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Comment by throwaway316943 | Hacker News Reader

I’m not a fan of galactic settlement simulations mostly because I think they simulate the wrong thing which is rate of diffusion. This treats the civilization as a static thing that simply spreads out at the edges. Compared to the history of human civilizations this is clearly unrealistic. The question to answer is what happens within the already colonized systems over time. How often would breakaway civilizations appear, wars, extinction events, mind upload cults, Luddite revolutions, stagnation, etc. Filters abound. The great civilizations of Earth’s past have succumbed to similar fates and we’ve only progressed by starting over again and again.

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I feel a need to add an important extra wrinkle. The front line of progress and growth in all things is driven by those who are pursuing progress and growth. If an upload cult arises in a planet, and 90% of the populace retreats into simulations, the remaining 10% are still around and we be selected to be exactly those people most invested in the material universe; within a few years (not millions of years, certainly) there’s a good chance they’ll be considering expansion. Or, consider how often new civilizations are formed by small populations of refugees from intolerably oppressive larger civilizations. Something like a war, extinction event or ecological difficult is similarly likely to prompt a desire for expansion as it is a total collapse.

Science fiction is full of sentences of the form, “The Klaatu were an alien race who colonized the galaxy a million years ago but have since moved on.” I always roll my eyes at this. Almost no matter what the Klaatu are or what they care about, there would be some group of them remaining. And the only Klaatu we would see would be the descendants of the ones who stayed. Giant galactic civilizations made of individuals are unlikely to make coherent collective decisions with no dissenters for the same reason our single planet (with much less serious communications obstacles) never makes unanimous collective decisions.

What if 90% of the populace retreats into simulations, but in such a way that the remaining 10% have no political power and no industrial base, because that all remained with the majority? Hard for the non-uploaders to expand in that case.

It's hard to command control over the physical reality when you are willingly absent from it.

Is what a chimpanzee might think of the white house.

Or what rest of the world been thinking of the White House.

Point stands.

POTUS himself may be absent from Africa but not from physical reality, and the physically real resources under their command certainly aren’t absent from the various corners of the world.

I don't understand your argument. How much control do you think the White House exercises over chimpanzees? Your hypothetical chimpanzee is completely correct.

That's quite contrived in my opinion. How can people uploaded into a simulation maintain that level of control in the physical world for any durable period?

They have to keep up all the computing infrastructure running the simulation, and deal with long-term threats like geological activity and asteroids. That requires having and maintaining considerable technology out in the real world, and if only a mere 10% refuse to enter the simulation, then that minority may not get to benefit from spacefaring technology, or have the capital or industrial base to develop their own.

In fact, since spacefaring presents a threat (kinetic bombardment) to any planetary-bound species, then that majority who choose to enter the simulation may want to expressly prevent the minority from leaving the planet.

This is obviously not impossible, but we are now in the realm of adding clauses to an already rather specific scenario, each clause adding another degree of improbability. (The odds of "an upload cult arises on a planet" is by definition greater than "an upload cult arises on a planet AND actively presents anybody else on the planet from ever leaving.)

I think the metaphor to look to isn't necessarily even human civilizations spreading around the globe; it's life spreading through the planet to colonize every niche out of which the slightest scrap of energy can be extracted.

Wouldn't it be a lot easier for the non-uploaders to, you know, just pull the plug? Or change the input to the digital existances in a way to simulate a reality "outside"?

No, because – as I mentioned above – the uploaders would still maintaining all kinds of technology to monitor and control the outside world in order to ward off any threats (natural disasters, sabotage from the non-uploaders) to the computing infrastructure on which the simulations are running. If the majority of society chooses to upload, then that suggests that such protective infrastructure is already so stable and advanced, that the non-uploaders would be powerless to simply "pull the plug".

You're getting very close to ending up with the script to The Matrix.

Software eats the world; control the software.

It's an interesting question. How do people maintain control now? In general, it is not through physical control. We have institutions, we have "manufacturing consent".

We have those in a negative sense. Manufactured consent is mostly about directing motivation towards wars of control and acquisition and preventing other activities - including the peaceful development of sustainable energy, which is finally happening fifty years after it could have, and non-corporate non-military access to space on top of a non-corporate internet, neither of which are happening at all.

Manufacturing positive consent for a billion-year project is - obviously - a completely different kind of problem.

Change the “upload filter” to “total upload filter” smaller chance but still relevant. Also it was a silly sci-fi example, I’m sure sufficiently advanced societies can think up better forms of planetary dead ends.

This is far more complex to model, and near impossible to. I wouldn't expect to see this anytime soon.

