Migrating extraterrestrial civilizations and interstellar colonization
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As has been show in other research, a post-biological species can more easily send small replicating probes at high fractions of C in order to populate other star systems (and even other galaxies) within a small fraction of cosmic time (meaning it would have already likely happened in the Milky Way).
Large populations need not be sent. So the question becomes the meaning of life. What does a cosmic-spanning-AI want to do with its life - and how do we detect that?
At that point, all your civilization needs is lots of energy, some raw meterials, and probably a purpose, be it scientific discovery, novelty, exploration...etc. That's assuming the intelligence is anything like humanity.
We can't help but dance in time, without reason, without rhyme.
Reproduce, evidently, or it wouldn't be cosmic-spanning.
But: of what use is intelligence if you just want to span the cosmos? Would evolution favor less intelligence over more if the goal is just to spread at maximum rate?
There are many things intelligence might be good for. Adapting to an environment that is uncertain and changing would be one. The better you are biologically adapted to your niche, and the more stable your niche is, the less intelligent you need to be. Cooperation would be another. The more social your species is, the more you need to be able to coordinate with one another, which means being able to communicate. Competition with other intelligent forms might be another. Intelligence could be seen as an arms race where in order to beat out the tribe next door, you need to out-think them.
Humans tick all 3 boxes. We are social animals who survive by cooperation, but in a rapidly changing world full of other intelligent animals who are always competing with us for resources. That's a recipe for intelligence. You will find extraterrestrial intelligence in situations where similar forces are at work.
Plenty of other animals met your criteria, yet humans are the only ones who passed it.
It is difficult to imagine how we would detect those - even if many orbited our sun. ...but if they exist, they likely already detected us and have relayed the fact of our existance.
Continuity of species against some catastrophe with a solar system scale blast radius. You can keep that train of thought out to multiple solar systems, galactic arm, galaxy, supercluster, and so on.
A post-biological intelligence would want to migrate to another system so it can build its own hosting substrate and increase its own resources without fighting with someone else. (Well... at least initially.)
Explanations based on "oh, they'd never want to do that" need to explain not why "a" post-biological intelligence might conceivably under some particular circumstance not want to spread out, but why all the post-biological intelligences never do. That's a much harder argument to make.
No other aspect of logic or simulation is dependent upon the substrate that models it.
You say 'likely' but you're talking about an a priori belief. Post-biological civilization is purely speculative science-fiction at this point, there is not a single real example that we can point to yet. This might one day change if we become a post-biological civilization, but so far not a single example of such has ever been seen.
Based on what we've already empirically observed, any life out there is likely to be biological because that's the only sort of life we know can exist. Furthermore, we're unlikely to ever encounter life outside our solar system anyway. We've been looking for decades and can't find anything. The techno-signatures we speculate advanced civilizations might produce remain elusive after years of searching with increasingly capable instruments. Primitive life is unlikely to ever produce conclusive signals we can detect; the best we'll get is suggestive but inconclusive atmospheric analysis which we'll be incapable of investigating properly because going there for a closer look is technologically and socially impossible.
My guess is we're not alone, but we might as well be.
This is like ants arguing that life outside their ant hill will likely have 6 or 8 legs because all the life they've seen so far have had 6 or 8 legs.
Maybe we cannot be certain that AI can exist, but it's certainly reasonable to predict that AI will surpass us, given the fundamental principles involved. Much like people who predicted that the Earth was round before it was circumvented. We've only seen a fraction of what AI can do, but there is no fundamental barrier to AI cognition.
Also, the only conclusion you can draw from SETI is that no one nearby is actively sending a signal too Earth. We aren't able to pickup "background" EM activity beyond a ~20 light years - which is only a handful of stars. Moreover, the notion of ET omnidirectional broadcasting so inefficient, it would be difficult to explain (thus unlikely).
My guess is that we are surrounded by quiet AI observation nodes, either in elongated orbits, or extra-solar transients. Probably near impossible to detect. There doesn't seem to be any great harnessing or storage of stellar solar outputs in the galaxy, so either their efforts do not involve large amounts of energy - or they've found some other means to capture it (maybe that's what dark matter is).
Full brain emulation is probably possible, but we don't know if it will be cost efficient compared to baseline humans.
Likewise AIs smarter than humans might be possible, but we don't know what the tradeoffs would be. Maybe they will lose coherence at larger scales. Maybe they will have high levels of goal drift making them functionally useless.
The other thing to consider is that the universe is still very very young vs our best estimates of its lifespan. We are roughly 14 Billion years into something that may very well be going for 100 Trillion years or more.
