15 ms·

Grabby Aliens

66 points by yosoyubik 6y ago

eigenhombre 6y ago
Which one of the colored blobs is the Culture?
- vnxli 6y ago
  Are the Culture the good guys or the bad guys? I read Consider Phlebas first and felt such a whiplash moving into Player of Games or whatever the next one was. I want to like that series but I just can’t figure out if I’m rooting for bad guys or not.
  - messe 6y ago
    The Culture believe they are the good guys, and that they are mostly in the right.
    - arethuza 6y ago
      And they have the data to justify that position, even then they still run control experiments, which is where we fit in...
  - simonh 6y ago
    By and large they're the good guys, or the least-worst guys anyway. Consider Phlebas is the weakest of the series IMO which is a shame as it's dealing with some interesting issues.
  - wannadingo 6y ago
    The books are meant to make you question your own assumptions of what is good or right. I think what many people like about Banks is that he did not write simple morality plays. Iain Banks also wrote mainstream novels so you could say that he wasn't coming from the normal genre writer's perspective.
  - ngvrnd 6y ago
    neither/both
  - Super_Jambo 6y ago
    Banks likes twists. The Culture is his attempt at writing a viable techno utopia. Every other book has a more pro-culture viewpoint. But if you're after 'good guys' and 'bad guys' Banks might not really be for you.
    - arethuza 6y ago
      Wasn't banks pretty clear that the Culture was his attempt to come up with a society that is as "good" as possible - if nothing else to provide a suitable employer for his supreme military genius (who I shall avoid naming). Edit: CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture? Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it’s my secular heaven….Yes, I would, absolutely. Again it comes down to wish fulfillment. I haven’t done a study and taken lots of replies across a cross-section of humanity to find out what would be their personal utopia. It’s mine, I thought of it, and I’m going home with it — absolutely, it’s great.
    - vnxli 6y ago
      I think that’s my answer. I like good guys/bad guys. There’s enough grey areas and anti heroes in real life. I want simpler fiction
  - elihu 6y ago
    I interpret it as that they're mostly the good guys, but Consider Phlebas is written from the point of view of someone who opposes the Culture. The main thing the Culture did that wasn't what I'd call a "good guy move" was destroying the orbital rather than allowing it to be used as a foothold by the Idirans. Basically, the Culture decided that winning was more important than holding the moral high ground.
bayesian_horse 6y ago
I'm still not very convinced any civilization will actually expand significantly beyond one solar system. It's not just really hard, you'd need really good reasons for expanding that long (as opposed to just exploring). As Humanity, we're not even sure about increasing our own population size forever.
- jdmichal 6y ago
  > I'm still not very convinced any civilization will actually expand significantly beyond one solar system. I'm fine with the idea of a species -- or whatever definition you want to use here -- expanding beyond one solar system. But without at least faster-than-light communication, I don't think it would be possible to maintain a cohesive civilization at that scale. And without faster-than-light travel, you're also going to have things like species rings developing.
  - deepstack 6y ago
    > I'm still not very convinced any civilization will actually expand significantly beyond one solar system. Whether a civilization expand beyond their solar system is entirely depending on if they develop the technology to do so in a relatively short time compare to their life span. One good reason could be habitable planets. There may not be enough habitable planets left in the solar system. Extra: some sci-fi look at Kardashev scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
    - bayesian_horse 6y ago
      They wouldn't need habitable planets at all Escaping one solar system with some amount of colonists is probably harder than developing the technology to not need whatever counts as "habitable planet" at the other end. They'd use the new system's ressources for all sorts of things, least of which would be biological survival.
      - lupire 6y ago
cyberlab 6y ago
> and they prevent other beings like themselves from emerging within their volume What so they go to war with other species who are unlike them? Doesn't sound very clever, and it's a losing strategy. 'War is a losing strategy' [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-win_situation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-win_situation
- jerf 6y ago
  I think you're underestimating the orders of magnitude in development that is possible. Even if an "enlightened" species was light-speed expanding at us right now, and they decided to leave us our entire solar system out of the goodness of their hearts, that would still prevent us from ever matching their expansion, because once we grew to the point that we'd like to light-speed expand into our neighborhood, there'd be no neighborhood to expand into.
- olooney 6y ago
  Absolutely trivial for an interstellar space-faring civilization to wipe out an up-and-coming species. Grab a medium size asteroid[1] from their solar system, adjust its trajectory slightly, bam! An extinction event level weapon. This works because your basically rolling the rocks downhill, and there is a tremendous potential energy difference[2] between Earth and say, the Kuiper belt[3]. Or a bit of biological warfare - can't be too hard for a super-advanced civilization to tweak a virus to be a little more dangerous. Or maybe a bit of radioactive dust, or just poking a whole in the planets ozone layer; there are probably lots of subtle techniques that an advanced AI could pull off too. the point is, is you command the technology and energy reserves needed for interstellar travel, you don't really need to fight a prolonged war against a species on a lower technology level. Just check in every few thousand years and if it seems like they're starting to expand just wipe them out. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_capture [2]: https://xkcd.com/681/ https://xkcd.com/681/ [3]: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/kuiper-belt/overview/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/kuiper-belt/overvi...
