Game theory, applied to aliens - Page 14

On January 06 2012 07:07 iPAndi wrote:
What the hell did i just read.

On January 07 2012 06:37 darkscream wrote:
this thread is just fantasy and conjecture

what if aliens shoot magic lasers that ignore the laws of physics, travel faster than light and burn hotter than any star

what if aliens are sentient energy beings who can teleport and inhabit human minds

what if aliens have an anal fetish, and rather than destroy us, simply come to probe us with a RAD (relativistic anal dildo)

I mean, that's the problem with talking about things that are not based on facts whatsoever, you can just make up anything you like because you have no input data, the conclusions drawn by the OP are equally as legitimate as what I wrote above, because they are based on the assumption that other civilizations exist in the universe, and that their sole goals are to harvest more energy and make more planet-bullets.

On January 07 2012 06:20 sorrowptoss wrote:
What is the point of defining or trying to predict something (ie the attitude of extra-terrestrial life forms) according to our extremely ignorant and limited point of view? The universe is so vast that the possibilities are endless; and by the way many replies on this thread are highly biased by american movies and such.

We do everything according to our knowledge (and also sadly according to pathetic action sci-fi movies) and apparently everybody here including the OP is desperately trying to define things. Why not accept to not know? That isn't giving up.

But to go with the flow, I'd say that Humanity is a very agressive life form and violence seems to always be the only way to fix things, whether it's verbal or physical. We can't seem to stop and understand the pointlessness of the struggle in unison (and in unison only). The only way another civilisation in the universe could thrive for thousands of years is by thinking in unison.

Though the odds of that happening is very unlikely due to the universal laws of evolution (the strongest survive for the short term and the most adaptive survive for the longterm), the most straightforward way to survive is ours: own, rule, use and destroy everything for our existence, only thinking short term. So honestly, I don't know how small the odds would be for a fundamentally solidary (thinking and working in unison) civilisation to spawn somewhere in the universe... Yet the universe is so vast that it must have happened somewhere sometime. But on top of that, the odds of that civilisation to find us in our little corner, to have the exact technology to do so, to "travel" all the way here and to be visible (and to speak english hahahahaha) is even less than what it was initially.

Extra-terrestrial life does exist, it must, due to the vastness of the universe, but for it to be visible and recognizable for us humans is so unlikely. On top of that, Humanity will be extinct soon, so the tiny lifespan of existence Humans had on this planet minimizes even more the chances of encountering other life forms in the universe. By now, after those 3 layers, it's nearly impossible for "aliens" to get in contact with us.

On January 07 2012 19:16 Humanfails wrote:
for further mind blowing:

What if humans were artificially accelerated in development by aliens, and we are in fact slaves, but not in the direct slave method you might think of. Imagine the matrix, but reality side.

What if, the reason we have this unquenchable urge to harvest resources and keep building and building and building beyond all sanity when logically this process of behavior is not sustaining, is that we have been very specifically genetically manipulated and programmed to do these things and genetically programmed to stay that shortsighted? I mean, we're already getting to the point where we can do this to ourselves with genetic manipulation, give it two hundred years or less, so why not the aliens?

And imagine this: If the aliens want resouces, why not SEED a planet to make resouirces available, and the alien race seeds bunches of planets, either by visitation or by shooting RKV's of specific genetic material at all planets which can support these "bio-machines as they evolve and become resource processing species", and then there's planets with their resources highly concentrated, pulled from the planet and placed clean on the surface, for the aliens to come along and scoop up, as they make their rounds harvesting their crops?

We're already considering making robots to replicate themselves and build space stations for humans on mars, why couldn't aliens have done this with bio-robots, i.e. us? We've seen blade runner, right? (about using artificial life forms that are actually genetically engineered living tissue beings that are like humans to do dirty and harsh human necessary space labor, not in any other sense than this)

On January 07 2012 20:28 KainiT wrote:
What I dont get about your experiment is the following: Why would not launching the RKV be a risk? In fact it doesnt affect the Alien's decision to launch a RKV on their own. So we would have the risk of getting destroyed no matter how we would react. The only thing we can choose is to eliminate the aliens as well. What I mean basically is that the launch of a RKV can not stop the alien's RKV. Even if they launch it for example two weeks later...

