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I’m not a fan of galactic settlement simulations mostly because I think they simulate the wrong thing which is rate of diffusion. This treats the civilization a

I’m not a fan of galactic settlement simulations mostly because I think they simulate the wrong thing which is rate of diffusion. This treats the civilization as a static thing that simply spreads out at the edges. Compared to the history of human civilizations this is clearly unrealistic. The question to answer is what happens within the already colonized systems over time. How often would breakaway civilizations appear, wars, extinction events, mind upload cults, Luddite revolutions, stagnation, etc. Filters abound. The great civilizations of Earth’s past have succumbed to similar fates and we’ve only progressed by starting over again and again.

JackFr 5y ago
It’s true that filters abound but the idea that we’ve had to start all over again is Whig history. It’s been a continuum. That being said I agree with your main point. The difference in worldview, ethics, where man sees himself in the universe over the course of our history (let alone pre-history) has taken dramatic and difficult to model changes. Imagine the worldview of the builders of the Great Pyramid vis a vis our own. (And then remember that Cleopatra was far closer in time to us than them.)
- QuesnayJr 5y ago
  Isn't it the opposite of Whig history? I thought Whig history was the idea of continual progress.
  - throwaway316943 5y ago
    Yes, thank you, that’s essentially what I’m arguing against. There’s no reason galactic civilizations should continually progress especially when each settled system is effectively cut off from its parent by light years of distance.
    - stubish 5y ago
      I think it will depend on how stable the culture is when it gets that far. Will our language become static, now we have the printing press and Netflix? We are still changing, where books and films from 80 years ago have not aged well due to social attitudes. But if it stabilizes, maybe the culture stabilizes, and maybe it can be stable enough for million year time frames. It might not even happen here.... maybe in a million years after the first colony or three has happened one of them will develop a culture capable of becoming galaxy spanning. I think it is worth noting that a new settlement will not be completely cut off from its parent. I imagine a new settlement around Alpha Centauri will be greedily consuming Earth media for quite some time, delayed by just a few years, until it progresses far enough for its own exotic drammedys to be consumed by Earth.
belter 5y ago
Your comment is interesting, but thinking about it, this is the most likely thing to happen: Any technological advance in interplanetary travel speed or new technologies of renewable and easy source of energy, would promote expansion. The new arrivals to an empty planet could start all over again, claim the resources as theirs, organize their own laws. And if they are overcome somehow move to other planets and start all over again...I think there is wave coming our way if we think about it.
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  Yes my point is that each system colonized becomes its own independent case subject to destroying itself or regressing or becoming antagonistic towards its parent civilization. Think back pressure or resistance. The question I’m asking is at what point does that resistance turn the tide of expansion.
narag 5y ago
There's a factor that would make a difference, a question of identity. A civilization grown out of a migration and only possible thanks to advanced science would look at some things unlike any other that we know.
xbar 5y ago
There are lots of questions to answer. Some can be modeled more easily than others. This one is pleasant because the model is simple enough for a broad audience to reason about, and the visualization is straightforward.
cestith 5y ago
One thing I seldom see mentioned, too, is why would a K3 civilization use easily detected communications like radio or broadly focused light sources? If we launched Voyager 3 (for lack of a better name) next decade, would we use primarily always-on, omnidirectional radio? Would we use a laser? Maybe we'd use a tightly focused, burstable digital radio system. What about next century? Are we simply looking largely for the wrong things?
- grishka 5y ago
  The tightly focused radio beam would still leak into surroundings and scatter off of things, and would thus still be detectable. Thing is, we still don't know yet what matter and energy actually are. We still don't understand the nature of spacetime. We have a lot of physics to discover. Those other civilizations might have discovered physics in different order. They might be communicating using phenomena we have no idea exist. It's not right to assume that advanced alien civilizations will be using any technology similar to ours.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    A radio observatory on Earth might be using a fiber optic connection to connect to the rest of the world but it's still looking at natural radio phenomena. It doesn't matter at all what a civilization might use as a backhaul, their Space iPhones could use SubspaceWifi, but their radio observatories will be looking at natural molecular hydrogen emissions. For an interstellar beacon signal radio is pretty good. Lots of natural phenomena are radio sources, CMB is radio, and a lot of things opaque to visible and near visible light are transparent to radio. So a radio beacon has a good chance of being detected just because any civilization that discovers radio astronomy can stumble across it. The idea that SETI would ever detect I Love Lqwynngh'tch reruns from an ETI has always been ludicrous. Even our most powerful radio telescopes (by sensitivity) wouldn't be able to detect television or radio broadcasts even a lightyear out from Earth. The only interstellar signal we (or another civilization) will ever detect are very intentional directed signals. If you had an omnidirectional radio source detectable from interstellar distances you could use it once as it would fry itself and anything around it pretty quickly.