But to give you some hints, breakaway civilizations would likely happen all the time. Every space program has issues with astronauts not following orders simply because the astronauts internalize the idea of "what are they going to do? Come get me?" This is frequently talked about in settings where they are discussing Moon and Mars colonization. A Martian colony won't really belong to the US/China/EU/whatever for very long. I'd expect something very similar to Red Mars/The Expanse.

Another big reason for this will simply be time of light communication delays. Between Earth and Mars that's 8-15 minutes one way. It is highly impractical to control a territory when communication takes so long, they will effectively become independent. We've seen this historically too. Colonies operate drastically differently than their home countries. Being so far away it is difficult to communicate and cultures will diverge, especially considering that their day to day lives will be drastically different. Different needs creates different cultures. But luckily this distance also makes war difficult between two planets. You have months to respond.

> Every space program has issues with astronauts not following orders simply because the astronauts internalize the idea of "what are they going to do? Come get me?"

From the script to Casino:

> Every couple of weeks I used to send Marino back to the bosses with a piece of what I made.

> Not a big piece, but fuck them, what did they know? They were fifteen hundred miles away... and I don't know anybody who can see that far.

On the other hand...

> Between Earth and Mars that's 8-15 minutes one way. It is highly impractical to control a territory when communication takes so long, they will effectively become independent.

This is totally wrong. Between Earth and Earth, empires have exerted effective territorial control while communication one way took weeks. A 15 minute delay in communication is meaningless. The problem is the difficulty of traveling, not of communicating.

> empires have exerted effective territorial control while communication one way took weeks.

That's because the effective territorial control was not exercised by the central government of the empire, but by territorial governments that were on the spot and that had pretty much complete authority to act on their own initiative without getting permission from the central government. They only had to meet very general policy goals. So the speed of communication with the central government was not relevant to the effectiveness of the territorial control.

The question is whether a territorial government on, say, Mars would have the same loyalty to the central government on Earth that, say, British territorial governors had to the British empire. Without that loyalty on the part of the territorial governments that are on the spot, there is in fact no way for the central government to effectively control territories.

Most of the same tactics used to control colonies could be used to control Mars.

Moreover, Mars would probably be utterly dependent on earth for multiple generations.

> Most of the same tactics used to control colonies could be used to control Mars.

Those tactics only work when backed up by a credible threat of overwhelming force. I do not think the Earth will be in a position to bring overwhelming force to bear on a Mars colony. It's a lot harder to do that across tens of millions of miles of space than it is to do it across an ocean. And even across oceans on Earth it often doesn't work.

> Mars would probably be utterly dependent on earth for multiple generations.

I'm not so sure. We have barely even started exploring Mars; we have no idea what resources exist there. We are still discovering new resources here on Earth; I would expect that humans on Mars would be doing the same there.

> Moreover, Mars would probably be utterly dependent on earth for multiple generations.

Probably not. The reason Mars colonization is difficult is because they have to be self reliant. It isn't like expanding in the past where people could live off the land or barter or steal from the native peoples. There are no natives on Mars. There is no native vegetation nor is the land adequate for farming/cultivating.

In the past colonies could rely on these things and exploit them. Mars is very different. If you aren't self sufficient on Mars you will die. Period. Astronauts visiting Mars, just visiting, will have to figure this out too because they can't just land and come back. They have to wait a full year for the planets to realign (this is also why it is difficult to subjugate Mars because it isn't just about the travel time, it is about the orbits being aligned plus the travel time).

> They have to wait a full year for the planets to realign

This actually shouldn't be true for much longer. The only reason it's true now is that we don't have spaceships that can produce constant thrust for the entire trip; our ships spend most of their time in free fall, which, as Robert Heinlein pointed out decades ago, is the equivalent of floating down the Mississippi on a raft. As he said, what we need are the equivalent of sailing ships: ships that can put out a constant thrust, even if it's small, for an entire trip. Even a thrust of 1/100 gee, which is well within our technical capability if we get serious about things like ion drives, would greatly reduce trip time to Mars (and would reduce trip times to more distant planets even more, since the advantage over free fall increases as the distance increases) and would open up a lot of options for travel that we don't currently have.

Note that this doesn't change the fact that humans on Mars will have to be self-reliant; payload mass is still payload mass and a spaceship just won't be able to carry enough of it to Mars to supply life support for any length of time staying there. Sending unmanned missions in advance might help, but I don't think even that would be enough.

