Peter Mulvey Performs Vlad the Astrophysicist
Why Hacker News recommends it
Brought up in Fermi paradox and alien-contact threads as a song that makes the point about distance in time and space.
What it is
Folk musician Peter Mulvey performs Vlad the Astrophysicist, a spoken-word style song that touches on why civilizations may never meet across space and time.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2021 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Recommends twinkletwinkle_ · 2021-11 · on “Aliens might just be too far away”
There's a song by one of my favorite artists, Peter Mulvey, which touches on this point. It's more of a spoken word poem, titled "Vlad the Astrophysicist". In the song, Peter asks Vlad if there are aliens, and if there are, why haven't they contacted us? Vlad answers basically that there almost certainly are aliens, but civilizations don't last for long enough compared to the size of the universe. > "You see?" He said, "They never meet each other. Time is too long, space is too large. I mean sure, maybe at one time, right next to each other at the same time, fss, fss - Two civilizations sprang up and they had war, better yet they had peace, They had arts exchanges, they had an intergalactic
Cites Supermancho · 2021-01 · on “NSA UFO Documents Index”
> If you say there are civilizations thriving somewhere in the galaxy, you're Carl Sagan. Modern thinking is it's more likely there were civs that thrived, but they are all dead now. - [this video] [LINK]
Cites markus_zhang · 2021-07 · on “Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?”
Although I very much enjoy the novel, I think Vlad's theory is more likely to be true: [this video] As of myself, I also have a theory why it's difficult for civilizations to see each other: 1 - You need very advanced technology to break through the barrier of speed of light (worm hole, someone?) 2 - Such advanced technology will need a long, continuous period of peace and prosperity for researchers to figure it out. Wars are "useful" in certain way but not always. 3 - Intelligent beings are in general greedy (regardless of their biological construction) and they want to take as much resources as possible. 4 - The resources in the universe is unlimited, but the resources that one civilization can