A Lonely Universe
inference-review.com
inference-review.com
Personally I think just the fact the universe hasn't been eaten by Von Neumann machines means we're alone.
Always remember that intergalactic travel is exponentially harder than interstellar travel and that is already brutally hard. We need only be among the first in our galaxy to explain the Fermi paradox.
Of course the energy requirements are insane and would require some kind of physicists nightmare propulsion system like antimatter rockets. Lose reactor containment and you are instantly converted into plasma and gamma rays. If you hit something the size of a dust particle it will destroy your spacecraft.
A bit hard.
Near light speed is a requirement for intergalactic travel because even solid state machines will not last long enough to make it without time dilation to shorten the trip.
Interstellar travel could theoretically be achieved with 1960s tech. Look up Project Orion. It could even be done with chemical rockets if you could hibernate, greatly extend life span, build a generational ship, or be an AI and just turn yourself off for the trip.
Yeah, this is why I don't think we'll ever achieve this and I very much doubt other species have or will either. I don't think the incentives are there to expend this kind of energy (and capital) trying to get to another galaxy - especially since it would a very, very long time before anyone would know if the project succeeded (if it would ever be known at all)- there's no success feedback for a project like that. Interstellar travel will be difficult enough and the feedback time there would likely be at least a couple generations (longer depending on where the travel is to).
And, this one spacecraft needs to be able to slow down, have the telescopes and equipment needed to identify exoplanets and decide they are suitable, have the means to travel all the way there, and have everything aboard to start a complete new viable colony on some unknown planet. It probably needs to bring all the energy for the first few millenna in batteries. That must mean a huge spacecraft, and there also needs to be some way to land it all on the planet, hopefully with all the pieces close to each other. Et cetera.
The engine that got all that close to light speed is just a tiny piece of the puzzle.
Imagine the "runway" you would need. How many lightyears would it take just to slow down? And that's before you even consider how some sort of reverse propulsion mechanism would even begin to turn on without tearing the ship apart in a microsecond.
Similarly, if the engines are operated at a constant acceleration, then the distance needed to decelerate is equal to the distance needed to accelerate.
Fuel(/reaction mass), on the other hand, us not equal. The fuel to be used to decelerate must also be accelerated first, meaning more fuel is used to accelerate than to decelerate.
So for, what, two million years or five, the front of your spaceship is blasted with near-lightspeed intergalactic-medium molecules, plus trillions of dust particles and an unknown number of rocks.
"Erosion" is not an adequate word, but we don't have any that is.
One supermassive black hole merger in the same or nearby galaxy, a biggish black hole merger within 10,000 light years, a magnetar hiccup within 500 ly, or a workaday supernova 5 ly off might be enough to sterilize a whole solar system. There is no guessing how many times life has been wiped clean that way.
The sooner our descendants can get the hell out of the galaxy, the better.
We could have been in sterilization range of a magnetar dozens or hundreds of times since life evolved, so we're just lucky none erupted when we were. The core supermassive black hole blew somehow just 100Mya, fortunately pointed somewhere else.
The only safe-ish corner is very far from everything else, and off-axis from the central black hole. We are deep in the thick soup.
But I don't expect our distant descendants to be dependent on starlight. A nice Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud are good to stay in for access to building material and fusion fuel, but the most valuable resource, otherwise, will be abundant free cold.
Planets, as such, and sunshine are for the extremest primitives. Nobody advanced would want to be closer to the sun than, say, Neptune.
There is a an obviously uninhabitable zone close to the core black hole, and uncountable similar zones elsewhere, but Sol could move into one of the latter at any time. And, distant events could wipe us out, anyplace else, with decreasing probability as the density of other stars in the immediate neighborhood decreases.
All we can say is that we have not entered any uninhabitable zones in the last billion years or so, i.e. five orbits, and not been blasted too badly from a distance, likewise. Milder events could wipe out everything but deep-sea microbes, which at this late date might not leave time to evolve intelligent life again.
Lots of galaxies have heavy star-forming going on in the rim, with increased risk of supernovas. I don't know if we know whether ours is among those. (I doubt we can tell. Such regions are identified by high UV flux, but UV is blocked by dust, which is plentiful.) But otherwise, farther from the core is generally safer.
Star formation zones are very far from the most deadly places in the galaxy, or even in our neighborhood.
Say we stretch our optimism and do make it. Now the colonization of the Milky Way starts. It's a 100,000 light years to the other end. You'd be a completely different species by the time you arrive. Say you achieve that (you won't), now we need some type of coordination and communication. Suck badly though that messages have a delay of 100.000 years. There is no such thing as the human species if we spread out as the delay between even closest habitable zones would be so large that orchestration is impossible.
