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Either intelligent life is rare in the universe or there's something that happens to it that prevents it from what we envision as the future of our own species,

Either intelligent life is rare in the universe or there's something that happens to it that prevents it from what we envision as the future of our own species, i.e., colonizing and spreading among planets. Maybe 99.99% of species ruin their own climate before getting off-world. Maybe they all decide it's happier living as hunter-gatherers. Unless we're alone, there is some fate that's common to all intelligences and it isn't a Star Trek future. The universe is simply too old. If anything else like us existed and it was possible to exist like us for a long period they'd have filled every planet before we ever evolved. Personally I think just the fact the universe hasn't been eaten by Von Neumann machines means we're alone.

elorant 5y ago
Actually, the universe might be too young for life, and we're one of the first. The further you go back in time the more violent events like supernovas you'd find which would make the universe a very hostile environment for life.
- api 5y ago
  I think this is likely. Always remember that intergalactic travel is exponentially harder than interstellar travel and that is already brutally hard. We need only be among the first in our galaxy to explain the Fermi paradox.
  - UncleOxidant 5y ago
    I don't see how there could ever be intergalactic travel.
    - api 5y ago
      Theoretically if you could travel very close to the speed of light time dilation would make the trip fairly short. Of course it’s one way since it would take hundreds of thousands to millions of years for everyone else. If you came back you would be returning to a different geological epoch. Of course the energy requirements are insane and would require some kind of physicists nightmare propulsion system like antimatter rockets. Lose reactor containment and you are instantly converted into plasma and gamma rays. If you hit something the size of a dust particle it will destroy your spacecraft. A bit hard. Near light speed is a requirement for intergalactic travel because even solid state machines will not last long enough to make it without time dilation to shorten the trip. Interstellar travel could theoretically be achieved with 1960s tech. Look up Project Orion. It could even be done with chemical rockets if you could hibernate, greatly extend life span, build a generational ship, or be an AI and just turn yourself off for the trip.
      - UncleOxidant 5y ago
        > Theoretically if you could travel very close to the speed of light ... Of course the energy requirements are insane Yeah, this is why I don't think we'll ever achieve this and I very much doubt other species have or will either. I don't think the incentives are there to expend this kind of energy (and capital) trying to get to another galaxy - especially since it would a very, very long time before anyone would know if the project succeeded (if it would ever be known at all)- there's no success feedback for a project like that. Interstellar travel will be difficult enough and the feedback time there would likely be at least a couple generations (longer depending on where the travel is to).
      - Scarblac 5y ago
        > Of course the energy requirements are insane and would require some kind of physicists nightmare propulsion system like antimatter rockets. Lose reactor containment and you are instantly converted into plasma and gamma rays. If you hit something the size of a dust particle it will destroy your spacecraft. And, this one spacecraft needs to be able to slow down, have the telescopes and equipment needed to identify exoplanets and decide they are suitable, have the means to travel all the way there, and have everything aboard to start a complete new viable colony on some unknown planet. It probably needs to bring all the energy for the first few millenna in batteries. That must mean a huge spacecraft, and there also needs to be some way to land it all on the planet, hopefully with all the pieces close to each other. Et cetera. The engine that got all that close to light speed is just a tiny piece of the puzzle.
        rewgs 5y ago
        Ha! Funny, I've never considered it even though it's so incredibly obvious: the spacecraft needs to be able to slow down out of light speed. That might honestly be even harder than getting up to light speed, and that of course is almost certainly impossible. Imagine the "runway" you would need. How many lightyears would it take just to slow down? And that's before you even consider how some sort of reverse propulsion mechanism would even begin to turn on without tearing the ship apart in a microsecond.
    - TheRealNGenius 5y ago
      much akin to how cavemen couldn't fathom how they could possibly talk to another caveman on the other side of the earth.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  A galaxy is really a pretty dangerous place for organic life. One supermassive black hole merger in the same or nearby galaxy, a biggish black hole merger within 10,000 light years, a magnetar hiccup within 500 ly, or a workaday supernova 5 ly off might be enough to sterilize a whole solar system. There is no guessing how many times life has been wiped clean that way. The sooner our descendants can get the hell out of the galaxy, the better.
  - brabel 5y ago
    I think we are in a relatively safe corner of the galaxy though... IIRC there's no cosmical existential threat we know of within the next billion years or so, and the kind of cataclism you're talking about would be the kind of thing we should already be able to predict millions of years in advance.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Sol orbits the galaxy independently of all other bodies. We don't know where most of the magnetars are, never mind their orbits, which are anyway unpredictable. (The nearest we know of is ~5kly? away. Or more, or less.) We don't know where any but two of the black holes are, although there must be a billion or more. Less than ten million years ago we flew into a dust cloud left over from a recent supernova. We could have been in sterilization range of a magnetar dozens or hundreds of times since life evolved, so we're just lucky none erupted when we were. The core supermassive black hole blew somehow just 100Mya, fortunately pointed somewhere else. The only safe-ish corner is very far from everything else, and off-axis from the central black hole. We are deep in the thick soup.
      - Thiez 5y ago
        And what exactly would our hypothetical descendents do there, in the middle of nowhere with no star, no planets, and no energy?
        jeremyjh 5y ago
mongol 5y ago
Is it not possible that colonizing a galaxy is simply too hard, no matter what intelligence?
- fleddr 5y ago
  Exactly. For an optimist, we might one day colonize Mars. Next, getting out of our solar system is incredibly unlikely as the first habitable destination in our own galaxy is just so far away. Say we stretch our optimism and do make it. Now the colonization of the Milky Way starts. It's a 100,000 light years to the other end. You'd be a completely different species by the time you arrive. Say you achieve that (you won't), now we need some type of coordination and communication. Suck badly though that messages have a delay of 100.000 years. There is no such thing as the human species if we spread out as the delay between even closest habitable zones would be so large that orchestration is impossible. And we're still within the bounds of a single galaxy, not even intergalactic travel. It simply can't be done. We'll never even escape the solar system. Long before that would even become a question, it's questionable whether our species continues to exist in its current form. Human level AI is at the horizon within our lifetime. And will then accelerate away. Add a few centuries to that and it's strange to assume we'll still be there, unchanged, as primates controlling a machine a billion times more intelligent. The only path would be to become a machine instead, slowly replacing biological parts with superior silicone. Until nothing biological remains. Sounds crazy or unlikely? The idea that we remain as-is is far crazier.
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    SETI scientist Paul Davies says his belief is that "all biological life is transitory". Essentially a temporary blip on the road to something greater. I assume he just means intelligent life.
  - abhishekjha 5y ago
    >The only path would be to become a machine instead, slowly replacing biological parts with superior silicone. Until nothing biological remains. Reproduction has to be intact. But I do agree. We as a species are not fit to these interstellar or intergalactic travels. It has to be dominantly machines.