  - andredz 6y ago
    Your comment brought the prologue of this novel https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/32411/bens-damn-adventure-the-prince-has-no-pants https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/32411/bens-damn-adventure-... to my mind.
Dumblydorr 6y ago
The vast distances between solar systems means that in order for life to expand beyond our system, it must either be put dormant for decades of interstellar travel, or it must travel in a craft so fast that modern physics thinks it unlikely. Since there's little reason to suspect that c speed of light is not the speed limit, that leaves us with some sort of biological suspension of life forms until they reach their destination. This tech is still extremely nascent, but to me there is possibility in at least sending seeds, microbes, probes, and very small crafts to nearby stars. Nevertheless, it seems likely that we will expand heavily within our own solar system before we ever reach another star. Proxima centauri is light years away, but mars, venus, the asteroids, and various rocky moons are within our grabby reach.
- scientaster2 6y ago
  Remember though that as you approach the speed of light, relativity starts to kick in with your time "slowing down". In other words, the inverse relationship between speed and time could allow civilizations to expand faster than it would seem possible at "normal time" speeds. Complete conjecture on my part, just a fun thing to think about!
  - umvi 6y ago
    This is true but the amount of energy needed to reach speeds where time dilation makes your journey seem short are just unfathomable.
- jerf 6y ago
  I'm not sure that's true. While you don't end up with lightspeed expansion, if you get to the point that you have the tech to live on an "iceball" by extracting the hydrogen and fusing it for energy, and can make the rest of what you need from raw atoms and energy, you can just sort of... keep expanding out into the oort cloud indefinitely, until after a while, you're not in the solar system anymore, and even more eventually, you're in another one. The more we learn the less empty interstellar space looks. That's certainly slow expansion, but it would be an expansion that in relatively short order would greatly exceed the biomass and biodiversity of Earth's biosphere, until it would be quite absurd that the whole thing would simultaneously decide to just stop one day. It would be slow but as difficult to stop as the biosphere is today. This does depend on some sort of practical fusion tech, though.
olooney 6y ago
The big bang only produced light elements and heavier elements were produced by nuclear fusion in stars. In particular, carbon and oxygen[1] would not have been abundant until the first generation of very hot, very large stars went supernova. Our own star is a third-generation star[2]; it is only 4-5 billion years old, forming ~10 billion years after the big bang, so our own solar system is fairly rich. Earlier solar systems would have been less rich, and this means life would have been far less likely to arise. Also, 25% of lightspeed is fairly aggressive. Even 1% would require engineering and energy reserves way beyond anything we can realistically hope for, largely due to the tyranny of the relativistic rocket equation[1]. Note that if you want to stop, you have to carry your own fuel, which makes the problem quadratically worse. Proposals like Breakthrough Starshot[3] can hope for 10% largely because they will just do a flyby and don't have to carry fuel for braking at the destination. Similar projects[4] have used much more realistic velocities and discovered in doesn't really matter - it still takes less than 100 million years to completely colonize every star in the galaxy. But this model doesn't solve or address the Fermi Paradox - where is everybody? It actually makes it worse. We might overlook or not be able to see a single populated solar system halfway across the galaxy, but a civilization that has expanded to fill every nook and cranny of the galaxy should be fairly easy to spot, no? Obvious, even. Yet there is no sign - not in our solar system, not in radio signals, not in Dyson spheres, nothing. On the other hand, every time we still down and make reasonable assumptions about how long it would take a species to colonize the galaxy, we usually find that it should have happened hundreds of times over, billions of years ago. So where is everybody? [1]: https://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_life.html https://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_life.html [2]: https://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae465.cfm https://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae465.cfm [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot [4]: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/294051-scientists-simulate-human-colonization-of-the-milky-way https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/294051-scientists-simula...
- m4rtink 6y ago
  If the slightly insane Nuclear Salt Water rocket can be pertectec then couple percent light speed might be doable even without complex exotic tech: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket
implying 6y ago
The paper (and code) describe a 3D voronoi diagram, and imagine what it would be like if each segment was an alien civilization.
- fogof 6y ago
  Almost. In their model, civilizations can start at different times, so it possible for the boundary between civilizations to be a hyperboloid, rather than flat as is the case for voronoi diagrams.
nanna 6y ago
Grabby aliens = projecting human colonialism across the cosmos, featuring an especially dubious technological determinism. Am I missing something?
- medicineman 6y ago
  Not missing anything, you brought enough snark for the whole class.
