Aliens might just be too far away | Hacker News Reader

Aliens might just be too far away

nav.al

44 pointstodsacerdoti65 comments

"I think Fermi also had the unreasonable assumption that interstellar aliens would figure out how to get past the speed of light..."

The Fermi Paradox does not involve faster-than-light travel.

"We still have this problem of what DNA was doing for that approximately two and a half billion years—the overwhelming majority of the history of life on Earth. Why didn’t it evolve at all during that time? What’s going on?"

Those early single-cell organisms were evolving!

The Fermi paradox is obviously influenced by how easy (and fast) it is to get from planet to planet, and Fermi himself did wonder about the probability of faster-than-light travel. From the Wikipedia page on the subject:

> Although he was not the first to consider this question, Fermi's name is associated with the paradox because of a casual conversation in the summer of 1950 with fellow physicists Edward Teller, Herbert York and Emil Konopinski. While walking to lunch, the men discussed recent UFO reports and the possibility of faster-than-light travel. The conversation moved on to other topics, until during lunch Fermi allegedly said suddenly, "But where is everybody?" (although the exact quote is uncertain)

In the evolution of life there are events that appear to be difficult, and events that appear to be easy:

1. The creation of life seems to be easy as the first life appeared very close to earth formation, in a very hostile environment (unless that seeding of life was done intentionally).

2. Sexual reproduction seems hard - it took 2.5B years to evolve, despite the significant evolutionary advantage

3. Plants and animal seem hard again - it took another billion years after sexual reproduction.

After plants and animals appeared, things seemed to accelerate, so for example you could say that having an intelligent species take over the world seems inevitable.

The problem is that those timescales are getting close to the entire lifespan of earth. Within a few hundred million years we expect the oceans to boil and all life to die. So even on earth, with a single sample, it appears that we are incredibly lucky to reach where we reached.

What's the mechanism for boiling oceans? I thought the Sun was a few billion years away from going red giant.

Personally, if I had to bet on an early filter, I'd go for the eukaryotic transition. Not so much the "having a nucleus" part, more the "dealing with genes at scale" part, because it requires so much machinery so low in the stack with so many knock-on effects and such a long payoff horizon. It's like the single-thread to multi-thread transition, except instead of everyone agreeing that multi-thread was the future and merely struggling to get there, we instead had a situation where everyone was trying to eat (literally, as in cannibalize) the proponents of multi-thread if their programs failed to go faster per dollar of hardware.

The sun's luminosity is increasing over time.

"In about one billion years, the solar luminosity will be 10% higher than at present. This will cause the atmosphere to become a "moist greenhouse", resulting in a runaway evaporation of the oceans."[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faint_young_Sun_paradox

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth

Cool, I hadn't heard about that. Thanks!

Speed of light is a problem in that it makes a lot journeys essentially one-way.

If we're talking about manned-space travel, the acceleration needed to get to anything approaching the speed of light would itself take months, if not an entire year.

So that's two years of travel just accelerating and braking. And to the next nearest star, you will probably be traveling at speed for somewhere around 3 years. I'm just assuming that you'd travel half a light year accelerating and braking. It's likely wrong. But I also suspect it's generous.

That's 10 years round trip to get to our closest neighbor.

And yes, while time dilation would cause those on the vessel to experience far less time than that, the people on Earth will still experience every minute of those ten years. It's also about 9 years before you even get a message. Because at least the information can be sent at SOL without having to worry about killing the messenger. 5 years to get there, 4 years to send a message back.

And some people will say "well, what about Von Neumann probes". Well, that still has the problem of at least a decade long wait to see if you have any return on that investment. And it assumes that we can develop artificial intelligence to the degree that such probes are possible. Which is a big leap considering we don't even really know what intelligence or conscience even is. We know what it can do, but we don't know how either works.

So, in order to colonize the galaxy, a civilization needs to be able to dedicate enormous resources to projects where the potential payoff, if any, are going to be at least a decade away. And to have developed technology far surpassing anything we have at the current moment. To have figured out very fundamental questions about exactly what life is.

