For sure from a game theory POV that can make sense. It’s a variant on
When the downside of being wrong is ginormous enough, you’ll accept almost any downsides, even big ones, to take the other side of the bet.
Folks have said and agreed upthread that one objection to the “zoo hypothesis” that all aliens are colluding to avoid interfering on Earth is that for the hypothesis to be true it requires an unrealistic amount of unanimity across space and time.
The “they’re all hiding from everyone else (and incidentally from us)” hypothesis has the same shortcoming. It doesn’t take very many non-hiders to spoil the surprise.
I thought I knew what series you were talking about, but only knew the name of the first book. Didn’t even realize that I namechecked the second novel.
I can’t tell, was the book named after the theory, or was the theory named after the book?
I can’t imagine the concept wasn’t thought of before hand, but maybe not with as descriptive a name.
I don’t know that I disagree that hiding would be the most effective strategy, but that assumes that we think that such a thing is possible.
As I said, we’ve already been pretty careless, and we can’t hide the evidence we’ve already sent out. So, it makes sense that rather than try hide here on Earth, we either bulk up to try to defend ourselves from any threat, or we run, and find places that we can hide.
If there is lots of intelligent life out there, I can’t imagine we are the first to find ourselves in that position.
I’m recalling an explanation by IIRC @Stranger_On_A_Train a few years ago that our EMR emissions are simply not a problem and almost certainly never will be.
Despite the jokes about I Love Lucy being now 70LY away and still spreading fast, the facts as I recall him explaining it was that the actual intensity would be down below the thermal noise of the universe well before it got to Alpha Centauri, much less any farther. The point being that no antenna or collector, no matter how huge, and no signal processing system, no matter how advanced, could pick those signals out of the noise of the universe in general at that distance. More simply, at even that trivial handful of lightyears’ distance they will have faded away to quantum noise and nothing more.
And oddly enough, the more advanced our communications tech, the closer our leaking signals come to being pure noise. A low frequency Morse code radio a la the Titanic’s SOS signal are very, very unnatural looking. The better we get at cramming more, and more thoroughly encrypted, data into a given block of bandwidth and time, the more it comes to resemble pure noise.
Such that we did spew out a bunch of coherent signals from, say, 1900 to say, 1970, but since then a much larger percentage of our every increasing total EMR output is much harder to detect, both as a matter of lower transmitted power, better antennas wasting less of the signal power uselessly out towards space, and as a matter of the actual information more closely resembling random noise as we’ve gotten better at cramming more info onto less signal.
To the point that if we want our SETI project to ever find anything advanced, we ought to be looking closely at the noise, not trying to find a Wow! signal in it.
Not sure that follows, unless all the non-hiders are beneficent and confident that the other one they see are. All it takes is one technologically advanced non-hider civilization in a region deciding that they had better destroy before they are destroyed …
I think I remember him making that claim as well. I do not agree that it is correct. The “noise” of the universe is in many frequencies, “I love Lucy” is on a single one. We can detect some pretty low powered signals, the Voyager signal is put out by a few dozen watts from billions of miles away, and is picked up by relatively small (compared to the sorts of space based technology we could have) antena. It’s all about signal processing.
It would be like saying that we can’t detect an FM signal that comes in at fractions of a milliwatt per meter over the sun with is over a thousand watts per meter. And we do that with a little handheld piece of kit that cost a couple dollars.
Some of it yes. Communications are becoming more and more like noise. Things like radar installations, or ILR landing broadcast stations, are much more coherent.
Yeah, I include all life that has been on Earth that has not hid its presence, all the way back.
Good point, but not real relevant to what I meant. Which I didn’t say as well as I might have, so your response is certainly understandable.
My thought was that if there are some non-hiders out there, for whatever combo of reasons make sense to them, then pretty quickly we’d see them. And thereby know that they exist. Said another way, that the galaxy appears empty to us means they’re all hiding; there are no non-hiders. Which IMO has the same unanimity problem as the “zoo”.
Maybe hiding is a more self-interested form of unanimity than is zoo-ing, and so is more plausibly unanimous. But that veers close to anthropomorphising the various aliens’ motivations to match our narrow ideas of self-interest uber alles.
