11 ms·

You are not thinking in a sufficient timescale. Human civilization is less than 10,000 years old. Barring some type of great filter event, it seems likely that

by 14u2c 4y ago

You are not thinking in a sufficient timescale. Human civilization is less than 10,000 years old. Barring some type of great filter event, it seems likely that human civilization will saturate the galaxy, or at least the local group, within the 400m years the OP mentioned.

schiffern 4y ago
Depends on how much competing interest is out there. A Petri dish might dream of taking over North America, but the humans might have other plans (for instance, the autoclave across the room). Maybe they'd reason that North America is entirely lifeless, since nobody has yet tried to communicate the secrets of the Universe to them in a (bacterially) intelligible language. Honestly the Petri dish has better chances. The bacteria that inhabit one already have the demonstrated ability to persistently survive outside of it. >the galaxy, or at least the local group The local group is bigger than the galaxy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Group
- 14u2c 4y ago
  Fair enough, however the Fermi Paradox and the consequently postulated Great Filter are a thing precisely because the evidence of this competition should be present but is not. > The local group is bigger than the galaxy. You are certainly correct, I misremembered the terms. Substitute for the local regions of our galaxy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion-Cygnus_Arm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion-Cygnus_Arm
  - schiffern 4y ago
    Thanks! I hadn't heard of the Local Bubble before.
teaearlgraycold 4y ago
Not sure I like the idea of humans taking over the galaxy unless we can evolve to be more caring.
gumby 4y ago
Human civilization is much more than 10,000 years old, but in any case robots can live longer and in more interesting modes (branching, eusocial, etc). They can colonize all sorts of planets unsuitable for us. They should carry our culture, such as it is, forward to the stars and galaxies.
- htag 4y ago
  As a living organism I am most interested in increasing the resources and habitat size for my species and decedents. The amount of resources on Earth (or that we could bring to Earth) is a tiny fraction compared to what's available. More resources and more habitats means more people, which means more of everything that makes humanity awesome. The robots are just a forward scouting tool. Human civilization is essentially 10k years old on galactic time scales, with agriculture being ~12k years old.
  - gumby 4y ago
    I am not the MAILMAN, I am also a living organism and I couldn't care less about those goals. I don't deny that you might have them but they are hardly an automatic consequence of being a human, much less some more general "living organism". They sound pretty high level to me, especially the bit about "species" (whatever that might really mean anyway). Speciation is a human construct. For all you know you are just running a program designed to transmit a message encoded in some "junk" DNA inherited from some long lost ancestor who was modified by some alien that crashed on our planet billions of years ago who hopes that some terrestrial decendent will eventually arrive at an inhabited planet where the residents will open up the astronaut, read the message, and come rescue your descendants to travel. Robots will be our real descendants.
    - htag 4y ago
      > I don't deny that you might have them but they are hardly an automatic consequence of being a human, much less some more general "living organism". Searching for resources, gathering them, and controlling territory from competitors are basic biological behaviors we see in most (all?) life. On a personal level this behavior might look like visiting a grocery store, storing the food at home, and locking your door. It seems reasonable that as our technology develops and we exhaust resources on Earth that we will need to increase our reach to resources and territories beyond Earth.
mrleinad 4y ago
There are many significant physical roadblocks at the moment, and putting aside how cool I think that a galactic civilization would be, I'm not sure we can remove enough of them to achieve that goal. FTL travel is impossible, and even the fastest ship would take centuries to get anywhere outside our solar system. That alone will restrict us to our little corner for the next millennia at least. Of course I reserve the right to change my mind if there's some groundbreaking discovery, but I find it unlikely. Add to that the possibility that we wipe ourselves out of existence (or the planet does), and I don't see ourselves getting to our 1 million year birthday.
- m4rtink 4y ago
  A lot to play with for the near future here with the resources of the solar system - think of all the unique cultures even just the early habitats swarms will spawn! And even without major breakthroughs I'm sure some will try to go interstellar AI uploading, some form of hibernation or even a generation ship. Or Nuclear Salt Water Rocket at a couple dozen % of the speed of light, so the trip won't take more than a few decades, which might be doable with some decent life length ehnacement - possibly even a round-trip! :-)
  - mrleinad 4y ago
    I agree, we need to focus on our local neighborhood. If there are breakthroughs, they'll come. We should make the most of what we already have.
- gumby 4y ago
  our robot descendants won't care about the long timescales. There's plenty they could do, or they could even power down for a few million years.
  - mrleinad 4y ago
    I don't care for robots if we're not there to experience the universe. They're just a byproduct, a piece of trash we'll leave after we're gone. I want us to explore, not our toasters.
wcoenen 4y ago
That would mean there will exist a factor million (or even much higher) more human lives in the future, than there have been so far. But then, that would mean we are among the "one-in-one-millionth earliest" humans, which is a very improbable position to find yourself in. We don't actually know what the future holds. But if we have to guess, it is more likely that we are in a typical case. E.g. if you buy a lottery ticket, it is more reasonable to assume that you are not going to win anything, than to assume you are in the one-in-a-million case (holding the ticket that will win). Applying that logic to our current situation, the reasonable assumption would be that we are close to the peak of human civilization. That's why we find ourselves here, and not in the distant future among a population of quadrillions.
- 317070 4y ago
  I have never understood this type of argument. Even in my regular life, I am atypical in more than one one-in-a-million way. I was born in a tiny city, population less than 1000. But following your line of reasoning, that is sufficient argument that the population of the world is less than 1 billion. It is fine to say "we don't know". Events in which you are in a one-in-a-million situation will be rare, but unless you know the number of events in consideration, there are few conclusions you can draw. There are way more than a million events, even in trivial probability spaces. This style of trickery with probabilities irks me as a statistician.
  - wcoenen 4y ago
    Imagine you are kidnapped and knocked unconscious. Then you wake up in a prison cell by yourself. You are now wearing a prison uniform with a label that says "prisoner N", where N is some number. Would it really be "trickery with probabilities" to say that there is only a one-in-thousand chance that the total number of prisoners is more than 1000*N? And that the real number of total prisoners is probably much closer to N?
    - 317070 4y ago
      Yes to the first question! The distribution representing my beliefs in such a scenario would not have a finite variance. Given the question, are you aware of the Pareto distribution? Nassim Taleb has great work explaining fat-tail distributions. (I do have strong priors on various things, such as the size of the human population and the sizes of large prisons, which I ignore here as they break the metaphore)
skedaddle 4y ago
The great filter is table stakes, getting over it doesn't guarantee anything. It's also impossible to accurately and confidently predict the future millions of years in advance.