And we're still within the bounds of a single galaxy, not even intergalactic travel. It simply can't be done. We'll never even escape the solar system.
Long before that would even become a question, it's questionable whether our species continues to exist in its current form. Human level AI is at the horizon within our lifetime. And will then accelerate away. Add a few centuries to that and it's strange to assume we'll still be there, unchanged, as primates controlling a machine a billion times more intelligent. The only path would be to become a machine instead, slowly replacing biological parts with superior silicone. Until nothing biological remains.
Sounds crazy or unlikely? The idea that we remain as-is is far crazier.
Reproduction has to be intact. But I do agree. We as a species are not fit to these interstellar or intergalactic travels. It has to be dominantly machines.
https://www.amazon.com/Saturns-Children-Freyaverse-Charles-S...
Assuming you're traveling at light speed across the Milky Way, a distance of 100,000 light years, the trip would take 100,000 years for the person traveling, no? I wonder then how long it would be for everyone left on Earth. Millions of years?
The closer you get to light speed, the less time it seems to you to take getting there. If you could get close to light speed, "only" 100,000+ years would pass back home, never less, but could be any larger amount. At 1/10 light speed, a million years pass back home and almost a million on board.
If you don't get really, really close to light speed, it still takes thousands of years, on board.
Getting close takes way, way more energy than (e.g.) getting to half light speed did, which itself takes unimaginably much; getting to 3/4 takes way more than getting to 1/2.
You probably can't carry enough material to produce that much energy, but everything you encounter on the way is blasting you at a good fraction of lightspeed. Maybe a laser from home can keep providing you energy, but that has to keep working for 100,000+ years. The faster you go, the less energy it can provide; and the farther away you are.
To be clear I’m not talking about “almost light speed,” I’m talking about traveling at exactly the speed of light (ignoring for a moment whether that’s possible).
Ants live in cities surrounded by humans, but have no idea what a human is or what humans do, and literally cannot experience - never mind imagine - what a human is, what a city is, what transport networks are, what culture is, what technology is.
Every so often an ant nest is destroyed because it's an irritant, but if the ants notice at all they carry on relatively unthinkingly. There are only other ants, pheromone trails, and food sources. [Other] may register very fleetingly but does not align with any ant concepts or ant goals, and therefore leaves no lasting impression.
Wide differences in intelligence make more advanced lifeforms invisible - not physically but conceptually. Which turns out to amount to the same thing in practice. Even between two species who share the same physical space.
We could be surrounded by a universal or galactic civilisation and we wouldn't know.
All the action is out in the Kuiper belts, where there is abundant cold, which is more valuable than any material substance.
I would think there is quite a bit of intelligent life in the universe that all feels equally alone.
Space constraints * time constraints make this a near insurmountable problem and then even if that is overcome then it gets multiplied again by the minuscule probability with sharing anything close to perception like the ants.
Not to mention we are going to be orders of magnitude closer to ants in perception than to aliens from a different planet.
Or maybe it'd make sense to consider how big the Universe is, how fast it expands and combine it with how very local is our perception of it.
If you do that and account for how young our capabilities to hear and see stuff out there actually are, Fermi's paradox doesn't make any sense just like the certainty of statements that start with "that must mean..."
I don't understand there to be any such estimation at all. The paradox is that ONE of the pieces of the equation has to be so improbable that it basically doesn't happen. That's absolutely allowed to be the piece that is nearly impossible to happen.
You mean the collection of stars that's 100,000 light years across?
How long has life existed on Earth?
Of that time, how long has life on Earth been generating signals that could be detected elsewhere?
How much of the Milky Way has recieved those signals by now?
50,000 light year radius squared (let's favor your argument by calculating the milky way disc as 2D area) = 2.5 billion square light years
Area our signals could have reached in the milky way over the past century of broadcasting: ~10,000 square light years
So the intelligent life here and now, only a fraction of the life that's existed (much of which has had some degree of intelligence) has only reached about 0.0004% of the Milky Way by now, to say nothing for the drop of signal to CMB noise as it propagates.
There's extensive discussion about the fine tuning argument for Earth regarding our gravity/propulsion to even be able to enter outer space, a threshold other intelligent life on a different planet may never be able to cross.
Fermi's Paradox is silly when you dive into the nuances.
Earth has a magnetic core and there are million things that generate EM radiation. Earth would have started radiating the moment it was created. It has a magnetic core as well. Now as per if somebody could read it 100000 light years away? Well the Sun was way hotter then and it would have obscured anybody looking this way.
Why aren't we seeing signs now, well maybe the signals are on their way but it may take another 20000 years to get them. I hope there is somebody here to receive and respond back.
