10 ms·

Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist

65 points by antognini 11y ago

maxander 11y ago
Could be great news- it rules out (within some limitations) most of the really bad paperclip-maximizer scenarios. At least if society is doomed we'll only doom ourselves, and not the entire Milky Way! One takes what cheer one can get when pondering this sort of subject.
- xiphias 11y ago
  It means it won't take long after we are doomed. Singularity which can bring doom and eternal life comes at almost the same time. I would pick longevity over Singularity any time.
coldtea 11y ago
They call economics a "dismal science", but I find such attempts at 'astrophysics' (or whatever this and stuff like the Drake equation are called) even more dismal... Tons of unknown variables filled-in with vigorous hand waving, ad-hoc and unproven assumptions left and right, etc, and some high school math thrown in for good measure...
- ep103 11y ago
  I think you're taking a wrong look at this paper. This paper isn't actually about whether or not type 3 societies exist. This paper is about the fact that there appear to be no galactic clusters that show a particularly abnormal, greater, amount of electromagnetic emission than the known standard. Which, actually, I'm pretty dang surprised hasn't been searched for already. Then, in order to be a little whimsical and make sure the paper gets read, (s)he explains where they came up with the idea for this experiment. Seems to me like a completely rationale thing to measure about the universe. Imagine if the result had come back true?
  - kbenson 11y ago
    > This paper isn't actually about whether or not type 3 societies exist. Ah, I see. It's a play on words. "Apparently" is meant as "is visible", not in the sense of "this is true". Astronomer humor.
  - TheCoelacanth 11y ago
    Obviously, this result is just because there is a type 3 society in every galaxy.
- tpeo 11y ago
  The "dismal science" thing has nothing to do with scientific standards. It was an expression coined and used by Thomas Carlyle in satirical essay in favor of slavery to refer to political economy because economist's support for emancipation. But I get what you mean.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    As for the origin of the quotation yes -- but it has been used to talk about scientific standards in Economy ever since it was coined -- there are even a couple of books with that exact name on the topic.
repn001 11y ago
After reading The Dark Forest, my bet is that an advanced society would never advertise themselves in such an obvious fashion.
Semiapies 11y ago
This really tells us extremely little about advanced civilizations, beyond that we haven't seen them doing a few variations on a very specific activity—harnessing all the stellar radiation in their galaxy. There are huge number of assumptions based on that idea. A fundamental one is that a civilization in a relativistic universe would grow to densely inhabit a galaxy. Another is that they would need that much energy. Another is that even if they did have need for that much energy, they'd bother collecting EM radiation from stars. That third is an interesting one to me. Now, you could muck up the night sky for the entire Milky Way, or you could, with Sufficiently Advanced Technology (tm), annihilate a total of 10 Jupiter-masses a year across the whole galaxy. For your average star system, that's extracting energy from 1.1 billion kg of mass a year, or roughly what NYC's garbage collection services dispose of every two weeks. Pondering that, I suspect it's the wrong idea to imagine that a very advanced civilization, something we can only understand in the dimmest sense, would be constrained by something as specific as stellar energy emissions.
- zamalek 11y ago
  > Another is that they would need that much energy. Even if they needed that much energy, the best way to do that [that we know of] is to build a Dyson sphere. With every star shrouded by a Dyson sphere you no longer need to shroud the galaxy. A more critical assumption is that a type III civilization even cares about masking its presence. If they were even worried about being attacked, the speed of light would mask their progress for a great deal of time and, because of the distances involved, even seeing them once the light reaches you would be a massive accomplishment - most likely you'd have to search for individual stars in another galaxy which are disappearing in unusual ways. A type II civilization could possibly build a telescope with a large enough aperture but I assume that type II civilizations would be long past their ignorant warring ways.
  - Retric 11y ago
    Dyson's spheres have low long term fuel efficiency. They are better off destroying the stars and burning their fuel in fusion reactors. At least with our current understanding of physics. Also, a civilization could have dimantled Andromida Galaxy 2 million years ago and can't tell yet. For more distant objects the gap gets rather wide.
state_less 11y ago
Why should an advanced civilization necessarily create the artifact mentioned in the article. The conclusion because we don't see this artifact, so type III societies don't exists seems too strong. Maybe they don't create giant veils around galaxies and instead have virtualized themselves, or can simply convert matter to energy at will. What use would there be in wrapping a giant ball of dust around a galaxy when you can convert matter directly to some other energy/form? Probably I think "they" are formless and more information based than physical. We aren't even sure if this reality is real or a simulation anyway, so why limit our thinking to advanced civilizations in the world as we know it?
- largote 11y ago
  The problem with the Kardashev scale is that it ties the advancement of a civilization with its energy consumption. In order to qualify as a Type III civilization, you pretty much need to harvest ALL of the energy in a galaxy.
weberc2 11y ago
> Whether technological societies remain small and planet-bound like our own, or ultimately span across galaxies is an open question in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. What questions in this field are not open?
kabdib 11y ago