mordymoop 5y ago
I feel a need to add an important extra wrinkle. The front line of progress and growth in all things is driven by those who are pursuing progress and growth. If an upload cult arises in a planet, and 90% of the populace retreats into simulations, the remaining 10% are still around and we be selected to be exactly those people most invested in the material universe; within a few years (not millions of years, certainly) there’s a good chance they’ll be considering expansion. Or, consider how often new civilizations are formed by small populations of refugees from intolerably oppressive larger civilizations. Something like a war, extinction event or ecological difficult is similarly likely to prompt a desire for expansion as it is a total collapse. Science fiction is full of sentences of the form, “The Klaatu were an alien race who colonized the galaxy a million years ago but have since moved on.” I always roll my eyes at this. Almost no matter what the Klaatu are or what they care about, there would be some group of them remaining. And the only Klaatu we would see would be the descendants of the ones who stayed. Giant galactic civilizations made of individuals are unlikely to make coherent collective decisions with no dissenters for the same reason our single planet (with much less serious communications obstacles) never makes unanimous collective decisions.
- Mediterraneo10 5y ago
  What if 90% of the populace retreats into simulations, but in such a way that the remaining 10% have no political power and no industrial base, because that all remained with the majority? Hard for the non-uploaders to expand in that case.
  - varjag 5y ago
    It's hard to command control over the physical reality when you are willingly absent from it.
    - autosharp 5y ago
      Is what a chimpanzee might think of the white house.
scotty79 5y ago
they assume 1 successful colonization ship per 100k years. This might take into account periods of stagnation and Luddite revolutions and such. Sentient beings do various weird thing but they do them fairly quickly.
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  I’m taking issue with the lifetime of the civilization, not the rate at which they send out colony ships.
shusaku 5y ago
The history of human civilizations is a blink in the eye compared to the history of the human race. And compared to the time scales of the simulations they run. So I wonder if maybe those filters end up as noise when we’re talking about filling the galaxy. History is less of a detailed story and more of a fundamental force.
godelski 5y ago
This is far more complex to model, and near impossible to. I wouldn't expect to see this anytime soon. But to give you some hints, breakaway civilizations would likely happen all the time. Every space program has issues with astronauts not following orders simply because the astronauts internalize the idea of "what are they going to do? Come get me?" This is frequently talked about in settings where they are discussing Moon and Mars colonization. A Martian colony won't really belong to the US/China/EU/whatever for very long. I'd expect something very similar to Red Mars/The Expanse. Another big reason for this will simply be time of light communication delays. Between Earth and Mars that's 8-15 minutes one way. It is highly impractical to control a territory when communication takes so long, they will effectively become independent. We've seen this historically too. Colonies operate drastically differently than their home countries. Being so far away it is difficult to communicate and cultures will diverge, especially considering that their day to day lives will be drastically different. Different needs creates different cultures. But luckily this distance also makes war difficult between two planets. You have months to respond.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > Every space program has issues with astronauts not following orders simply because the astronauts internalize the idea of "what are they going to do? Come get me?" From the script to Casino: > Every couple of weeks I used to send Marino back to the bosses with a piece of what I made. > Not a big piece, but fuck them, what did they know? They were fifteen hundred miles away... and I don't know anybody who can see that far. On the other hand... > Between Earth and Mars that's 8-15 minutes one way. It is highly impractical to control a territory when communication takes so long, they will effectively become independent. This is totally wrong. Between Earth and Earth, empires have exerted effective territorial control while communication one way took weeks. A 15 minute delay in communication is meaningless. The problem is the difficulty of traveling, not of communicating.
  - pdonis 5y ago
    > empires have exerted effective territorial control while communication one way took weeks. That's because the effective territorial control was not exercised by the central government of the empire, but by territorial governments that were on the spot and that had pretty much complete authority to act on their own initiative without getting permission from the central government. They only had to meet very general policy goals. So the speed of communication with the central government was not relevant to the effectiveness of the territorial control. The question is whether a territorial government on, say, Mars would have the same loyalty to the central government on Earth that, say, British territorial governors had to the British empire. Without that loyalty on the part of the territorial governments that are on the spot, there is in fact no way for the central government to effectively control territories.

