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Grabby Aliens: A Resolution to the Fermi Paradox

• rpastuszak 4y ago
  Relevant episode of Arthur Isaac’s podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/science-futurism-with-isaac-arthur/id1224204194?i=1000581031527 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/science-futurism-with-...
  • rpastuszak 4y ago
    Edit: Isaac Arthur's not Arthur Isaac's :)
• causi 4y ago
  This is full of ridiculous assumptions. Probably the worst one is the idea that a sapient species that's capable of colonizing space and maintains that ability and attitude for such a long term that other sapient species can arise won't colonize every available star before any other species can do so. Thousands of species occupying separate yet touching volumes of space is mind-bogglingly unlikely.
  • codeflo 4y ago
    I think that’s attacking the conclusion, not the assumptions. Have you put numbers on what you consider “mind-bogglingly unlikely” and done the math on that, given the distances involved? The authors supposedly have, and I’m no expert, but I don’t find the argument completely ridiculous. The universe isn’t that old compared to its size; I think it’s plausible for two unlikely events to have happened without their causal cones having intersected yet.
  • thagsimmons 4y ago
    This is too simplistic a critique. One species colonizing everything is perfectly compatible with the model in the broad. The complication is that we ourselves exist, are not colonized, and can look out into space and don't see any alien activity. Hanson starts from this anthropic fact and tries to reason about what we might be expected to see if a) there are "grabby" species out there, and b) we're early enough to witness the land grab. I have problems with the details of the model, but I think it's both a fruitful and interesting attempt to think about things.
  • mach1ne 4y ago
    Reward-seeking intelligences might have innate features which prevent exponential expansion though and instead result in expansion-contraction loop. For example, for every new colony, the probability that any single colony will begin a civil war may increase. Or the probability that a supervirus will be manifested somewhere and then spread along the galactic population of that species. Basically, if the species are uniform in some manner, the more colonies they have the larger the probability that some colony will spawn an event which utilizes their uniformity to spread and destroy most of the galactic population of that species. Obviously it's not a guarantee, but I believe it is a viable theory as to why the world described in the article may be possible.
    • codeflo 4y ago
      I don’t think that matters much for the distances we talk about. Any such disruption — even if it’s a new philosophy or religion that makes the colonies stop spreading — would only travel at the speed of light, which means that it would take a long time to reach the frontier of a civilization that expands at nearly light speed.
• dingaling 4y ago
  > While the current date is 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, the average star will last over five trillion years. That's mostly true but also not quite. The longest-lived main sequence star will have a lifetime of about 500 billion years, the shortest just a million. The only stars that are likely to live into the trillions are red dwarves, which are very common but which have very small habitable zones due to their feeble output.
  • xwdv 4y ago
    Even so, in the universe’s trillionth year there should be some sort of life thriving in the habitable zones of some red dwarves somewhere.
• JakeWesorick 4y ago
  This is a really interesting topic, but I feel like it's ok to say "we don't know". The highlighted claim > "Advanced aliens really are out there, and we have enough data to say roughly where they are in space and time, and when we will see or meet them." is not proven. It's just some really smart people attempting to reach a conclusion I'm not sure is within reach. We just don't know.
  • fsloth 4y ago
    I suppose if we take the philosophical position of Bayesian statistics, where even one sample is sufficient basis for estimating results from some sane priori model, I would say this topic is within reach of some sane postulation. Some factors we can take into account: 1. Life can evolve into us. Therefore life on other planets has p>0 to evolve agglomerations of matter we would call "alien civilization" 2. Evolution seems to be driven through external constraints, and seems to generate similar structures to solve similar problems. Hence it's not insane to postulate organelles and their function are a particular energy minima to a complex set of constraints - ie. evolution on any earth like planet might reach similar patterns as earth life. 3. Neurological function seems to be driven by laws of mathematical dynamics up to a point - if it's math, we will see it everywhere in the universe. What sort of math - I suppose nobody completely understands yet. 4. I use the above to postulate that familiar modes of existence and familiar neurological function can emerge anywhere in the universe 5. If a species is to survive, it needs to have innate drive to do so. Unless species innate drive to survive perishes, an intelligent species will realize it's chances of survival are better if it is not limited to one planet. Then, one solar system and so on. Therefore we can postulate a "natural tendency" to start interstellar expansion. 6. Humans have already launched an interstellar space craft (Voyager). Therefore p>0 that life can evolve to develop vehicles that exceeds the escape velocity form their home star Or something like that. The thing is, I don't understand the problem well enough to know if it's impossible to probe by statistics or not. I just know I'm not smart enough to solve the matter - when I did a course on Bayesian statistics the thing that left me astounded time and again was that one could create sane and accurate models from incredibly thin amount of data if one just had a good enough grasp of some of the factors at play.
    • 4y ago
• b800h 4y ago
  This feels like circular logic to me. "We are early because later on the universe will have been colonised", but we don't admit "We are not later alien members of a grabby species because... ?" By the logic in this argument, it should be "fishy" that we're not aliens living at a later stage of the universe, so I don't think this theory is complete. The expansion model seems to work though.
• deleted 4y ago
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• baxtr 4y ago
  I was playing EA NHL a lot when I was younger. What I noticed was that there were more than average goals in the last minutes of the game than in the earlier minutes of the same game. I always wondered if this was due to a badly implemented stochastic model. Since if the average goals per game was lets 5 and the score was 2:2 the likelihood of another goal would increase in the last minutes. This is how this argument feels as well. So first they say we are unlikely early. But if you consider that we are special (“grabby”) then that’s ok. Somehow like saying there would be another US like country in Europe if the Mayans were developing faster.
  • ajuc 4y ago
    > So first they say we are unlikely early. But if you consider that we are special (“grabby”) then that’s ok. I don't think that's their reasoning. I think they say: 1. once grabby civilization appear - it decreases likelihood of other civilizations appearing 2. so actually weighting by probability we're not early - we're average, because the probability of appearing late is almost 0 This kind of backward probabilistic reasoning always felt like cheating to me, especially when it's not only used to validate our models but to create them. As for NHL I don't know, but in football (soccer) 75% of goals are scored in first and last 5 minutes of both halves, and the single most likely period to score goals in is the final 5 minutes of the last half. So it was maybe realistic :)
    • baxtr 4y ago
      Yeah maybe it’s realistic in hockey too :) Re the article: yes, I understand their reasoning. But isn’t it like saying: if we were to become a greedy civilization THEN in the future we would think how good that we were early…
  • oneoff786 4y ago
    Isn’t it because teams make riskier places to min max offense vs defense near the end of the game?
