5 ms·

On a galactic scale, I wonder what the average time is between a species evolving intelligence, mastering technology, then using that technology to wipe themsel

On a galactic scale, I wonder what the average time is between a species evolving intelligence, mastering technology, then using that technology to wipe themselves out of existence? That's the most likely answer to the question, 'where are all the aliens?'

Jerrrry 3y ago
It is one of the leading Late filters; that excellence in the species cannot compensate for the inefficiencies in extracting energy to continue existing; leading to environmental/social problems, inevitably leading to either environmental collapse, preventing space colonialism, or social collapse. Nuclear energy is a popular crux, but not needed per se. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCzpYxedIe0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCzpYxedIe0
snapcaster 3y ago
I'm not convinced it's a Fermi paradox solution. I'm not saying civilizations don't sometimes destroy themselves but a). the one civilization we know of didn't do it yet and b). doesn't this require something inherent to life for this to explain the fermi paradox? it seems like this just moves the question from "where are all the aliens" to "why does every civilization regardless of environment/planet/etc. ALWAYS destroy themselves" which doesn't seem like an easier question to answer?
- bee_rider 3y ago
  A suffers from survivorship bias, right? The civilization in which we exist can’t have destroyed itself yet if we are to have made that observation.
  - snapcaster 3y ago
    Sure, but compared to what? I don't know what you would call the bias of "imaginging bad stuff happening in the future, and for some reason the bad stuff is inevitable regardless of planet, lifeform, etc."
- sethammons 3y ago
  we've seen many, many cases of civilizations not making it. In the case of the Mayan Empire, it is looking like they killed off their civilization via climate change -- weather models show that the increased agriculture and removal of the surrounding jungle would have dropped annual rainfall, leading to the drop in water levels that we know happened in the cinotes (where they got all their water), leading to the collapse of the civilization (lost knowledge and culture). By the time Cortez arrived, nobody knew how to build nor maintain their megalithic structures. Now, total extinction of a civilization meaning all of a civilized species, maybe we saw that with neanderthals and other early hominids.
  - masfuerte 3y ago
    Yes, and if we do end this civilization it will be much harder to bootstrap the next one. The easily accessible coal and oil are gone.
  - snapcaster 3y ago
    True, I guess what I meant is that we didn't blow ourselves up during the Cold War. For something to be a Fermi Paradox solution it has to explain the _complete_ lack of life we see. Something being hard or requiring luck isn't enough due to the vastness of space. It would still occur countless times even if rare
    - bluish29 3y ago
      > I guess what I meant is that we didn't blow ourselves up during the Cold War By being just lucky in many times. I imagine a scenario where one mistake happened and people took the wrong decision in one moment. It is not like if you repeated the cold war 1000 times you will end up fine in most of them. Lets remember that submarine in Cuban crisis, if this Soviet officer did not give his authentication we wouldn't get into that point. If you repeat the scenario with 1000 officers from this era, I wouldn't like our chances.
      - snapcaster 3y ago
        But the fermi paradox isn't about explaining why one specific civilization isn't present. It's about the _complete_ lack of alien life we observe. In the vast cosmos, there isn't any civilizations that have "got lucky" I don't see how this explanation addresses the core point
MeImCounting 3y ago
I am totally unconvinced by this whole "technology is a great filter" argument. First of all I have my doubts that, even at the height of the cold war, nuclear war would've extinctic all of humanity and nowadays with much less ordinance definitely not. Equally climate change is very unlikely to extinct all humans and dont even get me started on all the other "extinction risks" such as rogue AI or bioweapon because they are merely sci-fi and again would almost certainly not get everyone. We definitely dont have a convincing solution to the fermi paradox and if we did it would certainly not be so trite and silly of an idea as "technology kills"
- georgeecollins 3y ago
  It doesn't have to kill everyone, just destroy the technological society and that would solve Fermi's paradox. Think about the things our technological society consumes, particularly petroleum. There's no way there is enough of it to last a thousand years (a blip on a cosmological time scale). We have no way of feeding our current population without fossil fuels for fertilizer. Maybe that ends in a technological transition to something else, or a social transition to something sustainable. Maybe. There aren't a lot of data points.
  - MeImCounting 3y ago
    I was hoping someone would bring up the technological aspect of a collapse of modern society and then regrowth. There are two major issues with humans post-collapse being able to create a technological society and these are lack of fossil fuels and surface deposits of metals being used up. Both of these work together to make an industrial evolution type event very difficult and perhaps impossible. I would wager that there is a different type of technological path requiring less fossil fuels and less surface metals. I dont have any data to support this belief obviously but I do believe that given enough time a human society could develop technology to enable space colonization without the jumpstart of an industrial revolution. This would look like slow generational iteration as opposed to explosive revolution and therefore would be more sustainable IMO.
    - 3y ago
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dotnet00 3y ago
As usual with the filters, the problem always is that the filter has to be so significant that it's essentially guaranteed to happen. Else the galaxy should still be full of aliens. We seem to keep scraping by with close calls, so it doesn't seem all that guaranteed that a technological civilization wipes itself out before it can establish itself among the stars.