Harnessing stellar output might not be that interesting. Power density inside stars kind of sucks (about that of a reptile) and stars have bad failure modes. You're probably better off disassembling the suckers and storing their matter in a sensible way, rather than have it sit there, burning. Stars are kind of like trash fires; maybe we should be looking for less energy in a type III civ, not shielding.
- heavenlyhash 11y ago
  Just to play devil's advocate -- density isn't everything either. Plants on Earth play an incredible optimization game. Water is necessary not just for chemical metabolism, but because throwing it away is an essential part of the internal material transport systems of a plant. Evaporation in the leaves creates a relatively lower osmotic pressure in the higher levels of the plant. Between capillary action and the slight but insistent pull to replace evaporated water in the leaves, plants have a pumping mechanism with essentially nil energy input: minerals and nutrients gathered in the roots just ride on up with the tide. Stars may be a similar story for efficient fusion. Sure, with sufficiently advanced technology, I can make inordinately denser energy sources with less boil-off. But do I want to? Maybe letting the brute physics of a gravity well do the job simply has unbeatable efficiency -- just like evaporation as one end of a pump for plants on Earth is clearly no comparison to any motorized pump for volume, but for cost-effect, nothing else comes close.
  - tmptmp 11y ago
    >>just like evaporation as one end of a pump for plants on Earth is clearly no comparison to any motorized pump for volume But what if we need/want volumes? The way we can't (or don't want to) use trees/plants for pumping water in time-efficient manner, we may not (want to) use the gravity brute force based stars as energy sources and we may invent more time-efficient fusion reactors.
  - kabdib 11y ago
    A Type III civ is probably going to take the long view. The really long view. And in the long run, efficiency is everything. Stars are just so wasteful; all that energy going into convection currents, and you have to build this big damned sphere to capture all the energy. Better to lift the damned thing and, at the very least, make a dwarf star out of the larger ones. Now you're talking trillions of years of burning (it's still a trash fire, but at least it's manageable).
pjdorrell 11y ago
He estimates f_l, the probability of life arising in a habitable planet, as 0.1. Abiogenesis has never been observed to occur independently of its presumed occurrence when life started on Earth. Given the current state of scientific knowledge on this topic, the only certain lower bound on this number is the probability of molecules in a suitable "organic soup" arranging themselves into a self-contained bacterium. And that probability is a _very_ small number. If f_l is _very_ small, then there is no need to be pessimistic about our own long-term survival. We see no advanced alien civilisations, because there is no other life out there of any kind - the rest of the observable universe is sterile.
- gerbal 11y ago
  Even if abiogenesis is common, the transition from simple to complex cells is incredibly uncommon. As far as we can tell it only happened on earth once in 4 billion years. f_l may be 0.1 but f_i is almost certainly multiple orders of magnitude smaller.
drKarl 11y ago
If we expect to see the "brightness of the blackbox caused by the radiation of a Type III Kardashev Civilization", and we inspect galaxies that are maybe millions of light-years away from us, would we not be looking at how did those galaxies look millions of years ago? That is, maybe there are Type III Kardashev Civilizations and their usage of the energy of their galaxy in fact radiates energy that would be visible to us... except that they've evolved to that point much later that the light we're receiving since it takes millions of years for that light to reach us. In those millions of years they could very well have reached that technological level, but it will take some more millions of years for that to reach us... by that time mabye that Civilization doesn't exist anymore... Maybe our civilization doesn't exist anymore... In this case we extract information from the radiation that comes from those galaxies, and the information is too slow to travel such vast distances, since it can't go faster than the speed of light. In summary, we're looking for ANCIENT Type III civilizations.
- blincoln 11y ago
  > In summary, we're looking for ANCIENT Type III civilizations. Yes. This is because of the low probability that intelligent life develops somewhere else at even close to the same time as it did on Earth. Our best understanding is that life has existed on Earth for something like 4 billion years, and complex life has existed for about 500 million. However, complex life capable of building spacecraft (or even radios) has only existed for a few hundred thousand (that is being extremely generous, of course), and only developed that technology in the last ~100 years. If intelligent life has or will evolve somewhere else in the universe, and progresses anything like it did here, then the odds seem overwhelmingly in favour of one of two scenarios: - It evolved millions of years ago, and if it has not wiped itself out, is virtually god-like by our standards due to its head start on technological development. - It has not yet evolved, or at best is the equivalent of primates or the proto-humans of several hundred thousand years ago.
basicplus2 11y ago
well.. if we don't get off this planet within the next (approx) 4 Billion years.. our species will snuff it as the sun grows to a red giant. so assuming all life across the universe starts from similar beginnings as us, then this tells us something about what an advanced civilisation needs to be capable of to survive.
ValleyOfTheMtns 11y ago
Speculation like this is fun, but I think it's little more than intellectual masturbation until we crack fusion energy. Until we understand the energy economy with such technology, and the most efficient way to leverage it, we're not going to understand the most significant factors that we should be considering. And even then, we'll only be starting to get the slightest clue of how Type II and III civilisations might work.
epicureanideal 11y ago
Or, the blackboxes might not emit the radiation we expect because of some technology or physics that we don't know about yet.
- cwmma 11y ago
  Like maybe there is a very good reason NOT to be emitting radiation at that obvious wavelength, because we might not be the only ones looking...
