Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell)

Yeah, and often people's solution to the flood is to just create a bubble of sources they like and trust, usually a particular news site or youtube channel or podcast, and stick to that as their main source. And you can only hope they are good ones.

And as for good sources, that is not all that clear cut either. Is Wikipedia a reliable source? Many treat it as such, but anyone can edit it, and while it usually gets quickly corrected, it can be hard to know when that is. Is Ars Technica a reliable source? I'd say yes, but even they can fall victim to clickbait and bias at times.

Look at the sources Wikipedia cites, that’s easy enough.

Edited by fredhot16 on Dec 8th 2021 at 12:55:33 PM

And yet every teacher and professor I've ever known warns people to not trust Wikipedia.

Weird, I’ve been hearing that Wikipedia is becoming a more reputable source for schools.

It’s not like Wikipedia doesn’t have a system that notes things like “no source” or “seems biased”. Anybody can edit...but the contributions don’t just get waved past the line.

In English, maybe. Wikipedia in other languages can be a lot shakier.

One thing I've noticed in particular on Dutch Wikipedia is that as a rule, articles in Dutch are always a lot shorter than the same articles in English. Except when it is a specifically Dutch subject, then it's the reverse. That tells me that non-English Wikipedia isn't getting the same sort of care, attention, and dedication as English Wikipedia.

And Wikipedia has its own biases. The notability bias is a very notable one, which tends to favour English works and works popular in the Anglosphere over non-English works and those not familiar to English audiences.

And then there is the problem of writing style. Every article is written as if the audience is a cutting edge scholar on that specific subject. Pages on science and maths are particularly prone to this. Try reading a Wikipedia page on any maths subject, and you'll get lost very quickly.

Edited by Redmess on Dec 8th 2021 at 10:10:03 AM

Cough.

This seems to be going in territory beyond it being a reputable source, which was the initial contention.

Well, there's reputable, and there's useful. A source that is so technically written that non-experts can't make much of it isn't worth much as a source.

I'd argue that depends on what you're trying to research, Wikipedia does provide links to specific words if you want to learn more about those and if Wikipedia itself is somehow too dense, a quick Google search

It's a basic rule with research: you never stick to one source. Wikipedia is good enough for a basic glance but you need to stretch your internet legs out to get more in-depth information.

But what if you are immersed in a group of people who fervently believe that scientists are frauds, that Wikipedia is an agent of disinformation, that "mainstream media" is "fake news"? How do you go from there to real knowledge?

Yes, and what's more, how do you realize you are in such a group in the first place, once you're in there?

Kurzgesagt explains the "dark forest" solution to the Fermi paradox, in which civilizations would be so uncertain about other civilizations and their threat level that they would reach the conclusion that they should strike first before the other gets a chance to.

One way they could do this is with relativistic missiles, which are small missiles propelled at nearly the speed of light, which would be pretty much impossible to defend against, and even one could destroy pretty much any inhabited planet.

The "dark forest" hypothesis has been known for decades and discussed ad nauseam in various circles. It has similar problems to the "ancestor simulation" hypothesis in that it's difficult to establish any conditions under which it could be conclusively proven. What's the observable difference between a galaxy with no intelligent aliens and a galaxy in which all the intelligent aliens are hiding in their home systems, desperately hoping not to be noticed?

That said, it's solvable in principle if we gain the ability to travel to other stars, at which point we could investigate their planets and conclusively prove that they do or do not harbor life. It's also technically a "soft filter" in that it's based in psychology and assumes that all intelligent species would share this specific trait. All it takes is one to decide to fly around yelling, "Hey, we're here!" to break the silence.

If we want to be technical about it, the hypothetical fact of us investigating other solar systems to find potential aliens in a way that might reveal ourselves to them would disprove one of the tenets of the "dark forest" hypothesis: that no species would do such a thing.

Relatedly, there is the "cosmic zoo" hypothesis in which there are aliens all over the place but they've specifically decided not to reveal themselves to puny civilizations like ours that aren't ready to know about them. Slightly more disturbing is the "Reapers" hypothesis (I just made that term up; I don't know if it has an official name) in which a super-advanced civilization exists that maintains absolute silence and wipes out anyone else who figures out interstellar travel.

All of these would result in an apparently silent universe until it very suddenly isn't, and that wouldn't necessarily be to our benefit.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 15th 2021 at 7:00:58 AM

That's what Remembrance of Earth's Past goes for, and probably why the Dark Forest idea's blown up over the last few years.

Doesn’t Dark Forest have an obvious additional requirement that nobody has developed either the technology to find species which are hiding/minimally developed (like humanity) or the technology to keep their home planet hidden while revealing their species existence?

Put simply, nobody has space nuked us yet, which means that either nobody out there wants to or if they do their detection abilities are such that they can’t see us.

Plus, I don’t see what stops a theoretical interstellar species from finding a solar system other than their home one and then setting up a big “Hello, can we be friends?” sign there? If somebody then promptly attacks that system it’s not a catastrophic loss the way an attack upon their home system would be.

Edited by Silasw on Dec 15th 2021 at 8:50:21 PM

That's an excellent solution to the Dark Forest problem. Use proxy planets for first contact.

Hell, depending on the methods specie would use for attacks you could quickly end up in a MAD situation. If an interstellar attack is noisy enough to reveal the system it was launched from you’d have a massive reason not to attack somebody, as if what you’ve found is a proxy system you’ve both pissed another species off and revealed where you live.

The Dark Forest idea also I find tends to underestimate technosignitures. You'll find pollution way before you find the planet it's coming from. Unusual heat detection, loss or abundance of ultraviolet in the spectrum, signs of stars being tapped for power, there's just no such thing as stealth in space.