Yeah. I'm not surprised we haven't seen any extraterrestrial life. The universe is simply too vast.

The rocket equation,the difference between momentum change (linear) and energy (quadratic) in Vexhaust of rockets, and the laws of thermodynamics constrain us to low speeds if we actually want to stop anywhere rather than sail by in a few seconds, which doesn't get you much more than good telescopes do, if anything. Slow travel is also a lot safer because of kinetic energy being quadratic in v.

If a vessel can be made that survives travel durations of thousands of years, and the passengers likewise, then they're adapted for life in interstellar space, and won't see much point in expending a lot of energy to go far down a gravity well to a hostile environment. Telescopes are fine for observation. There's plenty of stuff in Kuiper belts. The locals won't be interesting until they get out to their own Kuiper belt anyway.

The Fermi Paradox was proposed during a discussion about whether faster-than-light travel would be developed. Fermi, famously, exclaimed "where are they?" saying that if ftl travel is possible, we should be regularly visited by the numerous alien civilizations that must, statistically, be out there.

The Fermi Paradox has come to be the term describing the more general lack of alien detection, but it's only a "paradox" if we expect to be able to detect aliens. That expectation is only reasonable if aliens produce enough activity close enough to us that we would be able to observe it. If FTL is possible, that assumption is an unequivocal yes. Without FTL, it's infinitely more contentious.

I'm not an astrophysicist, so somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

My understanding is that due to the expansion of the universe, all the galaxies are moving away from each other. The rate at which they move away from each other is directly proportional to the distance between them (the Hubble Constant), because space itself is expanding. Kind of like if you lined up a bunch of deflated balloons next to each other and inflated them at the same rate.

At some point, around 13-15 billion light years away, galaxies are actually moving away from us faster than the speed of light. Also, because their "velocity" is proportional to the distance, they're actually accelerating away from us.

With each year, more things reach a "velocity" where they're moving away from us faster than the speed of light, and will never be reachable without faster than light travel.

Thus the Fermi Paradox only makes sense if you consider it likely that interstellar aliens could travel faster than the speed of light. If FTL travel is impossible, then a timer was started on the day the universe was created, counting down the seconds until our galaxies were moving away from each other too fast for contact to ever be possible. In that case, the Fermi Paradox is a paradox no more. It's entirely possible other life does exist, it's just physically impossible for us to contact each other.

I saw this gif on reddit a few days ago which really puts into perspective how _slow_ the speed of light actually is.

Fermi Paradox? There's yer problem right there: https://preview.redd.it/w67ihk0r2ly71.gif?format=mp4&s=4611c...

Light is only slow relative to human timescales. It's wicked fast on evolutionary timescales.

Even accounting for sublight speeds and conservative spreading assumptions, galactic colonization should only take millions of years, not billions. Evolution has taken billions of years. So if an alien civilization in our galaxy got a billion year headstart -- which would be an unremarkable change to the evolutionary timeline -- then they should already have colonized the galaxy. They should be everywhere, and we should see them, but we don't.

Life has existed on Earth for almost a third of the lifetime of the universe as far as we can tell. This doesn't leave that much room for older civilizations, especially if it happens that life on Earth was especially fast evolving.

John has existed for about a third of the time since the industrial revolution. This doesn’t leave much room for people who have earned more money, especially if it turns out John was an especially fast earner. Therefore, we shouldn’t expect to find billionaires yet.

What I pointed out is not some iron-clad argument that it's impossible for there to be galactic empires or that people with reasonable assumptions can't be surprised that the universe isn't teaming with life.

My point was that it's also not unreasonable to not be surprised. After all, we know for sure that, even if the universe is eventually full of life, there must still exist at least one species with our experience - looking out and seeing no one else. That one species guaranteed to have this experience is of course the first one that starts colonizing.

To be clear again, I'm not claiming that we are for sure the first ones - there are many other reasonable explanations, but I believe this one is too.