The thing to remember is that given enough time and space, nearly every event has probability 0 or 1. BvN probes are either impossible or inevitable.
For instance, if our best Earth tech was pointed at Earth from a distant star, how far away would we be able to detect our own traces of life? We know that life is "a little rare" at least, but there is a huge range of rarity where life is everywhere across the vast, vast universe but sparse across the dinky number of light years we could see each other. Maybe aliens have tech that is 10,000x better than ours but the scale of distance is just too big of an obstacle.
There is an assumption that alien races must have figured out things well beyond our understanding and be doing things like harnessing stars in some dramatic way, but maybe that just isn't a reasonable thing for life forms to do? Or if they do have that ability, they may operate on a much longer timeline, simply nudging things along in a way that escapes notice.
One day we might be able to harness the output of a whole star but the amount of energy we’d need to get to that point seems out of reach right now.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the lack of energy is a universal issue across the stars.
A huge game changer would be if we discovered some physical phenomenon to allow us to safely extract energy easier from mass. It would do to our progress like what the telephones and the Internet did to communication.
In comparison, the best aluminum plants in the world use 13 kWh to make a kilogram of aluminum. Yet no one says aluminum is out of reach because it takes too much energy to make it.
The per capita primary energy consumption in the US is about 10 kw; your share of this energy over your lifespan would be enough to accelerate 1 kg to 2% of the speed of light.
https://www.space.com/40375-super-earth-exoplanets-hard-alie...
> To launch the equivalent of an Apollo moon mission, a rocket on a super-Earth would need to have a mass of about 440,000 tons (400,000 metric tons), due to fuel requirements, the study said. That's on the order of the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.
We may be in a Goldilocks zone not only for distance from the primary star (lots of systems are binary which gets problematic), but also in terms of size of the planet (not to light to loose atmosphere, not to heavy to trap everything), and we've got a nice big moon to keep things sloshing around and stabilize the tilt.
I am of the opinion that life is rare because we live in a surprisingly boring solar system with a terrestrial planet in the right range, not to large and not too small, and with a massive moon.
Polynomially, right?
And lastly: that is really depressing :-(
(Strangely, with hydrogen and helium the majority of all three atmospheres, they have water and ammonia clouds. What holds them up?)
Recent example: https://phys.org/news/2022-02-laser-mars.html
Note the very high specific power. High Isp rocketry is all about the heat dissipation.
And its not like with higher G or some other singular aspect moving into more challenging territory, everything becomes suddenly impossible. Think about how many obstacles mankind could conquer in a relatively short amount of time, say a million years.
Consider that the moon had an atmosphere - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_the_Moon#Ancient...
> In October 2017, NASA scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston announced their finding, based on studies of Moon magma samples retrieved by the Apollo missions, that the Moon had once possessed a relatively thick atmosphere for a period of 70 million years between 3 and 4 billion years ago. This atmosphere, sourced from gases ejected from lunar volcanic eruptions, was twice the thickness of that of present-day Mars.
http://time.com/4974580/nasa-moon-had-atmosphere-volcanoes/
Which brings us to
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13583/what...
While smaller planets are certainly more numerous - many of them likely lack the mass and active magnetic field to retain an atmosphere in the habitable zone.
The actual physical amount of energy needed to make aluminum would have been available since forever; it's the form of that energy that wasn't there.
Imagine that with all your knowledge you suddenly moved to the ancient times. You know how to make CPU but you can't even make a shovel because iron production is not there. You need to spend enormous amount of time and efforts to build all the industries required to build a factory to produce simple resistor. That's where we at when it comes to space right now. We need to spend lots of time and effort to build space industry. But once it's there, space ships will not be a big deal.
And earlier, this: https://pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html https://pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventur...
Still think it is all a good idea. Glad the "maker" movement is making some progress in that area. As I noted on the LibrePlanet mailing list a few weeks ago: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2022-...
Someday after I "retire" I hope to have more time to work on all that.
Tangentially, on a super earth with more gravity, they would have an easier time going into orbit energetically using mass drivers or laser launch systems instead of rockets. And in any case, how big a seed do you really need to make a space infrastructure if you are patient? And the ground can communicate to space with radio or lasers (like for telepresence) which are not affected much by planetary gravity even for super earths.
That's very likely. There are only two known systems with possibly habitable planets within 40 light years.
Even if intelligent life is rare enough that it only appears once on a single galaxy every several billion years, we're still talking probably millions of possible civilizations, though each almost completely out-of-reach of each other.
Drag on the interstellar medium using magnetic fields could be used for deceleration.
Accelerating ISM ions near your destination to slow down would necessarily consume as much energy as it took to get up to speed, and without assist from folks at home (who are anyway a different species by now). You will have plowed through untold tons of relativistic IGM on the way that I suppose you could collect on the way and then fuse to power your EM brakes.