bitcharmer 5y ago
> Personally I think just the fact the universe hasn't been eaten by Von Neumann machines means we're alone. Or maybe it'd make sense to consider how big the Universe is, how fast it expands and combine it with how very local is our perception of it. If you do that and account for how young our capabilities to hear and see stuff out there actually are, Fermi's paradox doesn't make any sense just like the certainty of statements that start with "that must mean..."
- furyofantares 5y ago
  The fermi paradox makes sense within "just" the milky way, so the size of the entire observable universe or the speed it expands doesn't seem relevant.
  - UncleOxidant 5y ago
    But what if he was overestimating the the frequency of intelligent life emerging? Yes, it's quite possible that there are many simple lifeforms spread throughout the galaxy, but what if we're the only intelligent life that's emerged in the galaxy? Sure there could be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe but we'd never find know about it because the distance between galaxies is so large.
    - furyofantares 5y ago
      > But what if he was overestimating the the frequency of intelligent life emerging? I don't understand there to be any such estimation at all. The paradox is that ONE of the pieces of the equation has to be so improbable that it basically doesn't happen. That's absolutely allowed to be the piece that is nearly impossible to happen.
  - kromem 5y ago
    "Just the milky way" You mean the collection of stars that's 100,000 light years across? How long has life existed on Earth? Of that time, how long has life on Earth been generating signals that could be detected elsewhere? How much of the Milky Way has recieved those signals by now? 50,000 light year radius squared (let's favor your argument by calculating the milky way disc as 2D area) = 2.5 billion square light years Area our signals could have reached in the milky way over the past century of broadcasting: ~10,000 square light years So the intelligent life here and now, only a fraction of the life that's existed (much of which has had some degree of intelligence) has only reached about 0.0004% of the Milky Way by now, to say nothing for the drop of signal to CMB noise as it propagates. There's extensive discussion about the fine tuning argument for Earth regarding our gravity/propulsion to even be able to enter outer space, a threshold other intelligent life on a different planet may never be able to cross. Fermi's Paradox is silly when you dive into the nuances.
pklausler 5y ago
I agree; any galaxy that produces even one civilization capable of launching self-reproducing interstellar probes will never be the same afterwards; it's like a phase change. We don't observe any activity from Bracewell - von Neumann probes today -- nothing is rampaging through our asteroid belt turning it into new probes. The thing to remember is that given enough time and space, nearly every event has probability 0 or 1. BvN probes are either impossible or inevitable.
lubujackson 5y ago
The third option is that everything is simply too far apart and any detectible transmissions are either too faint or buried behind all those massive fusion furnaces. For instance, if our best Earth tech was pointed at Earth from a distant star, how far away would we be able to detect our own traces of life? We know that life is "a little rare" at least, but there is a huge range of rarity where life is everywhere across the vast, vast universe but sparse across the dinky number of light years we could see each other. Maybe aliens have tech that is 10,000x better than ours but the scale of distance is just too big of an obstacle. There is an assumption that alien races must have figured out things well beyond our understanding and be doing things like harnessing stars in some dramatic way, but maybe that just isn't a reasonable thing for life forms to do? Or if they do have that ability, they may operate on a much longer timeline, simply nudging things along in a way that escapes notice.
- thrashh 5y ago
  Another possibility is that energy is really hard to come by. Humans absolutely struggle to amass much energy. Think of the insane amount of energy required to lift things into space, and how many millions more amounts of energy we’ll need just to build something in space. Heck if you go drive off grid on Earth, you can barely bring any energy with you and you won’t really be able to generate an appreciative amount of energy to do anything major. Climate change is ultimately caused by our energy needs. One day we might be able to harness the output of a whole star but the amount of energy we’d need to get to that point seems out of reach right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the lack of energy is a universal issue across the stars. A huge game changer would be if we discovered some physical phenomenon to allow us to safely extract energy easier from mass. It would do to our progress like what the telephones and the Internet did to communication.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    It actually doesn't require THAT much energy to get into orbit. The energy of a kilogram of mass in low earth orbit is about 9 kWh, although rockets will use a bit more than that (not enormously more, though). Fuel cost remains a minor fraction of launch cost, even with Falcon 9. In comparison, the best aluminum plants in the world use 13 kWh to make a kilogram of aluminum. Yet no one says aluminum is out of reach because it takes too much energy to make it. The per capita primary energy consumption in the US is about 10 kw; your share of this energy over your lifespan would be enough to accelerate 1 kg to 2% of the speed of light.
TrispusAttucks 5y ago
> Maybe they all decide it's happier living as hunter-gatherers. Wouldn't this be great! Screw universal dominance. Let's play in the woods and hangout with nature. Heat death is coming no matter what.
kingcharles 5y ago
How about the possibility that perfect VR is invented, every person can live inside their own perfect universe, and the whole species just doesn't give a fuck about exploring the (real) universe? That would stop a civilisation from exporting any spacecraft or signals outside its homeworld.
- 7thaccount 5y ago
  This is my main theory. Humans will eventually abandon their own bodies and live in a VR world. I think you'd still have massive energy requirements in the real world to deal with of course.
  - m3kw9 5y ago
    Yeah there is really no “need” to explore other than survival. If vr can provide an exponentially better world for life, the entire planet goes dark.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "Humans will eventually abandon their own bodies and live in a VR world." Those who "abandon their own bodies" are effectively killing themselves. Any "copies" which might exist in VR are separate beings, not the ones who chose to die in the real world. I feel nothing but sadness towards the possible future as you paint it. It would mean the end of the human race.
    - 7thaccount 5y ago
      Nothing would be sadder to me to see us stagnate forever. As a non corporeal being, I think you could live nearly forever and learn far more. I think creating "children" could be possible too if we had the technology to digitize people in the first place. I don't think we would give up on exploration either. Just build a ship, send it somewhere, and transport your consiousness over the distance. If you wanted to go back in the physical world, I think you could, or at least a copy of you. Of course it goes without saying that this is all basically magical sci-fi gibberish.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Or maybe Von Neumann machines can't be built because they're impractical. Consider that you need an AI that can deal with a huge range of potential environments, build extraction, processing, and assembly machinery, and do all of this with perfect error correction and oversight. Pretty much eternally. It's an interesting thought experiment. But as a practical engineering project, it really doesn't sound even remotely credible. Not without appealing to "Yes, but one day..." magic unobtanium technology. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of hard entropy limit on how long complex systems can remain functional and stable. Sooner or later you're going to run out of memory, and if you restart a build process from scratch at each iteration without accumulating information, what have you actually achieved - beyond a rather pointless machine infestation?
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  https://www.baen.com/chapters/W200203/0743435265___0.htm https://www.baen.com/chapters/W200203/0743435265___0.htm
- ncmncm 5y ago