- Symmetry 6y ago
  Not just human colonialism but also the colonialism that ants, rabbits, and kudzu exhibit.
Gunax 6y ago
The problem with 'unknown unknowns' is that you can come to whatever conclusion you want, and it's perfectly logical either way. The 'Dark Forest' model suggests that we should be as quiet and inconspicuous as possible. But I could also propose what I am calling the 'lumberjack model'. Suppose a lumberjack wishes to cut down all of trees in the forest--but being a sympathetic lumberjack, he avoids felling any trees with a birds nest in them. In that case, the birds should actively be as loud as possible and make their presence known to the lumberjack. Both models are perfectly logical, but come to opposite conclusions--we simply have no idea whether aliens are more like the predators of the dark forest or the lumberjack. As for Hanson's theory, it might be that the universe is one giant winner-takes-all system. But I suspect one could also come up with an equally valid theory that concludes something else--and we have no way to discern one over the other. It's fun to speculate, I am just encouraging extreme caution I'm thinking we have any clue about any of this stuff.
- lnanek2 6y ago
  Most theories like this are starting from the place of trying to solve the Fermi Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox As time goes on, and we find no evidence of aliens, the dark forest model is more and more likely vs. the kindly lumberjack model. In the kindly lumberjack model, we're more likely to detect other civilizations.
  - TTPrograms 6y ago
    The Fermi Paradox is not real if you consider the massive uncertainty we have on the parameters of the Drake equation: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
    - akvadrako 6y ago
      The assumptions of the drake equation are not relevant. The idea that we are the only intelligent life in the visible universe begs for an explaination. That it seems like we could colonize the galaxy in 0.1% the age of the universe makes it even more odd.
chris_wot 6y ago
Has anyone ever considered we may be the grabby aliens?
- Jach 6y ago
  The source material for this does, we have the potential to become a grabby species. In particular though one of the strange things we can observe about the universe is how early we are, relative to how long we expect the universe to last. The grabby idea explains this puzzle pretty nicely by a selection effect: if the universe is going to be grabbed in the future (by us or others), then being early is the only time at all that we could find ourselves with our seemingly natural development history.
- kilroy123 6y ago
  Oh yes. Every time I watch a SciFi movie or show about aliens coming and dominating with superior tech, I think, this is... us not someone else.
reason-mr 6y ago
There is no reason to believe this model - the premise is pure conjecture. If I were engaging in pure conjecture - I might think equally, on the positive side, that all Aliens converge to the belief that all life is to be encouraged and supported, and turn into "meta-gardeners", seeding and encouraging life wherever they go.
- lupire 6y ago
  The point is that if grabby and gardener aliens exist, grabby aliens will dominate. It's similar to the idea in evolution that we species that like to reproduce more than species that don't.
  - arbitrage 6y ago
    It is no means a foregone conclusion that grabby v. gardener => grabby wins. Perhaps grabby aliens, a known menace to life in the universe, are systematically exterminated when they are identified by other aliens in the universe. There are really strong implicit assumptions at play here. This is a very interesting thought experiment, and it's nice to see novel thinking in this area. It's important to recognize however, that this is not "logical" or a "forgone conclusion" in any meaningful or systematic way.
  - jjtheblunt 6y ago
    But in gardening, overinvasive species are weeds and they are removed by gardeners?
    - Aeronwen 6y ago
      The gardener merely holds the weeds at bay for a while. Without constant upkeep, the weeds take over again.
jccalhoun 6y ago
Space is just so unimaginably huge that although I think aliens exist, I don't think it is likely that multi-solar system civilizations exist or there is a lot of organic life traveling between solar systems. The fastest man-made object is Helios 2 which went a little over 250,000 km/h https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_(spacecraft) So if I did my math right, that's 0.02% of the speed of light. So we would have to go 50 times that fast to just be 1% of the speed of light. The nearest star is 4 light years away. So even at the speed of light it would take 4 years to get there. So a civilization would have to develop some way of going faster than light to realistically go to other solar systems which, even if possible, would likely take unimaginable amounts of power.
- causasui 6y ago
  Just speculation (I am not a physicist or astrobiologist), but this is my thinking also. If anything is traveling between the stars, it's either inorganic (an AI), or it has a natural lifespan several orders of magnitudes longer than humans. Without FTL travel, to conquer space you also have to conquer time. Organic life is fragile and ill-suited for space travel, at least organic life as we know it. Perhaps the destiny of all sufficiently advanced organisms is either to die off or replace itself with AI. Anyway, while I find it impossible to believe there's nothing out there, I find it nearly equally impossible to believe anything that's ever visited our rock resembled little green men.
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    I certainly like the idea of traveling at 1G better than living in a rotating ring-like spaceship. (On the other hand, in my imagination I keep seeing this huge sign at the end of a journey to another galaxy that took forty years saying “Nothing to see here, move along...”)
- ben_w 6y ago