Retaining all that IGM seems mainly a matter of dissipating heat, provided you have discovered how to keep it from instead blasting bits off of your bumper. It would, also, all need to be accelerated to match your speed. A substantial fraction of it would be neutral, so purely ballistic.
Maybe you have a million (or ten; hundred?) km of very diffuse spray foam for your front bumper, that you will wring out for protons when time comes to stop?
Presumably you want to stop where whatever you made the trip for is, assuming it is still there ("lo!") those millions of years later. It must be something you couldn't find anywhere among the half-trillion stars back home. (You did look, right?) Or maybe you just wanted not to be there -- neighborhood gone downhill, galaxy too small for both you and the ex?
Given that you can weather a million years of relativistic battering, and actually collect industrial feedstocks from it, maybe you don't really need a galaxy or anything in one anymore, and can just keep going. It ought to be safer out there, without an ever-present threat of magnetars around always threatening to belch slightly and sterilize everything for much farther than can be seen without a telescope.
The Local Group is embedded within the WHIM -- Warm/Hot Intergalactic Medium. This is a hot, ionized gas with density maybe a few ions per cubic meter, maybe 100,000x less dense than the ISM in our galaxy. Even better, it's ionized: a magnetic field will enable the ions to be guided around the vehicle without any erosion whatsoever.
If that's the case, the occurance rate of life could be very very small, and we are still practically gaurenteed to exist, along with many (infinite) more life.
But it's entirely possible that they are all over a "visible universe"'s distance away. Which with an expanding universe, would mean that we could never meet or even observe them.
In some ways, that's maybe more lonely, or at least sad, than being entirely alone.
Maybe we are still missing something fundamental about the universe and we don't know, like we ignored electricity or nuclear forces existed just decades or 150 years ago.
That UFO the US navy has in footage, from 2019, making a diving nose maybe at 200 mph into the ocean without making a single wave or splash, is telling you something: you don't know everything about physics, just yet.
Those who talk about the feasibility of alien life visiting us very simply haven't thought it through, or are ignorant of the reality of space.
It's just too staggeringly big.
There are so many ways to think of how big our galaxy is but two are particularly relevant to how difficult it would be to detect other life, or be detected:
1. The first radio signals the human race produced have so far travelled something like a thousandth of the distance to the other side of our galaxy. Light travels really slowly on astronomical scales.
2. A supernova goes off roughly once every 50 years in the milky way. That's an energy release that is utterly incomprehensible to a human being. A system-incinerating catastrophe briefly producing an energy output comparable to that of all the stars in the galaxy combined. But to us they appear as just brighter-than-usual dots in the sky. We (humans) have only noticed a handful of them. It's not that we're shielded from them. These events happen in direct line of sight. They're just insanely far way and light intensity falls off with the square of distance. The kinds of energy outputs produced by a species of comparable technology to our own are simply not visible to us over these kinds of distances, even with the very latest technology.
And that's just our galaxy. If you consider the entire universe the things happening in direct line of sight include billion-solar-mass supermassive black hole mergers, and you need a gravitational wave detector to even tell they're happening.
We've only just recently started to be able to detect the presence of planets around other stars. The Fermi Paradox, Great Filter, "Where's the intelligent life?" stuff is absurdly premature.
Only relative to our own existence. If the universe is ~14 billion years old, and life was plentiful, you might expect life to have emerged elsewhere hundreds of millions or a few billion years before us. That allows for enough time for signals to have reached earth, even at slow light speeds.
As far as us noticing other civilisations is concerned the second point is the major one: the signals involved would just be really, really tiny. The "prematureness" is relative to our development of technology that could detect them.
You can of course posit that really advanced civilisations would produce massive energy signatures but I'm not sure that makes sense. The visible night time glow our planet produces due to our presence is a signature of inefficiency and light pollution. I'd hope that with better technology and politics we could make our planet look dark again from space. Efficiency, lack of wasted energy seems at least as likely to be a hallmark of a very advanced civilisation as huge, catastrophic energy releases. And even if those energy releases exist and really are spectacularly huge they'd still be massively hard to spot.
Section 2 of this paper has some fun info on the ability to detect our radio signature at great distances.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.5540.pdf
For example, the Arecibo Planetary Radar typically transmits at a power of 0.8 MW and a frequency of 2380 MHz, with a gain of ~108. This means that low bandwidth transmissions from Arecibo, with B ~ 0.1 Hz, would be detectable by a watcher with a 1 km2 receiving antenna at distances up to 200,000 light years, while high bandwidth signals, with B ~107 Hz, would be detectable out to about 5 light years by the same watcher.