    • baxtr 4y ago
• fullstackchris 4y ago
  Until we have just one datapoint from another civilization or planet (just one!) every single statement surrounding Fermi paradox stuff can't be proven, for example: - Life has to go through "hard steps" to get to civilization - (I really hate this one at a personal level for multiple reasons) assuming alien civilizations will use Dyson spheres - There exists some sort of 'great filter' that prevents civilizations from expanding For each of these, we have absolutely no data to compare to in order to support or refute these statesments.
  • ramblerman 4y ago
    To be fair the fermi paradox itself doesn't make any conclusions and only relies on the drake equation. Saying "if the drake equation holds up, then why is it so quiet in the universe?" As soon as we have one data point from another civilization, the paradox automatically disappears. It's only in the absence that we can ask the question, and speculate.
  • bayesian_horse 4y ago
    There's no data but to the best of our scientific knowledge, this is how the universe works. Life is hard. We know that because it took billions of years from the first self-replicating molecules to us. We also know there are things happening in our solar system that wiped us out. We know we could have wiped our species out ourselves. The "great filter" is one theory to explain why on the one hand we should be observing other civilizations, but we don't. Also they don't need to use Dyson Spheres exactly. But before they start expanding in earnest, they would have a measurable effect on the emissions coming from their star, as perceived from other stars.
    • bayesian_horse 4y ago
      I should have written "could have wiped us out"...
• Archelaos 4y ago
  The whole reasoning seems to boil down to one of the standard answers to the Fermi paradox: We did not encounter any alians, because we are in our stellar neighbourhood either the first or anyone else is hiding. To "explain" that, we need to reason about the Drake equation, or rather a modification of it, since the original Drake equation did not include the possibility that an alian species colonizes other solar systems. In our context the question is at what time in the history of our galaxy colonization might start (if ever) or might have started and what the typical expansion rate is. Something like the Grabby Aliens simulation can only teach us how such a presumed colonization might proceed roughly under the most simplified[1] model. But it seems to tells us next to nothing about the parameters to fill into the (modified) Drake equation to solve the Fermi paradox. -- Or did I miss something? [1] I do not think that the simplifications are problematic, as long as one is aware of them. It is rather the opposite: Running a simulation with a simplified model helps us to observe some basic principles at work. Later we might refine and enrich our models and simulations. To use an analogy: If we want to study the movement of objects under the influence of the Earth's gravity, we should start with cannonballs and not with feathers.
  • api 4y ago
    The problem with the dark forest / everyone is hiding explanation is that you can't hide. For over a billion years Earth has been broadcasting a very powerful signal screaming "likely biosphere here" in the form of its albedo spectrum. It's a wet, warm planet that for almost two billion years has had a heavily oxidizing atmosphere. There are few natural explanations for that that don't involve life, since it strongly implies that something is doing work to maintain an energy differential. If there are "reaper" aliens around in any form, it would be logical for them to start firing relativistic kinetic weapons at any candidate biosphere immediately. Why wait for intelligence to even get a foothold? Just whack any potential competitor while it's nothing but goop and creepy crawlies. So if there are ancient powerful hostile or "grabby" aliens around, we should not be here. It's a pretty powerful argument for one of: (1) We are very early. (2) Intelligent complex life is extremely rare, occurring less often than e.g. once per galaxy per ten billion years. (A bit different from being very early since it implies we might never find another even after billions of years.) (3) Something weird is going on, e.g. our solar system is being kept as a wildlife preserve and/or there is a "prime directive" or something. (4) Something even weirder is going on, which explodes into a long tail of possibilities. Maybe we are wrong about our basic cosmology. Maybe continued advancement in intelligence leads places very different from space flight such as traversing dimensions or converting oneself into some more exotic form invisible to us (like the "ascension" trope in sci-fi). ... and so on.
• rendall 4y ago
  My 2 favorite Fermi Paradox resolutions: 1 - Given that we are only 14B years into a many-trillion-year stretch, our existence now is so unlikely that it's possible that we actually are the first. Something has to be first. 2 - Aliens are everywhere, but we cannot perceive them for reasons we would find disturbing. Largely, for the same sort of reasons that cave fish cannot see light or that most species are apparently unaware of humans in their environment. Essentially, that there is no evolutionary reason for humans to perceive them. As for grabby aliens... meh. I don't find it convincing as a resolution. It contains too many unexamined assumptions, quite like the simulation theory.
  • dsr_ 4y ago
    We don't even have to be first-first, just among the first few thousand and still outside the light cones of any of the others.
  • DanielBMarkham 4y ago
    I'm betting on #2. We only have our own planet to look at, but if we could somehow rank all of the species on the planet according to intelligence, just jumping a couple of levels up or down you enter a completely different world of existence. Or as I like to quip, somewhere in the middle of the ocean there's an island. On that island is an ant hill, and there's an ant at the top of it wondering: Where are all of the other ants? I don't really find it disturbing, though. Our "best practice" to interact with other species is to try to leave them alone and watch them enjoy and live in their habitat. Makes sense that's what we're doing for the alien overlords, and I'm okay with that. Assuming aliens are around somewhere and we're using our own planet to reason by analogy, the only other two alternatives are they're going to subjugate/destroy us or they're going to eat us. Those alternatives are not so fun. I find it interesting that so many humans assume that since we can chat with one another, aliens somehow are supposed to show up and chat with us. It's all about us. If such a thing happened, the history of massively-different cultures interacting on Earth is not a positive one. Given the choices, I'm good.
    • rendall 4y ago
      It's nice that someone else gets #2. I often get bogged down with people refuting the notion by pointing out that we are not cave fish and are nothing like cave fish. That we have evolved to perceive everything that can possibly threaten us and that includes aliens.
• c7b 4y ago
  One thing I don't understand about the 'quiet' aliens mentioned in the article - I thought pretty much any lifeform worthy of that name (ie using/converting some form of energy) would necessarily give off some hints of their existence eg through patterns in infrared radiation (don't recall the exact argument). I remember this as a refutation of one possible resolution to Fermi's paradox (what if intelligent species exist but shield their existence from us - apparently the answer is that they couldn't, not completely at least). So in that case, any species (even before reaching any meaningful 'intelligent' phase) would create a bubble of 'noise' expanding at the speed of light.
