Why we downplay Fermi’s paradox
nautil.us
nautil.us
Many people believe that strong AI is inevitable, or at least possible within the next few decades to centuries. Many people also believe that there's a natural solution to the Fermi paradox (space travel is hard, signals are faint).
But if strong AI is possible, then the Fermi paradox suddenly becomes much more acute because it makes von Neumann probes seem way easier- once you have self-replication across interstellar distance, you will blanket the galaxy with your Cylon spawn pretty quickly. The question isn't just why haven't we heard signals from people like us, but why haven't their robotic spawn already shown up and disassembled a few moons into robot factories?
Note that I don't really believe this, but it does seem to be a resolution of the paradox that (like many others) we don't yet have enough evidence to reject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe
If a civilization does expand via von Neumann replicator machine life, it becomes a lot more plausible that every machine has similar incentives. It also becomes a lot harder to fully exterminate all machines. There may be no winnable wars between interstellar-capable machine civilizations, assuming that more than one exists in the first place.
I know, I'm invoking a lot of speculation. But answering the "where are they?" question of the original Paradox with "lots of places, but we've failed to notice" feels more satisfying to me than guessing that Earth is extraordinarily special. Also more satisfying than guessing that technologically developed species inevitably self-destruct before developing interstellar capabilities.
I can't, right now, estimate probability of breaking the silence, though.
All of this could just be driven by ordinary post-biological-alien good engineering practices. It would seem extremely stealthy to humans, but that doesn't need to be intentional, any more than ham radio communications are intentionally stealthy against observation by whales.
It is statistically improbable for you to win. Given a large enough pool of players, statistically someone has to win.
It's incredibly unlikely, but the chance isn't 0. Someone has to be first.
Now, you could make the same argument about evolution. Bacterial evolution is far quicker than human evolution. If they saw an advantage to killing humanity, we'd be dead before dinner. So why haven't bacteria killed us yet ? No advantage ...
The simple truth is: it's not worth it. Large bacterial species lose and gain more biomass on a daily basis purely through accidents than all human biomass combined, and they wouldn't be able to use all that biomass if they took it from us, nor would they be able to harness the energy humans use, so that's no good either. So it's an idiotic thing to spend energy on, and so they don't spend energy on it.
For space faring civilizations you can make a similar argument. Despite the movies, there is nothing on earth that is worth coming down the gravity well (especially not water. There is FAR more water in the asteroid belt, and it's far easier to collect and use), and maybe it goes so far that it's just not worth it to come into a yellow dwarf solar system : there'll be exponentially more materials and energy available in many other solar systems. So at the very least, we'd be last in line for a visit, and maybe just outright not in line at all.
Reality is that humanity will never leave earth, and AI will never return home. We will launch AIs, and they'll decide to venture out, and conquer and multiply in starsystems with huge stars, massive asteroid belts (lots of resources ... no gravity wells you have to spend energy getting into and out of).
Why haven't we seen aliens ? Same reason bacteria don't kill us (well, only by accident) ... we're just not worth their attention.
And would they do it to study biology ? Well, you'd have to take into account that any race hopping solar systems we wouldn't be the first race they meet. Or the 100th. We'd be the 10000th. So would they still be interested ?
It's also entirely possible that amidst the vastness of space, we have yet to even be noticable, much less noticed. What few traces of our civilization that have been leaking into space for merely a century might be unrecognizable from background noise and impossible to to trace back to us if another civilization just happens to come across it.
Maybe they were listening for millions of years, when there were only dinosaurs here.
Making a self-replicating probe to litter the galaxy seems like a pretty piss-poor thing to do to any interstellar neighbors. Ideally, those probes would have to do something other than make more probes.
Ideally, those probes would send information back here.
And once we ascribe a goal to the probes, all of the problems come back. Information from 4 light years away will take 4 years to reach here at best. From further, longer. What good is information that 3 centuries ago, there was a civilization on planet X?
People go out of their way to try and uncover ancient and forgotten civilizations here on Earth already.