  You understand that we, personally, are von Neumann machines? Not very well-tuned ones, because we happened by accident. Bacteria did, too, and are more efficient, just limited in scope. So, we have proof it is possible; it only needs refinement.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
Maybe intelligent life isn't so rare, but technologically advanced intelligent life is exceedingly rare? It's possible that there could be planets where life emerged, evolved to an intelligent species that didn't have to compete for resources, maybe there were no large carnivores to worry about, maybe resources are even less scarce than they are here, maybe they developed a very collective culture and thus no concept of war, whatever - some scenario where technology doesn't really develop very far. It would never occur to this species to want to leave their planet to go exploring. They could be quite content to live this way for millions of years. We'd never see any signals from them. When it comes to questions like the one posed in the fermi paradox we always seem to assume that all intelligent lifeforms would be very much like us with similar drives and culture. But it seems exceedingly unlikely.
pndy 5y ago
Perhaps the intelligent life is so rare that we're the first species that exist across the universe and we're destined to reach for the stars - unless of course we manage to annihilate ourselves first. But then, if there's nobody else but us then perhaps all what we experience is just an elaborated simulation of more advanced species - perhaps our ancestors, who decided to keep us and our universe as a kind of memoir, or as some sophisticated experiment. A future of Star Trek, where the protective veil of some kind of "prime directive" is being lifted as we reach certain level of development as civilisation and then we get a galaxy-wide club membership feels like naive funny fairy tale. It would be of course great if that would happen but it's more likely reality is, or will be way too mundane and unattractive.
- shagie 5y ago
  > A future of Star Trek, where the protective veil of some kind of "prime directive" is being lifted as we reach certain level of development as civilisation and then we get a galaxy-wide club membership feels like naive funny fairy tale. It would be of course great if that would happen but it's more likely reality is, or will be way too mundane and unattractive. A story on that topic - The Crystal Spheres by David Brin https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-crystal-spheres/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-crystal-spher...
  - pndy 5y ago
    Thank you for the link - pretty sure I've bumped on this story once but got it lost in the sea of my bookmarks
analog31 5y ago
What if civilizations go dark after a century or two of rapid technological progress. Look at what we're doing. The bulk of our data bandwidth is now confined to fiber optics, that leak virtually nothing to outer space. Remaining wireless comms interfere with one another, using ever decreasing power, and are designed to be hard to distinguish from noise. It's like we've enclosed ourselves in a primitive Dyson sphere. A faint shift in the molecular spectrum of our atmosphere might be telling.
hyperpallium2 5y ago
Re: too old The Moore's law-like analysis of the exponentially increasing comlexity of life over time suggests the time for life of our complexity is... about now. We may he first.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Earth started out very late. Billions of years late.
lhorie 5y ago
Why are we assuming that we would be able to see intelligent alien life by just looking at the right spot in space? If we take it at face value the figure that the universe is 13 billion years old, and that the observable universe is 90 billion light years wide, presumably that means that there's a whole lot of universe that could have evolved intelligent life at a pace similar to our own, but that we just can't see because there hasn't been enough time for light to get from there to here. The assumption that an advanced life form would be able to take over the universe and be visible to us requires that said life form is able to travel large distances. So to be able to travel far enough to enter our field of vision, they need to basically speedrun evolution and space travel proportional to the distance from us, i.e. the farther they are, the faster they need to evolve and the farther they need to travel for us to be able to see them. But the age of the universe poses a hard limit on how much of a head start a civilization can get over us. So if we think this way, it seems somewhat plausible that life could exist, but be undetectable due to the sheer size of the universe and time constraints, even if they are capable of interstellar travel.
- wruza 5y ago
  Our evolution was not a straight line. We could stay in bacterial form for a couple of billion years if not the great oxygenation event, or have a couple of billions of years of advantage if it happened that earlier. The evolution from simple marine life to us happened in an instant compared to pre-O2 era. https://www.shutterstock.com/ru/image-vector/evolution-life-timeline-scale-geologic-time-1968647521 https://www.shutterstock.com/ru/image-vector/evolution-life-...
  - lhorie 5y ago
    Sure, but that doesn't really address the point. Suppose aliens got really lucky and managed to achieve interstellar travel in just 1 billion years since the big bang. That still leaves the entire area outside of a 12 billion light years radius from us invisible, i.e. they would have to be somewhere within that radius within the next 12 billion years, for us to be physically able to see them. But that radius is like less than 1% of the known universe. And in actuality, they would need to sit there detectably within the narrow period of a few hundred years or so that humanity is actually looking at that spot in the sky. So, for example, if they were galaxy hopping every few million years rather than cancerously leaving dyson spheres everywhere, and just happened to temporarily brush into our radius of visibility during their nomadic travels, we wouldn't necessarily see them if they got within view too early or too late.
andrei_says_ 5y ago
Whales for example are intelligent, but I don’t see them ever getting excited about space travel. Is it not possible for intelligent life to exist but not be interested in more?
- pharke 5y ago
  It is but they get cleared out of the equation by f sub c, the fraction of intelligent life that invents high technology capable of interstellar radio transmission.
wruza 5y ago
Expansion is a property of k>1 reproduction. We could make a sustainable happy civilization even on this dirty planet, if not our biological drive to multiply and eat all gifted to us resources with time. My bets are not on climate ops or hunting-gathering for mature civilizations, but simply on k~=1, the simplest form of existence that brings more value with time instead of more size.
- jason-phillips 5y ago
  In my opinion this comment brings the discussion full circle, from reasoning the difficulties of intergalactic travel back to the quandary of our home.
  - GoblinSlayer 5y ago
    Sustainable reproduction is what enables space travel, expansive species spend their time on infighting, they have no resources to fly anywhere, example: humankind. But even in case of humankind, our exponential reproduction is winding down over time. Irrespective of reproduction, a barbaric species won't be able to fly beyond moon.
TheRealNGenius 5y ago
You make hypothetical scenarios sound like presupposed fact. You don't know that life is rare or that something else happens to make it appear as such. There are multiple alternative scenarios that you haven't considered amongst the vast sea of possibilities. That you suppose thusly is indicative of your lack of imagination.
nonima 5y ago
> If anything else like us existed and it was possible to exist like us for a long period they'd have filled every planet before we ever evolved Yeah because you know exactly what alien civilization would have done right? Because that's what you would do, as a human. We are talking about aliens and we don't know what they would be like so assuming that they would think like us is just stupid.
rel2thr 5y ago
It’s pretty rare on earth too, 10 million species but only 1 has space flight and the others aren’t anywhere close to developing it!
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  We had neanderthals.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    And Denisovans, and still have raccoons. The raccoons shouldn't need more than another 10My.
viovanov 5y ago
I think you need multiple generations (subsequent) of stars in order to get heavier elements - which are probably needed by life. So maybe the universe is not _that_ old. https://www.quora.com/How-many-generations-of-stars-have-there-been https://www.quora.com/How-many-generations-of-stars-have-the...