  - venomsnake 11y ago
    We are very secure trough obscurity.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Security through obscurity give huge success at minimal effort. It might not be 100% secure but it's not meant to be, either. Just more secure than nothing.
- deegles 11y ago
  Maybe they emit neutrinos!
tomswartz07 11y ago
Somewhat tangentially related: a non-scientific discussion on what Type I, II, and III Societies are, and why they might not quite make it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhkwT466ykc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhkwT466ykc
nostrademons 11y ago
Plot twist: the "dark matter" in the universe actually consists of Type III societies harnessing the electromagnetic radiation of their galaxies by a means as-yet unknown to us.
- themgt 11y ago
  Plot twist: Black holes are where Type III civilizations merged into a unified singularity, absconding off to their own self-created universe.
- sewerinspector 11y ago
  Wow I've actually never even thought of that before. I smell a sci-fi novel...
  - amelius 11y ago
    This [1] Wikipedia article explains the concept, and also refers to a science fiction novel. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
- maaku 11y ago
  "A fire upon the deep" by Vernor Vinge is an interesting exploration of this. In the book different (and more desirable) physical laws take effect in places of low average matter density, so intelligent civilizations migrate out of their galaxies into the sparsely populated galactic rim.
  - monochromatic 11y ago
    I'm still hoping there will be a fourth novel. He never really explored what was going on with the zones of thought.
    - maaku 11y ago
      Well to be honest I found the Tines more interesting and so I'm glad he focused on them. But the zones of thought did strike me as a creative way to both solve the Fermi paradox and have space opera without otherwise breaking the rules of hard sci-fi.
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
I'm unconvinced by the Kardashev assumption that energy is the limiting factor for civilisation. It's more likely that beyond a certain point you have all the energy you can use, and the limiting factor becomes collective intelligence. I'd guess that in the same way that processors keep getting more efficient, so do civilisations. At the highest levels the energy signature of a civilisation is virtually indistinguishable from the cosmic microwave background - if it's observable at all.
- duaneb 11y ago
  > It's more likely that beyond a certain point you have all the energy you can use, and the limiting factor becomes collective intelligence. Why is this more likely?
  - tremon 11y ago
    My off-the-cuff response is that energy could be harvested locally in many places, but society as a whole will be bounded by the speed of communication (which might not exceed c). It's possible that too long communication lines will fracture society into separate "islands".
- venomsnake 11y ago
  I think that energy is not a limiting factor but rough measurement on your impact on the universe.
amelius 11y ago
Why would technologically advanced species explore the (mostly empty) universe, when they can sit inside their holodecks and have much more fun?
- metaphorm 11y ago
  because the holodecks can only show them what they already know and what they can imagine. the (mostly empty) universe can show them things they were not yet capable of imagining.
- eridius 11y ago
  4 reasons come to mind: 1. Advanced societies have probably solved the aging problem, leading to either extremely long lives or effective immortality. As long as these societies keep reproducing (and they will, unless they deliberately engineer out the urge to procreate, which I consider to be unlikely), they'll need space to spread out. Sure, they could probably pack themselves like sardines into a single solar system, but that only works if they'll be spending 100% of their time in virtual reality, and that would be begging the question. 2. A need for resources. Type III societies can capture 100% of the output of a star, but even this amount of energy might not suffice once society grows large enough. And even at that level it's still probably easier to manipulate matter than it is to convert energy into matter, so it'll be more efficient to harvest planets and asteroids and whatnot for raw building materials, which means leaving the solar system. 3. Even assuming they manage to create virtual reality that is 100% indistinguishable from reality, it's likely that there will still be a lot of beings that will reject the idea of living 100% in virtual reality simply because it's virtual. Even if it's indistinguishable from reality, they'll still know it's not real. So they may visit VR, but will want to actually live in the real world. Or in other words, humans have shown a tendency towards the perverse, and it's not unreasonable to assume aliens will too. 4. Any kind of scientific research still being done at that level will likely require the use of reality instead of VR. VR is a simulation, and even if it's indistinguishable from reality to your senses, it's still presumably not actually simulating reality down to the planck level (because it's part of the universe, it cannot simulate the entire universe at the same fidelity that the universe itself operates at, as that would presumably require more information than the universe contains), and so there's probably a fair amount of research at that level that simply can't work in simulation and requires testing against actual reality.
api 11y ago
My speculation has for a long time been what I call the uniform cooling hypothesis. There are no type III civilizations because such things haven't happened yet. If the universe is all the same age and if the emergence and evolution of life is tied to the overall thermodynamic evolution of the universe, then everything might be approximately of the same scale and complexity within a certain standard deviation. If this is true then when we go out there we will meet all the others who have also just developed to that level.
- stcredzero 11y ago
  Yes, but if someone is off by just one percentage point, then they're 13 million years ahead. There needs to be something so unlikely about sentient life, that it only arises approximately one at a time in each galaxy, or the Fermi paradox would apply.
