7 ms·

My favorite solution: The galaxy is teeming with life, but in the form of quasi-immortal software that lives at such vast timescales, they're as uninterested in

My favorite solution: The galaxy is teeming with life, but in the form of quasi-immortal software that lives at such vast timescales, they're as uninterested in talking to us as we would be in talking to a fruit fly. (Imagine Space Ents that say hello, and are perfectly content to wait 10,000 years for a reply.) It may well be that becoming such a life form is the only practical way to deal with the speed-of-light constraint, either in travel or communication.

joe_the_user 8y ago
To continue the speculation, such "life" may be what can travel between stars but life such as our may still be common. Indeed, life such as our may be common enough that interstellar life merely takes note of it and moves on since novelty wears off quickly.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Like some British ship visiting some pacific island circa 1800 "Yup, just some birds, palm trees and nothing particularly useful here, note the location in the log and move on."
gloriousduke 8y ago
I've encountered an idea similar to this: > The transcension hypothesis proposes that a universal process of evolutionary development guides all sufficiently advanced civilizations into what may be called "inner space," a computationally optimal domain of increasingly dense, productive, miniaturized, and efficient scales of space, time, energy, and matter, and eventually, to a black-hole-like destination. https://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.html https://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.htm...
- Joe-Z 8y ago
  Would you mind dumbing that down for me? As I understand it we'd be living inside a simulation. Isn't that what GP suggested?
  - matthewwiese 8y ago
    If I grokked the parent right, it's not that we are living in a simulation, but that the apex of development for a species is effectively becoming a simulation. Now, whether that is an argument that life at present is itself a simulation is yet to be determined. However, I'd imagine given that ungodly level of computational power we'd have the wherewithal to construct a reality for ourselves far more compelling than this one. ;)
    - Joe-Z 8y ago
      Wouldn't it be more fitting to call it a godly amount of computational power then? :) We're only looking at it from the inside perspective. Who knows, maybe our simulation overlords (ourselves?) already placed us in a far better place than they ever had!
      - matthewwiese 8y ago
        Haha. Well said. That's a clever take. I suppose if the "original" humans came from a universe as hellish as Warhammer 40K, ours would seem like a cakewalk!
    - jnicholasp 8y ago
      We're obviously not living in a best-of-all-possible-worlds simulation, but that doesn't preclude us either from being in a simulation or from being in one created by thoughtful entities for morally good ends. If you consider that bringing into being all possible worlds and all possible creatures whose existence is net positive in utility to themselves, is a good and desirable and interesting project, then you would end by creating an untold number of simulations, many of which would not be the, or mistakeable for the, best of all possible worlds. And it would be possible that many creatures who grew up in and formed a unique, not otherwise achievable, identity in the not-perfect worlds could graduate/ascend/sublime into one or more of the more perfect worlds after they had lived a life in their home simulation. And being such a creature in such a home simulation, not yet ascended or aware that there are other places to ascend to, could also be a solution to the Fermi paradox: we see no other aliens because we have been placed here at least in part to develop our specifically human nature, without the dilution of that nature via the influence of other creatures. Cf. the Star Trek policy of non-intervention, the Prime Directive [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive].
andrewla 8y ago
Hart's paper attempts to cover the idea of "sociological" phenomena like this. I think from an evolutionary biology standpoint, it seems dubious that such a thing could evolve -- even considering a software solution, software that more rapidly propagates will be more common then software that does not. They might not want to talk to us, but members of that species that actively convert planets into computational substrates would be the more common variants just because on these kinds of timescales they would not have competition.
Koshkin 8y ago
> talking to a fruit fly I believe it would be very interesting, scientifically, to be able to 'talk' to a fruit fly.
- Loughla 8y ago
  Once. How different can the experiences be between fruit flies after that first contact, though? And for that matter, what if your species descended from something similar to a fruit fly and you had the processing power to call those species memories to the front of your own mind?
  - matthewwiese 8y ago
    I don't think you intended your first remark to sound like this, but I'd imagine the same could be said of us from the perspective of a highly advanced interstellar species: how different can the experiences be between humans, right? However, given the level of complexity of a fruit fly I know this metaphor doesn't necessarily hold when analyzed from the perspective of a human. Yet, who is to say beings beyond our comprehension wouldn't think the same of us? Unless of course that was your point this entire time and I just stupidly repeated it in a more garrulous manner.
    - namanyayg 8y ago
      We have society, schooling, media, art, and culture; and every human is unique and individual thanks to thousands of years of these. Even if we got a fruit fly to speak, it's likely that every other fruit fly will say very similar things as they just have the genetic code but no "culture." So I think the difference here is caused by society, not by simplicity. Each human carries the combined knowledge of ancestors.
    - Loughla 8y ago
      That was exactly my point.
  - scj 8y ago
