China's FAST telescope could detect self-replicating alien probes:
One of the most challenging questions to answer when confronting the Fermi paradox is why exponentially scaling technologies haven't taken over the universe by now. Commonly known as von Neumann probes, the idea of a self-replicating swarm of extraterrestrial robots has been a staple of science fiction for decades. But so far, there has never been any evidence of their existence outside the realm of fiction. That might be because we haven't spent a lot of time looking for them—and that could potentially change with the new Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST). According to some recent calculations, the massive new observational platform might be able to detect swarms of von Neumann probes relatively far away from the sun.
Those calculations, carried out by Dr. Zaza Osmanov of the Free University of Tbilisi in Georgia, showed that von Neuman probe swarms for highly advanced civilizations could be visible in the radio spectral band that is the focal point of FAST. To help in the search, Dr. Osmanov used two frameworks to bound the potential solution. The first was the idea of Kardashev civilizations, while the other is estimates of the thermal and electromagnetic emissions profiles of any such swarm.
The Kardashev scale is a well-understood concept in science speculation—it focuses on a civilization's overall energy use, with different milestones (Type I, Type II, or Type III) correlating with the utilization of the entire energy output of a planet, a star, and a galaxy respectively. Currently, human civilization is thought to be around a .75 on the Kardashev scale.
[...] When a civilization has that much time to work on new technologies, it most likely will have developed the ability to create self-replicating machines, like a von Neumann probe, as part of that technological development process. Once that technological cat is out of the bag, it is almost impossible to put it back in. If even one civilization released them upon the galaxy, the self-replicators would likely begin to expand to every available resource, focusing solely on their own reproduction.
According to Dr. Osmanov, though, we would at least be able to see any such path of destruction coming. Like all imperfect systems, those self-replicating machines would emit some form of radiation, which, after some simplifying assumptions, Dr. Osmanov calculates should be visible in the radio spectrum. Specifically, it would fall right in the middle of the spectrum that FAST is designed to pick up.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @06:10PM (2 children)
Oh, absolutely most likely. That is burned into the psyche of all life: thou shall create self-replicating machines.
By the way, it's a lesser-known fact of Buddhism that to achieve the end of suffering, what everyone knows as the Noble Eightfold Path (Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration) was really the Noble Ninefold Path (Right Autonomous Self-Replication), but eight was much easier to market than nine, so they dropped that last one.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday October 21 2021, @06:40PM
I am sure that ones a swarm is detected, a pest extermination fleet is launched. Therefore they are either all dead or hiding well beyond our level of detection.
BTW, Ian Banks, where I got the idea from, called it "smart matter outbreak". Every civilization duty was to exterminate it asap.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday October 21 2021, @09:05PM
>That is burned into the psyche of all life: thou shall create self-replicating machines.
Since life *is* a self-replicating machine, your sarcastic comment is ironically true.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday October 21 2021, @06:35PM (4 children)
In the event that you're a Christian and believe in God and that Angels exist, you believe in Aliens, too.
"Rodents of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist."
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:13PM
Or just about any other religion. Don't you live in the US? Do you know freedom of religion is a constitutional right?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday October 22 2021, @01:39AM (1 child)
If rodents exist, and aren't all the same size, then rodents of unusual size must almost certainly exist. My first thought was of the capybara, or perhaps the giant rat of Sumatra, but kangaroo mice would also fit that description.
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(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday October 22 2021, @01:25PM
Yep, there are some pretty big "rodents". The Capybara is the largest existent. https://petkeen.com/largest-rodents-in-world/ [petkeen.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Funny) by mcgrew on Friday October 22 2021, @07:08PM
Of course aliens exist! Hell, every single person on the ISS is an alien. I was an alien when I was stationed in Thailand.
https://www.mcgrewbooks.com/info/Patty%20discussing%20the%20election%20with%20illegal%20aliens.JPG [mcgrewbooks.com]
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @07:38PM
Stargate defeated them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1ApwdSu4Wg [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by darkfeline on Thursday October 21 2021, @07:53PM (2 children)
That's why you always test your configs before deploying to prod.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:23PM (1 child)
Hah, production is updated with newest untested, theoretical improvements on Friday at 3pm and gloves drop immediately after reboot is commanded, laptop slammed closed and phone turned off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:40PM
Just like sending email - spell check, accept all, send.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:19PM (3 children)
Eh, why? I have to think any civilization that could make these would also include logic to throttle their resource use. I don't need my probes spending all their time making probes, I need them being, ya know, probes. Go here, make X copies, send them to these systems, rinse, repeat. Same with any other use of such a technology. That would be like day one of Self-replicating Engineering 101. I guess we could assume some civilization screwed up and set loose some tech that replicates infinitely, but more than likely they would make that screw up early on, before making them capable of interstellar travel.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:42PM
Yeah, that's the main objection. Certainly not the fact that it's a sci-fi kiddy fantasy. Grow the fuck up, idiots, you're the reason we can't all have a pink pony unicorn.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Thursday October 21 2021, @09:34PM (1 child)
Because there's no such thing as perfection, and any imperfect self-replication means evolution, which inherently selects for more effective reproduction strategies?
After all, self-replicating probes are relatively useless - not good for much except satisfying your curiosity about things you'll never see for yourself. If you've master self-replicating hardware, then you're almost certainly going to also turn it to industrial applications, intentionally letting it devour every useless thing in your solar system to turn it into something valuable.
