The Joy of Cosmic Mediocrity
nautil.us
nautil.us
Oh, as for intergalactic travel, I'm close to 100% certain it is way beyond the capability of any civilization. It's very hard to imagine intelligent beings with an attention span of millions of years.
We're evolutionarily fine-tuned to live on Earth. We love a blue sky, room temperature, certain levels of gases in the atmosphere, and so on. It takes very little work to live here, relatively speaking.
Living long-term in outer space and other planets means either forgoing most of the things that make people happy, or else attempting to recreate them in incredibly incredibly expensive ways that ultimately aren't as good.
It's cool to dream about living under glass domes on other planets... but the reality is that after the novelty wears off after a couple of weeks, I think you'd realize you'd just rather go back to Earth. It's way nicer.
"What about if we ruin Earth?" plenty of people counter. Well don't. It's a helluva lot easier to apply our intelligence to normal prosaic things here like taking care of the environment, than to building interstellar spaceships that can colonize other planets.
The clear payoff is: as far as we've seen, life only exists on one place in the universe, so it makes sense to spread it out. Not putting all your eggs in one basket. If you can't see how that's an inherently good idea, I'm not really sure I'll be able to convince you.
Your post is thinking on timescales of millennia, at the longest. We know the sun will burn out in a few billion years. We know another 'ice age' is coming in a few thousand years - the entirety of human civilization cropped up in the 10,000 years since the last major ice sheet retreated. We know earth will have some kind of natural disaster, whether it's tectonics or bombardment, and we may not be powerful enough to manage it when it happens. This knowledge alone is enough to justify the cost of trying to get off this planet.
>It's a helluva lot easier to apply our intelligence to normal prosaic things here like taking care of the environment, than to building interstellar spaceships that can colonize other planets.
"We should fix all the problems here on earth." Every time the idea of building in space comes up. As if we're capable of fixing all our problems on earth linearly and in order before moving on to space, and as if there are only enough resources for fixing the things you think are important. This is the classic, "this solution won't fix the problems we're currently not fixing, so we shouldn't do anything until those problems get fixed."
Sure, if the short term concerns don’t do us in first. You’re talking about an extremely long tail concern in terms of likelihood of human destruction compared to the threats that will come with developing the technology we need for material independence from earth. If history is any guide, colonization does not lead to spontaneous harmony or collectivized thinking.
I think the idea is “why are we playing with technology we aren’t responsible enough to use yet when the benefits aren’t clear”. Take the story recently about SpaceX launching satellites that are so reflective they obscure the sky: for a company with supposedly with noble intent, they clearly have their own interests which they will advance above our own. In the BEST case, they admit their own blasé ignorance as to the collectivized effects of their actions, and it’s not like they make any secret about serving militaries.
If there is a model for “space” research in the public interest, the US and comparable nations have barely invested a tiny drop in the bucket of military investments. I have no faith we’re going to start any time soon.
Yet humans have moved to temperate regions where the weather fluctuates throughout the year. Humans migrated to the coldest reaches of the arctic and the hottest regions of the desert. As much as humans love "home", they also love to explore. We were evolutionarily fine-tuned to live on a tiny portion of the Earth. Most of the places we live today, we had to adapt ourselves and the surroundings to survive.
> It's cool to dream about living under glass domes on other planets... but the reality is that after the novelty wears off after a couple of weeks, I think you'd realize you'd just rather go back to Earth. It's way nicer.
I'm sure that's true for some or even many. But there are plenty of people who would rather live and die living under glass domes on other planets. I, for, one would gladly give it a go if given the opportunity.
https://www.livescience.com/65299-how-will-the-universe-end....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#...
It doesn't have to be a single cause, either. Some mass extinctions in our history are believed to have multiple causes, or be comprised of multiple smaller events. It must suck to live on earth in those periods, even before the overall event is complete. It's like how you want your wealth to be diversified in a sinking economy even before "A Recession!" is officially declared.
An enormous, gigantic ‘Diversifying Wealth Tax’ would cause you to pause and assess though.
You're probably right, but that's not a solution to the Fermi Paradox. The central question is not why we don't see any spaceships, it's why we don't see anybody. No large scale construction, no radio signals, nothing.
A solution to the Fermi Paradox needs to provide reasoning for why nobody is visible. It's not enough to argue that most civilizations won't (visibly) exploit the resources of their home systems, or that the most prudent way to exist in the "Dark Forest" that is our galaxy is to stay very very quiet. It has to address why we don't see anything, meaning that not a single society decided to do this.