It's much more reasonable to assume we are not perfect and maximally intelligent.
I wouldn't scoff at those ants. Ants who conclude life outside their anthill will have 6 legs would be mostly correct. 90% of lifeforms on earth are insects.
Anyway, my guess is that life at least as intelligent as us exists out there somewhere, and that more technologically advanced than us is possible too. But interstellar civilization, from what we are today? I don't think so. I think we're already in the "great filter", which I suspect to be the speed of light and our developing addiction to low latency communication. Turning ourselves into AIs or something won't solve that problem; if anything it would only make it worse. The more intimate our relationship with computers becomes, the more insular our civilization becomes.
I've never liked this kind of argument because ants don't argue. So you're saying that the thing that we're doing is like something else that doesn't exist, and using that impossible connection to draw a larger conclusion.
Ants don't argue because they don't have brains to do so. We argue because we have the brains to do so, and those brains allow us to do so much more like actually measure and interpret the world around us to draw the kinds of conclusions that you're seeing here.
Even if ants could argue with each other the question would become are they arguing about anything relevant? Can they measure and reason about the world around them? Can they do science?
Eh idk man. If what's been spoken about for decades by seemingly credible government, IC, military, and private officials across the world, and if what Chris Mellon and Luis Elizondo have continuously been hinting at/breadcrumbing/speaking to over the last few years comes out, we already have.
If you're interested, check out the historical clips gov and military (US, UK, Russia, etc) interviews on this channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrxesxFeskSt6TMMm9rnqfw/vid...
Would also recommend the documentary The Phenomenon, as well as recent Ross Coulthart and Luis Elizondo interviews on youtube.
A post-biological flying machine is purely speculative science-fiction at this point, there is not a single real example that we can point to yet. This might one day change if we become a post-biological flying civilization, but so far not a single example of such has ever been seen.
Suppose the year is 1770 and I am a sailor on one of Captain Cook's expeditions. A fellow sailor breathlessly tells me about the advanced civilizations with flying machines we might encounter, reasoning that such constructions are theoretically possible according to science and extrapolating from extant technology. I'd tell him that I expect nothing of the sort.
I'd also concede that such technology might one day be created: " This might one day change if we become a post-biological civilization, but so far not a single example of such has ever been seen."
So far? No evidence for it. So far, it's only science fiction.
But I think that you are using correctly your likelihoods but forgetting your priors. The prior in this case is: there is no reason that we know for this not to happen, so, it has to be happening somewhere.
Post-biological life: There is presently no evidence of it happening even once.
You say that as though it's a long time. The first interstellar object in our own solar system was only spotted a few years ago.
The only conclusion we can derive from SETI results is that no one is beaming a signal at us intentionally and continuously.
It didn’t take long in our tech evolution for SSL to become ubiquitous. Surely the entire SETI program and decades of effort is not premised on aliens not having HTTPS?
Encryption as far as i know does not deal with hiding information in background noise of communication channel. So most types of encrypted communication still can be detected (but not understood). You would need aliens that are actively hidding their communication inside of natural phenomena, which is a little bit of a stretch to me.
I’m not an expert on this stuff at all, but it seems also unlikely we could depend on it being concentrated within a single frequency band.
As far as I know its not true - usually there are statistical anomalies that gives away encrypted data. The other part is the the randomness of background noise of the universe. Can anybody give some input here ? I do not really know this but if I had to guess the universe does not generator true randomness but some signals that can be recognized as natural background signal?
For example, there’s no known way to do this against AES, which is used prominently in HTTPS.
I still feel like I must be missing something, because this fact would be obvious to SETI researchers…
https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/1646/is-it-possib...
All well encrypted data should appear as random noise practically speaking.
For those that have a tendency to exist: Survive and propagate.
If something other than perpetuation of the essential forms and patterns that constitute the entity motivates it, then it will be more likely to cease to exist. Or be replaced by any variation that is more strongly motivated and capable of surviving and propagating.
The anthropic principle and all that.
Travel timescales need not be on human lifetime scales.
For completeness, I believe that the speed of light is a hard limit (and no I don't believe in any end-runs around this like warp drives, folding space or wormholes). Secondly, I accept the laws of thermodynamic.
Given this traveling between stars takes an incredibly long time. At a high percentage of c you get time dilation but that's not actually a practical travel speed for a few reasons:
1. The energy cost of accelerating to 0.99c and decelerating at the other end is extraordinarily high;
2. If you even can get to that speed, small objects in the interstellar medium become life threatening; and
3. Beyond about 0.86c gas in the interstellar medium actually creates drag making acceleration even harder.
Given the reaction mass problem, it creates a big question of how you'd actually travel between stars. The more you carry the more energy you need to accelerate and decelerate it. It's likely you'd need fusion at a minimum and possibly some far-future tech (eg antimatter, black holes).