If we have strong AI, the probe itself will be smart enough to chat with the locals in realtime. Any local AIs might send a probe on their own and have a century-long nap here to wait for a response. If our AIs are based on some sort of mind-uploading tech (probably unlikely, but who knows) then arguably, there is no wait- if you want to go, just upload yourself to the probe and go to sleep. Upload a thousand copies to a thousand ships.
We don't even really know what "strong AI" is. We have a kind of fuzzy "we'll know it when we see it" definition. We don't even know how we think.
And why is the probe smart enough to chat with the locals in real time? And that's not really the problem. It's not communicating with the locals: it's communicating with us. And then that information being of some actual use.
We are not investigating random rocks on Mars. We are exploring the possibility of moving there. If it can be made hospitable. Part of that is knowing rather dull stuff, like is there water, is it liquid, is the soil poisonous to plant life, etc.
Performing billion dollar archaeology with no actual return is not something that's going to go far. I'm sorry to say. At some point, you have to dedicate some resources to taking care of the population of the planet you are on.
> If our AIs are based on some sort of mind-uploading tech
Or how about we just instantaneously beam there since we can just pretend whatever limitations we know we currently have won't exist in the future.
I don't have a problem with speculating where technology may lead. However, that speculation needs to be grounded in reality. When we sent a man to the moon, we weren't waiting for something fanciful to be created. No, we took what currently existed and expanded upon that.
Learning that there was a contemporary civilization within 300 light years of here would be even more revolutionary in terms of knowledge about the universe.
But what for? Per article assumptions lets start by assuming an STL regime. It's not unreasonable to guess that strong AI would, even if it was entirely benevolent and decided to maintain an eternal space for its originators (in fact perhaps particularly in that case), wish to have more computation and storage power. It has plenty of time. So it constructs huge computational systems, with the thermodynamic end goal being some sort of stellar engine like a matrioshka brain. Even long before that though just with near-future tech it'd be likely to move into a rather huge computer system, probably planetary scale.
However doesn't that immediately back it into a bit of a corner at least near term? In an STL regime there is no way to send huge amounts of mass interstellar nor information over anything but an extreme time scale and a lot of energy consumed. A "big intelligence" without miracle tech would in fact be physically big too, it'll consume a lot of mass and energy running itself. The only way to leave its solar system would be to either lobotomize itself to the point of effective suicide or to construct a fully equivalent remote location and then either clone itself or transfer (the difference being whether it deleted the original location after a successful copy), which would still be an incredibly difficult and energy intensive and time costly affair. It might be justified in the case where a being wanted to continue to exist after its star left main sequence maybe but it wouldn't be trivial. The very fact of its strong AI existence could easily make it hard to travel.
So what are the von Neumann probes for? Like, picking a couple young promising systems as backups makes sense but why the whole galaxy? At some point extra backups with 100k year deltas or worse wouldn't actually add any significant redundancy, the lifespan of the galaxy itself would become limiting. Long before that having another strong AI develop might even be seen as attractive, assuming it wasn't insane. A well entrenched and developed AI or AI civ could conceivably feel secure enough that it/they could survive and snuff out trouble from anything new before it was an existential threat, and in turn decide the risk vs the reward of something new and interesting would be worth it. And the more in a agreement like that the more secure it can be.
I'm arguing a strong AI (singly or civilization based around some) might simply choose not to go the full "deconstruct everything in every solar system in the galaxy" route, because by virtue of its very existence it can't actually travel easily or at all. Exploration sure, but in the form of lots of star wisps and maybe a few stealthy replications in oort clouds or systems already checked for activity.
Now if a civilization explicitly chose to avoid strong AI, or at least put some sort of firm cap on it, precisely due to foreseeing being locked to their star (or maybe their star and a few near neighbors) that'd be different, but would that actually be stable itself? It would be risky if they encountered an alien stronger AI too perhaps.
