8 ms·

Migrating extraterrestrial civilizations and interstellar colonization

58 points by programd 4y ago

q1w2 4y ago
It's good to see more recognition that the likely extraterrestrial intelligences will be post-biological, but SMETI will have a hard time detecting such life because it will likely not need to move entire planets. As has been show in other research, a post-biological species can more easily send small replicating probes at high fractions of C in order to populate other star systems (and even other galaxies) within a small fraction of cosmic time (meaning it would have already likely happened in the Milky Way). Large populations need not be sent. So the question becomes the meaning of life. What does a cosmic-spanning-AI want to do with its life - and how do we detect that?
- 7thaccount 4y ago
  Agreed. It makes sense to me that biological life would be a transitory phase and that eventually one might be capable of moving beyond those limitations. At that point, all your civilization needs is lots of energy, some raw meterials, and probably a purpose, be it scientific discovery, novelty, exploration...etc. That's assuming the intelligence is anything like humanity.
  - state_less 4y ago
    > and probably a purpose We can't help but dance in time, without reason, without rhyme.
  - coenhyde 4y ago
    Self replicating AI maps closer to a virus than what we consider life I think (maybe our definition is wrong). But I can't substantially articulate why. No matter how i think about it there are exceptions and examples of things we do call life that are similar to an AI. So maybe it's just my inherit bias because I am biological.
    - Parallax22 4y ago
      You are correct. AI needs biological life to produce energy and means of replications for it. That's how virus depends on cells of living organisms. It is concerning how some persons all around the internet keep pushing someone's narrative about humankind not having right on independent existence and having to be only a supplier of resources for the emergence of AI.
- fallingfrog 4y ago
  "What does a cosmic-spanning-AI want to do with its life" Reproduce, evidently, or it wouldn't be cosmic-spanning. But: of what use is intelligence if you just want to span the cosmos? Would evolution favor less intelligence over more if the goal is just to spread at maximum rate? There are many things intelligence might be good for. Adapting to an environment that is uncertain and changing would be one. The better you are biologically adapted to your niche, and the more stable your niche is, the less intelligent you need to be. Cooperation would be another. The more social your species is, the more you need to be able to coordinate with one another, which means being able to communicate. Competition with other intelligent forms might be another. Intelligence could be seen as an arms race where in order to beat out the tribe next door, you need to out-think them. Humans tick all 3 boxes. We are social animals who survive by cooperation, but in a rapidly changing world full of other intelligent animals who are always competing with us for resources. That's a recipe for intelligence. You will find extraterrestrial intelligence in situations where similar forces are at work.
  - vkou 4y ago
    If that is the recipe for intelligence, why did it take four billion years to develop on Earth? Plenty of other animals met your criteria, yet humans are the only ones who passed it.
    - polotics 4y ago
      How do you know this for sure? Species may have come and gone, the fossil record is minuscule for the billion-years timespan.
      - koheripbal 4y ago
        There has been research into that notion. ... the conclusion is that no industrialized creatures have inhabited the earth before.
        polotics 4y ago
- sva_ 4y ago
  I know you said post-biological, but I sometimes ponder if the bacterium could be that self-replicating machine, extracting into intelligence through natural selection.
  - roscoebeezie 4y ago
    Sounds almost like the Protomolecule from The Expanse series.
  - izend 4y ago
    I wonder if it is the other way around, biological life is actually post-machine/robotics.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  When considering the spread of post-biological intelligence we should also spend some time thinking about what the substrate on which it exists would look like. Even just working out a likely size for such a substrate would be informative. It might turn out that we are looking for relatively small objects in orbit around stars. Would we even stand a chance of finding a single such object? Could there be one orbiting the Sun? If so, there could be an alien civilization with trillions of individuals existing in our solar system. We'd have little chance of contacting them unless they decided to speak to us or we managed to accidentally identify them through a telescope.
  - q1w2 4y ago