- ncmncm 5y ago
  The stars that make the elements we need form and blow up in only a few million years. A billion years is plenty of time, once you get the hydrogen gathered together enough to get things started.
raducu 5y ago
There's soo much we don't know at this point. 1. I'd presume life is exceedingly rare to start with, but I guess in the future we'll get a lot more tech to verify that -- direct imaging for biomarkers? 2. I'm sure there must be a "long term survival" equation for a given intelligent species that involves parameters such as "individual intelligence", individual lifespan, individual aggression level, individual empathy level, lifetime mating strategies that would predict if a species can go interstellar or not. There's just so much to unpack about humans -- we did not evolve to live like we do today and because this transition is so abrupt, it could lead to a collapse of modern civilization, in my humble opinion. We did not evolve to live in mega communities where antisocial behavior is rewarded (all kind of leaders), it is very likely that such an antisocial leader ends the human race in the future. It could be that a much more intelligent species where individuals have much greater "actuator power" that was able to reach our technological level with much fewer individuals would be able to eliminate such leaders and not have this problem. It could be that a species with a much higher lifespans but a bit less intelligence than humans would have a lot more individual and collective wisdom and be better equipped to deal with tyrants or climate change. To me it seems that we are not capable of long-term survival goals. I find it sad that as a species we haven't invested in a planetary asteroid defense, or transition to nuclear-solar-electric energy. It's just so sad we developed nuclear technologies only for this technology to enable perpetual tyrants. Or electronics only to enable the same tyrants in perpetuity. Looking back just a few thousand years we can see events that cam wipe out 90% or more of the population of the Earth (such as the eruption of a supervolcano that would destroy all crops). A species that can think of transcending historical-biological limitations should immediately strive to do so. It could be that a species with much higher intelligence and much higher empathy would not destroy its planet and would not let greed destroy the very fabric of their society and actually make it over the "hump". I don't see humans as having it to make it over "the hump", our "human condition" will prevent us from making it.
slothtrop 5y ago
More than likely, we're early (as expansionist intelligent lifeforms go), and the race is still on to colonize.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  More than likely, expansionists aren't welcome in the galaxy, and are curtailed by non-expansionists when they begin to become a nuisance.
  - slothtrop 5y ago
    The capability of "curtailing" another race from expanding is contingent on having expanded into the galaxy.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      It is contingent on having the physical capacity to have expanded, had they cared to.
      - slothtrop 5y ago
        Not going to curtail jack shit if you haven't left your homeworld. There's a large Universe out there, it's absurd to imagine muscling other races out without a wide-reaching presence, and that demands colonization.
        ncmncm 5y ago
        So says the reflexive expansionist, too big for its britches, about to be taken down a peg via novas induced on the suns of its homeworlds by unidentified offended parties. It is a dangerous galaxy, out there. Step carefully.
        slothtrop 5y ago
        That is the dumbest thing I've ever read.
echelon 5y ago
Maybe we're a simulation of an advanced alien intelligence in preparation for war games? Maybe we're a simulation of future earth historians? Maybe they're already here? A computational foam that surrounds us. Maybe we're the first? Or life is exceedingly rare? Maybe it's up there, purposefully undetected, killing anything that emerges? Like a spider in wait. Maybe we've been seeded by them, and they're watching us grow? Maybe physics breaking shenanigans and things we can't even model or understand are happening?
- kromem 5y ago
  There's a 2,000 year old document that claims we're in a recreation of a long dead world from within a world to come by a being that self-established in light and everything we see around us is just that creator's light in the images of what existed before. It says souls that depended on bodies were screwed and it's better to be a recreation - that the whole point of the recreation is to provide an afterlife for the dead. At the time it was written, it went over everyone's heads and eventually even devolved into Gnosticism. But it seems very pertinent in an age where we stand on the cusp of having AI self-evolve and are heavily investing into photonics for AI, and are then employing our nacent AI to bring photos of great grandparents "to life" and Microsoft was even granted a patent on resurrecting the dead using social media data and AI. Even the best software authors tend to put in Easter Eggs. I see no reason why the creator of a simulation wouldn't have put in some obscure lore that breaks the 4th wall on the nature of it.
pharke 5y ago
I've never understood the Von Neumann probe conjecture. Why would anyone design a probe that uses all of the available resources within a system to produce new probes that are sent to the N nearest systems? Surely it's more efficient to use a smaller number of more capable probes than to use a larger number of less capable ones when you consider the fuel mass necessary to get them to the next star. Ideally, you need one foolproof probe that can bootstrap a manufacturing facility in the next system. More likely you would send a few backup probes but you wouldn't send billions of them. I think multiple Von Neumann probes could have come and gone from our system using little more than a few asteroids and a sip of the Jovian atmosphere. It's also worth repeating that Von Neumann probes are only useful for information gathering. It would be highly impractical to pre-build all of the colonization infrastructure ahead of time and then mothball it for millions more years while the biologicals caught up, assuming they ever did. So these devices would be limited to scientific exploration or monitoring. The only thing that I think Star Trek got right about the future is that many people will live in space full time aboard starships. All the planet hopping they do is just to further the plot and provide a familiar backdrop to the audience. Once a species transitions to living in space they will most likely stay there and have little use for planets. Depending on their mastery of fusion or other energy sources they may not even bother hanging around stars anymore. If we want to talk about anthropocentric perspectives the whole concept of visiting other worlds is probably as progressive as vacationing in natural caves, an entertaining novelty done once but never repeated by people who enjoy a roof over their heads, modern conveniences and climate control.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Stars, anyway, have Kuiper belts full of useful materials, with lots of room to spread out, and far enough out not to be inconveniently warm. Any civilization working with very large energies will have large cooling needs: if there is anything we can say confidently about future technologies, it is that they will remain bound by thermodynamics.
PicassoCTs 5y ago
That fate is the technology acceleration with the scientific method versus the glacial development of species. Meaning its comparable easy to unlock exponential technologys (energy density/ information density) and its very hard to actually self + "tame" a species fresh out of the woods. Just look at our world of 9 billion, longing for ever more surplus, handing dangerous technology to the individual without providing any self-control beyond basic self-surveillance to society members. Anyone with a basic understanding of biology and a garage full of hamsters, can create a new covid based bioweapon right now. Ever more centralizing systems allow for one hacker to do incredible damage to a society. And while this plays out, there are still people demanding flying cars, so whoever hacks them, can fly them into buildings in case of civil unrest. The denial about this species being unfit for the stars, unfit even for nuclear energy and the idea that ever more powerful toys will magically fix this "retardation" is whats at the core of the fermi paradox. Most species just murder one another off with exp-tech once the environment and the surplus machinery runs out.