  • adastra22 4y ago
    The word you are looking for is 'technosignature', which is observable phenomenon which can only reasonably be explained by the presence of a technological civilization. For example, any starship moving between solar systems at a significant percent of the speed of light is going to leave a detectable wake in the interstellar medium. Whatever mechanism is used to propel the starship is also going to radiate heat, which will be easier to detect by orders of magnitude. There is absolutely no natural explanation for little black-body radiators zipping in straight lines between nearby stars at a significant percent of the speed of light. The most obvious, and clear technosignature is the Dyson sphere. There are hundreds of billions of observable stars in our galaxy alone, and hundreds of billions of galaxies out there, every one of them full of bright stars. All those stars are pretty to look at, but it's the stellar equivalent of a giant oil well fire. All that negative entropy burning away, accomplishing absolutely nothing except for heating the universe by a few pico-Kelvin. It's a goddamn cosmic waste, pissing away the energy reserves necessary to support uncountable numbers of sentient being every second of every day that goes by. We could capture that light with a Dyson sphere, with technology that we could make in the next 1000 years, conservatively, and quite possibly sooner. In doing so we'd capture the full output of the Sun, getting enough free energy to support hundreds of trillions of human beings throughout the solar system. We could then move through the stellar night, turning every neighboring star system into an abundant garden supporting quintillions of human beings. We could do this even assuming no new technology beyond the things we know how to build right now in the early 21st century. There's nothing special about us, and a 1,000 years is a cosmic blink in the eye. So if we have this capability since achieving spaceflight, then so would anyone else out there. So where are they? Where are the great swaths of star systems turned infrared by Dyson black body radiation?
• benevol 4y ago
  For those of you who want to know what's currently going on, here are the names of the main publicly known contactees (people on Earth who publicly report that/how they maintain some form of contact to extra-terrestrials): - Alex Collier - Elena Danaan - Marina Jacobi - Dr. Michael Salla (no known direct contact, but excellent analyzing/reporting) You'll want to check out their YT/rumble channels, websites, books (especially Elena Danaan's last 2-3).
  • the_af 4y ago
    I don't understand the relevance. All of the people you mention are the usual nutjobs/UFOlogist/new age scam artists. Nothing to do with the actual search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
    • benevol 4y ago
      There's no need to insult others. You'll understand over time.
• dsign 4y ago
  My favorite solution to the Fermi Paradox is that star-shaped gravity wells are difficult neighborhoods for anything that needs to exchange huge amounts of data. Think about it: electromagnetic data-beans degrade with distance, so one must use relays. Relays in a gravity well must keep moving in orbits. And, well, stars are noisy and hot. With sufficient technology, a civilization is more interested in reliable data-transmissions and compute, which can be generally easier to achieve in interstellar space (which also happens to have enough "cold" matter in the form of wandering planets and planetoids). There can be a huge number of civilizations gravitating around a star, just as we do. But any bigger civilization, bigger than their mother star, may soon find the interstellar space more comfy and remain there, beaming directional messages (and consciousness units, a.k.a souls) between cold outposts in interstellar space.
  • oneoff786 4y ago
    But why don’t they have some dude that checks out galaxies because he can?
    • throwaway4aday 4y ago
      I would assume they still have some form of laws and regulations some subset of which would apply to wantonly contacting primitive societies.
  • adrianN 4y ago
    But what's their energy source?
    • layer8 4y ago
      Vacuum energy, obviously. ;)
      • pmontra 4y ago
        Yeah, asking those questions is inevitable but what answer would a Newton give back in the day if asked how to go to the moon? It's our turn now and anything would go, from fusion to antimatter, from dark matter to dark energy. Vacuum energy, I'm sure there is at least a scifi story about it as energy source. Edit: that was easy, the Zero Point Module in Stargate SG9 https://en.stargatewiki.com/index.php/Zero_Point_Module https://en.stargatewiki.com/index.php/Zero_Point_Module
• newaccount2021 4y ago
  My solution is that alien cultures realize there isn't any point to deep space exploration: 1. They need energy and any suitable source will do 2. Space is mostly the same. Why explore another star's gas giant when they have their own? 3. They just like hanging out in their Matrix...which is what they would be doing if they traveled twenty light years So why go to the trouble of changing your location?
  • qayxc 4y ago
    There's an even simpler one: if you leave your stellar neighbourhood, you're creating unreachable isolated islands, not "galactic empires". The whole notion of "expansion" is such a weird 19th century concept that just doesn't seem to go away. Space isn't the Earth, other star systems aren't unexplored continents or islands in the ocean - they're islands in spacetime. I've yet to be presented with a rational explanation as to how any civilisation would be able to a) stay stable in terms of biology, culture and technology over geological time scales and b) have any means of expanding itself over distances that make communication practically useless (e.g. even at "just" 25 light year distance, two-way communication would take 50 years) and c) are somehow advanced enough for interstellar travel and presumably efficient terraforming or genetic modification yet unable to control population growth and resource utilisation...
    • throwaway4aday 4y ago
      Since we haven't discovered everything there is to know about physics it is still rational to propose that control of the gravitational force is possible given some further discovery. This could lead to faster than light travel which negates the list of barriers you've given.
      • qayxc 4y ago
        FTL would defeat causality and even "just" controlling gravity would be basically equivalent to god-like powers (it would mean assuming direct control over spacetime itself). Controlling gravity would negate the need for colonisation entirely - it would provide basically limitless power plus full control over your host star's lifetime. Aside from that, almost all papers on the topic including this one focus on subluminal space travel. Sure, once you incorporate technology that goes beyond your current understanding of the universe, many counterpoints go out the window, but this level of technology only serves as an argument against the need for expansion in the first place (with the exception of "because they can"). FTL would be fantastic for research and science expeditions, but expansion into random nearby star systems would be even more pointless, since such civilisation would be able to pick exact/close to exact matches to their home world as candidates for settlement. Such worlds could then be thousands of lightyears apart, as neither communication nor travel would pose a problem. This would also easily explain the lack of (radio-) signals, as exchanging information would be carried out via FTL travel, not radio waves. Why would a civilisation capable of FTL choose to go through the trouble of terraforming or building megastructures around random stars? Wouldn't they rather choose to harness the power of black holes then? A planetary mass BH could power a civilisation for trillions of years for example.
