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Why assume it's ahead of us? That would be assuming there are many intelligent civilizations in the local observable universe, facing challenges that are much m

Why assume it's ahead of us? That would be assuming there are many intelligent civilizations in the local observable universe, facing challenges that are much more insurmountable than the tiny chances of abiogenesis and development of intelligent life. Interstellar colonization sounds hard, but when you include possibilities like self-replicating probes and AI, it doesn't sound so impossible to expect no intelligent life to have managed it yet in a well-populated universe. The possibility of the great filter being behind us (life, complex life, or intelligent life is exceedingly rare) still makes a lot of sense.

ben_w 3y ago
An industrial and expansionary civilisation which came into existence anywhere in the Milky Way 10 Mya, and whose interstellar travel was limited to 0.01c, would’ve colonised Earth while we were still in the process of losing our body fur and interbreeding with Neanderthals. This is fairly recent compared to the age of the universe, and the speeds can be achieved with know (albeit expensive) human technology. If the aliens had self replicating probes (of the robotic kind, not the organics-in-factories kind), the known rules of physics suggest that a Dyson swarm can be built in less than a century, at which point (0) now you have to ask why there are stars to see, and (1) 0.9c is easy, as is going intergalactic, so such a civilisation can’t have been that recent in half the Council of Giants either. That we can see stars and that we exist, says that expanding industrial intelligences like us, either never got to this stage, or are filtered in what currently looks like a small gap between here and there. Misaligned AGI that doesn’t want to expand could be one, so could in-fighting necessarily becoming too easy at the same time as any tech for interstellar expansion. Personally, I think there’s dozens to hundreds of small-ish (think factors of 0.95-0.10) filters, some ahead, some behind.
- ulizzle 3y ago
  Assuming there is such a thing as other civilizations in the universe, which there is no proof of. Big Filter should leave space debris.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > Assuming there is such a thing as other civilizations in the universe, which there is no proof of. Generally it’s used as a proof of absence: if they existed we would see them, we don’t see them so they don’t exist. > Big Filter should leave space debris. What would you expect such debris to look like? Everything I can imagine looks like dust, very quickly.
    - ulizzle 3y ago
      Why does everything you imagine look like dust? Shouldn't civs advanced enough to build Dyson Spheres have figured out building materials better than those in the Titanic? That pressure is similar to or stronger than those found in outer space. They should at least be strong enough to withstand an asteroid hit, and those don't just disintegrate into space dust quickly. Space Junk is already a problem for us in our present state of advancement. There's space debris from the 50s out there. Why isn't that dust? Just like evolution doesn't happen suddenly, civilizations don't just disappear. And if the universe is so vast and old, we should be seeing civs in transition, like ours. There's the argument of the dark forest that everyone is in hiding, but accidents happen, right?t Karma. Why don't these UFOs ever make mistakes? Why don't we see the predator civs? Where's all the noise in the universe? Shouldn't there be massive explosions from all the space wars? I think it's more interesting and a lot creepier that we are alone in the material universe. Of course, this line of thinking leads to God, and that's poison for the "open-minded".
      - ben_w 3y ago