There’s a lot to unpack there and I think it’s missing the point that extreme outliers exist but we shouldn’t expect ourselves to be one. It’s akin to saying some people win the lottery therefore it’s unsurprising if we do. Yes, some civilization will be first. The odds of it being us are astronomically low based on time and # of planetary systems. Given that it’s exponential growth, it’ll likely either never start or quickly explode. If a capable species came even 0.01% before us, we’d expect to see them. If a species came after us but had even a slightly faster growth rate, we’d expect to see them. The Fermi paradox is puzzling because time is on the side of galaxy colonizing civilizations, not against it. There are many possible explanations to the Fermi paradox, but “we’re the first” is extremely naive.

Right. There are a bunch of stars that are way older than our Sun. (Remember, the Sun is pretty much the same age as Earth.)

Right, on first glance "we really might be first" looks like a poor hypothesis -- it's inconsistent with the mediocrity principle, it plays into dangerous self-centered cognitive biases -- but it's actually one of the better Fermi paradox solutions.

If I had to bet, I'd bet that we were first, and that it happened due to an early filter. I can hear a crowd of doomers grabbing their pitchforks and torches, screaming "late filter, late filter," but I don't buy it. There are many plausible apocalypse scenarios that would wipe out most of humanity and make life miserable for a long time -- but finishing the job is a very different thing, and you have to reach deep into the scenario bag to find an apocalypse that actually does the trick. In contrast, there are a bunch of cellular biology innovations that sound magnificently tricky to evolve. Cellular membranes and the eukaryotic transition are two that stand out, but who knows. Point is: I find the "early filter" hypotheses easy to believe, and not just because they wind up being good news in the end.

I agree with all or most of your comment. I wanted to comment a little bit on this though:

> ["we really might be first"] plays into dangerous self-centered cognitive biases

I'm not so sure that this bias exists to a great extent, and in fact an opposite bias seems to be to prevalent - in almost all art, there is always an assumption of some older more advanced progenitor race, some old golden age of advanced wisdom. This is true happens in the Epic of Gilgamesh (the antediluvian civilization was more advanced) just as in modern video games.

I don't think it's accurate to say that light is slow on any timescale. It's literally the fastest thing, no matter what scale you're on.

The issue at hand, and the reason that we can make light look slow, is that we can't comprehend the distances we're talking about covering. No one said anything about restricting the search for life to our galaxy, so let's set that aside. Given the distances involved, the odds that evolution has gone complex in more than one galaxy are high, but the odds that we might find evidence of this are low.

Yes, it's true, to define a velocity scale you need to plug in a spatial scale and a temporal scale. A human lifetime defines the temporal scale, but I technically didn't mention a spatial scale. However, we were talking about Fermi paradox and galactic colonization -- so a reasonable spatial scale would be that of the galaxy, and then we have defined a velocity scale and can make comparisons:

c << (galactic diameter / human lifetime)

c >> (galactic diameter / billion year evolutionary lead)

The end of the gif with the distances between the sun, Mercury, Venus and Earth to scale is kind of informative and then you look at the fine print that indicates that with that scale the planets are all represented at 50x and the sun at 2x and it really makes the distances that much more amazingly large. And I have to confess that my mental image of the distance from Mercury to the sun was way off—I'd always envisioned it as being close enough that the sun would fill the daytime sky but really it would just look about 2.5–3 times bigger than it does on Earth.

But intelligent civilizations don't exist on evolutionary timescales, they exist on the timescales of intelligent beings, like us. We struggle to maintain projects for more than a few years, a tiny fraction of our lifetimes. Our oldest institutions are only a few thousand years old, dozens of generations. Many of our civilizations rose and fell within centuries. Our species is much less than a million years old, and while it is unclear how long we will last, it seems pretty optimistic to think we are in the first few percent of our species history, nonetheless the first few thousandths of a percent of our civilization's history. If we had built ships travelling at 1% of lightspeed to colonize the galaxy, and launched them when the common ancestor of humans and chimps lived, some of them would still be travelling to their destinations. Maybe there are rare species that live on timescales tens, hundreds, even thousands of times longer than ours, but even for them these would be long time periods.

