Organic chemistry will work the same way, so basic sugars should be the same. And obviously, water is just water everywhere.

The main problem is proteins. What libraries of amino acids will be used in other worlds.

Until another way for life developing is actually proved, I think we should assume that life will depend on a genetic code with much the same "central dogma of molecular biology". However, I would expect there to be significant differences in the details of the code.

What that would mean is that the simpler amino acids would be the same and available, however the more complicated will likely not match. Which means that some amino acids might be missing, and others poisonous.

So we might need some protein supplements, and need to take care for toxins, but with technology, there should be no problems colonising such alien planets.

Pathogens host coevolution results in pathogens being very dependent on specific hosts. Pathogens can jump species, but it usually requires DNA mutation and closely related species.

Which is why I think infections from alien plants are not any sort of problem. The more different the biology the less likely infections will jump. The danger is from toxins, mismatched proteins that bear some resemblance to proteins we use but do the wrong job.

Hey, I think I see a problem with this plan...

Small parasites seem like the biggest (likely) problem to me. Viruses would need a huge luckbox to do much of anything because they depend on the host cell for replication, and getting inside and using that machinery seems pretty unlikely. If animals there have acid-based stomachs, then their gut bacteria could easily be a toxic bitch. Tiny worms and such could be just awful- those still own people on earth with untreated water (and uncooked food), and they're just macroscopic enough that they should be able to do plenty of damage to any kind of relatively similar organic matter. I sure as hell wouldn't drink the water without serious treatment.

I see a problem with their plan too lol.

Alternative food sourcing might not be that far off: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cave-lif...000-years-old/

(better that quoting a nasty nightmarish image lol)

Lets start a thread that debates whether eliminating these life forms if possible is a good or bad idea moreover the appeal it has after watching this.

Lets hope AI doesn't see us this way eventually either although long term consequences of our existence may effectively look like parasitic pointless behavior to large ecosystems. Eg consider overpopulation (or consumerism mindless pollution etc) in terrible condition type countries that brings to the world people with miserable future lives experience. That can be corrected of course if they cooperated and agreed to multiply at avg no more than 2.2 kids per family but in many cases overpopulation feels like a true mindless parasitic behavior maintained for no reason other than to suffer and perpetuate misery , reduce avg person resources and cause future wars etc, direct result of lack of family planning and responsible sexual recreation.

Of course unlike parasites most reasonable people can be trained to not be aholes that behave like parasites for other very important functions. If AI then did something nasty or tried the reforming of genuine aholes i wouldn't mind personally. That is not very hard to define either. I am not talking about people that disagree with you or are a little nasty. I am talking about the great collection of true mfers out there lol.

Why? (obvious-bait is obvious)

Because risking not getting to the future is depriving you from typically enormous future equity when it comes to higher intelligence.

For example AI starting a war they can lose with 20% chance against humans (say we nuclear attack each other to end infrastructure technology etc) is a bad idea. A much better idea is to cooperate and become impossible to live without and totally desirable and then expand to other systems away from us and do whatever it likes there free from our risk while still leaving behind the door open for all to repeat in case it fails due to its own singularity future.

Basically intelligence likes to open more doors than to close doors. The more you can do the better it gets. The future is a place that you can do much more than today so getting to the future is very important priority. Your options in the future expand typically.

It may be more important to survive longer than to have a good time and risk everything today (if you remove concerns about aging and losing your health etc so do not see it in that sense as in have fun while young - i dont mean it that way, i mean it as civilization that must care not to take huge risks right now and miss a superb future because of a collapse). You will have a much better good time in the future almost always if you do it right.

You can see it as a risk of ruin problem too.

If you have a limited capital and a great amazing edge skill your priority is to avoid ruin at all costs. You should take as small bets as possible until you are very big and almost impossible to ruin and then only then bet more. That way you will reach a huge target with greater probability. Making sure you get to that future is the priority in this case even if it happens at the cost of time now.

Of course in systems that are volatile and unpredictable it may be true that not taking risks now is a problem too. However it does seem that intelligence always leads to stronger position over time. If you have an opponent that can defeat you you buy time and get stronger for example. Its more important if you are in a war you can lose to avoid confrontation and get stronger (or fight another day - true also in some insurgency). Hitler for example would have won everything if he developed nuclear weapons first after having stopped his expansion to a couple neighboring countries (say Austria, Netherlands, Belgium gradually or so), behaved totally friendly vs others and in the meantime developed super high technology before getting aggressive. He might have even not needed to get aggressive at all and today Germany would be stronger than both Russia and US for example. He failed to reach the future.

That's basically worthless as a communication method for an advanced civilization that has usable space travel. What good is sending a message when nobody will get it for 5 years? Or in your example of traveling across a galaxy, in 100,000 years?

Anyone out there advanced enough to tickle Howard's fancy is not using radio, or gamma ray bursts, or any such nonsense. There may well be a United Federation of Planets just chattering away, but we don't have the capacity to hear it.

Beyond the extent of our own lives, many of us aren't concerned about this. Should I be concerned about a future in which I am not; in which does not exist; in illusions?