elorant 5y ago

Actually, the universe might be too young for life, and we're one of the first. The further you go back in time the more violent events like supernovas you'd find which would make the universe a very hostile environment for life.

api 5y ago
I think this is likely. Always remember that intergalactic travel is exponentially harder than interstellar travel and that is already brutally hard. We need only be among the first in our galaxy to explain the Fermi paradox.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  I don't see how there could ever be intergalactic travel.
  - api 5y ago
    Theoretically if you could travel very close to the speed of light time dilation would make the trip fairly short. Of course it’s one way since it would take hundreds of thousands to millions of years for everyone else. If you came back you would be returning to a different geological epoch. Of course the energy requirements are insane and would require some kind of physicists nightmare propulsion system like antimatter rockets. Lose reactor containment and you are instantly converted into plasma and gamma rays. If you hit something the size of a dust particle it will destroy your spacecraft. A bit hard. Near light speed is a requirement for intergalactic travel because even solid state machines will not last long enough to make it without time dilation to shorten the trip. Interstellar travel could theoretically be achieved with 1960s tech. Look up Project Orion. It could even be done with chemical rockets if you could hibernate, greatly extend life span, build a generational ship, or be an AI and just turn yourself off for the trip.
    - UncleOxidant 5y ago
      > Theoretically if you could travel very close to the speed of light ... Of course the energy requirements are insane Yeah, this is why I don't think we'll ever achieve this and I very much doubt other species have or will either. I don't think the incentives are there to expend this kind of energy (and capital) trying to get to another galaxy - especially since it would a very, very long time before anyone would know if the project succeeded (if it would ever be known at all)- there's no success feedback for a project like that. Interstellar travel will be difficult enough and the feedback time there would likely be at least a couple generations (longer depending on where the travel is to).
    - Scarblac 5y ago
      > Of course the energy requirements are insane and would require some kind of physicists nightmare propulsion system like antimatter rockets. Lose reactor containment and you are instantly converted into plasma and gamma rays. If you hit something the size of a dust particle it will destroy your spacecraft. And, this one spacecraft needs to be able to slow down, have the telescopes and equipment needed to identify exoplanets and decide they are suitable, have the means to travel all the way there, and have everything aboard to start a complete new viable colony on some unknown planet. It probably needs to bring all the energy for the first few millenna in batteries. That must mean a huge spacecraft, and there also needs to be some way to land it all on the planet, hopefully with all the pieces close to each other. Et cetera. The engine that got all that close to light speed is just a tiny piece of the puzzle.
      - rewgs 5y ago
        Ha! Funny, I've never considered it even though it's so incredibly obvious: the spacecraft needs to be able to slow down out of light speed. That might honestly be even harder than getting up to light speed, and that of course is almost certainly impossible. Imagine the "runway" you would need. How many lightyears would it take just to slow down? And that's before you even consider how some sort of reverse propulsion mechanism would even begin to turn on without tearing the ship apart in a microsecond.
  - TheRealNGenius 5y ago
    much akin to how cavemen couldn't fathom how they could possibly talk to another caveman on the other side of the earth.
ncmncm 5y ago
A galaxy is really a pretty dangerous place for organic life. One supermassive black hole merger in the same or nearby galaxy, a biggish black hole merger within 10,000 light years, a magnetar hiccup within 500 ly, or a workaday supernova 5 ly off might be enough to sterilize a whole solar system. There is no guessing how many times life has been wiped clean that way. The sooner our descendants can get the hell out of the galaxy, the better.
- brabel 5y ago
  I think we are in a relatively safe corner of the galaxy though... IIRC there's no cosmical existential threat we know of within the next billion years or so, and the kind of cataclism you're talking about would be the kind of thing we should already be able to predict millions of years in advance.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Sol orbits the galaxy independently of all other bodies. We don't know where most of the magnetars are, never mind their orbits, which are anyway unpredictable. (The nearest we know of is ~5kly? away. Or more, or less.) We don't know where any but two of the black holes are, although there must be a billion or more. Less than ten million years ago we flew into a dust cloud left over from a recent supernova. We could have been in sterilization range of a magnetar dozens or hundreds of times since life evolved, so we're just lucky none erupted when we were. The core supermassive black hole blew somehow just 100Mya, fortunately pointed somewhere else. The only safe-ish corner is very far from everything else, and off-axis from the central black hole. We are deep in the thick soup.
    - Thiez 5y ago
      And what exactly would our hypothetical descendents do there, in the middle of nowhere with no star, no planets, and no energy?
      - jeremyjh 5y ago

mongol 5y ago

Is it not possible that colonizing a galaxy is simply too hard, no matter what intelligence?

fleddr 5y ago
Exactly. For an optimist, we might one day colonize Mars. Next, getting out of our solar system is incredibly unlikely as the first habitable destination in our own galaxy is just so far away. Say we stretch our optimism and do make it. Now the colonization of the Milky Way starts. It's a 100,000 light years to the other end. You'd be a completely different species by the time you arrive. Say you achieve that (you won't), now we need some type of coordination and communication. Suck badly though that messages have a delay of 100.000 years. There is no such thing as the human species if we spread out as the delay between even closest habitable zones would be so large that orchestration is impossible. And we're still within the bounds of a single galaxy, not even intergalactic travel. It simply can't be done. We'll never even escape the solar system. Long before that would even become a question, it's questionable whether our species continues to exist in its current form. Human level AI is at the horizon within our lifetime. And will then accelerate away. Add a few centuries to that and it's strange to assume we'll still be there, unchanged, as primates controlling a machine a billion times more intelligent. The only path would be to become a machine instead, slowly replacing biological parts with superior silicone. Until nothing biological remains. Sounds crazy or unlikely? The idea that we remain as-is is far crazier.
- 7thaccount 5y ago
  SETI scientist Paul Davies says his belief is that "all biological life is transitory". Essentially a temporary blip on the road to something greater. I assume he just means intelligent life.
- abhishekjha 5y ago
  >The only path would be to become a machine instead, slowly replacing biological parts with superior silicone. Until nothing biological remains. Reproduction has to be intact. But I do agree. We as a species are not fit to these interstellar or intergalactic travels. It has to be dominantly machines.