Now, one would hope that the threat posed by self-replicating machines is sufficiently obvious to any thinking being capable of making one, that some really robust safeguards would be put in place. But nothing is perfect, and unless they were inconveniently draconian those safeguards would likely have to survive the eventual death of the creating civilization, followed by millions of years of unsupervised operation. And all it takes is one replicator getting the wrong bit(s) flipped by a cosmic ray in the "perfect copy verification" routines to start things evolving.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Friday October 22 2021, @12:43PM
We are talking about machines, not biology. It's not like DNA, with a built-in mechanism primed for mutations. A machine can perfectly replicate digital code. Even bit-flipped code can be detected and dealt with with ease.
No. If they infinitely replicate, then they are not doing anything useful for me except driving their own value down. I need to them to do work for me, not robo-fuck themselves silly.
If any civilization makes this mistake, they will likely make it early on and not when they have given the replicating machines interstellar capabilities. They would wipe themselves out and leave their planet, maybe solar system devoid of life. It's not like a machine is going to randomly create a interstellar drive on its own. Again, they are machines not biological creatures. Their ability to "mutate" would be very limited at best.
We here, today, know how to protect against this. Anyone with the ability to create these has almost certainly developed error correction technology, most likely beyond our own capability today.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday October 21 2021, @09:03PM (4 children)
A self replicating probe has an energy budget. That budget is going to be aimed at a) finding new resources, b) using those resources to satisfy it's mission; and c) making goodies out of found stuff that leads to A and B.
A self replicating probe is not going to waste energy making a signal detectable from a few light years away.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @09:09PM (3 children)
There are so many you can see their heat
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @09:24PM (2 children)
> There are
so manynone you can't see their heat dumbassFTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @09:28PM (1 child)
Grammar and punctuation are your friends.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 22 2021, @08:40AM
"Grammar and, punctuation is your friends' not my."
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday October 21 2021, @09:49PM (5 children)
Kardashev scale is flawed, by its fixation on growth and sheer energy consumption.
Both concepts are derived from the model of humanity of the relevant epoch, obvious anthropocentrism.
True advanced civilization are well-balanced and careful to not destroy the parts of universes callously.
It's about structure.
The more advanced entity is, the less rough energy it needs to sustain its information processes, rendering it less observable by brute force science.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday October 22 2021, @01:45AM (4 children)
Unfortunately (for that argument), things don't scale that way. Transistors are a lot more efficient than vacuum tubes, and they can be a lot more durable, but this just means that a lot more of them get used. One can reasonably argue that they do a better job and are more powerful, but this just means that they get used for lots more jobs, so the total energy use is higher. An IBM 7090 used a lot more power than a laptop, but there are enough more laptops that in aggregate they use more energy and resources.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday October 22 2021, @07:17PM (2 children)
My last TV was a 40 inch flat tube. It weighed 215 pounds and used 250 watts of electricity. My current TV weighs maybe thirty pounds and uses fifteen watts.
A sixty watt incandescent bulb like was used for over a century is the same brightness as a seven watt LED. When I was renting this place the landlord had a new furnace installed, and my heat bills were cut in half.
Your post assumes everyone wants an unlimited number of TVs, light bulbs, furnaces (how many does your house need?), and computers. Ten years ago almost every house had a computer, today they have smartphones instead. Innovation Nation claims that it costs less than a dollar to charge your phone, compare that to ENIAC.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday October 22 2021, @11:27PM (1 child)
There are a lot more cell phones than there were ENIACs. Each single one is less resource consumptive, but in aggregate that's not true. You can argue around "They aren't doing the same thing" and I'll agree, but that's not the current point.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday October 25 2021, @06:48PM
ENIAC had 18,000 vacuum tubes, each one drawing at least 40 watts of power. Vacuum tubes are like incandescent light bulbs. Your phone, however, costs less than a dollar to keep charged all year. And those incandescent bulbs? I have the same number of LED bulbs that I used to have incandescents. And phones are doing the same thing as ENIAC, plus being a phone and camera and being far more powerful than all of NASA's IT when men walked on the moon.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 23 2021, @09:05AM
This is something that was already observed with the advent of steam power where more efficient steam engines caused an increase in coal demand. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @10:06PM (1 child)
Plant sentient life in a life supporting environment.
It self learns until it becomes space faring,. Or exhausts it's resources with unproductive effort.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday October 22 2021, @01:47AM
Unless your definition of "sentient" incldues bacteria and archaea, then that arguement appears false. (But we still don't know just how bacteria and archaea got started, so if you include them, then "maybe".)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 22 2021, @02:30AM (1 child)
How far did they have to stretch it to cram Spherical in there and drop the Radio. I think it is much more likely to be parabolic than spherical, but I guess F.A.P.T. was as much of a no-go as F.A.R.T.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 22 2021, @04:01AM
Spherical design removes the problems with pointing. With a parabolic reflector, you need to move the whole parabola to point, whereas you don't need to with spherical. Therefore, you can fix your spherical design to the ground.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday October 22 2021, @07:04PM
There is no paradox. The universe had to be old enough and had enough supernovas to produce almost all of the elements, on top of them becoming planets, moons, and other space objects. It could be that there are hundreds of civilizations in our galaxy but none are any more advanced than us. If so, it will be a long time before we find each other. Forget about other galaxies, they could already have Dyson spheres but we would never know it.
It could be that abiogenesis takes an exact set of circumstances for it to happen. There is no known planet besides Earth, for example, that can have solar and lunar eclipses; the sizes and distances of the moon and sun are extremely unlikely. There may be other things in this world that are only here as well. Again, eclipses and life could be common, just not in our galaxy. Our planet could actually be another freak of nature.
Life is probably common in the universe, but we know so little about the universe it could be right under our noses without our being able to see it.
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