By comparison, television carrier waves have similar power but gain ~10, B ~ 1 Hz, and frequencies in the range of 100 to 2700 MHz; such signals could be detected with a square kilometer array out to a distance of about 50 light years.
RIP Arecibo
If life sorts more or less neatly into expansionist and sedentary cultures, the sedentary species will generally be much older and, typically, much more technologically advanced than the expansionists that try to encompass them. Aggressive expansionists will tend to be destroyed by the first, second, or anyway tenth sedentary culture they try to strong-arm. So, the galaxy is full of very old, sedentary cultures not interested in visiting us, and young expansionists popping up all the time and being obliterated before they reach us.
Wouldn't this be great! Screw universal dominance. Let's play in the woods and hangout with nature. Heat death is coming no matter what.
That would stop a civilisation from exporting any spacecraft or signals outside its homeworld.
Those who "abandon their own bodies" are effectively killing themselves. Any "copies" which might exist in VR are separate beings, not the ones who chose to die in the real world.
I feel nothing but sadness towards the possible future as you paint it. It would mean the end of the human race.
Of course it goes without saying that this is all basically magical sci-fi gibberish.
But it wouldn't be you living forever. It would be some copy of you (at best).
Edit: and some will want to dedicate their lives to the expansion of life throughout the universe
I particularly like the short story in there "Wang Carpets".
It builds on Wang Tiles, discovered by Hao Wang when trying to solve a tiling the plane problem. He discovered that it is possible to simulate a Turing machine with a given tile set which meant that solving that tiling the plane problem was equivalent to solving the halting problem. ... but you can simulate a Turing machine with tiles.
If that piques your curiosity, Andrew Glassner's Notebook: Recreational Computer Graphics has some examples of tile sets that can solve math problems.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Andrew_Glassner_s_Noteb... (page 216 and page 217)
Consider that you need an AI that can deal with a huge range of potential environments, build extraction, processing, and assembly machinery, and do all of this with perfect error correction and oversight. Pretty much eternally.
It's an interesting thought experiment. But as a practical engineering project, it really doesn't sound even remotely credible. Not without appealing to "Yes, but one day..." magic unobtanium technology.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of hard entropy limit on how long complex systems can remain functional and stable. Sooner or later you're going to run out of memory, and if you restart a build process from scratch at each iteration without accumulating information, what have you actually achieved - beyond a rather pointless machine infestation?
So, we have proof it is possible; it only needs refinement.
When it comes to questions like the one posed in the fermi paradox we always seem to assume that all intelligent lifeforms would be very much like us with similar drives and culture. But it seems exceedingly unlikely.
A future of Star Trek, where the protective veil of some kind of "prime directive" is being lifted as we reach certain level of development as civilisation and then we get a galaxy-wide club membership feels like naive funny fairy tale. It would be of course great if that would happen but it's more likely reality is, or will be way too mundane and unattractive.
A story on that topic - The Crystal Spheres by David Brin
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-crystal-spher...
A faint shift in the molecular spectrum of our atmosphere might be telling.
Re: too old
The assumption that an advanced life form would be able to take over the universe and be visible to us requires that said life form is able to travel large distances. So to be able to travel far enough to enter our field of vision, they need to basically speedrun evolution and space travel proportional to the distance from us, i.e. the farther they are, the faster they need to evolve and the farther they need to travel for us to be able to see them. But the age of the universe poses a hard limit on how much of a head start a civilization can get over us.
So if we think this way, it seems somewhat plausible that life could exist, but be undetectable due to the sheer size of the universe and time constraints, even if they are capable of interstellar travel.
https://www.shutterstock.com/ru/image-vector/evolution-life-...
And in actuality, they would need to sit there detectably within the narrow period of a few hundred years or so that humanity is actually looking at that spot in the sky. So, for example, if they were galaxy hopping every few million years rather than cancerously leaving dyson spheres everywhere, and just happened to temporarily brush into our radius of visibility during their nomadic travels, we wouldn't necessarily see them if they got within view too early or too late.
Is it not possible for intelligent life to exist but not be interested in more?
Yeah because you know exactly what alien civilization would have done right? Because that's what you would do, as a human. We are talking about aliens and we don't know what they would be like so assuming that they would think like us is just stupid.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-generations-of-stars-have-the...
1. I'd presume life is exceedingly rare to start with, but I guess in the future we'll get a lot more tech to verify that -- direct imaging for biomarkers?
2. I'm sure there must be a "long term survival" equation for a given intelligent species that involves parameters such as "individual intelligence", individual lifespan, individual aggression level, individual empathy level, lifetime mating strategies that would predict if a species can go interstellar or not.
