I've just published my first novel for adults, The Dark Sorcerer's Intern, my bid to bring back fun and comedy to a fantasy genre that has spent years in a grimdark rut.
The relevance to hackers is that unlike most fantasy where spells are cast with hand motions, magic words, or spell ingredients, there's actually an explanation for why that works and makes sense.
This is a compelling theory, especially the implication that humans are early. I do wonder whether we should see the evidence of spheres of growing alien influence out in the stars, but instead we see a highly uniform universe in all directions.
This would indicate a few possibilities:
1. Expanding alien civilizations are relatively low impact and don't collect all of the energy of stars in ways that are visible to our current telescopes.
2. We are a very early civilization, civs are fairly rare, and we're relatively alone in the parts of the universe that we can see. Civs that are expanding in a grabby fashion started less recently in years than their distance in light years.
3. Aliens expand at close to the speed of light, so there are a lot out there but we won't see them until they're almost here.
4. Something that we have already noticed is actually evidence of grabby aliens, but it is happening in every direction so we assume that it is a natural phenomenon, because it is so uniform.
At the very least, it seems likely that we either we are alone in the galaxy, or expansion is very slow. The idea of "expanding in a bubble of influence close to the speed of light" seems implausible to me, just because of the vast amounts of energy required to accelerate and decelerate to relativistic speeds, not to mention protecting the cargo in transit--when you're flying at .9c, almost every other piece of matter in the universe is flying towards you at you at .9c. Accelerating tiny nanomachine von Neumann probes might be a solution, but how would they decelerate enough to not be destroyed on arrival?
5. Controlled transportation between the stars, sufficient for colonization, is sufficiently impractical that there are no grabby aliens within our light-cone.
That itself would be quite interesting though, because based on what we know now it's merely difficult, not impossible with reasonably foreseeable technological improvements.
The dynamics which would make it impossible on any known timespan don't seem currently observable.
I think a huge factor you don't account for here is that some of these technological improvements might imply a great-filter that we really haven't passed yet as humans, and the negative effects would affect most similarly expansionist and competitive races alike us since it might be questionable if there would be enough pressure on a non-competitive race to expand rather than just conserve local resources.
Just with state-controlled nuclear weapons we've been on the brink of extinction a couple of times already, the energy levels required for star-travel implies this kind of destructive power being in the hands of even more people (and by necessity more or less out of control of the nation states). A commercial airliner took down WTC, a starship would be an WMD capable of taking out a city (or more).
One implication of this is that there's a chance that we've already invented practical fusion power, but if it's trivial to miniaturize AND weaponize then people in control of it have decided to withhold it to avoid every weird terrorist group creating one.
You might want to check the physics on your assertion that a starship could take out a city. It’d have to be designed to do so otherwise it would just vaporize as it entered the atmosphere at the velocity you’d need for that kind of impact.
I haven't done any calculations (since we don't have any feasible crafts for interstellar travel that's irrelevant really), but considering it for a few minutes I'd say there's 3 increasingly likely ways around that.
1: Considering the amount of rocket fuel we need to leave earths atmosphere and reach the Moon, people have been proposing nuclear rockets to reach Mars. That's still within the solar system, reaching another star requires magnitudes more energy, even more so to accomplish enough acceleration to reach another star within a persons lifetime. Such a mode of energy generation not having an explosive failure more feels unlikely (thus making it blow up in a dock is enough).
2: Barring option 1, reaching fractional light speeds, would not a ship need enormously more capable shields than anything today to safeguard humans? The Tunguska event(3-5 mt) was at "just" 27km/s of a 50 meter object.
3: Speaking of Tunguska, even if the ship itself would lack such shields (however a human would be expected to survive w/o one), a ship capable of interstellar travel should be able to push out a rock and then accelerate it back to earth to create a Tunguska (or larger) event at a target location.
The core issue is the energy levels required(1), converting them to something destructive is usually within grasp of less intelligent people than those that research the advances that make them available.
If we’re talking specifically about interstellar craft with enough shielding to survive an uncontrolled reentry at high velocity then what the heck are those going to be doing near a planet? Sublight travel would have to be performed by craft large enough to support the crew for years if not decades or generations. You’re not going to want to maneuver that much mass into orbit around a planet. They’d be better off parked in a trojan orbit and letting smaller craft move people and supplies back and forth You might as well try to hijack an aircraft carrier and fat chance of surprising anyone if you could pull it off.
To get a ship to hit the ground at the velocity you’re talking about a large chunk of it would need to be solid steel like a bullet basically. Space craft aren’t built like that, they need to be mostly empty space for storing propellant and people. A reactor and its shielding might survive but that’s on the scale of 5 - 10 meters and it’s still not 100% solid so it doesn’t compare to a large metallic asteroid.
Throwing rocks at a planet might work but you need the right equipment and expertise to bullseye a planet from 100 million miles away and if anyone saw you do it they could take their time intercepting the rock.
If you assume FTL travel will never be developed then distance and time are simple limiting factors. How do you keep a cohesive civilization going when communication takes 200 years? Or even just 20? Here on Earth entirely new languages and cultures arose across distances that wouldn’t even cross a state line when communication was limited to a small handful of travellers and merchants. Any colony further away than 5ly would quickly diverge. I’m pulling that number out of my hat but I’m sure you could figure out the effect of time spent in journey on willingness to travel. Not many people would commit significant chunks of their lives to interstellar business trips. Radio communications won’t solve it either since they’d be out of date and essentially one way if it took decades to get a response. No I think any interstellar colonization effort would immediately create competing civilizations distinct from their homeworld.
Consider a colony of bacteria multiplying by splitting. Each new pair of cells is independent and do not cooperate. Some die, some stay put. Nonetheless, the “colony” spreads and explores new territory with zero coordination of these activities. Certainly not an intelligent centralised leadership!
Even if our first interstellar colonies diverge immediately and some even turn into reclusive hermits, some may expand, repeating the cycle.
Hard to say what would happen but I think we still need to avoid the assumption that each star system remains relatively static especially over very long periods of time. You also need to consider the purpose behind colonization, if it is to spread the existence of your civilization to new worlds then no one says those worlds must be uninhabited.
We barely knew about flight in air, or germs on hands, sent even small objects in to space in extremely recent history.
Hand waving away “we can’t travel through stars” because we currently don’t get it, seems like the weakest way to discuss the topic.
You/we can’t imagine it; so it must be impossible or in practically difficult? What if it turns out to be extremely easy, we’re just extremely small or extremely uninteresting? Those are far more likely topics than we already have the answers and have decided it’s not possible.
