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But if we had precluded the emergence of other civilizations in our neighborhood, wouldn’t we have known about it when we were taking resources away from those

But if we had precluded the emergence of other civilizations in our neighborhood, wouldn’t we have known about it when we were taking resources away from those other living creatures? Based on that theory, a prerequisite to preventing the arising of other civilizations is the knowledge of the existence of other living beings at the very least.

rolleiflex 5y ago
The other end of the argument is also interesting. It is possible that this has already happened before the age of Homo Sapiens, and we lack the one crucial thing that makes fusion power possible, say, deuterium oxide (heavy water) in sufficient quantities. It’s a ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ situation — we could be living on a stellar neighbourhood that is already tapped out of that crucial resource, forever doomed to travel the slow way, never able to go more than knee deep into the vast ocean beside us.
blueblisters 5y ago
I think the argument is that if there’s an advanced enough civilisation in our neighbourhood, it would have precluded us from evolving.
DavidSJ 5y ago
No, for two reasons: 1) The idea is that we will do it, not that we have done it already. (How does something we will do in the future affect what we see today? It doesn't, at least not causally. It's just that some civilization had to be first in the neighboorhod, and that civilization will be the one to preempt the others, at least according to this model. So it's more of a probabilistic conditioning effect than a causal effect: conditional on existing, that means no one preempted us, which means we're the first, which means we'll preempt everyone else.) 2) The preemption happens well before the other civilizations come into existence. For example, we might deplete their stars of energy so that evolution doesn't happen at all on their planet.

rolleiflex 5y ago

The other end of the argument is also interesting. It is possible that this has already happened before the age of Homo Sapiens, and we lack the one crucial thing that makes fusion power possible, say, deuterium oxide (heavy water) in sufficient quantities. It’s a ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ situation — we could be living on a stellar neighbourhood that is already tapped out of that crucial resource, forever doomed to travel the slow way, never able to go more than knee deep into the vast ocean beside us.

blueblisters 5y ago

I think the argument is that if there’s an advanced enough civilisation in our neighbourhood, it would have precluded us from evolving.

DavidSJ 5y ago

No, for two reasons: 1) The idea is that we will do it, not that we have done it already. (How does something we will do in the future affect what we see today? It doesn't, at least not causally. It's just that some civilization had to be first in the neighboorhod, and that civilization will be the one to preempt the others, at least according to this model. So it's more of a probabilistic conditioning effect than a causal effect: conditional on existing, that means no one preempted us, which means we're the first, which means we'll preempt everyone else.) 2) The preemption happens well before the other civilizations come into existence. For example, we might deplete their stars of energy so that evolution doesn't happen at all on their planet.