  - api 11y ago
    This hypothesis works best if we propose an extremely narrow developmental range. Of course since we have basically no data, we can't actually argue either way beyond vague hand-wavey speculation. You can't calculate standard deviation from a sample size of one.
    - stcredzero 11y ago
      In general, sub percentage point uniformity is taken as evidence of a very strong synchronization mechanism. The extreme uniformity of the cosmic ray background was taken as evidence of inflation, which is quite an extreme position, if you look at the numbers. That such a synchronization mechanism should work with such precision over the entire universe seems very unlikely. Filtering would not require synchronization, so that seems much more likely.
      - api 11y ago
        The only way I can imagine it being that synchronized is if evolution itself is somehow tightly coupled to cosmic inflation. Here's the speculation in more detail: Evolution can be viewed as an information transfer mechanism that learns about the universe and transfers that information into the genome. (This is one interpretation found in evolutionary information theory.) As the universe inflates there is more total information in it, and therefore more information for evolution to learn. At certain points, a kind of information density "critical mass" is reached and phase transitions occur: the emergence of life, complex life, cooperative/multicellular life, higher order intelligence, industrialization and complex society, etc. Since the total amount of information in the universe is (we're speculating) tied directly to the arrow of time, this occurs simultaneously everywhere at approximately the same time. Again this is hypothesis bordering on speculation since we do not know of any mechanism that directly couples information content to cosmic inflation like this, or even how we would go about measuring such a thing objectively. For instance it's not possible to differentiate between random and encrypted data using Shannon information measures, so what statistic would you use?
sgt101 11y ago
I wonder what ants think of airports? Or what mice believe about tube trains as they scuttle under the platform. We are separated from mice (or at least somewhat similar animals) by approximately 40m years of evolution, I think that the separation to a Galaxy altering level entity would be much more profound, and frankly we wouldn't understand what it was if it came and tickled us.
- xemoka 11y ago
  We are in no way separated by 40m years of evolution. Our common ancestor 'is'. That mouse you see today has been evolving just as long as you have, but with different priorities.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Technically yes, but practically the mouse reached a more or less standard form millions of years ago, in a local maximum, and we've been developing into all that we are mostly far more recently and represent a far more advanced form with lots of metrics (fitness to local environment is not the be all end all metric -- just the one evolution uses).
  - moret1979 11y ago
    Good point. Separation can be even greater since each is 40M apart from a common ancestor.
  - gohrt 11y ago
    Our common ancestor 'is' what? We are separated from mice by 80million years of evolution -- 40million from the common ancestor, and 40million to the other modern species. Or simply 40million years of divergent evolution.
  - sgt101 11y ago
    Hello - I said "somewhat similar animals" by which I meant very early primates who were a bit like squirrels and mice. I should have made it a bit clearer! I did get the date wrong - I should have said 65my. Here is a link http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/five-early-primates-you-should-know-102122862/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/five-early-prim...
stcredzero 11y ago
I don't think societies/civilizations are a viable organization scheme on cosmic time scales. What if very advanced civilizations all reorganize themselves into symbiotic aggregations of less-than-wholly-individual entities? Communications between these entities inhabiting virtual reality is so fast that the aggregate seems like a hyper-intelligent hive mind to human-like sentience? If we take mind upload as a given, then it should also be possible to create "clones" of our minds with ease. This level of technology will have a profound effect on the value society places on individuality.
- jobigoud 11y ago
  > What if [...] all "all" is usually the key issue with solutions to the Fermi paradox. We can certainly find reasons for any given civilization to go the other way, but it's more difficult to argue that all of them do.
  - stcredzero 11y ago
    There are very strong reasons to believe that all civilizations (multitudes of independent, individualistic semi-cooperating sentient creatures) are inherently chaotic and therefore unstable. There are loads of arguments as to why they are doomed to fail, or to try to expand exponentially. If we take a cold and realistic eye to technological civilizations, they do seem doomed to self-destruct or "sublime" into something incomprehensible. There aren't many examples in nature of things that are the confluence of two or more super-exponential processes that are long-term stable. (In our case, those would be population, energy use, and technological change.) In fact, I think there are basically none.
    - tremon 11y ago
      I think you take a particularly narrow view of what constitutes a "society". Arguably, current human society is the product of over 10,000 years of continuous development. Yes, there have been numerous changes in structure and power, but our fundamental "human" identity hasn't really changed in that time. I would also argue that life itself has proven remarkably long-term stable on our planet. Granted, it has not been stable enough to produce a type-III society, but if we remove homo sapiens from the planet for a thought experiment, there exist other species that are developing communication or tool-use skills and might succeed us even on the technological path. So my view is that, unless we continue to fail spectacularly, life will still continue without us. Even if we do not reach type-III, that does not necessarily preclude Earth from producing a type-III society in the future.