But if interstellar travel is hard, then the best solution to exploring another star system is to colonize it. One trip there, plant the seed of a new civilization, and let it expand in place to explore everything.
A very long lived civilization doesn't have to do this very much in order to colonize the galaxy. It can wait for other stars to come near on their own to make it easier. Stars in our area are moving relative to one another at about 30 km/s, with some much faster. If these colonized systems also decide to spread when other stars get close to THEM, then exponential growth can fill the galaxy in 100 million to a billion years.
A replicating machine intelligence can presumably be very patient, and an early civilisation evolved into that, or using it to seed colonies or just investigate could have populated the galaxy many times over by now.
It such a huge undertaking I doubt think anyone has ever seriously done any analysis of hat would be involved. That’s not a good sign, when a task so many people seem to write off as trivial, is so hard that nobody has even managed to do an overall actual engineering assessment or draft plan.
Countering your other reply, I acknowledge physics limitations like the maximum speed are unlikely to change, but see no reason for similar constraints on progress in self-replicating intelligence (apart from our current understanding of technologies involved like AI, which IMO is vastly overhyped).
By "machine intelligence", I meant AI (a term I don't like), but see no reason why it should be constrained to metal chips and boxes as it might be using our current technology.
For a machine that can build a dish antenna out of asteroid material and receive beamed instructions to build more complex machines, the seed probably would have to be bigger than a bacterium, but it seems disproportionate to imagine the complexity has to be greater than the seed of a tree. On the one hand, it has to grow in a very different environment, but on the other it's an environment without voracious competitors looking to eat or outgrow it.
Aside from which, his work doesn’t actually address any of the challenges I described. He tries to wave it away with the magic singularity wand, but doesn’t provide any actual technical roadmap to AI. I do believe we’ll get there eventually, I’m not an AI denier, but I think I have a realistic sense of the limitations we face given the actual physics of the universe, and the limitations of the materials it’s composed of.
So, while not actually countering current challenges - eg. The Fermi Paradox - head on, the reminder was reassuring for those of us sceptical about life elsewhere, but longing to be proved wrong.
If you go back to the early scientific age, you will find a widespread belief that the other planets in our solar system were inhabited! After all, why should the Earth be special? It was only after this was shown to be nonsense that SETI moved out to planets around other stars.
What all this does, of course, is ignore anthropic selection. If life is extremely rare, then Earth will be special just by the fact we are here to be making observations. In the end, a PoM argument for intelligent life being common is just circular reasoning.
Science is prodigy but not magic, so when we try to explain things that are way too complex or out-of-scale (whether big or small) relatively to us, the solution space is so incredibly vast that we might as well be guessing — science lets us rule out 1% of the 'whys' and we're almost none the wiser.
Consider this:
- galaxies may generally follow cycles, patterns, notably depending on the activity of their supermassive blackhole (or quasar, etc); life may be peaking during a "sweet spot" in the cycle, and plummeting at other times. What may be critical is thus not only age but 'state' of the galaxy, and we might find ourselves in the beginning of such a cycle (we sure accumulate enough particularities in the topology of our local spacetime, being both rich yet calm enough, to warrant the assumption that we're currently 'privileged' on average).
- We have no way to detect life in other galaxies. They could be swarmed by spaceships and interstellar spatian empires and we just wouldn't be able to determine that. Thus basing the Fermi "paradox" on such a small sample (on the order of 10⁻¹²) seems much too weak data. We simply don't know. We actually can't properly observe ours yet, especially behind the core, generally in the alignment of the disc. We are just now discovering that said disc is distorted and there are remnants of jets above/below us[1]. There are hundreds of galaxies in our local Andromeda-Triangulum region, huge gravity streams, and we've only begun to grasp that in the last few decades... It's still very, very early in our observations of the cosmos.
I think it's good to ponder such questions and raise apparent "paradoxes", go science! — but to draw any conclusions based on weak data and conjecture of a perceived (read: biased) mean is, IMHO, rather foolish, way too premature at best. Not hubris but wishful thinking, belief, opinion. So let it be that, humbly, defusing the anxiety.
In the grander scheme of things, we're not much better off than the Ancient Greeks when faced with this question. Give it another thousand years, and then I'd expect a whole other level of questioning. Not 10 or 20 or even 100, if we are to tackle that kind of scale — we need infrastructure for this, in space, way beyond the solar system (think telescopes, probes, not even manned missions).
