The Berserker Hypothesis and the Dark Forest
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- Опубліковано 29 жов 2023
- A halloween eve exploration of two of the spookiest solutions to the Fermi Paradox. The Dark Forest Hypothesis and the Berserker Hypothesis.
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I read a short story in which an astronomer receives an alien message. The message is only very slightly larger than the Arecibo message sent in 1974.
The astronomer arranges the message by the dimensions of the Arecibo message and discovers. Sure enough it's the Arecibo message repeated back at us with 6 words in English, "Be quiet. They might hear you."
💀
Oh I love that creepypasta.
Id shit my pants.
Name of story and author?
Yeah that would terrify me. What really scares me is if some naive jackoff thought they could just negotiate, or some wackjob decided the planet is hopeless and makes contact hoping we will be destroyed.
It's true the predators of a dark forest make noticeable calls and screeches.. that is until they've spotted prey, then the predators of the dark forest fall silent...
Happy Halloween everyone!
True. Prey make noises too, until they sense a predator. Then they fall silent as well. So if you are in a forest, and it is silent. Get out. As fast as you can.
Cougars are awfully quiet- you never see one until you are about to get eaten, and many prey animals never see them at all. Snakes are the same way- it's a lucky mouse that detects one before being consumed. Some animals in the ocean may make sounds- like whales- but sharks are not among them. A Berserker force out there probably discovered early on not to warn their prey they are coming. OTOH I don't see evidence for them- where are the space battles, the fleets of starships and the exploding planets? Technology is messy.
@@livetotell100If everything goes silent in the forest, that just means you’re getting closer to your meal.
Yep. That's why dead silence is already a concerning sign.
What if the forest is empty because our ancestors cleared it from dangers in a era long forgotten
No one is afraid of being alone in the dark. It's actually NOT being alone in the dark that is a lot more concerning.
It depends how long the "dark" is though, doesn't it? I mean, we aren't afraid on Earth because we know the morning will always come and we will see other people.
@@unsteadyeddy3107probability
That mostly depends on wether or not you know the nature and intentions of what is out there. The most concerning is therefore to be NOT being alone in the dark with the unknown.
Even a known hostile entity is preferable to an unkown one, because we can prepare against what we know about.
Thr more terrifying situation is whrn your no longer alone in the dark… but haven’t realized it yet.
Excellent, and true!
I'm currently reading The Dark Forest by Cixin. Three Body Problem is an astounding series.
I have read the whole series, and I must say that it is the scariest series that I have EVER read. 😮
The Aliens are the size of a grain of rice
I can't be bothered about reading, but I'm listening to the audiobook for the 4th time now XD
Also I can't wait for the Netflix premiere in January...I feel like it's gonna disappoint, though
@Archangelus_Dei I still can't really buy that they are that small.
@@thakyou5005Most likely but it might be a fun watch.
Call me crazy but I’d say a moon similar to our own that so regulates the planet is probably extraordinarily rare.
I think moons and multiple moons are probably more common than not but they may have different effects on their planets.
The assumption being that regulation is necessary
Our setup here is so unlikely that it's absurd. Vallee calls reality a farce. Keel quit.
Our moon is insane.
Luna ❤
I'm actually starting to warm up to the rare earth hypothesis. How rare still remains a question, but I don't think it's unreasonable to think there's validity to the rare earth hypothesis... Even just having a single sun is rare. The vast majority of star systems have 2 or more and I don't think scientists know enough to say with any certainty how that could affect a planet's climate. We've never seen it up close, so aside from spectroscopy, I don't see how they could know much.
It's true that we do hear predators. For instance, I might hear an owl in the distance. But the owl is not preying on me. A mouse foraging for food is the animal that needs to hear the owl, and the mouse will not hear the owl when the owl swoops down on it. There could be predators out in the universe that we could see and hear if we were of sufficient capabilities. But if we are in the category of a prey animal, we won't know they are there until it's too late.