65 points by antognini 11y ago

Could be great news- it rules out (within some limitations) most of the really bad paperclip-maximizer scenarios. At least if society is doomed we'll only doom ourselves, and not the entire Milky Way! One takes what cheer one can get when pondering this sort of subject.

xiphias 11y ago
It means it won't take long after we are doomed. Singularity which can bring doom and eternal life comes at almost the same time. I would pick longevity over Singularity any time.

coldtea 11y ago

They call economics a "dismal science", but I find such attempts at 'astrophysics' (or whatever this and stuff like the Drake equation are called) even more dismal... Tons of unknown variables filled-in with vigorous hand waving, ad-hoc and unproven assumptions left and right, etc, and some high school math thrown in for good measure...

ep103 11y ago
I think you're taking a wrong look at this paper. This paper isn't actually about whether or not type 3 societies exist. This paper is about the fact that there appear to be no galactic clusters that show a particularly abnormal, greater, amount of electromagnetic emission than the known standard. Which, actually, I'm pretty dang surprised hasn't been searched for already. Then, in order to be a little whimsical and make sure the paper gets read, (s)he explains where they came up with the idea for this experiment. Seems to me like a completely rationale thing to measure about the universe. Imagine if the result had come back true?
- kbenson 11y ago
  > This paper isn't actually about whether or not type 3 societies exist. Ah, I see. It's a play on words. "Apparently" is meant as "is visible", not in the sense of "this is true". Astronomer humor.
- TheCoelacanth 11y ago
  Obviously, this result is just because there is a type 3 society in every galaxy.
tpeo 11y ago
The "dismal science" thing has nothing to do with scientific standards. It was an expression coined and used by Thomas Carlyle in satirical essay in favor of slavery to refer to political economy because economist's support for emancipation. But I get what you mean.
- coldtea 11y ago
  As for the origin of the quotation yes -- but it has been used to talk about scientific standards in Economy ever since it was coined -- there are even a couple of books with that exact name on the topic.

repn001 11y ago

After reading The Dark Forest, my bet is that an advanced society would never advertise themselves in such an obvious fashion.

Semiapies 11y ago

This really tells us extremely little about advanced civilizations, beyond that we haven't seen them doing a few variations on a very specific activity—harnessing all the stellar radiation in their galaxy. There are huge number of assumptions based on that idea. A fundamental one is that a civilization in a relativistic universe would grow to densely inhabit a galaxy. Another is that they would need that much energy. Another is that even if they did have need for that much energy, they'd bother collecting EM radiation from stars. That third is an interesting one to me. Now, you could muck up the night sky for the entire Milky Way, or you could, with Sufficiently Advanced Technology (tm), annihilate a total of 10 Jupiter-masses a year across the whole galaxy. For your average star system, that's extracting energy from 1.1 billion kg of mass a year, or roughly what NYC's garbage collection services dispose of every two weeks. Pondering that, I suspect it's the wrong idea to imagine that a very advanced civilization, something we can only understand in the dimmest sense, would be constrained by something as specific as stellar energy emissions.

zamalek 11y ago
> Another is that they would need that much energy. Even if they needed that much energy, the best way to do that [that we know of] is to build a Dyson sphere. With every star shrouded by a Dyson sphere you no longer need to shroud the galaxy. A more critical assumption is that a type III civilization even cares about masking its presence. If they were even worried about being attacked, the speed of light would mask their progress for a great deal of time and, because of the distances involved, even seeing them once the light reaches you would be a massive accomplishment - most likely you'd have to search for individual stars in another galaxy which are disappearing in unusual ways. A type II civilization could possibly build a telescope with a large enough aperture but I assume that type II civilizations would be long past their ignorant warring ways.
- Retric 11y ago
  Dyson's spheres have low long term fuel efficiency. They are better off destroying the stars and burning their fuel in fusion reactors. At least with our current understanding of physics. Also, a civilization could have dimantled Andromida Galaxy 2 million years ago and can't tell yet. For more distant objects the gap gets rather wide.

state_less 11y ago

Why should an advanced civilization necessarily create the artifact mentioned in the article. The conclusion because we don't see this artifact, so type III societies don't exists seems too strong. Maybe they don't create giant veils around galaxies and instead have virtualized themselves, or can simply convert matter to energy at will. What use would there be in wrapping a giant ball of dust around a galaxy when you can convert matter directly to some other energy/form? Probably I think "they" are formless and more information based than physical. We aren't even sure if this reality is real or a simulation anyway, so why limit our thinking to advanced civilizations in the world as we know it?

largote 11y ago
The problem with the Kardashev scale is that it ties the advancement of a civilization with its energy consumption. In order to qualify as a Type III civilization, you pretty much need to harvest ALL of the energy in a galaxy.

weberc2 11y ago

> Whether technological societies remain small and planet-bound like our own, or ultimately span across galaxies is an open question in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. What questions in this field are not open?