JackFr 5y ago

It’s true that filters abound but the idea that we’ve had to start all over again is Whig history. It’s been a continuum. That being said I agree with your main point. The difference in worldview, ethics, where man sees himself in the universe over the course of our history (let alone pre-history) has taken dramatic and difficult to model changes. Imagine the worldview of the builders of the Great Pyramid vis a vis our own. (And then remember that Cleopatra was far closer in time to us than them.)

QuesnayJr 5y ago
Isn't it the opposite of Whig history? I thought Whig history was the idea of continual progress.
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  Yes, thank you, that’s essentially what I’m arguing against. There’s no reason galactic civilizations should continually progress especially when each settled system is effectively cut off from its parent by light years of distance.
  - stubish 5y ago
    I think it will depend on how stable the culture is when it gets that far. Will our language become static, now we have the printing press and Netflix? We are still changing, where books and films from 80 years ago have not aged well due to social attitudes. But if it stabilizes, maybe the culture stabilizes, and maybe it can be stable enough for million year time frames. It might not even happen here.... maybe in a million years after the first colony or three has happened one of them will develop a culture capable of becoming galaxy spanning. I think it is worth noting that a new settlement will not be completely cut off from its parent. I imagine a new settlement around Alpha Centauri will be greedily consuming Earth media for quite some time, delayed by just a few years, until it progresses far enough for its own exotic drammedys to be consumed by Earth.

belter 5y ago

Your comment is interesting, but thinking about it, this is the most likely thing to happen: Any technological advance in interplanetary travel speed or new technologies of renewable and easy source of energy, would promote expansion. The new arrivals to an empty planet could start all over again, claim the resources as theirs, organize their own laws. And if they are overcome somehow move to other planets and start all over again...I think there is wave coming our way if we think about it.

throwaway316943 5y ago
Yes my point is that each system colonized becomes its own independent case subject to destroying itself or regressing or becoming antagonistic towards its parent civilization. Think back pressure or resistance. The question I’m asking is at what point does that resistance turn the tide of expansion.

narag 5y ago

There's a factor that would make a difference, a question of identity. A civilization grown out of a migration and only possible thanks to advanced science would look at some things unlike any other that we know.

xbar 5y ago

There are lots of questions to answer. Some can be modeled more easily than others. This one is pleasant because the model is simple enough for a broad audience to reason about, and the visualization is straightforward.

cestith 5y ago

One thing I seldom see mentioned, too, is why would a K3 civilization use easily detected communications like radio or broadly focused light sources? If we launched Voyager 3 (for lack of a better name) next decade, would we use primarily always-on, omnidirectional radio? Would we use a laser? Maybe we'd use a tightly focused, burstable digital radio system. What about next century? Are we simply looking largely for the wrong things?

grishka 5y ago
The tightly focused radio beam would still leak into surroundings and scatter off of things, and would thus still be detectable. Thing is, we still don't know yet what matter and energy actually are. We still don't understand the nature of spacetime. We have a lot of physics to discover. Those other civilizations might have discovered physics in different order. They might be communicating using phenomena we have no idea exist. It's not right to assume that advanced alien civilizations will be using any technology similar to ours.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  A radio observatory on Earth might be using a fiber optic connection to connect to the rest of the world but it's still looking at natural radio phenomena. It doesn't matter at all what a civilization might use as a backhaul, their Space iPhones could use SubspaceWifi, but their radio observatories will be looking at natural molecular hydrogen emissions. For an interstellar beacon signal radio is pretty good. Lots of natural phenomena are radio sources, CMB is radio, and a lot of things opaque to visible and near visible light are transparent to radio. So a radio beacon has a good chance of being detected just because any civilization that discovers radio astronomy can stumble across it. The idea that SETI would ever detect I Love Lqwynngh'tch reruns from an ETI has always been ludicrous. Even our most powerful radio telescopes (by sensitivity) wouldn't be able to detect television or radio broadcasts even a lightyear out from Earth. The only interstellar signal we (or another civilization) will ever detect are very intentional directed signals. If you had an omnidirectional radio source detectable from interstellar distances you could use it once as it would fry itself and anything around it pretty quickly.