- chuckadams 3y ago
  For all we know the galaxy is full of aliens who just never find each other. Space is big and light is only so fast.
- kortilla 3y ago
  But none of our technology can really let us spread at this stage. We’re barely detectable from nearby solar systems. It’s very possible that the technology required to travel between solar systems is where the filter occurs and we’re in a narrow window of having enough technology to look around at nearby planets before we wipe ourselves out.
- krisoft 3y ago
  Give it time. Let’s check back on this once our ability to nuke ourselves is as old as the Great Pyramid of Giza was in Cleopatra’s time.
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  We've had several close calls in the last ~80 years. I have no idea what the actual probabilities of inciting WWII and causing a nuclear winter were in the Korean war, Cuban Missile Crisis, Able Archer exercise, and various computer errors and false alarms that occurred, but if you're rolling the dice on existing every 10 years, the chances of taking over the galaxy in a million years are remote.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I think you meant WWIII, but it does bring up another interesting possibility—WWII could be seen as the release of pressure which had been building, in some sense inevitable. If we were only slightly less belligerent as a species, we might have been able to put it off until nukes were invented, and what a mess that would have been. If we were only slightly more belligerent, we could have blown ourselves up in the Cold War. Of course, belligerence isn’t a tunable parameter that you can tweak without changing all of history, but it is funny to think that we just happened to land right in the sweet spot.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
Billions of forms of life on this earth over billions of years and we are the only ones to make cities and send junk into space. I’m not sure why we have this fallacy expect other alien life to look anything like humanity.
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  On the other hand, there were billions of forms of life on this earth, and the first and only one to develop advanced technology took over the entire planet in the blink of an eye. Why would we not expect the apex species on other planets to likewise dominate their ecosystems?
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Bacteria took over the planet. We are merely a host. We aren’t even long term habitants of all the continents much less the ocean. Meanwhile bacteria have colonized even the air currents on earth.
feoren 3y ago
Technology is evil and evil kills everyone OMG cut to credits of B-movie sci-fi flick. No. That's trite and silly. There's a much, much more likely answer to the Fermi Paradox -- so likely it's obvious. So obvious it's boring. So boring that everyone ignores it. I don't understand why. It's so blaringly obvious that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is: Intelligent life is unbelievably, inconceivably, staggeringly unlikely. Quadrillions of universes lived and died without any life emerging -- at least any that could create a civilization. It has literally never, ever happened before, because the odds of it happening are one in 10^billions. It's nearly completely impossible. Which is why uncountable eternities with uncountable cycles of uncountable universes have passed with no life ever emerging ... except, except just this once. Just this once, it happened. And what are the odds that, given life occurred on one planet, that it would be on that planet that its lifeforms looked around and asked "what are the odds of life? Shouldn't life be everywhere? It's everywhere on this planet!" What are the odds that it would be us lifeforms that life happened to? Well, 100%. So it looks easy. But it's not. See? Boring. Life is staggeringly close to impossible. It will take another 10^10000000 universes being born and dying before it ever happens again. There is absolutely nowhere else in our entire universe, as big as it is, where intelligent life happened. But you'll continue to ignore that answer, because deep scary biblical lessons about how the AI plague is consuming the universe and the Mass Effect reapers are going to come one day because we're making noise in the Dark Forest ... well, those just make better Sci-Fi books. And yet if you shuffle a deck of cards, that particular order of cards will never again be seen in the universe, or hundreds of other universes full of card-shufflers. It is staggeringly close to impossible that you could have possibly gotten that order of cards. Are you really so sure that life didn't require more particulars to be exactly right than one specific order of a 52-card deck? It's so blindingly obvious that everyone just refuses to see it.
- cwillu 3y ago
  Meh, the boring answer is that it's probably common, but interstellar detection and signalling is very hard, and interstellar travel is impossible with the materials available in a single star system.
- darth_aardvark 3y ago
  > everyone just refuses to see it. You are not the only person to ever think that life might be super rare in the universe. This is not a unique or even a rare opinion. People can speculate on other reasons for its rarity while still knowing it's likely to just be a naturally rare event. And there's no way you (you personally, and I guess humanity as a whole) can know it's as rare as 1 in 10^1000000 universes either, so your hypothesis is as evidence free as other hypotheses.
rurp 3y ago
I would imagine it's a pretty short timespan, relatively speaking. Technology can progress exponentially in a way that biology does not. Once a society gets to the point where they can create existential risks faster than they can manage them, in an accelerating fashion, things are likely to collapse in pretty short order. Our own society has created a number of serious risks for ourselves that our evolved minds aren't great at mitigating in just the last century. Now think about how tech is accelerating and what might be developed in the next 1000 years. We're either going to figure out a new structure for managing existential risks or die trying.