by 14u2c 4y ago

schiffern 4y ago

Depends on how much competing interest is out there. A Petri dish might dream of taking over North America, but the humans might have other plans (for instance, the autoclave across the room). Maybe they'd reason that North America is entirely lifeless, since nobody has yet tried to communicate the secrets of the Universe to them in a (bacterially) intelligible language. Honestly the Petri dish has better chances. The bacteria that inhabit one already have the demonstrated ability to persistently survive outside of it. >the galaxy, or at least the local group The local group is bigger than the galaxy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Group

14u2c 4y ago
Fair enough, however the Fermi Paradox and the consequently postulated Great Filter are a thing precisely because the evidence of this competition should be present but is not. > The local group is bigger than the galaxy. You are certainly correct, I misremembered the terms. Substitute for the local regions of our galaxy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion-Cygnus_Arm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion-Cygnus_Arm
- schiffern 4y ago
  Thanks! I hadn't heard of the Local Bubble before.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago

Not sure I like the idea of humans taking over the galaxy unless we can evolve to be more caring.

gumby 4y ago

Human civilization is much more than 10,000 years old, but in any case robots can live longer and in more interesting modes (branching, eusocial, etc). They can colonize all sorts of planets unsuitable for us. They should carry our culture, such as it is, forward to the stars and galaxies.