  Space is big, but Helios isn’t us trying to go as fast as possible, it’s going the speed it is because that’s a requirement of orbital dynamics. If we really really wanted, nuclear options could get us to a few percent of c with current tech and no breakthroughs. On the other hand, if someone builds a von Neumann probe that eats sunlight and Mercury (the planet), it could make a Dyson swarm in a human lifetime, and that would enable us to colonise most of our causal future light cone directly from Sol: https://youtu.be/zQTfuI-9jIo https://youtu.be/zQTfuI-9jIo
patwillson22 6y ago
I think people underestimate the gains that new technology will have for aiding our ability to see neighboring galaxies and exoplanets. For instance, our interpretation of spectral data is limited by both technological limitations (lasers can only probe certain wavelengths) and also theoretical ones. We also cannot accurately determine what happens in light matter interactions. Thus, the signal to noise ratio is so high that our current instruments have little chance of finding definitive evidence for life. This could change rather quickly though, the james webb telescope is one example, it is equipped with CCD that can "see" light in the infrared spectrum.
k__ 6y ago
I'm currently reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book about the rise of civilization explained by their ecological starting points. It's interesting how much luck people from Mediterranean had with all the crops and animals they could domesticate thousands of years before the humans in other places. In light of what I read, we can only hope that we will belong to the first who will colonize the galaxy.
- Herodotus38 6y ago
  I have wondered about one of the premises of that book, the lack of animals that could be domesticated in the Americas, it may have been that the opportunity to domesticate them was lost after a certain amount of time passed and they went extinct due to hunting or climate changes. Recently there has been found in Brazil huge amounts of rock art from prehistoric Ice age civilization, that showed that they drew pictures of ice age horses and a now extinct camelid species called a paleolama. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chapel-of-the-ancients-rock-art-discovered-in-remote-amazon-forest https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chap...
  - k__ 6y ago
    The book mentioned something about humans hunting potentially domesticatable animals too extinction around the time of the ice age. The climate wasn't good enough for agriculture yet, so people had to rely more on hunting and gathering.
mchusma 6y ago
If interested in this kind of thing, I always recommend Issac Arthur. He describes the Fermi Paradox and related concepts 100x better than anyone else. Some relevant ones: The Fermi Paradox Compendium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDPj5zI66LA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDPj5zI66LA Fermi Paradox: The Dyson Dilemma v2.0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfuK8la0y6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfuK8la0y6s I believe he would say that there is no really good explanation to why we don't see other intelligent civilizations except that we are effectively the first (at least in our galaxy), and intelligent space-faring life is exceedingly rare. This is a similar conclusion to Robin Hanson here, but I think I think Issac Arthur does a better job of deeply explaining it. I think both would agree though.
ericb 6y ago
Wouldn't population growth rate need be massive in order to overcome the large difference in volume that a small increase to the diameter of the sphere causes? Given a quick scan, I don't see anywhere that takes into account population increases in the paper. The only way I think this works is if you count meeting the society's Von Neumann probes as meeting them.
FpUser 6y ago
Loved the audio track
CRUDite 6y ago
The 'dark forest model' is predicated on game theory. This same model controls nuclear conflict doctrine on earth and is responsible for megatons pointed at you right now. An old 50's methodology, absorb the Russians since we cant beat icbm's and dont trust they would disarm under a treaty. In a multiploar world arms races continue (this then is a mini analogue for grabby aliens but based on nation states). Worryingly usa now seeks asymetric dominance in this area increasing the likelyhood of conflict (or is it worrying?). I would say at this point that perhaps advanced intelligences, or even aumented humans of 50 years hence! Or decentralised direct democracies of 5 - 10 years from now! Or me! May consider 'game theory' and its paranoid centralised power adherants as psychotic and a smaller filter in of itself ( to our kind of socially structured lifeform). The dark forest has as its conlusion relativistic first strike weapons ( the same as the missile 'shield' ) I would think grabby aliens + uplift and absorption would answer the question of how they deal with new life. Dark forest is a fad imho, and if im wrong, well i dont think we'll be like that, and we will still succeed if we get out of this period
ncmncm 6y ago
Expanding Menaces explored here [0]. Tl;dr: Expanding menaces get nipped pretty early by inconceivably older non-menaces with limited patience. [0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26440071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26440071>
pjdemers 6y ago
Assuming that neither FTL travel nor communication are possible, and that other intelligent species have life times similar in length to ours (ok, maybe twice as long as ours), how does a society spanning dozens of light years work? It would take more than a generation for information, never mind things, to get from one end of the bubble to the other. How would culture work? How would the economy work? Is it really the same society at both ends of the bubble?
sfg 6y ago
If a grabby alien civilisation spreads out, then would not the frontier going parts become alien to each other, due to the distances and time involved, which will lead to both divergent development and difficulties with communication. Given this, would each of the expanding parts in the animation have to fragment? If so, then how fragmented will each be?