bitcharmer 5y ago

> Personally I think just the fact the universe hasn't been eaten by Von Neumann machines means we're alone. Or maybe it'd make sense to consider how big the Universe is, how fast it expands and combine it with how very local is our perception of it. If you do that and account for how young our capabilities to hear and see stuff out there actually are, Fermi's paradox doesn't make any sense just like the certainty of statements that start with "that must mean..."

furyofantares 5y ago
The fermi paradox makes sense within "just" the milky way, so the size of the entire observable universe or the speed it expands doesn't seem relevant.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  But what if he was overestimating the the frequency of intelligent life emerging? Yes, it's quite possible that there are many simple lifeforms spread throughout the galaxy, but what if we're the only intelligent life that's emerged in the galaxy? Sure there could be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe but we'd never find know about it because the distance between galaxies is so large.
  - furyofantares 5y ago
    > But what if he was overestimating the the frequency of intelligent life emerging? I don't understand there to be any such estimation at all. The paradox is that ONE of the pieces of the equation has to be so improbable that it basically doesn't happen. That's absolutely allowed to be the piece that is nearly impossible to happen.
- kromem 5y ago
  "Just the milky way" You mean the collection of stars that's 100,000 light years across? How long has life existed on Earth? Of that time, how long has life on Earth been generating signals that could be detected elsewhere? How much of the Milky Way has recieved those signals by now? 50,000 light year radius squared (let's favor your argument by calculating the milky way disc as 2D area) = 2.5 billion square light years Area our signals could have reached in the milky way over the past century of broadcasting: ~10,000 square light years So the intelligent life here and now, only a fraction of the life that's existed (much of which has had some degree of intelligence) has only reached about 0.0004% of the Milky Way by now, to say nothing for the drop of signal to CMB noise as it propagates. There's extensive discussion about the fine tuning argument for Earth regarding our gravity/propulsion to even be able to enter outer space, a threshold other intelligent life on a different planet may never be able to cross. Fermi's Paradox is silly when you dive into the nuances.

pklausler 5y ago

I agree; any galaxy that produces even one civilization capable of launching self-reproducing interstellar probes will never be the same afterwards; it's like a phase change. We don't observe any activity from Bracewell - von Neumann probes today -- nothing is rampaging through our asteroid belt turning it into new probes. The thing to remember is that given enough time and space, nearly every event has probability 0 or 1. BvN probes are either impossible or inevitable.

lubujackson 5y ago

The third option is that everything is simply too far apart and any detectible transmissions are either too faint or buried behind all those massive fusion furnaces. For instance, if our best Earth tech was pointed at Earth from a distant star, how far away would we be able to detect our own traces of life? We know that life is "a little rare" at least, but there is a huge range of rarity where life is everywhere across the vast, vast universe but sparse across the dinky number of light years we could see each other. Maybe aliens have tech that is 10,000x better than ours but the scale of distance is just too big of an obstacle. There is an assumption that alien races must have figured out things well beyond our understanding and be doing things like harnessing stars in some dramatic way, but maybe that just isn't a reasonable thing for life forms to do? Or if they do have that ability, they may operate on a much longer timeline, simply nudging things along in a way that escapes notice.

thrashh 5y ago
Another possibility is that energy is really hard to come by. Humans absolutely struggle to amass much energy. Think of the insane amount of energy required to lift things into space, and how many millions more amounts of energy we’ll need just to build something in space. Heck if you go drive off grid on Earth, you can barely bring any energy with you and you won’t really be able to generate an appreciative amount of energy to do anything major. Climate change is ultimately caused by our energy needs. One day we might be able to harness the output of a whole star but the amount of energy we’d need to get to that point seems out of reach right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the lack of energy is a universal issue across the stars. A huge game changer would be if we discovered some physical phenomenon to allow us to safely extract energy easier from mass. It would do to our progress like what the telephones and the Internet did to communication.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  It actually doesn't require THAT much energy to get into orbit. The energy of a kilogram of mass in low earth orbit is about 9 kWh, although rockets will use a bit more than that (not enormously more, though). Fuel cost remains a minor fraction of launch cost, even with Falcon 9. In comparison, the best aluminum plants in the world use 13 kWh to make a kilogram of aluminum. Yet no one says aluminum is out of reach because it takes too much energy to make it. The per capita primary energy consumption in the US is about 10 kw; your share of this energy over your lifespan would be enough to accelerate 1 kg to 2% of the speed of light.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago

> Maybe they all decide it's happier living as hunter-gatherers. Wouldn't this be great! Screw universal dominance. Let's play in the woods and hangout with nature. Heat death is coming no matter what.

kingcharles 5y ago

How about the possibility that perfect VR is invented, every person can live inside their own perfect universe, and the whole species just doesn't give a fuck about exploring the (real) universe? That would stop a civilisation from exporting any spacecraft or signals outside its homeworld.

7thaccount 5y ago
This is my main theory. Humans will eventually abandon their own bodies and live in a VR world. I think you'd still have massive energy requirements in the real world to deal with of course.
- m3kw9 5y ago
  Yeah there is really no “need” to explore other than survival. If vr can provide an exponentially better world for life, the entire planet goes dark.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "Humans will eventually abandon their own bodies and live in a VR world." Those who "abandon their own bodies" are effectively killing themselves. Any "copies" which might exist in VR are separate beings, not the ones who chose to die in the real world. I feel nothing but sadness towards the possible future as you paint it. It would mean the end of the human race.
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    Nothing would be sadder to me to see us stagnate forever. As a non corporeal being, I think you could live nearly forever and learn far more. I think creating "children" could be possible too if we had the technology to digitize people in the first place. I don't think we would give up on exploration either. Just build a ship, send it somewhere, and transport your consiousness over the distance. If you wanted to go back in the physical world, I think you could, or at least a copy of you. Of course it goes without saying that this is all basically magical sci-fi gibberish.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

Or maybe Von Neumann machines can't be built because they're impractical. Consider that you need an AI that can deal with a huge range of potential environments, build extraction, processing, and assembly machinery, and do all of this with perfect error correction and oversight. Pretty much eternally. It's an interesting thought experiment. But as a practical engineering project, it really doesn't sound even remotely credible. Not without appealing to "Yes, but one day..." magic unobtanium technology. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of hard entropy limit on how long complex systems can remain functional and stable. Sooner or later you're going to run out of memory, and if you restart a build process from scratch at each iteration without accumulating information, what have you actually achieved - beyond a rather pointless machine infestation?