? Did you read the original post? On grabby aliens?
This whole discussion is about being 'early'.
Not sure you are making a point.
Edit:
The original post discusses below light speed transportation. 25% speed of light is used in the estimates.
But guess I agree, if no aliens including us, never-ever with infinite time ever develop transportation that can get up to some fraction of light speed. Then maybe no colonization ever happens, and the grabby guys stay in their system.
“Alas, there's a fifth possibility” was my comment, and I made it because the discussion was excluding the possibility, despite it being explicitly discussed in the paper.
“We can't see any evidence because there is nothing there to see” is a possibility, grabby aliens _requires_ significant-fraction-of-C travel for the argument to hold, and it's entirely possible that it's just impractical-to-the-point-of-impossibility. (That's why I quoted it in another comment).
Yes, it's possible that we're early. It's equally possible that we're “early” because there's no concert: _everybody_ is early in a universe where the band never gets on stage and it turns out that nobody bothers colonizing the universe due to the cost and lack of benefits.
See also: “Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".” https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And I can ask for clarification concerning if you read the original post, since your objection/point was already covered.
Did you read it and simply making some additional argument against it, or did you miss it entirely?
"5. Controlled transportation between the stars, sufficient for colonization, is sufficiently impractical that there are no grabby aliens within our light-cone.
"
This is covered in the other points of the theory? So should I assume you read it?
"The universe isn't a rock concert, “we're here too early” is not the only possible reason why there's no band on the stage.
"
Even if interstellar travel is impractical, an advanced expansionist civ would be interested in building megastructures. And since there is no stealth in space (unless you can somehow mask heat), they should be observable.
Ofc there are explanations for that part of the paradox as well, but the impractical travel theory doesn't cover it.
> no stealth in space (unless you can somehow mask heat)
I know two things.
1. We are now already using heat mask measures, even when we are very young civ in terms of Kardashev scale. We already use simple slit heat emitters in military tech (many Stealth planes have slit nozzles and for example, Leopard tanks also use slit exhaust for same reason).
2. Even we now know about possibility of laser heat, which could emit heat directly with very high focus.
In conclusion, idea is, to surround whole civ with heat mask blanket, and make all heat exhausts directly focused on directions, where now observer expected.
Second, looks like our development now is very slow, because it should be on early stages (Kardashev scale), and old civ's should know this.
And I now support theory, that we are fortunate to be far enough, so stronger civ's are not interested in spending resources to limit our development.
I even consider might be exists some preservation pact between Big civ's, to avoid touch young civ's, for some purposes like scientific, or arts. So yes, basically, I support Zoo theory.
> In conclusion, idea is, to surround whole civ with heat mask blanket, and make all heat exhausts directly focused on directions, where now observer expected.
Although focussing emissions (not really a blanket) is possible, not only would some specific civilisation have to actually do that, it would have to be a common enough choice that every example we would otherwise have been able to see actually does choose to do that that — this gets increasingly difficult the more such examples there are: if a civilisation can build a Dyson swarm, what are they afraid of that they would want to hide? Even if one civilisation has a reason, everyone has to make this decision, regardless of how many (or few) "everyone" is.
"Dark forest" is a bad reason, as everyone with a Dyson swarm will have been able to know your planet existed and had life on it even when it was all single-cell species; a star winking out of existence is noteworthy, and easily noticed[0].
One Dyson swarm is enough to directly colonise a high percentage of all galaxies that aren't beyond the "reachable horizon"[1] of the universe. As soon as we can make artificial self-replicating machines (we know such machines can be made because all life is self-replicating nano-machines, we just don't know enough to do it completely from scratch yet), this would take us about 31 years[2] to make such a swarm.
> this would take us about 31 years[2] to make such a swarm
They assume, when have already working general AI technology and it have some limited size (volume-mass-energy consumption).
Unfortunately, we still not have GAI and even cannot predict, how large will be first practical unit.
Must admit, looks like we very close to do it, but from history of previous great technical inventions, some things takes decades to achieve production status and was repeatedly reinvented in some years after another inventor fail.
General AI is unnecessary. Bacteria do not possess this trait, and yet reproduce themselves, some in as little as 30 minutes.
It is also possible to have a large system where humans are just a component, if this were necessary. The human-machine ratio is a function of how close the automation you have is to what you need.
> Bacteria do not possess this trait, and yet reproduce themselves
If you programmer, you should know from experience or from learn, that in complex system possible just two ways to achieve reliable execution.
1. Brute force, just test as many possible scenarios as could, 99.999% is better than 99.99%, and make script for each scenario.
2. Smart, run system when tested somewhere between 70..90% and make some sort of insurance, so when happen non-tested scenario and all failing, you will pay (compensate) for harm, and make additions.
That is. Bacteria lives in comfortable environment (mostly in liquid water drop), and spent billions of slightly modified reproductions, to make solutions for all possible scenarios. You may hear, DNA of simplest bacteria are more than Million pairs, that's because of number of scenarios it successfully survive.
Space is much less comfortable environment than liquid water, it have wide range of possible parameters, I even not sure if exists some structure, which could survive in all possible space environments, so need some adaptation mechanisms, to change structure, and best is consciousness AI, which could make smart predictions of causes and reasons, and control all these machinery.
And also it will have memory, to repeat moves which helps to survive when something similar happens earlier.
> If you programmer, you should know from experience or from learn, that in complex system possible just two ways to achieve reliable execution.
Irrelevant. A self-replicating system does not need to be highly reliable. Look to the past, any time over 200 years ago most families were a dozen kids because most didn't reach adulthood.
> That is. Bacteria lives in comfortable environment (mostly in liquid water drop), and spent billions of slightly modified reproductions, to make solutions for all possible scenarios. You may hear, DNA of simplest bacteria are more than Million pairs, that's because of number of scenarios it successfully survive.
False. Bacterial environments are hostile because other bacteria fight them for the same resources, including predation. Many chemicals are hazardous even in small quantities. Internal chemistry requires water in liquid form, yet there's only a narrow range of temperatures where water is liquid, and worse the chemical processes change rate significantly even within that range.
Also irrelevant, we've been using simulated evolution as a form of AI for ages already. It's not new or novel. I implemented a version of this in 30 minutes over a decade ago just to prove a point. A million bases is trivial to store, so is a billion or a trillion.
> Space is much less comfortable environment than liquid water, it have wide range of possible parameters, I even not sure if exists some structure, which could survive in all possible space environments, so need some adaptation mechanisms, to change structure, and best is consciousness AI, which could make smart predictions of causes and reasons, and control all these machinery. And also it will have memory, to repeat moves which helps to survive when something similar happens earlier.
