scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/3dl8u0.md

[D] [HSF] Do Not Leave

• Author: u/gbear605 history’s greatest story*

• URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3dl8u0/d_hsf_do_not_leave/

• Score: 9

• Created: 2015-07-17T04:28:38

Post:

As New Horizons passed Pluto, it picked up a signal emanating weakly from a beacon on Pluto. The signal is found in the data three months from now. The signal says (oddly in perfect English using an established method of transcription),

"Do not leave. We have set a protective cloud around your solar system. If you go past the Oort cloud, you will be detected. And if you are detected, you will be killed and the protective cloud will break, exposing all of your race."

What is the rational thing for humanity to do?

Comments:

u/alexanderwales [+15] Time flies like an arrow*

The rational thing to do is assume that it's a hoax. Most of the efforts involved with this message should be in trying to figure out how someone on Earth would have managed it. Even if they can't figure it out, the rational thing is probably still to assume that it's not legitimate, just on balance of probability. If I see someone vanish a coin before my eyes, I assume that it's a trick, not I'm witnessing magic. That aside, step two is to gather more data. That means another mission to Pluto, which means another decade and a half for construction, launch, and transit. That's assuming you could get the project green-lit at all, which probably wouldn't happen unless searching for the signal again was part of some bigger mission. The thing is, we've already sent out some things that are going to pass through the Oort cloud given enough time. We can't exactly send a recall signal to them. If our second mission to Pluto confirms that it's not a (conventional) hoax and there's not further information waiting for us there, then our only real option is to make some new probes that can race ahead of the Voyager and Pioneer probes and bring them back home, or start improving technology as swiftly as possible so we might be able to mount a defense against whatever's out there. But I doubt that it would change anything at all, in the day-to-day, given the timespans involved with the probes.

u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm*

Edit see /u/pleasedofthenerdful 's comment: see I read this year or last that Voyager or another of the probes passed out far enough that it saw other partical currents exceed the magnitude of the solar wind: effectively that it was now in interstellar space. here it is it's wired which is high on conclusions low on data highs noise to signal ratio for a rational Mind, but good to look at to find what data might be interesting to investigate. Edit: It reminded me of a SCP story: mission statment

u/MugaSofer [+1] *

That's assuming you could get the project green-lit at all, which probably wouldn't happen I think the alien message might help with that, although admittedly I've never actually tried to get an interplanetary probe financed.

u/None [+6] *

This sounds like the start of a beautiful tale about rowing and fighting the power. Please go on. But seriously, I think that we've already got some probes past the Oort Cloud, so either it's a matter of time, or a hoax. If it's a matter of time, we should work on trying to improve our technology as swiftly and soundly as possible. Whoever's waiting outside the Oort Cloud needs to get several kinds of giga-drill to the face when they decide to walk into our motherfucking Solar System.

u/pleasedothenerdful [+4] *

While Voyager I has entered interstellar space, it has not yet exited the Oort Cloud, which is mindnumbingly huge. However, I don't think we have the means to prevent it from eventually exiting at this point, as it's travelling 10 miles/second relative to the Sun and out of reaction mass/delta-v.

u/Sparkwitch [+2] *

From your Wikipedia links: let's assume an inner bound of the Oort cloud at 2000 AU. Further, let's assume that this boundary is the bubble about which the hypothetical aliens are concerned. An AU is 1.5x10^8 km, and New Horizons (our fastest probe) is happens to be slowing asymptotically to 15 km/s. So it will travels an AU once every 10^7 seconds: About 2800 hours, or 120 days. 1962 AU - subtracting the 38 AU New Horizons has already traveled - would schedule arrival at the Oort cloud in about 620 years. Unfortunately, Voyager 1 is our current speediest probe at 17 km/s, and it has a substantial head start. It's currently 132 AU from the sun, and it's faster speed means it will arrive at the interior of the Oort cloud in only 520 years. So even if we believe this is not a hoax, and we trust that aliens are telling the truth... no big rush. 520 years ago was 1495.

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+8] Godric Gryffindor*

Human hoax. There's no plausible set of alien goals which implies that this, and no other visible actions, is the best strategy for achieving those goals.

u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow*

Could be an alien hoax? I often wonder about a universe where our first contact with aliens involves them trolling us for the lulz.

u/Chronophilia [+6] sci-fi ≠ futurology*

I'd expect alien first-contact hoaxes to be a little more elaborate than this. You only get one chance at them.

u/Sagebrysh [+3] Rank 7 Pragmatist*

Hey guys, what if we're the alien invaders?

u/None [+2] *

Protective implies that they're protecting us. If the entities doing the protecting and detecting are different - right of intelligent species vs search-and-destroy pest exterminators - then it is, if not likely, at least plausible. Protective, for example, could just mean that there's a cloak which hides the presence of life on our planet which can modify EM radiation but not physical objects, and artificial objects that pass it would thus be likely to be detected by the exterminators, after which backtracking and probably subsequent extermination would be trivial.

u/None [+3] *

There's some nuance in the way EY worded his comment that negates this is a reasonable possibility. No alien species would do what the OP describes, and only what the OP described, even if it was a species trying to protect us from space-terminators.

u/None [+2] *

I can kind of see it happening - for example, if the protecting aliens have a limited budget, and the project for protecting Earth wasn't given much in the way of resources. Unless there's a scale of organization at which bureaucracy becomes more efficient rather than less...

u/ulyssessword [+3] *

Step one: check for hacks, bugs, and other errors that would cause this message to appear without it being sent by a beacon on Pluto. I assume this is possible. Step two: Attempt to crash New Horizons into a comet or meteor, and probably fail. Step three: Whether or not it crashes into the cloud, immediately fast-track development of another probe bound for Pluto, to investigate the beacon. Keep in mind that it took nearly 10 years to reach it last time.

u/Sparkwitch [+3] *

Keep in mind there are five probes leaving the solar system: Pioneers 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, and New Horizons itself. Worse, they're going substantially different directions.

u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow*

Plus four of the rocket boosters as well!

u/daydev [+1] *

Give 'em hell.

u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est.*

lol we're fucked

u/Sagebrysh [+1] Rank 7 Pragmatist*

I really, really, really like this premise. I'm a big fan of lovecraftian style outer horror aliens, like in Blindsight. Assuming your second probe gets there and the beacon is legitimately alien, then in the long term you'd have to send out new probes to catch up with the old probes and grab them, but space is pretty huge, you'd have some time.

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