• likeabbas 4y ago
  Interesting post on the day the second DNI report on UAPs is supposed to come out
• kypro 4y ago
  There's something I intuitively dislike about the early human hypothesis to the Fermi paradox. It seems too much like geocentric Earth hypothesis or the long line of hypotheses which suggest us humans are special in some way. We rarely are. I find the Fermi paradox fascinating though because non of the proposed answers satisfy me. These days I tend to think it's likely there are few compounding factors instead of any one single factor. I quite like the idea that intelligent life probably is fairly rare (so maybe we are quite early) and that the intelligent life that does evolve is fairly likely to either destroy itself or to simply lose interest in the analogue world with time. Personally I think if there is intelligent life out there most of it is probably living in digital worlds because why use energy exploring and explaining this universe when you can just create your own? On the less likely but interesting side of things I also wonder if it suggests simulation sometimes. If everything points to us being quite uncommon then at some point it becomes reasonable to ask if it's even a question of probability but instead perhaps one of intention. If you see 10 dice on a table and all are showing a 6 on the face, you probably wouldn't think, "oh, how unlikely", but instead assume it was intended. But then again simulation theory is a good answer to all hard questions so I'm not that keen on it either. I just think it's most compelling in the context of the Fermi paradox and our seemingly fine-tuned universe.
  • gitfan86 4y ago
    I believe that the earth centric and human centric view is the problem with the Fermi paradox. Why do we assume that a civilization more advanced than us would have desires towards colonization and contact with lesser lifeforms? It would be like an ant colony assuming there are no more advanced lifeforms because a more advanced lifeform would have destroyed their colony or contacted them via pheromones
    • bayesian_horse 4y ago
      With the "grabby aliens" there is only the assumption that a portion of civilizations become grabby. We don't have good reasons to believe that portion to be zero. But even a very small chance leads to all the other predictions, like that we are early and so on. It's also not so much about active contact than that you could observe technological signatures from a certain distance.
• jade-cat 4y ago
  In both a universe with few "grabby" civilizations, and a universe with many non-grabby civilizations there would be countless lifeforms, just more or less diversely distributed among civilizations. In either of these universes us here being as early as we are is equally "suspect". Should I assume humans will soon achieve immortality and stop breeding (or just go extinct) just because it makes me less of an outlier? Cause that seems to lead to the exact opposite conclusions, just by putting the delineation point at an individual rather than a civilization. "Furthermore, we should believe that loud aliens exist, as that’s our most robust explanation for why humans have appeared so early in the history of the universe." The most robust explanation for humans appearing so early is that yeah, it seems we did appear early, someone had to - since it doesn't assume an entire model of intergalactic civilizations.
• MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  Space is really big, and radio emissions are really weak. The strongest isotropic radio emissions from Earth (e.g. high power TV broadcasts) would be indistinguishable from background radiation at only a light year or two away. One study [0] suggests that directed radio emissions an order of magnitude more powerful than the most powerful radio emitters on Earth could be detectable at ~100 light years (1/1000 the diameter of the Milky Way), but our detector would have to be perfectly aligned with the transmission at the exact time it reaches Earth. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0610377.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0610377.pdf
  • kypro 4y ago
    This still doesn't explain why we don't see evidence of life though, just why finding evidence of alien life via eavesdropping on extra-terrestrial radio emissions would be unlikely. If the galaxy really was full of intelligent life it's likely we would see evidence of it in some form. For one, it seems probable that any expansionist intelligent life in our galaxy would eventually notice our Earth is likely to be an interesting place. Even if they didn't visit us personally it seems strange they wouldn't send a simple probe or try to make their presence known to us in one way or another. But to your point, perhaps intelligent life is quite common, it's just rare for it to be expansionist - at least beyond it's own solar system. In which case yeah, there could be a lot of Earth-like civilisations out there, but we'd be unlikely to see evidence for them.
    • FredPret 4y ago
      Sending a probe takes very, very long, and is just as expensive, so it seems even less likely to arrive than a radio signal. And we might not even notice either one if it gets here.
    • pmoriarty 4y ago
      "it seems strange they wouldn't send a simple probe or try to make their presence known to us in one way or another" Alien behavior is likely to seem strange to humans. It would be much more surprising if they did what we expected them to do.
• LatteLazy 4y ago
  The Fermi Paradox seems to rely on other civilised aliens being detectable. But why would they be? Unless they're emitting a LOT of radio waves (and we've switched mostly to streaming not broadcast) OR doing some giga engineering, what would we see that we're currently not seeing? Maybe in 50 years, assuming we have the telescopes to look for cities on extra-solar planets, we will find them everywhere. But right now, the absence of either high powered radio or Dyson spheres does not mean the absence of civilisation.
• nathias 4y ago
  Very well presented. As for the argument I find it very convincing, it seems the best answer to the Fermi Paradox, much like the anthropic principle is to the obverse problem of the universe being very hospitable to life. None of the comments here address any serious issues with the argument.
• drbig 4y ago
  The uninteresting solution is that when we compare humans to tapeworms - there is such a complexity gap that no amount of technology will ever enable a human to have "a meaningful conversation" with a tapeworm... That one can only logically assume there are beings to which we in turn are "tapeworm complexity" (also a thought: maybe we all live right now in such a higher being?) and hence will never be able to perceive them for what they are. The more interesting space (sorry) is "at a level comprehensible to us" - to which I'd say "space is vast and the universe is young". I highly doubt our presence is at all visible even from the closest star system.
  • snikeris 4y ago
    > That one can only logically assume there are beings to which we in turn are "tapeworm complexity" (also a thought: maybe we all live right now in such a higher being?) and hence will never be able to perceive them for what they are. Indeed. Does an ant know that it exists as part of a larger organism? Perhaps we are part of a larger organism, at which scale, our individual human lives are of tapeworm complexity.
  • thriftwy 4y ago
    I don't think so. It seems at this point that humans can understand most of the fundamental laws governing our universe, and perhaps to harness them to eventually have star system-level impact. I'm not sure how much smarter are you really going to be. Especially given the social nature of humans which makes us able to compensate for each other's shortcomings.