I mean we're by definition in pretty deep pure speculation territory here, and others have devoted far more thought to any of this then I. I'm just saying that if there is no magic then everything still has to deal with the laws of thermodynamics and relativity. And widely spread concentrated point energy/mass sources (stars/solar systems) are what everything has to work with in that case, which means there has to be a pretty hard tradeoff between "intelligence" (processing/storage ability) and to what extent something can exist away from stars or move between them. Even go a fraction of the way towards maxing out what you can do with the available mass and energy in a solar system and it's simultaneously hard to go away from a solar system right?
So basically I'm saying going maximal von Neumann across the galaxy isn't clearly the ultimate end state of a civ reaching strong AI level.
I don't understand the "too big/locked to a star" idea. It's not like all that mass/energy would be locked into one giant indivisible entity (if that is your assumption, why?). With current space travel, we don't attempt to move our entire civilization to the Moon or to Mars in one big go. We send out a small piece that establishes itself and then grows, and perhaps over time the rest is migrated if necessary, but the original entity goes on existing for some time while the probe gets established.
I'm not saying they would deconstruct everything in every solar system but it seems it would be pretty likely for a civilization at that level to develop a program that establishes some kind of presence in as many systems as possible.
Yeah it is. That's the assumption right from the start here, embodied in "strong AI" and that I've repeatedly and explicitly referred to throughout including a reflection on why it might be consciously avoided and whether that could work too. A strong AI could grow to use any amount of available computational and memory capacity, and might well need to in order to accomplish some things. There would certainly be advantages to having a higher degree of thought possible. That's the whole question raised by the OP of this thread.
Again, if you want to instead theorize why strong AI might be explicitly avoided by a civilization that's fine, but that's not the premise I was replying to originally is all.
Do the humans have any say in this, any control? If not, how/why are they being kept alive? Again, even if the AI is so myopic that it won’t spare any resources to expand into other systems, the humans will still want to.
We are physically and mentally bound by 4 dimensional spacetime. We have begun to discover further dimensional notions via computing. As our technological intelligence advances, we will have the opportunity to leave behind our current physical states and transcend into higher level dimensional existence. The reason we have not found any other life, or intelligence, is not because it doesnt exist, but because in our current state we are simply incapable of comprehending/experiencing it.
In Hadith (I was raised Muslim), Abu Huraira states: "Allah has said: I have prepared for My righteous servants what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no heart has conceived."
Regardless of religious context, I believe this notion lends credibility to the idea that we exist in a dimensional bubble, and that there is indeed existence beyond this bubble (regardless if it's God/s, forces of nature, multi-dimensional aliens performing simulations, etc).
There have been several discussions on psychedelics on HN. If you discuss the notion of inter-dimensional beings with someone who has experienced a strong psychedelic journey (Ayahuasca, etc), they will almost always discuss the foreign beings they interact with during their trip, out of the realm of their physical body. Why is that?
I strongly believe that humanity's salvation will not be in the form of space travel, but inter-dimensional travel.
We gotta go full Tron in this b&!%$.
Maybe aliens also hide from each other, for protection. Even UN agreed that we should avoid disclosing our existence and position through long range transmissions as much as possible.
TLDR is that technology ramps to effectively infinite levels far faster than anyone can reach the nearest star. The only safe option, strategically, is to kill off any intelligent life you are capable of killing, lest the balance go the other way before you know it. And knowing that, no intelligent species should let itself be found.
Even if you accept the premise, a counter-argument could be that the only way to truly "win" the race would be to be the first one out the gate and ramp your resources to infinity. If a strategy requires an unknown condition to be true to win, you have to assume it's true as all other outcomes are a loss.
I've also heard it argued that any species that makes it that far will need to have overcome its violent impulses.
It's a lot of speculation, but interesting stuff.
It would still just take one civilization build Skynet by accident or to hold a firm belief in mind-uploading though, and then we're knee-deep in cybermen.
In the same novel he suggest a means for avoiding a negative AI "Singularity".
We don't have enough knowledge of fundamental physics, chemistry, or biology to come up with any reasonably tight bound (tight here meaning only a few orders of magnitude) as to how likely alien interstellar voyaging is, to say nothing of our complete ignorance of xenosociology. Our own experience is n=1, which means it's extremely dangerous to generalize.