Even a space battle lightyears off would be pretty easy to see from a distance with a decent radio telescope. Heck, the reason why the Fermi Paradox is as solid as it is is because space is so generally quiet, even the earliest civilizations creeping through the stars could be detected pretty quickly in galactic time in our local galaxy.

Anything that's not advanced enough to effect the local solar system it came from likely wouldn't be much of a threat anyway. At least not before we ourselves would be ready.

And that's to say nothing of conservation of energy. If a civilization did know others were out there, the costs of funding, building, and traveling anywhere to start a war would bankrupt entire planets for the sake of something lightyears off that wouldn't improve the local situation.

I have an idea for a short story about the Dark Forest scenario: An alien civilization follows the logic that they have to destroy any other form of intelligent life wherever they find it and try firing missiles at relativistic speeds to destroy them... and then seem to keep finding more and more and more of them they have to destroy. Their society starts to center itself around the idea of constant war of extermination as things like art and quality of life fall by the wayside... and then it turns out that They've been shooting at decoy systems the whole time. The ones who have been making those decoys show up in their home system, and turn out to be a multi-species coalition who do not approve of Dark Forest thinking.

While we will almost certainly be able to spot potentially life-bearing planets around nearby stars in the next decade or so given ideal conditions, it's a big leap from that to being able to spot technological, spacefaring civilizations. Our own technology wouldn't be able to detect a civilization like ours from more than a few light-years away unless we sent a directed radio signal. Our "radio bubble" is far too weak to be picked up, never mind decoded, by anything less than a planet-sized observatory... preferably bigger.

The composition of our atmosphere would certainly be a dead giveaway that we've been polluting it, but to pull off a detection of a planet our size at our orbital distance via transit spectrography would be a fairly freak event. Within a few decades we should have surveyed enough local systems that we can figure out which potentially habitable planets are in the proper position to see us themselves, or at least be able to make a good statistical guess.

If we get really big and start reaching for Type 2 status, we might decide to build megastructures, like Dyson swarms, that would significantly alter the light emitted from the Sun and thus make ourselves visible to our neighbors. This would shine a beacon into the cosmos saying "Big britches species here!" We might get some interesting visitors.

The point is that civilizations who don't deliberately call attention to themselves are unlikely to be detected by other civilizations at equivalent technology levels. Of course, if there are more advanced ones out there, they could detect us without us ever seeing them. Having done so, if they are inclined to wipe out any potential competition before it gets started, we're just plain toast.

The fact that we have survived this long is indicative of three primary possibilities:

1. Advanced civilizations do not obliterate their neighbors (or something prevents them from doing so).
2. There are no advanced civilizations with the ability to detect us within a suitable distance and/or at a suitable alignment with our ecliptic.
3. It is so hard to travel between solar systems (including via automated craft) that nobody has achieved it in the history of our galaxy, at least not within the last million years or so.

There's a remote fourth possibility that the ancestor simulation, Boltzmann brain, or similar hypotheses are correct and what we are seeing is not "real". I dismiss this out of hand because it's not falsifiable.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 15th 2021 at 10:41:25 AM

Actually, the stealth is provided by the sheer scale of the universe. It's hard to be detected when your opponent doesn't even know which direction to look for you. It's like getting lost in a massive crowd. You don't need a disguise when you can just blend into the masses.

Oh, look, it's another apocalyptic scenario: What if the Moon Crashes into Earth? - Real Physics (Mostly)

The title is a little misleading. They aren't crashing the Moon directly into the Earth but instead letting it spiral in ever closer over the course of a year via magic. Literal magic, since there is no conceivable feat of technology that could achieve this within current physics. In this concept, something is applying thrust to reduce the Moon's orbital energy gradually over time so its orbit remains mostly circular.

That said, there's no need for the Moon to hit the Earth to cause horrific destruction. Merely being half as far away would cause the tides to quadruple and destroy most of our civilization. As it gets ever closer, the tides rise up to thirty-plus meters and the oceans literally run out of water to power them, so the crust starts flexing and earthquakes and volcanoes take over the destruction of the biosphere.

Once it reaches geostationary orbit, a giant Moon hangs, fixed in the sky, holding up a massive flood beneath it while the opposite side of the Earth sees the water withdraw into the depths. Getting closer, the tides reverse, sweeping across the Earth faster and faster in the opposite direction before the Moon reaches the Roche limit and breaks up, forming spectacular rings.

At that point, the tides and volcanoes stop and things return to "normal". If we're lucky, the debris doesn't rain down so quickly that it superheats the atmosphere and boils all the water off of the surface. If it does, everyone is dead, the end. If it doesn't, the survivors might eventually rebuild civilization with a substantially more amazing view than before.

Someone should really make a movie about this idea.

Not mentioned in the video: that kind of ring system around the Earth, while short-lived on astronomical scales, would cut off any possibility of space travel for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. Think Kessler syndrome, but a million times worse.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 8th 2022 at 10:42:30 AM

Sounds like a Roland Emerich movie in the making.

Because it is.

Edited by Demongodofchaos2 on Feb 8th 2022 at 3:06:14 PM

That's the joke.

"that kind of ring system around the Earth, while short-lived on astronomical scales, would cut off any possibility of space travel for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. Think Kessler syndrome, but a million times worse."

Is it really, though? Since the rings would stay fixed to the equator, would it still be possible to avoid them with higher inclined trajectorys? The main problem with Kessler Syndrome from what I understand is that, with so many orbiting satellites and junk on various inclinations, it would literately coat the entire Earth in debris. The rings look rather tame by comparison.

I mean, Cassini exploited an opening in Saturn's rings to get closer, so I would hardly call it a "permanent barrier".

Edited by DivineFlame100 on Feb 9th 2022 at 2:44:05 AM