The ultimate problem with time is not evolution (of us, of science, of tech), it's information travel: e.g. if we were to use the thickness of the Milky Way to set up telescopes, at ~1,000 LY, it would take half that time to transmit pictures to a central aggregator. 5 centuries for your next picture, I don't know if we'll be able to commit to such transgenerational projects without huge changes in our biology (lifespan, mindset, whatever but huge, enough to make us a different species).
Until we're able to do such things, grow such infrastructure, gather such meaningful data, we're just too small to even look at the cosmos. Let alone draw conclusions. We really just have to keep going at it, and it's gonna take a long, long time.
[1] Contrary to the very regular spiral illustration we're acquainted to, we are now realizing the Milky Way could actually look more like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A
https://phys.org/news/2015-04-advanced-civilizations-earth-o...
The base assumption of this study is:
> “if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced spacefaring civilization, the energy produced by that civilization's technologies would be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths”
Requiring galaxy-spanning civilizations who love to advertise themselves from afar is a bit of a narrow path to victory.
100 K galaxies is about one millionth of our observable universe (which is possibly itself just a tiny fraction of the whole).
So while this could have found something, provided all assumptions held true, that it found nothing is hardly representative nor conclusive of anything. It wouldn't have detected a billion thriving Kardashiev-2 civilizations and 'below', and that's ruling out a lot of life (actually, 100% of what we know to exist). It also assumes that Kardashiev is a valid representation of a civilization's advancement — in all likelihood, that measure is quite far from the whole picture.
Again, I commend the effort and welcome more, ever more, but let's not jump to conclusions.
OTOH, any world that was inhabited by aliens would, besides within a very narrow time frame, either have advanced to a state where their world would, for sure, be unrecognizable by us, or have destroyed themselves to such an extent that we would never have known they were there.
Typically human hubris, why can't we recognize the most logical explanation for so much dark matter? The wreckage and debris of a great alien war. Face it humanity, you're not the pinnacle of intelligence that you think, but, frankly the figurative apes throwing stones at each other after a (galactic version of) World War III.
Dark matter isn't merely "not bright" matter, it is matter which does not interact with electromagnetic radiation. It is generally expected that the vast majority is non-baryonic, for a variety of reasons.
The observed density of all matter in the universe is about 30% of the universe's critical density, but Big Bang nucleosynthesis results readable in the cosmic microwave background show much less helium and lithium than you would expect if it were baryonic — it is safe to say that baryonic matter is only 5% of the critical density. Moreover, small dense objects (black holes) would produce gravitational micro-lensing effects which aren't present, while more diffuse objects would affect the absorption spectra of light.
And finally, the observed distribution of dark matter in the universe just ... sorta makes it a rather poor candidate for war debris.
The observed distribution is very odd, actually. In some galaxies there is nearly none, in others quite a lot, yet it tends to be hang quite close to matter even though the forces between them are quite weak.
It's not hubris. It's rationality. If what you say is correct, we would probably see more evidence of alien life. You can't just see a star flicker and jump to aliens.
Why is that explanation much better than we're inside Matrix. And dark matter is rounding error or even worse our overlords manually tweaking parameters.
Both are untestable theories, which means they are essentially useless.
Why? It's entirely possible (also for us) that scientific and technological advancement plateaus. You get the early hanging fruit and a progress that looks like an exponential curve but turns out to be more like a sigmoid, as more advanced inventions get harder to reason for a human level intelligence, require too much energy, need resources that are depletable (minerals etc), are too complex to manufacture, etc.
So there wont be any logical necessity for "a state where their world would, for sure, be unrecognizable by us".
Nor it's required that they would "have destroyed themselves".
>Typically human hubris, why can't we recognize the most logical explanation for so much dark matter? The wreckage and debris of a great alien war.
Black matter has some physical properties. It's not just garbage we can't identify.
Also how is a "great alien war" the "most logical" explanation for black matter?
If technology does plateau and did so near where we are now, it would be extremely unlikely, because it would require two unlikely but unrelated events both happening. Mathematically, you would multiply the probabilities of each together.
> Also how is a "great alien war" the "most logical" explanation for black matter?
It's distribution is quite odd. In some galaxies but not much in others, and tends to be around regular matter even though it there isn't much force keeping it that way.
Yeah, I don't buy this argument.