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
https://www.baen.com/chapters/W200203/0743435265___0.htm https://www.baen.com/chapters/W200203/0743435265___0.htm
ncmncm 5y ago
You understand that we, personally, are von Neumann machines? Not very well-tuned ones, because we happened by accident. Bacteria did, too, and are more efficient, just limited in scope. So, we have proof it is possible; it only needs refinement.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

Maybe intelligent life isn't so rare, but technologically advanced intelligent life is exceedingly rare? It's possible that there could be planets where life emerged, evolved to an intelligent species that didn't have to compete for resources, maybe there were no large carnivores to worry about, maybe resources are even less scarce than they are here, maybe they developed a very collective culture and thus no concept of war, whatever - some scenario where technology doesn't really develop very far. It would never occur to this species to want to leave their planet to go exploring. They could be quite content to live this way for millions of years. We'd never see any signals from them. When it comes to questions like the one posed in the fermi paradox we always seem to assume that all intelligent lifeforms would be very much like us with similar drives and culture. But it seems exceedingly unlikely.

pndy 5y ago

Perhaps the intelligent life is so rare that we're the first species that exist across the universe and we're destined to reach for the stars - unless of course we manage to annihilate ourselves first. But then, if there's nobody else but us then perhaps all what we experience is just an elaborated simulation of more advanced species - perhaps our ancestors, who decided to keep us and our universe as a kind of memoir, or as some sophisticated experiment. A future of Star Trek, where the protective veil of some kind of "prime directive" is being lifted as we reach certain level of development as civilisation and then we get a galaxy-wide club membership feels like naive funny fairy tale. It would be of course great if that would happen but it's more likely reality is, or will be way too mundane and unattractive.

shagie 5y ago
> A future of Star Trek, where the protective veil of some kind of "prime directive" is being lifted as we reach certain level of development as civilisation and then we get a galaxy-wide club membership feels like naive funny fairy tale. It would be of course great if that would happen but it's more likely reality is, or will be way too mundane and unattractive. A story on that topic - The Crystal Spheres by David Brin https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-crystal-spheres/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-crystal-spher...
- pndy 5y ago
  Thank you for the link - pretty sure I've bumped on this story once but got it lost in the sea of my bookmarks

analog31 5y ago

What if civilizations go dark after a century or two of rapid technological progress. Look at what we're doing. The bulk of our data bandwidth is now confined to fiber optics, that leak virtually nothing to outer space. Remaining wireless comms interfere with one another, using ever decreasing power, and are designed to be hard to distinguish from noise. It's like we've enclosed ourselves in a primitive Dyson sphere. A faint shift in the molecular spectrum of our atmosphere might be telling.

hyperpallium2 5y ago

Re: too old The Moore's law-like analysis of the exponentially increasing comlexity of life over time suggests the time for life of our complexity is... about now. We may he first.

ncmncm 5y ago
Earth started out very late. Billions of years late.

lhorie 5y ago

Why are we assuming that we would be able to see intelligent alien life by just looking at the right spot in space? If we take it at face value the figure that the universe is 13 billion years old, and that the observable universe is 90 billion light years wide, presumably that means that there's a whole lot of universe that could have evolved intelligent life at a pace similar to our own, but that we just can't see because there hasn't been enough time for light to get from there to here. The assumption that an advanced life form would be able to take over the universe and be visible to us requires that said life form is able to travel large distances. So to be able to travel far enough to enter our field of vision, they need to basically speedrun evolution and space travel proportional to the distance from us, i.e. the farther they are, the faster they need to evolve and the farther they need to travel for us to be able to see them. But the age of the universe poses a hard limit on how much of a head start a civilization can get over us. So if we think this way, it seems somewhat plausible that life could exist, but be undetectable due to the sheer size of the universe and time constraints, even if they are capable of interstellar travel.

wruza 5y ago
Our evolution was not a straight line. We could stay in bacterial form for a couple of billion years if not the great oxygenation event, or have a couple of billions of years of advantage if it happened that earlier. The evolution from simple marine life to us happened in an instant compared to pre-O2 era. https://www.shutterstock.com/ru/image-vector/evolution-life-timeline-scale-geologic-time-1968647521 https://www.shutterstock.com/ru/image-vector/evolution-life-...
- lhorie 5y ago
  Sure, but that doesn't really address the point. Suppose aliens got really lucky and managed to achieve interstellar travel in just 1 billion years since the big bang. That still leaves the entire area outside of a 12 billion light years radius from us invisible, i.e. they would have to be somewhere within that radius within the next 12 billion years, for us to be physically able to see them. But that radius is like less than 1% of the known universe. And in actuality, they would need to sit there detectably within the narrow period of a few hundred years or so that humanity is actually looking at that spot in the sky. So, for example, if they were galaxy hopping every few million years rather than cancerously leaving dyson spheres everywhere, and just happened to temporarily brush into our radius of visibility during their nomadic travels, we wouldn't necessarily see them if they got within view too early or too late.

andrei_says_ 5y ago

Whales for example are intelligent, but I don’t see them ever getting excited about space travel. Is it not possible for intelligent life to exist but not be interested in more?

pharke 5y ago
It is but they get cleared out of the equation by f sub c, the fraction of intelligent life that invents high technology capable of interstellar radio transmission.

wruza 5y ago

Expansion is a property of k>1 reproduction. We could make a sustainable happy civilization even on this dirty planet, if not our biological drive to multiply and eat all gifted to us resources with time. My bets are not on climate ops or hunting-gathering for mature civilizations, but simply on k~=1, the simplest form of existence that brings more value with time instead of more size.

jason-phillips 5y ago
In my opinion this comment brings the discussion full circle, from reasoning the difficulties of intergalactic travel back to the quandary of our home.
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  Sustainable reproduction is what enables space travel, expansive species spend their time on infighting, they have no resources to fly anywhere, example: humankind. But even in case of humankind, our exponential reproduction is winding down over time. Irrespective of reproduction, a barbaric species won't be able to fly beyond moon.

TheRealNGenius 5y ago

You make hypothetical scenarios sound like presupposed fact. You don't know that life is rare or that something else happens to make it appear as such. There are multiple alternative scenarios that you haven't considered amongst the vast sea of possibilities. That you suppose thusly is indicative of your lack of imagination.

nonima 5y ago

> If anything else like us existed and it was possible to exist like us for a long period they'd have filled every planet before we ever evolved Yeah because you know exactly what alien civilization would have done right? Because that's what you would do, as a human. We are talking about aliens and we don't know what they would be like so assuming that they would think like us is just stupid.

rel2thr 5y ago

It’s pretty rare on earth too, 10 million species but only 1 has space flight and the others aren’t anywhere close to developing it!