There's just so much to unpack about humans -- we did not evolve to live like we do today and because this transition is so abrupt, it could lead to a collapse of modern civilization, in my humble opinion.
We did not evolve to live in mega communities where antisocial behavior is rewarded (all kind of leaders), it is very likely that such an antisocial leader ends the human race in the future. It could be that a much more intelligent species where individuals have much greater "actuator power" that was able to reach our technological level with much fewer individuals would be able to eliminate such leaders and not have this problem.
It could be that a species with a much higher lifespans but a bit less intelligence than humans would have a lot more individual and collective wisdom and be better equipped to deal with tyrants or climate change. To me it seems that we are not capable of long-term survival goals. I find it sad that as a species we haven't invested in a planetary asteroid defense, or transition to nuclear-solar-electric energy. It's just so sad we developed nuclear technologies only for this technology to enable perpetual tyrants. Or electronics only to enable the same tyrants in perpetuity. Looking back just a few thousand years we can see events that cam wipe out 90% or more of the population of the Earth (such as the eruption of a supervolcano that would destroy all crops).
A species that can think of transcending historical-biological limitations should immediately strive to do so.
It could be that a species with much higher intelligence and much higher empathy would not destroy its planet and would not let greed destroy the very fabric of their society and actually make it over the "hump".
I don't see humans as having it to make it over "the hump", our "human condition" will prevent us from making it.
It is a dangerous galaxy, out there. Step carefully.
Maybe we're a simulation of future earth historians?
Maybe they're already here? A computational foam that surrounds us.
Maybe we're the first? Or life is exceedingly rare?
Maybe it's up there, purposefully undetected, killing anything that emerges? Like a spider in wait.
Maybe we've been seeded by them, and they're watching us grow?
Maybe physics breaking shenanigans and things we can't even model or understand are happening?
It says souls that depended on bodies were screwed and it's better to be a recreation - that the whole point of the recreation is to provide an afterlife for the dead.
At the time it was written, it went over everyone's heads and eventually even devolved into Gnosticism.
But it seems very pertinent in an age where we stand on the cusp of having AI self-evolve and are heavily investing into photonics for AI, and are then employing our nacent AI to bring photos of great grandparents "to life" and Microsoft was even granted a patent on resurrecting the dead using social media data and AI.
Even the best software authors tend to put in Easter Eggs. I see no reason why the creator of a simulation wouldn't have put in some obscure lore that breaks the 4th wall on the nature of it.
I think multiple Von Neumann probes could have come and gone from our system using little more than a few asteroids and a sip of the Jovian atmosphere.
It's also worth repeating that Von Neumann probes are only useful for information gathering. It would be highly impractical to pre-build all of the colonization infrastructure ahead of time and then mothball it for millions more years while the biologicals caught up, assuming they ever did. So these devices would be limited to scientific exploration or monitoring.
The only thing that I think Star Trek got right about the future is that many people will live in space full time aboard starships. All the planet hopping they do is just to further the plot and provide a familiar backdrop to the audience. Once a species transitions to living in space they will most likely stay there and have little use for planets. Depending on their mastery of fusion or other energy sources they may not even bother hanging around stars anymore. If we want to talk about anthropocentric perspectives the whole concept of visiting other worlds is probably as progressive as vacationing in natural caves, an entertaining novelty done once but never repeated by people who enjoy a roof over their heads, modern conveniences and climate control.
Meaning its comparable easy to unlock exponential technologys (energy density/ information density) and its very hard to actually self + "tame" a species fresh out of the woods. Just look at our world of 9 billion, longing for ever more surplus, handing dangerous technology to the individual without providing any self-control beyond basic self-surveillance to society members.
Anyone with a basic understanding of biology and a garage full of hamsters, can create a new covid based bioweapon right now. Ever more centralizing systems allow for one hacker to do incredible damage to a society. And while this plays out, there are still people demanding flying cars, so whoever hacks them, can fly them into buildings in case of civil unrest.
The denial about this species being unfit for the stars, unfit even for nuclear energy and the idea that ever more powerful toys will magically fix this "retardation" is whats at the core of the fermi paradox. Most species just murder one another off with exp-tech once the environment and the surplus machinery runs out.
> The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7378369-the-universe-is-a-d...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest
Kurzgesagt video (12m):
Another alternative hypothesis could be that the universe / even the galaxy is just too big to settle. Any civilization going out would take centuries to cross to other spaces, and completely lose touch with those members which stayed behind. It's hard to have a galactic "empire" when it takes centuries to send resources/soldiers to other worlds. The nearest planet to us, New Horizons, would take nearly 7 hours just to send a message at the speed of light!
The logical thing to do would be to send out machines to mine for resources and send them back and the machines may not be that interested in other lifeforms, other than possibly avoiding them.