    I suspect one of the more interesting aspects of humanity would be that our "day-world" (the sun) is about the same size as our "night-world" (the moon) from our perspective. Sometimes our night world covers our day world completely. Sun worship might be common, but the human spin on it might be rare. Studying the impact on our mythology and philosophy could prove interesting to outsiders. It is possible that our species thinks in an extremely binary way compared to other intelligent beings. Talking to us about it would likely prove less interesting. Betting quatloos on outcomes might prove an interesting sport though.
svachalek 8y ago
To me, any solution that requires all alien life acting the same is just as paradoxical as it not existing.
- lukifer 8y ago
  I'm not proposing that such life forms would choose to act the same, but rather that they would be adapted to the constraints of their environment (the speed of c). (There are countless ways to adapt to the conditions of the deep ocean, but none of them are going to be jogging or flight.) That said, you're right that it's not a given that electronic life would be uninterested in us, even indirectly, such as long-distance observational probes. Strictly speaking, we don't know for sure that that isn't the case. ;) It's also worth considering that a particular long-lived culture or life form might achieve long-term stable hegemony and/or territoriality, resulting in a consistent policy with regard to either our planet, or planets with organic life in general. All just speculation, at any rate. I don't claim the model is necessarily correct, just that it's my favorite. :)
sporkland 8y ago
Sounds like the plot for Spin: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/910863.Spin https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/910863.Spin
jcoffland 8y ago
Why software? Seems like a pretty dumb and fragile platform for a quasi-immortal being.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  DNA is kinda, like software. We're, what, decades after transistors were invented and people are already talking about implanting chips t smarten us up. Imagine 1 billion years from now. Some civ might have started billions of years before us.
burtonator 8y ago
We don't have conversations with paramecium. If you wanted to build a Dyson sphere you would capture all the light from your star and might not exhibit ANY radiation. We wouldn't see such a species and if there's such a small blink of time between the industrial age to the singularity the probability that there is an overlapping species is very very low. We would only have about 20-40 years to actually have the technology to find them before we hit the singularity. We have NO idea what happens after that point but my plan is to just chill with my wife in a virtual Yosemite park once we hit the singularity.
- sampo 8y ago
  > might not exhibit ANY radiation That would be against thermodynamics. Every object that has a temperature (above 0K) emits radiation.
  - androidgirl 8y ago
    You're right obviously, but a Matrioshka Brain would put out such a small amount of radiation, it'd be invisible for all sensor technology outside of, say, black hole lenses.
    - sampo 8y ago
      > a Matrioshka Brain would put out such a small amount of radiation, it'd be invisible for all sensor technology A huge object emitting infrared radiation would be quite detectable. At the level of energy output from our Sun, a Dyson sphere with a diameter of the Earth's orbit, would actually have a surface temperature of 395K or 122C. It would put out lots of infrared radiation, and would be very detectable against the cosmic background which has a radiation temperature of 2.7K. Some SETI programs have looked for these, and already in 1984 we had the technology to observe, and as it turns out, to rule out any of these (Dyson spheres around stars with energy output comparable to our Sun) existing within the nearest 300 light years. https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#HEAT https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#HEAT https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#OBS https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#OBS http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/weirdastronomy.php#id--Object_X http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/weirdastronomy....
knodi123 8y ago
My favorite solution: consciousness is not that important of a criteria when determining the success of an organism- there are plenty populated planets all over the universe, but none of them care about learning, or exploring the unknown. Our giant brains are just one very specific solution to one very specific problem, and in some environments, there are advantages to not having such a brain.
Balgair 8y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that ~80% of the universe is 'dark energy' and ~20% is 'dark matter'. The stuff we're made of is ~5% of the mass-density of the universe. For the stuff you and I are made of, we have a pretty good clue as to what is going on, how it works, what the 'bottlenecks' are in terms of talking with other stuff that is like us. For dark matter, well... it falls down. That's about all we got. How it interacts, if at all, is a total mystery at this point. And there's about 4x more of it than of the stuff you and I are made up of (which is mostly in stars and black holes, at that!). Does it have phases? Can it have a temperature? If it can sustain something like life, what would that even be like? For dark energy... um... it falls up? Honestly, we got nothing at this point. We've not really even got an idea if it's a particle or a field or what. Most 'serious' physicists just ignore it as it's embarrassingly mysterious. If life could exist in something like dark energy, we'd be totally left out of any avenue to talk to it. At least with dark matter aliens you can send gravity waves at them. With dark energy ones, we have no idea at all. And dark energy has 16x the mass-density that we do. My point is that the majority of the universe that we know about today is just a total mystery. And we've only discovered this issue in the last 50 years or so. Meaning that in another 10,000 years, we're likely to have a completely different understanding of the universe than we have today. Like, so radically different that it's akin to the flat-earth model vs. general relativity. When it comes to alien communication, be patient. It's likely to be so outside our current understanding that it would baffle anyone currently alive; it will be literally unbelievable to you and I.
- namanyayg 8y ago
  Interesting, and the probabilities seem to support it. This also means that I'm not going to get to understand any of it in my lifetime, though. _sigh_.