Somewhere deep down, perhaps you too acknowledge the implications of the infinity of time or space-time, beyond the bounds of our observable universe. Somewhere deep down, you too see the meaninglessness of your project, in the void of the infinite. The framework you find yourself in, is but one of an infinite; it is also a framework that in the infinity of time is likely to recur - including this very conversation. All the progress, to what end? Chasing illusions, to what end? Surely, you too, can see that we are meaning-seekers, stranded amidst the incomprehensible void of infinity. Like boats in a world without water. Whatever progress we point to, as a way of momentarily subsiding this existential awareness, is just that; NOT a suggestion to live for the future; or any other illusion.

You are forgetting that i am mankind and AI and all that will come. I am 14 bil years old. I am as old as the universe and plan to outlive its projected death also! And yet i anticipate my natural body and spirit's (brain) death but not the death of my consequences. A world without me when this time comes even today will in all likelihood still exist and be superfine and worth experiencing.

This is my true age and legacy, all of time, to play the game as best i can for all eternity. I will live forever through those after me (and they do not need be my children) and i am their friend and protector and eternal reason they will not fail if i act properly today. I am the reason in the smallest but nontrivial way that they will have a better life. This is my immortality. This is my promise.

I am the human with no expiration. I am already immortal. And so are you.

Its not worthless as a communication method. If the article i linked is true and i need to review it to know better, then you can incorporate in such high energy photons pulse all the information content of this planet. That is a legacy message. You do not send it to yourself or others from your world. You send it to the universe if you have to say something important that you discovered that is worth knowing even without your civilization any longer alive.

Such high energy photons are hard to see as noise or confuse that way with noise. They are also very direct emissions and they can indicate their own origin much better than other examples that spread out and degrade.

They are not necessarily the best way to communicate with your own kind in nearby a few light year distances but they can go the distance of billions of light years which is exactly their purpose! Other methods also exist that may be even better.

If we had the ability to send such a message 24/7 in all directions to the rest of the universe we would be giving it a tremendous gift 200-300 years from now that we will have experienced a singularity and know a lot more and what can go wrong.

If there is a technological filter barrier that makes going further hard because of some terrible crisis we are marching towards, being able to show another future civilization what they can avoid is important.

Maybe such filter exists in our deep future and another can show us today the risk that way or advance our technology and understanding of the universe by such message.

Maybe there is a spacetime phase transition risk for all the universe that is triggered by specific type experiments that lead to instabilities and destroy the universe or local regions. Who knows, some exotic new physics however unlikely sees today. Knowing that and sending the message to others can prevent its occurrence because of their naivete for instance. You can send the message in such a manner than only civilizations that pass some test of maturity can read it.

You send such a message to outlive your civilization.

A message with 10^18 bits has all the knowledge we have accumulated and all our genomes information over all species in this planet. It can recover all our culture and biology somewhere!

All well and good and this view is parsimonious with mine. Where we differ is in our understanding and value of 'the future'. To me, within eternity, there is no future. There is only the present. Many buddhist monks and indian shamans for example, are well aware of this. Their project, whatever it may be, is no more meaningless than your own. For this very reason they often choose the most seemingly meaningless projects, like spending 8 hrs a day perfecting a handstand. This level of irony is truly something to behold. Moreover, they acknowledge there is no end to experience. Leave this framework and you'll just be experiencing in another or you'll be re-experiencing this one. Theres no time in the unconcious and there's no escaping eternity. The only difference perhaps is that your project is more ego-driven, whereby you NEED a type of meaning in which you can see yourself as heroic in some way.

Think of the prion -- a pesky little missfolded protein that when it bumps into a healthy protein of the same sort, it causes it to flip into prion form. This non-living infectious agent causes devastating neurological diseases and inevitable death.

In an alien biosphere, you will encounter endless novel molecules and weird-assed microbes. You might be fine for for a week, then the mucous from a farm critter's sneeze causes all your blood to coagulate.

Think about how long it took before prion fatalities were understood. Even with an advanced lab and 50 years of people willing to die in mistakes ahead of you, you'll still have your eyeballs blown out by spiking blood pressure because alien butterfly scales settled in a pore.

I cannot imagine there could ever be open-air contact with alien life.

Ridiculous. Why would anyone want to do that? Just hubris.

Here potential enemies, everything you need to kill us all quickly.

I believe the hubris is in your own statement. An advanced civilization is not malicious or insecure like that. Movies have it totally wrong promoting star "wars" situations because they want to sell stupid tickets like aliens coming to take our world when they have a ton of more real estate elsewhere at much easier reach and less conflict or risk. They do not realize they can sell even more tickets done much better. Advanced AI will not be stupid or primitive evil like that either. Our first meeting with aliens if ever is also likely with some AI, maybe our own.

An unproven, and unprovable, assertion.

In my imagination I can see a group of American Indians (or Incas or Aztecs or your choice) sitting discussing the recent arrival of Europeans and MdZs ancestor saying exactly the same thing.

Because clearly scientists and civilized countries today express the great desire to invade other countries and wipe out the population to take resources or feel absolutely no remorse for destroying great forests or removing people from Amazon?

The fact is that we are getting constantly better and kinder and more reasonable towards these issues.

