Some of both Sagan's and Shklovsky's suggestions were superseded by later exploration of the Solar System, but the book is one of the seminal texts of exobiology and contains, among other things, discussion of its question in terms of debates on dialectics in the USSR and a decent amount of bashing of the U.S. academy and its fucked-up priorities.
The book's also fun to read and past the serious bits, it's got some funny more-than-half-joking stuff from both guys, like Shklovsky idly pondering whether one of the moons of Mars is a hollow artificial structure because of its low calculated density and Sagan theorizing that a Babylonian fish god might have been a visitor from space. Good stuff... If you've ever read Contact, Sagan mostly based the cool Moscow astronomer character (not found in the movie) on Shklovsky because I guess they got drunk at conferences together a lot.
as far as the thread topic goes, Shklovsky is also famous for making fun of the 20th century plague of UFO sightings in the U.S. which he considered a reflection of its cultural problems.
Ufuk_Surekli posted:proposition: revolutionary science is determined in the final analysis by developments in the means of productive technology
die mechanical materialist!! Mao informs us that relations of production, theory and the superstructure all have the potential to manifest themselves in the principle and decisive role.
shriekingviolet posted:anyone expecting alien life to operate at a size, time scale, or chemical composition similar enough to our own to be immediately recognizable and familiar as life, or to have sufficiently similar psychological structures for communication to even be possible, is a big anthropocentric dingus imho.
thats a lot of big words to say your a nerd.
my dude have you heard the Good News of marxism-leninism, also i'm your friends upside down head on spider legs isn't that neat??
toyotathon posted:the fact we can date the LUCA to early in earth's history, that it's the sole type of life on earth, means there at least hasn't been contamination in 4.5 billion years. ie no settler aliens left a microbe trace in this time, at least nothing that managed to beat the adhoc and silly accidental indigenous cellular machinery.
this is kind of orthogonal to your point but there is actually some suggestion that there could be a 'shadow biosphere', which would be made up of microbes that use different molecules for the basis for biochemistry and hence don't show up on the kinds of tests that are usually done to detect life. if there were organisms based on RNA rather than DNA in the past for example then they might still be around, just not detectable by usual methods. this is a cool idea but no one's actually come up with any evidence for it yet though(there was a thing a few years back about how some organisms that used arsenic instead of phosphorus in DNA might have been found, but there were a number of problems with the study and it was probably a result of contamination).
if anything this kind of thing always strikes me as a lack of imagination about how genuinely alien an alien organism would be. like we're sitting here imagining aliens who are just different looking humans, like its mass effect or something. but realistically its unlikely they would even have the same kind of mental life as us. it would probably be drastically different to ours based on the different circumstances they develop and live in. they would just be totally inscrutable. think about something like an octopus - as far as we can tell they're very intelligent organisms (they're arguably better at some cognitive tasks than some mammals). yet we really know nothing about what their mental life is like - even whether they feel pain or conceive of their environment like we do is poorly understood. do they think like us, do they have basic intentionality, are they conscious in the same way as dogs or humans?
its not really surprsiing, since octopuses are so "alien". they evolved their cognitive abilities seperate to us, in a different context. they have a totally different body and way of interacting with the world and others. they can stretch their body to any size, it can engage very flexibly with their world. their limbs are totally prehensile and lack predefined joints. their brain is distributed throughout their limbs and hence their experience of the world and others will be nothing like ours. their society is weird and we don't understand any of their social behaviours, like the weird gesturing and boxing stuff they do. there are no human analogues.
think about whether the Marxist Alien argument works for octopuses. like super advanced octopuses. lets make our octopuses capable of all kinds of typically "intelligent" behaviours. it doesn't seem to follow that such a very different organism would relate to something like "technology", or even be able to conceive of (no matter how intelligent it was) what technology is. notions like technology or development are very specifically things that mean something to humans in our current context. they are not fundamental features of being a living thing. because of the bodies and arrangements we find ourselves in, humans apply ourselves to our environment and look for new ways to use it, like new medicine or metallurgy or whatever. now think about how different that would be if we had different bodies or drastically different kinds of lives or environments, like the octopus, or some weird fucked up alien.
the long term outcome of human society on Earth is going to be communism. the long term outcome for bizarre alien in unknown environment is unknowable. other living things aren't just mirrors of the human world. they have their own trajectory and experience that's not like ours. so the idea that aliens will be anything even remotely like us seems completely demented to me. let alone that they'll turn up and be communists or whatever.