Jerrrry 3y ago

It is one of the leading Late filters; that excellence in the species cannot compensate for the inefficiencies in extracting energy to continue existing; leading to environmental/social problems, inevitably leading to either environmental collapse, preventing space colonialism, or social collapse. Nuclear energy is a popular crux, but not needed per se. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCzpYxedIe0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCzpYxedIe0

snapcaster 3y ago

I'm not convinced it's a Fermi paradox solution. I'm not saying civilizations don't sometimes destroy themselves but a). the one civilization we know of didn't do it yet and b). doesn't this require something inherent to life for this to explain the fermi paradox? it seems like this just moves the question from "where are all the aliens" to "why does every civilization regardless of environment/planet/etc. ALWAYS destroy themselves" which doesn't seem like an easier question to answer?

bee_rider 3y ago
A suffers from survivorship bias, right? The civilization in which we exist can’t have destroyed itself yet if we are to have made that observation.
- snapcaster 3y ago
  Sure, but compared to what? I don't know what you would call the bias of "imaginging bad stuff happening in the future, and for some reason the bad stuff is inevitable regardless of planet, lifeform, etc."
sethammons 3y ago
we've seen many, many cases of civilizations not making it. In the case of the Mayan Empire, it is looking like they killed off their civilization via climate change -- weather models show that the increased agriculture and removal of the surrounding jungle would have dropped annual rainfall, leading to the drop in water levels that we know happened in the cinotes (where they got all their water), leading to the collapse of the civilization (lost knowledge and culture). By the time Cortez arrived, nobody knew how to build nor maintain their megalithic structures. Now, total extinction of a civilization meaning all of a civilized species, maybe we saw that with neanderthals and other early hominids.
- masfuerte 3y ago
  Yes, and if we do end this civilization it will be much harder to bootstrap the next one. The easily accessible coal and oil are gone.
- snapcaster 3y ago
  True, I guess what I meant is that we didn't blow ourselves up during the Cold War. For something to be a Fermi Paradox solution it has to explain the _complete_ lack of life we see. Something being hard or requiring luck isn't enough due to the vastness of space. It would still occur countless times even if rare
  - bluish29 3y ago
    > I guess what I meant is that we didn't blow ourselves up during the Cold War By being just lucky in many times. I imagine a scenario where one mistake happened and people took the wrong decision in one moment. It is not like if you repeated the cold war 1000 times you will end up fine in most of them. Lets remember that submarine in Cuban crisis, if this Soviet officer did not give his authentication we wouldn't get into that point. If you repeat the scenario with 1000 officers from this era, I wouldn't like our chances.
    - snapcaster 3y ago
      But the fermi paradox isn't about explaining why one specific civilization isn't present. It's about the _complete_ lack of alien life we observe. In the vast cosmos, there isn't any civilizations that have "got lucky" I don't see how this explanation addresses the core point

MeImCounting 3y ago

I am totally unconvinced by this whole "technology is a great filter" argument. First of all I have my doubts that, even at the height of the cold war, nuclear war would've extinctic all of humanity and nowadays with much less ordinance definitely not. Equally climate change is very unlikely to extinct all humans and dont even get me started on all the other "extinction risks" such as rogue AI or bioweapon because they are merely sci-fi and again would almost certainly not get everyone. We definitely dont have a convincing solution to the fermi paradox and if we did it would certainly not be so trite and silly of an idea as "technology kills"

