What do they “want?”
I think a lot about what kind of material and real estate would be of interest to an interstellar intelligence. The old notions of seeking ordinary resources or some kind of interaction with primitive species seems hard to believe. The universe is a wealth of resources and there is nothing particularly unusual chemically about a planet like the earth (not necessarily taking into account the presence of higher order life on earth, which we can’t yet speak to the relative rarity of).
One thing that seems certain to me is that whatever the goals of an interstellar species might be, what they would need to store and harness in abundance is energy. Whether one traversed the universe with simple reaction thrust or with the sort of metric engineering required for an inertialess drive, in either case the energy requirements are literally astronomical.
It seems to me that the most valuable pieces of real estate in the local cosmos would be places where energy can be harvested on an astronomical scale for storage in whatever medium was most efficient (stored antimatter would seem to be the gold standard as far as energy storage goes).
So where are the conditions sufficiently extreme so as to allow for the collection of massive amounts of energy? Certainly stars are useful, but most of their energy is emitted over an enormous surface area and short of encircling a star with some kind of incomprehensibly vast structure it seems like a tough place to refuel easily and quickly.
That leaves more exotic locales. Black holes and Neutron stars are relatively small and might allow for back doors in physics that would allow borrowing from the angular momentum or rest mass of these objects to get energy fairly easily. Hawking radiation from a black hole could be the easiest way to collect antimatter, for example.
So maybe the answer to the question ‘where is everybody’ might be triggered by the fact that we are looking in entirely the wrong places. The most extreme phenomena in the galaxy might also be the most highly trafficked.
Posted May 7, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC · edited
I dont think we can really grasp what an alien life form may "want." I mean, we don't understand our own consciousness or that of the plants and animals around us.
That being said, I don't necessarily think our planet or us as a species are as useless as we assume. I mean, Earth has a lot of liquid water which could potentially be a good fuel source for something that has the technology to split hydrogen atoms. Liquid water isn't super common in space. Maybe we are a truck stop for aliens.
I guess what I’m saying is that we shouldn’t so much ask what an alien species would want, so much as ask what they need. What they need is energy. Water is all over the universe and so is molecular hydrogen with useful isotopes in abundance. Liquid water is just a matter of applying a little power to ice, which is microscopic in magnitude compared to the amount of energy it takes to get around.
Its my understanding that naturally occurring liquid water has the highest density of hydrogen atoms for availability. But, we are pretty sure liquid water exists on various moons in our solar system, so I dont know if this is a reasonable explanation. Additionally, I am not an astrophysicist or anything. I read this potential explanation from someone who knows more about the topic than I do, but I have no real way to confirm or assess the truth of it.
I think assessing the wants and needs of potential alien lifeforms requires a whole lot of assumptions. I dont think we can more convincingly argue and alien need over an alien want. Additionally, I dont think it is safer to assume such a being would be more motivated by a need than a want. Humans ignore needs to pursue wants all the time. If you were to try and understand human psychology only though their needs, you would come to some pretty unreliable conclusions. I dont spent time on the internet writing to other people because I need to, I do it because I want to.
Indeed, I think non-need based arguments when it comes to possibly super intelligent entities or networks are fun but probably fruitless. My motivations are literally incomprehensible to my dog, for example. That being said my physical needs are comprehensible to my dog. Whatever the technology available in fact is when it comes to a spacefaring species, I think the energy question is probably the starting point. Whatever the specifics of propulsion or the sustainment of life in whatever form actually are, it’s hard to imagine any of it working without an abundant source of energy and a way to store it. This is a universal principle applicable to everything from bacteria to supercomputers to human society at large. I guess I’m suggesting that the most easily harvested energy in the universe is likely to draw the most universal attention, being an essential component to any system no matter how advanced. (Without resorting to the sort of metaphysical arguments that often plague these discussions I think it’s safe to approach things from some positions of fundemental physics and -in particular- conservation of energy, of charge, of momentum, etc). In other words: energy has to come from somewhere.
I don't really think anyone's physical needs are comprehensible to their dog. I think that is the crux of where we disagree. I seriously doubt a dog has the level of cognition necessary to even begin to process another beings physical needs in anything resembling an actual concept. Consider my 5 year old, He knows that he shouldn't stick his head in a bucket of water and take a deep breath. However, he doesn't know this fact conceptually, he understands it from experience. He doesn't really understand that water in your lungs and trachea obstructs breathing and that you need the breath in order to survive. He doesn't really understand breathing or maintaining a clear airway as a matter of physical necessity. He has held his breath and has choked on water while drinking/ swimming and understands how uncomfortable it its.
So once again, I just dont believe we can reasonably assess the physical necessities of a being or object that we dont actually know anything about. Sure, we can assume, if an alien life is somewhat like us, they might need X, Y, and Z. However, that carries the assumption that they are somewhat like us. Should we assume an extraterrestrial being is somewhat like us? What if they are actually extra-dimensional? What if they aren't even carbon based life forms? What if they are impacted by time differently than we are?
