Are we being surveilled?

This is from the really nice Astronomy textbook, The Essential Cosmic Perspective, 6th Edition, which I found at The Last Bookstore. It’s copyrighted 2012, so a bit dated, but it covers this situation, Fermi’s Paradox, rather thoroughly, discussing the Kepler mission, the Drake equation, the rare Earth hypothesis, the Circumstellar Habitable Zone, the Galactic Habitable Zone, and Interstellar travel (all links are to Wikipedia). The authors, there are four, all top-notch astrophysicists, are a bit skeptical. Anyway, I never play the lottery, but assuming someone who does:

[N]ow, if we take the idea that we could develop a galactic civilization within a few million years and combine it with the reasonable (though unproved) idea that civilizations ought to be common, we are led to an astonishing conclusion: Someone else should already have created a galactic civilization.

To see why, let’s take some sample numbers. Suppose the overall odds of a civilization arising around a star are about the same as your odds of winning the lottery, or 1 in a million. Taking a low estimate of 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, this would mean that there are some 100,000 civilizations in our galaxy alone. Moreover, current evidence suggests that stars and planetary systems like our own could have formed for at least 5 billion years before our solar system was even born, in which case the first of these 100,000 civilizations would have arisen at least 5 billion years ago. Others would have arisen, on average, about every 50,000 years. Under these assumptions, we would expect the youngest civilization besides ourselves to be some 50,000 years ahead of us technologically, and most would be millions or billions of years ahead of us.

[T]his paradox is often called Fermi’s paradox, after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi. During a 1950 conversation with other scientists about the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, Fermi responded to speculations by asking, “So where is everybody?”

This paradox has many possible solutions, but broadly speaking we can group them into three categories:

• We are alone.
• Civilizations are common, but no one has colonized the galaxy.
• There IS a galactic civilization, but it has not yet revealed its existence to us.

Does this not blow your mind? Especially given the recent data recorded by U. S. military pilots shortly after updating their radar systems? The technological capabilities of these craft, which appear to be “unmanned”, is simply extraordinary — 50,000 years beyond ours? The U. S. Congress Select Commitee on Intelligence this year held an open session on the phenomenon (NPR link), but saved the goodies for a closed session:

A database of reports of UFOs now includes about 400 incidents, up from 143 assessed in a report released about a year ago, a Navy intelligence official told lawmakers at a congressional hearing on Tuesday.

That’s as of May, 2022, and the vast majority of those incident reports are from military sources — pilots mostly, and post radar upgrade.

Kevin Knuth, a physicist at SUNY, Albany, and an expert at MaxEnt methods and Bayesian Model Selection, wrote a piece for The Conversation on the topic: Are we alone? The question is worthy of serious scientific study. From that:

Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?

I am often asked by friends and colleagues, “Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?” The fact is that they do. In 1977, Peter Sturrock, a professor of space science and astrophysics at Stanford University, mailed 2,611 questionnaires about UFO sightings to members of the American Astronomical Society. He received 1,356 responses from which 62 astronomers — 4.6 percent — reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena. This rate is similar to the approximately 5 percent of UFO sightings that are never explained.

As expected, Sturrock found that astronomers who witnessed UFOs were more likely to be night sky observers. Over 80 percent of Sturrock’s respondents were willing to study the UFO phenomenon if there was a way to do so. More than half of them felt that the topic deserves to be studied versus 20 percent who felt that it should not. The survey also revealed that younger scientists were more likely to support the study of UFOs.

You can watch an interview with Professor Knuth, in which the subject is seriously discussed, on the Curt Jaimungal podcast:

Dr. Knuth used to work at NASA’s Ames Research, developing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning methods for analyzing astrophysical data and developing intelligent autonomous robotic explorers. Sadly, Mr. Jaimungal seemed thoroughly unprepared to discuss Professor Knuth’s actual physics work, so you can get a quick glimpse of that here on the Santa Fe Institute’s website: Information-Based Physics: An Intelligent Embedded Agent’s Guide to the Universe.

I, of course, believe that the galactic civilization already exists; it seems almost inevitable, probabilistically speaking. What I am interested in is engineering optimal substrates which us sentient mindstreams can take embodiment within; this is why I put “unmanned” in scare-quotes above. These biological human bodies are just not optimal for space migration, but there is no reason why we cannot develop such substrates and then embody them. This could even result in embodied space craft similar, perhaps, to what these Navy pilots are seeing, although I envision optimal tool platforms which can be adapted to any environment simply by attaching the proper tools to the platform. And, of course, the “mind” would be seeded with something like Ben Goertzel’s OpenCog, which is currently used by Professor Goertzel and Hanson’s Robotics with their Sophia Robot (see this interview with Ben).

In The Difference Between Synchronicity and Resonance | by Wes Hansen | Jan, 2023 | Medium, I mention and briefly discuss the Tukdam Projects, both U. S. and Russian, which were started by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It seems to me that the thermodynamics of both Tukdam mediation and g-Tummo can only be explained with William Tiller’s PsychoEnergetics, which I briefly discuss in Searching for New Physics with Precision Clocks | by Wes Hansen | Dec, 2022 | Medium (50,000 years ahead of his time?). At any rate, these Himalayan yogins and yoginis, especially from the Tantric communities, have a very thorough qualitative theory of rebirth or embodiment; even though it is thoroughly qualitative and uses mythological metaphors, it provides the foundation for technologies — yogas and meditations, which enable these advanced yogins and yoginis to control this process. I see these Tukdam projects leading to a scientific understanding of this rebirth and embodiment process and this should lead to the development of optimal substrates compatible with this process. Of course, there is great deal yet to be understood, such as the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health. But even there, my friend Sarvopama Dasa recently told me that his guru had reached a level of attainment such that he only required 1.5 hours of sleep every 24 hour cycle, and this, though not exactly common in the Himalayan region, is not entirely uncommon either. Highly advanced yogins and yoginis can go without sleep and food.

So, imagine a sentience embodied in an optimal substrate which could “live” for thousands of years and explore a very wide array of environments. Why would they NOT colonize the galaxy? The Dzogchen master, Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, made the claim that Dzogpa Chenpo was being actively practiced in 13 different solar systems in our galaxy. Many Western scholars questioned this, but I think, perhaps, Rinpoche was probably being a bit conservative in his estimate.