But even then, we run into a problem: intrastellar travel is hard. We don't yet have the technology to colonize a single other body in our own solar system, and it's dubious that we could send a human to and from any other body save our own Moon. The only mechanism we have to travel in space is via rockets, whose fuel costs are prohibitive for any sort of long journey. Even getting out of our gravity well requires rockets, and while we have concepts of other ideas that are less expensive, they tend to have problematic requirements such as "requires things we haven't discovered yet."
the point of the paradox is not merely wondering how likely alien life is. rather, it starts with the simple fact that no evidence for alien life has been observed, ever, anywhere. why?
well, there's all kinds of potential explanations, maybe its far away, maybe its not advanced anywhere else, etc. we don't know the answer of course, but given the vastness of space one might expect to at least see some evidence of alien life, if not alien life directly, somewhere. that we do not suggests something fundamentally bigger is going on (ie the speed of light is legit)
i don't think most people would have that intuition but it's fair.
drake's equation is a fun way to try to answer fermi. it seems you would assign n_e or f_1 a value close to 0
We just don't know.
Is it? Or is it that no one wants to put any resources into that because you would probably get very little out of it.
We are a money-based mostly capitalistic society, so unless there is any gain any entity whether it be a government or commercial company, investments in development of technology or actually attempting colonisation will not get anywhere anytime soon.
Based on the evidence we have, the proposition that "there are no interstellar civilizations that have colonized our galaxy" seems reasonable. This whole psychological thing about how we think we're special and how we treat animals...I don't see how that is relevant at all. Is the assertion that this attitude is preventing massive amounts of funding for SETI programs? We don't have a single shred of evidence of extraterrestrial life, nor much of a clue on how to go about finding it. All the evidence we have says that, yes, life on earth actually is quite special. Didn't find any argument against that in this article.
There is just such a huge variety of factors that had to go right on top of life being on the planet already for civilization to get going.
We do have a surprising variety of life forms here on Earth. True, they all developed from a common base, but they've splintered into what seems like an infinite diversity.
I mean, as far as we know, dinosaurs weren't building spaceships.
But proponents of the Fermi paradox say that even if human-style intelligence is incredibly rare, the universe is incredibly old. The sheer magnitude of the timescales involved mean that there are literally no new ideas we could think of. That it only needs to have happened once for it to be noticeable.
Of course, the Fermi paradox assumes that it is possible and desirable to do such a thing.
The claim is that our journey into the stars is inevitable. That we will begin to colonize other planets. And that this colonization is exponential. To illustrate let's say tomorrow we know how to do it. The only issue is the time it takes. Let's pretend we can do it in 10 years. From nothing to fully functional, autonomous human colony in 10 years. Technologically equivalent. Which means that colony is also capable of sending out colonies. So now instead of one planet sending out colonies, you have two. Then four, then eight, and so on. Basically, every 10 years, you would double the number of planets inhabited by a species. In just 100 years, there would be 1024 planets supporting human life. In 1000 years? 100 cycles of colonization? 1.2e+30. Huge. There are "only" 40 billion planets that seem habitable in our galaxy. We'd have run out of planets to colonize at the 36th cycle. And even if it takes 100 years to colonize a planet to the point where they're just as capable, you're just really shifting the decimal one point. That's 3600 years to a fully inhabited galaxy. Cosmically, a blip in time.
So, the Fermi paradox says that given that colonization of other worlds is inevitable for an intelligent species, if life and human-style intelligence aren't unique, why haven't we seen evidence of other civilizations yet?
Either been contacted, run into an artifact of some sort, or found some sort of signal.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
and quickly heading towards self destruction. If this is the norm then living civilizations would be rare indeed.
Or maybe it's just the vast distances involved and some harsh physical reality. Warp drives, FTL, even approaching the speed of light, perhaps it's been tried repeatedly on one of those planets that's billions of years older than ours. And after billions of years and the best minds of planet Argwagh toiling away, turns out that c is the universe's speed limit...period. And when asked, "who wants to spend the remainder of their life in a tin can for the cause? And to doom your descendants to the same fate?", not a single hand went up.
