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Honestly, the idea of a coherent starfaring civilization is itself kind of dubious to me based on the following things:

IMO, biological corporeal from for intelligence is not a longterm solution. Bodies are good at what the things they evolved to do and interstellar travel aint one of those things. Now downloading your consciousness onto a robot/computer/swam on the other hand is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more robust against all manner of failures and threats and really opens up the door for interstellar travel.

HOWEVER.... Assume speed of light is an absolute limit. This means even short hops between stars take a really long time. This doesn't really get much better with increasing technology either, because the amount of computation and evolution we would expect for a sentient robot swarm likely increases faster or at least at the same rate to where, in relative time, it's probably always going to be long and expensive in terms of energy. Even worse... take two "individuals" within this civilization and separate them for 100 years, which is not an unreasonable estimate for interstellar travel. They will be separated for far longer in practical computation time and are likely to evolve substantially without a lot of communication over that time. They will be so different as to not even be the same kind by the time they rejoin. So any semblance of stability for a galactic civilization is such a massively unlikely assumption in my mind. Instead individuals are likely to be in competition with each other. This produces an incentive to prevent such travel from occurring to begin with.

If mind states can be streamed and integrated continuously while traversing those light years, that would make reintegration less of shock.

That's a hell of a network latency to contend with.

We've only barely detected that planets exist outside of our solar system fairly recently. Our observations are mainly limited to the general size of them, e.g. 1 Jupiter width, 2 earth masses, etc. Telescopic images of other stars in our galaxy are just a couple pixels.

We're essentially blind but saying there's nothing to see. We don't yet have the technology to really observe what's happening in our galactic neighborhood. We don't even know what's going on under the atmospheres of the gas giants in our own solar system and it's mostly speculation.

If another planet had a pipeline linking their planet to a star for pure plasma energy, we couldn't even observe that with today's tools.

Another planet observing earth for intelligent life using our standards would also conclude that there's absolutely nothing here. Artificial lighting is under 200 years old, leaving little in the visible spectrum as an obvious sign of intelligent life for anything over 200 light years away. They could easily brush off oxygen/CO2 production as some sort of natural process. They could also conclude that the idea of life existing on earth for hundreds of millions of years is insanity, because clearly earthlings have planetary rodeos where we'd drag planets around for fun or we'd be using the methane on our gas giants for sustenance.

> superintelligent viruses

What if some virus evolved to work super intelligently as a hive mind?

> My personal view is that our knowledge of the Universe at this point isn't perfect but it's closer to correct than not.

I think most of the evidence contradicts this. My suspicion is that if we continue to progress at the same rate or accelerate, in 1000 years we (assuming we are still recognizably human) will look back at our understanding of reality right now as nearly completely wrong.

So your constraints don't seem to be givens.

> My personal view is that there simply aren't any starfaring civilizations to find within a pretty large (1M+ light years) light cone.

This makes a lot of assumptions, including that intelligent species don't accelerate quickly into something unrecognizable as they evolve to more advancement, or that our model of spacetime is basically right and there isn't much more to expand into besides our sparse region of reality.

> What if some virus evolved to work super intelligently as a hive mind?

I'd say that this would make that Hive organism look a lot like a macro-organism.

> ... in 1000 years we (assuming we are still recognizably human) will look back at our understanding of reality right now as nearly completely wrong.

So let's take gravity as an example. Newton proposed his laws ~350 years ago. Newton's laws are a pretty good approximation. Of course, Einstein improved on this with special/general relativity but... Newton's laws are still mostly correct. Classical and relativistic models only really diverge in extreme circumstances.

That's a long time to be mostly correct without a massive revision.

> This makes a lot of assumptions, including that intelligent species don't accelerate quickly into something unrecognizable as they evolve to more advancement

Yeah, there's a whole lot discussion about this as a possible answer to the Fermi Paradox. The idea has a problem though: ultimately civilizations are bound by how much mass and energy they have access to. If they aren't, this breaks thermodynamics.

So in a universe where this is limited, it will be an advantage for a civilization to hoard as much as possible for the long term. That sort of thing would tend to be... noticeable.

The other is that it isn't limited. If that's the case it really creates more problems than it solves. Basically life in the Universe should be even more prevalent and thus visible.

In a thousand years, most of what we know will still be right, so far as it goes, but as wholly irrelevant to choices being made as Thomas Aquinas's conclusions are today. We are missing that great ocean of truth, distracted by washed-up seashells.

I think most of the evidence contradicts this. My suspicion is that if we continue to progress at the same rate or accelerate, in 1000 years we (assuming we are still recognizably human) will look back at our understanding of reality right now as nearly completely wrong.

Most of the evidence?

We haven't found any new physics phenomenon from which we can derive new technology. There's no known or theoretical ways for us to traverse to different realities let alone prove or disprove such existence, for example.

This makes a lot of assumptions, including that intelligent species don't accelerate quickly into something unrecognizable as they evolve to more advancement, or that our model of spacetime is basically right and there isn't much more to expand into besides our sparse region of reality.

Just because we can imagine something doesn't make it possible.