Also false.
1. Space has far fewer parameters than water.
2. One does not need to make a single machine to survive "all possible space environments" to do this, just our solar system at 0.47-0.31 AU from the sun. We already have that, we sent probes there.
3. Consciousness is not necessary for any of that. Neither is episodic memory (though that is trivial to implement). Bacteria exist and do these things well enough with mere DNA.
> Look to the past, any time over 200 years ago most families were a dozen kids because most didn't reach adulthood.
Do you know mathematics? Calculate, how slow will become your Dyson swarm, if for example only 1/20 will survive?
BTW, you may hear about baby-boomers, and they are exactly caused by much improved medicine, now in EU survive near 100% children.
Calculated? Ok, now calculate, how much suffer probability of overall success, because limited resources does not accept to make 20 turns to achieve 1 successful?
> 2. One does not need to make a single machine to survive "all possible space environments" to do this, just our solar system at 0.47-0.31 AU from the sun. We already have that, we sent probes there.
Well, now I see you are just overweening human, but without real knowledge. Solar system is itself have wide parameters spectrum, but is is also significantly different from other stars environments.
> Bacteria exist
Bacteria have sacrificed billions lives, to gather information, to achieve current success rate.
But must admit, I will consider idea you suggest me, about send hopeless missions, to just gather info, and I'm sure you also lazy, so I'll myself calculate success rate for each sacrifice rate.
> Do you know mathematics? Calculate, how slow will become your Dyson swarm, if for example only 1/20 will survive?
It means the real reproduction time is t/f, where t is the time it takes to make a single unit and f is the fraction of units which survive to further reproduction. For 1 in 20 surviving, that means the real reproduction time is 20t.
Some bacteria take 30 minutes for a single reproduction, so that with a 1/20 success rate would be an effective population doubling every 10 hours. An E. coli cell weighs 1 pg, and this is only a factor of 2^128 from the planet Mercury. These random example numbers would therefore be able to consume the entire planet in 53.32 days. At this level, almost all the time (97%) is spent on waiting for the solar panels to supply enough to get the stuff from the planet's surface to solar orbit.
> Calculated? Ok, now calculate, how much suffer probability of overall success, because limited resources does not accept to make 20 turns to achieve 1 successful?
I have no idea what point you're even trying to make here.
We know we don't need to worry about your 1/20 random example for humans because we know ourselves; only the machines need this consideration. That's a number which you made up, and your own complete fiction is what you're now trying to use for an example that I don't understand.
> Well, now I see you are just overweening human, but without real knowledge. Solar system is itself have wide parameters spectrum, but is is also significantly different from other stars environments.
Completely irrelevant. I don't even know what point you think you're making. I linked you to a specific plan to build a Dyson swarm specifically in our solar system at the orbit of Mercury. The rest of the universe is irrelevant to this part of the plan, for exactly the same reason and in exactly the same way that it is irrelevant to bacteria on Earth that the rest of the universe exists.
What you do with your Dyson swarm (including colonising the universe) only matters after you've built your Dyson swarm. Building one is fast the moment von Neumann machines can be engineered rather than grown, and give you such an incomprehensibly large industrial and resource base to work from that comparing it to what we have access to today is more extreme than asking a single pre-writing cave painter to imagine our current entire world.
> Bacteria have sacrificed billions lives, to gather information, to achieve current success rate.
BTW if you really know, you could make GAI for some reasonable amount of money, or you know people, who have this knowledge, I know few very serious people, who want to invest into such thing and have money.
You're implying we'd easily see megastructures. Believe it or not, there's many more stars we haven't inspected than have. And our telescopes suck too much to see all but the largest megastructures, which you're assuming it would make rational sense to build in the first place. There can be better things for an economy to spend its (always finite) resources on.
> which you're assuming it would make rational sense to build
Yes I mean why not. If you are an expansionist advanced civ, travel is impractical and you have enought time and resources then what else is there to do?
Obviously there are explanations "why not" (as I said), but insterstellar travel unavailability is not one of them.
A hypothetical megastructure Dyson's sphere would not radiate heat.
And I'm not so sure that you can apply the stealth principle here. Stealth inhibits active measurement and astronomical measurements are passive. We have sensor resolution and we have a mass of data to sift through - each time sensor generation or data processing advances, we see stuff we haven't seen before.
The data is analyzed as a dynamic system. Radar just looks at a bounce. If you setup radar incorrectly you might get false hits and no returns on valid targets. If you use a wrong model in analysis of astronomical data you're never getting anywhere close to a correct result.
A Dyson's sphere is a device to convert high frequency photons (visible light and uv) to low frequency photons (radiated “heat”). A sufficiently deep stack of shells can bring the temperature of the radiated light closer to the temperature of the cosmic background radiation, but it absolutely will radiate.
The question isn't whether Dyson speheres radiate, the question is can we detect an artificial megastructure and my answer is no, based on the hypothetical Dyson design.
That is physically impossible unless there is new physics in that hypothetical design. All physical objects radiate heat and a Dyson sphere in particular would be trivial to detect. You look take a picture of the sky in infrared and in the visible spectrum. If you find an infrared source but no associated visible star you’ve got a strong candidate for being a Dyson sphere. Such searches have actually been conducted.
Other megastructures might be discovered through the same methods as exoplanets.
Yes, but a Dyson sphere, even around a red dwarf, would be far more luminous in the infrared than a brown dwarf. It would also have a different spectrographic signature, and importantly its heat distribution would appear artificial.
Rough calculation get's me a dyson sphere big enough to bring the black body radiation of the sun down to ~4k being hundreds of times the orbit of pluto. At that point it's actually an interesting question of where you get all the mass for the nesting shells.
> A hypothetical megastructure Dyson's sphere would not radiate heat
Could you elaborate why not? All current technology I know of has an efficiency of <100%, with waste energy being lost as heat (which in space would be radiated away in the infrared spectrum). Why would this not be the case for a hypothetical dyson sphere or swarm?
There are many middle possibilities between that and aliens expanding at c.
Expansion at c is very unlikely. Insane things happen when you approach c, like the cosmic microwave background transforming into a gamma ray laser aimed at your head and collisions with microscopic particles destroying you. It may be that travel close to c is so hard as to be effectively impossible.
I’ve read that speeds up to about 30% the speed of light are “thinkable” with currently known physics plus advances like compact fusion reactors. Think something that looks like the Epstein Drive in The Expanse or the ships from Avatar.
These models provide indirect evidence against the existence of FTL travel. If FTL exists it means we really have to be extremely early, maybe even the first in our galactic cluster. Otherwise someone would have visited at least.