On January 07 2012 19:03 flamewheel wrote:
this thread is a mix of bad, good, awesome, and space dicks

and rekrul

On January 08 2012 09:00 Fontong wrote:

Why bother when you can just use machines instead?

Presumably any race that can travel from star to star would have machines orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than having humans do their work for them at a painstakingly slow pace. It's like saying I should seed a colony of flies in my trash can to eat all the trash because I don't want to take it out every week.

On January 07 2012 06:38 Caller wrote:

If this is the person that I think it is, long time no see.

I already graduated though lawl so no can do

On January 07 2012 23:22 Sbuiko wrote:
The problem i have with this scenario is, that the starting conditions have been skewed to make a point. So here just a few counterpoints off the top of my head:

Precision:

The precision needed to hit a tiny planet like earth from several light years afar with an object moving at speeds unbeknown to natural stelar objects are not reachable by current technologies. in flight adjustments to the flight pattern would be needed, exorbitantly increasing energy requirements for these projectile weapons. The chance of being aggressive, but not actually destroying anything are high, and then retaliation becomes possible, destroying the basic premiss of the proposed dilemma.

Proposal of nuclear-powered near light speed flight:

The theory to use such crafts do exist, and conventional chain explosion drives have been used in space probes. The problem with nuclear ones is, that they need a shield that is nuclear explosion proof (or something that absorbs the explosion, like large materials that crumble away with each explosion). In addition, the actual projectile needs to be of a high density, to sustain constant rocking and compression from the sudden accelerations. So a largish piece of concrete would simply crumble into dust, while a steel-cube might be more useful, but immensely costly to produce. Meanwhile future acceleration steps (A-Bombs) need to be completely shielded from all explosions, as they're highly delicate machines. In addition, nuclear bombs disable themselves trough radiating away their explosives over time. As such a rocket would travel several hundreds of years at least, the bombs would need to be assembled on board(!). Of course one could use smaller explosions, or use less energy for each explosion, but that increases the acceleration time, decreases total speed, and makes the premise of these attacks being undiscoverable and non-defendable doubtful.

Our current or near future world building one of these things:

Our only acceleration method would be nuclear chain bombs, as described above. The projectile can be small-ish (in stelar measures), but then we'd need to built nuclear production facilities on the projectile itself. We also need to ship several hundreds or thousands of the current yearly uran production from earth to space, and rockets have quite a high failure rate. Fall-out from an exploding nuclear transport rocket is catastrophic immediately, while the gains of the stelar projectile are highly hypothetical. That skews the risk to reward ratio into the unsustainable. So I'd say, our current world (even 100-500 years into the future), would not be able to produce one of these projectiles, without neglecting self sustenance. Not to speak of a whole arsenal. But then, future technology, and more importantly, economical advances might remove this problem.

Assumption that other races are dangerous to own survival:

If the only thing that can reach aliens are one of the following three, then destruction of alien planets becomes unnecessary:
1. Radio transmissions at light speed
2. Almost light speed projectiles
3. Habitated space ships or robotic probes at slow speeds
Warp drives and faster then light travel notwithstanding, moving a live sustaining vessel for light years is costly beyond imagination. Sending a survivable amount of colonists to a planet is even more bonkers. Therefore destroying live on another planet would be useless to begin with, as we'd never have a need for another planet that far away. Ignoring that, bombing and then colonising such a far away planet would simply replace one adversary with another one, because control or unified acting as a single entity is simply impossible when all communication takes more then 20 years for a single question/answer (and finding a habitable planet within 10 light years is optimistic).

