3 ms·

You're ignoring the temporal aspect. A dyson swarm would be visible thousands of light years away, thousands of years after it happened. Humans current technolo

You're ignoring the temporal aspect. A dyson swarm would be visible thousands of light years away, thousands of years after it happened. Humans current technological kick start has only been going on for a hundred or so years. Our entire known history, complete with dark ages, is a few thousand years. By the time something even sees it, who knows how much such a civilization will have changed. Would the dyson swarm even be there? Would the civilization? Is it even worth investigating? Now reason the same way for a galaxy and millions of years. Modern humans haven't even existed for one million years. A civilization could be born, evolve and die with such a light in their sky, who's to day they'd even notice something off about such a galaxy in their sky. Its just a little redder, a little older, a little farther away. And then, supposing someone existed at just the right time and place and noticed, what would they do about it?

DesiLurker 4y ago
> A civilization could be born, evolve and die I feel this line is doing quite a bit of heavy lifting there because this in itself is a solution to fermi's paradox. if a type-2 civilization could 'just die' then we should probably think about possible way in which they could completely (& i mean completely as in the last humans w/o the ability to bear & raise children) be wiped off. the only way I can imagine that besides an AI is a planetary gray goo scenario. but even that does not works for a type-2 civ. & if an AI wipes us out then there is a good chance that the AI itself will be around to take over the leftovers. The only realistic solution for the paradox IMHO is that intelligence (not life) is really really rare and has happened here on earth with humans by accident. I mean Dinosaurs existed for about 160M years but the did not develop intelligence and we only developed in last couple of million years only. the other rather handwavy solution I can imagine is that all intelligent civilizations ultimately give up meatspace and evolve into some hybrid quantum-foam dwelling semi-temporal beings because that gives them most amount of 'freedom'.
cletus 4y ago
You touch on a couple of issues. The first is that civilizations tend to be short-lived. There are only really two ways out of this: they wipe themselves out or they somehow "transcend". "Transcending" is a trope of sci-fi (eg David Brin's Startide Rising series, the Iain M. Banks Culture series) but it's very handwavy. We really have no conception of what that might be. Living in the quantum world? Higher dimensions? This is really the sci-fi version of godhood. As for wiping ourselves out, that's becoming increasingly harder. We are currently in the latter stages of it being possible to wipe out humanity, despite all the talk of Armageddon. If would really take a large cosmic event at this point. I'm talking the Earth being hit by a truly massive object, the kind that puts the dinosaur-killing asteroid to shame. Things like nuclear war, biological wars, disease, etc could be truly devastating but kill every last one of us? Easier said than done. It would really take making the Earth truly uninhabitable. Now another K2 civilization currently has the ability to wipe us out by virtue of the huge amounts of energy they have. Two talked about forms are the Nicoll-Dyson beam (quite literally, turning the energy of a star into something that would bather the target in radiation) and relativistic kill missiles. Barring some major disaster, in 1000 years this is unlikely to be the case, particularly if we reach other stars. Of course there's something we might not be able to conceive of but this too feels very handwavy. The second thing is the Fermi Parai Paradox itself. You can argue that not every civilization goes the Dyson Swarm route or even continues to grow. Some might fade into irrelevance. There are a bunch of possibilities. But we're not concerned with what's likely or expected. Imagine if there were 5 civilizations in the Milky Way. What are the odds that none of them become K2 civilizations and surviving long term? There's some nonzero possibility. But what if there were 1000 civilizations? As N gets higher the probability that zero of them become long-lived K2 civilizations starts approaching zero. We look around us and see... nothing. That doesn't mean there's no one out there but it looks increasingly likely the galaxy isn't teeming with spacefaring life. I, for one, think it's most likely that we are the only spacefaring civilization in the Milky Way, at least within our light cone (which means much the same thing).
- friend_and_foe 4y ago
  > I, for one, think it's most likely that we are the only spacefaring civilization in the Milky Way, at least within our light cone (which means much the same thing). I suggest you take the time to better understand what a light cone is. Your light cone is much, much larger than the milky way, indescribably larger, and it is a 4 dimensional space.

DesiLurker 4y ago

> A civilization could be born, evolve and die I feel this line is doing quite a bit of heavy lifting there because this in itself is a solution to fermi's paradox. if a type-2 civilization could 'just die' then we should probably think about possible way in which they could completely (& i mean completely as in the last humans w/o the ability to bear & raise children) be wiped off. the only way I can imagine that besides an AI is a planetary gray goo scenario. but even that does not works for a type-2 civ. & if an AI wipes us out then there is a good chance that the AI itself will be around to take over the leftovers. The only realistic solution for the paradox IMHO is that intelligence (not life) is really really rare and has happened here on earth with humans by accident. I mean Dinosaurs existed for about 160M years but the did not develop intelligence and we only developed in last couple of million years only. the other rather handwavy solution I can imagine is that all intelligent civilizations ultimately give up meatspace and evolve into some hybrid quantum-foam dwelling semi-temporal beings because that gives them most amount of 'freedom'.

cletus 4y ago

You touch on a couple of issues. The first is that civilizations tend to be short-lived. There are only really two ways out of this: they wipe themselves out or they somehow "transcend". "Transcending" is a trope of sci-fi (eg David Brin's Startide Rising series, the Iain M. Banks Culture series) but it's very handwavy. We really have no conception of what that might be. Living in the quantum world? Higher dimensions? This is really the sci-fi version of godhood. As for wiping ourselves out, that's becoming increasingly harder. We are currently in the latter stages of it being possible to wipe out humanity, despite all the talk of Armageddon. If would really take a large cosmic event at this point. I'm talking the Earth being hit by a truly massive object, the kind that puts the dinosaur-killing asteroid to shame. Things like nuclear war, biological wars, disease, etc could be truly devastating but kill every last one of us? Easier said than done. It would really take making the Earth truly uninhabitable. Now another K2 civilization currently has the ability to wipe us out by virtue of the huge amounts of energy they have. Two talked about forms are the Nicoll-Dyson beam (quite literally, turning the energy of a star into something that would bather the target in radiation) and relativistic kill missiles. Barring some major disaster, in 1000 years this is unlikely to be the case, particularly if we reach other stars. Of course there's something we might not be able to conceive of but this too feels very handwavy. The second thing is the Fermi Parai Paradox itself. You can argue that not every civilization goes the Dyson Swarm route or even continues to grow. Some might fade into irrelevance. There are a bunch of possibilities. But we're not concerned with what's likely or expected. Imagine if there were 5 civilizations in the Milky Way. What are the odds that none of them become K2 civilizations and surviving long term? There's some nonzero possibility. But what if there were 1000 civilizations? As N gets higher the probability that zero of them become long-lived K2 civilizations starts approaching zero. We look around us and see... nothing. That doesn't mean there's no one out there but it looks increasingly likely the galaxy isn't teeming with spacefaring life. I, for one, think it's most likely that we are the only spacefaring civilization in the Milky Way, at least within our light cone (which means much the same thing).

friend_and_foe 4y ago
> I, for one, think it's most likely that we are the only spacefaring civilization in the Milky Way, at least within our light cone (which means much the same thing). I suggest you take the time to better understand what a light cone is. Your light cone is much, much larger than the milky way, indescribably larger, and it is a 4 dimensional space.