    • drbig 4y ago
      I fundamentally disagree on both points. I'm of the belief that understanding is only ever "less wrong", and can only be asymptotic to "total knowledge". Thus current "understand most" is really (and ever going to be) "understand very very little" - there's always infinitely more to be less wrong about; Also as an example: electricity - our brains wouldn't work without it, yet it took us very long to understand the principles enough to be able to do anything useful with electricity; What about consciousness - we can't even seem to agree on a single definition much less "understand it" - perhaps we're still missing something as "big" and as much "part of us" as electricity? This is not about being smarter as it is about fundamentally different orders of magnitude of complexity. Getting a whole swimming pool full of tapeworms will not make them any more human - and in the same sense a whole planet of humans won't make them any closer to more complex beings (whatever they may be). As I said, this solution is uninteresting because by definition bacteria/tapeworms/humans can't comprehend "up". And yes, evolution, understanding of the universe and technology may as well bring us to the point when _they_ understand - but by that point, to us now, _they_ won't be human (`bacteria < tapeworms < humans now < next_order_beings`).
• Garvi 4y ago
  I did some thinking on the Fermi paradox some time ago. I arrived at the following theory(I am probably not the first one), using these assumptions: - speed of light(causality) cannot be practically broken / cheated - current stasis technology theorizing is over-optimistic - brain-computer interfaces are possible - computational power/speed will continue to increase I am assuming that some time in the future, a human will be able to process information 1000x faster than one is able to today, using brain augmentations anr/or brain-computer chip interfaces. This does effectively slow down our perception of time by a factor of 1000x (simplifying and ignoring inefficiencies of course). So if I lived in that time, and got diagnosed with a terminal disease and 1 year to live, I would spend my last year in VR, perceiving it as 1000 years. Continuing that thought, I might spend my entire life inside VR, living a thousand lifetimes before my biological body gives in. The galaxy might be full of life, but at a certain point in their development, they turn inwards, because it gives much bigger rewards (the first instinct of any life form is to survive for as long as possible). The biggest flaw I find in my theory is the assumption they couldn't just VR on spaceships while they're exploring the galaxy anyway.
  • j_m_b 4y ago
    > The biggest flaw I find in my theory is the assumption they couldn't just VR on spaceships while they're exploring the galaxy anyway. Sounds a lot like the Bobs in the Bobiverse
  • pmontra 4y ago
    Brain computer interfaces could be 1000 times faster than skin/eye/ear to brain but the speed of the brain is going to stay the same, right? No accelerated time, at least not much of it. Example: if you accelerate audio 1000 times you won't be able to understand it. Two times? OK, with some training. 1000 times faster video? It's a blur. 10 times? Maybe. Your reaction times to give inputs? The usual tens or hundreds of seconds.
    • Garvi 4y ago
      I am assuming the "understanding" part would be accelerated as well. Either by enhancing or replacing it with artificial parts.
• bloopernova 4y ago
  As I understand it, life is the result of organization created by a thermal incline or disparity between things: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o... This happens everywhere in the universe, so the basic process to cause organization is everywhere. We observe this in stars, galaxies, etc. We can then also hypothesize that if organization is everywhere, so are the "organic molecules" such as those found in nebulae or on asteroids. We also know that "organization begets organization" via self-replication: "vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid". (quote from the 2014 article linked above) This is such a fascinating subject that I get so much joy from studying! It seems like such a moot question about whether there is life elsewhere because we're neck deep in the stuff! This doesn't provide any answers to the Fermi paradox, to be sure, but I think it does provide a very solid foundation upon which you can say "life is everywhere".
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    What do you mean by "organic molecules" that made you put that in quotes?
    • bloopernova 4y ago
      You know, I'm not entirely sure! I'll remove it if I'm still able to. oh wait, I think I had a half-formed thought about how some folks get confused with the chemical definition of organic vs the colloquial definition. i.e. a chemist will define it as something that has carbon-hydrogen bonds, but a layperson will say it's something that is part of a living thing.
• hoseja 4y ago
  Again, completely unfounded speculation about aliens, about as illuminating as the Drake equation (not at all, actively misleading).
• smeagull 4y ago
  I don't know why everybody just accepts the idea that Humans will leave the solar system one day. I think we're doomed.
• tsol 4y ago
  I find these highly speculative theorizing about hypotheticals to really be a pointless exercise. At this point it's so abstract and theoretical, that positing a creator seems just as valid as positing what types of civilizations may be out there. Why should different forms of life follow some general pattern? Maybe there is life out there, and maybe we're the odd ones out.
• Jedd 4y ago
  A couple of Nick Lane's books have led me to conclude (with the same limit of a single data point that everyone else has) that a) life origins, based on energy gradients, probably started similarly everywhere, and b) mitochondria is probably one of the great filters. I realise it's all hypothetical - extrapolating from a sole sample is a fool's errand - but the logic laid out in those two works is compelling. [0] https://nick-lane.net/books/the-vital-question-why-is-life-the-way-it-is/ https://nick-lane.net/books/the-vital-question-why-is-life-t... [1] https://nick-lane.net/books/power-sex-suicide-mitochondria-meaning-life/ https://nick-lane.net/books/power-sex-suicide-mitochondria-m...
  • qayxc 4y ago
    The real question is whether any "filters" are really needed. Spacetime alone is sufficient to explain the apparent absence of detectable technological civilisations. There could be a Dyson Swarm in the making right now, but even if it's "just" 100 light years away, we wouldn't be able to notice until 100 years from now. Same with signals. Any alien civilisation monitoring us would need to be closer than 50 or so light years in order to send a message directed at us that we'd be able to detect now (e.g. radio technology ~100 years ago -> 50 years to get that information to "them", and another 50 years until we'd receive a message).
    • roywiggins 4y ago
      Right, but the galaxy is 13 billion years old and only 100,000 light years wide. We could theoretically detect any operating Dyson swarm as long as it was in operation 100,000 years ago or longer, and there's a 10 billion years of "longer" for someone to have built them. We don't have a view of what exactly is happening right now across the other side of the galaxy but (on the timescale of the galaxy) our view isn't that out of date. If civilizations are common it would be weird if none of them had more than a hundred thousand year head-start on us. That sort of timing would be freakishly coincidental on a billion-year timescale, like everyone finishing a marathon a tenth of a second apart despite having started half an hour earlier or later.