I also think if someone has visited, such as if some tiny number of UFOs are actually of ET origin, it means we are probably incredibly lucky to have neighbors that aren’t “reapers” in the dark forest sense. It’d be funny if our galaxy is actually full of aliens and we lucked out and are camped next to some superintelligence that is both benevolent and powerful enough to fight off anyone who isn’t. So hey if they’re taking our cattle maybe that’s a pretty small price to pay.
Lightsail seems sufficiently practical if you don't care about being fast. You basically directly exploit energy of the stars you are traveling between.
The argument is premised on grabby aliens being fast enough to explain why we don't see their expansion; grabby aliens that don't care about being fast would have showed up _long_ ago.
Yeah, it's like we're playing cosmic detective trying to figure out if there's anyone else out there in the universe. The fact that we haven't seen any clear signs of alien civilizations doing their thing is kind of mind-boggling. It's like, are they just really subtle about it, or are we just super early to the party?
When you mine asteroids in orbit on a large scale around your star, the released dust/debris would form an IR halo around the star that would be very easy to detect and reveal your presence but we dont see any of it.
Your point on missing IR halos is valid, but don't overlook anomalies like Tabby's Star (KIC 8462852) [0]. Its odd dimming led to theories about alien megastructures like Dyson Spheres, though dust or comets are possible explanations. Still, Tabby's Star highlights the difficulty in excluding advanced alien activities with our current tech. [1]
This person [1] ran a data search for stars with a similar light profile (“slow dippers”) to Tabby/Boyajian’s Star, and claims to have found a cluster of similar stars in the region. But the results are not particularly high confidence and are probably just data artifacts.
I don’t think we’re going to build rock crushers in space. With all that available energy it’d make more sense to just throw the whole rock into a smelter and fractionate the elements as they boil off. Why waste the slag either? You need all the material you can get so hang on to it and use it as ballast or extract the carbon and silicon from it. It’s more likely that we don’t see waste because there isn’t any, a dollar saved is a dollar earned.
My money is on option 2 with the key factor being that complex, intelligent life takes a long time to develop. Our empirical data (of sample size one) indicates that it takes multiple billions of years to go from single celled life to even quite simple multi-celled life. If we got lucky with that, the average could easily be longer than the age of the universe.
The problem with option 3 is that even a small drop below light speed becomes a large multiplier when looking at galactic and intergalactic distances. Let's say you can manage 0.5 c (pushing far beyond any current physical understanding of what is possible), that means we would have up to a 40,000 year heads up on an approaching galactic civilization. Even if it was 0.9c we would have up to 8,000 years notice. Even with something crazy like direct antimatter - matter conversion the amount of energy to bring a ship to that kind of speed would be a gigantic beacon in the night sky. Barring science fiction we can be relatively confident none are on their way right now.
Given that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, 40,000 years is nothing.
The presumption that other putative galactic civilizations start at nearly exactly the same time as us is implausible, especially considering more than 9 billion years passed before the solar system even formed.
Sure, but we'd see the markers on timescales relevant to us. The gap between the light cone and actual velocity is the critical difference between a kugelblitz and an invasion: you could conceivably conceal the former but not the latter.
I'm pointing out that any scenario that requires this synchronization is inherently implausible. So if we don't see the markers, trying to say it's because there are lots of civilizations but they just happened to pop up in synchrony with us is not a plausible theory.
> 4. Something that we have already noticed is actually evidence of grabby aliens, but it is happening in every direction so we assume that it is a natural phenomenon, because it is so uniform
* Brown dwarfs: These are objects with masses too small to ignite nuclear fusion in their cores and shine like stars. However, they are still warm enough to emit infrared radiation.
* There are rogue planet candidates that do not belong to a solar system.
Aliens collecting all the light/electromagnetic radiation from stars would be an interesting way to get dark matter. That's one place it could fit.
And, if our theories are right, we're at 4.9% regular matter and 26.8% dark matter, so dark matter is five times as much as regular matter, so that's a lot of aliens...
Dark matter isn't non-luminous matter. It's matter that only interacts gravitationally, but not electromagnetically. This means it doesn't undergo collisions and can't shed angular momentum. It forms a diffuse, largely uniform cloud throughout galaxies. The result is that galaxies are more dense further from the galactic core than we would predict from luminous matter alone.
It's clearly confirmed that galaxies don't obey the known laws of quantum electrodynamics (QED) + general relativity (GR) if we assume they are made entirely of Standard Model particles. So, either QED is wrong (extremely unlikely) or GR is wrong (unlikely) or there is some matter that is not in the Standard Model (plausible).
Dark matter corresponds to option 3 - and there are observations that conform some models of dark matter distribution that match quite well between different galaxies. There are other theories as well, such as MOND (modified Newtonian gravity) that explore option 2 (GR is wrong).
Still, whatever the theory, it's clear that what is not happening is "aliens someone consuming all of the EM radiation from some stars". With anything resembling currently known physics, it's impossible to "consume" EM radiation in this way. Electric charge is always conserved, electrons and quarks don't disappear just because they move around, even with something like controlled fusion. A Dyson sphere would be an extremely hot visible object, not some dark point.
> So, either QED is wrong (extremely unlikely) or GR is wrong (unlikely)
Not my area, but I thought both were known to be incomplete? Q because it presumes a flat spacetime; R because it predicts the formation of singularities that the maths used to develop it assume don't exist?
I think the general belief is that it will turn out that space time is actually approximately flat at small levels, so that QED will be essentially exactly correct, while GR will turn out not to apply past a certain small scale.
5. Grabby aliens do not exist because the universe is a dark forest and any detectable signs of life result in anonymous relativistic snowflake bombardment.
There are electromagnetic waves reaching the earth from this galaxy which were emitted anywhere from 80,000 years ago to an instant ago, and everywhen in between. Practically all alien races among the hundreds of billions of solar systems would have to have been electromagnetically silent for a minimum of 80 thousand years for us not to see them.
If you include other galaxies, then they would've had to have been silent since the beginning of time.
Also, non-living matter spontaneously forms into living matter by no known mechanism.
If you're going to believe something religiously, make it something less trivial than muh aliens.
Okay, so you imagine a galaxy-wide communist society in which everyone is successfully prevented from emitting any unencrypted signal from so much as a Dyson refrigerator, for tens of thousands of years at a time.