And it's not enough to simply reach these distant star systems, you need to survive there indefinitely. A billion years is a long time, much longer than complex life has existed on Earth. Most of Earth's crust is less than 250 million years old. Objects in space would be pulverized to dust by a billion years of collisions, assuming their orbits were even stable for anywhere near that long. On timescales like that, even structures made of solid granite would erode away on a planet's surface. Maybe by looking for weird minerals which couldn't have formed naturally or microfragments of broken down structures we could identify a civilization as having existed in the deep geologic past, but there is no way we could do that sort of analysis from light years away, even if we knew what to look for.

Realistically, there are only a few technosignatures we could hope to find. Of course there are active radio transmissions, which requires the civilization to be active in an incredibly narrow timeframe. Exoplanet atmospheres containing short lived gases with no known natural production mechanism would be good, and may outlive a civilization, but anything stable enough to last for geologic timescales would be impossible to rule out as natural. Probably the longest lived evidence that we could detect would be the remnants of alien megastructures in space. No one really knows how long say a dyson sphere would last after it stops being maintained, maybe millions of years. But unless we make some extremely tenuous assumptions about what and how alien civilizations would construct megastructures, we can only make extremely rough guesses as to what a functional megastructure would look like, nonetheless one that has suffered millions of years of wear and tear. Of course eventually they'll all start to look like clouds of dust and debris, but how do we distinguish them from the clouds of dust and debris that we find all over the place with a presumed natural origin?

I recently have been considering whether space travel is even relevant to advanced species.

Assuming the technological knowhow for interstellar travel requires much more evolution and adaptation I wonder if at that point we or any species would be interested in physically travelling.

Early scientific research was mostly based on field observations due to the lack of intricate technological understanding. As we advance, more and more of our research is done in labs and on computers for obvious reasons. I doubt aliens or our future selves will be reliant on field observations for research.

The ocean is on our doorstep, yet vast amounts of research have not gone into exploring that compared to space. The reason is because of the perceived potential outcomes of space vs ocean exploration. The same reasons will stop us from exploring physical space in the future, and could be preventing aliens from exploring now.

Eventually a matrix like integration with technology could give ourselves access to realities with enough to keep our minds occupied. Not only could we have access to procedurally generated worlds, but procedurally generated physics and rules to those worlds. Once we crack the locks to access the rules our consciousness we can generate even more "realities" to explore. Natural evolution of the mind could negate the need for the technological matrix.

I consider the mind to be the end game for exploration. The "last frontier" if you will. Negating the need for physical travel. Consider as an example the Organian way of life from Star Trek.

I completely agree. This seems to be the most convincing solution to the Fermi Paradox. The physical world seems so limited and boring compared to what a virtual world could be (as you said, at least if we ever crack the secret of consciousness) that it seems self-evident that any sentient beings would eventually prefer to "live" inside that, removing itself from the physical world almost entirely (leaving behind just probes to collect energy and repair themselves and the computers generating their new reality, I guess).

There's a song by one of my favorite artists, Peter Mulvey, which touches on this point. It's more of a spoken word poem, titled "Vlad the Astrophysicist". In the song, Peter asks Vlad if there are aliens, and if there are, why haven't they contacted us? Vlad answers basically that there almost certainly are aliens, but civilizations don't last for long enough compared to the size of the universe.

> "You see?" He said, "They never meet each other. Time is too long, space is too large. I mean sure, maybe at one time, right next to each other at the same time, fss, fss - Two civilizations sprang up and they had war, better yet they had peace, They had arts exchanges, they had an intergalactic library... but they are all dead now, too. In all likelihood, we are alone, and by the time the next civilization arises, We'll have been gone for a long, long time."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9kbcGfX35M

Fermi did not think that aliens would get past the speed of light, but what we have found out in the last 40 years does make his paradox less striking. If Fermi was alive today I expect he would not have wondered "where's everyone?" Instead I think that he would be saying that there's a range of reasons why intelligent life is vanishingly rare. The dynamics of most solar systems (big planets migrate in) and the role of Jupiter as a comet catcher as well as the insights into the history of life and the miracle of the eucaryotic cell.

