Comment by planck01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by planck01 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think that thinking around the Fermi Paradox has the fatal flaw that we think our current technological boom can be extrapolated. We have the feeling that the Kardashev scale, even type 1, is attainable. I'm more technological pessimistic and think it is not attainable. I think the technological boom will peter off, because of hard insolvable questions limited by nature and energy and money. We are enthusiastic now because of past progress and progress we see we can still make. But we will get in diminishing return time and slow stabilization before too long. And progress will become hard until impossible.

Humans will never colonize this galaxy. It's too hard, too expensive, and too pointless. And neither will other intelligent civilizations, of which I guess a small handful at most will exist in the lifetime of our galaxy. Maybe some galaxies do exist where a civilization lives that put everything of their energy on spreading within their galaxies. But even they will not be able to spread to other galaxies. The acceleration of the universe and the extreme distances and nothingness forbids that.

>Humans will never colonize this galaxy. It's too hard, too expensive, and too pointless.

If we stick around long enough, it will eventually, over a long enough scale, become none of those things. We're 95% of the way, as a species, toward the point of spreading out to such a diaspora that no natural force can eradicate us.

Even if we don't end up doing it because of nuclear weapons or mass suicide or some other reason, we would expect at least some other civilizations that reach our level of advancement to reach that last 5% beyond -- unless no other comparable civilizations have ever arisen in the first place.

Why do you think we are in danger of a dramatic slow down in new tech? The tech challenges today are certainly more difficult but our gains compound on themselves. Faster computers allow for previously computationally infeasible techniques, better tech allows for better understanding of biology from which we draw better, biologically inspired techniques, better cultural improvements/ greater access to information allows more people to work on a given problem. I definitely see certain roadblocks like the end of moore's law but there are other ways forward too.

Exponential curves are unnatural. If there is something that constrains growth--such as physical laws about energy constraints--then you'll get a sigmoid curve instead. And it does seem that we're on the slowdown section of that curve for computers. Meanwhile, in biology, we can summarize most of the research results of the past few decades as "it turns out that this is more complex than we thought it was."

> too pointless

It has seemed to me that we _have_ to colonize the galaxy, if we aren't - as a species - going to be forced to resort to periodic mass genocide of exactly the type discussed in the Marvel Studios Infinity War movie.

This is patently false. Hans Rosling and others have explored the statistics of the population growth on Earth, and unless our course of childbirth and death drastically changes, we will cap out at 9-10 billion. There are many factors, but basically, as poorer nations become middle-class they start having fewer than 2 children per couple on average.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com