    There was a research paper that described AI robots the size of a toaster traveling from star system to star system (and galaxy to galaxy). It is difficult to imagine how we would detect those - even if many orbited our sun. ...but if they exist, they likely already detected us and have relayed the fact of our existance.
- lumost 4y ago
  abiological intelligence has a much larger set of possible habitats. Given the vast possibilities of virtual spaces it's somewhat unclear to me why a post-biological intelligence would even be interested in spreading across the galaxy beyond a few observation outposts.
  - yourapostasy 4y ago
    > ...why a post-biological intelligence would even be interested in spreading across the galaxy beyond a few observation outposts. Continuity of species against some catastrophe with a solar system scale blast radius. You can keep that train of thought out to multiple solar systems, galactic arm, galaxy, supercluster, and so on.
  - jerf 4y ago
    "A" post-biological intelligence? Why would there only be one? A post-biological intelligence would want to migrate to another system so it can build its own hosting substrate and increase its own resources without fighting with someone else. (Well... at least initially.) Explanations based on "oh, they'd never want to do that" need to explain not why "a" post-biological intelligence might conceivably under some particular circumstance not want to spread out, but why all the post-biological intelligences never do. That's a much harder argument to make.
  - macintux 4y ago
    Hopefully curiosity will always be around. I personally would love to have a few billion years to explore the universe (at least, if I could find a way to skip the boring transitions between planetary systems).
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  This is all assuming, of course, that true artificial intelligence is actually achievable
  - q1w2 4y ago
    I think it's a bigger assumption to believe that true intelligence is only possible with an organic group of neurons. No other aspect of logic or simulation is dependent upon the substrate that models it.
    - macintux 4y ago
      Nonetheless we should know, and document, our assumptions.
  - throwaway743 4y ago
    I take it you're referring to artificial intelligence by human standards? Homo sapiens have only been around for ~300,000 years. Should there be an intelligent species/civilization that's been around much much longer, then it's likely they've advanced to develop true artificial intelligence.
- robonerd 4y ago
  > likely You say 'likely' but you're talking about an a priori belief. Post-biological civilization is purely speculative science-fiction at this point, there is not a single real example that we can point to yet. This might one day change if we become a post-biological civilization, but so far not a single example of such has ever been seen. Based on what we've already empirically observed, any life out there is likely to be biological because that's the only sort of life we know can exist. Furthermore, we're unlikely to ever encounter life outside our solar system anyway. We've been looking for decades and can't find anything. The techno-signatures we speculate advanced civilizations might produce remain elusive after years of searching with increasingly capable instruments. Primitive life is unlikely to ever produce conclusive signals we can detect; the best we'll get is suggestive but inconclusive atmospheric analysis which we'll be incapable of investigating properly because going there for a closer look is technologically and socially impossible. My guess is we're not alone, but we might as well be.
  - q1w2 4y ago
    When it comes to extra terrestrial life, past Earth experience cannot be reliably used as a good predictor for the future. We need to map possible future scenarios and apply logic and reasoning. This is like ants arguing that life outside their ant hill will likely have 6 or 8 legs because all the life they've seen so far have had 6 or 8 legs. Maybe we cannot be certain that AI can exist, but it's certainly reasonable to predict that AI will surpass us, given the fundamental principles involved. Much like people who predicted that the Earth was round before it was circumvented. We've only seen a fraction of what AI can do, but there is no fundamental barrier to AI cognition. Also, the only conclusion you can draw from SETI is that no one nearby is actively sending a signal too Earth. We aren't able to pickup "background" EM activity beyond a ~20 light years - which is only a handful of stars. Moreover, the notion of ET omnidirectional broadcasting so inefficient, it would be difficult to explain (thus unlikely). My guess is that we are surrounded by quiet AI observation nodes, either in elongated orbits, or extra-solar transients. Probably near impossible to detect. There doesn't seem to be any great harnessing or storage of stellar solar outputs in the galaxy, so either their efforts do not involve large amounts of energy - or they've found some other means to capture it (maybe that's what dark matter is).