No, I imagine them doing exactly the same thing we are: using more and more efficient methods of communication as we develop them. Compressing and encoding data, focusing our transmissions where they need to be instead of blasting at max power in all directions, using the most effective form of transmission for the purpose whether it’s laser, microwaves, specific wavelengths of radio, or hard line connections for planet side comms. Signals decay very rapidly over distance so unless you have a very good reason to build a gigantic transmitter capable of reaching beyond a few light years in all directions you’re not going to just accidentally wind up communicating with a random star 100ly away.
Oh, yeah, because zero of the roughly 5 quintillion aliens which the Milky Way could comfortably support have hobbies (very primitive) and none would ever use a cheap and effective terraforming unit or dyson sphere even once in 80 thousand years when they could use a more expensive one which mimics pure blackbody radiation
even in war (or are they pacifist communists), they would never emit a signal for any reason on any of the multiple trillions of planets during this 80,000 year period. not even from a bomb.
yes, yes; this all makes sense -- I have done the math.
maybe all 5 quintillion aliens are being hunted by equally non-emitting terminators and they don't want to give themselves away and also they want to save energy
directional communication makes sense when you have only two planets. if you have an entire solar system (or the entire galaxy) it's a dumb idea to eschew simple omnidirectional devices
You should really look into basic probability calculation LOL. If you have to come up with like nine different copes like "alien population in Milky Way is low" AND "aliens are relatively low technology with no Dyson spheres and limited terraforming" AND "aliens by mere chance don't exist within this arm of the Milky Way (except for us)" AND "zero aliens which do exist have tried deliberately signalling to the rest of the galaxy despite humans having done this nearly continuously since they developed the means" AND AND AND
Like just throw in the towel bro. You're adding epicycles on top of epicycles when the answer is right in front of you. You're just too stubborn to admit you were wrong.
Who are you responding to? I gave one reason and it’s called the inverse square law. The distances we’re talking about are unimaginably huge so the chances of any signal reaching us is practically zero unless it’s close by (within a few hundred light years) and intentionally directed at us with sufficient power.
Despite all your bluster you obviously have no idea what you’re talking about if you think exoplanet detection techniques can tell us if there is even a single radio transmitter on that planet.
you literally think that aliens are all so primitive and just happen to be completely absent from anywhere within 5000 light-years despite that being so statistically improbable it's laughable.
that every alien race just happens to either be on the opposite side of the galactic core or they all abide by the Georgia Guidestones and live primitive one-planet lifestyles.
how many copes do you need, honestly? either that or some people are literally incapable of grasping basic statistics.
by the way, how would you have felt if you didn't have breakfast this morning?
Is this in comparison to some other evaluation function which is perfect? I agree that all positions should have a certainty of win, draw, or lose with perfect play, but no engine is close to that level of evaluation function.
I do suspect that this pathological behavior could be trained out with additional fine tuning, but likely not without slightly diminishing the model's overall ability.
It comes down to: What is the evaluation for? For a human using an engine to analyze, it is about getting to more win-likely positions. And for an engine, it really is the same; plus to guide the search. Having a perfect trinary win/draw/loss would certainly be the _truth_ about a position in some objective way, but it would almost certainly not be the optimal way to win chess games against a set opponent. 1. e4 and 1. h3 are almost certainly both draws with perfect play from both sides, but the former is much more likely to net a win, especially for a human using the engine.
I'd suspect it will actually accelerate moving everything into the cloud.
If your entire business is in the cloud, you can give an AI access to everything with a single sign or some passwords. If half is on the cloud and half is local, that's very annoying to have all in-context for your AI assistant. And there's no way we're getting everything locally stored again at this point!
Right, this is why StabilityAI is getting in bed with Amazon, so private, fine-tuned models can operate on all your data sitting out there in S3 buckets or whatever.
Alternatively, figure out how to use GPT-3 in a market that involves some schleps. I'm working on one in Education Tech, building something for a need that teachers have been practically begging for. There are particular regulatory challenges, unique sales paths, and a big first to market advantage because educators aren't online constantly researching their options. Once you're embedded in the education consciousness, you're there for years.
But yes, another random thing GUI for generating marketing copy from GPT3 isn't a good long term play.
Having this be a universal policy has a big clear benefit--when someone at the company dies, their family's immediate needs and expenses are taken care of. It avoids the awkward "passing the hat" to the company or fellow employees for support. There's no need to make special exceptions, determine how much to help out in a crisis, etc--it's taken care of automatically, to a pre-determined extent. No one can complain that an employee died and big rich Google did nothing for their family. It saves a lot of potential handwringing, bad PR, and employee dissatisfaction, etc.
We did have it, we just didn't know which one it was. And we refused to risk any individual life in order to potentially save hundreds of thousands or more.
We also could have invested single digit billions early on to build capacity for all of these different potential vaccines, but we decided to play if "safe" and will now be spending over a trillion again to try to save the economy.
I don't blame the pharma companies for this. Our government and medical establishment was not intellectually prepared to make the hard decisions required to save us. And we need to be building momentum to learn how to do better.
> we refused to risk any individual life in order to potentially save hundreds of thousands or more.
The concern wasn't Trolley problem[1] paralysis, where authorities are afraid to deliberately shift harm to a minority to protect a majority. The concern was vaccine-associated disease enhancement (VADE), which could possibly cause more overall harm and deaths than simply doing nothing at all. It's a significant and legitimate concern because not only has it happened before with released vaccines, it has been a particular problem in SARS vaccine research and trials for 20 years. See "Learning from the past: development of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines", https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-00462-y
We had complete candidate vaccines mere days into the outbreak, but nobody was sure they were safe because they were just the latest iterations in long lines of similar candidate vaccines, all eventually failing. They couldn't rush trials too quickly because VADE situations might not become apparent without a large pool tracked over an extended period of time so that you can see what happens with reinfections, etc.
We got lucky. It seems to be the case that we had just recently turned the corner in resolving many of these barriers. If were were facing COVID-10 (i.e. a SARS pandemic in 2010), we'd be screwed because in 2010 we were much further away from figuring out how to avoid VADE-like failures in SARS vaccines.
Actual it was trolley problem paralysis. We could've gotten a much larger sample size much earlier (and with challenge trials, in addition to other methods) to screen out the very thing you're mentioning here (VADE).
Trials were accelerated. Anyhow, the whole premise that excessively cautious American and European regulations delayed testing is flawed. This is a global problem, and there are plenty of countries with far less onerous regulatory requirements, or with less apprehensive populations more willing to volunteer. It's no coincidence that many of these trials have occurred in other countries like Brazil.