kabdib 11y ago

Harnessing stellar output might not be that interesting. Power density inside stars kind of sucks (about that of a reptile) and stars have bad failure modes. You're probably better off disassembling the suckers and storing their matter in a sensible way, rather than have it sit there, burning. Stars are kind of like trash fires; maybe we should be looking for less energy in a type III civ, not shielding.

heavenlyhash 11y ago
Just to play devil's advocate -- density isn't everything either. Plants on Earth play an incredible optimization game. Water is necessary not just for chemical metabolism, but because throwing it away is an essential part of the internal material transport systems of a plant. Evaporation in the leaves creates a relatively lower osmotic pressure in the higher levels of the plant. Between capillary action and the slight but insistent pull to replace evaporated water in the leaves, plants have a pumping mechanism with essentially nil energy input: minerals and nutrients gathered in the roots just ride on up with the tide. Stars may be a similar story for efficient fusion. Sure, with sufficiently advanced technology, I can make inordinately denser energy sources with less boil-off. But do I want to? Maybe letting the brute physics of a gravity well do the job simply has unbeatable efficiency -- just like evaporation as one end of a pump for plants on Earth is clearly no comparison to any motorized pump for volume, but for cost-effect, nothing else comes close.
- tmptmp 11y ago
  >>just like evaporation as one end of a pump for plants on Earth is clearly no comparison to any motorized pump for volume But what if we need/want volumes? The way we can't (or don't want to) use trees/plants for pumping water in time-efficient manner, we may not (want to) use the gravity brute force based stars as energy sources and we may invent more time-efficient fusion reactors.
- kabdib 11y ago
  A Type III civ is probably going to take the long view. The really long view. And in the long run, efficiency is everything. Stars are just so wasteful; all that energy going into convection currents, and you have to build this big damned sphere to capture all the energy. Better to lift the damned thing and, at the very least, make a dwarf star out of the larger ones. Now you're talking trillions of years of burning (it's still a trash fire, but at least it's manageable).

pjdorrell 11y ago

He estimates f_l, the probability of life arising in a habitable planet, as 0.1. Abiogenesis has never been observed to occur independently of its presumed occurrence when life started on Earth. Given the current state of scientific knowledge on this topic, the only certain lower bound on this number is the probability of molecules in a suitable "organic soup" arranging themselves into a self-contained bacterium. And that probability is a _very_ small number. If f_l is _very_ small, then there is no need to be pessimistic about our own long-term survival. We see no advanced alien civilisations, because there is no other life out there of any kind - the rest of the observable universe is sterile.

gerbal 11y ago
Even if abiogenesis is common, the transition from simple to complex cells is incredibly uncommon. As far as we can tell it only happened on earth once in 4 billion years. f_l may be 0.1 but f_i is almost certainly multiple orders of magnitude smaller.

drKarl 11y ago

If we expect to see the "brightness of the blackbox caused by the radiation of a Type III Kardashev Civilization", and we inspect galaxies that are maybe millions of light-years away from us, would we not be looking at how did those galaxies look millions of years ago? That is, maybe there are Type III Kardashev Civilizations and their usage of the energy of their galaxy in fact radiates energy that would be visible to us... except that they've evolved to that point much later that the light we're receiving since it takes millions of years for that light to reach us. In those millions of years they could very well have reached that technological level, but it will take some more millions of years for that to reach us... by that time mabye that Civilization doesn't exist anymore... Maybe our civilization doesn't exist anymore... In this case we extract information from the radiation that comes from those galaxies, and the information is too slow to travel such vast distances, since it can't go faster than the speed of light. In summary, we're looking for ANCIENT Type III civilizations.

blincoln 11y ago
> In summary, we're looking for ANCIENT Type III civilizations. Yes. This is because of the low probability that intelligent life develops somewhere else at even close to the same time as it did on Earth. Our best understanding is that life has existed on Earth for something like 4 billion years, and complex life has existed for about 500 million. However, complex life capable of building spacecraft (or even radios) has only existed for a few hundred thousand (that is being extremely generous, of course), and only developed that technology in the last ~100 years. If intelligent life has or will evolve somewhere else in the universe, and progresses anything like it did here, then the odds seem overwhelmingly in favour of one of two scenarios: - It evolved millions of years ago, and if it has not wiped itself out, is virtually god-like by our standards due to its head start on technological development. - It has not yet evolved, or at best is the equivalent of primates or the proto-humans of several hundred thousand years ago.

basicplus2 11y ago

well.. if we don't get off this planet within the next (approx) 4 Billion years.. our species will snuff it as the sun grows to a red giant. so assuming all life across the universe starts from similar beginnings as us, then this tells us something about what an advanced civilisation needs to be capable of to survive.