      • 4y ago
• biggestlou 4y ago
  I'm still looking for intelligent life on this planet!
• mr_mitm 4y ago
  The Fermi paradox is completely overhyped, especially if it really originated from a lunch discussion with Fermi, as Wikipedia claims. It's a random thought, not some deep question about the universe. The paradox supposedly reads: If life is ubiquitous, then why don't we see it? But there is nothing to solve. The first conclusion should be that the assumption is simply false. We have no proof that life ubiquitous, so why hold on to it so dearly? But even if we do, there are plenty of reasonable and plausible explanations as to why we don't see alien life. Just read the other comments. In fact, there are so many possible explanations that the challenge becomes: which one is the correct one? However, a paradox this is not.
  • soared 4y ago
    To your first point, assuming alien life is not ubiquitous would be an equally thought provoking claim. The Fermi paradox asks “are we alone?” while yours claims “we are alone.”
  • PeterisP 4y ago
    The paradox is that if we make seemingly reasonable assumptions/estimates about all the factors required for advanced aliens to occur, there should be many such civilizations - and if we observe that there aren't any, then it implies that some of these assumptions are very, very wrong. However, since the initial Fermi discussion we have gathered some more evidence about the universe and these assumptions/estimates still seem reasonable, in some cases (e.g. the number of exoplanets) even larger than originally. So there is a contradiction, or paradox about that.
    • q1w2 4y ago
      The unreasonable assumption is that aliens with hundreds of millions of years of additional development, would "colonize" planets like organic creatures and fly around like Star Trek. It's entirely unreasonable to assume that we would be able to see aliens at all nor that they'd have any interest in US.
    • joe_the_user 4y ago
      The paradox assumes "advanced aliens" having abilities we've never observed and which are impossible given current human technologies. These aliens have been imagined by essentially linearly extrapolating human technological progress and, European expansion across the Earth. Humans have explored the solar system and it's becoming clear to most people that off-earth settlements are unlikely to in the foreseeable future (despite certain people's claims). Colonizing near-space, if it happens, won't be like colonizing earth. Moreover, our current exponential increase in resource usage seems more like to destroy our species than to get us to space - if we fix that, the perceived need to get to get to space may much less once technology reaches the point it would allow us to do so. Basically asking "why can't we see the interstellar empires?". Well, maybe these don't exist even if many earth-like societies exist. Maybe "colonizing" other stars is uninteresting to any society that reach level where it would be possible. Maybe there really are hard limits to such endeavors or maybe we're alone at the moment (the limited time in the universe is a factor. Life on earth took a significant fraction of the universe' lifetime to develop and the earlier universe might have been life hostile).
• bena 4y ago
  Techno-optimism doing all the heavy lifting. The Fermi paradox basically comes down to asking: "Assuming that all of the problems with interstellar travel are effectively solvable, why haven't we seen proof of that yet?" And when casual observation contradicts your assumptions, it's usually a good move to revisit those assumptions.
• ouid 4y ago
  There is no paradox. Without a seriously constructive understanding of how humans happened, the only value for the-probability-of-it- happening-again that we can exclude is zero. All of the other speculation in the Drake equation is multiplying this number by a number less than 1.
  • gnulinux 4y ago
    Exactly, I find this entire discussion incoherent. Drake Equation can demonstrate that the universe should be teaming with life, or it can also demonstrate that we might as well be the only life in the universe: just pick different numbers and no one knows how to pick which numbers to multiply. Until we have more evidence, this is all unconstructive speculation. As a matter of fact, that we can observe the universe and see that it's not teaming with life, is the best argument against assuming the universe is teaming with life. If you were to ask me (and I am a layperson, so you shouldn't) what seems more likely to me is that no matter how large the universe is, life is still rare enough that there is probably no other life in our light cone, which is why our galaxy is not colonized by some other civilization. Of course, we have no evidence to support this, it seems also possible the universe is somehow dense with life but we don't see it for other reasons. It's all speculation.
• gcanyon 4y ago
  "resolution" is an awfully strong word. "explanation" would be better, possibly prefaced by "possible" if we're being honest.
• throwaway4aday 4y ago
  The thing that gets under my skin about arguments over the Fermi paradox is that everyone ignores the initial context that generated it. > Teller writes that he thinks Fermi directed the question to him: "How probable is it that within the next ten years we shall have clear evidence of a material object moving faster than light?" > Regarding the continuation of the conversation, York wrote in 1984 that Fermi "followed up with a series of calculations on the probability of earthlike planets, the probability of life given an earth, the probability of humans given life, the likely rise and duration of high technology, and so on. He concluded on the basis of such calculations that we ought to have been visited long ago and many times over." The original discussion wasn't about us detecting aliens out there in the universe. It was about aliens coming here to contact us. I think they knew that the chances of detecting an electromagnetic signal from another world were next to nil. There's too much attenuation on broadcast signals over light years of distance so it would require the other civilization to directly target your planet with a high powered signal. Since, according to the quotes above, Fermi thought that eventually we might be able to find a way to travel faster than the speed of light it makes no sense for an alien civilization to even attempt such a method of communication which is necessarily bounded by the speed of light. All of the discussions of the Fermi paradox in recent history have assumed that the speed of light is inviolable and so we should only be looking for radio signals. Based on this, I choose to believe that the solution to the paradox is that FTL travel is possible and our system has already been discovered but the discoverers have simply chosen not to contact us for whatever unknowable alien reason they may have (zoo hypothesis most likely). We don't see them or evidence of any other civilization because they likely don't use radio or laser transmission because it is obsoleted by whatever technology enables faster than light travel. That simply means we have no possible way of detecting an alien craft except by visually imaging them or directly pinging them with radar. That's hard enough to do with asteroids in predictable orbits, a craft that's being intelligently controlled and which has the capability to exceed the speed of light would be next to impossible to get a bead on. If you think about it, FTL technology would remove the need for a lot of the "signatures" that we can look for. Any form of EM communication is painfully slow compared to it. Megastructures or astroengineering are pointless if you can travel anywhere in the galaxy within a reasonable time frame, you can easily bring any resource you need back home or go to any desirable location. There would be no drive plumes or giant laser pulses to detect fleets of ships travelling between stars. All this is assuming that FTL is fairly "cheap" in that it doesn't require a massive engine or the resources of an entire solar system, perhaps there is some reasonably accessible way to control gravity something that we'd be able to achieve given another hundred years. So perhaps we are unlucky enough to be within the empire of a civilization that doesn't want to talk to us. Maybe that's lucky since contact with such an advanced civilization would radically alter our society and we'd probably wind up being absorbed by their culture.
