Rep Burlison on That UFO podcast recently
“…what I think is the least likely probability is that we’re being visited by some alien race from another planet that is light years away…”
“…it’s a long way. It’s a really long way… so the probability of some alien race evolving to that level, and then deciding of all places to come this direction, and then, as I said in the hearing, they’ve got the technology to get here, and invest all that time to get here and energy to get here, and then they crash? I just don’t buy it. “
It’s a version of an argument you hear from a lot of people. Unfortunately it’s packed with assumptions based on human social norms and morality that ought to be challenged. When you put those assumptions aside, the ETH starts to make a lot more sense.
To get ahead of the inevitable comments, I’m not an ETH fanatic. I have no idea where they come and like to entertain all the possibilities. What I’m pushing back on is what I see as these “common sense” arguments against the ETH that are heavily biased by our own anthropocentric perspective.
“It’s a really long way”
Any journey, by extension, would take a very, very long time. Moving at a respectable 25% the speed of light, it would take approximately half a million years for one of our alien visitors to cross the Milky Way galaxy. So what?
These distances and timescales only seem absurd if we are imagining living biological entities flying in a spacecraft. Why do we presume that an NHI would attempt such a thing?
Far more likely – they’d send a Von Neumann probe – an intelligent machine capable of extracting resources from the environment. Such a machine would have the infinite patience to wait out the millennia of travel required, repairing and maintaining itself as it went. On arrival it could set up shop and start manufacturing craft, equipment and living beings.
Time is not a problem in this strategy, nor the logistics of transporting live beings. Sure, we humans aren’t comfortable with being manufactured and raised by an AI, but thats on us. Socially too, we struggle to care about any endeavor that wont bare fruit within more than 3 human lifetimes. Again, thats on us. There is no reason to think a NHI would have the same qualms.
In fact, the unfathomable scale of cosmic time actually works in favor of the ETH in another way. Life on Earth has been broadcasting biosignatures the type of which the James Web space telescope may have just detected on K2-18b, for at least 250 million years. Thats a heck of a long time to get identify and get here, even if it takes a while.
“And then they just crash”
Again, this is only really absurd in the story we keep telling ourselves where live beings are traveling across the cosmos in spacecraft to get here. If they’re sending Von Neumann probes instead, then individual craft and beings are far more expendable since they are manufactured right here from practically unlimited resources. I think its still fair to question why such advanced beings would crash at all, but it’s still a very different scenario.
A civilization’s tolerance for loss of craft and individuals is also a factor of scarcity and how they value the worth of individuals. If they are truly advanced, they be a post-scarsity society. They may view the worth of individuals differently, or have technologies that negate the loss of individual lives. It’s hard, perhaps pointless to speculate about NHI morality. That doesn’t excuse us using our own morality as a reference for judging their behavior.
You ask me, the ETH is very much still on the table.
submitted by /u/vespaking
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