- WhitneyLand 4y ago
  If Earth were directly in the path of high powered radio signals sent by EI long ago, would it all be undetectable to us if it were encrypted? It didn’t take long in our tech evolution for SSL to become ubiquitous. Surely the entire SETI program and decades of effort is not premised on aliens not having HTTPS?
  - v-erne 4y ago
    >> would it all be undetectable to us if it were encrypted? Encryption as far as i know does not deal with hiding information in background noise of communication channel. So most types of encrypted communication still can be detected (but not understood). You would need aliens that are actively hidding their communication inside of natural phenomena, which is a little bit of a stretch to me.
    - WhitneyLand 4y ago
      Not sure what you mean by “hiding information”. Encrypted data should appear no different than random noise right? I’m not an expert on this stuff at all, but it seems also unlikely we could depend on it being concentrated within a single frequency band.
      - v-erne 4y ago
        >> Encrypted data should appear no different than random noise right As far as I know its not true - usually there are statistical anomalies that gives away encrypted data. The other part is the the randomness of background noise of the universe. Can anybody give some input here ? I do not really know this but if I had to guess the universe does not generator true randomness but some signals that can be recognized as natural background signal?
        WhitneyLand 4y ago
        It seems all encryption is not theoretically guaranteed to appear random, but practically speaking it’s nearly impossible to do. For example, there’s no known way to do this against AES, which is used prominently in HTTPS. I still feel like I must be missing something, because this fact would be obvious to SETI researchers… https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/1646/is-it-possible-to-distinguish-a-securely-encrypted-ciphertext-from-random-noise https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/1646/is-it-possib...
- steelframe 4y ago
  > What does a cosmic-spanning-AI want to do with its life For those that have a tendency to exist: Survive and propagate. If something other than perpetuation of the essential forms and patterns that constitute the entity motivates it, then it will be more likely to cease to exist. Or be replaced by any variation that is more strongly motivated and capable of surviving and propagating. The anthropic principle and all that.
  - koheripbal 4y ago
    Since it would have no finite lifespan, it would not need to propagate at all.
    - steelframe 4y ago
      Assuming that "it" figured out how to eliminate any potential form of competition for energy.
      - q1w2 4y ago
        Looking at the universe and the abundance of waste solar energy being emitted, it doesn't seem like there's much competition going on for energy.
- Parallax22 4y ago
  Small replicating probes at high fraction of C sound good on paper. In reality, there is interstellar matter that can destroy your high-fraction-C small probes when colliding. Space radiation will deteriorate their condition as well. Do yourself a favor and educate yourself about space radiation. It's really bad in the interstellar space. Even your favorite AI creatures need protection from it.
  - q1w2 4y ago
    High fractions of C are not needed. AI with an unbounded lifespan can be content with very low fraction of C travel. Travel timescales need not be on human lifetime scales.
causality0 4y ago
I propose that extraterrestrial civilizations may use free-floating planets as interstellar transportation to reach, explore and colonize planetary systems. Is it just me or is that completely idiotic? It's like building a spaceship whose mass is 99.99% inert. Migration is incredibly unlikely to be a thing on interstellar scales unless some kind of magical transport is discovered. That is because, under almost any conceivable schema, it takes less energy and resources to sustain an individual for its entire life than it takes to transport that individual to another solar system. Advanced civilizations may very likely spread to other solar systems, but there's no practical reason to migrate.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > there's no practical reason to migrate Nearby star going supernova?
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Not unless you’re orbiting the supernova-ing star. It’s easier to put a big thin metal sheet between your planet and the exploding star to block the radiation, than to evacuate a billion people.
- godshatter 4y ago
