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I'm highly skeptical of a Darwinian argument for galactic conquest. Intelligent societies would, by definition, be determined by non-genetic learning transmitte

I'm highly skeptical of a Darwinian argument for galactic conquest. Intelligent societies would, by definition, be determined by non-genetic learning transmitted via culture. Humans are not naturally aggressive anymore than they're naturally peaceful. They have dispositions capable of moving in both directions, the relative strength of which depend cultural socialisation, which is historically variable. I'm not at all sure that, even assuming your estimate, ETI would be 'fairly obvious'. Take some speculative figures. The total area of the milky way is about 30 trillion light years. Let's speculate that intelligent life occurs in one in a million planets. There are something like 100 billion planets in the milky way, so that would be 100,00 planets bearing ETI. If one in a thousand intelligent civilizations are super-expansionary, that comes down to just 100. If we divide the area of the milky way - 30 trillion - by a hundred, we get one super-expansionary civilization per three hundred billion square light years. Would that be obvious? Even if we assume that ETI occurs on average on one in 10,000 planets, that would still be one super-expansionary civilization per three billion square light years.

philwelch 6y ago
> Intelligent societies would, by definition, be determined by non-genetic learning transmitted via culture. This is inherently Darwinian as well. In fact, cultural evolution is usually smarter than we are; indigenous pre-industrial cultures typically have an excellent practical understanding of how to thrive in their immediate environment even without having anything close to a theoretical scientific understanding of why their own cultural practices work in the first place. More to the point, cultures that expand and grow, do so at the expense of cultures that don’t. So through natural selection, we would expect to see more expansionary cultures than non-expansionary cultures. And, even setting aside the argument, you still have the much tougher task of explaining the notion that no extraterrestrial cultures are expansionary, which is what your side of this argument would require. > I'm not at all sure that, even assuming your estimate, ETI would be 'fairly obvious'. It would be eventually if it were growing exponentially. On the timescale of the galaxy and by all probability, eventually has already happened unless humanity is an extreme, extreme, extreme outlier early bloomer.
- Emma_Goldman 6y ago
  > More to the point, cultures that expand and grow, do so at the expense of cultures that don’t. So through natural selection, we would expect to see more expansionary cultures than non-expansionary cultures. Natural selection cannot apply to societies because there is no reliable mechanism for successful decision-making to propagate itself in the way genes convey successful characteristics to future generations. Does survival depend on expansion? The last century has seen the fragmentation of the imperial world into a proliferation of independent states, big and small. It is now widely recognised that exchange is more profitable than territorial acquisition, and war has become a highly technologically-intensive project bearing exorbitant costs. Most arguments for expansion as a survival strategy would depend upon some version of the realist theory of anarchy, that the absence of a supra-national sovereign creates conditions of mutual insecurity in which states are forced to maximise their relative power. But I would think that any major inter-stellar expansion would require the unification of the world - in some form - removing the realist premise from the argument for super-expansion. > And, even setting aside the argument, you still have the much tougher task of explaining the notion that no extraterrestrial cultures are expansionary, which is what your side of this argument would require. That depends on how common intelligent life is, the maximum possible speed of interstellar travel, the number of ETI that would commit to super-expansion, how good we are (not very) at searching the sky for signs of life, among other things. If you take the upper-bound estimate for most of those categories, then it is not at all paradoxical that we do not see alien life teeming around us.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    > Natural selection cannot apply to societies because there is no reliable mechanism for successful decision-making to propagate itself in the way genes convey successful characteristics to future generations. Behaviors, customs, and beliefs face the exact same selective pressure as genes. If a certain behavior or custom consistently leads to fatal consequences for the people who practice it, that behavior will become less common over time, and societies that normalize that behavior will go extinct. If a certain different behavior or custom consistently leads to success--in terms of maintaining or, better yet, increasing the number of people who engage in that behavior or custom--then that behavior will persist and spread. > The last century has seen the fragmentation of the imperial world into a proliferation of independent states, big and small. Individual empires always rise and fall. That's the nature of history. But for humanity, at least, there are only two options: either some of us will eventually colonize space (in which case those of us colonizing space will be more numerous 1000 years from now, and the set of behaviors, customs, and beliefs that led that group to colonize space will be the representative set among humanity), or else we won't colonize space because we ran into the Great Filter. The same is true for any extraterrestrial intelligence.

philwelch 6y ago

> Intelligent societies would, by definition, be determined by non-genetic learning transmitted via culture. This is inherently Darwinian as well. In fact, cultural evolution is usually smarter than we are; indigenous pre-industrial cultures typically have an excellent practical understanding of how to thrive in their immediate environment even without having anything close to a theoretical scientific understanding of why their own cultural practices work in the first place. More to the point, cultures that expand and grow, do so at the expense of cultures that don’t. So through natural selection, we would expect to see more expansionary cultures than non-expansionary cultures. And, even setting aside the argument, you still have the much tougher task of explaining the notion that no extraterrestrial cultures are expansionary, which is what your side of this argument would require. > I'm not at all sure that, even assuming your estimate, ETI would be 'fairly obvious'. It would be eventually if it were growing exponentially. On the timescale of the galaxy and by all probability, eventually has already happened unless humanity is an extreme, extreme, extreme outlier early bloomer.

Emma_Goldman 6y ago
> More to the point, cultures that expand and grow, do so at the expense of cultures that don’t. So through natural selection, we would expect to see more expansionary cultures than non-expansionary cultures. Natural selection cannot apply to societies because there is no reliable mechanism for successful decision-making to propagate itself in the way genes convey successful characteristics to future generations. Does survival depend on expansion? The last century has seen the fragmentation of the imperial world into a proliferation of independent states, big and small. It is now widely recognised that exchange is more profitable than territorial acquisition, and war has become a highly technologically-intensive project bearing exorbitant costs. Most arguments for expansion as a survival strategy would depend upon some version of the realist theory of anarchy, that the absence of a supra-national sovereign creates conditions of mutual insecurity in which states are forced to maximise their relative power. But I would think that any major inter-stellar expansion would require the unification of the world - in some form - removing the realist premise from the argument for super-expansion. > And, even setting aside the argument, you still have the much tougher task of explaining the notion that no extraterrestrial cultures are expansionary, which is what your side of this argument would require. That depends on how common intelligent life is, the maximum possible speed of interstellar travel, the number of ETI that would commit to super-expansion, how good we are (not very) at searching the sky for signs of life, among other things. If you take the upper-bound estimate for most of those categories, then it is not at all paradoxical that we do not see alien life teeming around us.
- philwelch 6y ago
  > Natural selection cannot apply to societies because there is no reliable mechanism for successful decision-making to propagate itself in the way genes convey successful characteristics to future generations. Behaviors, customs, and beliefs face the exact same selective pressure as genes. If a certain behavior or custom consistently leads to fatal consequences for the people who practice it, that behavior will become less common over time, and societies that normalize that behavior will go extinct. If a certain different behavior or custom consistently leads to success--in terms of maintaining or, better yet, increasing the number of people who engage in that behavior or custom--then that behavior will persist and spread. > The last century has seen the fragmentation of the imperial world into a proliferation of independent states, big and small. Individual empires always rise and fall. That's the nature of history. But for humanity, at least, there are only two options: either some of us will eventually colonize space (in which case those of us colonizing space will be more numerous 1000 years from now, and the set of behaviors, customs, and beliefs that led that group to colonize space will be the representative set among humanity), or else we won't colonize space because we ran into the Great Filter. The same is true for any extraterrestrial intelligence.