Radio silence:

We as a planet are not currently sending radio waves to aliens. This is due to several factors. Our radio transmissions are weak, and even tho they might reach out some, they do diminish in strength exponentially with distance. This is an effect of increasingly much space that the energy has to 'cover' in a 3-D sphere. It's like spreading butter on a bread too thin. Secondly, our radio transmissions are weak, compared to what the sun is producing. It's like using a walky-talky next to a military grade radio tower, on the same frequency. And thirdly, we don't actively try to send out centred, clear transmissions to a single space, but send radio waves that are ideal for small distances. Meanwhile, we are listening on single, high probability spaces ourselves. Why? Because sending to another planet on purpose takes a ton of energy, while listening doesn't cost almost anything at all.

In essence the proposed "dilemma" is so highly abstracted from reality, that it becomes false. Unless we discover an important use for distant planets that are habitable, this is useless at best, but actually misleading and fearmongering/uncertainty/destructive (FUD) at it's worst.

On January 07 2012 07:09 Gummy wrote:


Your comments reflect a lack of understanding of game theory, so I offer this model based on information sets and extensive form sequential games.

Consider:

1.) Player 1 chooses to broadcast or not broadcast.
2.) Player 2 receives message and chooses whether or not to broadcast or launch a RKV.
3.) Player 1 either receives broadcast or detects RKV and decides whether to launch RKV. (this stage is a 3-fold branching. Detect response first, detect RKV first, or detect nothing)

That fully specifies an extended form game (tree structure) with all the necessary components to establish information sets given some strongly negative payoff for being dead and some presumably slightly negative payoff for having to launch an RKV, with broadcasting information being basically free. Information sets come into play in stage 3, since player 1 does not know if an RKV has been sent or not and has to make a decision based on the possibility of both situations.

The OP suggests that a SPNE is for 1 not to broadcast and launch RKV on detection of traceable communication. This is trivally a SPNE since the payoffs are 0 for both parties and we have not formulated any positive payoffs in this game. Thus, since we cannot do better (period), we cannot do better by deviating. (simple argument from weakening)

Later on, the OP suggests a peaceful outcome if the game is extended into

1.) Player 1 chooses to broadcast location, not broadcast, or to broadcast that player possesses advanced first strike and broadly decentralized second strike capabilities.
2.) Player 2 receives message and chooses whether or not to broadcast or to broadcast in turn the possession of advanced first strike and broadly decentralized second strike capabilities or to launch a RKV.
3.) Player 1 either receives broadcast or detects RKV and decides whether to launch RKV.

In this game, we see that broadcasting advanced first strike capabilities with broadly decentralized second strike capabilities while committing to launch RKV on detection of incoming RKV is also a SPNE. Given the payoffs we described earlier, there is a strongly negative payoff for player 2 to launch RKV, since they will be greeted in turn with an RKV in response.

A point that was somewhat unclear to me after the somewhat confusingly ordered edits in the OP was whether or not the origin of an RKV could be successfully traced for MAD. If RKVs are traceable then as I said in the previous paragraph, communication can still be an RKV. Otherwise, the only SPNEs are those where the first player does not broadcast.

On January 08 2012 10:52 Humanfails wrote:



machine require maintenance, overhead, and the resources to produce them. Or in other words, what makes you think that biological machines ARE NOT the machines?

it's like saying you seed a colony of flies on tiny specks of dog poop outside your yard so you dont have to pick it up, assuming the dog isn't producing anymore of course. see how the trash analogy is flawed, I hope.

The point is, we as HUMANS are trying to produce machines that work like viruses. They replicate, use instructions to grow objects, and build up parts of extraterrestrial stations and do some work. machines designed to work in this fashion have only been able to be formed precisely because we're telling them to mimic our functions. But if you can just create some biological machine to do it, you could achieve similar results and it has the benefit that these "sentient" machines can be creative in protecting themselves from natural disasters and other events, whereas machines could be wiped out without an artifical intelligence so complex as to be be considered sentient by turing tests. In the end, especially with the medical tech we're aquiring even now, it'd be a simple matter to produce some bio-machines and let them loose.

Just look at the graph curve of technological advancement for humans over the course of the last 3000 years. it skyrockets in a similar fashion to the idea of how fast 10^x nanobots would keep replicating themselves and building something up.

basically, we are the machines they sent out, if all this could be believed.