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My new theory is that it's just a breakaway civilization from the past that achieved AGI and ASI and then moved off planet while the people against it simply remained on earth with whatever means they had left to them and then eventually became us.
If AGI, robots, life extension, self driving cars, etc become a reality, you bet your sweet cheeks I'm exiting that sort of society and rebelling against it all. That's the wrong path for advancement imo.
Are the aliens stupid? Why not like… write out the sequence of prime numbers on the moon with big dots? Or have it emit a continuous, meaningful radio signal?
Why settle for making in (almost, not quite) the same size as the sun from our perspective?
I personally thing they wanted something to last for hundreds of millions of years. No structure or markings will last that long. Only perfect orbital mechanics or some specific radioactive materials, which I would presume we could find on the moon.
It's good to see this topic discussed in the main stream, but I think the application of Occam's Razor is situational and hardly applies here. You see, once (and if) you conclude there is advanced non-human tech here and now on Earth, that we're not at the top of the metaphorical food-chain, that they don't show their hands--and if they did we likely couldn't understand.. In such a situation, the only sure thing we can establish with Occam's Razor is that we are the idiots at the table: we're hardly be in a position to divine plausible theories about how it is that we find ourselves at the table.
That's a bit of a sensationalist title. The paper doesn’t present evidence for alien terraforming, and it definitely doesn't present any "findings". Firstly, it's an unreviewed thought piece about how information might build up in early Earth chemistry. Panspermia gets a mention, but no supporting evidence is presented. It was an interesting read, but the estimates are rough and it makes a lot of assumptions.
Since History repeats itself and homo sapians are basically locked into their human conditions. Since we are still warring and killing each other, and our culture is violent and competitive. I would say our genes were manipulated to continue this way on purpose. Unless some caring brilliant ET helps us evolve by changing our genes to a peaceful species. We are doomed as we exist today.
Wouldn't directed panspermia potentially be more plausible given that it could allow evolution to occur over a much longer proportion of the age of the universe before the Solar System existed and then be seeded here once the conditions were right? And it could potentially account for many potentially missing building blocks or intermediate evolutionary steps that we haven't found on earth (yet)?
Important to keep in mind, life originated in this universe in free-floating space during the billion year Goldilocks period where heat was so abundant, basic cellular life had no need for predation until it waned.
Basically the idea is that the spontaneous assembly of a protocell requires overcoming massive entropic and informational barriers. Using algorithmic complexity (the shortest program that could generate a given system), they argue protocells are "algorithmically incompressible" as in they require instructions nearly as complex as the structures themselves. This makes their spontaneous formation extraordinarily improbable within Earth's early timeframe.
They also acknowledge that panspermia (the idea that life was seeded from elsewhere) remains logically open alternative, but it adds complexity without solving the fundamental problem. It just pushes the origin question elsewhere.
So this paper is pretty flawed just from this... It still entertains terraforming by advanced extraterrestrials as an alternative explanation, but this creates an infinite regress problem. If life is too improbable to arise spontaneously on Earth, then how did the advanced extraterrestrials who supposedly terraformed Earth come into existence? They would face the exact same informational and entropic barriers that they calculated for Earth-based life. That would just make it even more unlikely because they would have had less time thus a smaller probability of forming.
Yeah man, never wonder, never dream, never search for meaning or look beyond what's in front of you. Just pay those bills and be a good little consumer.
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