Grabby Aliens

66 points by yosoyubik 6y ago

eigenhombre 6y ago

Which one of the colored blobs is the Culture?

vnxli 6y ago
Are the Culture the good guys or the bad guys? I read Consider Phlebas first and felt such a whiplash moving into Player of Games or whatever the next one was. I want to like that series but I just can’t figure out if I’m rooting for bad guys or not.
- messe 6y ago
  The Culture believe they are the good guys, and that they are mostly in the right.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    And they have the data to justify that position, even then they still run control experiments, which is where we fit in...
- simonh 6y ago
  By and large they're the good guys, or the least-worst guys anyway. Consider Phlebas is the weakest of the series IMO which is a shame as it's dealing with some interesting issues.
- wannadingo 6y ago
  The books are meant to make you question your own assumptions of what is good or right. I think what many people like about Banks is that he did not write simple morality plays. Iain Banks also wrote mainstream novels so you could say that he wasn't coming from the normal genre writer's perspective.
- ngvrnd 6y ago
  neither/both
- Super_Jambo 6y ago
  Banks likes twists. The Culture is his attempt at writing a viable techno utopia. Every other book has a more pro-culture viewpoint. But if you're after 'good guys' and 'bad guys' Banks might not really be for you.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    Wasn't banks pretty clear that the Culture was his attempt to come up with a society that is as "good" as possible - if nothing else to provide a suitable employer for his supreme military genius (who I shall avoid naming). Edit: CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture? Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it’s my secular heaven….Yes, I would, absolutely. Again it comes down to wish fulfillment. I haven’t done a study and taken lots of replies across a cross-section of humanity to find out what would be their personal utopia. It’s mine, I thought of it, and I’m going home with it — absolutely, it’s great.
  - vnxli 6y ago
    I think that’s my answer. I like good guys/bad guys. There’s enough grey areas and anti heroes in real life. I want simpler fiction
- elihu 6y ago
  I interpret it as that they're mostly the good guys, but Consider Phlebas is written from the point of view of someone who opposes the Culture. The main thing the Culture did that wasn't what I'd call a "good guy move" was destroying the orbital rather than allowing it to be used as a foothold by the Idirans. Basically, the Culture decided that winning was more important than holding the moral high ground.

bayesian_horse 6y ago

I'm still not very convinced any civilization will actually expand significantly beyond one solar system. It's not just really hard, you'd need really good reasons for expanding that long (as opposed to just exploring). As Humanity, we're not even sure about increasing our own population size forever.

jdmichal 6y ago
> I'm still not very convinced any civilization will actually expand significantly beyond one solar system. I'm fine with the idea of a species -- or whatever definition you want to use here -- expanding beyond one solar system. But without at least faster-than-light communication, I don't think it would be possible to maintain a cohesive civilization at that scale. And without faster-than-light travel, you're also going to have things like species rings developing.
- deepstack 6y ago
  > I'm still not very convinced any civilization will actually expand significantly beyond one solar system. Whether a civilization expand beyond their solar system is entirely depending on if they develop the technology to do so in a relatively short time compare to their life span. One good reason could be habitable planets. There may not be enough habitable planets left in the solar system. Extra: some sci-fi look at Kardashev scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
  - bayesian_horse 6y ago
    They wouldn't need habitable planets at all Escaping one solar system with some amount of colonists is probably harder than developing the technology to not need whatever counts as "habitable planet" at the other end. They'd use the new system's ressources for all sorts of things, least of which would be biological survival.
    - lupire 6y ago

cyberlab 6y ago

> and they prevent other beings like themselves from emerging within their volume What so they go to war with other species who are unlike them? Doesn't sound very clever, and it's a losing strategy. 'War is a losing strategy' [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-win_situation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-win_situation

jerf 6y ago
I think you're underestimating the orders of magnitude in development that is possible. Even if an "enlightened" species was light-speed expanding at us right now, and they decided to leave us our entire solar system out of the goodness of their hearts, that would still prevent us from ever matching their expansion, because once we grew to the point that we'd like to light-speed expand into our neighborhood, there'd be no neighborhood to expand into.
olooney 6y ago
Absolutely trivial for an interstellar space-faring civilization to wipe out an up-and-coming species. Grab a medium size asteroid[1] from their solar system, adjust its trajectory slightly, bam! An extinction event level weapon. This works because your basically rolling the rocks downhill, and there is a tremendous potential energy difference[2] between Earth and say, the Kuiper belt[3]. Or a bit of biological warfare - can't be too hard for a super-advanced civilization to tweak a virus to be a little more dangerous. Or maybe a bit of radioactive dust, or just poking a whole in the planets ozone layer; there are probably lots of subtle techniques that an advanced AI could pull off too. the point is, is you command the technology and energy reserves needed for interstellar travel, you don't really need to fight a prolonged war against a species on a lower technology level. Just check in every few thousand years and if it seems like they're starting to expand just wipe them out. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_capture [2]: https://xkcd.com/681/ https://xkcd.com/681/ [3]: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/kuiper-belt/overview/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/kuiper-belt/overvi...
- andredz 6y ago
  Your comment brought the prologue of this novel https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/32411/bens-damn-adventure-the-prince-has-no-pants https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/32411/bens-damn-adventure-... to my mind.

