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I often wonder if this type of thing is an answer to the Fermi Paradox, that complex societies inevitably destroy themselves by failing to solve fatal problems

I often wonder if this type of thing is an answer to the Fermi Paradox, that complex societies inevitably destroy themselves by failing to solve fatal problems requiring collective action.

jandrese 9y ago
I don't buy it. Even if we do fuck this up royally and cause a mass extinction event (which seems increasingly likely), humans will survive. There may (probably will) be a loss of population, but it's the sort of thing humans can definitely recover from given time. At the timescales of the Fermi Paradox this shouldn't be an issue. It's barely a blip.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  The Fermi paradox still applies if, every time society reaches a point of advanced development, it sets itself back to the stone age by triggering an extinction level event.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    So the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that nobody ever learns from their mistakes?
    - zzalpha 9y ago
      We can't learn from our own mistakes now. What makes you think, 2,000 years from now, our ancestors will look back and a) remember what happened accurately, and b) learn from it? I can imagine someone in the future saying "No man, that wasn't humanity's fault... the earth just goes through natural cycles. Or maybe it was just the sun." In short: I think you're denying our contemporary and historical reality if you think that, in the future, we'll do any differently. Edit: As an aside, I want you to reflect, for a moment, on our ability to understand human society even just 500 years back. Even at a time with decent written records, there's still entire disciplines focused on trying to understand how those people worked and lived, and enormous amounts of disagreement on the same. Now imagine we fast forward, say, 2,000 years after we've destroyed modern society and started to rebuild in earnest. An enormous amount of information about who we are is now locked up in optical, magnetic, and solid state storage, and the technology to read that information will be destroyed right along with the rest of us. Much of the rest is stored on paper that doesn't have the long-term archival properties of something like vellum. Why do you think our ancestors will understand us any better than we understand people in the middle ages?
  - jerf 9y ago
    The problem with this answer to the Fermi paradox, along with many others, is that it can't just be "very likely". It has to be essentially 100% likely. And while I'm sure a lot of people are ready to believe "very likely", "literally zero civilizations out of millions manages to survive ecological catastrophe", despite those millions of civilizations having fundamentally different mental architectures, ecologies, circumstances, time scales, and difficulties in spreading out into space is really a tough sell. You're really telling me the sentient Bee People of Madeupertrus XIII, whose singular queen dominates all decisions on the planet in the universal hive mind, couldn't figure out they needed to stop burning anthracite coal if they wanted to live? Personally, I think "it's just inevitable that all civilizations die from ecological collapse" takes some of the emotional frisson out of the doom and gloom as well; if it's just that inevitable, you can't really blame anyone, can you? If it's inevitable, it isn't really "fossil fuel's" fault (after all it is likely that many civilizations never even had fossil fuels, or lacked an oxygenated environment or similar that makes combusting them so easy), or careless use of farm land, or anything else... it's just the inevitable workings of the impersonal universe. As with many other putative answers to the Fermi paradox, I don't think this one is powerful enough to explain it.
