There’s a group of people who are desperate to prove existence of extraterrestrials because then they no longer have to adult and made decisions for themselves.
You see it in religion too. Blind faith so they can abscond responsibility.
I firmly believe it’s all up to us.
Even if there were extraterrestrials, why in the universe would they risk coming here? We got nukes.
bluGill · 2m ago
Forget about why would they - they can't get here. The speed of light is too slow. They can't even detect earth exists much less there is life (dinosaurs). detectable signals won't reach then for a long time if they even can reach them.
spott · 1h ago
Extraterrestrial in this sense is “didn’t come from earth”, not “aliens!”.
j1mr10rd4n · 18m ago
Maybe it was a cobalt spike...
treetalker · 2h ago
Extraterrestrial as in "not of Earthly origin" — not as in space aliens.
moomoo11 · 1h ago
Either way, I really hope that we establish contact with aliens in my lifetime. Hopefully they're chill, and like us lol.
richardw · 43m ago
Which of our leaders do you hope their leaders are like?
this_user · 1h ago
Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species. You don't get to the top of the food chain by being nice, you get there by murdering all of the competition and plundering all of the resources. And if you were trying to be nice, someone else would have just wiped you out.
The big question is if a species can eventually reach some point of collective enlightenment where they leave these primitive impulses behind. But based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic.
0xDEAFBEAD · 1h ago
Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. Aggression leads to infighting; infighting wastes resources on zero-sum conflict.
>based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic.
Which version of Earth culture has a better shot at building e.g. a megastructure for an interstellar beacon: Earth culture during the post-nationalist 90s moment, or Earth culture during the current dysfunctional moment?
"Earlier this year, the White House proposed a nearly 24% cut to NASA's 2026 fiscal year budget, primarily aimed at the organization's fundamental science research. If the cuts come to fruition, they would be the largest in the agency's entire history." https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/1266983866/trump-science-spac...
Telemakhos · 1m ago
> Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation.
In that sense, war is a megaproject. War organized the Manhattan Project, which is still the metaphor we use for any massive scale, sophisticated project. The space race was a cold war endeavor to make ICBMs that weren't obviously ICBMs, and the Soviets were terrified that the Space Shuttle was a nuclear dive-bomber (actually it was for deploying and returning recon satellites) [0]. Cooperation does not necessarily imply peace or post-nationalism: war is strong cooperation on each side of the war, with competition between the two sides. In fact, the cooperation is so strong that actions taken against that cooperation end up being punished as treason much more strenuously than in peace time.
>Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation.
Alternatively, megastructures are only achievable through massive amounts of low wage workers with terrible working conditions.
Consider: Panama canal, most large railroads, Snowy hydro.
As time rolls forward we appear to lose our ability to do large things, and in part that's because we are less and less accepting of risk.
autoexec · 45m ago
There's no reason to think that megastructures are only achievable through slavery, but I think it's fair to say that it's a lot cheaper if you're willing to disregard the humanity of others and abuse them until you get what you want. The alternative is that you pay workers what they're worth and use enough of them that they aren't being overworked, but that eats into profits.
I think we still take plenty of risks, still do big things, and still enslave and abuse a lot of workers. It's increasingly seen for the evil it is, but that hasn't stopped it from happening. I think the biggest reason you don't see as many massive projects these days is because we've already got a ton of infrastructure in place, major technological advances are getting harder to come by as we've covered a lot of the "easy" stuff already, and the emphasis on short term/immediate profits.
When we suddenly need a massive structure to house a major sporting event like the world cup or Olympics where a small number of people are basically certain to make a fortune you'll find we're still perfectly willing to construct it on the backs and corpses of forced labor and migrant workers suffering abuse, only to abandon it afterwards until it's time to build a new one somewhere else.
immibis · 43m ago
I am to my dorsal-most heart muscle cell what society is to me. All my cells mostly cooperate. Certainly they cooperate long enough to build a megaproject called a human, so large-scale cooperation is possible.