Dumblydorr 6y ago

The vast distances between solar systems means that in order for life to expand beyond our system, it must either be put dormant for decades of interstellar travel, or it must travel in a craft so fast that modern physics thinks it unlikely. Since there's little reason to suspect that c speed of light is not the speed limit, that leaves us with some sort of biological suspension of life forms until they reach their destination. This tech is still extremely nascent, but to me there is possibility in at least sending seeds, microbes, probes, and very small crafts to nearby stars. Nevertheless, it seems likely that we will expand heavily within our own solar system before we ever reach another star. Proxima centauri is light years away, but mars, venus, the asteroids, and various rocky moons are within our grabby reach.

scientaster2 6y ago
Remember though that as you approach the speed of light, relativity starts to kick in with your time "slowing down". In other words, the inverse relationship between speed and time could allow civilizations to expand faster than it would seem possible at "normal time" speeds. Complete conjecture on my part, just a fun thing to think about!
- umvi 6y ago
  This is true but the amount of energy needed to reach speeds where time dilation makes your journey seem short are just unfathomable.
jerf 6y ago
I'm not sure that's true. While you don't end up with lightspeed expansion, if you get to the point that you have the tech to live on an "iceball" by extracting the hydrogen and fusing it for energy, and can make the rest of what you need from raw atoms and energy, you can just sort of... keep expanding out into the oort cloud indefinitely, until after a while, you're not in the solar system anymore, and even more eventually, you're in another one. The more we learn the less empty interstellar space looks. That's certainly slow expansion, but it would be an expansion that in relatively short order would greatly exceed the biomass and biodiversity of Earth's biosphere, until it would be quite absurd that the whole thing would simultaneously decide to just stop one day. It would be slow but as difficult to stop as the biosphere is today. This does depend on some sort of practical fusion tech, though.

olooney 6y ago

The big bang only produced light elements and heavier elements were produced by nuclear fusion in stars. In particular, carbon and oxygen[1] would not have been abundant until the first generation of very hot, very large stars went supernova. Our own star is a third-generation star[2]; it is only 4-5 billion years old, forming ~10 billion years after the big bang, so our own solar system is fairly rich. Earlier solar systems would have been less rich, and this means life would have been far less likely to arise. Also, 25% of lightspeed is fairly aggressive. Even 1% would require engineering and energy reserves way beyond anything we can realistically hope for, largely due to the tyranny of the relativistic rocket equation[1]. Note that if you want to stop, you have to carry your own fuel, which makes the problem quadratically worse. Proposals like Breakthrough Starshot[3] can hope for 10% largely because they will just do a flyby and don't have to carry fuel for braking at the destination. Similar projects[4] have used much more realistic velocities and discovered in doesn't really matter - it still takes less than 100 million years to completely colonize every star in the galaxy. But this model doesn't solve or address the Fermi Paradox - where is everybody? It actually makes it worse. We might overlook or not be able to see a single populated solar system halfway across the galaxy, but a civilization that has expanded to fill every nook and cranny of the galaxy should be fairly easy to spot, no? Obvious, even. Yet there is no sign - not in our solar system, not in radio signals, not in Dyson spheres, nothing. On the other hand, every time we still down and make reasonable assumptions about how long it would take a species to colonize the galaxy, we usually find that it should have happened hundreds of times over, billions of years ago. So where is everybody? [1]: https://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_life.html https://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_life.html [2]: https://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae465.cfm https://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae465.cfm [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot [4]: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/294051-scientists-simulate-human-colonization-of-the-milky-way https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/294051-scientists-simula...

m4rtink 6y ago
If the slightly insane Nuclear Salt Water rocket can be pertectec then couple percent light speed might be doable even without complex exotic tech: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket

implying 6y ago

The paper (and code) describe a 3D voronoi diagram, and imagine what it would be like if each segment was an alien civilization.

fogof 6y ago
Almost. In their model, civilizations can start at different times, so it possible for the boundary between civilizations to be a hyperboloid, rather than flat as is the case for voronoi diagrams.

nanna 6y ago

Grabby aliens = projecting human colonialism across the cosmos, featuring an especially dubious technological determinism. Am I missing something?

medicineman 6y ago
Not missing anything, you brought enough snark for the whole class.
Symmetry 6y ago
Not just human colonialism but also the colonialism that ants, rabbits, and kudzu exhibit.