ValleyOfTheMtns 11y ago

Speculation like this is fun, but I think it's little more than intellectual masturbation until we crack fusion energy. Until we understand the energy economy with such technology, and the most efficient way to leverage it, we're not going to understand the most significant factors that we should be considering. And even then, we'll only be starting to get the slightest clue of how Type II and III civilisations might work.

epicureanideal 11y ago

Or, the blackboxes might not emit the radiation we expect because of some technology or physics that we don't know about yet.

cwmma 11y ago
Like maybe there is a very good reason NOT to be emitting radiation at that obvious wavelength, because we might not be the only ones looking...
- venomsnake 11y ago
  We are very secure trough obscurity.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Security through obscurity give huge success at minimal effort. It might not be 100% secure but it's not meant to be, either. Just more secure than nothing.
deegles 11y ago
Maybe they emit neutrinos!

tomswartz07 11y ago

Somewhat tangentially related: a non-scientific discussion on what Type I, II, and III Societies are, and why they might not quite make it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhkwT466ykc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhkwT466ykc

nostrademons 11y ago

Plot twist: the "dark matter" in the universe actually consists of Type III societies harnessing the electromagnetic radiation of their galaxies by a means as-yet unknown to us.

themgt 11y ago
Plot twist: Black holes are where Type III civilizations merged into a unified singularity, absconding off to their own self-created universe.
sewerinspector 11y ago
Wow I've actually never even thought of that before. I smell a sci-fi novel...
- amelius 11y ago
  This [1] Wikipedia article explains the concept, and also refers to a science fiction novel. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
maaku 11y ago
"A fire upon the deep" by Vernor Vinge is an interesting exploration of this. In the book different (and more desirable) physical laws take effect in places of low average matter density, so intelligent civilizations migrate out of their galaxies into the sparsely populated galactic rim.
- monochromatic 11y ago
  I'm still hoping there will be a fourth novel. He never really explored what was going on with the zones of thought.
  - maaku 11y ago
    Well to be honest I found the Tines more interesting and so I'm glad he focused on them. But the zones of thought did strike me as a creative way to both solve the Fermi paradox and have space opera without otherwise breaking the rules of hard sci-fi.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago

I'm unconvinced by the Kardashev assumption that energy is the limiting factor for civilisation. It's more likely that beyond a certain point you have all the energy you can use, and the limiting factor becomes collective intelligence. I'd guess that in the same way that processors keep getting more efficient, so do civilisations. At the highest levels the energy signature of a civilisation is virtually indistinguishable from the cosmic microwave background - if it's observable at all.

duaneb 11y ago
> It's more likely that beyond a certain point you have all the energy you can use, and the limiting factor becomes collective intelligence. Why is this more likely?
- tremon 11y ago
  My off-the-cuff response is that energy could be harvested locally in many places, but society as a whole will be bounded by the speed of communication (which might not exceed c). It's possible that too long communication lines will fracture society into separate "islands".
venomsnake 11y ago
I think that energy is not a limiting factor but rough measurement on your impact on the universe.

amelius 11y ago

Why would technologically advanced species explore the (mostly empty) universe, when they can sit inside their holodecks and have much more fun?

metaphorm 11y ago
because the holodecks can only show them what they already know and what they can imagine. the (mostly empty) universe can show them things they were not yet capable of imagining.
eridius 11y ago
4 reasons come to mind: 1. Advanced societies have probably solved the aging problem, leading to either extremely long lives or effective immortality. As long as these societies keep reproducing (and they will, unless they deliberately engineer out the urge to procreate, which I consider to be unlikely), they'll need space to spread out. Sure, they could probably pack themselves like sardines into a single solar system, but that only works if they'll be spending 100% of their time in virtual reality, and that would be begging the question. 2. A need for resources. Type III societies can capture 100% of the output of a star, but even this amount of energy might not suffice once society grows large enough. And even at that level it's still probably easier to manipulate matter than it is to convert energy into matter, so it'll be more efficient to harvest planets and asteroids and whatnot for raw building materials, which means leaving the solar system. 3. Even assuming they manage to create virtual reality that is 100% indistinguishable from reality, it's likely that there will still be a lot of beings that will reject the idea of living 100% in virtual reality simply because it's virtual. Even if it's indistinguishable from reality, they'll still know it's not real. So they may visit VR, but will want to actually live in the real world. Or in other words, humans have shown a tendency towards the perverse, and it's not unreasonable to assume aliens will too. 4. Any kind of scientific research still being done at that level will likely require the use of reality instead of VR. VR is a simulation, and even if it's indistinguishable from reality to your senses, it's still presumably not actually simulating reality down to the planck level (because it's part of the universe, it cannot simulate the entire universe at the same fidelity that the universe itself operates at, as that would presumably require more information than the universe contains), and so there's probably a fair amount of research at that level that simply can't work in simulation and requires testing against actual reality.

api 11y ago

My speculation has for a long time been what I call the uniform cooling hypothesis. There are no type III civilizations because such things haven't happened yet. If the universe is all the same age and if the emergence and evolution of life is tied to the overall thermodynamic evolution of the universe, then everything might be approximately of the same scale and complexity within a certain standard deviation. If this is true then when we go out there we will meet all the others who have also just developed to that level.