> our ships spend most of their time in free fall, which, as Robert Heinlein pointed out decades ago, is the equivalent of floating down the Mississippi on a raft. As he said, what we need are the equivalent of sailing ships: ships that can put out a constant thrust, even if it's small, for an entire trip.

Sails don't do that. In terms of propulsion, they're exactly the same as pole-less rafts. Ever heard of being becalmed?

> Sails don't do that.

The propulsive force is not as controllable as it is for a low-thrust rocket, true. But Heinlein was not claiming an exact comparison.

> they're exactly the same as pole-less rafts.

No, they're not. Pole-less rafts don't have sails.

> Ever heard of being becalmed?

Ever hear of missing the point?

Yes, sailing ships can be becalmed. But they can also not be becalmed. And sailing ships that were not becalmed created a worldwide system of trade. Pole-less rafts would not have been capable of doing that.

You statement doesn't actually confer confidence that you understand space propulsion. No fret. This is something most people don't know about, but I guess a lot of people speak about it because it is cool. We already have ion drives. But butterfly farts won't get warheads to Mars faster. Your burn rate will increase dramatically depending on Mars/Earth alignment. This again adds to the cost that we've been talking about above and how historically oppressors have had a difficult time sustaining combat with subjugated people, and cost is directly proportional to distance. It's a matter of will mostly and how much they get from those subjugated people. But even with the best technology we can see ourselves building within the next decade or so we're talking 3 months on a good alignment (current is 9 months). For comparison, Columbus was on the sea for 36 days. People saying that "oh, it was just like ye old times" don't realize that we're still talking about substantially longer time frames and substantially higher (proportionally) costs of travel.

And as for robotic warfare, I'll give the same answer to everyone that asks how guerillas fight tanks and jets. 1) you can't rule the dead, 2) international trade looks down upon countries that commit genocide, 3) genocide is typically pretty expensive.

> We already have ion drives

Yes, indeed.

> Your burn rate will increase dramatically depending on Mars/Earth alignment.

Why? I am not talking about keeping trip time constant. I am just talking about significantly reducing trip time compared to free fall. That is easily done with a low thrust ion drive; even a hundredth of a gee makes a significant reduction in trip time, and the longer the distance, the more the reduction in time even holding the thrust constant (since the trip time now increases only logarithmically with the distance instead of linearly). And that makes trips more feasible even when the planets aren't in alignment.

> even with the best technology we can see ourselves building within the next decade or so we're talking 3 months on a good alignment

Now it's you who aren't conferring much confidence in your knowledge. Below are some numbers (travel times are one-way). I've even included numbers for 1/1000 gee to show that even those numbers are much better than the free-fall numbers.

Closest approach: about 60 million km (6 x 10^10 m) Free-fall travel time: 180 days 1/100 gee travel time: 18 days 1/1000 gee travel time: 57 days

Furthest away: about 400 million km (4 x 10^11 m) Free-fall travel time: 1200 days 1/100 gee travel time: 47 days 1/1000 gee travel time: 148 days

The free-fall transit time for closest approach is taken from the Wikipedia article on free-return Earth-Mars trajectories; I have used the shortest time that appears to have a reasonable return trip (though the return trip transit time is longer). [1] Free-fall transit times for furthest away are taken by multiplying the closest approach time by 6.67, which is probably somewhat of an underestimate (it assumes straight linear dependence of trip time on distance, without confirming that there actually is a viable transfer orbit with that transit time).

1/100 gee and 1/1000 gee transit times are obtained by using the formula t = 2 sqrt(d / a), where d is the distance and a is the acceleration. This formula assumes constant acceleration to the halfway point, then turnaround and constant deceleration the rest of the way. (I also adjusted the units in the answers above to days instead of seconds, which is what the formula I just gave gives; I rounded up all fractions.)

I have ignored orbital maneuvers and takeoff/landing at both ends for all travel times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-return_trajectory#Earth%E...

> Columbus was on the sea for 36 days

Which was by no means the longest, or even a particularly long, voyage for the time period. Vasco da Gama was at sea for more than three months at a time during his voyage around Africa to the Far East and back. So was Magellan during his round the world expedition.

True but the reason these territories respected the metropoles laws is because they were aware if they didn’t the metropole had the resources to overrun them if they were upset enough. The same will be true of any off world colony for the foreseeable future.

I'm not convinced that's true. The New World exists for exactly this reason. The British were not able to sustain a war half a globe away with the Americans. It is incredibly expensive (hell, even the French supporting the US took a big hit). All a Martian colony would need to do is play guerilla warfare and wait it out. There's plenty of history to suggest that this is an effective strategy.