        I think your sense of scale for time and distance needs recalibration. Billions of years for structures of old to break, not just for civilisations to arrive. It's enough time for planetary atmospheres to boil off into space. > Shouldn't civs advanced enough to build Dyson Spheres Kessler cascade. But, once they're actually that big, I think their only possible downfalls are fratricidal conflicts; so my thinking and comments here are mainly regarding pre-Dyson civilisations. Further aside: on this scale, one thing I want to find out but don't know who to ask, is "how fast do iron and aluminium sublimate in a vacuum at 300 K?" > They should at least be strong enough to withstand an asteroid hit, and those don't just disintegrate into space dust quickly. Asteroids come in many sizes, up to "moon"; moons also disintegrate under gravity when they pass the Roche limit, and for other reasons; the rings of Saturn are young on such timescales, 10 million to 100 million years old. Now I think about it (in favour of your position, but again I'm assuming filters other than fratricide have to happen before Dyson swarms) an expansive civilisation that Dysoned up 10 Mya inside the Milky Way should've turned the galaxy into one of red dwarfs even if the spheres have since disintegrated. > Space Junk is already a problem for us in our present state of advancement. There's space debris from the 50s out there. Why isn't that dust? Remember this is in the context of what we can see looking out into the cosmos. Our space junk is indistinguishable from dust at lunar distance, let alone interstellar. And 50 years? Every beat of your heart is to your lifetime what 8 Earth years is to the lifetime of Sol. > civilizations don't just disappear Yeah they do. Heck, entire species disappear. > And if the universe is so vast and old, we should be seeing civs in transition, like ours. Only with sufficiently good telescopes. The actual ones we've got? It's noteworthy when they've got the capacity to resolve stars as more than single pixels.
- in_vestor 3y ago
  What do you propose are the biggest filters ahead? And what do you think are the biggest ones in the past that we overcame?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    The usual, in both cases. The biggest of the past: the relatively thin crust that allows non-catastrophic volcanism, the dual composition of the crust so we have both oceanic and continental plates and the right amount of water to get both massive oceans and not so much as to be a water world, surviving the oxygenation catastrophe, evolution of multicellular life/Cambrian explosion, that the various inorganic carbon sinks and sources are balanced well enough for billion year evolutionary history, that we’re cooperative enough to work together while being competitive enough to develop new tech for “our side” (too little competition and we’d have stopped in c. 1860 tech and communism; too much competition and we’d be at each other’s throats and not be able to sustain global supply chains needed for modern computers). Arguably the Moon is a big part of many of these things. My best guess for the future: as we get more tech, it gets easier for individual insane people to blow up important things and/or kill lots of people. AI (never mind AGI/ASI) is just one of many such technologies that make this risk bigger, but even just sufficiently cheap electricity and manufacturing makes it (relatively) simple to use a cyclotron to enrich uranium. The only way I can see past that is a ridiculous and unpleasant level of surveillance that you need some kind of AI to be able to achieve in the first place, with all the downsides that come with that surveillance, and that’s still the case even if you’re “only using the surveillance AI to find and section dangerously insane people, honest”.
    - qup 3y ago
      > My best guess for the future: as we get more tech, it gets easier for individual insane people to blow up important things and/or kill lots of people. I've been saying this recently. I think EM or similar could potentially take and defend a big area with the massive number of drones he could buy or build companies to produce. And that's without inventing any new tech, just mass producing specialized drones. That's scary enough, but then imagine some small nation-state you've never thought much about, that has all that manpower and collective wealth, and maybe some ambition... Tech is able to concentrate a big amount of power into a very small number of hands.