I'm referring to historical evidence. At any point in history other than recent, our understanding of reality has been completely revised since then. And the extrapolation is that the same trend will continue. We've got zero evidence whatsover that we've found core models that can't be overridden by further discovery, and eventually made obsolete in whole by large paradigm shifts.

That would be true if the development of our understanding had happened at a linear pace. It hasn't, though.

Our understanding of the physical universe has grown so much within the last hundred or couple hundred years that I'm not sure understanding had grown equally much even throughout the entire preceding human history. At least you'd have to go pretty far in history.

With accelerating growth of understanding you will, at some point, get to "mostly correct". I don't know if we're there yet but you can't extrapolate linearly from history that we aren't.

I don't see how the pace of understanding is important. It presumes that we are somehow getting closer to the "truth", the absolute nature of reality. That is not how science works. It says nothing of "truth" - that's the realm of religion and philosophy. It builds models that can be tested empirically, refined and sometimes replaced. The acceleration of the last couple hundred years only says that we are getting better at refining the current model to match current testing capabilities, but it doesn't make the model impervious to some bit of information we could discovery that destroys its entire validity. The Catholic church did great a refining their model of reality and making it more internally self-consistent, but it doesn't mean that it's the same thing as the truth. Neither is a particular scientific model, and it is just as prone to being eventually dismantled or replaced.

One pathological example that could overturn our entire understanding of the physical world is finding out that we are in a simulation. You'd think you were "mostly correct" until you are "100% wrong". Not suggesting we are in a simulation, but it's an example that shows that as long as the possibility exists that we can discover something that overturns our current models, there's no way we can say we are "close to the truth". It's pompous and presumptuous.

Again, just because it's possible that there's more to cover doesn't make it true.

I don't see how the pace of understanding is important. It presumes that we are somehow getting closer to the "truth", the absolute nature of reality. That is not how science works. It says nothing of "truth"

OK, you can argue semantic all you want, but science is pretty much the closest thing we have to 'truth'.

The acceleration of the last couple hundred years only says that we are getting better at refining the current model to match current testing capabilities, but it doesn't make the model impervious to some bit of information we could discovery that destroys its entire validity.

No. Newton's Law isn't invalidated just because we came up with relativity. It's useful enough that we still use it to calculate orbit and teach students and do a kazillion things with it.

It is incorrect to assume that one day in the future that some new theory will destroy our previous understanding and invalidate everything we know.

Here’s a possible counterexample: our understanding of the overall shape and structure of the universe has changed drastically over the last 100 years. The concept of a “galaxy” is fairly new; the idea that the universe is expanding is fairly new and was initially shocking (most scientists had assumed a steady state); the idea that expansion is accelerating is new and surprising.

Constellations are still useful for teaching the stars, but it doesn't mean that mythical beings embedded themselves in the sky. Discovering that the earth was not the center of the universe pretty much did invalidate everything we know about cosmology. Newton's laws are fine for now, but once again, it doesn't make them truth. It makes them useful tools. We can't confuse useful for true, that's the entire point, because one day, even if it's still useful, there's a chance it will be found to not be true.

I will happily argue there is pretty strong historical evidence our models are correct. In my amateur trip through philosophy from Plato to Wittgenstein I've seen a lot of acknowledgements by the intelligencia of a generation as to what is presumed, convenient, or constructed fact and what is actual fact. Paradigm shifts in thinking have gotten repeatedly smaller over the written record, and would hardly be considered a paradigm shift by previous generations.

You're right that we've repeatedly revised understandings of reality that were based on mysticism and voodoo. But understandings of reality based on Science have only been refined and updated, rather than replaced. Newtonian physics is still accurate for day-to-day purposes. Similarly, the quantum nature of light isn't important for optics, nor steam or internal combustion engines, physical machines, radio, or even fast networks. Electricity concepts like voltage and current are still madly useful.

Scientific understanding has been about filling in fine details about the very small and very large, not throwing everything out the window every 5 years.

My view is that we can reason about organisms living in space because we are one of them. We have a sample size of one, but assuming that properties of different space-faring organisms are distributed normally, it stands to reason that the first sample collected is near to the mean of the underlying distribution.

In other words, imagine a normal distribution with very, very low variance (say, 0.0001). The mean is unknown to you. If you take one sample, your sample will very likely be close to the mean.

Within your argument, what's the justification for assuming low variance?

There is none! Variance could be arbitrarily high I suppose. In the limit, if you assume a uniform distribution, I don't think that a single sample will give you any information about the underlying distribution characteristics.

However, for the sake of the argument, variance can be arbitrarily high and still provide increasingly lower amounts of Bayesian evidence. As long as the variance is not unbounded (i.e. as long as the distribution is Gaussian, which I think is a reasonable assumption in nature), you can extract _some_ evidence from a single sample.

Natural selection means that they likely are warlike and violent. Warlike and violent intelligent species destroy themselves quickly so are unlikely to exist at the same time as us.

Only the ones that can reengineer themselves to not be warlike and violent before they destroy themselves will survive for long enough to exist at the same time as us. Therefore it is likely any intelligent species we meet will be peaceful (among themselves at least).