8 ms·

This is the L constant of the Drake equation. Probably the hardest to find a value for until we've actually discovered other intelligent life or remains of such

by pharke 5y ago

This is the L constant of the Drake equation. Probably the hardest to find a value for until we've actually discovered other intelligent life or remains of such. The confounding part of it is that we can only guess at things that may end a civilization so completely that it will never recover. Things like the so called Great Filters, natural extinctions like impact events or gamma ray bursts, or other more speculative things that prevent expansion. The tricky part is that our existence seems to fly in the face of such events so far, is that mere luck or do all forms of intelligent life have enough sense to navigate around these problems? The last and most paradox defining part of the problem is that even if the tiniest fraction of civilizations can evade these filters then they should eventually be everywhere in the galaxy. Assuming the Copernican principle that we are not at a special place in the universe or time then there should have already been ample opportunity for such civilizations to develop and hence Fermi's question "Where is everybody?".

kryogen1c 5y ago
> Great Filters, natural extinctions like impact events or gamma ray bursts you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances on a very, very short-time scale. they are inevitable, yet no one seems alarmed when meteors come between us and the moon and we dont see it coming until hours beforehand. sun bursts blowing out the electric grid, nuclear war, antiobotic resistance, crop and animal monoculture, climate change, natural resource depletion... taleb is right. we need an agent of chaos to make anti-fragility valuable. otherwise we learn the lesson the hard way. by dying.
- TrainedMonkey 5y ago
  > you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances on a very, very short-time scale. they are inevitable, yet no one seems alarmed when meteors come between us and the moon and we dont see it coming until hours beforehand. That is why Elon is so hell bent on making humanity multi planetary.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Elon Musk has the same chance of making humanity multi-planetary as the Pharaohs did. We are still far away from any semblance of a chance to do so. Besides, anything at all that we can imagine hitting the earth (except a gamma ray burst or collision with another planet) would still leave the earth in a better shape than Mars is. It's entirely doubtful that humanity could be self-sustaining on Mars even in principle, it is certainly not possible with known technologies.
    - hutrdvnj 5y ago
      Well, but Pharaohs couldn't shoot a car into space.
      - lmohseni 5y ago
        I don’t think Elon could build a pyramid. He might be capable of tweeting about one though.
        zokula 5y ago
        Elon Musk will use child slave labor to build a Pyramid.
        iseanstevens 5y ago
        He could certainly get a pyramid built. And that is the best you can do.
    - EthanHeilman 5y ago
      >It's entirely doubtful that humanity could be self-sustaining on Mars even in principle, it is certainly not possible with known technologies. Citation needed. What's the blocker here? Energy production on Mars? Why not Solar or Simple Stirling Engines. Food/Closed ecological systems? Hard, for sure yeah, but even not particularly well funded small ecosystems like Biosphere2 worked for several years. The biggest issue seems psychological.
- aeturnum 5y ago
  I think people are alarmed, but solutions to these problems are enormously costly and largely fictional. The techniques we have for living in space (or transiting through it) would not sustain us if we lost earth. They are enormously costly[1], which is fine for what we are doing, but we need multiple orders-of-magnitude improvement to be practically interstellar. On balance, I think we could spend more, but I also think diminishing returns is very real. Giving the wright brothers 100,000 workers to build copies of their planes would not have gotten us to the space shuttle much faster. Ironically, it could have slowed us down because of sunk cost fallacies. [1] https://twitter.com/sim_kern/status/1411304471934685184 https://twitter.com/sim_kern/status/1411304471934685184
  - e40 5y ago
    > I think people are alarmed I think your view is skewed. Every single person I've talked to about this as looked at me like they are bored. Of course, here on HN, I've found many like-minded people. That's great, but I think very few humans, especially humans in the power structures that run this planet, care about this issue.
    - aeturnum 5y ago
      > I think your view is skewed I suspect it's more that we have different definitions of how widely a feeling of alarm should spread before saying this. I agree the absolute number of people who are worried about the problem is small. I guess I think about it in terms of "what proportion of the population that would be directly involved in solving this problem"? I would suspect that is close to 100%. Anyone involved in space work is aware that we may we wiped out and would not like that to happen. Government leaders are also, I think, aware, but unconvinced that more resource expenditure would be meaningfully helpful. Given how difficult it's been to convince people to deal with a much cheaper & easier problem that is much more obvious and immediate (global climate change) I have trouble critiquing people for being insufficiently zealous about this issue.
      - e40 5y ago
        I think there's a correlation between the age of politicians and how much they care, and we have far too many old politicians. (I'm old, btw.) We need more young people to get involved and get into positions of power. They have a vested interested in seeing solutions implemented, rather than the current crop who know they'll be dead when the real shit hits the fan and they're just letting things stay as is, because they want to maximize their benefits between now and death.
schwartzworld 5y ago
> The tricky part is that our existence seems to fly in the face of such events so far. We've only been here for a few minutes. We aren't really making any efforts to save the planet or colonize space. It's totally possible that we will wipe ourselves out before our TV and radio signals ever make it far enough to be detected by aliens, even if there are a ton of them out there.