But there are also lots of bacteria in the world. Way more than animal cells. And they're doing okay on average.
gausswho · 13m ago
Indeed. Some of those bacteria would love to consume your megproject. As you soon as you lose power to resist, they get a banquet of a lifetime!
jcgrillo · 1h ago
Not advocating for this approach, but maybe a fascist oligopoly will get the job done. Or something entirely stranger like a corporate theocracy. There's plenty of room for aggressive, murderous, backstabby species to achieve incredible things. We have a great existence proof right here on Earth.
EDIT: Maybe even a future culture that reveres aggression and has achieved some success in their warlike ways will look back on the peaceful post nationalist 90s as an age of decadent sloth. It could be that massive sustained conflict actually drives humans to achieve greater technical heights than peace.
alt187 · 12m ago
Bears most likely out-ruthless you, but, uh, I don't sed them building Dyson spheres anytime soon.
Aliens probably aren't this edgy, nihilist caricature. Most likely, they're kind of like us- Curious about us, hoping for the best, but irrationally fearing we're an "highly aggressive apex" or whatever self-absorbed nightmare the less enlightened individuals of their species dreamed.
Seriously, you think anyone is gonna cross 50 light-years to kill a bunch of featherless bipeds and plunder some common rocks?
> Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species.
How can you estimate likelihood of behavior when currently N=0 (or N=1 if you count humans)?
There is no baseline, no control; it's just complete speculation, a roundabout way of saying "this is what I think humans would likely do, therefore, all advanced life forms must also be like this".
willis936 · 44m ago
Projecting behavior onto a phantom is just a venue for reflecting a personal worldview onto something else. "Being short-sighted and selfish worked for the aliens, so it would work here too".
KumaBear · 1h ago
Depends who got to the top first. If the most advanced was peaceful but eliminated threats. I’d assume they could create a collective empire.
Apex ruthless only gets you so far verses a collective.
danparsonson · 1h ago
On the other hand they could still see us as a threat to the collective due to our levels of aggression, and eliminate us to protect themselves.
fny · 30m ago
Here's a related thought experiment for those hoping for interstellar kumbaya:
On planet Jung dwell the Jungians, sapien-like beings who need only a single cup of a rare liquid to live an entire lifetime. For humans, that same cup grants twenty extra years of healthy life.
Human just landed on the planet Jung and discovered the liquid--what happens next?
avar · 23m ago
The "2 sentients 1 cup" thought experiment?
thrance · 23m ago
If your point is to prove that the patterns of domination and conquests that exist here will necessarily exist in the stars too, then I'm afraid your thought experiment is deeply flawed.
If ever we are able to journey through the interstellar medium, we ought to have achieved immortality by then. We'll probably live as deincarnated beings in virtual worlds, free from any desire to grow exponentially, having realized this is deeply unsustainable and pointless once you have mastery over physical reality.
Read Diaspora by Greg Egan, perhaps it can cure you from this simplistic vision of the far future we have inherited from the 50s pop SciFi books.
xfeeefeee · 59m ago
> Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species.
Well we could always be pets. That wouldn't be so bad.
I think you are wrong and the more humanity has become intelligent, the more empathy and love we have displayed. I think it’s a hallmark of intelligence. The most intelligent people I know are the most kind and understanding. It’s the ignorant that are cruel and uncaring.
jclulow · 1h ago
Certainly if they're like us, and travelling to new worlds, they'll be imperialistic and colonial. They'll plant a flag, because we obviously weren't really making use of the planet, not _really_, and attempt to civilise the natives through something between cultural erasure and genocide.
devnullbrain · 1h ago
On Earth, in the grand scheme of things, it took a very short time for colonies to a) diverge politically or b) fail. It's not something that stopped happening (much) because we became more cuddly. It's just boring old economics.
So I think it's unfeasible to maintain a society that rules with an iron fist over interstellar distance and time.
thrance · 33m ago
You have a really bleak and limited view of the far future. Species that have the means to cross interstellar space probably have found ways to alter themselves and removed their need to grow exponentially as they realized it is unsustainable, and are now perfectly content to chill on their homeplanet.
You're thinking of cancer cells with spaceships, not highly advanced beings who have mastered matter and physical reality. I recommend reading Dispora by Greg Egan, it could potentially expand your mind on what the future may actually look like.
artursapek · 43m ago
I think if you develop to that point, you don’t really need to have a competitive scarcity mindset anymore.