  > That is because, under almost any conceivable schema, it takes less energy and resources to sustain an individual for its entire life than it takes to transport that individual to another solar system. I've thought about this in relation to colonizing other planets in our solar system let alone ones in another one. I'm of the opinion that we'd be better off building orbital habitats similar to the ISS and then iterating on those until they can house more people safely, become more and more self-sufficient, and we have the ability to put them into solar orbits and/or making them self-propelled. I always assumed we would populate earth orbit and bases on the moon first, then expand our infrastructure to be able to mine metals from asteroids and start building larger space stations outside of earth's orbit. If Mars were more Earth-like I could see pushing for that first but I think we're getting ahead of ourselves. There is solid ground we can build on, but the atmosphere is almost non-existent, the radiation is incredibly high, water is scarce, it's a long way away, and there are two gravity wells to deal with. Unless we're talking about terraforming Mars, which is an even larger project than colonizing it, we're still talking basically people living in the equivalent of tin cans. In terms of people living off of our home planet it seems to me that we could increase the population much faster in space stations and lunar bases than we would be able to do so on Mars. If I were a billionaire space tech guy, I'd be working toward O'neil cylinders instead of Mars colonization. I'm not a space scientist or an engineer, though. Or a billionaire, sadly enough.
coding123 4y ago
This strikes me as someone that wanted to invent a new acronym. :/
- Parallax22 4y ago
cletus 4y ago
This is something I've thought about on and off for awhile. For completeness, I believe that the speed of light is a hard limit (and no I don't believe in any end-runs around this like warp drives, folding space or wormholes). Secondly, I accept the laws of thermodynamic. Given this traveling between stars takes an incredibly long time. At a high percentage of c you get time dilation but that's not actually a practical travel speed for a few reasons: 1. The energy cost of accelerating to 0.99c and decelerating at the other end is extraordinarily high; 2. If you even can get to that speed, small objects in the interstellar medium become life threatening; and 3. Beyond about 0.86c gas in the interstellar medium actually creates drag making acceleration even harder. Given the reaction mass problem, it creates a big question of how you'd actually travel between stars. The more you carry the more energy you need to accelerate and decelerate it. It's likely you'd need fusion at a minimum and possibly some far-future tech (eg antimatter, black holes). So what do you do? Well, there are rogue objects not bound to any solar systems. We've seen some of these. We can't easily detect them so can only speculate on how many there are but it's likely to be a fairly large number. So what if you opportunistically wait for one of these objects to travel through the Solar System and then hitch a ride? Imagine a planetoid 100 miles in diameter. That's likely all the resources you'd need. It then becomes less of an issue that it might not reach another star for 100,000+ years because your attitude is that this is a new home. Obviously you still have to match velocities with this object but that's vastly easier to do with a bunch of people and equipment than it is with those same things plus all the same materials that are already traveling at intersellar speeds.
- zikzak 4y ago
  You still need to accelerate and decelerate and you need to alter the course of this object to match your course. But you get all the resources for almost free. How would this compare to a raft of asteroids you select in your home system to have the exact stuff you need and the accelerate it? I realize there's differences in mass here but I am asking is it material given the scope? Because you are kind of guessing what is going on with that rogue planetoid but the asteroids you could select at your leisure and also hollow out easily while you are in your home system with access to orbital factories, etc. Anyway, fun thought experiment! I totally agree that you would have to approach this as if this is your new home and you MIGHT get to a planetary system you could also colonize at some point. Generations in that idea might seem as foreign as living on a colony flotilla.
BrianOnHN 4y ago
Rant: smart-people daydreaming while bad-people manipulate the less fortunate is all I see here.
- Parallax22 4y ago
  How exactly does this research prevent you from fighting against bad people?
- koheripbal 4y ago
  You forgot to say "bah humbug" Humanity is capable of doing more than one thing at a time.
yummypaint 4y ago
It seems like there is an implicit assumption in both article and comments that interstellar travel necessarily involve living things. If a civilization is willing to put possibly millions of years into waiting and preparing for a wandering planetoid, why not launch robotic ships with the equivalent of frozen embrios onboard? The timescales involved are pesumably much longer than the life of an individual anyway, so the end result should be no different.

