Blind Lake
At Blind Lake, a large federal research installation in northern Minnesota, scientists are using a technology they barely understand to watch everyday life in a city of lobster like aliens upon a distant planet. They can't contact the aliens in any way or understand their language. All they can do is watch. Then, without warning, a military cordon is imposed on the Blind Lake site. All communication with the outside world is cut off. Food and other vital supplies are delivered by remote control. No one knows why. The scientists, nevertheless, go on with their research. Among them are Nerissa Iverson and the man she recently divorced, Raymond Scutter. They continue to work together despite the difficult conditions and the bitterness between them. Ray believes their efforts are doomed; that culture is arbitrary, and the aliens will forever be an enigma. Nerissa believes there is a commonality of sentient thought, and that our failure to understand is our own ignorance, not a fact of nature. The behavior of the alien she has been tracking seems to be developing an elusive narrative logic--and she comes to feel that the alien is somehow, impossibly, aware of the project's observers. But her time is running out. Ray is turning hostile, stalking her. The military cordon is tightening. Understanding had better come soon...
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What Hacker News says
- What you're describing is edging close to the setup for the 2003 novel 'Blind Lake': https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Lake_(novel)
In the novel, quantum computers (rather than ML per-se) are tasked with interpolating more and more detailed data from astronomical observations, to the point that tracking individual members of an alien species on a distant world, underground, is possible. Eventually it is noticed that cutting off the astronomical data entirely doesn't interrupt the interpolated data. Then things get weird.
I won't go into further plot details, as that would be spoilery, but it is a pretty good book, reminiscent to me of Greg Egan's oeuvre (the novel is actually by Robert Charles Wilson).
- Robert Charles Wilson is one of my favorite authors. He has some of the most amazing plot lines I've ever seen in SciFi. The guy is a font of amazing ideas.
Reading the reviews on The Affinities (the recommended book on the EFF page), makes it seem like it's not like his other novels. The Spin series is excellent. I can recommend A Bridge of Years, Blind Lake and The Chronoliths.
- I recently read a contemporary one I'd add to the list: Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson.
http://www.amazon.com/Blind-Lake-Robert-Charles-Wilson-ebook...
It reminded me of classic Asimov, but updated, and the writing and characterization are superb. I find that I can't read some sci-fi because I can't deal with cardboard characterization.
- Infinite expansionism is just one of a whole tower of assumptions that underlie the Fermi paradox. It’s a good thought experiment and does rule out certain scenarios with ET life but beyond that it’s a speculation.
The main scenario it rules out is one where intelligent ET life is common and we are late to the party. I feel like both those things can’t be true or we would see evidence.
I do find it fun to think about because it unfolds under scrutiny into such a vast tree of possibilities. But that same huge tree of possibilities makes it hard to say much.
One of my favorite wild speculations is that there is somewhere more interesting to go than space, and more accessible, and eventually whatever that is gets found before starships get built. What could that be? A traversable multiverse maybe?
That belongs to a subset of scenarios I call “positive great filters.” That’s where the great filter is a big success that renders space flight unimportant or uninteresting but does not result in extinction.
What about hyper-miniaturization. Maybe you can have something the size and scope of a galactic civilization without leaving home by folding your minds and everything else up into quantum states or hidden extra dimensions. Think a civilization of “sophons” (three body problem reference) with trillions upon trillions of minds occupying a few square meters of space and consuming a few hundred watts.
Yet another is some kind of remote sensing that lets you explore without physically moving, like a real equivalent to remote viewing. There’s a sci-fi novel called Blind Lake about this. Combine with miniaturized super efficient information processing and you could have superintelligences that explore everywhere and learn everything without going anywhere.
Lots of speculations and possibilities if you allow for the fact that we’ve only been doing science seriously for about 150 years and surely do not know everything.
- Robert Charles Wilson's "Blind Lake" (2004) is a scifi book about a (then) very near future when the data from telescopes would be almost as much hallucinated from big data models as composed of actual data from measurements. It's plot goes a little more quantum handwavy than direct machine learning but the gist is the same.