htag 4y ago
As a living organism I am most interested in increasing the resources and habitat size for my species and decedents. The amount of resources on Earth (or that we could bring to Earth) is a tiny fraction compared to what's available. More resources and more habitats means more people, which means more of everything that makes humanity awesome. The robots are just a forward scouting tool. Human civilization is essentially 10k years old on galactic time scales, with agriculture being ~12k years old.
- gumby 4y ago
  I am not the MAILMAN, I am also a living organism and I couldn't care less about those goals. I don't deny that you might have them but they are hardly an automatic consequence of being a human, much less some more general "living organism". They sound pretty high level to me, especially the bit about "species" (whatever that might really mean anyway). Speciation is a human construct. For all you know you are just running a program designed to transmit a message encoded in some "junk" DNA inherited from some long lost ancestor who was modified by some alien that crashed on our planet billions of years ago who hopes that some terrestrial decendent will eventually arrive at an inhabited planet where the residents will open up the astronaut, read the message, and come rescue your descendants to travel. Robots will be our real descendants.
  - htag 4y ago
    > I don't deny that you might have them but they are hardly an automatic consequence of being a human, much less some more general "living organism". Searching for resources, gathering them, and controlling territory from competitors are basic biological behaviors we see in most (all?) life. On a personal level this behavior might look like visiting a grocery store, storing the food at home, and locking your door. It seems reasonable that as our technology develops and we exhaust resources on Earth that we will need to increase our reach to resources and territories beyond Earth.

mrleinad 4y ago

There are many significant physical roadblocks at the moment, and putting aside how cool I think that a galactic civilization would be, I'm not sure we can remove enough of them to achieve that goal. FTL travel is impossible, and even the fastest ship would take centuries to get anywhere outside our solar system. That alone will restrict us to our little corner for the next millennia at least. Of course I reserve the right to change my mind if there's some groundbreaking discovery, but I find it unlikely. Add to that the possibility that we wipe ourselves out of existence (or the planet does), and I don't see ourselves getting to our 1 million year birthday.

m4rtink 4y ago
A lot to play with for the near future here with the resources of the solar system - think of all the unique cultures even just the early habitats swarms will spawn! And even without major breakthroughs I'm sure some will try to go interstellar AI uploading, some form of hibernation or even a generation ship. Or Nuclear Salt Water Rocket at a couple dozen % of the speed of light, so the trip won't take more than a few decades, which might be doable with some decent life length ehnacement - possibly even a round-trip! :-)
- mrleinad 4y ago
  I agree, we need to focus on our local neighborhood. If there are breakthroughs, they'll come. We should make the most of what we already have.
gumby 4y ago
our robot descendants won't care about the long timescales. There's plenty they could do, or they could even power down for a few million years.
- mrleinad 4y ago
  I don't care for robots if we're not there to experience the universe. They're just a byproduct, a piece of trash we'll leave after we're gone. I want us to explore, not our toasters.

wcoenen 4y ago

That would mean there will exist a factor million (or even much higher) more human lives in the future, than there have been so far. But then, that would mean we are among the "one-in-one-millionth earliest" humans, which is a very improbable position to find yourself in. We don't actually know what the future holds. But if we have to guess, it is more likely that we are in a typical case. E.g. if you buy a lottery ticket, it is more reasonable to assume that you are not going to win anything, than to assume you are in the one-in-a-million case (holding the ticket that will win). Applying that logic to our current situation, the reasonable assumption would be that we are close to the peak of human civilization. That's why we find ourselves here, and not in the distant future among a population of quadrillions.

317070 4y ago
I have never understood this type of argument. Even in my regular life, I am atypical in more than one one-in-a-million way. I was born in a tiny city, population less than 1000. But following your line of reasoning, that is sufficient argument that the population of the world is less than 1 billion. It is fine to say "we don't know". Events in which you are in a one-in-a-million situation will be rare, but unless you know the number of events in consideration, there are few conclusions you can draw. There are way more than a million events, even in trivial probability spaces. This style of trickery with probabilities irks me as a statistician.
- wcoenen 4y ago
  Imagine you are kidnapped and knocked unconscious. Then you wake up in a prison cell by yourself. You are now wearing a prison uniform with a label that says "prisoner N", where N is some number. Would it really be "trickery with probabilities" to say that there is only a one-in-thousand chance that the total number of prisoners is more than 1000*N? And that the real number of total prisoners is probably much closer to N?
  - 317070 4y ago
    Yes to the first question! The distribution representing my beliefs in such a scenario would not have a finite variance. Given the question, are you aware of the Pareto distribution? Nassim Taleb has great work explaining fat-tail distributions. (I do have strong priors on various things, such as the size of the human population and the sizes of large prisons, which I ignore here as they break the metaphore)

skedaddle 4y ago

The great filter is table stakes, getting over it doesn't guarantee anything. It's also impossible to accurately and confidently predict the future millions of years in advance.