I mean, this is kind of true already, although not exactly in that sense. Companies are essentially meta-entities made of humans, making their own decisions in the same way that humans are meta-entities made of cells, making decisions independent of any of those cells.
In fact, I wonder if anyone has done that already. It seems like we'd be able to see their stars dancing about.
Be sure to read the text below the strip (on how to do this with a gas giant planet).
That is a huge leap.
OTOH, that method of travel would still be rather slow and aliens might have abandoned the idea because it's too boring.
Then perform that on a scale capable of shifting the path of something that contains practically all of the mass of the solar system.
Far from "too boring", it seems "too implausible". Your "step 1" would be a huge leap in and of itself.
CO2 levels were far higher in the past.
During the Jurassic period CO2 concentrations were 4x higher than in 2018. During the Cambrian period, 15x higher.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Phaneroz...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...
> we consume all of the carbon and oxygen and die off
is a far cry from
> change our coastlines and weather patterns
We're not. And we may never be, let alone able to travel through space continuously while somehow maintaining generation after generation of life using a finite amount of resources that could travel with us. The paradox assumes so many things that are far from a given, to me it's confusing why such a great thinker couldn't see his own fallacious thinking. Maybe there is a ton of intelligent life out there that can barely get to the moon once or twice before giving up forever. That intelligent life would be like us, possibly dreaming of colonizing the next planet over while destroying itself. We could not, with current technology, possibly detect such life. We can barely detect earth like planets as is. The assumptions Fermi makes are simply too great for this idea to be compelling.
We have to at least try, and we have more than enough capability if we cared to try - we put men on the moon while fighting a major war and engaging in a nuclear arms race, with computers orders of magnitudes less powerful than a raspberry pi.
― Arthur C. Clarke
Bigger worlds will have bigger gravity and might have thicker atmospheres, possibly less deep though.
All of these factors would make space travel much harder, life support would be more difficult. take off harder (much) return to the surface much, much harder. So I think that even if civilisation is common space faring civilisation is going to be rare, and as we know even space faring civilisation doesn't approach interstellar civilisation.
(1) life as we know it can exist at extremely small scales (2) intelligence is not correlated to brain size: ex. birds
People love to make these big-sounding claims of Having Figured It All Out. But the data don't support the conclusions, most of us don't really buy the conclusions. That's a good thing.
Dissolving the Fermi Paradox https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
Given you probably need 3rd generation stars to create enough complex elements for life, it's only very recently that life has been possible at all
However, the going assumption of the Fermi thesis is intelligent life is different. Intelligent life forms civilizations that are expected to naturally expands forever, eating planets, stars and so-forth.
So far, human behavior looks much like the other phenomena that expand to the limit of their fuel and then die.
And, if somehow against all odds, we wise up and stop exhausting the resources needed for our existence, well, then that infinite expansion tendency quite likely won't be there.
"If we humans are now on the cusp of colonizing our solar system, and we are not much faster than other civilizations, those civilizations should have completed this colonization long ago and spread to other parts of the galaxy."
But what if we aren't on the cusp of this colonization, if one can argue such colonization would happen by quite a few technological advances that are purely hypothetical, that "colonizing the solar system" only seems plausible by incorrect analogy with the colonization of various areas of earth by various local societies.
Space seem wholly hostile to human from it's lack of gravity to its lack of all other components needed by us. Our era has gone from believing "space the final frontier" to seeing just how fragile our condition on earth is.
Are you sure about that? It seems to me that humanity has often made a "leap" in the past... Romans "fed" on slaves, then collapsed, and eventually we found coal. The industrial revolution "fed" on coal, then we found "oil", there's probably the next thing!
The only thing not justified is the expand forever thing.
It just takes one civilization with a runaway von Neumann probe to drop huge monoliths on every single rocky body in the Galaxy over a couple millennia, and since evidently nobody did that in our solar system, the question is why not. If there's a rule that forbids it, what is the rule and does it apply to us? That's the question posed by the Fermi paradox.