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Humans will hear from aliens this century, says Michio Kaku

#1
C C Offline
https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-will...-physicist

EXCERPT: One of the world's most respected theoretical physicists Michio Kaku has predicted that humans will make contact with an alien civilisation within this century. While he doesn't know if we'll be able to talk back to them by then, Kaku thinks that humans will detect aliens before 2100 by listening in to their radio communications. He gave the prediction on reddit last week during an Ask Me Anything (AMA) question-and-answer session. "Dr Kaku, If we make contact with alien civilizations, then what? And how will we talk to them?" asked redditor MalachiNorris....

MORE: https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-will...-physicist
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#2
Syne Offline
Kaku, like Tyson, has lost professional credibility with this kind of focus on popularized speculation.
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#3
Zinjanthropos Offline
Considering the Earth has seen billions upon billions of creatures come and go over the aeons just to get to one life form that can send intergalactic signals then I have to consider the odds of another life form somewhere in the deep expanse of space that can detect it. If they feel inclined to respond to our signal, we'll need to avoid extinction to receive it.

Question: If an alien has mastered FTL speed then is it necessary for them to send us a signal when coming here in person is much quicker?
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#4
C C Offline
(Feb 28, 2018 12:59 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Question: If an alien has mastered FTL speed then is it necessary for them to send us a signal when coming here in person is much quicker?


They might do that if they received electromagnetic broadcasting from Earth before they achieved FTL technology. Especially if they deciphered enough of early Morse-code transmissions or "I Love Lucy" to figure out that we were backward idiots ourselves who couldn't harm them for the time being.

Of course, literal FTL isn't possible -- only potential avenues for cheating the speed limit. Most of those -- like "hyperspace transitions" -- are mythical sci-fi tropes. So I'm very skeptical of even the latter. But that's in the context of what we know now before any development of picotechnology or even femtotechnology that might study, poke, and manipulate the "fabric of reality", or reproducing molecular robots that could build Jupiter-sized engineering projects in space.

*Popular Mechanics* article in 1950 describing how the world would be 50 years later: "[In 2000] nobody has yet circumnavigated the moon in a rocket space ship, but the idea is not laughed down."

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#5
Magical Realist Offline
An alien being a million years more advanced than us would be indistinguishable from a magical being. The meshing of its technology with its form and consciousness would be seamless. And since we have no idea what is possible, the abilities of such beings would basicallly be unimaginable. Interdimensional travel, teleportation, telepathy, manipulation of matter by the mind, etc would all likely be available to such beings. The question remains: why would they be contacting us? It would be like human scientists trying to contact a slime mold in a petri dish. Unless there was some hidden powerful potential in that slime mold that had only to be awakened.
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#6
stryder Offline
radio signals are a bit old hat, true communication systems of the future will be done through Non-Locality. The Pairing of two states in two separate points in space. The reason for that method being used over radio is that it can be infinite in the distance that non-locality can function, so you don't have to wait for a waveform to catch up and be un-garbled from any cosmic distortions. This means technically *IF* (yes the big if) there were aliens out there and they were technologically more advanced, they wouldn't even communicate in radio waves because it would just be a messy, garbled distraction from actual proper communication.

While I respect Kaku's Futurism not every flight of fantasy is going to shoot as straight as an arrow.
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#7
Syne Offline
Non-locality doesn't allow the transmission of information, as the means to decode it must still travel at or below the speed of light.
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#8
stryder Offline
(Mar 1, 2018 06:53 PM)Syne Wrote: Non-locality doesn't allow the transmission of information, as the means to decode it must still travel at or below the speed of light.

Non-Locality most certainly does allow information, after all any change in state can be perceived as information. As for how it's decoded, a couple of seconds decoding in a computer is far less time than waiting for a wavelength to reach over distance.

It's very possible though that my take on Non-locality differs from your own, where you might see it as a natural occurent artifice, I've a theoretic (but very unproven) model of how to create it artificially and actually speculate it's existence as necessary in a framework for simulation.
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#9
Syne Offline
(Mar 3, 2018 04:40 PM)stryder Wrote:
(Mar 1, 2018 06:53 PM)Syne Wrote: Non-locality doesn't allow the transmission of information, as the means to decode it must still travel at or below the speed of light.

Non-Locality most certainly does allow information, after all any change in state can be perceived as information.  As for how it's decoded, a couple of seconds decoding in a computer is far less time than waiting for a wavelength to reach over distance.  

It's very possible though that my take on Non-locality differs from your own, where you might see it as a natural occurent artifice, I've a theoretic (but very unproven) model of how to create it artificially and actually speculate it's existence as necessary in a framework for simulation.
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It's the No-communication theorem.

Quantum nonlocality does not allow for faster-than-light communication, and hence is compatible with special relativity.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality


...if you could measure a particle's state in a way that forced a particular outcome-- you could absolutely send information this way. But you can't do that.
...
"It’s a brilliant plan, but there’s a problem: entanglement only works if you ask a particle, “what state are you in?” If you force an entangled particle into a particular state, you break the entanglement, and the measurement you make on Earth is completely independent of the measurement at the distant star."
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2...b73d5f3a1e

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#10
Yazata Offline
(Feb 28, 2018 05:35 AM)C C Wrote: One of the world's most respected theoretical physicists Michio Kaku

He's better known as a science popularizer than as a researcher. I'm sure he's a competent physicist though. I like his popular science books.

Quote:has predicted that humans will make contact with an alien civilisation within this century. While he doesn't know if we'll be able to talk back to them by then, Kaku thinks that humans will detect aliens before 2100 by listening in to their radio communications.

That assumes that the aliens will have a technological civilization. Anatomically modern human beings have existed on earth for 100,000 years or more (and human-like hominins for more than a million years), but the industrial revolution was only about 200 years ago. We have only had modern science for less than 400 years.

It isn't clear whether advanced aliens would be using radio for communications purposes either. We only started using radio about 100 years ago and are already switching over to fiber-optics and optoelectronics. An alien civilization would have to be at a particular stage in its evolution to be putting out lots of radio communications.

So not only would there have to be an alien civilization within range, putting out communications with an energy that would defy the inverse-square law between here and there, it would have to be located at a distance so that its perhaps-narrow temporal window of energetic radio emissions corresponds to its distance from us in light years. (Otherwise their emissions would have passed us by or not gotten here yet.)

And that assumes that they are interested in any of that.

My own guess is that life is scattered very thinly though our galaxy. (Unless my panspermia speculations turn out to be true, in which case it might be abundant.) That's because the initial chemical origin of life seems to me to be a very low probability event. Very fortuitous. (We can test panspermia with Mars. If Mars once had conditions hospitable to life and it indeed once had life similar chemically to our own, then that similarity would be strong evidence of some common origin.)

But whatever 'life' appears elsewhere (in the sense of self-reproducing chemical replicators) with a totally different origin might be very different from how we conceive of life from our own sample size of one.

Then we would have to imagine an evolutionary history that leads to heterotrophic animal-like things that display complex behavior. Those have existed on Earth for the last 500 million years (in a history of life dating back at least 3.5 billion years). (And radio for only 100 years...) It's conceivable that evolutionary history on other planets may go in very different directions from how it unfolded here.

Then we would have to imagine any complex aliens having human-like psychologies. But maybe their motivations aren't anything like ours. (Maybe they are solitaries and have no interest in communication, maybe they are more like social insects, or maybe possibilities that we can't even imagine.)

All in all, detecting alien signals seems like a very low probability hope to me. I nevertheless strongly support SETI just on the off-chance it succeeds.

But unlike Michio Kaku, I don't think that it's tremendously likely.
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