Sure by the time there is a huge population of basically nations on Mars that may be the case but that isn’t in the foreseeable future. The New World existed as colonies for centuries before it had the ability to become independent and even then that more to do with Napoleon for South America and the rest of the world wanting to take Britain down a peg for. The US.

> The New World existed as colonies for centuries before it had the ability to become independent

No, many of the British colonies had the ability to become independent fairly soon after being colonized. The key variable wasn't how capable the colonists were but how interested Britain was in controlling them, and that varied widely from colony to colony, depending on who in Britain had to exercise the control. Some, like the British peers who had ownership interests in New York and Virginia, were control freaks and wanted to exercise all sorts of detailed micromanagement of their colonies. Others, like Penn with Pennsylvania, basically let them do whatever they wanted and didn't bother much about it. And even in colonies like New York and Virginia, once you got away from the coastal cities or river ports that were easily accessible to British ships, the level of British control dropped drastically. The British couldn't do much at all about up-country backwoods farmers and trappers, who basically didn't care what the British or the colonial governments did since it couldn't really affect them.

What didn't crystallize until the 1770s was the political unity between the colonies behind an explicit declaration of independence. Which was, in large part, a product of the British, after the end of the French and Indian War, deciding that the colonies had already gotten too independent and needed to be reminded that they were still British subjects. Which didn't work out very well.

> that more to do with Napoleon for South America and the rest of the world wanting to take Britain down a peg

All of which happened after the US had already become independent. So it's irrelevant when looking at how the US became independent.

It is true that the British were still dealing with the French in Europe and that this limited their ability to project power in America during the US revolution. (The Americans also took full advantage of this by allying with France.) But that just illustrates my point: empires aren't omnipotent and can't just magically project power whenever and wherever they want to.

> the reason these territories respected the metropoles laws is because they were aware if they didn’t the metropole had the resources to overrun them if they were upset enough

I don't think that's true, since, as godelski points out, in a salient historical case where the colonies did not respect the home empire's laws--the United States of America--the home empire did not have the resources to overrun them. The British ended up learning similar lessons in South Africa and India later on.

I think the main reason colonial governments respected the home empire's laws is that the territorial governors and their personnel were loyal to the empire; they believed in the empire and its aims. When that loyalty goes away, as it did in the USA, the home empire can't do much about it.

> The same will be true of any off world colony for the foreseeable future.

You must be joking. If the British empire was unable to enforce its will on the United States, with only an ocean separating them, how could an Earth empire possibly enforce its will on a Mars colony, with tens of millions of miles of space separating them?

This does not take away from what I’m saying, like at all. When territories are unable to be held on to they are no longer territories of their metropole but independent states. I also like how you chose the US as an example to claim I must be joking.

1. The US territories existed in a time before our current technology which allows one to send drones to other planets

2. The US was heavily settled by the time it gained independence it could hardly be called a colony anymore at that point.

3. I said the foreseeable future, not indefinitely. Sure by the time there are millions of people on another world with their own economy, militias and legal tradition going back centuries that territory could make a bid for true independence but that won’t be the case for centuries at best. Any territory doing so anytime soon will seriously lack the industry and manpower to even hold their own territory against a large Earth based nation capable of colonizing other worlds.

I think it is you who must be joking here

> When territories are unable to be held on to they are no longer territories of their metropole but independent states.

In other words, you redefine words to avoid admitting any flaws in your argument. The United States was a territory of the British Empire. The British Empire failed to "overrun" them when it got "upset enough" (your words). So your argument fails for this case. You can't change that by redefining words.

> The US was heavily settled by the time it gained independence it could hardly be called a colony anymore at that point.

Excuse me? Being "heavily settled" in no way prevents a place from being a territory of a foreign empire. The population of India during British rule was far larger than the population of the British colonies in North America in the 1770s. That didn't stop India from being a territory of the British Empire.

> a large Earth based nation capable of colonizing other worlds

Colonizing other worlds is a lot easier than controlling them from tens of millions of miles away once they're colonized. The former just takes enough people willing to make the trip and a spaceship that can make the journey. The latter takes the ability to project overwhelming military force across that distance, which is a lot harder.

Also, I am not saying that, for example, a Mars colony must become independent. I'm simply saying that whether or not it does will depend on the motivations of the people in the colony. If those people remain loyal to Earth, the colony will. If those people stop being loyal to Earth, they will start acting independently, and there won't be a lot that Earth can do about it.

Metropoles had some control over those governors who wanted to return home.

