Comment by erdevs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erdevs | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know. Fermi paradox has never bothered me too badly. Between possible great filters (behind and/or ahead of us), the time and distance involved in species discovery and travel, and the fact we're still apparently pretty early in the universe's lifespan ... it seems reasonable to me that we may be some combination of rare and early. So, Group I seems reasonable.

One potential "great filter" always stood out as likely to me, even if all the other leaps before we came along had been made:

That filter is developing the combination of (i) self-aware intelligence to a degree that you are capable of deep layers of abstraction, (ii) the physical ability to adeptly physically build complex creations, (iii) an inclination toward social living that encourages cooperation. Other relatively high intelligences have evolved here on earth: octopuses, dolphins, elephants, etc. But it's hard to imagine any of them being physically capable of dramatically modifying their environment and building complex, useful creations. And we mammalian humans, dolphins and elephants are all social and cooperative to some degree, but octopuses don't seem to be. The combination of these three occurrences is extremely powerful, but may also be extremely rare. And it's difficult to imagine a space-faring civilization that wouldn't need all 3.

And Group 2 seems reasonable too. In particular, it's interesting to consider that while we currently hold an expansionist mindset because expansion has driven the course of our civilization, this may be a temporary thing. It makes sense when competing locally with enemies (other tribes, cities, nations, empires, etc) that are very similar to yourself. And we believe that survival and expansion go hand in hand. But it may well be the case that intelligent species generally discover that survival is maximized when not expanding aggressively, beyond some point, and when conserving resources. Hiding themselves so as to minimize the risk of contact with other alien species may go hand in hand with that as well.

So, between seemingly plausible filters in both Group 1 and Group 2 explanations, I think it's reasonable to entertain the possibility that it'll be a long time before we meet another alien civilization, if we ever do.

I think it makes sense for an intelligent civilization not to expand, if you consider the problem of synchronizing over vast interstellar distances. If it takes years to exchange messages and resources back and forth between two colonies, it will be slow and costly to keep them on the same page. That means they will likely evolve independently and may become competitors.

In other words, colonies lacking resources inside the expansion wave would start attacking their own neighbours, and colonies at the periphery may decide to expand inward, because even though other colonies' resources are harder to acquire, they are already processed/terraformed and therefore more useful. So you don't expand, not necessarily to hide, but to avoid creating enemies in close proximity to yourself, because you can't control your own offspring except at a tremendous cost.

Of course, even so, it seems strange that no civilization would ever make this mistake. Perhaps those that do are far away, or the propensity of colonies to eventually expand inward slows down the expansion.

>In other words, colonies lacking resources inside the expansion wave would start attacking their own neighbours,

This could be possible if interstellar travel was very, very, very easy. But in all likelihood the last place you're going to want to find resources is on a tiny speck of rock 20 lightyears away.

Well, the basic idea is that some inhabitants of colony A may figure that if they remain on A, they can only expect to get 100 resource units, but if they move to B, which is weaker, they may be able to acquire 1,000 resources units instead. They wouldn't bring back resources from B to A, they would just do a hostile takeover so that they can live like kings.

True hive-mind intelligences may not face that problem, though.

A hive mind would face tremendous costs and very small returns. If you think of a human brain as a hive mind made out of neurons, which isn't an unfair way to describe it, a hive mind split on two planets would be like two brain hemispheres being light years apart. They can't help each other without unacceptable delays, so they would both have to be almost completely independent to function properly. They couldn't make each other very much stronger.

Furthermore, synchronization overhead scales with distance: you may be part of a hive mind, but if it takes ten years to exchange a message with the rest of the hive, you have to act independently during these ten years. This means the hive's "goals" must be replicated on each colony well enough to make sure they can't drift too far in that time. This is not cheap: for example, a lot of innovative technologies would have to be stifled while the whole hive assesses the risks they pose to its own integrity. Independent colonies, on the other hand, would just plow forward.

Delays in research and coordination, yes, but not the threat of internal competition or warfare, at least.

I imagine a hive mind would first send scouts to potential habitats, wait to gain enough information about a world from them, and then dispatch a colonizing group with fixed orders and some leeway in local operating parameters.

After that they'll coordinate just like all species will have to, within the confines of Physics.

If a colony cannot adapt to a planet while remaining within the hive's goals, then I guess it simply withers happily, till new scouts deem the world worth another try.

That could actually turn out to be an efficient way of spreading across the galaxy..

Possibly. On the other hand, the delays in research and coordination may be so large that they basically negate the advantages of being united. An expanding orb of viciously competitive societies would probably make them pretty damn efficient at deception, murder and hostile takeover. A hive mind that has never had to harden itself against what's basically an expanding sphere of vicious viruses may be easy prey that gets utterly annihilated.

To put it in another way, I think an expanding hive mind needs to develop an immune system of sorts if it is to stand up against nimbler (virus-like) societies, but it's hard to see how it could succeed effectively without extended exposure to the latter.

So I feel there's a kind of catch-22 going on: if we expand without extensive synchronization, we create competitors out of our own offspring, but competition breeds efficiency, so even though the system is a horrible Malthusian hellhole on the inside, it is pretty strong as a whole. But if we try to avoid this and expand as a hive mind, we have to expend a lot of overhead on synchronization and an immune system, but we don't really know what the potential threats are, so the result will be brittle.

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