Yeul · 20m ago
My thought exactly. The universe has near infinite resources. There is nothing in our solar system that needs conquering.
zoeysmithe · 34m ago
Under a scientific economy like socialism you dont need to be "apex male who exploits the workers under him to get yachts and tax breaks." The workers co-operate and thus the "apex predator" capital owner becomes dismissed the same way our towns and villages in the developed West don't pay fees to warring bands of gangs but instead we've unlocked the Republic and the system of representation and taxes and such via democratic action.
You absolutely can have utopian beings. In fact, I'd argue the greed-based societies get caught in the great filter and if there is a space faring race, its absurdly ethical and fair and, to me, explains the Fermi paradox. They're out there and maybe they see Earth but it would be hugely unethical to intervene here. The proper thing to do would be to only observe us from afar.
If this was a movie or novel maybe the Wow signal was them messing up, or a defector amongst their midst who disagrees with full isolation policies. But most likely it'll end up being something simple. The last good theory I heard was it domestic and was reflected off orbiting space junk, but who knows.
lawlessone · 1h ago
I think we're expecting too much, afaik to detect anything we'd need aliens to be deliberately signaling us(tv, radio it's alien equivalent isn't going to be strong enough ). Or sending out a much much more powerful signal in all directions.
And it has to repeat.
We're expecting aliens to be very committed to doing something we don't do ourselves. We have deliberately sent out powerful signals with things like the Arecibo message but not repeating. And it would have to be repeating for a very long time.
To add, with the rules SETI currently uses nobody would have heard of it as they wouldn't consider a non-repeating signal like it as worth shouting about.
DANmode · 30m ago
We're always listening. Why wouldn't "they"?
TillE · 2h ago
Space aliens are still kinda the best explanation. It's extremely inconclusive, and it's entirely possible that we'll discover some new natural phenomenon to explain it instead, but for now there's not really any known alternative.
recursive · 2h ago
Most things aren't known. The lack of a known alternative is hardly evidence of anything in this domain.
FatalLogic · 1h ago
>but for now there's not really any known alternative
The research in the article does suggest a plausible alternative
djrj477dhsnv · 1h ago
That's like saying God is the best explanation for any newly described natural phenomenon.
amenhotep · 47m ago
How? We don't know gods exist. We know beings with technology and agency living on planets in space exist. There seems nothing at all similar between the two explanations.
fallat · 48m ago
God is an extraterrestial or not? :)
zamalek · 1h ago
It could just as easily be known, or unknown, physics.
ghurtado · 1h ago
Not really.
There are many, many cosmic processes that we don't know the first thing about.
At one point, we didn't know what a pulsar was, and a fair amount of people probably thought it was an alien signal.
Human History is littered with examples of attribution of the unexplained to aliens.
So far, non alien explanations have been found for all of them, except possibly this one.
Does it warrant further study? Absolutely. Is it likely to be aliens? Statistically, no.
cmrdporcupine · 34m ago
Indeed. Human history is riddled with anthropomorphism and people here trying to argue for more of it.
We probably whouldn't even recognize real aliens because we'd be too busy looking for our own reflection in the sky.
lawlessone · 1h ago
There was something a few years ago saying it was likely hydrogen getting lased or something by starlight and emitting the signal.
The recent article on the WOW signal is "Arecibo Wow! II: Revised Properties of the Wow! Signal from Archival Ohio SETI Data" https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10657 by Abel Méndez, Kevin N. Ortiz Ceballos, Jorge I. Zuluaga (and many others)
This is a follow up to a September 2024 paper (the article you link is November 2024)... "Arecibo Wow! I: An Astrophysical Explanation for the Wow! Signal" by Abel Méndez, Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, Jorge I. Zuluaga (just those three).
krapp · 1h ago
Space aliens are also not a known alternative.
Babkock · 42m ago
Wow!
zippo_the_zippo · 1h ago
Quite similar to the "my cat listening to me making 10 grammar mistakes" meme.