58 points by programd 4y ago

q1w2 4y ago

It's good to see more recognition that the likely extraterrestrial intelligences will be post-biological, but SMETI will have a hard time detecting such life because it will likely not need to move entire planets. As has been show in other research, a post-biological species can more easily send small replicating probes at high fractions of C in order to populate other star systems (and even other galaxies) within a small fraction of cosmic time (meaning it would have already likely happened in the Milky Way). Large populations need not be sent. So the question becomes the meaning of life. What does a cosmic-spanning-AI want to do with its life - and how do we detect that?

7thaccount 4y ago
Agreed. It makes sense to me that biological life would be a transitory phase and that eventually one might be capable of moving beyond those limitations. At that point, all your civilization needs is lots of energy, some raw meterials, and probably a purpose, be it scientific discovery, novelty, exploration...etc. That's assuming the intelligence is anything like humanity.
- state_less 4y ago
  > and probably a purpose We can't help but dance in time, without reason, without rhyme.
- coenhyde 4y ago
  Self replicating AI maps closer to a virus than what we consider life I think (maybe our definition is wrong). But I can't substantially articulate why. No matter how i think about it there are exceptions and examples of things we do call life that are similar to an AI. So maybe it's just my inherit bias because I am biological.
  - Parallax22 4y ago
    You are correct. AI needs biological life to produce energy and means of replications for it. That's how virus depends on cells of living organisms. It is concerning how some persons all around the internet keep pushing someone's narrative about humankind not having right on independent existence and having to be only a supplier of resources for the emergence of AI.
fallingfrog 4y ago
"What does a cosmic-spanning-AI want to do with its life" Reproduce, evidently, or it wouldn't be cosmic-spanning. But: of what use is intelligence if you just want to span the cosmos? Would evolution favor less intelligence over more if the goal is just to spread at maximum rate? There are many things intelligence might be good for. Adapting to an environment that is uncertain and changing would be one. The better you are biologically adapted to your niche, and the more stable your niche is, the less intelligent you need to be. Cooperation would be another. The more social your species is, the more you need to be able to coordinate with one another, which means being able to communicate. Competition with other intelligent forms might be another. Intelligence could be seen as an arms race where in order to beat out the tribe next door, you need to out-think them. Humans tick all 3 boxes. We are social animals who survive by cooperation, but in a rapidly changing world full of other intelligent animals who are always competing with us for resources. That's a recipe for intelligence. You will find extraterrestrial intelligence in situations where similar forces are at work.
- vkou 4y ago
  If that is the recipe for intelligence, why did it take four billion years to develop on Earth? Plenty of other animals met your criteria, yet humans are the only ones who passed it.
  - polotics 4y ago
    How do you know this for sure? Species may have come and gone, the fossil record is minuscule for the billion-years timespan.
    - koheripbal 4y ago
      There has been research into that notion. ... the conclusion is that no industrialized creatures have inhabited the earth before.
      - polotics 4y ago
sva_ 4y ago
I know you said post-biological, but I sometimes ponder if the bacterium could be that self-replicating machine, extracting into intelligence through natural selection.
- roscoebeezie 4y ago
  Sounds almost like the Protomolecule from The Expanse series.
- izend 4y ago
  I wonder if it is the other way around, biological life is actually post-machine/robotics.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