ben_w 3y ago

An industrial and expansionary civilisation which came into existence anywhere in the Milky Way 10 Mya, and whose interstellar travel was limited to 0.01c, would’ve colonised Earth while we were still in the process of losing our body fur and interbreeding with Neanderthals. This is fairly recent compared to the age of the universe, and the speeds can be achieved with know (albeit expensive) human technology. If the aliens had self replicating probes (of the robotic kind, not the organics-in-factories kind), the known rules of physics suggest that a Dyson swarm can be built in less than a century, at which point (0) now you have to ask why there are stars to see, and (1) 0.9c is easy, as is going intergalactic, so such a civilisation can’t have been that recent in half the Council of Giants either. That we can see stars and that we exist, says that expanding industrial intelligences like us, either never got to this stage, or are filtered in what currently looks like a small gap between here and there. Misaligned AGI that doesn’t want to expand could be one, so could in-fighting necessarily becoming too easy at the same time as any tech for interstellar expansion. Personally, I think there’s dozens to hundreds of small-ish (think factors of 0.95-0.10) filters, some ahead, some behind.

ulizzle 3y ago
Assuming there is such a thing as other civilizations in the universe, which there is no proof of. Big Filter should leave space debris.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > Assuming there is such a thing as other civilizations in the universe, which there is no proof of. Generally it’s used as a proof of absence: if they existed we would see them, we don’t see them so they don’t exist. > Big Filter should leave space debris. What would you expect such debris to look like? Everything I can imagine looks like dust, very quickly.
  - ulizzle 3y ago
    Why does everything you imagine look like dust? Shouldn't civs advanced enough to build Dyson Spheres have figured out building materials better than those in the Titanic? That pressure is similar to or stronger than those found in outer space. They should at least be strong enough to withstand an asteroid hit, and those don't just disintegrate into space dust quickly. Space Junk is already a problem for us in our present state of advancement. There's space debris from the 50s out there. Why isn't that dust? Just like evolution doesn't happen suddenly, civilizations don't just disappear. And if the universe is so vast and old, we should be seeing civs in transition, like ours. There's the argument of the dark forest that everyone is in hiding, but accidents happen, right?t Karma. Why don't these UFOs ever make mistakes? Why don't we see the predator civs? Where's all the noise in the universe? Shouldn't there be massive explosions from all the space wars? I think it's more interesting and a lot creepier that we are alone in the material universe. Of course, this line of thinking leads to God, and that's poison for the "open-minded".
    - ben_w 3y ago
      I think your sense of scale for time and distance needs recalibration. Billions of years for structures of old to break, not just for civilisations to arrive. It's enough time for planetary atmospheres to boil off into space. > Shouldn't civs advanced enough to build Dyson Spheres Kessler cascade. But, once they're actually that big, I think their only possible downfalls are fratricidal conflicts; so my thinking and comments here are mainly regarding pre-Dyson civilisations. Further aside: on this scale, one thing I want to find out but don't know who to ask, is "how fast do iron and aluminium sublimate in a vacuum at 300 K?" > They should at least be strong enough to withstand an asteroid hit, and those don't just disintegrate into space dust quickly. Asteroids come in many sizes, up to "moon"; moons also disintegrate under gravity when they pass the Roche limit, and for other reasons; the rings of Saturn are young on such timescales, 10 million to 100 million years old. Now I think about it (in favour of your position, but again I'm assuming filters other than fratricide have to happen before Dyson swarms) an expansive civilisation that Dysoned up 10 Mya inside the Milky Way should've turned the galaxy into one of red dwarfs even if the spheres have since disintegrated. > Space Junk is already a problem for us in our present state of advancement. There's space debris from the 50s out there. Why isn't that dust? Remember this is in the context of what we can see looking out into the cosmos. Our space junk is indistinguishable from dust at lunar distance, let alone interstellar. And 50 years? Every beat of your heart is to your lifetime what 8 Earth years is to the lifetime of Sol. > civilizations don't just disappear Yeah they do. Heck, entire species disappear. > And if the universe is so vast and old, we should be seeing civs in transition, like ours. Only with sufficiently good telescopes. The actual ones we've got? It's noteworthy when they've got the capacity to resolve stars as more than single pixels.
in_vestor 3y ago
What do you propose are the biggest filters ahead? And what do you think are the biggest ones in the past that we overcame?
- ben_w 3y ago
  The usual, in both cases. The biggest of the past: the relatively thin crust that allows non-catastrophic volcanism, the dual composition of the crust so we have both oceanic and continental plates and the right amount of water to get both massive oceans and not so much as to be a water world, surviving the oxygenation catastrophe, evolution of multicellular life/Cambrian explosion, that the various inorganic carbon sinks and sources are balanced well enough for billion year evolutionary history, that we’re cooperative enough to work together while being competitive enough to develop new tech for “our side” (too little competition and we’d have stopped in c. 1860 tech and communism; too much competition and we’d be at each other’s throats and not be able to sustain global supply chains needed for modern computers). Arguably the Moon is a big part of many of these things. My best guess for the future: as we get more tech, it gets easier for individual insane people to blow up important things and/or kill lots of people. AI (never mind AGI/ASI) is just one of many such technologies that make this risk bigger, but even just sufficiently cheap electricity and manufacturing makes it (relatively) simple to use a cyclotron to enrich uranium. The only way I can see past that is a ridiculous and unpleasant level of surveillance that you need some kind of AI to be able to achieve in the first place, with all the downsides that come with that surveillance, and that’s still the case even if you’re “only using the surveillance AI to find and section dangerously insane people, honest”.
  - qup 3y ago
    > My best guess for the future: as we get more tech, it gets easier for individual insane people to blow up important things and/or kill lots of people. I've been saying this recently. I think EM or similar could potentially take and defend a big area with the massive number of drones he could buy or build companies to produce. And that's without inventing any new tech, just mass producing specialized drones. That's scary enough, but then imagine some small nation-state you've never thought much about, that has all that manpower and collective wealth, and maybe some ambition... Tech is able to concentrate a big amount of power into a very small number of hands.