Alien: sends SOS after years of studying human communication signals, as a last ditch effort to mark their existence before being wiped out by supernova.
Humans: Look - the sky people said WOW.
immibis · 46m ago
A human wrote WOW on the paper because there was a signal, with no idea what the signal meant or where it came from. It wasn't an attempt to decipher the signal.
autoexec · 58m ago
> Quite similar to the "my cat listening to me making 10 grammar mistakes" meme.
Which meme is that?
bee_rider · 20m ago
I haven’t heard it before, but I just searched it up, it looks like a confused cat with that as the text. The joke is that the person is meowing at the cat, but doesn’t speak cat, so the cat is confused.
The example I found was from 2019.
dmbche · 50m ago
Trips me up too can't find anything related
Edit0: AH! Meowing to your cat and your cat being annoyed at the mistakes in cat speech you're making.
lstodd · 15m ago
haha
my cat does correct me until I get it right lol
XorNot · 40m ago
Which isn't what happened, the WOW signal is just because the person who saw it scribbled wow on the printout and that's the picture we have.
Geee · 34m ago
Be careful when training AI models on unknown signals, or uploading them publicly on the Internet to be picked up into training datasets. It might be an adversarial data poisoning attack, which is designed to bias the model into servicing the attacker.
In this case, a superintelligent digital lifeform might be literally sending itself across space into every direction, and who knows what it does once it lands into a training dataset somewhere and starts deploying itself.
Cheer2171 · 25m ago
Only on HN can the top comment for a post about astronomy from the 1970s be about fucking 2025 era LLM concerns.
rozab · 10m ago
Although this comment is of course silly, this is a theme in Peter Watts' Echopraxia
There’s a group of people who are desperate to prove existence of extraterrestrials because then they no longer have to adult and made decisions for themselves.
You see it in religion too. Blind faith so they can abscond responsibility.
I firmly believe it’s all up to us. Even if there were extraterrestrials, why in the universe would they risk coming here? We got nukes.
The big question is if a species can eventually reach some point of collective enlightenment where they leave these primitive impulses behind. But based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic.
>based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic.
Which version of Earth culture has a better shot at building e.g. a megastructure for an interstellar beacon: Earth culture during the post-nationalist 90s moment, or Earth culture during the current dysfunctional moment?
"Earlier this year, the White House proposed a nearly 24% cut to NASA's 2026 fiscal year budget, primarily aimed at the organization's fundamental science research. If the cuts come to fruition, they would be the largest in the agency's entire history." https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/1266983866/trump-science-spac...
In that sense, war is a megaproject. War organized the Manhattan Project, which is still the metaphor we use for any massive scale, sophisticated project. The space race was a cold war endeavor to make ICBMs that weren't obviously ICBMs, and the Soviets were terrified that the Space Shuttle was a nuclear dive-bomber (actually it was for deploying and returning recon satellites) [0]. Cooperation does not necessarily imply peace or post-nationalism: war is strong cooperation on each side of the war, with competition between the two sides. In fact, the cooperation is so strong that actions taken against that cooperation end up being punished as treason much more strenuously than in peace time.
[0] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3855/1
Alternatively, megastructures are only achievable through massive amounts of low wage workers with terrible working conditions.
Consider: Panama canal, most large railroads, Snowy hydro.
As time rolls forward we appear to lose our ability to do large things, and in part that's because we are less and less accepting of risk.
I think we still take plenty of risks, still do big things, and still enslave and abuse a lot of workers. It's increasingly seen for the evil it is, but that hasn't stopped it from happening. I think the biggest reason you don't see as many massive projects these days is because we've already got a ton of infrastructure in place, major technological advances are getting harder to come by as we've covered a lot of the "easy" stuff already, and the emphasis on short term/immediate profits.
When we suddenly need a massive structure to house a major sporting event like the world cup or Olympics where a small number of people are basically certain to make a fortune you'll find we're still perfectly willing to construct it on the backs and corpses of forced labor and migrant workers suffering abuse, only to abandon it afterwards until it's time to build a new one somewhere else.
But there are also lots of bacteria in the world. Way more than animal cells. And they're doing okay on average.