joe_the_user 8y ago

To continue the speculation, such "life" may be what can travel between stars but life such as our may still be common. Indeed, life such as our may be common enough that interstellar life merely takes note of it and moves on since novelty wears off quickly.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Like some British ship visiting some pacific island circa 1800 "Yup, just some birds, palm trees and nothing particularly useful here, note the location in the log and move on."

gloriousduke 8y ago

I've encountered an idea similar to this: > The transcension hypothesis proposes that a universal process of evolutionary development guides all sufficiently advanced civilizations into what may be called "inner space," a computationally optimal domain of increasingly dense, productive, miniaturized, and efficient scales of space, time, energy, and matter, and eventually, to a black-hole-like destination. https://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.html https://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.htm...

Joe-Z 8y ago
Would you mind dumbing that down for me? As I understand it we'd be living inside a simulation. Isn't that what GP suggested?
- matthewwiese 8y ago
  If I grokked the parent right, it's not that we are living in a simulation, but that the apex of development for a species is effectively becoming a simulation. Now, whether that is an argument that life at present is itself a simulation is yet to be determined. However, I'd imagine given that ungodly level of computational power we'd have the wherewithal to construct a reality for ourselves far more compelling than this one. ;)
  - Joe-Z 8y ago
    Wouldn't it be more fitting to call it a godly amount of computational power then? :) We're only looking at it from the inside perspective. Who knows, maybe our simulation overlords (ourselves?) already placed us in a far better place than they ever had!
    - matthewwiese 8y ago
      Haha. Well said. That's a clever take. I suppose if the "original" humans came from a universe as hellish as Warhammer 40K, ours would seem like a cakewalk!
  - jnicholasp 8y ago
    We're obviously not living in a best-of-all-possible-worlds simulation, but that doesn't preclude us either from being in a simulation or from being in one created by thoughtful entities for morally good ends. If you consider that bringing into being all possible worlds and all possible creatures whose existence is net positive in utility to themselves, is a good and desirable and interesting project, then you would end by creating an untold number of simulations, many of which would not be the, or mistakeable for the, best of all possible worlds. And it would be possible that many creatures who grew up in and formed a unique, not otherwise achievable, identity in the not-perfect worlds could graduate/ascend/sublime into one or more of the more perfect worlds after they had lived a life in their home simulation. And being such a creature in such a home simulation, not yet ascended or aware that there are other places to ascend to, could also be a solution to the Fermi paradox: we see no other aliens because we have been placed here at least in part to develop our specifically human nature, without the dilution of that nature via the influence of other creatures. Cf. the Star Trek policy of non-intervention, the Prime Directive [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive].

andrewla 8y ago

Hart's paper attempts to cover the idea of "sociological" phenomena like this. I think from an evolutionary biology standpoint, it seems dubious that such a thing could evolve -- even considering a software solution, software that more rapidly propagates will be more common then software that does not. They might not want to talk to us, but members of that species that actively convert planets into computational substrates would be the more common variants just because on these kinds of timescales they would not have competition.

Koshkin 8y ago

> talking to a fruit fly I believe it would be very interesting, scientifically, to be able to 'talk' to a fruit fly.

Loughla 8y ago
Once. How different can the experiences be between fruit flies after that first contact, though? And for that matter, what if your species descended from something similar to a fruit fly and you had the processing power to call those species memories to the front of your own mind?
- matthewwiese 8y ago
  I don't think you intended your first remark to sound like this, but I'd imagine the same could be said of us from the perspective of a highly advanced interstellar species: how different can the experiences be between humans, right? However, given the level of complexity of a fruit fly I know this metaphor doesn't necessarily hold when analyzed from the perspective of a human. Yet, who is to say beings beyond our comprehension wouldn't think the same of us? Unless of course that was your point this entire time and I just stupidly repeated it in a more garrulous manner.
  - namanyayg 8y ago
    We have society, schooling, media, art, and culture; and every human is unique and individual thanks to thousands of years of these. Even if we got a fruit fly to speak, it's likely that every other fruit fly will say very similar things as they just have the genetic code but no "culture." So I think the difference here is caused by society, not by simplicity. Each human carries the combined knowledge of ancestors.
  - Loughla 8y ago
    That was exactly my point.
- scj 8y ago
  I suspect one of the more interesting aspects of humanity would be that our "day-world" (the sun) is about the same size as our "night-world" (the moon) from our perspective. Sometimes our night world covers our day world completely. Sun worship might be common, but the human spin on it might be rare. Studying the impact on our mythology and philosophy could prove interesting to outsiders. It is possible that our species thinks in an extremely binary way compared to other intelligent beings. Talking to us about it would likely prove less interesting. Betting quatloos on outcomes might prove an interesting sport though.