Speaking of apprehensive populations, there's another concern on the mind of health authorities--managing the next pandemic. Say a vaccine has VADE or similar ill effects on some small but substantial part of the population. Even if the overall benefit in harm reduction is clearly superior, you may end up destroying trust. Even if your regulatory authorities are cold, calculating, utilitarian, econometric philosopher-kings, the population is not. The next pandemic might be worse, or social trust might continue to tank. Maximizing the long-term utility function might require a level of risk averseness that seems irrational in the present.
Safety rules are good and valid. They are not a suicide pact, however. With a once-in-a-century global pandemic, brave volunteers should be allowed (through even earlier large-n phase 1 and 2 groups) to help expedite the safety approval of something that can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people worldwide.
Phase III trials for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines actually began in late July, a mere 4 months after declaration of the pandemic. Challenge trials were unnecessary because they wouldn't have actually sped things up. By the time of the phase III trials you could already expect vaccinated individuals to be challenged via natural infection. And I'll bet money that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were, as a practical matter, given a green light by the FDA when the first early phase III results came back, months before formal approvals (which actually came in the middle of the phase III trials); meaning there would've been no regulatoryrisk to pushing the manufacturing pipeline into maximum overdrive.
There have been plenty of fumbles and mistakes all around, but I don't understand how people don't appreciate how incrediblyfast the process has already been.
IMO, the real issues involve more mundane matters of logistics--coordination, resource allocation, etc. Could the process have gone faster? Probably. Not because of safety protocols or inflexible regulations, but because we had unforced errors starting and executing trials. For example, AFAICT, trials could have started in Brazil in early June, but presumably didn't because the companies needed more time to spin things up. And of course manufacturing and distribution of the vaccine should be going much smoother. Pharmaceutical companies and, especially, governments should have thrown more resources toward growing the supply chain of machinery; it was foreseeable from the beginning because of the manifest deficiencies in the supply chain for personal protection equipment, ventilators, etc, all of which made evident the need to retool industries to be able to scale manufacturing. And governments have had almost an entire year to figure out distribution protocols, but instead it seems officials across the board in the U.S. simply assumed it would be sufficient to push vaccines through existing healthcare networks, despite the fact they're notoriously byzantine and inefficient, especially for something so time critical, and especially given the need for consistency and uniformity across the population.
Is COVID-19 providing cautionary tales regarding government intervention in the free market? Absolutely. Not because governments have been intervening too much, but because they've been intervening too little; not because it has proven government more inept than private enterprise, but because private enterprise is intrinsically incapable of achieving alone the level of coordination needed to scale our response in the time required, yet we have shown ourselves too politicallyandfiscallyriskaverse to wield the tools of government in an emergency. It's like the delayed and anemic Katrina response, writ large.
> And I'll bet money that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were, as a practical matter, given a green light by the FDA when the first early phase III results came back, months before formal approvals (which actually came in the middle of the phase III trials); meaning there would've been no regulatory risk to pushing the manufacturing pipeline into maximum overdrive.
If this is true this is the most insane thing I've ever heard.
They can't have it both ways. You can't say "the FDA knew it was safe and effective so they gave the geeen light to the manufacturers" and also "they had to withhold this vaccine from the population because they didn't know if it was safe and effective".
> Is COVID-19 providing cautionary tales regarding government intervention in the free market?
I don't believe criticism of the government needs to be condensed into "government intervention good" or "government intervention bad".
I don't think the solution is smaller government or bigger government it's better government.
The FDA has royally fucked up over and over again by being far too cautious. A lot of the government fucked up when they said masks didn't work.
The CDC fucked up when they promoted vaccinating essential workers instead of the old.
And the executive branch has been far too cautious and uninvolved in ensuring we have enough high quality masks, and broadening vaccine the pipeline.
To be fair, part of the reason we establish rules of ethics is so that when an emergency happens, we don't just wing it and start making up the rules. Situations like this pandemic are a very good reason to revisit established rules of ethics, but using it as justification to overrule existing rules negates the entire idea of establishing rules of ethics in the first place.
I agree in principle. On the other hand, global crises have always called for extraordinary measures.
Even in this pandemic, we've (correctly, I would say) basically thrown out important principles like freedom of movement and freedom of association during lockdowns. I think that allowing volunteers to put themselves at a relatively low risk to speed up vaccine trials would have been a relatively small transgression, compared to the lockdowns and travel bans (which, again, I think were justified).
This is a very good point. The lockdown measures, while very arguably necessary, are an extremely severe measure. They were perhaps the only measure that would have been effective at the beginning when there was no preparation.
Yet, things like enforced mask wearing, or enforced out of home quarantine/isolation somehow were off the table. It is a weird path-dependent quirk of the fact that we had no testing at the beginning, that instead of quarantining and isolated the exposed and infected, we are effectively quarantining everyone.
Isn't it exactly what happened? Some vaccines started large scale tests around March/April.
It's just that you have to wait a few months to know if the vaccine you're testing is effective. You can't make this delay shorter with more volunteers.
And when you're fighting a decease that "only" kills 0.5% of the people inflected, your risk margin is pretty low (what if your vaccine creates deadly consequences to 0.6% of the people vaccinated?).
Challenge trials shorten the period by intentionally exposing the volunteers to the infection.
The mRNA vaccines had to wait until November to get enough infections.
There can be an issue that the measurement of the effectiveness of the vaccine is then related to the exposure protocol (which may not be the same as typical natural infections), but it's reasonable to expect results much sooner.
So, you'd have to tell the participants that they're going to be deliberately exposed to the virus; I don't think you're going to get a representative sample of the population agreeing to that.
People volunteer for military service even during wars, but you're right. Challenge trials won't be brimming with 75-year olds, the same way 75-year olds don't enlist. You'd learn that the vaccine works on healthy 20-somethings though, and that might have been enough for approval.
If you can prevent 20 and 30 year olds from being infected, you might just manage to halt the spread of the virus even if you don't confer individual immunity onto older people.
Yeah, I dunno. I don't see why there couldn't be a challenge arm to a trial that also did a larger group with no challenges.
The challenge arm wouldn't have any influence over the other arm (and likely not much impact on recruitment), but might provide results for some groups much faster. Starting vaccinations on younger healthcare workers in August seems like it would have been a win (assuming they had data to justify it by that point).
> We also could have invested single digit billions early on to build capacity for all of these different potential vaccines
As of the end of October, the U.S. had invested $18 billion to "build capacity," mainly by making advance purchases of vaccines that had yet to be produced (and had yet to pass clinical trials). See [1]. But maybe you're thinking of building capacity in a different way.
> We refused to risk any individual life in order to potentially save hundreds of thousands or more.