Gunax 6y ago

The problem with 'unknown unknowns' is that you can come to whatever conclusion you want, and it's perfectly logical either way. The 'Dark Forest' model suggests that we should be as quiet and inconspicuous as possible. But I could also propose what I am calling the 'lumberjack model'. Suppose a lumberjack wishes to cut down all of trees in the forest--but being a sympathetic lumberjack, he avoids felling any trees with a birds nest in them. In that case, the birds should actively be as loud as possible and make their presence known to the lumberjack. Both models are perfectly logical, but come to opposite conclusions--we simply have no idea whether aliens are more like the predators of the dark forest or the lumberjack. As for Hanson's theory, it might be that the universe is one giant winner-takes-all system. But I suspect one could also come up with an equally valid theory that concludes something else--and we have no way to discern one over the other. It's fun to speculate, I am just encouraging extreme caution I'm thinking we have any clue about any of this stuff.

lnanek2 6y ago
Most theories like this are starting from the place of trying to solve the Fermi Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox As time goes on, and we find no evidence of aliens, the dark forest model is more and more likely vs. the kindly lumberjack model. In the kindly lumberjack model, we're more likely to detect other civilizations.
- TTPrograms 6y ago
  The Fermi Paradox is not real if you consider the massive uncertainty we have on the parameters of the Drake equation: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
  - akvadrako 6y ago
    The assumptions of the drake equation are not relevant. The idea that we are the only intelligent life in the visible universe begs for an explaination. That it seems like we could colonize the galaxy in 0.1% the age of the universe makes it even more odd.

chris_wot 6y ago

Has anyone ever considered we may be the grabby aliens?

Jach 6y ago
The source material for this does, we have the potential to become a grabby species. In particular though one of the strange things we can observe about the universe is how early we are, relative to how long we expect the universe to last. The grabby idea explains this puzzle pretty nicely by a selection effect: if the universe is going to be grabbed in the future (by us or others), then being early is the only time at all that we could find ourselves with our seemingly natural development history.
kilroy123 6y ago
Oh yes. Every time I watch a SciFi movie or show about aliens coming and dominating with superior tech, I think, this is... us not someone else.

reason-mr 6y ago

There is no reason to believe this model - the premise is pure conjecture. If I were engaging in pure conjecture - I might think equally, on the positive side, that all Aliens converge to the belief that all life is to be encouraged and supported, and turn into "meta-gardeners", seeding and encouraging life wherever they go.

lupire 6y ago
The point is that if grabby and gardener aliens exist, grabby aliens will dominate. It's similar to the idea in evolution that we species that like to reproduce more than species that don't.
- arbitrage 6y ago
  It is no means a foregone conclusion that grabby v. gardener => grabby wins. Perhaps grabby aliens, a known menace to life in the universe, are systematically exterminated when they are identified by other aliens in the universe. There are really strong implicit assumptions at play here. This is a very interesting thought experiment, and it's nice to see novel thinking in this area. It's important to recognize however, that this is not "logical" or a "forgone conclusion" in any meaningful or systematic way.
- jjtheblunt 6y ago
  But in gardening, overinvasive species are weeds and they are removed by gardeners?
  - Aeronwen 6y ago
    The gardener merely holds the weeds at bay for a while. Without constant upkeep, the weeds take over again.

jccalhoun 6y ago

Space is just so unimaginably huge that although I think aliens exist, I don't think it is likely that multi-solar system civilizations exist or there is a lot of organic life traveling between solar systems. The fastest man-made object is Helios 2 which went a little over 250,000 km/h https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_(spacecraft) So if I did my math right, that's 0.02% of the speed of light. So we would have to go 50 times that fast to just be 1% of the speed of light. The nearest star is 4 light years away. So even at the speed of light it would take 4 years to get there. So a civilization would have to develop some way of going faster than light to realistically go to other solar systems which, even if possible, would likely take unimaginable amounts of power.

causasui 6y ago
Just speculation (I am not a physicist or astrobiologist), but this is my thinking also. If anything is traveling between the stars, it's either inorganic (an AI), or it has a natural lifespan several orders of magnitudes longer than humans. Without FTL travel, to conquer space you also have to conquer time. Organic life is fragile and ill-suited for space travel, at least organic life as we know it. Perhaps the destiny of all sufficiently advanced organisms is either to die off or replace itself with AI. Anyway, while I find it impossible to believe there's nothing out there, I find it nearly equally impossible to believe anything that's ever visited our rock resembled little green men.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  I certainly like the idea of traveling at 1G better than living in a rotating ring-like spaceship. (On the other hand, in my imagination I keep seeing this huge sign at the end of a journey to another galaxy that took forty years saying “Nothing to see here, move along...”)
ben_w 6y ago
Space is big, but Helios isn’t us trying to go as fast as possible, it’s going the speed it is because that’s a requirement of orbital dynamics. If we really really wanted, nuclear options could get us to a few percent of c with current tech and no breakthroughs. On the other hand, if someone builds a von Neumann probe that eats sunlight and Mercury (the planet), it could make a Dyson swarm in a human lifetime, and that would enable us to colonise most of our causal future light cone directly from Sol: https://youtu.be/zQTfuI-9jIo https://youtu.be/zQTfuI-9jIo