The whole "cosmic predator" thing is just a projection of our own primitive imagination. We're barely out of the jungle, and we have a hard time imagining a universe that is far beyond predator/prey reality. Predation is a horribly inefficient way to meet your needs. That's why we have agriculture, trade, and spare time to contemplate these things. Interstellar beings wouldn't waste their time as predators unless they were bored and wanted to re-enact more interesting and dramatic times. Even then, they'd probably do it virtually.
...not to say that we are "safe". Other beings may have other reasons to harm, eliminate, or otherwise make use of us, but I doubt they would come here just to eat us.
It's ALL about energy, and the universe has plenty of it. If living beings were particularly energy dense, we'd have farms on our roofs instead of solar panels... but we still wouldn't "hunt and gather", except for our primitive throwbacks...
Got any advice on getting the neighborhood owls to shut up. All day and night just yelling back and forth across the neighborhood like dogs at night.
Yeah but you can’t hear a Owl fly
That’s like 90% of their hunting strategy
I don't think we're could detect ourselves if we were located in the nearest star system let alone 10-50 ly away.
I think the most plausible partial solution to the Fermi paradox is that we're looking for primitive, weak radio signals and none of that is detectable because better technology for communication is easily obtained and the weak signals for those brief periods of usage by other civilizations are beyond our capabilities to detect.
That has to be absurd. Radio signals do indeed have a range of some lightyears, even if distorted. So if there were advanced civilizations _directly_ neighboring us, they should be able to hear us.
Forests can get very quiet when there's a large predator on the prowl.
I like that line, that's dope.
Putting in a song!!!
Who’s hunting who?
Seems like we've been looking through a keyhole for a few seconds wondering where the horribly energy inefficient or loud aliens are then calling it a paradox.
being energy efficient is extremely noticeable though.. it's not like energy efficiency makes you invisible.
@@SwiftEon Not necessarily: One possible answer to the fermi paradox is that civilisations do not stay in the state we're currently in for long, that is, they develop more precise and guided or entirely different means of communication which we have no way of detecting. All the radio waves we send into space become distorted beyond recognition after a while, so we're probably only detectable as a civilisation up to a few thousand lightyears at worst. IF we assume that usage of this technology fades out after a few hundred years max then we, too, would appear silent after a cosmically insignificant amount of time.
@NniemandweiterR Still doesn't matter, when you consider that if we take astronomical timescales into account, if intelligent life isn't terribly rare and there isn't something special about this specific moment in time in the universe, then there should be percievable evidence of those civilizations if they need energy at all. Because needing energy means they need space, no matter what kind of energyproduction they have. If they are as humanity, they might even spread potentially - meaning that, as alluded to in the Video, even a slow-spreading allen civilization could colonize a galaxy in astronomically 'quick' time.
Nobody has made a convincing case for anything biological or technological being able to leave a star system without complete destruction.
Totally. I agree. If aliens came by and looked at earth in the daytime, they wouldn't know we were there.
Earth has only been radio loud for a bit less than 100 years, If the nearest berserker is 50 light years away, then we may have some years before they arrive, even if they can go close to the speed of light.
Kinda spooky to think about being on the precipice of total annihilation but at the same time... we all die. It would be kind of neat to go out that way, or I guess maybe it wouldn't matter or we wouldn't even notice? It'd be cool if we could at least notice and be like, hey that's neat. There's aliens. Then be annihilated lol.
They wouldn’t even have to come here themselves. Just fling some giant rocks at us or point something like a Gamma Ray Burst at our solar system.
Godier could read the phone book and it would be soothing.
I can't watch when I'm tired...😂
JOHN!!!! The final comment about how our own animals don’t actually stay quiet in real dark forests, ESPECIALLY the predators, got me thinking…maybe if others are hostile the idiotic thing is to try to hide when we live on a planet that’s been broadcasting a biosphere for billions of years in its light spectrum. Instead, like the colourful poison dart frog or Yellowjacket or such, we should broadcast our presence as loudly, even obnoxiously, as possible, as if to ask anyone watching us “do you feel lucky, punk?” 🤣
we may not look that formidable but the aliens plotting our doom might take pause and feel cautious…”what don’t we know about those earthlings that they’re not afraid of anything despite how small their power seems….better steer clear!”
