'incomprehensible' results going forward on similar scales.

So I'm very skeptical of scenarios (fun as they are for sci-fi) where we turn into sentient light balls or 4th dimensional beings or whatever whereby we somehow become incomprehensible to ourselves (or other life-as-we-know-it beings). Future humans might be good at living in a shitty, polluted atmosphere (heck, they better be), but I don't see us developing psionic powers.

Humans today might seem as incomprehensibly basic to those future "humans" as ants seem to us now.

I feel like all of these arguments fall back on a hand-wavy appeal to big numbers as a reason to disregard... well, everything we know about anything. Sure, space and time are vast and the numbers are big. Yet we can see the products of the first ~14 billion years, a third of it up close. It follows observable mechanics, many of which we have a functional, if not total understanding. I'm not sure why the next 1, 2, or 10 billion suddenly equals 'magical transformation into incomprehensible, nigh-impossible forms divorced from everything that happened in the prior 14 billion.'

[Tinuviel]

@thenomain said in Life... in outer space!:

This would be wrong

Oh yes, I know. But that leads into my point. The definition of civilisation isn't etched in stone, and we don't really have a thing to point at and say "no, this is what civilisation is" and so perceptions - even 'obviously' incorrect ones are pervasive. I mean originally it meant 'people what live in cities and speak Greek' (in an incredibly paraphrased way).

[Thenomain]

@tinuviel

I gave indications to exactly what I meant. If you want to ignore context then yes, anything can be argued.

And apparently will be.

[ixokai]

@bored said in Life... in outer space!:

Why this shouldn't be the case? Did we forget how telegraphs worked when we invented the phone? Sure, we might not read every ancient ideograph perfectly, but we recognize them as language. And that loss is only because they predate certain milestones of information-storage technology. Why can't we store everything going forward? Hasn't the internet already largely solved this one, and won't it also improve?

There's this cute/funny movie, Aliens in the Attic back in '09. In it, a group of a couple teenagers and a couple younger kids are at this rental house and they need to call the police!

And they rush over and find this rotary phone, the likes of which they've never seen in their life, and stare dumbfounded at it for a minute.

Then they curiously put their finger in the nine and spin it about and it goes all clickclickclickclickclickclickclick back into place, with them staring in disbelief.

I really do find that scene relevant to the discussion at hand, and do think an advanced species/people might have tremendous difficulty communicating with a less advanced people, save for a subset of those people who dedicated their lives to Old Stuff. Ie, techno-anthropologists.

[bored]

@ixokai said in Life... in outer space!:

There's this cute/funny movie, Aliens in the Attic back in '09. In it, a group of a couple teenagers and a couple younger kids are at this rental house and they need to call the police!

Sure, I get that part of it. But, if pressed, they could look up that information. Their ignorance isn't the same thing as civilization-wide forgetfulness.

I really do find that scene relevant to the discussion at hand, and do think an advanced species/people might have tremendous difficulty communicating with a less advanced people, save for a subset of those people who dedicated their lives to Old Stuff. Ie, techno-anthropologists.

This hits something I've been trying to get at maybe better than I have: I don't think an advanced civilization would want or be able to sit down and chat over coffee, but I imagine that this class of specialists would exist. It's a similar bit with the entomologists. The average human doesn't give a damn about ants, barely notices them, and has no clue about how they communicate. But a few specialists do. In general we can't see and care little about microbes, but a Mars mission would absolutely study them in great detail if we discovered some, not ignore them as 'insignificant.' And per the diminishing returns idea, it should be easier for them and us than for us and animals, not harder.

[Tinuviel]

@thenomain I believe I was agreeing with you, not arguing with you.

[HorrorHound]

Short-answer: Yes.

Long-Answer: By the time we ever reached any zone with other life not in our own system, within the Ort Cloud, the life forms and their system, would likely be gone. Evidence of them too, potentially.