To be sure it’s early days yet in our own remote “exploration” of the galaxy using local instruments on and near the Earth. So there may well be non-hiders nearby that we haven’t spotted. Yet.
Here’s the problem. You’re assuming multiple civilizations are developing within the timescale of civilization. The timescale of civilization is, if we are being generous, the amount of time it takes to go from apes just leaving the trees and taking tools to a new level all the way to space travel. That’s around 2 million years, in our case. Interstellar travel may take longer, but if it will ever happen for us, it will be in thousands or tens of thousands of years, not millions. Or it won’t happen at all.
Compare that to the entire other history of life. Remember that we aren’t the apex of a pyramid that evolution was always building towards. We just happened to be successful. At any other point in time, a different clade entirely could have evolved down this path. Alternatively, life could have gone on another billion years until finally dying out without intelligence like ours that leads to space travel ever evolving.
And then consider how long our planet was around before it was ready for life. The other planets in our solar system apparently never were, at least as far as we know so far. Consider that there were solar systems much like our own billions of years before our sun formed.
So the odds that multiple species will happen to reach the stage of interplanetary flight within the same three million years are astronomically tiny.
That means that if there is intelligent interplanetary life out there near us, it has almost certainly been intelligent and interplanetary for tens of millions of years AT LEAST.
In another thread, someone mentioned whether it was odd that all the vaccines were released so near each other, and it was explained that it wasn’t, because they were all going through roughly the same process and started at roughly the same time, and one’s experience affected the other’s supply chains.
Species reaching sentience on different planets is nothing like that. They could have started the process billions of years apart.
It bears repeating that Voyager 1, as of today, is only ~0.002413 light-years from Earth. And because the intensity of radio signals is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, I have to take Stranger_On_A_Train’s side here, any terrestrial television signals we’ve sent out will have faded to be indistinguishable from background noise, long before they reach Alpha Centauri.
So, alpha centauri is about 1945 times further than Voyager, which means that a signal would be around 2.3E-7 times the strength, or about 4 million times weaker. So, if you have a collecting surface a few million times larger, something a couple hundred kilometers in diameter, you could pick up Voyager from alpha centauri.
Keep in mind that the square cubed law works both ways. You have to double the distance in order to quarter the power. This is true when it’s a mile, a billion miles, or a light year. So, Alpha Centauri, while nearly 2000 times further away, is only a bit less than 11 doublings further away. Distance = 2^~11, power=.25^~11.
Not only are the signals that Earth sends out much stronger than Voyager’s transmissions, but television signals are not the only things that we have sent out. Radar is much more powerful and directed. We have things like Eglin AFB Site C-6 - Wikipedia, which can transmit 32 megawatts. Something like that would only need an antenna a few times larger than the deep space communications antennas we use to pick up Voyager to be picked up several light years out.
There really is no such thing as “fading to be indistinguishable from noise.” there is just how good your resolution is. If it were true that things could fade away that way, we wouldn’t be able to see galaxies billions of light years away. It is true that we need to point a telescope right at them, and if we just let it be combined with the ambient noise, then it would be washed out, but that’s why we point radio telescopes at things, rather than just stick up an antenna and see what we get.
Let me ask you, if we sent a probe out to Centauri, are you saying that it would be impossible for it to transmit a signal that we could hear? Would it be impossible for us to transmit a signal that it could hear?
Sure, we can construct a radio transmitter array on Earth large enough to transmit a signal legible to probes as far out as Alpha Centauri. But for the probe to send a legible signal back to us, I think that is impossible due to practical considerations of size and fuel required for such a trip.
Good luck turning the Earth into a galaxy-sized radio transmitter.
Another possibility to consider of course is that technologically advanced civilization is an evolutionary dead end, consistently and convergently destroying itself in what is on the time scales under consideration not even a blink, and well before interstellar travel. Given the magnitude of risk of an existential level we have created even at this relatively primitive point on the yardstick, such a conclusion does not seem far fetched.