What I am trying to say is that both non-needs based and needs based assessments of an alien being that we know absolutely nothing about are equally fun, but equally fruitless. However, I will concede, if we ever learn some basic details about a potential alien being, you are likely to be right. But again, this is sort of assuming we have the mental ability to even conceptualize such a being's needs. Their needs could be so abstract that we couldn't even grasp it.
Energy and matter are abundant, complexity is rare. What is rare is valuable. Complex life is ... complex.
With all due respect, your flow of logic isn't even really true for humans on earth, let alone for some sort of alien being. Value, for humans for much of human history, is decided by a combination of supply and demand. Your explanation deals with supply but totally ignores demand. You could possess the most rare material in the universe, but if there is no demand for it, it is essentially worthless.
Similarly, neither energy nor matter are really abundant. They seem abundant to us as humans because our demand for energy and matter is so small when compared to the amount of energy and matter that is out there. However, if you consider the emptiness of the universe against the amount of matter and energy in it that we perceive, both energy and matter are strikingly rare. A vast vast vast amount of space actually devoid of matter and energy.
Finally, the complexity of life is something artificial and only used in reference to humanity. As far as we know, we as humans are the most complex life forms in the universe, but that is only because no life of Earth is similar to our complexity by the metrics that we have decided. Obviously there are problems with that logic. For starters, we can not even fathom the maximum level of complexity that is possible in the universe. So, compared to an alien being we may not be even remotely complex. We may be to an alien being what a virus is to us. We can already theorize this in the context of creating a general Artificial Intelligence. If we ever create a general Artificial Intelligence, we can easily theorize that it will very rapidly overcome us in complexity in troubling orders of magnitude.
Additionally, this complexity is only measured by means that we have invented, therefor it is a bit self-fulfilling. How do we measure complexity of a being that has a different relationship with gravity or time? A virus may be less complex than us by every means we measure complexity. However, if a virus were to have an entirely different relationship with consciousness, time, gravity, or any other force in existence, it may have complexities which we simply can not perceive.
If you are capable of faster than light travel then I think that energy should not be a problem. Galactic centers have abundant energy that you could extract assuming that you can get to them easily. Planets are also abundant based on our current knowledge so getting mineral resources should be easy.
You are assuming that the energy resources required by advanced space travel are very large. You may be right but my impression is that UAPs somehow manage to cancel gravity and hence also kinetic mass (by the principle of equivalence), which might require less energy than we imagine. This appears to be a blind spot in our physics thinking and why we find the performance of UAPs so puzzling.
Up to now the only thing that appears to be rare in the universe according to what we know is complex life. They'd be more interested in the Sun than in any planet if they were here for energy; but in that case why bother with the galaxy's arms when you have so much energy in the galactic center. They'd also be interested in Mercury and asteroids if they were here for minerals. Earth is not all that impressive from an energy and minerals perspective. Water should be easy to synthesize by an advanced civilization from oxygen and hydrogen.
Ultimately that's a matter of opinion since I am making certain assumptions about the technology and energy needs of an advanced space-faring civilization. I am aware that this disagrees with Kardashev.
There is one other element to my argument. As far as we know the complexity of advanced life is the result of evolution, but evolution takes a lot of time. It might be possible that evolution can be accelerated, but most likely that requires energy. All indications are that advanced life is rare in this universe when compared to minerals and energy. This is so because it is a negentropic (order-creating) process, and such processes appear to be rare when compared to entropic (disorder-creating) processes.
Let me also point out a hidden assumption in your and Kardashev's argument, namely that advanced civilizations would have very large populations. I doubt that this is the case. I think that such civilizations control their population numbers and that they use some forms of controlled evolution and life-technology merger that involve advanced nanotech. The latter are two other blind spots in our current thinking about what is possible. For the same reasons I think that there is no sharp difference between sufficiently advanced AI and sufficiently advanced intelligence with a life-based substrate.
The presence of complex life seems to be the only thing that makes our planet "special".
I am actually going out of my way to not make assumptions. I have no idea if aliens exist and I have no idea what they may or may not want if they do. Additionally, I am making no assumptions about their technology or their priority.
I think your position would absolutely be sound if humans ever achieved faster than light travel. You are certainly describing us and how we might conceptualize it. However, in dealing with alien lifeforms, we may have to consider who non-carbon based lifeforms might exists or how extra-dimensional beings might exist. I don't think you have to introduce many variables about other beings in order to come up with incredibly different conclusions than yours. I mean, we have no idea what an alien being might want, if they even have the capacity to "want." Additionally, we don't have any idea of what they might consider to be "life" and what they consider to be "complex".