First, regarding "technology plateau" being unlikely, that presupposes what it oughta prove [1]. We can discuss it as a counter-assertion to mine, but it can't be part of an argument that proves that we're unlikely to be in a plateau, because that would be circular reasoning.
Second, even if that "technology plateau" is low probability was a legit argument, and even given that "technology plateaus now" is also low probability, and thus their chances of happening together being even lower probability (the multiplication of those two low probabilities) -- that would just prove that "technology plateaus now" is low probability. It wouldn't mean it's impossible, much less that it's not happening.
And my assumption wasn't based on probabilities, but on empirical observations. Winning the lottery is low probability. Your first script getting accepted to be made into a major movie is too. But if you have the lottery ticket in your hands, have verified the winning numbers, and you just got a call from a Hollywood director that want's to buy your script, the fact that those two events occurring together are "low probability" doesn't matter. They are reality.
(Besides, for any two events with low probability that have happened in history, somebody could have made the exact same argument you've made, to "prove" that they didn't happen).
Plotting the outline of inventions on a timescale, and their impact, one can see that there's a big boom in the 18th century, continues to 19th century, peaking in 20th to mid 20th century. For 60+ years we haven't found anything as big as electricity (Maxwell and co), electric light, combustion engine, telephone, television, internet, photography, AD/DA conversion, nuclear power, transistors, DNA, Quantum Mechanics, penicillin, antibiotics, Relativity, flight, plastics, rockets, etc. Even computers and the internet herald back to 30s and 60s respectively. Where are those equivalent impact theories or inventions (as opposed to mere optimizations and marginal improvements to existing theories/inventions) in the last 60 years?
I'm sure you'll find a few. I doubt you'll find 1/10th as many as in, say, 1900-1950.
(High impact items, equivalent to the ones listed above. Not e.g. string theory -- compared to the advent of Relativity or QM it's small incremental peanuts).
[1] Of course, me saying that "technology does plateau" is also an assertion that I haven't proven. So, sure, one could argue in favor or against it. But one can't start from asserting that technology plateau is an "unlikely event" to disprove that technology plateaus, because that would be a circular argument. So at best your argument is not an induction, but just an unproved assertion itself).
You previously wrote, "It's entirely possible (also for us) that scientific and technological advancement plateaus." I don't see how "entirely possible" equates to "likely", so if you really felt it was likely, you can't blame me for assuming we were in agreement here, because you haven't made that clear until now.
> Second, even if that "technology plateau" is low probability was a legit argument, and even given that "technology plateaus now" is also low probability, and thus their chances of happening together being even lower probability (the multiplication of those two low probabilities) -- that would just prove that "technology plateaus now" is low probability. It wouldn't mean it's impossible, much less that it's not happening.
Yes, but if technology plateaus in the future, it would be the same as if it didn't plateau at all, in that we wouldn't be able to recognize the telltale signs of it, being completely foreign to our own.
> And my assumption wasn't based on probabilities, but on empirical observations. Winning the lottery is low probability. Your first script getting accepted to be made into a major movie is too. But if you have the lottery ticket in your hands, have verified the winning numbers, and you just got a call from a Hollywood director that want's to buy your script, the fact that those two events occurring together are "low probability" doesn't matter. They are reality.
> (Besides, for any two events with low probability that have happened in history, somebody could have made the exact same argument you've made, to "prove" that they didn't happen).
I find your empirical evidence rather weak. You cherry picked the data.
> Plotting the outline of inventions on a timescale, and their impact, one can see that there's a big boom in the 18th century, continues to 19th century, peaking in 20th to mid 20th century. For 60+ years we haven't found anything as big as electricity (Maxwell and co), electric light, combustion engine, telephone, television, internet, photography, AD/DA conversion, nuclear power, transistors, DNA, Quantum Mechanics, penicillin, antibiotics, Relativity, flight, plastics, rockets, etc. Even computers and the internet herald back to 30s and 60s respectively. Where are those equivalent impact theories or inventions (as opposed to mere optimizations and marginal improvements to existing theories/inventions) in the last 60 years?
> I'm sure you'll find a few. I doubt you'll find 1/10th as many as in, say, 1900-1950.
You realize human history started a long while before the 18th century, don't you? We have a long way to go before we drop back to the level of invention attained in the previous millennium. You are extrapolating out tiny fluctuations at the very tail end of the history of humanity, and ignoring the rest of it.
Ooh, this one is original. Great sci-fi idea.