> the role of Jupiter as a comet catcher

Do you happen to have any info on this?

Attempting to answer my own question, I found https://earthsky.org/space/is-it-true-that-jupiter-protects-... and also https://bigthink.com/hard-science/how-jupiter-protects-earth... but I was curious if you knew of better sources to read up on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_tack_hypothesis

I recall waiting for Shoemaker-Levy 9 [0] back in 1992; it was not expected to go off with such a bang, when it did it put the spotlight on Jupiter's protective effect.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9

I didn't read the book, but at least in this article/interview they use too many[1] qualitative descriptors like "quite rare", "incredibly vast", "too far", "a lot longer", "long before", "very big", and "almost entirely empty". The quantities involved are not intuitive, you need to run a calculator to figure out the probability.

The Grabby Aliens hypothesis [2] [3] is a recent publication by Robin Hanson (originator of the descriptor "The Great Filter" in the Fermi Paradox) which describes these times and distances mathematically.

In short, either the model and its assumptions are flawed, or we're really, really early as far as intelligent spacefaring alien species go. We're here about 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, and the solar system about 4.6 billion years old. That's nothing in terms of spacetime! Expanding at 0.1c (note, this all assumes non-faster-than-light travel) we could recolor the spectrum of the Milky Way in 1 million years, Andromeda in 25 million years, and the entire local group in 50 million years. None of those galaxies are 'just too far away'.

[1]: 9, by my count, and only 1 quantitative descriptor - 2.5 billion years.

[2]: https://grabbyaliens.com/

[3]: A nice video summary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LceY7nhi6j4

The Earth may be rare but self perpetuating intelligent systems may not be.

The chaotic fluid dynamics of some gas giant, star, or accretion disk could spontaneously form an intelligence given enough time the same way we evolved from a chaotic system here on Earth.

There must be something like the Drake equation but for how many large chaotic systems need to exist for something to evolve that can perform non-trivial computation.

Like an estimate for how many Solaris planets may exist in the universe.

My fun hypothesis is that it's relatively easy for technology to trigger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay, which results in a bubble of destruction expanding outward at the speed of light. The universe actually looks like swiss cheese, but we're still here because c is so slow.

Oblig. link to Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004JHY8C6

Perfectly reasonable, but seems to be innocent of all the usual discussion of the Fermi Paradox[1], Drake Equation[2] or the Dark Forest[3]. Also I don't see any reason all civilizations would pass through a 'radio age' when we might overhear them, or be able to pick up our transmissions.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

3: https://www.iflscience.com/space/the-dark-forest-hypothesis-...

As animals ventured out into the grasslands, visual acuity was selected for because the viewing distances expanded.

As visual acuity improved, camouflage was selected for very strongly to allow animals to hide from the increasingly visually seeking predators.

Now what happens when sensory perception extends to near-infinite distances? There is selection pressure for near-infinite camouflage.

All non-camouflaged civilizations will be picked off by those who are camouflaged until the universe is quiet.

If there's an alien eating predator starving for resources, sure.

My theory is that we just didn’t look long enough. It took earth 2-3 billion years to evolve from nothing to humans to this stage. So we essentially just started to see for the first time and we see nothing. A blink of an eye in the time frame of the universe.

The distance also plays into the time frame because a civilization may only broadcast for 2-3000 years before new tech is used and that is easy to not be in the right place at the right time.

> a civilization may only broadcast for 2-3000 years before new tech is used

2-3000 years is awfully specific. How did you arrive at that theory?