These cultures were entirely untouched and it gave anthropologists a look into what life was like before before civilization.
The island was divided into tiny tribes which lead an incredibly brutal way of life. One of the interesting features that anthropologists remarked upon was the fact that when two people met each other out and about, if they didn't know each other, the first thing they would do is immediately start trying to kill each other.
If you take a cultural evolutionary point of view, then it is clear that these practices evolved because it was the best way to guarantee their own survival, and those tribes and people who behaved this way had a better chance of having offspring and passing on their way of life to the next generation.
Anyway, I don't see any reason to believe that the dark forest of our universe would be any different to the dark forests of West New Guinea.
But a counter example to it is that only via cooperation a tribe can become technologically advanced.
All those tribes are just tribes due to their constant squabbling and fighting, while the other that cooperated, traded and exchanged ideas ended up advancing. Wars were/are part of humans but in Europe it quickly became evident that technology and ideas > traditional warfare. Each tech eventually falling out of favour when better strategy/tech emerged.
I believe that the solution to the Feremi paradox is biology/game theory, the only way for intelligence to emerge is via evolutionary competition where intelligence is justified cost for the enormous energy requirement. And that mechanism is the local maxima where competition is wired in and drags down sufficiently large groups down.
Any successful organism/organisation will fall prey to an exploiting organism/individual due to its size, be it internal or external. Empires. countries dominant species all fall prey to exploits over time.
Getting out into space is really hard and we hardly scratched the 'surface' of space exploration. And even if we somehow managed to colonize mars and/or Europa, i think Expanse have an accurate picture of what would happen, new species of humans will develop (slowly) and will culturally diverge putting whole 'one humanity' going into space into wishful thinking category back again.
But at the start where everything is unknown and everything is new, and we can't see beyond the next tree, when we don't know what is out there and what they want. In that world, it has always kill or be killed.
1. You are barely space capable meeting advance civ. Its like modern country meeting tribe. They hold cards but dont really care about you or maybe help you.
2. Opposite of 1, but the outcome is the same. Why destroy them if they are technologically inferior.
3. Both equally advanced, if you were both capable of fighting would it make sense to actually fight?
The dark forest holds true if there were a lot of civilisations out there and if you can have magical tech that can wipe a star system or fold it into 2d, but if all you have spears you can at best only threat the guy on the other island - or trade with them.
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old.
Life existed by roughly 3.5 billion years ago, possibly earlier.
Multicellar life only got going about 0.7 billion years ago.
So, roughly speaking, 1 billion years to get to life, but 4 billion years to get to multicellular life. So we know that multicellular life is 4 times more difficult than life itself.
So for every 4 planets where we find life, we should expect 3 of those planets to only have single-celled life.
Of course, it is possible that life arose on Earth as early as 4 billion years ago. We have no record of that, partly because the Earth was still getting hit by asteroids that left craters 1,000 kilometers in diameter (we know this because we can see that the moon was hit with these asteroids, back at that time). Since such events would sterilize the planet, that would also imply that life re-started many, many times. But it would also mean that the single-cell/multicell ratio is more like 1 in 8.
e.g. did the evolution of homo sapiens and its subsequent monopolization of earth resources decrease the chances of another intelligent species evolving? Probably.
maybe eukaryoticity and sexual reproduction are also advantages so great they confer world domination to their lineages, and therefore will exhibit this kind of founder effect.
Once a world-dominating feature evolves, the rest of the tree must produce a competitor before resources are exhausted, otherwise the feature will only appear once in present lineages. It'd be interesting to know what effects modelling this might have on the resolved probabilities. Seems like the time-to-takeover/time-to-evolve ratio would be the critical factor.
The thought experiment would be: if you took away all the life with feature X, how long would it take to re-evolve that feature?
It might seem like Earth's resources are so vast that they couldn't possibly be 'taken over' in a meaningful way, but consider that all life is competing for a very narrow window of mineral availability, pH, and temperature, and that straying from these consensus boundaries requires you to evolve a huge amount of technology to begin using energy. Also recall that life tends to reproduce conditions suitable for its own continuance. So the result would be, that if you evolve something cool like a mitochondria, you might be able to replace your ancestors in every currently exploitable niche with significant energy flow in fairly short order.
I have often wondered if this is not exactly what occurred on earth, basically immediately after life first appeared. That direct ancestor to modern humans, maybe not even a real unicellular organism yet, won that very first resource race and extinguished any/all other contenders. That distant ancestor would have suffocated any possibility for carbon-based abiogenesis to occur again, leaving us with the tree of life we have today.
Only if you assume that intelligent life fills an ecological niche. As far as I am aware that’s some hot debate in evolutionary biologist circles.