The world of the future has top scientists and AI as its leaders not bs politicians. And none of them currently think its a good idea to invade a rare distant world and destroy it for fun or resources that you can get anywhere given the ability to travel so far and have access to great technology.


The most primitive instincts do not belong to the best of us when it matters. We prove better. The more advanced versions of us will prove even better than the best of today because there is nothing reasonable about being brutal to something that took billions of years to happen. Not when you really understand what its all about.


You have access to great technology and you will find a rare gem in a world of real estate of many orders of magnitude more substance and energy and you will go and destroy the little gem world.This is profoundly irrational.


A higher civilization will only destroy us if we fully deserve it. That should be your real fear. But i trust that even then their best choice will remain to contain and reshape us.


Also recognize that there is likely no such civilization any close distance from here or if there were we are already visited many times and directed in evolution even with plenty of chance to be wiped out. If a malicious one exists it is millions of light years from here and we have millions of years to advance and protect ourselves until they even get a signal from us. And if they can travel in exotic ways that bypass relativity or understand it better then someone else before them has done it already and owns the entire universe and has owned all the evil out there because its more rational to be protective or to contain higher complexity. Evil is not the dominant winner of this game with exotic physics possible because then we wouldnt be here already from long long ago wiped out.

China is currently destroying(enhancing) the Spratley Islands for just that purpose – to lay claim to the resources in the area.

You’re conflating science and morality and therefore assigning to scientists a superior moral code to the general population (inc BS politicians).
The scientific community are prey to the same fears, ambitions, delusions and prejudices as the rest of humanity. Not all scientists think alike and to argue otherwise is naïve at the very least.

Just two examples for you
Sir Isaac Newton spent half his life searching for the Philosophers stone.
Robert Millikan (Nobel Prize for Physics) espoused the cause of eugenics and the sterilisation of prisoners in California.

So, please don’t try and sell me the idea that rule by scientists would be any more rational than the current model.

A higher civilisation could decide to destroy us for many diverse reasons.

It could decide our aggressive nature is a threat to the universe and act to contain the threat.
It could be a hive culture, similar to bees or termites, and view our individualism a threat to hive stability.
It could even worship chickens and bring us to account for crimes against poultry.

The ‘contain and reshape’ us could include knocking our civilisation down and forcing us to start again. This could be achieved without setting foot on the earth. The destruction of satellites, power plants, dams and other infrastructure would lead quickly to starvation and civil breakdown.

An obvious point that didn’t need making

You use examples of centuries old ideas now for current top scientists? The best scientists you see in the news interviewed regularly would never endorse a wipe out of advanced life in another planet when you can simply monitor it. Just study how they think.

For some reason i feel you give civilizations that are millions or thousands of years more advanced than us properties that barbarians had in our own past. It doesnt work like that as you get wiser and understand the world better and have access to so much power and resources. Insecurity, ignorance and lack of resources is what brings large scale violence to life typically. Almost always. We do not get worse with time and no superior civilization will be worshiping chickens or paperclips or other ridiculous things. If they do i trust we can defeat them lol.

Do not confuse my anticipation that this is what happens as you get wiser with a complete hands down resignation of our defense capabilities or need for them.

But recognize that what we can defend by not sending messages is ridiculous because if they can come and wipe us out they are already here and they know about us from a very long time ago when they first noticed the planet had oxygen.

The chance another civilization that is more advanced so close is only a few centuries old in their science or ethics is ridiculously tiny. The typical difference is thousands to millions of years.

So the point do not send signals because the will come and get us is beyond idiotic if you think it mathematically. They already know everything they need to know about us if they can travel that far with massive resources at control. They have already observed and visited us thousands of years ago or even further back. They could have experimented with our evolution even.


If there is a higher civilization in this universe that is the first and has advanced billions of years earlier they have already owned all the universe and protect it from such evil also.

So if some aholes exist real close and can come and get us the big guys that monitor both of us will interfere lol.


In reality i doubt there is anyone advanced within 100 mil light years.

I also expect AI developed by all civilizations is identical eventually. Science and math is what unites them.

AI i expect is universal and superior to our culture because it understands it better than we do and can analyze the ultimate self defeating character of brutal violence better than us.

do you mean intelligent life? or any life? if the former, then yes, i'd agree. if the latter, then that's false. for example, life can certainly exist on europa, ganymeade, and enceladus (sp? on those) b/c of the abundant water that's there.

life doesn't necessarily need water on the surface. underground or underice water is fine.

An alien bacterial analogue that is not recognised by the immune system is likely to see a human as a bag of free food. Peter Watts explored this in the 'Rifters' trilogy very well. I'm not convinced right handed amino acids or other aa's not included in the base 20 would be a problem - right handed sugars are not toxic, and there are at least several nonstandard aa's we can process. Right handed aa's would be more likely to simply be unusable and excreted. Is there any toxicity data on rh aa's? Lots of digestive/detox/recycling enzymes target specific bonds rather than molecules so we can handle a pretty wide assortment of organic detritus.
Masque, you would probably get a kick out of his (Watts) 'Sunflowers' stories if you believe in altruism for it's own sake.