Thank you, this is what I was trying to suggest. That these localized governments, while loyal to their empires, operated fairly independently (which should be fairly obvious for similar reasons to space. Which travel times are actually similar). Hopefully your comment has helped clear some confusion up.

One thing I seldom see mentioned, too, is why would a K3 civilization use easily detected communications like radio or broadly focused light sources? If we launched Voyager 3 (for lack of a better name) next decade, would we use primarily always-on, omnidirectional radio? Would we use a laser? Maybe we'd use a tightly focused, burstable digital radio system. What about next century? Are we simply looking largely for the wrong things?

The tightly focused radio beam would still leak into surroundings and scatter off of things, and would thus still be detectable.

Thing is, we still don't know yet what matter and energy actually are. We still don't understand the nature of spacetime. We have a lot of physics to discover. Those other civilizations might have discovered physics in different order. They might be communicating using phenomena we have no idea exist.

It's not right to assume that advanced alien civilizations will be using any technology similar to ours.

A radio observatory on Earth might be using a fiber optic connection to connect to the rest of the world but it's still looking at natural radio phenomena. It doesn't matter at all what a civilization might use as a backhaul, their Space iPhones could use SubspaceWifi, but their radio observatories will be looking at natural molecular hydrogen emissions.

For an interstellar beacon signal radio is pretty good. Lots of natural phenomena are radio sources, CMB is radio, and a lot of things opaque to visible and near visible light are transparent to radio. So a radio beacon has a good chance of being detected just because any civilization that discovers radio astronomy can stumble across it.

The idea that SETI would ever detect I Love Lqwynngh'tch reruns from an ETI has always been ludicrous. Even our most powerful radio telescopes (by sensitivity) wouldn't be able to detect television or radio broadcasts even a lightyear out from Earth. The only interstellar signal we (or another civilization) will ever detect are very intentional directed signals.

If you had an omnidirectional radio source detectable from interstellar distances you could use it once as it would fry itself and anything around it pretty quickly.

Your comment is interesting, but thinking about it, this is the most likely thing to happen:

Any technological advance in interplanetary travel speed or new technologies of renewable and easy source of energy, would promote expansion. The new arrivals to an empty planet could start all over again, claim the resources as theirs, organize their own laws. And if they are overcome somehow move to other planets and start all over again...I think there is wave coming our way if we think about it.

Yes my point is that each system colonized becomes its own independent case subject to destroying itself or regressing or becoming antagonistic towards its parent civilization. Think back pressure or resistance. The question I’m asking is at what point does that resistance turn the tide of expansion.

It’s true that filters abound but the idea that we’ve had to start all over again is Whig history. It’s been a continuum.

That being said I agree with your main point. The difference in worldview, ethics, where man sees himself in the universe over the course of our history (let alone pre-history) has taken dramatic and difficult to model changes.

Imagine the worldview of the builders of the Great Pyramid vis a vis our own. (And then remember that Cleopatra was far closer in time to us than them.)

Isn't it the opposite of Whig history? I thought Whig history was the idea of continual progress.

Yes, thank you, that’s essentially what I’m arguing against. There’s no reason galactic civilizations should continually progress especially when each settled system is effectively cut off from its parent by light years of distance.

I think it will depend on how stable the culture is when it gets that far. Will our language become static, now we have the printing press and Netflix? We are still changing, where books and films from 80 years ago have not aged well due to social attitudes. But if it stabilizes, maybe the culture stabilizes, and maybe it can be stable enough for million year time frames. It might not even happen here.... maybe in a million years after the first colony or three has happened one of them will develop a culture capable of becoming galaxy spanning.

I think it is worth noting that a new settlement will not be completely cut off from its parent. I imagine a new settlement around Alpha Centauri will be greedily consuming Earth media for quite some time, delayed by just a few years, until it progresses far enough for its own exotic drammedys to be consumed by Earth.

There are lots of questions to answer. Some can be modeled more easily than others. This one is pleasant because the model is simple enough for a broad audience to reason about, and the visualization is straightforward.

There's a factor that would make a difference, a question of identity. A civilization grown out of a migration and only possible thanks to advanced science would look at some things unlike any other that we know.

they assume 1 successful colonization ship per 100k years. This might take into account periods of stagnation and Luddite revolutions and such. Sentient beings do various weird thing but they do them fairly quickly.

I’m taking issue with the lifetime of the civilization, not the rate at which they send out colony ships.

The history of human civilizations is a blink in the eye compared to the history of the human race. And compared to the time scales of the simulations they run. So I wonder if maybe those filters end up as noise when we’re talking about filling the galaxy. History is less of a detailed story and more of a fundamental force.

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