There’s a strong chance this is all a massive fluke, given the configuration of our solar system and happenstance of earths position and chemical makeup.
Then again we wouldn’t be around to observe what we see today if it wasn’t for all those things aligning.
As observations of extra solar systems increase, I’m more inclined to think life is rarer and intelligence is exceedingly more rare.
Nothing wrong with an empty universe. Less to contend with.
Heck even closer, is virus alive or its just a random runaway mutation of organic code?
I don't think life is rare, but self aware intelligence probably is exceedingly rare, given how expensive it is in terms of energy cost, and the balance of disadvantageous environment needed for it to emerge and survive but not enough to destroy it.
There are organisms that haven't evolved intelligence for millions of years because they are good enough to survive and not to mention the self awareness.
And even on the edge of it you are talking about enormous receivers to capture those transmissions.
When looking into scales of universe its truly staggering how vast distances we are talking about.
https://mediachomp.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-sci-fi-short-...
Those arbitrary constants are arbitrary and made up. The argument presented in this article makes a lot more sense.
The notion that we have to sterilize all the interplanetary probes just so we don't "infect" other dead planets is just silly. We should have dropped a bag of life into Saturn's atmosphere, instead of a sterile probe.
There isn't any life on them. More and more investigations yield more and more nothing. The people who think earth's life is some sort of cosmic malignancy will never be satisfied. We should be doing our best to seed the Sol system with life, while we can.
Perhaps. But we may not be spacefaring for very long. Now's the chance.
We've been exploring Mars for 45 years now. No life yet. As I said, the people who regard life as a malignancy will never be satisfied. There's always a deeper hole to look in.
> contaminate
Earth life isn't "contamination".
> unknown-unknown phenomena we shouldn't blindly rob ourselves of
Instead we'll blindly rob ourselves of the opportunity to spread life into a lifeless universe. How incredibly sad.
What science has life on earth prevented? What secret of the universe has life blinded us to?
That is very clever way of putting it, looking at the state of our planet its 100% correct analogy. Thank you for making me chuckle.
This is not reddit mate, cool of and take your personal attacks somewhere else. That and idea of jizzing at every planet you see just because you can sounds awfully indicative of your age.
Also I find the drake equastion estimates to be incredibly generous in most places that it is used. It often has very high estimates for inhabitable planets. Since we only know of one such planet anything over zero in that equation is basically wild speculation. Once you put one or zero for average inhabitable planets the drake equation gets depressing.
For example human intelligence might have quickly wiped out or constrained to small populations all other mammals on the path to the same level of intelligence?
Early forms of life may also have multiplied so fast that all chemical resources useful for it became involved in the "lifecycle" of life and hence were not available for other types of life to evolve.
USA may produce more food than it can consume, but there is still the cost of production and delivery of food. Hunger will still be a thing if food costs more than people can pay. USA may collectively have enough money to buy food for everyone, but the will to spend public money is not there at the current cost of food.
The following is scifi hopefulness ...
When I say an end to scarcity, I mean all scarcity. Primarily that of energy. If we had unlimited free energy we could solve most other problems of scarcity. With free energy we could desalenate ocean water, we could have vertical indoor farms with artificial sunlight.
Robots could do all the manual labor. I'm assuming a society with free energy has also developed general purpose robots that can learn to do any task assigned to them.
There is still the problem of limited natural resources. Unless we develop the technology to create the raw materials by reassembling the molecules of trash.
Also, I wonder what will happen to people and economic activity if robots take all the manual labor jobs.
Having some hunger now and then is actually healthy for people. Fasting for a day or two here and there is a good practice. It also substantially lowers one's food expenses. If you walk down the street, you'll see many people who could use a day off from food :-)
Most of America's food problems are with obesity.
Incidentally, my name is Walter too.
Hence is quite reasonable our fellow alien visitor probably would be better than us at contacting very agressive cavemen with nuclear weapons.
There exists an interesting XKCD comic "Surface Area", about a giant patchwork quilt, comprised of all solid surfaces in the Solar System. To visualize that the combined surface area of all solid bodies (in the Solar System) is surprisingly small.
Earth and Venus had a major share on that quilt, and the combined surface areas of all other planets, dwarf planets, big moons and small moons were surprisingly small.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9kbcGfX35M&list=PLxKjapmTeX...
I read a study on HN a couple weeks ago that talked about likelihood of self replicating protein strings forming randomly, and the summary is that it is unlikely for abiogenesis to happen randomly within a volume the size of the observable universe more than once. Now, there could be panspermia, there could be something non random about the process, there could be other types of intelligence, but until you show me an ongoing alien biosphere process I'm convinced it isn't common, and I don't believe we will find intelligent life anywhere we look.