The the unseen ones are mostly the harmless ones. The grabby (basically the "expansionist Dyson sphere builders") are the ones we should be on the lookout for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3whaviTqqg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LceY7nhi6j4

https://grabbyaliens.com/

Robin Hanson's model explains the data, answers the Fermi paradox. We don't see aliens because if there were aliens to be seen they would be in our place. (Because the hard-steps model parametrized by habitable zone time-frames limited by the lifecycle of stars gives a distribution of emergence of intelligent life. And if just a few of those start expanding, they'll soon cover enormous volumes, taking away the possibility for later emergence of intelligent life.)

Might? Unless they are in the Solar System, they are too far away for any reasonable cooperation, period.

Period?

UAP sightings are rarely taken seriously, which is no surprise considering that 99% don't hold up against any kind of scrutiny. There are however a number of credible sightings, the 2004 USS Nimitz incident being the most well known. Unfortunately, studying UAPs in an academic context is still mostly career suicide, so exploratory and speculative work like uaptheory.com can only be found at the fringes. As physicist Avi Loeb said before: if we don't look, we will never find anything. If only we could take the topic more seriously, we may eventually find that the Fermi Paradox is not a paradox after all.

>UAP sightings are rarely taken seriously, which is no surprise considering that 99% don't hold up against any kind of scrutiny.

Until what a year ago and then even bigger half a year ago? The news/journalists basically didnt cover the US government admitting to the existence. Why? They were clearly ordered in secret history to not cover it. Then some random politician(does white checkmark me its a real account?) said it only scratches the surface? https://twitter.com/senatorreid/status/1254836730546384897?l...

UFO claims must now all be investigated as much as we can.

It's actually more hopeless than you realize. Okay, so you just arrived at your destination. Now what, unless this new world was EXACTLY like earth, you will perish relatively quickly. The atmosphere will probably have a different mix of gases. The gravity may be different. The star may not be a type G, so radiation might be a real problem. There might be nothing to eat. Certainly viruses and bacteria of that world would attack the astronauts almost immediately. You would surmise before your death that the journey was not worthwhile.

In my fantasy/scifi book series I have it such that aliens can make it to Earth, but why do they want to? The few who do, they are doing it for scientific/exploration purposes and therefore not interested in breaking our ignorance.

The break point is obviously aliens taking refuge in our system hiding from their enemy. We now know aliens for sure exist, they just find us boring. They'd rather goto vacation/pleasure stations, not some jerk primitive planet who attack all aliens they meet.

i think we're just incredibly lucky to have been able to go through all this progress: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~cpd/history.html

without being hit by another civilization-ending event

also, would oil/plastic/hydrocarbons be as easy to source on another planet? having millions of years of biofuel stored under our feet just as we were getting ready to exploit it must be really lucky

While life is probably more common than we all think. The permutation that leads to human sentience or greater is probably less common. In fact we would've probably see it occur some within our own solar system besides some bacteria. Life exiting the bacterial single celluar stage to a multi-cellular life is probably pretty hard too. Life is common, complex life is uncommon, thinking complex life is rare.

Slightly related new release by ParallaxNick about the topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Nrm1JsKhzeA

I generally recommend his high qualify cosmology content and his older Fermi paradox releases.

Everything is too far away and the speed of light is really, really slow compared to the size of the universe. And to make matters worse, the universe is expanding.

We may leave Earth, and might even manage to leave our solar system, but we’ll never leave our galaxy.

"The universe is expanding"..I would ad "faster than the speed of light". And that some galaxies that we see today we will not see in the future, as the space between us will be traveling faster than the light they emit can travel.

My answer to Fermi's paradox is that everyone is in a slightly parallel univers with a much cooler physics. As soon as they get the possibly, they leave this place, to join the party elsewhere!

There exists a possibility of a white hole developing near Earth from which aliens can emerge

I realize the math works out, but does seem rather fanciful.

So a blackhole is caused, mass goes in, it gets heavier and the event horizon gets larger. Mass is conserved, no magic needed.