patwillson22 6y ago

I think people underestimate the gains that new technology will have for aiding our ability to see neighboring galaxies and exoplanets. For instance, our interpretation of spectral data is limited by both technological limitations (lasers can only probe certain wavelengths) and also theoretical ones. We also cannot accurately determine what happens in light matter interactions. Thus, the signal to noise ratio is so high that our current instruments have little chance of finding definitive evidence for life. This could change rather quickly though, the james webb telescope is one example, it is equipped with CCD that can "see" light in the infrared spectrum.

k__ 6y ago

I'm currently reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book about the rise of civilization explained by their ecological starting points. It's interesting how much luck people from Mediterranean had with all the crops and animals they could domesticate thousands of years before the humans in other places. In light of what I read, we can only hope that we will belong to the first who will colonize the galaxy.

Herodotus38 6y ago
I have wondered about one of the premises of that book, the lack of animals that could be domesticated in the Americas, it may have been that the opportunity to domesticate them was lost after a certain amount of time passed and they went extinct due to hunting or climate changes. Recently there has been found in Brazil huge amounts of rock art from prehistoric Ice age civilization, that showed that they drew pictures of ice age horses and a now extinct camelid species called a paleolama. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chapel-of-the-ancients-rock-art-discovered-in-remote-amazon-forest https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chap...
- k__ 6y ago
  The book mentioned something about humans hunting potentially domesticatable animals too extinction around the time of the ice age. The climate wasn't good enough for agriculture yet, so people had to rely more on hunting and gathering.

mchusma 6y ago

If interested in this kind of thing, I always recommend Issac Arthur. He describes the Fermi Paradox and related concepts 100x better than anyone else. Some relevant ones: The Fermi Paradox Compendium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDPj5zI66LA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDPj5zI66LA Fermi Paradox: The Dyson Dilemma v2.0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfuK8la0y6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfuK8la0y6s I believe he would say that there is no really good explanation to why we don't see other intelligent civilizations except that we are effectively the first (at least in our galaxy), and intelligent space-faring life is exceedingly rare. This is a similar conclusion to Robin Hanson here, but I think I think Issac Arthur does a better job of deeply explaining it. I think both would agree though.

ericb 6y ago

Wouldn't population growth rate need be massive in order to overcome the large difference in volume that a small increase to the diameter of the sphere causes? Given a quick scan, I don't see anywhere that takes into account population increases in the paper. The only way I think this works is if you count meeting the society's Von Neumann probes as meeting them.

FpUser 6y ago

Loved the audio track

CRUDite 6y ago

The 'dark forest model' is predicated on game theory. This same model controls nuclear conflict doctrine on earth and is responsible for megatons pointed at you right now. An old 50's methodology, absorb the Russians since we cant beat icbm's and dont trust they would disarm under a treaty. In a multiploar world arms races continue (this then is a mini analogue for grabby aliens but based on nation states). Worryingly usa now seeks asymetric dominance in this area increasing the likelyhood of conflict (or is it worrying?). I would say at this point that perhaps advanced intelligences, or even aumented humans of 50 years hence! Or decentralised direct democracies of 5 - 10 years from now! Or me! May consider 'game theory' and its paranoid centralised power adherants as psychotic and a smaller filter in of itself ( to our kind of socially structured lifeform). The dark forest has as its conlusion relativistic first strike weapons ( the same as the missile 'shield' ) I would think grabby aliens + uplift and absorption would answer the question of how they deal with new life. Dark forest is a fad imho, and if im wrong, well i dont think we'll be like that, and we will still succeed if we get out of this period

ncmncm 6y ago

Expanding Menaces explored here [0]. Tl;dr: Expanding menaces get nipped pretty early by inconceivably older non-menaces with limited patience. [0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26440071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26440071>

pjdemers 6y ago

Assuming that neither FTL travel nor communication are possible, and that other intelligent species have life times similar in length to ours (ok, maybe twice as long as ours), how does a society spanning dozens of light years work? It would take more than a generation for information, never mind things, to get from one end of the bubble to the other. How would culture work? How would the economy work? Is it really the same society at both ends of the bubble?

sfg 6y ago

If a grabby alien civilisation spreads out, then would not the frontier going parts become alien to each other, due to the distances and time involved, which will lead to both divergent development and difficulties with communication. Given this, would each of the expanding parts in the animation have to fragment? If so, then how fragmented will each be?