    - minikites 9y ago
      >despite those millions of civilizations having fundamentally different mental architectures, ecologies, circumstances, time scales, and difficulties in spreading out into space is really a tough sell Absolutely, which is why I said "an answer" as opposed to "the answer".
  - Broken_Hippo 9y ago
    Only, we won't be going back to the stone age. Ever. Even if the tech is wiped out. We know all this stuff is possible and it is unlikely that everyone that knows something will die, just as it is unlikely that all print resources will be taken away. Cars and cell phone towers will still likely exist. Televisions, radios, computers. The remains of power plants will stand. We'll continue to wash our hands after shitting because we won't lose germ theory. Sorry, but there is no going back to the stone age. At worst, the tech of today becomes the goal of humanity after our numbers rebuild.
- PoachedSausage 9y ago
  Unfortunately we only get the one free gift of fossil fuel energy accumulated over millions of years.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    Insuring that we don't make the same mistake again? Development would be slower if you have to start with renewables, but it's not blocked entirely.
    - PeterisP 9y ago
      There's some historical arguments that without fossil fuels, the industrial revolution doesn't happen and we'd never get beyond that block. I.e. if man/animal labor is more effective than crude machines, then societies never make mass investment into crude machines and don't prepare large numbers of people working with said machines, so there's no stimulus that might ever reach fancy machines that might be actually useful. We'd have the same fate as the medieval Chinese society, which invented lots of nifty tech centuries before Europe, but didn't go beyond that to the industrial revolution for social reasons until the progress elsewhere forced the social reasons to change.
    - echlebek 9y ago
      I think the consensus is that the industrial revolution would have been impossible without fossil fuels.
      - jandrese 9y ago
        It would have been impossible to power steam engines with wood instead of coal? I get that it is less efficient, but wood burners certainly existed back in that era. Every train would have needed a balloon funnel and there would have been far more significant logging operations and probably deforestation problems, but it doesn't seem completely impossible.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
jadell 9y ago
It would depend on how often the "in-tribe altruism / out-tribe selfishness" trait crops up in other intelligent species.
- minikites 9y ago
  Exactly, and to me that leads to the question of whether or not selfishness is required for a civilization/society to advance.
  - convolvatron 9y ago
    not much of advance if shortly after we all drown trying to come up with costing models for lifeboat usage
    - minikites 9y ago
      This is veering off topic but your example is one of the reasons capitalism strikes me as a transitional system. It only makes sense to weigh the cost of something like a lifeboat or healthcare when the inputs are scarce. When the inputs become plentiful there's much less of a reason to be so miserly.
abhi3 9y ago
The most convincing answer to the Fermi Paradox I have read is that we are not seeing space faring civilizations because all planets have dysfunctional political systems and had to cancel their space programs under citizen pressure to 'solve problems at home first'.
- bonzini 9y ago
  Another is that a sustainable civilization doesn't evolve to the point of being visible.

