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I think that the speed of light limitation is insurmountable. Advanced civilizations become insular and stay close in space to themselves to minimize communica

I think that the speed of light limitation is insurmountable. Advanced civilizations become insular and stay close in space to themselves to minimize communication latency. They all become addicted to Internets and never go exploring very far, if at all.

XorNot 4y ago
The problem is self-replicating technological mechanisms undermine this hypothesis. A civilization which is being efficient, and as such Matroska brain's it's local star would still find value in launching Von Neumann explorer probes, since that's practically zero-cost at that resource-scale but extremely high reward: without reconnaissance you can't know if you should defend yourself or not. Also even if it takes millions of years, having your autonomous machines cut up the local stellar bodies and ship materials back to you is an obvious move. You're immortal, so who cares how long it takes.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > self-replicating technological mechanisms undermine this hypothesis The problem is observed reality contradicts this hypothesis, so far there are no observed techno-signatures. Some call this a paradox because they're very attracted to their hypothesis, but it's not a paradox if the explanation for not seeing anything is there being nothing to see. I expect there to be gnomes in my garden, but I don't see any gnomes in my garden. Is that a paradox? Maybe I'm just wrong about gnomes. As for recon probes, maybe. But we wouldn't see them would we? If a recon probe is looking for threats to the civilization that created it, it wouldn't do to have the recon probe seen. Recon is about seeing while not being seen. Disassembling other star systems? It's a neat idea, but there's no evidence for it. Maybe it's not such an obvious idea to the sort of civilization that might be capable of it and it only seems obvious to primitive apes who can't do it anyway. Or maybe there are no such capable civilizations in our neighborhood at all.

XorNot 4y ago

The problem is self-replicating technological mechanisms undermine this hypothesis. A civilization which is being efficient, and as such Matroska brain's it's local star would still find value in launching Von Neumann explorer probes, since that's practically zero-cost at that resource-scale but extremely high reward: without reconnaissance you can't know if you should defend yourself or not. Also even if it takes millions of years, having your autonomous machines cut up the local stellar bodies and ship materials back to you is an obvious move. You're immortal, so who cares how long it takes.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
> self-replicating technological mechanisms undermine this hypothesis The problem is observed reality contradicts this hypothesis, so far there are no observed techno-signatures. Some call this a paradox because they're very attracted to their hypothesis, but it's not a paradox if the explanation for not seeing anything is there being nothing to see. I expect there to be gnomes in my garden, but I don't see any gnomes in my garden. Is that a paradox? Maybe I'm just wrong about gnomes. As for recon probes, maybe. But we wouldn't see them would we? If a recon probe is looking for threats to the civilization that created it, it wouldn't do to have the recon probe seen. Recon is about seeing while not being seen. Disassembling other star systems? It's a neat idea, but there's no evidence for it. Maybe it's not such an obvious idea to the sort of civilization that might be capable of it and it only seems obvious to primitive apes who can't do it anyway. Or maybe there are no such capable civilizations in our neighborhood at all.