This is such an important point. In particular, human challenge trials, in which healthy, low-risk volunteers are infected with a low dose of the virus, could have saved tens of thousands of lives -- at a minimum -- in the U.S. alone. The case for HCTs, including the ethical case, is taken up in [2].
In a comment below, someone likens HCTs to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. The comparison isn't apt. In the Tuskegee study, people infected with syphilis were promised medical care that they were later denied. When they were diagnosed with syphilis, they weren't even told of the diagnosis. Those conditions are a world apart from the HCTs that Eyal et al. propose in [2].
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I don't think challenge trials would have really helped much. The issue is that obtaining an accurate estimate of vaccine efficacy in the real world is a crucial piece of information. There is a very large difference between a 95% effective and a 70% effective vaccine in terms of the roll out and who/how many need to be vaccinated. Additionally, challenge trials are fundamentally contrived in terms of the innoculum size and mode of transmission. There is no substitute for a proper randomised trial under native transmission conditions. Challenge trials would lead us into a long night of uncertainty about efficacy.
That's not evident at all. The vaccines appear to be effective enough against the existing 'notable' mutations, and we don't really have much information about what rate of concerning mutations to expect.
And then on the other side of it, Moderna has a vaccine against the South African mutation in a trial. And production capacity on the mRNA vaccines is pretty clearly not maxed out in any long term sense (and then the other vaccines apparently have a better path to volume; J&J still sounds like they will make 1 billion vaccines this year. The viral vector vaccines aren't as immediately adjustable as the mRNA vaccines, but they are similarly targeted, choosing a protein to be expressed).
There's talk in the press about the vaccines being less effective on the mutations.
In any case, the more people who are vaccinated, the more likely a strain will arise that is not affected by the vaccine. This will reset all the vaccination efforts back to zero.
They have reduced but sufficient effectiveness against the mutations that are in the news.
I guess there's lots of room for arguing about definitions, but I think we don't go back to zero if there is a vaccine escape. The production capacity that has been built in the last year is a big step forward (and we can expand it), and we are building out the administrative capacity to get the vaccine in people's arms (capacity that won't just vanish).
> We also could have invested single digit billions early on to build capacity for all of these different potential vaccines
Are we sure "we" didn't? I don't know the actual numbers behind what was spent ahead of time for the various vaccines, but I believe the manufacturing process was ramped up before the trials completed.
There was discussion of it early on, but there's no evidence that it was done on any significant scale outside of the efforts of individual pharma companies working on their own supply chains.
It's possible that I'm wrong! Maybe we invested everything possible and couldn't have done significantly more. But it's striking that this article doesn't even address that question.
I am not entirely sure I agree with the thinking though.
While initial production ramp up would get the richer countries vaccinated quickly it seems like Gates has a more holistic picture and wants to see the whole world vaccinated faster.
I agree with this thinking. It won't matter if rich countries are vaccinated if other countries are coming up with new variations all the time. We want to eradicate this by having everyone in the world on the same page, not have it hanging around like the flu.
The economists that put together this working paper estimated that we left a lot on the table. Several months and hundreds of billions of dollars in the US (that invested a relatively large amount) and nearly a year and over a trillion dollars for the globe. Table 1 on page 6 summarizes it.
The virus can be controlled with appropriate measures to limit the death rate - see Taiwan, SK, Australia, New Zealand etc. If you want to argue that we could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives I would probably start there instead of experimenting on billions of people.
While this is true (I live in Melbourne Australia) it did affect a lot of people - financially, mentally etc.
Depending on where in society you sit probably shapes whether you think it was worth it.
(Full disclosure, I do but I was also not inconvenienced much.)
As it stands currently, I note that interventions in Australia are much faster now.
Our stand down position was we had to wear masks to the supermarket and on public transport. Everywhere else was pretty close to normal.
But one case detected yesterday in our 4 million population city, means we all wearing masks whenever we're indoors today.
That one case has flicked that switch overnight. So it seems that the main thing is to test well and react quickly.
An island at the edge of the world with more sheep than people is not at all comparable with the US or Europe.
If they'd acted early and decisively like the countries you mentioned, the outcome would likely have been better. But it would still look very different from those countries.
Yes, that's my point - the outcome would have been better, less people would have died. Italy was there as a stark warning, to the point where it was obvious that provinces with stricter controls did better than those without.
The USA had the poorest performance. When a country can't attend to basic matters of engaging with reality and protecting its citizens, despite incredible resources, it is defunct.
I am going to rant here.
This virus is really an indictment on the state of the world. It seems inevitable now that it will be endemic, and due to the infectivity and presence of animal hosts, will not be eradicable. This is terribly disappointing. Consider that this is the year we gifted an entirely new disease to all the billions of people that will live in the future. We just increased by 1 the number of things that can make you sick and kill you. Think about HIV - if we could go back and stop HIV from spreading, with the benefit of 40 years of hindsight, we absolutely would have done that, no question, not for one minute. The economic saving alone is compellingly enormous, not accounting for the amount of suffering that would have been avoided. To me, all this calculus about economic activity and mental health versus stopping the virus is so short-sighted and missing the point entirely. It seems obvious to me that any degree of short term pain is a mere blip compared to how many people will suffer and die of the virus over the next 20 years because we let it out. We had one chance, one moment to stop this virus and we blew it. Everyone, every country, ever politician, blew it. I know it could have emerged in a few years, or there could be another virus next year but that doesn't change the fact that we could have stopped this one.
Yeah, I agree. I also sympathize with your rant and feel our politicians in the West, nearly without exception, let us all down and continue to do so. They failed to demonstrate any kind of preparation or logical science based response and continue to fail at that.
China has it under control (yes, seriously, it's not just CCP propaganda) and they have over a billion people. So do many other countries like Vietnam.
China (and Vietnam and SK) did this successfully with extremely strict lockdown rules. I'm not sure those would have been accepted in the West.
Arguably the West handled in the worst of both outcomes - arbitrary and incomplete lockdowns - that caused a huge financial toll and a huge human toll.
Unfortunately that only works when there's no guarantee of freedoms by the government. No free country was able to do a lockdown that strictly and effectively.
We do pay a price for those freedoms sometimes in times of crises - but there's no doubt which system we'd rather live under.
Even ignoring the tens of thousands of people crossing the uk-france border daily, heathrow alone sees (saw) immense transfer traffic that airports like Sydney and Auckland don’t.
EXACTLY my question. How much would it have cost to make some bets against the various types of vaccines that could come out. Make a "generic" manufacturing facility that could then help scale up. So what if we "wasted" $10B on facilities that didn't pan out?