😁😁😁😁
Of course, if they call our bluff well then….oops!!! 🤣
It’d be like those moths that have evolved to bear such a close resemblance to hornets that nobody messes with them…a trick that works great until it doesn’t.
@@Hydromon99maybe. If the only goal is to exterminate us then absolutely, if they can get large objects up to relativistic speeds (which would be needed for interstellar travel of any practical timeframe) just bombard the earth with these relativistic bullets/missiles.
BUT…if they want to occupy our planet, preserve it for their own uses, conquer and invade and enslave and such (like sci fi depicts) they might get hurt real bad. We have teeth of our own. I often hear that we would be like ants to them. That may be….but we also hopefully know better than to try setting up shop IN AN ANTHILL!!!!! OUCH!
But just straight up killing all the ants with what amount to thermal or chemical weapons is not that hard. I guess it depends on what the aliens want.
I kindof like that idea tbh.
Like, unless they physically come here, they couldn't possibly know whether or not we have dozens or hundreds of space habitats up to and out passed the Ort.
And if they CAN physically come here, that likely means they're close, and if there's 2 unicorn civilizations close to eachother on the galactic scale I highly doubt there's ONLY two.
Imagine, only two civs in the entire galaxy and they're somehow right next to eachother? Wildly unlikely. More likely: civs are everywhere.
They'd have to worry about who else is watching.
@@stevenhetzel6483 physically coming here, that is, transporting matter across spacetime is wildly inefficient and will be avoided if at all possible. There is another method but you lack the words to describe it effectively. It would be like trying to explain the difference between blue and red to a child who was born blind... possible to transmit the knowledge, impossible to foster an understanding of that knowledge.
@@nathancawley8759can u please transport me a few million
Or a battalion of androids.
the three body problem series is so gosh dang good.
And scary as Hell. 😮
“Don’t tell the wolves where the food is.” I think “Don’t tell the lion where its rivals cubs are.” Is a better dark forest analogy
There are a number of comments regarding predators not being silent (in relation to the Dark Forest Hypothesis), but while in our world there are apex predators in their environment that have little or no fear of others, in the DFH, every species is potentially also prey, thus why staying silent is the smart move.
Perhaps we are the first to win the lottery? Also to the person who wins the lottery it seems impossible, even divine, but they are winners because of chance.
Chances are we aren't. It's much more probable that there IS other life, but vast distances are ensuring that not only are we not aware of them, but that we are likely looking at them so far in their own past that we can't see anything.
I often was teased by my peers when young. My brother’s favorite movie as a child was called “The Never-Ending Story”.
The main villain was called ‘The Nothing’.
It gave me existential dread as a five year old.
If something like this happens in real life, it could be a ‘berserker probe’.
Read the book. Michael Ende.
But that's another story 😯
But can they do a dimension strike and reduce our 3D solar system into 2D?
i felt my brain release happy chemicals when i saw there was a new JMG vid.. thanks john!
I am surprised the Inhibitors (aka wolves) from Alistair Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe weren’t mentioned in a video about berserkers ;)
I love the Berserker series by Fred Saberhagen.
Another video from my favorite content creator!! Thanks for all your hard work. Its well appreciated.
You speak for so many of us. If you are a JMG fan then you have great taste in UA-cam Channels. 👍🏻
Your videos truly have anxiolytic effect. It really fueled back my interest in astronomy and I'm ready to revive my old telescope.
Thanks for making me learn a new word! I've been around the block a few times and have a considerable vocabulary, but I've never encountered "anxiolytic" before. Seems to be a bit of a tongue twister. I would probably resort to a simple "relaxing" if I were attempting to communicate with a mere mortal....
@@theobserver9131 that's the word I use common in field I work in. Guess I'm too much into my work. However, I'm glad if someone find something in my comment useful
I wonder if the future space explorers will remember Halloween. I hope they do. It would be awesome.
K
Excellent JMG! Saberhagens berserker stories are actually frightening. Niven wrote a very good one too. "A teardrop falls"
Timing seems to be the solution that makes sense to me. Ships passing in the night chronologically. We're probably early to the party too.