georgeecollins 3y ago
It doesn't have to kill everyone, just destroy the technological society and that would solve Fermi's paradox. Think about the things our technological society consumes, particularly petroleum. There's no way there is enough of it to last a thousand years (a blip on a cosmological time scale). We have no way of feeding our current population without fossil fuels for fertilizer. Maybe that ends in a technological transition to something else, or a social transition to something sustainable. Maybe. There aren't a lot of data points.
- MeImCounting 3y ago
  I was hoping someone would bring up the technological aspect of a collapse of modern society and then regrowth. There are two major issues with humans post-collapse being able to create a technological society and these are lack of fossil fuels and surface deposits of metals being used up. Both of these work together to make an industrial evolution type event very difficult and perhaps impossible. I would wager that there is a different type of technological path requiring less fossil fuels and less surface metals. I dont have any data to support this belief obviously but I do believe that given enough time a human society could develop technology to enable space colonization without the jumpstart of an industrial revolution. This would look like slow generational iteration as opposed to explosive revolution and therefore would be more sustainable IMO.
  - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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dotnet00 3y ago

As usual with the filters, the problem always is that the filter has to be so significant that it's essentially guaranteed to happen. Else the galaxy should still be full of aliens. We seem to keep scraping by with close calls, so it doesn't seem all that guaranteed that a technological civilization wipes itself out before it can establish itself among the stars.

chuckadams 3y ago
For all we know the galaxy is full of aliens who just never find each other. Space is big and light is only so fast.
kortilla 3y ago
But none of our technology can really let us spread at this stage. We’re barely detectable from nearby solar systems. It’s very possible that the technology required to travel between solar systems is where the filter occurs and we’re in a narrow window of having enough technology to look around at nearby planets before we wipe ourselves out.
krisoft 3y ago
Give it time. Let’s check back on this once our ability to nuke ourselves is as old as the Great Pyramid of Giza was in Cleopatra’s time.
LeifCarrotson 3y ago
We've had several close calls in the last ~80 years. I have no idea what the actual probabilities of inciting WWII and causing a nuclear winter were in the Korean war, Cuban Missile Crisis, Able Archer exercise, and various computer errors and false alarms that occurred, but if you're rolling the dice on existing every 10 years, the chances of taking over the galaxy in a million years are remote.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I think you meant WWIII, but it does bring up another interesting possibility—WWII could be seen as the release of pressure which had been building, in some sense inevitable. If we were only slightly less belligerent as a species, we might have been able to put it off until nukes were invented, and what a mess that would have been. If we were only slightly more belligerent, we could have blown ourselves up in the Cold War. Of course, belligerence isn’t a tunable parameter that you can tweak without changing all of history, but it is funny to think that we just happened to land right in the sweet spot.