When considering the spread of post-biological intelligence we should also spend some time thinking about what the substrate on which it exists would look like. Even just working out a likely size for such a substrate would be informative. It might turn out that we are looking for relatively small objects in orbit around stars. Would we even stand a chance of finding a single such object? Could there be one orbiting the Sun? If so, there could be an alien civilization with trillions of individuals existing in our solar system. We'd have little chance of contacting them unless they decided to speak to us or we managed to accidentally identify them through a telescope.
- q1w2 4y ago
  There was a research paper that described AI robots the size of a toaster traveling from star system to star system (and galaxy to galaxy). It is difficult to imagine how we would detect those - even if many orbited our sun. ...but if they exist, they likely already detected us and have relayed the fact of our existance.
lumost 4y ago
abiological intelligence has a much larger set of possible habitats. Given the vast possibilities of virtual spaces it's somewhat unclear to me why a post-biological intelligence would even be interested in spreading across the galaxy beyond a few observation outposts.
- yourapostasy 4y ago
  > ...why a post-biological intelligence would even be interested in spreading across the galaxy beyond a few observation outposts. Continuity of species against some catastrophe with a solar system scale blast radius. You can keep that train of thought out to multiple solar systems, galactic arm, galaxy, supercluster, and so on.
- jerf 4y ago
  "A" post-biological intelligence? Why would there only be one? A post-biological intelligence would want to migrate to another system so it can build its own hosting substrate and increase its own resources without fighting with someone else. (Well... at least initially.) Explanations based on "oh, they'd never want to do that" need to explain not why "a" post-biological intelligence might conceivably under some particular circumstance not want to spread out, but why all the post-biological intelligences never do. That's a much harder argument to make.
- macintux 4y ago
  Hopefully curiosity will always be around. I personally would love to have a few billion years to explore the universe (at least, if I could find a way to skip the boring transitions between planetary systems).
HideousKojima 4y ago
This is all assuming, of course, that true artificial intelligence is actually achievable
- q1w2 4y ago
  I think it's a bigger assumption to believe that true intelligence is only possible with an organic group of neurons. No other aspect of logic or simulation is dependent upon the substrate that models it.
  - macintux 4y ago
    Nonetheless we should know, and document, our assumptions.
- throwaway743 4y ago
  I take it you're referring to artificial intelligence by human standards? Homo sapiens have only been around for ~300,000 years. Should there be an intelligent species/civilization that's been around much much longer, then it's likely they've advanced to develop true artificial intelligence.
robonerd 4y ago
> likely You say 'likely' but you're talking about an a priori belief. Post-biological civilization is purely speculative science-fiction at this point, there is not a single real example that we can point to yet. This might one day change if we become a post-biological civilization, but so far not a single example of such has ever been seen. Based on what we've already empirically observed, any life out there is likely to be biological because that's the only sort of life we know can exist. Furthermore, we're unlikely to ever encounter life outside our solar system anyway. We've been looking for decades and can't find anything. The techno-signatures we speculate advanced civilizations might produce remain elusive after years of searching with increasingly capable instruments. Primitive life is unlikely to ever produce conclusive signals we can detect; the best we'll get is suggestive but inconclusive atmospheric analysis which we'll be incapable of investigating properly because going there for a closer look is technologically and socially impossible. My guess is we're not alone, but we might as well be.
- q1w2 4y ago