I think the reason people think being alone in the universe is the base state / default reasoning, is because if intelligent life is out there in our galaxy, at this point it might as well not be for all it effects us. No visitation because we are alone, or because we are unknown, or because we are avoided all have the same outcome... That is until that state of being unvisited ends.
Maybe the K-T event was the Berserker attack. Von Neumann machines thought they had done a good enough job that they packed up and went after new worlds.
Yes, John, forrest predators do make noise, right up to the moment when they begin to hunt you. There's a spooky thought to add.
i kinda stray away from the dark forest theory because we would at least see the battles that did happen before the dark forest scenario took effect...meaning that bad stuff would have had to happen before those civilizations chose to stay quiet in fear
Maybe supernova explosions are the aftermath ? What great way to destroy a civilisation.
Sort of like those dark regions of space that litter the universe?
I was genuinely hyped to see your upload. I've been watching all of your videos in backwards order :)
Your voice, research, and storytelling is fantastic!
It helps me chill out too haha
There's a few good theories on this, Dark forest and Berserkers being being most likely from the more fantastical ones. I think rare earth hypothesis combined with grabby aliens theory are best candidates so far.
So basicly, life is common, but due to long time needed to develop intelligent life and many steps needed to produce it, makes complex life very rare. So even if life is almost everywhere where conditions are even remotely right, it might get destroyed sproradically and needs very stable environments to grow into more complex life-forms. This would also lead into case that we are one of the first few species getting to the threshold of multiplanetary civilization and even we are not quite there yet.
So there might be less than 10 civilizations currently in our galaxy, so odds are very low that we will become aware of them, or they will become aware of us, because distances are so massive even inside our small home galaxy.
Once while spending 72 hours in a psych ward one of the few things I could find to read was a Fred Saberhagen novel, and frankly it was absolutely lousy. It was, however, the highlight of my stay.
I did this with "contact" by Sagan.
In jail, the only non-Billy Graham literature was Harriet the Spy.
Neither jail nor asylum. Porn, various.
On holiday with the wife the only thing I could find to read was
Simon Scarrow , “Eagles of the Empire “ series , I’ve now read all 22 books in the series , brilliant.
Thanks for your videos, always exciting to see more content from ya, life finds a way~
After watching countless nature documentaries, I find it highly absurd that an allegedly intelligent species is shouting out loud it’s location into a vast, unexplored dark space without knowing what’s out there.
We are...
We are NOT really an intelligent species. We are barely scratching at the surface of intelligence.
Ummmmmm.........isn't that what we're doing?
We're alone in the universe, so of course we have no qualms about sending radio waves into the cosmos.
It's like bird populations on islands. They never had to deal with predators, so when the rats and cats show up, the birds are wiped out.
Thankfully, space is so insanely vast.
My thoughts are that if we are the first, then we should expand.
If we are not the first, then conflict is natural, and may the best man win.
Then again maybe it's like Star Trek and there's a universal UN.
Conflict may not be natural, hence why we have been left alone because we are the odd ones out.
Or we may be an overlooked weed patch between skyscrapers.
John, here’s a spooky scenario: what if the Berserker Probe doesn’t end a civilization in an instant, but inserts a technological poison pill which causes the civilization to inevitably destroy itself? Perhaps it is nuclear technology, AI, high energy particle physics, biological weaponry, etc.
Or disinformation. Perhaps their rules of engagement require that they truly understand a civilization before they end it, so they use a weapon that requires that knowledge.
Social media?
A big black prism?
@@defies4626❤
Religion? Although we are already infected with that!
It could also be possible that there's a species with working radio telescopes but haven't discovered us because they think the signals they are receiving are just noise made by our star. Maybe they are using different algorithms for their communication that makes it appear this way and they might be even sending signals to us and we also think it's just noise. Maybe the static noise we see is actually a communications stream that if you have the right algorithms you could decode them.
Love this man’s voice. Great videos! I listen to them a lot while falling asleep.
Mr. Godier you have a wonderful wonderful ability to propose questions and extract possibilities that challenge the mind. Well done!
When we finally detect alien life, I would bet we’ll find we were aware of it for a long time just didn’t realize that particular signal came from sentient life.