mordymoop 5y ago

I feel a need to add an important extra wrinkle. The front line of progress and growth in all things is driven by those who are pursuing progress and growth. If an upload cult arises in a planet, and 90% of the populace retreats into simulations, the remaining 10% are still around and we be selected to be exactly those people most invested in the material universe; within a few years (not millions of years, certainly) there’s a good chance they’ll be considering expansion. Or, consider how often new civilizations are formed by small populations of refugees from intolerably oppressive larger civilizations. Something like a war, extinction event or ecological difficult is similarly likely to prompt a desire for expansion as it is a total collapse. Science fiction is full of sentences of the form, “The Klaatu were an alien race who colonized the galaxy a million years ago but have since moved on.” I always roll my eyes at this. Almost no matter what the Klaatu are or what they care about, there would be some group of them remaining. And the only Klaatu we would see would be the descendants of the ones who stayed. Giant galactic civilizations made of individuals are unlikely to make coherent collective decisions with no dissenters for the same reason our single planet (with much less serious communications obstacles) never makes unanimous collective decisions.

Mediterraneo10 5y ago
What if 90% of the populace retreats into simulations, but in such a way that the remaining 10% have no political power and no industrial base, because that all remained with the majority? Hard for the non-uploaders to expand in that case.
- varjag 5y ago
  It's hard to command control over the physical reality when you are willingly absent from it.
  - autosharp 5y ago
    Is what a chimpanzee might think of the white house.

scotty79 5y ago

they assume 1 successful colonization ship per 100k years. This might take into account periods of stagnation and Luddite revolutions and such. Sentient beings do various weird thing but they do them fairly quickly.

throwaway316943 5y ago
I’m taking issue with the lifetime of the civilization, not the rate at which they send out colony ships.

shusaku 5y ago

The history of human civilizations is a blink in the eye compared to the history of the human race. And compared to the time scales of the simulations they run. So I wonder if maybe those filters end up as noise when we’re talking about filling the galaxy. History is less of a detailed story and more of a fundamental force.

godelski 5y ago

This is far more complex to model, and near impossible to. I wouldn't expect to see this anytime soon. But to give you some hints, breakaway civilizations would likely happen all the time. Every space program has issues with astronauts not following orders simply because the astronauts internalize the idea of "what are they going to do? Come get me?" This is frequently talked about in settings where they are discussing Moon and Mars colonization. A Martian colony won't really belong to the US/China/EU/whatever for very long. I'd expect something very similar to Red Mars/The Expanse. Another big reason for this will simply be time of light communication delays. Between Earth and Mars that's 8-15 minutes one way. It is highly impractical to control a territory when communication takes so long, they will effectively become independent. We've seen this historically too. Colonies operate drastically differently than their home countries. Being so far away it is difficult to communicate and cultures will diverge, especially considering that their day to day lives will be drastically different. Different needs creates different cultures. But luckily this distance also makes war difficult between two planets. You have months to respond.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Every space program has issues with astronauts not following orders simply because the astronauts internalize the idea of "what are they going to do? Come get me?" From the script to Casino: > Every couple of weeks I used to send Marino back to the bosses with a piece of what I made. > Not a big piece, but fuck them, what did they know? They were fifteen hundred miles away... and I don't know anybody who can see that far. On the other hand... > Between Earth and Mars that's 8-15 minutes one way. It is highly impractical to control a territory when communication takes so long, they will effectively become independent. This is totally wrong. Between Earth and Earth, empires have exerted effective territorial control while communication one way took weeks. A 15 minute delay in communication is meaningless. The problem is the difficulty of traveling, not of communicating.
- pdonis 5y ago
  > empires have exerted effective territorial control while communication one way took weeks. That's because the effective territorial control was not exercised by the central government of the empire, but by territorial governments that were on the spot and that had pretty much complete authority to act on their own initiative without getting permission from the central government. They only had to meet very general policy goals. So the speed of communication with the central government was not relevant to the effectiveness of the territorial control. The question is whether a territorial government on, say, Mars would have the same loyalty to the central government on Earth that, say, British territorial governors had to the British empire. Without that loyalty on the part of the territorial governments that are on the spot, there is in fact no way for the central government to effectively control territories.