GoblinSlayer 5y ago
We had neanderthals.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  And Denisovans, and still have raccoons. The raccoons shouldn't need more than another 10My.

viovanov 5y ago

I think you need multiple generations (subsequent) of stars in order to get heavier elements - which are probably needed by life. So maybe the universe is not _that_ old. https://www.quora.com/How-many-generations-of-stars-have-there-been https://www.quora.com/How-many-generations-of-stars-have-the...

ncmncm 5y ago
The stars that make the elements we need form and blow up in only a few million years. A billion years is plenty of time, once you get the hydrogen gathered together enough to get things started.

raducu 5y ago

There's soo much we don't know at this point. 1. I'd presume life is exceedingly rare to start with, but I guess in the future we'll get a lot more tech to verify that -- direct imaging for biomarkers? 2. I'm sure there must be a "long term survival" equation for a given intelligent species that involves parameters such as "individual intelligence", individual lifespan, individual aggression level, individual empathy level, lifetime mating strategies that would predict if a species can go interstellar or not. There's just so much to unpack about humans -- we did not evolve to live like we do today and because this transition is so abrupt, it could lead to a collapse of modern civilization, in my humble opinion. We did not evolve to live in mega communities where antisocial behavior is rewarded (all kind of leaders), it is very likely that such an antisocial leader ends the human race in the future. It could be that a much more intelligent species where individuals have much greater "actuator power" that was able to reach our technological level with much fewer individuals would be able to eliminate such leaders and not have this problem. It could be that a species with a much higher lifespans but a bit less intelligence than humans would have a lot more individual and collective wisdom and be better equipped to deal with tyrants or climate change. To me it seems that we are not capable of long-term survival goals. I find it sad that as a species we haven't invested in a planetary asteroid defense, or transition to nuclear-solar-electric energy. It's just so sad we developed nuclear technologies only for this technology to enable perpetual tyrants. Or electronics only to enable the same tyrants in perpetuity. Looking back just a few thousand years we can see events that cam wipe out 90% or more of the population of the Earth (such as the eruption of a supervolcano that would destroy all crops). A species that can think of transcending historical-biological limitations should immediately strive to do so. It could be that a species with much higher intelligence and much higher empathy would not destroy its planet and would not let greed destroy the very fabric of their society and actually make it over the "hump". I don't see humans as having it to make it over "the hump", our "human condition" will prevent us from making it.

slothtrop 5y ago

More than likely, we're early (as expansionist intelligent lifeforms go), and the race is still on to colonize.

ncmncm 5y ago
More than likely, expansionists aren't welcome in the galaxy, and are curtailed by non-expansionists when they begin to become a nuisance.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  The capability of "curtailing" another race from expanding is contingent on having expanded into the galaxy.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    It is contingent on having the physical capacity to have expanded, had they cared to.
    - slothtrop 5y ago
      Not going to curtail jack shit if you haven't left your homeworld. There's a large Universe out there, it's absurd to imagine muscling other races out without a wide-reaching presence, and that demands colonization.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        So says the reflexive expansionist, too big for its britches, about to be taken down a peg via novas induced on the suns of its homeworlds by unidentified offended parties. It is a dangerous galaxy, out there. Step carefully.
        slothtrop 5y ago
        That is the dumbest thing I've ever read.

echelon 5y ago

Maybe we're a simulation of an advanced alien intelligence in preparation for war games? Maybe we're a simulation of future earth historians? Maybe they're already here? A computational foam that surrounds us. Maybe we're the first? Or life is exceedingly rare? Maybe it's up there, purposefully undetected, killing anything that emerges? Like a spider in wait. Maybe we've been seeded by them, and they're watching us grow? Maybe physics breaking shenanigans and things we can't even model or understand are happening?

kromem 5y ago
There's a 2,000 year old document that claims we're in a recreation of a long dead world from within a world to come by a being that self-established in light and everything we see around us is just that creator's light in the images of what existed before. It says souls that depended on bodies were screwed and it's better to be a recreation - that the whole point of the recreation is to provide an afterlife for the dead. At the time it was written, it went over everyone's heads and eventually even devolved into Gnosticism. But it seems very pertinent in an age where we stand on the cusp of having AI self-evolve and are heavily investing into photonics for AI, and are then employing our nacent AI to bring photos of great grandparents "to life" and Microsoft was even granted a patent on resurrecting the dead using social media data and AI. Even the best software authors tend to put in Easter Eggs. I see no reason why the creator of a simulation wouldn't have put in some obscure lore that breaks the 4th wall on the nature of it.

pharke 5y ago

I've never understood the Von Neumann probe conjecture. Why would anyone design a probe that uses all of the available resources within a system to produce new probes that are sent to the N nearest systems? Surely it's more efficient to use a smaller number of more capable probes than to use a larger number of less capable ones when you consider the fuel mass necessary to get them to the next star. Ideally, you need one foolproof probe that can bootstrap a manufacturing facility in the next system. More likely you would send a few backup probes but you wouldn't send billions of them. I think multiple Von Neumann probes could have come and gone from our system using little more than a few asteroids and a sip of the Jovian atmosphere. It's also worth repeating that Von Neumann probes are only useful for information gathering. It would be highly impractical to pre-build all of the colonization infrastructure ahead of time and then mothball it for millions more years while the biologicals caught up, assuming they ever did. So these devices would be limited to scientific exploration or monitoring. The only thing that I think Star Trek got right about the future is that many people will live in space full time aboard starships. All the planet hopping they do is just to further the plot and provide a familiar backdrop to the audience. Once a species transitions to living in space they will most likely stay there and have little use for planets. Depending on their mastery of fusion or other energy sources they may not even bother hanging around stars anymore. If we want to talk about anthropocentric perspectives the whole concept of visiting other worlds is probably as progressive as vacationing in natural caves, an entertaining novelty done once but never repeated by people who enjoy a roof over their heads, modern conveniences and climate control.

ncmncm 5y ago
Stars, anyway, have Kuiper belts full of useful materials, with lots of room to spread out, and far enough out not to be inconveniently warm. Any civilization working with very large energies will have large cooling needs: if there is anything we can say confidently about future technologies, it is that they will remain bound by thermodynamics.

PicassoCTs 5y ago

That fate is the technology acceleration with the scientific method versus the glacial development of species. Meaning its comparable easy to unlock exponential technologys (energy density/ information density) and its very hard to actually self + "tame" a species fresh out of the woods. Just look at our world of 9 billion, longing for ever more surplus, handing dangerous technology to the individual without providing any self-control beyond basic self-surveillance to society members. Anyone with a basic understanding of biology and a garage full of hamsters, can create a new covid based bioweapon right now. Ever more centralizing systems allow for one hacker to do incredible damage to a society. And while this plays out, there are still people demanding flying cars, so whoever hacks them, can fly them into buildings in case of civil unrest. The denial about this species being unfit for the stars, unfit even for nuclear energy and the idea that ever more powerful toys will magically fix this "retardation" is whats at the core of the fermi paradox. Most species just murder one another off with exp-tech once the environment and the surplus machinery runs out.