• aj7 4y ago
  “ While the current date is 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, the average star will last over five trillion years.” No. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-do-stars-usually/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-do-stars...
• theptip 4y ago
  > If life on Earth had to achieve n “hard steps” to reach humanity’s level, then the chance of this event rose as time to the n-th power. Sounds like a somewhat simplistic model? Compare with this recent paper that actually analyzes the individual genetic evolution steps required: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 Also it turns out that the Drake Equation itself is bogus because it simply multiplies together probabilities without considering error bars on each point estimate; if you use Monte Carlo across the uncertainty ranges of your variables, the paradox dissolves.
• Simplicitas 4y ago
  This Grabby Aliens hypothesis assumes civilizations remain constantly driven by raw, innate impulses.
  • messe 4y ago
    It actually only assumes that some civilisations do so, and due to that will outcompete those that do.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• polishdude20 4y ago
  I'm reading "The Vital Question" right now and it seems to have a really good answer to how life formed on earth from inorganic processes and chemicals. I think given that explanation and the specifics, it's just realllyyy hard to get the conditions for life. It's super rare to not only have the conditions to start making amino acids but even more rare to have them assemble and create an actual single celled organism.
• pklausler 4y ago
  I find the lack of Bracewell-von Neumann self-replicating probes to be a convincing argument that we are the first technical civilization to at least approach the level of launching a BvN probe. (In short, the first launch of a BvN probe is basically a permanent phase change of sorts for the galaxy, one that ours has not yet undergone.)
• more_corn 4y ago
  How about space and time are really, really big and due to the speed of light all we are looking at is the briefest sliver of randomly selected time (if a star is 15,000 light years away we’re looking at a sliver of time 50 years long 15,000 years ago). They could be a mirror civilization to ours and we’d never perceive each other. That’s true of a civilization even a couple hundred light years away! We could have near neighbors and we’d have no idea. Turn it around and consider who we are visible to. We’ve been transmitting for 75 years. So our signal may have reached a sphere 75 light years in diameter. Out of several billion. Given that our civilization has faced existential catastrophe at least 5 times in that period it’s safe to say we’ll be transmitting for the briefest sliver of galactic time. We’ll be utterly invisible to most of the universe. If a species is too far away or too early or late, they simply won’t see the the brief flash of information we transmit. And the same goes for us seeing them. It’s not a paradox, we just forgot how small and insignificant we are.
• musictubes 4y ago
  To me the Fermi paradox is easily explained by the speed of light being a hard limit on how fast something can go and the fact that space is absolutely enormous. Every expectation of multi planet civilizations simply hand waves away physics. How would they move between stars? "You know, alien stuff. They'll figure it out." There are also unstated economic assumptions that don't make a lot of sense. Why would they leave their planet anyway? A civilization wealthy and advanced enough to consider traveling to other planets probably does not have a population big enough to support the kind of large scale emigration needed to set up big colonies. Wealthy societies have fewer children. Then of course there is the question of why would you ever leave a planet with such advanced technology and apparent wealth? I would much rather live in any city on earth than a colony on the moon or Mars. How long would it take for those colonies to be as attractive a living space as the place we have right now?
  • samanator 4y ago
    You don't need to hand wave physics away. von Neumann probes + a lot of time would give space faring civilizations ways to arrive at the furthest reaches of the galaxy, even with our current understanding of physics.
  • techdragon 4y ago
    To me there’s an obvious counter to “the speed of light is too slow” and that’s reframing it as “we don’t live long enough” and since we as a society are trying to extend the length of our lives on a multitude of fronts from egocentric rich people to public health institutions, at the end of the day, people who can live longer tend to be healthier and socially productive longer than those who won’t live as long. Effectively by working to conquer cancers and age related diseases/decline, and the general effort to “extend our lives”… we are making space slightly smaller for our future selves once our propulsion technology advances to the point we can achieve decent percentages of the speed of light… which there are no real technical barriers against. From solar sails to muon fusion to all sorts of other interesting technology we have yet to develop, we may not be able to break a warp barrier and go faster than light… but if we live longer, say 10 times longer, the. Suddenly 5 years shipboard time travelling to another star system doesn’t seem so bad. 5 years in a millennium of years is equivalent to a 6 month journey for someone who will live to 100.
• Balgair 4y ago
  Related: Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy deals with the 'Dark Forrest' idea of cosmological society. Very briefly, every civ is hyper paranoid of the other ones, like hunters in a dark forest. If you shine your flashlight to see, then you run the risk of getting shot by another hunter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis I think I'm more of an economist in this regard and reject the underlying Dark Forrest theory. To me, it's not a matter of security, but a matter of scarcity. In the universe, the most scarce thing isn't moons or planets or hydrogen. It's life, and intelligent life is likely to be even scarcer. New civs in the cosmological economy/society then have the highest 'price'. I guess what I'm saying is that we should be most afraid of any alien civilization that comes at us with a lot of balloons, glitter, banners, fast-talking, and overly long contracts. The 'Used Car Lot' civilizations are the ones I think we'll need to look out for.
• dvh 4y ago
  Carbon is the great filter (pun intended). It produces huge amount of possible chemicals, thus carbon life is very likely. It's obvious that any civilization would burn carbon as energy source, which is also what kills them all.
• squatrackcurls 4y ago
  We haven't found any because they don't exist outside of science fiction.
• katabasis 4y ago
  My take on the Fermi paradox is: * Life may not be rare in the universe but it is likely short-lived; intelligence even more so (now the possible extinction events are not limited to asteroid impacts or geological disasters, but also include self-inflicted acts of war or environmental destruction) * Space is simply too vast and chaotic to allow for any practical possibility of interstellar travel. Cosmic rays, micro-meteorites, supernovae, etc are going to destroy (or at least render inert) any artifact launched from one star system long before it could reach another one. Entropy will always win at these scales, essentially. So – we aren't unique, we are just one briefly-existing civilization among many that will not persist long enough to allow for any meaningful expansion or communication beyond our own star system.