I’ve just realized another, more fundamental issue with the hiding hypothesis.
Let’s say a naive species beams messages deliberately out into space (as humans are doing), or sends probes or whatever, and these signals are what enables the Ur Quan, or whoever, to come and kill that species.
The question then is: what do they do about the signals? Because, not only is it an unnecessary expense to track down every probe / beacon / whatever, it’s counter productive: the existence of those signals could make other species respond and so reveal themselves.
A deathly dangerous galaxy should be noisier than a benign one.
It kind of is though, because humans are so close right now.
Humans are among the most aggressive of primates and we recently had two world wars, including using nuclear weapons against each other, and we’ve never known full peace.
And yet we’re right on the cusp of sending our junk around the galaxy.
Regardless of whether we blow ourselves up before then, the implication is surely that it’s not that hard, and a species doesn’t need to be that peaceful, to pass this particular filter.
Sending a bit of junk into space for a century or two is not so noticeable across the expanse of space and time at the scale we are talking about. And even if something flew by us we would only wonder if it a strange very thin rock or an ancient alien artifact.
It’s not just Voyager I we’re talking about here though. But anyway, forget the probes for a minute; the argument is primarily about signals.
If signals are a way that the Big Bad finds and destroys fledgling species, then, when they’ve accomplished their goal, they are not going to shut down such broadcasts. Far from it – they’d rebroadcast them, to try to draw out other civilizations.
So, for this reason, a dangerous galaxy should be a noisy one.
One counter argument to this of course is that the Big Bad may not wish to potentially draw attention to themselves. But, this hypothetical species must already consider themselves the biggest swinging dick in the galaxy to be engaging in genocide – nothing is going to put a bigger target on a species’ back than demonstrating that they are an aggressive, genociding threat.
Which of course leads to another serious issue with the hiding hypothesis
From the game theory POV, it doesn’t make sense for a mere big fish to go genocidin’. Why go stomp out a species that is no threat to you right now, when that very action might draw the attention of a bigger fish species that very much is a threat?
Only a species with a strong conviction that they are the top fish species can risk going genocidin’.
But…why would a species with such a conviction passively wait for species to reveal themselves?
Why wouldn’t they just send out millions of probes in every direction to actively find all the sentient species?
So following the game theory through, it doesn’t make sense that a species calling out “Hello!” will be the thing that gets them killed. Of course, one could always argue that our strategic understanding is incomplete. But bear in mind, it was only our strategic understanding that made us consider this threat in the first place.
Yup. No one knows how big the other fish are or will be by contact.
Of course some strong convictions of superiority are just unfounded arrogance … delusional. Okay more than some.
Old novelty song. Sheldon, the 222nd fastest gun in the West, always looking for a number 223.
And another option being that your own civilization has no option of completely hiding, your own home is predicted to disaster or already has. Which would be the case for some, likely most often self inflicted, but could be of natural origin in the home star system.
Sure. But it doesn’t matter in this context whether their conviction is correct.
Either they believe that they are the top fish, or they don’t. Either way, a policy of “keep a low profile + obliterate weaker / comparable species” doesn’t make sense.
But believe and are not is a short duration, destroyed when they they attack what they perceive as a weak neighbor trying to hide that in fact is indeed trying to hide, but not from puddly them, who they swat down without a trace on approach.
Transmissions from them go radio silent very quickly. Dark debris floats off into the void.
The idea that civs are hiding is not because there is a genocidal civilization, it is because they are worried that there may be one.
But, as I said, in our case, it’s probably too late to hide, and I would assume that many other civs on our path would find themselves in the same situation. So, rather than hide, if we are worried about this, then we either need to bulk up our defenses so that we can take on these genocidal maniacs, spread our population out so that it can’t be taken out in one hit, or we need to go find somewhere where we can hide.
This may explain why it’s quiet, maybe. We are currently around a fairly large, somewhat uncommon, bright star, our planet and solar system stand out.
If we want to hide, we need to go find a red dwarf, the smaller the better. If civs are running in fear, it explains why the haven’t come here, our solar system would be a terrible place to try to lay low.