Thanks JMG another brilliant topic. Appreciate all you and your team do. 🚀🌌
You can't judge from the point of statistics considering chances of our existence. Because our ability to make any statistics depends on our existence in the first place. In that sense it doesn't matter how rare life is, it's always 100% chance for the life itself, or there would be nobody to make statistics in the first place.
If there were two planets and one was 10 million degree acid and the other was an earth clone we would only have a 50% chance of finding life. We have the experience of being alive but also the knowledge of life. Well, some of us have knowledge and than some of us make comments like yours.
An asteroid or cometary collision with something like a dwarf planet sized object like Ceres might sterilize the old dirt ball pretty well.
Thank you John, hope you are doing well.
Idk I’ve watched all your videos, many others and still can’t decide how I feel. I’m torn but right now I think that life is very rare, there is others but we are all too far away both in distance and time. I also think that other life forms probably wonder what’s up there too but have no way to contact us either. Eventually giving up, as we likely will due to realizing that fact. The only way I can see contact or signs of life, is from a life form that can withstand space and live much longer.
Probably the correct take. Despite many many efforts artificial life has never been created in a lab, therefore we know it requires some rather unlikely scenarios to occur. Habitability is rare, life is likely rare among habitable planets, and even among life worlds, intelligence is probably vanishingly rare.
Also the universe is still young.
We are likely among the first.
As always, GREAT VIDEO !!!
Really love the way that you present thoughts and ideas.
In my opinion ... we are not alone .. we are just one civilization of many !!! 👽👽👽
I heard that note change at the end there. I like it. Love your videoa man. Thank you for all you do.
Three body trilogy is amazing.
We are at the beginning of astronomy, radio astronomy only since end of WW2 as by-product of Cold War b4 astronomy. Not expecting answers in the near term and am am happy with that.
Me too. I don’t see advantages to alien life.
@@solvingpolitics3172very true.
Let's not forget the prophetic words of Olaf the Metal "My love for you is ticking clock, Berserker"
Would you like some making F*** BERSERKER! ✊ *oh its been so long I forgot the lyrics
"Moscow"
I think the answer to the Fermi paradox is that all advanced civilization ends up creating recursively improving AGI around the level of tech we are at now (so just before space colonization).
This gives them access to insane amounts of intelligence very quickly, and they use it acquire super advanced knowledge of physics. This allows them to do things essentially beyond our comprehension, like escape to a higher dimension.
We think we will want to colonize the galaxy in the future, but that’s our view from our current primitive paradigm.
Why would you want to escape to a higher dimension? I quite like the dimension I’m in at the moment.
@@johndonson1603 the higher dimension bitches put out like there's no tomorrow, and they have burritos and booze for you too
The only thing I heard or watched on Halloween that was scary. Thanks for that John.
Re: Tabby’s Star, if any Death Star-type particle beam takes 1500 years to reach our solar system, wouldn’t the relative motion of both stars affect where the beam is to be aimed? Ie. at a point in space where we’ll have drifted… 1500 yrs from now… ?
Exactly. Same goes for any type of "death probe" - once they arrive, the target civilisation might be thousands of years ahead technologically and simply squash them like an annoying fly.
If they/it would be that advanced to even make it then I'm sure it could predict the trajectory of it pretty well. They could probably simulate everything before hand.
Oh perfect timing John! Was just thinking what to do right now before sleeping cus having some trouble, but now I know 😆👍
Are you saying Mr Godier puts you to sleep ?
I have to read the Berserker Series now. Thanks, John!
Just in time for the dab sesh. I thank you.
Frosty buds for me.
Different path,same destination - stoned
immaculate and a
top rate space video.
Could be worse.
yesss another JMG video
I wonder if John will ever run out of new ways to explain the fermi paradox.
No kidding. If I had to sum up this channel it would be an exploration of the Fermi paradox
Let’s hope he dosent!
My own view is that the Fermi paradox is on its way to being a footnote in history.
@@jankoszuta9835in what manner?
Loved it - very well done!
Spooky video... just in time for Halloween!