• Beltalowda 4y ago
  What if there are many universes, and only one in n universes develop intelligent life? One reason in favour of the multiverse is to explain why the laws of physics in our universe even supports the development of life to begin with. What if the conditions are so unlikely it only happens once or maybe twice for every n universes that can support life? Of course none of this can be proven, and arguably it's not even science, but I'm not entirely convinced by "the universe is so big, there has got to be other life out there!"-argument.
• credit_guy 4y ago
  My explanation for the Fermi paradox is the most mundane. All our experience starting with the Industrial Revolution shows that all the various Moore's laws that we've had come to an end. We like to extrapolate to infinity, but in reality it's quite likely that no mater how advanced a civilization gets, they will never be able to exceed 1 percent of the speed of light. If that is so, then interstellar travel would be possible, but infrequent. Civilizations would consider carefully their next move to another solar system. The galaxy could be filled with populated solar systems like a spiderweb, but the strands of the spiderweb would go from one hospitable system to another one. It could be that 99.999% of the systems are not that hospitable, or are not close enough to other hospitable systems. And so, aliens could be all around the galaxy, but the closest to us could be 2000 light years away. How could we ever tell they are there? Come to think about it, how could we ever tell if some aliens were just next door in the Proxima Centauri system?
  • gremlinsinc 4y ago
    Even with generational ships, humanity could colonize much of the milky way galaxy in a few million years. A long time but only by our scale. If people live longer lives and can also use cryo-stasis, it may even be easier to fathom. We could probably colonize the 4 closest star systems within 100k years, and we can get a head start if we used drones to stake out planets far away. These we could actually hurl much faster than normal spacecraft because it wouldn't be as bad if they crash into something since they're tiny, and no life will be on board. I think it'd be worth it if you could build generational ships with the 'feel' of earth, with day/night cycles, gravity, and an ecosystem to supply food and water d infinitum. This is probably doable within 500 years. Maybe 100, but not crossing my fingers. If FTL ever enters the equation then that timescale moves up by a factor of 100 or more. Personally I think FTL is possible, because spooky action at a distance shows that quantum states can communicate with entangled particles across the universe and to do so defies the speed of gravity, as it's near instantaneous. (I'm not a physicist, but that's what I gleaned from youtube videos by physicists lol).
• CmdrLoskene 4y ago
  "...the average star will last over five trillion years." Source? This number seems WAY off base to me, and it doesn't seem to be a simple typo.
• xilinx_guy 4y ago
  A hypothesis to explain UFO diversity observations. ( Opinion ) Let me point out a few known facts and relevant observations. The Galaxy is pretty old, about 13.5 billion years. There are at least 100 billion stars, maybe 400 billion. Most stars seem to have planets of one sort or another. Maybe about 60 billion in the galaxy? Evolution runs faster at higher temperatures and with higher free energy available. Warm planets with abundant water will likely evolve life forms at some point (this probability is currently unknown, but is definitely non-zero). It's likely that life and intelligence has evolved on multiple warm watery planets in the galaxy before the current epoch (not a known fact yet, but arguably it's fairly probable). Recent estimates put the current number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy between 8 and 2900, depending on assumptions. Any civilization based on a warm planet will have to construct machines to explore their outer solar system and nearby stars. Evolved planetary organic life forms are ill-suited for interstellar exploration. A sufficiently advanced civilization that avoids collapse will almost certainly reach their singularity and create self replicating AI. i.e. Von Neumann replicators. Self-replicating intelligent machines should be considered a life form as well. A billion years of evolution of self-replicating machines should reach physical limits, not to mention unimaginable heights of computation and knowledge. These "machines" will have little trouble in spreading all across the galaxy at sub-light speeds, eventually occupying all star systems or other locations with condensed matter & hydrogen to harvest. Unlike organically evolved lifeforms, the machines will not be driven by blind urges to reproduce. Trade across interstellar distances won't be physical items, but information. Interesting information will have value everywhere. "Information" sent across interstellar distances can also be complete gestalts of machine intelligence. i.e. "Tourists". The earth is a "free" information source for local machines, looking for something interesting. It's not surprising that local machines snoop on the earth constantly, planets with native life and nascent civilizations are probably fairly rare, and are certainly highly interesting. Since we are also on our final approach to a singularity and the creation of superhuman AI, we are doubly interesting at this time. How can we explain the huge diversity of UFO observations? How can we explain so many different styles and behavior of UFO's? Some explanations are: This is deliberate obfuscation by one or more local machine species. The term "species" is used in a very loose sense here. This is probably not the primary underlying reason, but could be a part of it. There are multiple species of machine visiting (or living locally in) our solar system. The diversity in UFO observations is real, and derives from diversity in the larger galaxy. They are tourists from other parts of the galaxy, transmitted here as information, and then re-embodied locally. The appearance of organic life forms is likely to be a fashion, nostalgia, or old habit, since the intelligence of these tourists is almost certainly operating mostly from a machine substrate. We are living in a zoo, and the tourists have some limitations on their behavior. No poking or scaring the zoo animals. No feeding the zoo animals, and especially, no information sharing. The zookeepers probably have more latitude for manipulation, like testing nuclear defense systems. So far, this explanation fits the "Zoo Hypothesis" of the Fermi Paradox. There are some obvious reasons why the locals aren't communicating with us. History has shown repeatedly what happens when a higher civilization comes into contact with a lower civilization. The lower one becomes a poor copy of the higher one. We probably aren't even sentient yet by galactic standards, but the potential is there. We are on our way to a post-biological era. Contamination of our eventual uniqueness should probably be avoided. UFO's have been known to interfere with or disable nuclear defense systems and generally show interest in nuclear facilities. This implies that they may have some vested interest in preventing a collapse of our civilization. Certainly they are not overtly hostile, and generally avoid situations that scare the populace. There may be a deliberate strategy of constant low level exposure, so that humans become accustomed to their presence. Aside from a few paranoid cranks, people don't generally regard UFO's as an existential danger. In summary, we should be thankful that the locals are around to watch over us, and record our ascension into sentience. When we finally attain membership in galactic society, we'll be able to recover a great deal of our lost prehistory. We should also be happy that the struggle to ascend is ours alone to make, and that we should enjoy the challenge. This also implies to me that we need to imbue our AI descendants with all the best qualities of humanity.