stcredzero 11y ago
Yes, but if someone is off by just one percentage point, then they're 13 million years ahead. There needs to be something so unlikely about sentient life, that it only arises approximately one at a time in each galaxy, or the Fermi paradox would apply.
- api 11y ago
  This hypothesis works best if we propose an extremely narrow developmental range. Of course since we have basically no data, we can't actually argue either way beyond vague hand-wavey speculation. You can't calculate standard deviation from a sample size of one.
  - stcredzero 11y ago
    In general, sub percentage point uniformity is taken as evidence of a very strong synchronization mechanism. The extreme uniformity of the cosmic ray background was taken as evidence of inflation, which is quite an extreme position, if you look at the numbers. That such a synchronization mechanism should work with such precision over the entire universe seems very unlikely. Filtering would not require synchronization, so that seems much more likely.
    - api 11y ago
      The only way I can imagine it being that synchronized is if evolution itself is somehow tightly coupled to cosmic inflation. Here's the speculation in more detail: Evolution can be viewed as an information transfer mechanism that learns about the universe and transfers that information into the genome. (This is one interpretation found in evolutionary information theory.) As the universe inflates there is more total information in it, and therefore more information for evolution to learn. At certain points, a kind of information density "critical mass" is reached and phase transitions occur: the emergence of life, complex life, cooperative/multicellular life, higher order intelligence, industrialization and complex society, etc. Since the total amount of information in the universe is (we're speculating) tied directly to the arrow of time, this occurs simultaneously everywhere at approximately the same time. Again this is hypothesis bordering on speculation since we do not know of any mechanism that directly couples information content to cosmic inflation like this, or even how we would go about measuring such a thing objectively. For instance it's not possible to differentiate between random and encrypted data using Shannon information measures, so what statistic would you use?

sgt101 11y ago

I wonder what ants think of airports? Or what mice believe about tube trains as they scuttle under the platform. We are separated from mice (or at least somewhat similar animals) by approximately 40m years of evolution, I think that the separation to a Galaxy altering level entity would be much more profound, and frankly we wouldn't understand what it was if it came and tickled us.

xemoka 11y ago
We are in no way separated by 40m years of evolution. Our common ancestor 'is'. That mouse you see today has been evolving just as long as you have, but with different priorities.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Technically yes, but practically the mouse reached a more or less standard form millions of years ago, in a local maximum, and we've been developing into all that we are mostly far more recently and represent a far more advanced form with lots of metrics (fitness to local environment is not the be all end all metric -- just the one evolution uses).
- moret1979 11y ago
  Good point. Separation can be even greater since each is 40M apart from a common ancestor.
- gohrt 11y ago
  Our common ancestor 'is' what? We are separated from mice by 80million years of evolution -- 40million from the common ancestor, and 40million to the other modern species. Or simply 40million years of divergent evolution.
- sgt101 11y ago
  Hello - I said "somewhat similar animals" by which I meant very early primates who were a bit like squirrels and mice. I should have made it a bit clearer! I did get the date wrong - I should have said 65my. Here is a link http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/five-early-primates-you-should-know-102122862/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/five-early-prim...

stcredzero 11y ago

I don't think societies/civilizations are a viable organization scheme on cosmic time scales. What if very advanced civilizations all reorganize themselves into symbiotic aggregations of less-than-wholly-individual entities? Communications between these entities inhabiting virtual reality is so fast that the aggregate seems like a hyper-intelligent hive mind to human-like sentience? If we take mind upload as a given, then it should also be possible to create "clones" of our minds with ease. This level of technology will have a profound effect on the value society places on individuality.

jobigoud 11y ago
> What if [...] all "all" is usually the key issue with solutions to the Fermi paradox. We can certainly find reasons for any given civilization to go the other way, but it's more difficult to argue that all of them do.
- stcredzero 11y ago
  There are very strong reasons to believe that all civilizations (multitudes of independent, individualistic semi-cooperating sentient creatures) are inherently chaotic and therefore unstable. There are loads of arguments as to why they are doomed to fail, or to try to expand exponentially. If we take a cold and realistic eye to technological civilizations, they do seem doomed to self-destruct or "sublime" into something incomprehensible. There aren't many examples in nature of things that are the confluence of two or more super-exponential processes that are long-term stable. (In our case, those would be population, energy use, and technological change.) In fact, I think there are basically none.
  - tremon 11y ago
    I think you take a particularly narrow view of what constitutes a "society". Arguably, current human society is the product of over 10,000 years of continuous development. Yes, there have been numerous changes in structure and power, but our fundamental "human" identity hasn't really changed in that time. I would also argue that life itself has proven remarkably long-term stable on our planet. Granted, it has not been stable enough to produce a type-III society, but if we remove homo sapiens from the planet for a thought experiment, there exist other species that are developing communication or tool-use skills and might succeed us even on the technological path. So my view is that, unless we continue to fail spectacularly, life will still continue without us. Even if we do not reach type-III, that does not necessarily preclude Earth from producing a type-III society in the future.