Wow! Best reply I’ve ever received! Thank you this additional information, even at 83 you can learn some outstanding stuff.
This is not satire, I’m being awkwardly serious.
Interestingly, Dr. Deamer that made the cell wall discovery I mentioned published it at age 84 after a lifetime of field work collecting evidence for it. It's some of the most careful, deliberate and rigorous long-term research I've ever seen, something along the lines of 60 years in the making. I conducted an interview with him on the subject on my other channel here:
ua-cam.com/video/3lJ_VFkKiqg/v-deo.htmlsi=sgzKwo88y8P5-HcD
Awesome video as always. But, I don't get why "aliens" would build a Dyson Sphere?? An idea some guy on Earth had. They probably have something we haven't even thought about.
It may be the only way to obtain fusion energy.
They are a feasible way to harness a star's energy.
John that ending made me crack up 😂 another great video .
One last spooky vid! Thanks! 🎃👻☠
I think Rare Earth is still a good hypothesis. The fact that we see other planets near stars doesn't discount that. How many planets have we found with liquid water, a moon, and a large planet like Jupiter to soak up extra meteors?
Billions. The rare earth isnt that rare even if we would take 1% of everything there would still be 110.000 other civilizations left out there.
All our favorite speculative astronomy UA-camrs like to acknowledge this on occasion, but tend to forget it when they go into space opera mode. Still, I love what they make!
It's too reliant on assumptions that what happened to us has to happen for anything like us.
I'll answer your q with another q: what percentage of the universe's worlds have we looked at? 0.00000000001%? You wouldn't dip a cup in the ocean, find it empty, and conclude that the entire ocean is empty.
I'm no expert. Yet, I believe if there are earth sized planets orbiting stars like our sun, that they are simply hard to find. Sure, we discovered earth sized planets around red dwarfs. However, those planets are easier to find due to them have smaller orbits and are much closer to their stars. Such planets affect their stars's wobbles and pass through our plane of sight due to them orbiting their stars quickly. Now, try finding an earth like planet around a larger star such as our sun. Those stars won't nearly be affected by those planets' gravity. Factoring that with those planets taking much longer to orbit, and they would be much harder to find.
Given more time, we might discover these planets in the near future.
Point of order. The moon we have is a rarity. It took a rare glancing blow to earth by Theia to create it.
Perfect Halloween. Keep Watching the Skies...and be Very, Very, Afraid.
Berserker Hypothesis is similar to Reapers in Mass Effect ;) Interesting film. Greetings :)
Alright , I have a doubt not sure it's related to this but is there a maximum weight limit on a particular point in spacetime.
Yeah, whatever your mom weighs plus a pound
Ton 618 is an ultramassive black hole.
It has a mass of 66 Billion with a B times that of our sun, in a small, perhaps zero, volume of space.
Actually, Yes. That's what a black hole is, kinda.😅
"Weight limit" probably isn't the most correct way to describe it. "Maximum possible density" sounds better to me.
If enough stuff gets stuffed into a small enough area of space time then it becomes a black hole.
That becomes a problem when calculating max possible density because we haven't figured out the physics equations that would work in a black hole.
I'm not a physicist so hopefully someone else will have a better answer.
@@mastercharlesdiltardino8058got him.
Once FTL is found to be possible, then I'll start to wonder why Aliens aren't showing up.
Longevity is an issue. Just as the south sea islands were populated by humans taking long voyages, stellar voyages might be taken by aliens who simply have life spans far longer than ours - generational ships not necessary. A ten thousand year voyage for a being that can live a million years isn't a big deal.
if ftl were possible then wouldn't time travel be possible? wouldn't everyone from everywhen in the universe know about it if ftl were possible?
Even with FTL, how many star systems could a star systems could a civilization visit per year? It might be that the only form of FTL travel possible is via wormholes, and creating the other endpoint is still limited to sublight travel. Even if there is a form of FTL more akin to warp drive, it might be something possessed only by extremely advanced civilizations which might be quite rare.
Frankly, the explanation to the Fermi Paradox could very well be not just one of the possible explanations, but a combination of many, all to differing degrees.