svachalek 8y ago

To me, any solution that requires all alien life acting the same is just as paradoxical as it not existing.

lukifer 8y ago
I'm not proposing that such life forms would choose to act the same, but rather that they would be adapted to the constraints of their environment (the speed of c). (There are countless ways to adapt to the conditions of the deep ocean, but none of them are going to be jogging or flight.) That said, you're right that it's not a given that electronic life would be uninterested in us, even indirectly, such as long-distance observational probes. Strictly speaking, we don't know for sure that that isn't the case. ;) It's also worth considering that a particular long-lived culture or life form might achieve long-term stable hegemony and/or territoriality, resulting in a consistent policy with regard to either our planet, or planets with organic life in general. All just speculation, at any rate. I don't claim the model is necessarily correct, just that it's my favorite. :)

sporkland 8y ago

Sounds like the plot for Spin: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/910863.Spin https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/910863.Spin

jcoffland 8y ago

Why software? Seems like a pretty dumb and fragile platform for a quasi-immortal being.

onetimemanytime 8y ago
DNA is kinda, like software. We're, what, decades after transistors were invented and people are already talking about implanting chips t smarten us up. Imagine 1 billion years from now. Some civ might have started billions of years before us.

burtonator 8y ago

We don't have conversations with paramecium. If you wanted to build a Dyson sphere you would capture all the light from your star and might not exhibit ANY radiation. We wouldn't see such a species and if there's such a small blink of time between the industrial age to the singularity the probability that there is an overlapping species is very very low. We would only have about 20-40 years to actually have the technology to find them before we hit the singularity. We have NO idea what happens after that point but my plan is to just chill with my wife in a virtual Yosemite park once we hit the singularity.

sampo 8y ago
> might not exhibit ANY radiation That would be against thermodynamics. Every object that has a temperature (above 0K) emits radiation.
- androidgirl 8y ago
  You're right obviously, but a Matrioshka Brain would put out such a small amount of radiation, it'd be invisible for all sensor technology outside of, say, black hole lenses.
  - sampo 8y ago
    > a Matrioshka Brain would put out such a small amount of radiation, it'd be invisible for all sensor technology A huge object emitting infrared radiation would be quite detectable. At the level of energy output from our Sun, a Dyson sphere with a diameter of the Earth's orbit, would actually have a surface temperature of 395K or 122C. It would put out lots of infrared radiation, and would be very detectable against the cosmic background which has a radiation temperature of 2.7K. Some SETI programs have looked for these, and already in 1984 we had the technology to observe, and as it turns out, to rule out any of these (Dyson spheres around stars with energy output comparable to our Sun) existing within the nearest 300 light years. https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#HEAT https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#HEAT https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#OBS https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#OBS http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/weirdastronomy.php#id--Object_X http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/weirdastronomy....

knodi123 8y ago

My favorite solution: consciousness is not that important of a criteria when determining the success of an organism- there are plenty populated planets all over the universe, but none of them care about learning, or exploring the unknown. Our giant brains are just one very specific solution to one very specific problem, and in some environments, there are advantages to not having such a brain.

Balgair 8y ago

One thing to keep in mind is that ~80% of the universe is 'dark energy' and ~20% is 'dark matter'. The stuff we're made of is ~5% of the mass-density of the universe. For the stuff you and I are made of, we have a pretty good clue as to what is going on, how it works, what the 'bottlenecks' are in terms of talking with other stuff that is like us. For dark matter, well... it falls down. That's about all we got. How it interacts, if at all, is a total mystery at this point. And there's about 4x more of it than of the stuff you and I are made up of (which is mostly in stars and black holes, at that!). Does it have phases? Can it have a temperature? If it can sustain something like life, what would that even be like? For dark energy... um... it falls up? Honestly, we got nothing at this point. We've not really even got an idea if it's a particle or a field or what. Most 'serious' physicists just ignore it as it's embarrassingly mysterious. If life could exist in something like dark energy, we'd be totally left out of any avenue to talk to it. At least with dark matter aliens you can send gravity waves at them. With dark energy ones, we have no idea at all. And dark energy has 16x the mass-density that we do. My point is that the majority of the universe that we know about today is just a total mystery. And we've only discovered this issue in the last 50 years or so. Meaning that in another 10,000 years, we're likely to have a completely different understanding of the universe than we have today. Like, so radically different that it's akin to the flat-earth model vs. general relativity. When it comes to alien communication, be patient. It's likely to be so outside our current understanding that it would baffle anyone currently alive; it will be literally unbelievable to you and I.

namanyayg 8y ago
Interesting, and the probabilities seem to support it. This also means that I'm not going to get to understand any of it in my lifetime, though. _sigh_.