Gibbonstrength posted:think about all the hidden premises contained in this argument. its assuming that 1. communism is the predefined outcome for all intelligent life and b. that notions like technology, development, society, etc., are something that apply to all intelligent life too, regardless of their circumstances.
if anything this kind of thing always strikes me as a lack of imagination about how genuinely alien an alien organism would be. like we're sitting here imagining aliens who are just different looking humans, like its mass effect or something. but realistically its unlikely they would even have the same kind of mental life as us. it would probably be drastically different to ours based on the different circumstances they develop and live in. they would just be totally inscrutable. think about something like an octopus - as far as we can tell they're very intelligent organisms (they're arguably better at some cognitive tasks than some mammals). yet we really know nothing about what their mental life is like - even whether they feel pain or conceive of their environment like we do is poorly understood. do they think like us, do they have basic intentionality, are they conscious in the same way as dogs or humans?
its not really surprsiing, since octopuses are so "alien". they evolved their cognitive abilities seperate to us, in a different context. they have a totally different body and way of interacting with the world and others. they can stretch their body to any size, it can engage very flexibly with their world. their limbs are totally prehensile and lack predefined joints. their brain is distributed throughout their limbs and hence their experience of the world and others will be nothing like ours. their society is weird and we don't understand any of their social behaviours, like the weird gesturing and boxing stuff they do. there are no human analogues.
think about whether the Marxist Alien argument works for octopuses. like super advanced octopuses. lets make our octopuses capable of all kinds of typically "intelligent" behaviours. it doesn't seem to follow that such a very different organism would relate to something like "technology", or even be able to conceive of (no matter how intelligent it was) what technology is. notions like technology or development are very specifically things that mean something to humans in our current context. they are not fundamental features of being a living thing. because of the bodies and arrangements we find ourselves in, humans apply ourselves to our environment and look for new ways to use it, like new medicine or metallurgy or whatever. now think about how different that would be if we had different bodies or drastically different kinds of lives or environments, like the octopus, or some weird fucked up alien.
the long term outcome of human society on Earth is going to be communism. the long term outcome for bizarre alien in unknown environment is unknowable. other living things aren't just mirrors of the human world. they have their own trajectory and experience that's not like ours. so the idea that aliens will be anything even remotely like us seems completely demented to me. let alone that they'll turn up and be communists or whatever.
thats a lot of big words to say your a nerd.
Gibbonstrength posted:think about all the hidden premises contained in this argument. its assuming that 1. communism is the predefined outcome for all intelligent life and b. that notions like technology, development, society, etc., are something that apply to all intelligent life too, regardless of their circumstances.
if anything this kind of thing always strikes me as a lack of imagination about how genuinely alien an alien organism would be. like we're sitting here imagining aliens who are just different looking humans, like its mass effect or something. but realistically its unlikely they would even have the same kind of mental life as us. it would probably be drastically different to ours based on the different circumstances they develop and live in. they would just be totally inscrutable. think about something like an octopus - as far as we can tell they're very intelligent organisms (they're arguably better at some cognitive tasks than some mammals). yet we really know nothing about what their mental life is like - even whether they feel pain or conceive of their environment like we do is poorly understood. do they think like us, do they have basic intentionality, are they conscious in the same way as dogs or humans?
its not really surprsiing, since octopuses are so "alien". they evolved their cognitive abilities seperate to us, in a different context. they have a totally different body and way of interacting with the world and others. they can stretch their body to any size, it can engage very flexibly with their world. their limbs are totally prehensile and lack predefined joints. their brain is distributed throughout their limbs and hence their experience of the world and others will be nothing like ours. their society is weird and we don't understand any of their social behaviours, like the weird gesturing and boxing stuff they do. there are no human analogues.
think about whether the Marxist Alien argument works for octopuses. like super advanced octopuses. lets make our octopuses capable of all kinds of typically "intelligent" behaviours. it doesn't seem to follow that such a very different organism would relate to something like "technology", or even be able to conceive of (no matter how intelligent it was) what technology is. notions like technology or development are very specifically things that mean something to humans in our current context. they are not fundamental features of being a living thing. because of the bodies and arrangements we find ourselves in, humans apply ourselves to our environment and look for new ways to use it, like new medicine or metallurgy or whatever. now think about how different that would be if we had different bodies or drastically different kinds of lives or environments, like the octopus, or some weird fucked up alien.