So what do you do? Well, there are rogue objects not bound to any solar systems. We've seen some of these. We can't easily detect them so can only speculate on how many there are but it's likely to be a fairly large number.
So what if you opportunistically wait for one of these objects to travel through the Solar System and then hitch a ride? Imagine a planetoid 100 miles in diameter. That's likely all the resources you'd need. It then becomes less of an issue that it might not reach another star for 100,000+ years because your attitude is that this is a new home.
Obviously you still have to match velocities with this object but that's vastly easier to do with a bunch of people and equipment than it is with those same things plus all the same materials that are already traveling at intersellar speeds.
How would this compare to a raft of asteroids you select in your home system to have the exact stuff you need and the accelerate it? I realize there's differences in mass here but I am asking is it material given the scope? Because you are kind of guessing what is going on with that rogue planetoid but the asteroids you could select at your leisure and also hollow out easily while you are in your home system with access to orbital factories, etc.
Anyway, fun thought experiment! I totally agree that you would have to approach this as if this is your new home and you MIGHT get to a planetary system you could also colonize at some point. Generations in that idea might seem as foreign as living on a colony flotilla.
With a rogue planet you should be able to refuel from that rogue body so your fuel payload required is really only to get to the rogue planet.
But for a rogue planet you need far less. Consider the Moon. It has lava tubes. You can seal these, fill them with air and live in them. You don't need to accelerate that living space. Sure you still need to bring some things but it's far, far less.
What's more, if you have several such settlements in different lava tubes you have automatic redundancy. A single catastrophe won't snuff out the entire colony.
So for a true interstellar colony you really have to build a fleet because a single colony is too big of a failure mode.
This seems silly. Even if intelligence remains biological (which I find exceedingly unlikely), then why wouldn't you just freeze them? That's a lot easier than moving a PLANET.
FYI - rodents can be frozen and revived. There's no fundamental reason you cannot freeze and thaw a human.
Theses are called Paulis's mines.
Is it just me or is that completely idiotic? It's like building a spaceship whose mass is 99.99% inert. Migration is incredibly unlikely to be a thing on interstellar scales unless some kind of magical transport is discovered. That is because, under almost any conceivable schema, it takes less energy and resources to sustain an individual for its entire life than it takes to transport that individual to another solar system. Advanced civilizations may very likely spread to other solar systems, but there's no practical reason to migrate.
Nearby star going supernova?
I've thought about this in relation to colonizing other planets in our solar system let alone ones in another one. I'm of the opinion that we'd be better off building orbital habitats similar to the ISS and then iterating on those until they can house more people safely, become more and more self-sufficient, and we have the ability to put them into solar orbits and/or making them self-propelled. I always assumed we would populate earth orbit and bases on the moon first, then expand our infrastructure to be able to mine metals from asteroids and start building larger space stations outside of earth's orbit.
If Mars were more Earth-like I could see pushing for that first but I think we're getting ahead of ourselves. There is solid ground we can build on, but the atmosphere is almost non-existent, the radiation is incredibly high, water is scarce, it's a long way away, and there are two gravity wells to deal with. Unless we're talking about terraforming Mars, which is an even larger project than colonizing it, we're still talking basically people living in the equivalent of tin cans.
In terms of people living off of our home planet it seems to me that we could increase the population much faster in space stations and lunar bases than we would be able to do so on Mars.
If I were a billionaire space tech guy, I'd be working toward O'neil cylinders instead of Mars colonization.
I'm not a space scientist or an engineer, though. Or a billionaire, sadly enough.
While I agree with you in the longer term, I don’t think we’re even close to ready to build O'Neill cylinders. First thing I’d go for would be a lunar colony. Lots of useful resources, relatively short trip home in emergencies, a way to get experience working in real vacuum, and non-rocket launch systems could already be built there with current tech.
The Puppeteers took 5 planets with them when they found out about the galactic core explosion. It honestly sounds like the guy who wrote this just finished Niven's known space series.
If you can muster enough energy to accelerate a planet, you probably don't need a planet for migration in the first place.
Also, the planets would get cold during the journey. Very cold. You'd better pack a load of welding kits for the brass monkeys.
Some like to think advanced civilizations would not be so brutal, but I'm unconvinced.
Humanity is capable of doing more than one thing at a time.