  When it comes to extra terrestrial life, past Earth experience cannot be reliably used as a good predictor for the future. We need to map possible future scenarios and apply logic and reasoning. This is like ants arguing that life outside their ant hill will likely have 6 or 8 legs because all the life they've seen so far have had 6 or 8 legs. Maybe we cannot be certain that AI can exist, but it's certainly reasonable to predict that AI will surpass us, given the fundamental principles involved. Much like people who predicted that the Earth was round before it was circumvented. We've only seen a fraction of what AI can do, but there is no fundamental barrier to AI cognition. Also, the only conclusion you can draw from SETI is that no one nearby is actively sending a signal too Earth. We aren't able to pickup "background" EM activity beyond a ~20 light years - which is only a handful of stars. Moreover, the notion of ET omnidirectional broadcasting so inefficient, it would be difficult to explain (thus unlikely). My guess is that we are surrounded by quiet AI observation nodes, either in elongated orbits, or extra-solar transients. Probably near impossible to detect. There doesn't seem to be any great harnessing or storage of stellar solar outputs in the galaxy, so either their efforts do not involve large amounts of energy - or they've found some other means to capture it (maybe that's what dark matter is).
WhitneyLand 4y ago
If Earth were directly in the path of high powered radio signals sent by EI long ago, would it all be undetectable to us if it were encrypted? It didn’t take long in our tech evolution for SSL to become ubiquitous. Surely the entire SETI program and decades of effort is not premised on aliens not having HTTPS?
- v-erne 4y ago
  >> would it all be undetectable to us if it were encrypted? Encryption as far as i know does not deal with hiding information in background noise of communication channel. So most types of encrypted communication still can be detected (but not understood). You would need aliens that are actively hidding their communication inside of natural phenomena, which is a little bit of a stretch to me.
  - WhitneyLand 4y ago
    Not sure what you mean by “hiding information”. Encrypted data should appear no different than random noise right? I’m not an expert on this stuff at all, but it seems also unlikely we could depend on it being concentrated within a single frequency band.
    - v-erne 4y ago
      >> Encrypted data should appear no different than random noise right As far as I know its not true - usually there are statistical anomalies that gives away encrypted data. The other part is the the randomness of background noise of the universe. Can anybody give some input here ? I do not really know this but if I had to guess the universe does not generator true randomness but some signals that can be recognized as natural background signal?
      - WhitneyLand 4y ago
        It seems all encryption is not theoretically guaranteed to appear random, but practically speaking it’s nearly impossible to do. For example, there’s no known way to do this against AES, which is used prominently in HTTPS. I still feel like I must be missing something, because this fact would be obvious to SETI researchers… https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/1646/is-it-possible-to-distinguish-a-securely-encrypted-ciphertext-from-random-noise https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/1646/is-it-possib...
steelframe 4y ago
> What does a cosmic-spanning-AI want to do with its life For those that have a tendency to exist: Survive and propagate. If something other than perpetuation of the essential forms and patterns that constitute the entity motivates it, then it will be more likely to cease to exist. Or be replaced by any variation that is more strongly motivated and capable of surviving and propagating. The anthropic principle and all that.
- koheripbal 4y ago
  Since it would have no finite lifespan, it would not need to propagate at all.
  - steelframe 4y ago
    Assuming that "it" figured out how to eliminate any potential form of competition for energy.
    - q1w2 4y ago
      Looking at the universe and the abundance of waste solar energy being emitted, it doesn't seem like there's much competition going on for energy.
Parallax22 4y ago
Small replicating probes at high fraction of C sound good on paper. In reality, there is interstellar matter that can destroy your high-fraction-C small probes when colliding. Space radiation will deteriorate their condition as well. Do yourself a favor and educate yourself about space radiation. It's really bad in the interstellar space. Even your favorite AI creatures need protection from it.
- q1w2 4y ago
  High fractions of C are not needed. AI with an unbounded lifespan can be content with very low fraction of C travel. Travel timescales need not be on human lifetime scales.