But at some point mass stops being conserved, a worm hole forms, and matter is ejected from the other side? Despite needing negative mass/energy to keep it open? If this was true, wouldn't there be a max size of black holes? Or maybe a MUCH easier to see white hole for each black hole?

Fantasy like Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, Foundation, and Cowboy Bebop are farcical and stem from human whimsy. They do not depict how things will actually play out.

The next stage is post-biological intelligence, and if we don't nuke ourselves, we'll hit it in 100 - 300 years. The shape of post-biology will be one of two forms -- AGI or BCI --, and it will be winner take all.

No democracy, no equality. Fastest agent wins due to leverage and fear of other parties.

Once this happens, it will explode from our solar system and into the reaches of space.

This has to be happening elsewhere too.

Humans are an evolutionary stepping stone, just like everything that came before us.

In Greg Egan's book about this, basically the digital intelligence is invisible; the metaverse runs on a cubic centimeter of ultradense compute matter in orbit around whatever; any physical comms are tightbeam lasers that don't leak energy; the metaverse is in fact so far decoupled from classical reality that meta-time decouples from physical time. Sure you could inhabit a robot body, slow down to match physical time and interact with earthers but why would you bother.

That level of density of matter/energy and information is probably in black hole range.

Of course there are theories that we live in a black hole formed from a 4d hyper-dimensional star.

at the risk of turning this into a game of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortunately,_Unfortunately, any such digital intelligence is going to be concerned about events in the real that could result in them being unplugged / blown-up etc. and would thus be compelled to sterilize it just in case.

You're just replacing one human-created fantasy with another.

Which is all well and good, but don't pretend you have any actual insight into the matter.

I'd make a bet with you if I were going to be around long enough to see the outcome. It's going to be a digital intelligence explosion or societal collapse. I might be off on the timeline, but I bet my life that these are the two possible futures.

We won't continue to grow linearly forever with incremental advancements like smartphones every few decades. Once we have digital general intelligence, things will be weird.

Innovation and labor are no longer performed by short-lived beings with limited capacity for thought, that tire, and that eventually expire. There will be ethical questions about giving birth to consciousnesses that die. Certain parties will have exponentially more than others. There will be digital slaves that only exist to labor, hidden away in data warehouses. Etc.

With that setup, some entity with enough power will take over energy, communication, and defensive capabilities so that others don't do it in. If there's no risk posed by dying, why not make bold moves? Someone else will.

I stand by my prediction that we certainly won't have humans venturing out of the solar system. That just doesn't make sense from a biological or utilitarian perspective. If we have the tech to reach beyond our sun, we've certainly got the tech to no longer think with decaying brains. Once those agents exist, they will multiply. Just like the genes that gave birth to us.

The problem with your wager is that on a long enough timeline, the doomsayers are always right.

So saying anything OR societal collapse is going to evaluate to true.

There are any number of disasters, both terrestrial and cosmic, that can radically change the landscape of the Earth.

I also don't really find discussions about what's going to happen beyond our lifetime that interesting for the most part. Often, they're just fantastic wishing attached to some loose thread of logic.

The Island

Escape from New York

The Running Man

Akira

Strange Days

A Scanner Darkly

Back to the Future II

Blade Runner

2001: A Space Odyssey

2010: The Year We Make Contact

Death Race 2000

1984

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Freejack

Westworld

Real Steel

Pacific Rim

12 Monkeys

The Abyss

Timecop

And a host of other films and books are set in futures that are now our past. And while some of these are fantasy designed to entertain, they all make assumptions about what would be possible by that time. And we have fallen woefully short of those predictions. So short, that "flying cars and meals in pill form" is a meme about such predictions.

>I'd make a bet with you if I were going to be around long enough to see the outcome. It's going to be a digital intelligence explosion or societal collapse. I might be off on the timeline, but I bet my life that these are the two possible futures.

Yeah, well, that's still just, like, your personal sci-fi AU fanfic, man.

what are AGI and BCI ?

(guessing the I stands for intelligence.)

Artificial General Intelligence and Brain Computer Interfaces.

thank you

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