by pharke 5y ago

kryogen1c 5y ago

> Great Filters, natural extinctions like impact events or gamma ray bursts you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances on a very, very short-time scale. they are inevitable, yet no one seems alarmed when meteors come between us and the moon and we dont see it coming until hours beforehand. sun bursts blowing out the electric grid, nuclear war, antiobotic resistance, crop and animal monoculture, climate change, natural resource depletion... taleb is right. we need an agent of chaos to make anti-fragility valuable. otherwise we learn the lesson the hard way. by dying.

TrainedMonkey 5y ago
> you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances on a very, very short-time scale. they are inevitable, yet no one seems alarmed when meteors come between us and the moon and we dont see it coming until hours beforehand. That is why Elon is so hell bent on making humanity multi planetary.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Elon Musk has the same chance of making humanity multi-planetary as the Pharaohs did. We are still far away from any semblance of a chance to do so. Besides, anything at all that we can imagine hitting the earth (except a gamma ray burst or collision with another planet) would still leave the earth in a better shape than Mars is. It's entirely doubtful that humanity could be self-sustaining on Mars even in principle, it is certainly not possible with known technologies.
  - hutrdvnj 5y ago
    Well, but Pharaohs couldn't shoot a car into space.
    - lmohseni 5y ago
      I don’t think Elon could build a pyramid. He might be capable of tweeting about one though.
      - zokula 5y ago
        Elon Musk will use child slave labor to build a Pyramid.
      - iseanstevens 5y ago
        He could certainly get a pyramid built. And that is the best you can do.
  - EthanHeilman 5y ago
    >It's entirely doubtful that humanity could be self-sustaining on Mars even in principle, it is certainly not possible with known technologies. Citation needed. What's the blocker here? Energy production on Mars? Why not Solar or Simple Stirling Engines. Food/Closed ecological systems? Hard, for sure yeah, but even not particularly well funded small ecosystems like Biosphere2 worked for several years. The biggest issue seems psychological.
aeturnum 5y ago
I think people are alarmed, but solutions to these problems are enormously costly and largely fictional. The techniques we have for living in space (or transiting through it) would not sustain us if we lost earth. They are enormously costly[1], which is fine for what we are doing, but we need multiple orders-of-magnitude improvement to be practically interstellar. On balance, I think we could spend more, but I also think diminishing returns is very real. Giving the wright brothers 100,000 workers to build copies of their planes would not have gotten us to the space shuttle much faster. Ironically, it could have slowed us down because of sunk cost fallacies. [1] https://twitter.com/sim_kern/status/1411304471934685184 https://twitter.com/sim_kern/status/1411304471934685184
- e40 5y ago
  > I think people are alarmed I think your view is skewed. Every single person I've talked to about this as looked at me like they are bored. Of course, here on HN, I've found many like-minded people. That's great, but I think very few humans, especially humans in the power structures that run this planet, care about this issue.
  - aeturnum 5y ago
    > I think your view is skewed I suspect it's more that we have different definitions of how widely a feeling of alarm should spread before saying this. I agree the absolute number of people who are worried about the problem is small. I guess I think about it in terms of "what proportion of the population that would be directly involved in solving this problem"? I would suspect that is close to 100%. Anyone involved in space work is aware that we may we wiped out and would not like that to happen. Government leaders are also, I think, aware, but unconvinced that more resource expenditure would be meaningfully helpful. Given how difficult it's been to convince people to deal with a much cheaper & easier problem that is much more obvious and immediate (global climate change) I have trouble critiquing people for being insufficiently zealous about this issue.
    - e40 5y ago
      I think there's a correlation between the age of politicians and how much they care, and we have far too many old politicians. (I'm old, btw.) We need more young people to get involved and get into positions of power. They have a vested interested in seeing solutions implemented, rather than the current crop who know they'll be dead when the real shit hits the fan and they're just letting things stay as is, because they want to maximize their benefits between now and death.

schwartzworld 5y ago

> The tricky part is that our existence seems to fly in the face of such events so far. We've only been here for a few minutes. We aren't really making any efforts to save the planet or colonize space. It's totally possible that we will wipe ourselves out before our TV and radio signals ever make it far enough to be detected by aliens, even if there are a ton of them out there.