causality0 4y ago

I propose that extraterrestrial civilizations may use free-floating planets as interstellar transportation to reach, explore and colonize planetary systems. Is it just me or is that completely idiotic? It's like building a spaceship whose mass is 99.99% inert. Migration is incredibly unlikely to be a thing on interstellar scales unless some kind of magical transport is discovered. That is because, under almost any conceivable schema, it takes less energy and resources to sustain an individual for its entire life than it takes to transport that individual to another solar system. Advanced civilizations may very likely spread to other solar systems, but there's no practical reason to migrate.

ceejayoz 4y ago
> there's no practical reason to migrate Nearby star going supernova?
- ben_w 4y ago
  Not unless you’re orbiting the supernova-ing star. It’s easier to put a big thin metal sheet between your planet and the exploding star to block the radiation, than to evacuate a billion people.
godshatter 4y ago
> That is because, under almost any conceivable schema, it takes less energy and resources to sustain an individual for its entire life than it takes to transport that individual to another solar system. I've thought about this in relation to colonizing other planets in our solar system let alone ones in another one. I'm of the opinion that we'd be better off building orbital habitats similar to the ISS and then iterating on those until they can house more people safely, become more and more self-sufficient, and we have the ability to put them into solar orbits and/or making them self-propelled. I always assumed we would populate earth orbit and bases on the moon first, then expand our infrastructure to be able to mine metals from asteroids and start building larger space stations outside of earth's orbit. If Mars were more Earth-like I could see pushing for that first but I think we're getting ahead of ourselves. There is solid ground we can build on, but the atmosphere is almost non-existent, the radiation is incredibly high, water is scarce, it's a long way away, and there are two gravity wells to deal with. Unless we're talking about terraforming Mars, which is an even larger project than colonizing it, we're still talking basically people living in the equivalent of tin cans. In terms of people living off of our home planet it seems to me that we could increase the population much faster in space stations and lunar bases than we would be able to do so on Mars. If I were a billionaire space tech guy, I'd be working toward O'neil cylinders instead of Mars colonization. I'm not a space scientist or an engineer, though. Or a billionaire, sadly enough.

coding123 4y ago

This strikes me as someone that wanted to invent a new acronym. :/

Parallax22 4y ago

cletus 4y ago

This is something I've thought about on and off for awhile. For completeness, I believe that the speed of light is a hard limit (and no I don't believe in any end-runs around this like warp drives, folding space or wormholes). Secondly, I accept the laws of thermodynamic. Given this traveling between stars takes an incredibly long time. At a high percentage of c you get time dilation but that's not actually a practical travel speed for a few reasons: 1. The energy cost of accelerating to 0.99c and decelerating at the other end is extraordinarily high; 2. If you even can get to that speed, small objects in the interstellar medium become life threatening; and 3. Beyond about 0.86c gas in the interstellar medium actually creates drag making acceleration even harder. Given the reaction mass problem, it creates a big question of how you'd actually travel between stars. The more you carry the more energy you need to accelerate and decelerate it. It's likely you'd need fusion at a minimum and possibly some far-future tech (eg antimatter, black holes). So what do you do? Well, there are rogue objects not bound to any solar systems. We've seen some of these. We can't easily detect them so can only speculate on how many there are but it's likely to be a fairly large number. So what if you opportunistically wait for one of these objects to travel through the Solar System and then hitch a ride? Imagine a planetoid 100 miles in diameter. That's likely all the resources you'd need. It then becomes less of an issue that it might not reach another star for 100,000+ years because your attitude is that this is a new home. Obviously you still have to match velocities with this object but that's vastly easier to do with a bunch of people and equipment than it is with those same things plus all the same materials that are already traveling at intersellar speeds.

zikzak 4y ago
You still need to accelerate and decelerate and you need to alter the course of this object to match your course. But you get all the resources for almost free. How would this compare to a raft of asteroids you select in your home system to have the exact stuff you need and the accelerate it? I realize there's differences in mass here but I am asking is it material given the scope? Because you are kind of guessing what is going on with that rogue planetoid but the asteroids you could select at your leisure and also hollow out easily while you are in your home system with access to orbital factories, etc. Anyway, fun thought experiment! I totally agree that you would have to approach this as if this is your new home and you MIGHT get to a planetary system you could also colonize at some point. Generations in that idea might seem as foreign as living on a colony flotilla.

BrianOnHN 4y ago

Rant: smart-people daydreaming while bad-people manipulate the less fortunate is all I see here.

Parallax22 4y ago
How exactly does this research prevent you from fighting against bad people?
koheripbal 4y ago
You forgot to say "bah humbug" Humanity is capable of doing more than one thing at a time.

yummypaint 4y ago

It seems like there is an implicit assumption in both article and comments that interstellar travel necessarily involve living things. If a civilization is willing to put possibly millions of years into waiting and preparing for a wandering planetoid, why not launch robotic ships with the equivalent of frozen embrios onboard? The timescales involved are pesumably much longer than the life of an individual anyway, so the end result should be no different.