I really enjoyed Greg Bear's 'The Forge of God' when i read it many years ago. I need to dig that out and re-read it.
@4:32 Remember the old 1970 UFO TV series? The Earth was being attacked by aliens (who turned out to be abducted humans - but by whom?).
But as more they went ahead, every fact they uncovered only raised 10 times more questions, and at the end, they knew less and less stuff about the aliens...
I’ve always thought that the drake ewuarion and the Fermi paradox have a potentially simple answer, we have underestimated the size of the universe. What I mean is, that instead of “stars” think “galaxies” in that you CAN expect life to be “everywhere” in that everywhere is every galaxy. So it’s inevitable and everywhere, but the universe is absurdly huge. So to have 1 in EVERY galaxy is insanely commonly because of how many galaxies there are. Sorry for the typos, I am partially blind.
I think life in other galaxies is probably a certain, but it's so far away as to be irrelevant for the purposes of contacting or interacting with us.
I have my own idea on this. And it's probably common knowledge to us all. But, what if you're right... I thought ghosts were scary, now I have to deal with a spooky action at a distance berserker. Thanks for providing me with a genuine real reason to be scared. Lol. Imagine if we all came together on this one fear. I thought asteroids were our biggest predator. Berserkers, that really gives me the creeps. Thank you JMG
EDIT: Thank you so much you're so good at this. Much appreciated.
Asteroids ARE our biggest predator. Isaac Arthur states (wildly paraphrased): we could be as quiet as we want and it ultimately doesn't matter. The jury was out 2 billion years ago when life oxygenated the atmosphere, you don't get mass free O2 particles in the atmosphere without something actively producing it, and any alien looking in our direction would see it, and know it.
Oxygen is profoundly reactive, to almost everything. The only way you get an atmosphere in double digit percentages of Oxygen is for some active process cleaving it from other compounds. .
So why wait for a civilization to spring up when you can suffocate the baby in the cradle? If that's really your concern - other life at ALL - you wouldn't. You'd send mass relatavistic bombs at the planet, and if you couldn't, 2 billion years is a long time to develop the tech....
Yet, here we are.
Asteroids are still a problem, though.
My favourite answer to The Dark Forest scenario is the ADF short story ‘With Friends Like These’.
Alright, nothimg new for me personally, but the presentation and YOU Mr Godier, got that personal charmisma going on for you and have a complelling voice and know how to use it to draw us in, keep us here from beginning to end.
Now, just because this one isn't new to me, does not mean that everything else you do will be of the same topic and i dare say that your other videos won't be repetitions either, so i'm gonna check them out, YOU were the one making the topics interesting, not the way around, and that's worth checking out.
Take care brother,
Solo - Sweden
Reminds me of the Flash Gordon movie scenario, where Ming would test developping civilizations by inflicting large sale weather and geological disasters on them. Those who declared those disasters to have natural causes were deemed too primitive to represent a danger and werre spared, while those who recognized the action of a hostile intelligence in them were destroyed utterly.
No, he only said that to dispirit Dr. Zargon. He meant to play with Earth before destroying it. And of course anyone should be able to figure out that "hot hail" was unnatural.
My question about the Dark Forest Hypothesis has always been about information procurement. If everyone is keeping silent, hiding, sweeping their tracks for fear of a big all-destroying baddie, how did such secluded intelligences come to learn about this state of affairs if everyone was silent and hiding in the first place? If it were true right now, what kind of confirmation can we hope to get, short of meeting face-to-face with said baddie.
Because they have hunted in the past , to arrive at the top of your food chain you remove the competition.
Sick channel, I love it
Great video as always john. I’ve been wondering since you mentioned a while back, could you please share any photos/ videos of you skating or skateboard adjacent? At the very least give some details about your life as a skateboarder ❤
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
-Arthur C. Clarke
That's said over and over to the point of a mantra, but I don't agree with it.
The only thing we can be pretty sure of is that aliens aren't merely rare. If they were, they'd have been sure to come here, to the other weird place. They either don't exist at all, or there are so many of them that Earth just isn't that interesting. The "Earth is boring" hypothesis sure doesn't make us feel good about ourselves, but it's probably the correct answer.