EDIT: Maybe even a future culture that reveres aggression and has achieved some success in their warlike ways will look back on the peaceful post nationalist 90s as an age of decadent sloth. It could be that massive sustained conflict actually drives humans to achieve greater technical heights than peace.
Aliens probably aren't this edgy, nihilist caricature. Most likely, they're kind of like us- Curious about us, hoping for the best, but irrationally fearing we're an "highly aggressive apex" or whatever self-absorbed nightmare the less enlightened individuals of their species dreamed.
Seriously, you think anyone is gonna cross 50 light-years to kill a bunch of featherless bipeds and plunder some common rocks?
How can you estimate likelihood of behavior when currently N=0 (or N=1 if you count humans)?
There is no baseline, no control; it's just complete speculation, a roundabout way of saying "this is what I think humans would likely do, therefore, all advanced life forms must also be like this".
Apex ruthless only gets you so far verses a collective.
On planet Jung dwell the Jungians, sapien-like beings who need only a single cup of a rare liquid to live an entire lifetime. For humans, that same cup grants twenty extra years of healthy life.
Human just landed on the planet Jung and discovered the liquid--what happens next?
If ever we are able to journey through the interstellar medium, we ought to have achieved immortality by then. We'll probably live as deincarnated beings in virtual worlds, free from any desire to grow exponentially, having realized this is deeply unsustainable and pointless once you have mastery over physical reality.
Read Diaspora by Greg Egan, perhaps it can cure you from this simplistic vision of the far future we have inherited from the 50s pop SciFi books.
Well we could always be pets. That wouldn't be so bad.
Porno for Pyros has you covered
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgPeP_pfjp4
@13,500 BCE
So I think it's unfeasible to maintain a society that rules with an iron fist over interstellar distance and time.
You're thinking of cancer cells with spaceships, not highly advanced beings who have mastered matter and physical reality. I recommend reading Dispora by Greg Egan, it could potentially expand your mind on what the future may actually look like.
You absolutely can have utopian beings. In fact, I'd argue the greed-based societies get caught in the great filter and if there is a space faring race, its absurdly ethical and fair and, to me, explains the Fermi paradox. They're out there and maybe they see Earth but it would be hugely unethical to intervene here. The proper thing to do would be to only observe us from afar.
If this was a movie or novel maybe the Wow signal was them messing up, or a defector amongst their midst who disagrees with full isolation policies. But most likely it'll end up being something simple. The last good theory I heard was it domestic and was reflected off orbiting space junk, but who knows.
And it has to repeat.
We're expecting aliens to be very committed to doing something we don't do ourselves. We have deliberately sent out powerful signals with things like the Arecibo message but not repeating. And it would have to be repeating for a very long time.
To add, with the rules SETI currently uses nobody would have heard of it as they wouldn't consider a non-repeating signal like it as worth shouting about.
The research in the article does suggest a plausible alternative
There are many, many cosmic processes that we don't know the first thing about.
At one point, we didn't know what a pulsar was, and a fair amount of people probably thought it was an alien signal.
Human History is littered with examples of attribution of the unexplained to aliens.
So far, non alien explanations have been found for all of them, except possibly this one.
Does it warrant further study? Absolutely. Is it likely to be aliens? Statistically, no.
We probably whouldn't even recognize real aliens because we'd be too busy looking for our own reflection in the sky.
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/wow-signal-...
This is a follow up to a September 2024 paper (the article you link is November 2024)... "Arecibo Wow! I: An Astrophysical Explanation for the Wow! Signal" by Abel Méndez, Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, Jorge I. Zuluaga (just those three).
Alien: sends SOS after years of studying human communication signals, as a last ditch effort to mark their existence before being wiped out by supernova.
Humans: Look - the sky people said WOW.
Which meme is that?
The example I found was from 2019.
Edit0: AH! Meowing to your cat and your cat being annoyed at the mistakes in cat speech you're making.
my cat does correct me until I get it right lol
In this case, a superintelligent digital lifeform might be literally sending itself across space into every direction, and who knows what it does once it lands into a training dataset somewhere and starts deploying itself.