the long term outcome of human society on Earth is going to be communism. the long term outcome for bizarre alien in unknown environment is unknowable. other living things aren't just mirrors of the human world. they have their own trajectory and experience that's not like ours. so the idea that aliens will be anything even remotely like us seems completely demented to me. let alone that they'll turn up and be communists or whatever.
i think the octopus is a good 'model animal' for this kind of speculation, but they're at least animals with brains and nervous systems that work in a similar way to ours. plants don't have brains and are made up of repeating parts constructed in a modular fashion, but there's a lot of evidence now(i can talk more about this if anyone is interested) that they have behaviour just as animals do, they're not automatons. and they're still relatively similar to us in many ways, like biochemistry. now we have trouble thinking of what the mental life of some 'lower' animals might be like, i don't know how we'd even begin to get an idea of the mental life of an intelligent plantlike organism, or something more alien.
so assuming that a steady development in technology (or anything like technology) must necessarily occur for alien life is misguided, because its not an inevitability of being an intelligent being, but a contingent fact about a particular set of circumstances (humans on Earth in our particular context). So the premise that "if alien life with technology more advanced than human technology exists, it is Marxist-Leninist (or better)" is operating under the false assumption that there's a continuum of "technological advancement" that life forms fall under, and every kind of life sits somewhere on that continuum.
its even tougher to see how communism applies to aliens. it's cracked to think that this specific political thinking is some kind of cosmic force that determines the material circumstances of all intelligent life, which must all end up living in a way that only humans would find ideal. maybe they'd hate it. like how do a bunch of intelligent sea cucumbers that communicate via root synapses implement communism. what would communism even mean to organisms that didn't share our exact biological needs, social arrangements, history, psychology, material context, and so on?
lo posted:i think the octopus is a good 'model animal' for this kind of speculation, but they're at least animals with brains and nervous systems that work in a similar way to ours. plants don't have brains and are made up of repeating parts constructed in a modular fashion, but there's a lot of evidence now(i can talk more about this if anyone is interested) that they have behaviour just as animals do, they're not automatons. and they're still relatively similar to us in many ways, like biochemistry. now we have trouble thinking of what the mental life of some 'lower' animals might be like, i don't know how we'd even begin to get an idea of the mental life of an intelligent plantlike organism, or something more alien.
yeah one of my colleagues did a bunch of experiments on plant cognition and did some talks on it, which was interesting. but i dont want to underestimate the differences between us and animals, like thinking that broad similarities between mammals or humans and octopuses (have brains, nerves, sensory organs, etc) means they work in a similar way. there are philosophy of mind people who think that cephalopods don't even have "minds" in the conventional sense, but some other kind of cognition unlike ours. im not saying i necessarily believe that, but its credible that the differences are profound
colddays posted:Yeah most life forms in the universe, if they exist, would probably be hard to apply human concepts to, but in the case that they manage to travel to Earth from wherever they came from, unless they're some kind of space fish, they'd have to create a vehicle or launcher of some kind, and doesn't that require a concept of technology?
all kinds of animals build things without higher order concepts of technology
Gibbonstrength posted:lo posted:
i think the octopus is a good 'model animal' for this kind of speculation, but they're at least animals with brains and nervous systems that work in a similar way to ours. plants don't have brains and are made up of repeating parts constructed in a modular fashion, but there's a lot of evidence now(i can talk more about this if anyone is interested) that they have behaviour just as animals do, they're not automatons. and they're still relatively similar to us in many ways, like biochemistry. now we have trouble thinking of what the mental life of some 'lower' animals might be like, i don't know how we'd even begin to get an idea of the mental life of an intelligent plantlike organism, or something more alien.
yeah one of my colleagues did a bunch of experiments on plant cognition and did some talks on it, which was interesting. but i dont want to underestimate the differences between us and animals, like thinking that broad similarities between mammals or humans and octopuses (have brains, nerves, sensory organs, etc) means they work in a similar way. there are philosophy of mind people who think that cephalopods don't even have "minds" in the conventional sense, but some other kind of cognition unlike ours. im not saying i necessarily believe that, but its credible that the differences are profound
i agree that the differences are still very significant in animals(perhaps insurmountable)
Caesura109 posted:If they are anything like humans, their capacity and desire for exploration will be driven primarily by a hunger for resources, and even if they left their planet seeking sentient life and only manage to find it on earth, they might be more inclined to preserve all the nice mangoes and horses than the dominant species that lays claim to them
thats an if that you can't assume, and is probably not going to be the case