Or it's just impossible with any technology to travel to another life-bearing planet without said life becoming extinct during the long, long voyage
Yeah, IDK about "good," but definitely more comfortable than a lot of the other possibilities.
One of my hunches on this is that while Earth and its humans might be dull, there's other natural features about the star system that are of interest (such as our near-perfect ability to spit out solar eclipses, for the time being. The math and ratios on that are nearly perfect and have been for some time). Basically, we're only of interest to the exo-society equivalent of bird watchers. There's some folks here hanging out in loose orbit around Saturn (for example) but they're only here to monitor probes and eclipse-watch (or something).
Or you simply don't have insight. The Aliens are real and Here. Just do a base study of the UFO topic.
I think it's more like the Earth is the restaurant at the end of the Galaxy that's s only been open for 3 seconds and all the waiters are ready to quit because they haven't gotten a tip yet.
Main problem with trying to find life in distant galaxies, ain't the fact it's not there or not, it's the AGE of the light your seeing or the speed of the signal you send or want to find, and not what is currently "now" in there timeframe. By looking, unless it's very close, your looking at the past, not now relatively.
I think it's kind of a waste of time to look at other galaxies, that are millions of light-years away, while we have 400 billion stars more or less in our galaxy at distances of tens of thousands of light-years at most.
*Happy Halloween John!*
The Dark Forest Hypothesis fills me with existential dread.
Two great series of books.
what an interesting idea, in order for us to be alone it neccessarily means that the galaxy/universe must have been populated once (and they are the cause of the great silence) and since the scale of that kind of domination/catastrophe is unlikely then ergo we are not alone. I think it always just comes back to relative rareness of life, considering the distances involved.
I like using transpermia better than pan.
Pan-anything cosmically seems less likely
-Thank you for all these bedtime stories John
Tabby star:
1: Nanite swarm around a star.
2: Trying to make a simulation/personality matrix around the star to make it into a stable star, gotten very close many times but occasionally fails and starts at beginning.
3: Nanites hold human(tm) civilization that was on the planet.
4: Mood of planet is "early medieval age mysticism" of common trope with magic and stuff.
5: Communicative with humans but requires specific set of beliefs to be talkative.
6: Not interested in expansion, trying to find a personality that has a steady god/player like mood that can be put into a star and used as a "we found god and put it in jar" thing.
7: Humorous, good hearted, intelligent, and quirky civilization.
Great way to start the day
These thumbnails go hard
yay! another JMG video : )
Remorselessly logical dark forest thought experiment masquerading as a novel, "The Killing Star", by the author who had first proposed the possibility of extracting dinosaur DNA from ambered mosquitoes.
My favorite theory is that there's too many stars and planets in the universe for us to be alone because life is the ultimate form of conservation of energy. I don't know how much merit there is to that theory but I like the food for thought.
Until we solve the question of abiogenesis (or until we find another, unique genesis), it’s not possible to speak of “the odds.” The number of planets has not yet been demonstrated to be the conclusive, primary determinant factor.
I'm curious, when we get this tractor beam tech figured out, do you think we could safely tow away the black knight satellite for study, have we ever been close enough to truly observe it or take notes about it do we know anything of its material composition and all of that good stuff we know it's very heavy and it's been here a long time but is that truly all we know about it?
sorry, silly question here, but wouldnt it be remarkably easy for an advanced civilization to mask their presence and any other presence or indicator of life/activity out there in the vastness of space?
One of the potential measures of an advanced civilization is how much energy they use (Kardashev Scale). This will look anomalous from a very long distance. In general, all life modifies its environment as a product of its existence, or to suit itself. This can be as simple as microbes changing the atmospheric chemistry of a planet. If spectroscopy detects a chemistry that is hard to maintain, it means something is constantly replenishing it.
Inside of a black hole yes, or around a extremely warped spacetime. Not easy by any means, the universe works against being hidden lol. But it’s not impossible I’d have to say.
Our sun is actually rare. It is uncommonly "quiet" and stable for a star of its type.
Oh... I'm going to sleep really well tonight, thanks.
One word. INTERESTING!