kjkjadksj 3y ago

Billions of forms of life on this earth over billions of years and we are the only ones to make cities and send junk into space. I’m not sure why we have this fallacy expect other alien life to look anything like humanity.

LeifCarrotson 3y ago
On the other hand, there were billions of forms of life on this earth, and the first and only one to develop advanced technology took over the entire planet in the blink of an eye. Why would we not expect the apex species on other planets to likewise dominate their ecosystems?
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Bacteria took over the planet. We are merely a host. We aren’t even long term habitants of all the continents much less the ocean. Meanwhile bacteria have colonized even the air currents on earth.

feoren 3y ago

Technology is evil and evil kills everyone OMG cut to credits of B-movie sci-fi flick. No. That's trite and silly. There's a much, much more likely answer to the Fermi Paradox -- so likely it's obvious. So obvious it's boring. So boring that everyone ignores it. I don't understand why. It's so blaringly obvious that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is: Intelligent life is unbelievably, inconceivably, staggeringly unlikely. Quadrillions of universes lived and died without any life emerging -- at least any that could create a civilization. It has literally never, ever happened before, because the odds of it happening are one in 10^billions. It's nearly completely impossible. Which is why uncountable eternities with uncountable cycles of uncountable universes have passed with no life ever emerging ... except, except just this once. Just this once, it happened. And what are the odds that, given life occurred on one planet, that it would be on that planet that its lifeforms looked around and asked "what are the odds of life? Shouldn't life be everywhere? It's everywhere on this planet!" What are the odds that it would be us lifeforms that life happened to? Well, 100%. So it looks easy. But it's not. See? Boring. Life is staggeringly close to impossible. It will take another 10^10000000 universes being born and dying before it ever happens again. There is absolutely nowhere else in our entire universe, as big as it is, where intelligent life happened. But you'll continue to ignore that answer, because deep scary biblical lessons about how the AI plague is consuming the universe and the Mass Effect reapers are going to come one day because we're making noise in the Dark Forest ... well, those just make better Sci-Fi books. And yet if you shuffle a deck of cards, that particular order of cards will never again be seen in the universe, or hundreds of other universes full of card-shufflers. It is staggeringly close to impossible that you could have possibly gotten that order of cards. Are you really so sure that life didn't require more particulars to be exactly right than one specific order of a 52-card deck? It's so blindingly obvious that everyone just refuses to see it.

cwillu 3y ago
Meh, the boring answer is that it's probably common, but interstellar detection and signalling is very hard, and interstellar travel is impossible with the materials available in a single star system.
darth_aardvark 3y ago
> everyone just refuses to see it. You are not the only person to ever think that life might be super rare in the universe. This is not a unique or even a rare opinion. People can speculate on other reasons for its rarity while still knowing it's likely to just be a naturally rare event. And there's no way you (you personally, and I guess humanity as a whole) can know it's as rare as 1 in 10^1000000 universes either, so your hypothesis is as evidence free as other hypotheses.

rurp 3y ago

I would imagine it's a pretty short timespan, relatively speaking. Technology can progress exponentially in a way that biology does not. Once a society gets to the point where they can create existential risks faster than they can manage them, in an accelerating fashion, things are likely to collapse in pretty short order. Our own society has created a number of serious risks for ourselves that our evolved minds aren't great at mitigating in just the last century. Now think about how tech is accelerating and what might be developed in the next 1000 years. We're either going to figure out a new structure for managing existential risks or die trying.