I often wonder if this type of thing is an answer to the Fermi Paradox, that complex societies inevitably destroy themselves by failing to solve fatal problems requiring collective action.

jandrese 9y ago

I don't buy it. Even if we do fuck this up royally and cause a mass extinction event (which seems increasingly likely), humans will survive. There may (probably will) be a loss of population, but it's the sort of thing humans can definitely recover from given time. At the timescales of the Fermi Paradox this shouldn't be an issue. It's barely a blip.

zzalpha 9y ago
The Fermi paradox still applies if, every time society reaches a point of advanced development, it sets itself back to the stone age by triggering an extinction level event.
- jandrese 9y ago
  So the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that nobody ever learns from their mistakes?
  - zzalpha 9y ago
    We can't learn from our own mistakes now. What makes you think, 2,000 years from now, our ancestors will look back and a) remember what happened accurately, and b) learn from it? I can imagine someone in the future saying "No man, that wasn't humanity's fault... the earth just goes through natural cycles. Or maybe it was just the sun." In short: I think you're denying our contemporary and historical reality if you think that, in the future, we'll do any differently. Edit: As an aside, I want you to reflect, for a moment, on our ability to understand human society even just 500 years back. Even at a time with decent written records, there's still entire disciplines focused on trying to understand how those people worked and lived, and enormous amounts of disagreement on the same. Now imagine we fast forward, say, 2,000 years after we've destroyed modern society and started to rebuild in earnest. An enormous amount of information about who we are is now locked up in optical, magnetic, and solid state storage, and the technology to read that information will be destroyed right along with the rest of us. Much of the rest is stored on paper that doesn't have the long-term archival properties of something like vellum. Why do you think our ancestors will understand us any better than we understand people in the middle ages?
- jerf 9y ago
  The problem with this answer to the Fermi paradox, along with many others, is that it can't just be "very likely". It has to be essentially 100% likely. And while I'm sure a lot of people are ready to believe "very likely", "literally zero civilizations out of millions manages to survive ecological catastrophe", despite those millions of civilizations having fundamentally different mental architectures, ecologies, circumstances, time scales, and difficulties in spreading out into space is really a tough sell. You're really telling me the sentient Bee People of Madeupertrus XIII, whose singular queen dominates all decisions on the planet in the universal hive mind, couldn't figure out they needed to stop burning anthracite coal if they wanted to live? Personally, I think "it's just inevitable that all civilizations die from ecological collapse" takes some of the emotional frisson out of the doom and gloom as well; if it's just that inevitable, you can't really blame anyone, can you? If it's inevitable, it isn't really "fossil fuel's" fault (after all it is likely that many civilizations never even had fossil fuels, or lacked an oxygenated environment or similar that makes combusting them so easy), or careless use of farm land, or anything else... it's just the inevitable workings of the impersonal universe. As with many other putative answers to the Fermi paradox, I don't think this one is powerful enough to explain it.
  - minikites 9y ago
    >despite those millions of civilizations having fundamentally different mental architectures, ecologies, circumstances, time scales, and difficulties in spreading out into space is really a tough sell Absolutely, which is why I said "an answer" as opposed to "the answer".
- Broken_Hippo 9y ago
  Only, we won't be going back to the stone age. Ever. Even if the tech is wiped out. We know all this stuff is possible and it is unlikely that everyone that knows something will die, just as it is unlikely that all print resources will be taken away. Cars and cell phone towers will still likely exist. Televisions, radios, computers. The remains of power plants will stand. We'll continue to wash our hands after shitting because we won't lose germ theory. Sorry, but there is no going back to the stone age. At worst, the tech of today becomes the goal of humanity after our numbers rebuild.
PoachedSausage 9y ago
Unfortunately we only get the one free gift of fossil fuel energy accumulated over millions of years.
- jandrese 9y ago
  Insuring that we don't make the same mistake again? Development would be slower if you have to start with renewables, but it's not blocked entirely.
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    There's some historical arguments that without fossil fuels, the industrial revolution doesn't happen and we'd never get beyond that block. I.e. if man/animal labor is more effective than crude machines, then societies never make mass investment into crude machines and don't prepare large numbers of people working with said machines, so there's no stimulus that might ever reach fancy machines that might be actually useful. We'd have the same fate as the medieval Chinese society, which invented lots of nifty tech centuries before Europe, but didn't go beyond that to the industrial revolution for social reasons until the progress elsewhere forced the social reasons to change.
  - echlebek 9y ago
    I think the consensus is that the industrial revolution would have been impossible without fossil fuels.
    - jandrese 9y ago
      It would have been impossible to power steam engines with wood instead of coal? I get that it is less efficient, but wood burners certainly existed back in that era. Every train would have needed a balloon funnel and there would have been far more significant logging operations and probably deforestation problems, but it doesn't seem completely impossible.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]

jadell 9y ago

It would depend on how often the "in-tribe altruism / out-tribe selfishness" trait crops up in other intelligent species.

minikites 9y ago
Exactly, and to me that leads to the question of whether or not selfishness is required for a civilization/society to advance.
- convolvatron 9y ago
  not much of advance if shortly after we all drown trying to come up with costing models for lifeboat usage
  - minikites 9y ago
    This is veering off topic but your example is one of the reasons capitalism strikes me as a transitional system. It only makes sense to weigh the cost of something like a lifeboat or healthcare when the inputs are scarce. When the inputs become plentiful there's much less of a reason to be so miserly.

abhi3 9y ago

The most convincing answer to the Fermi Paradox I have read is that we are not seeing space faring civilizations because all planets have dysfunctional political systems and had to cancel their space programs under citizen pressure to 'solve problems at home first'.

bonzini 9y ago
Another is that a sustainable civilization doesn't evolve to the point of being visible.