> And we refused to risk any individual life in order to potentially save hundreds of thousands or more
But we are risking individual lives now. Vaccines have side effects. It's never about an individual life, always a calculus of number of lives risked vs number of lives saved, I would think.
I think the point is that we chose and are still choosing to wait for a hundred people to get infected at random in each efficacy trial, instead of just deliberately infecting a hundred people immediately.
The cost of our approach is that roughly the same proportion of the country's population must bet infected as in the trials.
Honestly, I would. The way things are going down here in my country (Brazil) I will get infected eventually, at least by participating in challenge trials it would help other people.
That's an difficult and potentially eternal question - some people volunteer to go to space or cross the ocean on a canoe because to them its worth the risk. Some do it for the money. Some are just mad or obsessed.
Back in my time at uni, volunteers had to be unpaid to ensure they do it kf their own free will. Its unclear which is better / worse.
A lot of people who take trips and meet friends and family (me included) instead of staying home, basically said that they will take the risk of being infected than losing part of life.
Given that we have seen that the poorest are the most at risk of dying from the disease, I'm not sure that argument even holds any more.
Sadly, it's this obsession with straw man arguments about ethics and equity that's cost the West a million lives in the last year.
Doesn’t this raise the same problem with the current manufacturing process?
There was limited capacity to manufacture back then, probably less so than there is today. Which vaccine candidate would Pfizer have manufactured? All of them?
Yes, all of them. Or possibly expanding capacity for each of the major vaccine types, to be ready when we know which one is the winner.
And then, yes, a lot of those factories would have ended up sold for scrap (or mothballed for future pandemics or mutations). But the few that worked then save trillions of dollars of value and hundreds of thousands of lives.
It's a simple matter of calculating expected values and investing accordingly. But thats not how our civilization works.
Last year Bill Gates talked about doing exactly that (I don't know if this actually happened):
https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-factories-7-diffe...
The fact that someone like Gates is throwing the idea around suggests that it's not really incompatible or inconsistent with our civilization. (EDIT: saw your other comment with the follow-up, sigh.)
I'm going off the assumption that the capacity has been expanding as much as possible, so scrap factories wouldn't be a problem.
The Pfizer vaccine seems to have a shelf life of 6 months, so realistically the earliest they could have begun mass manufacture and have an effect today would have been June. That's right around the time they narrowed down to a single vaccine candidate.
I'm surprised that mass manufacturing didn't begin back then with the only possible candidate, especially since the US government also put their order in around that time. I can't find a whole lot of info on when they did ramp up (something I saw said October), and what reasons they had for not starting earlier.
Agree that relative to the cost in lives and global GDP leaders have drastically under invested in production and distribution of vaccines. Arguments about what ethical and incentive policies should be will continue forever. Certainly though we shouldn't be blocked at this point by availability of a few machines, shipping and inventory tracking, etc. Especially in the US we have really wasted 9-10 months to work on public health in general and vaccine delivery in particular. History will not be kind
That's refuted in the article. We were not finished developing them in February. It took all the time it took, to find vaccines that actually worked. With science. Not throwing darts. Several companies have still not worked out their vaccines.
It's like saying "We had steel mills; we had cars back in February!" All it takes is designing and building them.
It was clear the US government made the wrong decision when they backtracked and tried to buy more doses from Pfizer + Moderna[1]. Given how much the US has spent on stimulus, you would think even like 10-15 extra billion would be nothing.
> And we refused to risk any individual life in order to potentially save hundreds of thousands or more.
Are you volunteering? Will you sign all the paperwork?
If you die in the trial or get a severe reaction, would your family be happy with the paperwork, or they will claim that they fooled you?
If you die and the vaccine candidate fails, will the TV claim that they should have used a good old method like a modified adenovirus instead of playing god and creating a frankenvirus in the lab?
I and a ton of other people signed up for challenge trials through 1 Day Sooner (https://www.1daysooner.org/). Sure, there was some risk to me but it was small compared to the potential to save the lives of older friends and family even before considering strangers.
It kind of is. Hypothesis rejection is the primary means of advancing knowledge.
"We tried to prove this hypothesis wrong and could not" is the main thing you want a study to do. Having everyone try to prove your hypothesis wrong, and failing, is the main way that science advances.
No, really, it is not. In your own example you're already jumping to testing a hypothesis. "Scientific method" isn't just a vague phrase, there literally is a specific method of steps to go through.
The first step is Observation. Sometimes split out into Observation, then Research.
Then comes the formulation of a hypothesis.
After that is constructing a way to test the hypothesis. Not to prove it wrong, not to prove it right, but to test it.
There's more after that, it's an iterative process and a single test of a hypothesis isn't always definitive, often it is not. But "Prove me wrong" is not the starting point.
While you are correct conceptually, most scientific research using statistics does in fact attempt to provide evidence against no-effect (the null hypothesis).
The p-value of a scientific study is the probability that the given data would have been observed, given that there is no effect. Hence why small p-values can be associated with the success of the alternative hypothesis (i.e. what a scientist actually thinks will happen).
I know some people who tap a can of Coke before they open it, because "that prevents it from spilling". Each time they do that, they are more convinced that their hypothesis is correct.
But is it correct? To find out, we need to try to invalidate it. Try opening the can without tapping it first. If the Coke doesn't spill, the hypothesis is clearly wrong. It the Coke does spill now, it's quite strong evidence in favor of the hypothesis.
Given that a vaccine may not provide total protection, they should consider how to sell a potential early, safe but only moderately effective vaccination. For instance, calling it a "COVID-19 Immune Booster Shot," and be very transparent that it reduces your protection against the virus but is not total immunity. Then the world won't lose faith in science and medicine when folks who had the shot are testing positive and even dying.
Hopefully either way the amount of news coverage will be enough that most people will get informed about it, in a way that they don't for most issues.
Yes, flat-earthers would probably count as non-conformist. I think the point is that in order to have Galileo, you have to tolerate flat-earthers as well.
I do agree that calling most people "sheep" is uncharitable, and would add that calling aggressive conformists "stupid" is also not accurate or productive. They might be making stupid decisions, but they're not stupid people.
To view the majority of human beings as livestock, metaphorically or not, really shows the kind of person he is. Everyone is for the most part unique and will have bouts of aggressive independent mindedness. No one is constantly questioning the system or breaking rules, Paul would like to think that's what he does but in reality he is more of a conformist than he thinks and if he saw himself this way he would probably not use the term 'sheep' to describe it.
The relevance to hackers is that unlike most fantasy where spells are cast with hand motions, magic words, or spell ingredients, there's actually an explanation for why that works and makes sense.
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sorcerers-Intern-Humorous-Fantas...